Editorial

What is health? The ability to adapt

Academic amotivation stems from different classes of reasons in school. Using the amotivation taxonomy that comprises four types of motivational deficits (i.e., deficient ability beliefs, effort beliefs, academic values, and unappealing task characteristics), we designed this study to examine developmental patterns in academic amotivation among early-stage college students and how cardiorespiratory fitness and meaning in life related to the growth trajectories. 488 students reported amotivation at the beginning, middle, and end of a semester while their cardiorespiratory fitness and meaning in life were evaluated at the semester start. Multi-indicator latent growth models revealed that all types of motivational deficits increased over time. Insufficient academic values appeared to increase steeper than other amotivation dimensions while cardiorespiratory fitness buffered the enhancement of motivational deficits in ability and effort. Integration of a broad ecological framework including health may potentially enrich our theoretical understanding of academic amotivation.

Understanding amotivation during early stage of college is important for academic and personal development. We find evidence of average increases in students' amotivation due to deficient ability beliefs, effort beliefs, academic values, and unappealing task characteristics. Associations of amotivation with gender, cardiorespiratory fitness, and meaning in life provide insights with the design of cohesive learning environments to minimize amotivation and support personal development. Integration of a broad ecological framework including health may potentially enrich our theoretical understanding of academic amotivation/motivation.

Essential workers such as medical workers and police officers are first-line fighters during public-health crises, such as COVID-19 pandemic. Every time, they are under heavy stress both physically and mentally. The goal of the present study was to develop a novel nature-based intervention to promote their well-being. A representative sample of essential workers in China was recruited for a five-day intervention program, and were randomly assigned to two groups. The experimental group watched 2-min video clips of natural scenes every day, while the control group watched urban scenes. Results indicated that after five days, the natural stimuli intervention yielded overall improvements in various indices of subjective well-being. Furthermore, analyses of nested longitudinal data confirmed that everyday nature stimuli exposure provided both immediate and repeated restorative benefits. The proposed natural-based intervention is brief and easy-to-use, offering a cost-efficient psychological booster to promote subjective well-being of essential workers during this crisis time.

Our understanding of health has changed substantially since the World Health Organization initially defined health in 1948 as “a state of complete physical, mental and social and well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. These changes include reconceptualizing health on a continuum rather than as a static state, and adding existential health to physical, mental, and social well-being. Further, good health requires adaptation in coping with stress and is influenced by social, personal and environmental factors. Building on prior work, we propose a reconsidered 2020 definition: “Health is the dynamic balance of physical, mental, social, and existential well-being in adapting to conditions of life and the environment.” Health is dynamic, continuous, multidimensional, distinct from function, and determined by balance and adaptation. This new definition has implications for research, policies, and practice, with particular relevance for health considered within a context of disability and chronic conditions.

Most of the commonly used health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measures were developed in the West and have been introduced into other countries for use worldwide. Arguably, this adaptation process assumes that health, as a concept, has universal cultural equivalence. This study identified those Chinese-developed HRQoL measures and summarized their contents, with which the Western-developed HRQoL measures were compared, aiming to explore cultural differences in defining and measuring health between the East and the West.

A systematic literature search was conducted to identify Chinese-developed generic HRQoL measures. Two Western-developed HRQoL measures (EQ-5D, SF-36) and a cross-culturally developed measure (WHOQOL-100) were included for comparison. A qualitative content analysis was undertaken both deductively and inductively to categorize and summarize the content of the questionnaires in analyzing similarities and differences between Western and Chinese-developed HRQoL measures.

Eight HRQoL measures that were designed in a Chinese cultural context were identified and compared with the 3 non–Chinese-developed HRQoL measures. Although there is an agreement between the East and the West regarding the domains and subdomains of HRQoL, health concepts including “emotion control,” “weather adaption,” “social adaption,” “spirit,” and “complexion” were exclusively introduced by the Chinese measures.

The results demonstrate that health is a culturally grounded concept, and because of cultural differences, it cannot be taken for granted that a well-recognized Western HRQoL measure is always appropriate for use in other cultural contexts. This study implies the necessity of further examining the legitimacy of applying Western-developed HRQoL measures in other cultural settings.