This study aimed to fabricate core/sheath-structured composite nanofibers containing cinnamon oil by emulsion electrospinning and to investigate their acaricidal effect on house dust mites as well as their antibacterial and antifungal properties in relation to cinnamon oil concentration in the nanofibers. An oil-in-water emulsion, which comprised cinnamon oil and poly(vinyl alcohol) solution as oil and water phases, respectively, was used to prepare core/sheath-structured nanofibers. The morphology and the inner structure of the electrospun nanofibers were observed by scanning electron microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy. Core/sheath-structured nanofibers containing cinnamon oil were successfully prepared by emulsion electrospinning. The composite nanofibers prepared from an emulsion containing 20 wt% of cinnamon oil exhibited a strong acaricidal effect against house dust mites (Dermatophagoides farinae). The composite nanofibers fabricated from an emulsion containing 4.29 wt% of cinnamon oil showed excellent antimicrobial effects against Staphylococcus aureus and a series of fungi that can trigger respiratory- and skin-related diseases. The release profile of cinnamon oil from the core/sheath-structured nanofibers showed a continuous release of functional ingredients over 28 days. Our findings demonstrate that the use of such fibrous structures could be a promising approach for delivering naturally derived bioactive agents in a controlled way.
As the mental health crisis deepens with the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increasing need for understanding individuals’ emotional experiences. We have built a large-scale Korean text corpus with five self-labeled psychological ground-truths: empathy, loneliness, stress, personality, and emotions. We collected 19,025 documents of daily emotional experiences from 3,805 Korean residents from October to December 2020. We collected 42,128 sentences with different levels of theory-of-mind. Each sentence was annotated by trained psychology students and reviewed by experts. Participants varied in their ages from the early 20s to late 80s and had various social and economic statuses. The pandemic impacted the majority of daily lives, and participants often reported negative emotional experiences. We found the most frequent topics: responses to confirmed cases, health concerns of family members, anger towards people without masks, stress-relief strategies, change of the lifestyle, and preventive practices. We then trained the Word2Vec model to observe specific words that match each topic from the topic model. The current dataset will serve as benchmark data for large-scale and computational methods for identifying mental health levels based on text. This dataset is expected to be used and transformed in many creative ways to mitigate COVID-19-related mental health problems.
We investigated the subjective experience of loneliness during COVID-19 by analyzing social media postings from March 2020 to January 2021. We collected text data from loneliness-related subgroups of Reddit and sampled 12787 posts that were written in ten consecutive days from each month. The results suggest that when individuals express their loneliness, they show an internal focus of attention on their emotions, desires, and cognitive appraisals rather than an external focus of attention on situations or other people. Linguistic markers of emotions expressed by lonely individuals included depression, anxiety, anger, hate, helplessness, and sadness. Also, loneliness-related topics were generally about their internal states pertinent to various social relationships, interpersonal interaction deficits, and their own lives in broad time perspectives. COVID-19 related loneliness was associated with negative appraisal of one’s situation and reaching out for new relationships online.
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