About 11% of Hong Kong's population of 7 million people are aged 65 and over and many of them live in old urban areas. Many of these areas have been subjected to urban redevelopment and some of the residents have been relocated to newer estates in peripheral new towns. Previous studies have focused on the challenges the urban environment has placed on older persons in terms of capability to cope with the demands that the environment places upon them. This paper suggests that dwelling conditions can act as stressors and become contributing factors that impact on older persons' residential satisfaction and psychological well-being (subjective well-being). This study examines the role of residential satisfaction (satisfaction with dwelling unit, estate and district) in mediating the effects of dwelling conditions (interior environment and exterior environment) on psychological well-being. A sample of older persons was recruited from a sampling frame of 16 urban sub-areas located in old urban areas and new towns. 518 older persons (224 males, 294 females) aged 60 and over were interviewed and the findings indicated that residential satisfaction was determined by assessment of both the interior environment and the exterior environment, although these were appraised differently. The interior environment had a greater impact on residential satisfaction than the exterior environment. It appeared that environmental dwelling conditions mainly affected older persons' psychological well-being indirectly and, hence, probably influenced their opportunities for successful ageing. However, subsequent tests revealed that dwelling conditions had no direct impact on psychological well-being. In light of these findings, it is proposed that the role of environmental factors and their relation to older persons' psychological well-being depends on the extent to which a person's expectations of residential satisfaction are met. Some implications of these findings for local housing and social care policy are discussed.

A supervisor's behaviour may not be the only factor that determines the performance of team members (Kerr & Jermier, 1978). Taking this postulation as a basis, we formulated a model to describe how service climate moderates the effects of the leadership behaviour of supervisors. When the organization and working environment are not conducive to providing a good service to colleagues and customers, the supervisor's leadership behaviour makes an important difference. However, when the service climate is good, a supervisor's leadership behaviour makes no substantial difference. This hypothesis was supported in an examination of the service quality of 511 frontline service providers as sampled from 55 work groups in 6 service organizations. The employee service quality was low when both the service climate and the supervisor's leadership behaviour were lacking. However, when the service climate was unfavourable, effective leadership behaviour played a compensatory role in maintaining performance standards towards external customers. When the leadership was ineffective, a favourable service climate nullified the negative effect on service quality to internal customers.

This paper focuses on the importance and the effectiveness of various types of informal support for older persons' psychological well-being. It examines the effects of objective measures of informal support (such as size of social networks and frequency of contact) and subjective measures (such as satisfaction with the support received) on psychological well-being of older occupants in different household circumstances (i.e.,living alone, with spouse or relatives, in old urban areas or new towns, in private or public housing). Data were collected from face-to-face interviews with a sample of 518 older persons (224 males, 294 females) aged 60 and over, systematically drawn from a GIS-derived framework of housing districts in old urban areas and new towns in Hong Kong. The results show that both objective and subjective measures of informal support were related to older persons' psychological well-being, but subjective measures of informal support (specifically satisfaction with support received from family members) were found to be more important predictors of psychological well-being. Furthermore, the effects of size of social network on psychological well-being were stronger for older persons who lived alone than for those who lived with a spouse or relatives. The results also show that persons who lived in the old urban areas received more support than did their counterparts in the new towns and older persons who lived in public housing received more objective informal support than those who lived in private housing. The implications of the findings for policy towards older persons in Hong Kong and similar Asia-Pacific societies are discussed.

Many different "domains" of older persons' living environments potentially influence their residential satisfaction and thereby their well-being. Factors that might impact on older persons' residential satisfaction were explored in a busy Asian city, Hong Kong, in terms of a number of "domains" with elements: the Structural domain (interior and exterior dwelling characteristics, security concerns), the informal domain (informal social support including family, friends, and neighbours) and the formal domain (social services and community facilities) around or near the neighbourhood. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with a random sample 518 Hong Kong residents aged 60 and over, who lived in various housing arrangements including private/public and new/old housing establishments. Hierarchical regression analysis models revealed that the structural domain had the strongest tie with residential satisfaction. Formal and informal types of support for older persons' needs were generally unrelated to residential satisfaction. Further investigations showed that all three elements of the structural domain contributed unique variance to residential satisfaction. Satisfaction with community facilities, an element of the formal domain, was related to residential satisfaction even when variations from other domains were accounted for. When all the three domains were simultaneously analysed for their contributions to residential satisfaction, all of the elements of the structural domain and the community facilities element of the formal domain contributed to unique variance. The implications of the findings for policy makers in designing home settings for older persons in Hong Kong and some other Asian cities are discussed.

Immersion is recognised as an important element of good games. However, it is not always clear what is meant by immersion. Earlier work has identified possible barriers to immersion including a lack of coherence between different aspects of the game.Building on this work, we designed an experiment to examine people's expectations of how a game should behave and what would happen if that behaviour was deliberately made to be incoherent. The idea then is to understand immersion through seeing how immersion can be broken. The main manipulation was to alter the behaviour and realism of the graphics in the course of a simple game situation.Surprisingly, results indicated that participants could be so immersed within a simple environment such that even significant changes in behaviour had little effect on the level of immersion. In some cases, the attempted disruptions went completely unnoticed.These results suggest that immersion within an application can overcome effects which are completely against user expectations.