The Inevitability of Death: Mental Simulation Moderates the Effect of Death Anxiety on Older Adults' Vulnerability to Fraud.

Death anxiety arousal is a common tactic in fraud targeting older adults; however, little is known about its impact on vulnerability to fraud and the moderating role of mental simulation. Two experiments were conducted using the mortality salience task. Experiment 1 employed a mortality salience manipulation to examine the causality of death anxiety arousal affecting older adults' vulnerability to fraud using a behavioral experiment. Experiment 2 used the imaginary priming paradigm to manipulate different types of mental simulation to address whether mental simulation could moderate the relationship between death anxiety and vulnerability to fraud. The results showed that death anxiety significantly increased the vulnerability to fraud. Process and downward outcome simulation buffered this effect, while upward outcome simulation exacerbated it. Clinicians may focus on relieving death anxiety, decreasing upward outcome simulation, and enhancing process or downward outcome simulation as promising pathways to protect older adults against fraud.

Death anxiety and older adults' vulnerability to fraud: the mediating role of materialism.

Death anxiety arousal, provoked by anticipating self-nonexistence, may be used as a fraud tactic by scammers on older adults; however, little is known about how it affects older adults' decision making when confronted with a scam and the mechanisms underlying these effects. This study used a questionnaire survey and experimental design to examine them. In Study 1, 307 older adults in China completed questionnaires. The results showed a positive link between death anxiety and vulnerability to fraud, partially mediated by materialism. In Study 2, 82 older adults in China were randomly assigned to the mortality salience group and control group to examine whether death anxiety arousal can increase older adults' vulnerability to fraud and the mediating role of materialism. The results indicated that death anxiety and materialism increase the risk of consumer products and services fraud; therefore, targeting these risk factors might protect older adults from fraud.

A stratified approach for camera calibration using spheres.

This paper proposes a stratified approach for camera calibration using spheres. Previous works have exploited epipolar tangents to locate frontier points on spheres for estimating the epipolar geometry. It is shown in this paper that other than the frontier points, two additional point features can be obtained by considering the bitangent envelopes of a pair of spheres. A simple method for locating the images of such point features and the sphere centers is presented. An algorithm for recovering the fundamental matrix in a plane plus parallax representation using these recovered image points and the epipolar tangents from three spheres is developed. A new formulation of the absolute dual quadric as a cone tangent to a dual sphere with the plane at infinity being its vertex is derived. This allows the recovery of the absolute dual quadric, which is used to upgrade the weak calibration to a full calibration. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data are presented, which demonstrate the feasibility and the high precision achieved by our proposed algorithm.