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In the context of climate change, the intensity, frequency, and duration of drought events have increased significantly, resulting in a profound impact on both natural ecosystems and socio-economic systems. In arid and semi-arid regions, precipitation is the main limiting factor for vegetation growth, and the ecosystems are very sensitive to climate change. Over the past 10 years, the Namibian government has declared national emergencies in 2013, 2016, and 2019 due to extreme drought events. The continued extreme drought has posed serious threat to the country's food security. Accurately monitoring the continuous drought events in Namibia and assessing their impact on the ecosystem is essential for drought risk management in the region. Based on long-term satellite observation of vegetation index and precipitation, we have evaluated the spatiotemporal dynamics of the three drought events, the vegetation–precipitation relationship across biomes, and the impact of continuous drought events on regional ecosystems. The results suggest that: (1) According to affected area and severity, the drought in 2019 was the most severe one, followed by the drought in 2013 ; the 2015–2016 drought spread over smaller spatial area, although it continued for two years ; (2) Both the accumulated NDVI and precipitation in the growing season in Namibia increased from 2001 to 2010 while showing a significant decreasing trend during 2011–2020 ; (3) In Namibia, there is a significant correlation between the current season's accumulated precipitation and the current season's accumulated NDVI (r = 0.90, p < ; 0.01). The current season's accumulated precipitation is also well correlated with the next season's accumulated NDVI (r = 0.87, p < ; 0.01), and the correlation between the current season's accumulated precipitation and the next season's accumulated NDVI in a wet year is even stronger (r = 0.96, p < ; 0.01). This indicates that part of the precipitation in the current season may be stored in the soil for the next season's plant growth, which is more obvious in the northern plains with deep-rooted woody plants ; (4) In 2013, the drought event suddenly changed from a long-term relatively humid state to an extremely dry state. During the ecological recovery stage, the NDVI during the growing season could not return to the state before the drought, causing irreversible damage to the Namibian ecosystem. In summary, the continuous extreme drought events during the last decade have caused profound impacts on the regional ecosystem. Much more attention should be paid to whether the extreme drought events will continue into the next decade and how the ecosystem can sustain a new equilibrium under a warmer and drier climate.

Earlier research has documented that debt at older ages has increased significantly in Canada over the period from 1999 to 2016. In this article, I explore the consequences of a growing proportion of older Canadian households experiencing financial vulnerability. After controlling for household characteristics, I find among older households that a high debt-to-asset ratio and very low liquid wealth are significantly and positively associated with skipping or delaying a mortgage or non-mortgage debt payment and with usually paying the minimum amount or less on credit cards in the previous year. The debt-to-income ratio, however, is not an important indicator of financial vulnerability for older households.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the financial innovation product Credit-Default-Swap (CDS) was widely blamed as the main cause of this crisis. CDS is one type of over-the-counter (OTC) traded derivatives. Before the crisis, the trading of CDS was very popular among the financial institutions. But meanwhile, excessive speculative CDSs transactions in a legal environment of scant regulation accumulated huge risks in the financial system. This dissertation is divided into three parts. In Part I, we discussed the primers of the CDSs and its market development, then we analyzed in detail the roles CDSs had played in this crisis based on economic studies. It is advanced that CDSs not just promoted the eruption of the crisis in 2007 but also exacerbated it in 2008. In part II, we asked ourselves what are the legal origins of this crisis in relation with CDSs, as we believe that financial instruments could only function, positive or negative, under certain legal institutional environment. After an in-depth inquiry, we observed that at least three traditional legal doctrines were eroded or circumvented by OTC derivatives. It is argued that the malfunction of these doctrines, on the one hand, facilitated the proliferation of speculative CDSs transactions; on the other hand, eroded the original risk-control legal mechanism. Therefore, the 2008 crisis could escalate rapidly into a global financial tsunami, which was out of control of the regulators. In Part III, we focused on the European Union's regulatory reform towards the OTC derivatives market. In specific, EU introduced mandatory central counterparty clearing obligation for qualified OTC derivatives, and requires that all OTC derivatives shall be reported to a trade repository. It is observable that EU's approach in re-regulating the derivatives market is different with the traditional administrative regulation, but aiming at constructing a new market infrastructure for OTC derivatives.

I collected group-level data in a laboratory experiment, and explored the roles of affect and cognition in predicting supervised groups' attitudes toward direct and indirect supervisors. Results suggest that both affect and cognition were significant predictors for the 2 target attitudes.
Cognition exerted a stronger influence than affect on attitudes toward direct supervisors, whereas affect predicted attitudes toward indirect supervisors more strongly than cognition, despite the nonsignificant predictive difference. I also suggest how to improve supervised groups' attitudes
toward supervisors through affective and cognitive interventions.

Cooperation is vital to human evolution and the development of society. In addition, social justice is one of humanity's long pursuits. Based on social exchange theory and system justification theory, we built and tested a comprehensive mediated moderation model of the relationship between social justice and public cooperation intention via the mediation of political trust and with the moderation of outcome dependence. This research consisted of two studies using laboratory experiment (N = 320) and field survey (N = 1240) methods. Data were collected from participants located in China. The results showed that (1) both competence-based trust and motive-based trust mediated the relationship between social justice (i.e., distributive justice and procedural justice) and public cooperation intention; (2) outcome dependence moderated the relationship between social justice and public cooperation intention; and (3) the moderation of outcome dependence functioned through the mediating effect of competence-based and motive-based trust. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings is discussed.

We analyzed the primary factors influencing malevolent creativity as reported in existing research by gathering papers through comprehensive searches of the following databases: PubMed, Science Direct, KIC, Web of Science, CNKI, VIP, and Wanfang Data. We assessed the methodological
quality using the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality risk of bias assessment tool, and tested the measures' reliability through conducting a convergence analysis. The cumulative probability ranking indicated that moral disengagement, aggression, Dark Triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism,
psychopathy), and hostility were all significant factors with a ranking above 80% and, therefore, were crucial factors in inducing malevolent creativity. On the other hand, empathy, psychological resilience, conscientiousness, and age played important roles in mitigating or dissolving malevolent
creativity. Emotional intelligence, openness, agreeableness, extraversion, grade point average, and verbal aggression were unrelated to malevolent creativity.

The number of college student volunteers has been increasing and they have provided voluntary services in several fields. However, their willingness to continue volunteering remains unsustainable. Thus, this study, integrating the theory of planned behavior and event system theory, constructed a moderated mediating model to test the underlying mechanism of perceived calling on sustained volunteering intention through volunteering norm, and the moderating effect of the COVID-19 pandemic strength. A three-wave field questionnaire was designed and administered to the same 700 college students. The results showed that perceived calling positively predicted volunteering norm; volunteering norm positively influenced sustained volunteering intention. Volunteering norm mediated the link between perceived calling and sustained volunteering intention. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic strength moderated the direct relationship between perceived calling and volunteering norm and the indirect effect. When COVID-19 pandemic strength was at its peak, the direct and mediating effects were stronger. These findings suggest that cultivating college student volunteers' perceived calling and norm are important to improve their sustained volunteering intention.

This study integrated COVID-19 and creativity into the literature through knowledge mapping visualization, to promote existing academic results and provide a reference value for subsequent research. Accordingly, we analyzed the distribution of the literature on COVID-19 and creativity,
research hotspots, and representative groups of authors. We found that the topic of COVID-19 and creativity has sparked interdisciplinary research, leading to cross-disciplinary and cross-national collaborations. Creativity can be used to cope with the challenges and social complexity brought
about by COVID-19. The law of theme development in the existing literature was divided into three stages: exploratory (2020), active (2021), and stable (2022). Our findings indicate that the upsurge of research on COVID-19 and creativity may slow down, but that models, intention, energy, life,
benefits, space, and music are likely to be themes for future research.