This research on the ethics of meaningful work examined how types of job-related harm and their magnitude of consequences influenced components of ethical decision-making. The research also investigated the moderating effects of individual differences on the relation between the MOC and the ethical decision-making elements for each type of harm. Using a sample of 185 Chinese professionals, a between-subjects, fully crossed experimental scenario design revealed that physical and economic job-related harm were recognized as moral issues to a greater extent than (...) cognitive or emotional harm. Second, physical job-related harm stimulated a higher level of moral evaluations than economic and cognitive harm. Third, individuals intended to act ethically when MOC was high versus low. Finally, experience with layoffs and IMO helped explain the relations between MOC and moral evaluations for economic and cognitive job-related harm, respectively. Implications for research and management are discussed. (shrink)

We tested the hypothesis that perception of an alternative image in ambiguous figures would be manifest as high-frequency (gamma) components that become synchronized over multiple scalp sites as a ''cognitive binding'' process occurs. For 171 combinations of data from 19 electrodes, obtained from 17 subjects and 10 replicate stimuli, we calculated the difference in correlation between the response to first seeing an ambiguous figure and when the alternative percept for that figure became consciously realized (cognitively bound). Numerous statistically significant correlation (...) differences occurred in all frequency bands tested with ambiguous-figure stimulation, but not in two kinds of control data (a reaction-time test to sound stimuli and a no-task, mind-wandering test). Statistically significant correlation changes were widespread, involving frontal, parietal, central, and occipital regions of both hemispheres. Correlation changes were evident at each of five frequency bands, ranging up to 62.5 Hz. Most of the statistically significant correlation changes were not between adjacent sites but between sites relatively distant, both ipsilateral and contralateral. Typically, these correlation changes occurred in more than one frequency band. These results suggest that cognitive binding is a distinct mental state that is reliably induced by ambiguous-figure perception tasks. Coherent oscillations at multiple frequencies may reflect the mechanism by which such binding occurs. Moreover, different coherent frequencies may mediate different components of the total cognitive-binding process. (shrink)

Background: Losing one’s only child may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, of which re-experiencing is the core symptom. However, neuroimaging studies of sex differences in re-experiencing in the context of the trauma of losing one’s only child and PTSD are scarce; comparisons of the functional networks from the hippocampal subfields to the thalamus might clarify the neural basis.Methods: Thirty couples without any psychiatric disorder who lost their only child, 55 patients with PTSD, and 50 normal controls underwent resting-state functional magnetic (...) resonance imaging. The functional connectivity from the hippocampal subregions to the thalamus and the correlations of FC with re-experiencing symptoms were analyzed within and between the sexes.Results: Compared with husbands without PTSD, wives without PTSD had higher re-experiencing symptoms and weaker FC between the right hippocampal cornu ammonis 3 and the right thalamus. Moreover, only the correlation between the RCA3-RT FC and re-experiencing in wives without PTSD was significant. Among the three groups, only the RCA3-RT FC in female subjects was markedly different. Additionally, the RCA3-RT FC in wives without PTSD was remarkably lower relative to female patients with PTSD.Conclusion: Wives without PTSD who lost their only child had worse re-experiencing symptoms relative to their husbands, which was associated with the FC alteration between the hippocampal subregions and the thalamus. Importantly, the low level of the RCA3-RT FC may play a potentially protective role against the development of PTSD in wives who have lost their only child. (shrink)

Facial expressions of emotion play an important role in human social interactions. However, posed expressions of emotion are not always the same as genuine feelings. Recent research has found that facial expressions are increasingly used as a tool for understanding social interactions instead of personal emotions. Therefore, the credibility assessment of facial expressions, namely, the discrimination of genuine (spontaneous) expressions from posed (deliberate/volitional/deceptive) ones, is a crucial yet challenging task in facial expression understanding. With recent advances in computer vision and (...) machine learning techniques, rapid progress has been made in recent years for automatic detection of genuine and posed facial expressions. This paper presents a general review of the relevant research, including several spontaneous vs. posed (SVP) facial expression databases and various computer vision based detection methods. In addition, a variety of factors that will influence the performance of SVP detection methods are discussed along with open issues and technical challenges in this nascent field. (shrink)

Whole eye transplantation (WET) remains experimental. Long presumed impossible, recent scientific advances regarding WET suggest that it may become a clinical reality. However, the ethical implications of WET as an experimental therapeutic strategy remain largely unexplored. This article evaluates the ethical considerations surrounding WET as an emerging experimental treatment for vision loss. A thorough review of published literature pertaining to WET was performed; ethical issues were identified during review of the articles.

This study aimed to develop and test the reliability and validity of a multi-item nurses’ presenteeism behaviour questionnaire. Study 1 administered the Nurse Presenteeism Questionnaire to 250 Chinese nurses. Study 2, surveyed 650 nurses with the NPQ, the Sickness Presenteeism Questionnaire, the Stanford Presenteeism Scale, the General Health Questionnaire, and the Emotional Exhaustion Scale using convenience sampling. After item analysis, the subjects were randomly divided into two groups to verify the questionnaire structure. Study 1 revealed the nurses’ core symptoms when (...) they go to work with illness, and the NPQ with 11 items was developed. Study 2’s item analysis revealed that 11 NPQ items had good discrimination and high homogeneity. Besides, the scale had good reliability and external criterion validity. Thus, the NPQ can be used to measure presenteeism behaviour in nursing. (shrink)

Young migrants have been the major migrant labor force in urban China. But they may be more vulnerable in quality of life and mental health than other groups, due to their personal characteristic and some social/community policies or management measures. It highlights the need to focus on psychological wellbeing and probe driving and reinforcing factors that influence their mental health. This study aimed to investigate the influence of subjective/objective status and possible pathways of young migrants’ life satisfaction and psychological distress. (...) Data on 9838 young migrants in the China Migrants Dynamic Survey were analyzed by LISREL 8.8. A total of 94.03% migrated for jobs or business. Subjective status, including subjective socioeconomic status, social adaptation, and psychological integration, had positive effects on life satisfaction, whereas social adaptation and psychological integration negatively affected psychological distress. Objective status, including objective socioeconomic status and health insurance, had adverse effects on life satisfaction, whereas they positively affected psychological distress. Social participation and city belonging had only significant positive mediating roles on life satisfaction. It is essential to increase social adaptation and decrease integration stress according to younger internal migrants’ practical needs. It is also necessary to enhance community/social resources and activities in the context of developing sustainability in the community to assist in mental health promotion. (shrink)

Humanistic and ethical thought existed in China already in the ancient culture period, and was strongly enhanced during the Spring and Autumn era. Based on this background and foundation, Confucius is ‘a creator of the paradigm’ of Chinese philosophy, and Lao-Tzu is ‘an original metaphysician,’ both establishing the basic tendencies of Chinese philosophy. After that, the philosophies of pre- and post-Qin eras, all continued to develop along their thought. Chinese philosophy has several characteristics, including the unity of nature and man, (...) truth and goodness, cognition and behavior, ontology and cosmology, humanity and natural law, the theory of human nature and values and many others. Its theoretic framework and basic structure aims to enlighten what humans ought to be - a question at the core of Chinese culture, reflecting the national spirit. The Chinese spirit is paradigmatically expressed in two sayings, “as Heaven’s movement is ever vigorous, so must a gentleman ceaselessly strive,” and “as Earth is broad and profound, so must a gentleman be greatly virtuous and lenient.”. (shrink)

The ordering tendency in binary f -Ti solid solution containing 3sp or 4sp simple-metal or 3d transition-metal solute is investigated systematically by the linear muffin-tin orbital method within the atomic sphere approximation . We demonstrated that the effective pairwise interaction energy in a solid solution is equal to half the solute-solute interaction energies and can be evaluated by a supercell total energy approach. The calculations of EPI energy both with and without volume relaxation of the supercells and local density of (...) states show that the EPI energies of Ti-SM and Ti-TM solutions are dominated by different factors. For Ti-SM solutions, the EPI energies are of large absolute values with a negative sign, indicating strong ordering tendency in these solutions. The volume relaxation does not alter the EPI energy substantially. The calculated LDOS shows that the ordering tendency in Ti-SM solutions may be related to the hybridization between the electrons of the SM atoms when they are close to each other. For most Ti-TM solutions, if calculated without relaxation, the absolute EPI energies are very small; however, if calculated with relaxation, they are of relatively large positive values, indicating a clustering tendency in these solutions. By combining the calculated EPI energy and Flinn's model for short-range order strengthening, the increase in critical shear stress ‰ sro due to SRO is estimated for Ti-SM alloys, and the results qualitatively agree with experiment. (shrink)

Contrary to the assumption of arbitrariness in modern linguistics, sound symbolism, which is the non-arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings, exists. Sound symbolism, including the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, implies the universality of such relationships; individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can similarly relate sound-symbolic words to referents, although the extent of these similarities remains to be fully understood. Here, we examined if subjects from different countries could similarly infer the surface texture properties from words that sound-symbolically represent hardness in Japanese. (...) We prepared Japanese sound-symbolic words of which novelty was manipulated by a genetic algorithm. Japanese speakers in Japan and English speakers in both Singapore and the United States rated these words based on surface texture properties, as well as familiarity. The results show that hardness-related words were rated as harder and rougher than softness-related words, regardless of novelty and countries. Multivariate analyses of the ratings classified the hardness-related words along the hardness-softness dimension at over 80% accuracy, regardless of country. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the number of speech sounds /g/ and /k/ predicted the ratings of the surface texture properties in non-Japanese countries, suggesting a systematic relationship between phonetic features of a word and perceptual quality represented by the word across culturally and linguistically diverse samples. (shrink)

With the rapid development of information age, various social groups and corresponding institutions are producing a large amount of information data every day. For such huge data storage and identification, in order to manage such data more efficiently and reasonably, traditional semantic similarity algorithm emerges. However, the accuracy of the traditional semantic similarity algorithm is relatively low, and the convergence of corresponding algorithm is poor. Based on this problem, this paper starts with the conceptual structure of language, analyzes the depth (...) of language structure and the distance between nodes, and analyzes the two levels as the starting point. For the information of a specific data resource description frame type, the weight of interconnected edges is used for impact analysis so as to realize the semantic similarity impact analysis of all information data. Based on the above improvements, this paper also systematically establishes the data information modeling process based on language conceptual structure and establishes the corresponding model. In the experimental part, the improved algorithm is simulated and analyzed. The simulation results show that compared with the traditional algorithm, the algorithm has obvious accuracy improvement. (shrink)

At the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophy held in Seoul, Korea, from July 29 to August 5, 2008, a panel was convened to debate the ideas for a "democracy with Confucian characteristics'' in Daniel A. Bell's Beyond Liberal Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). While all participants welcome the attempt to remedy the shortcomings of liberal democracy with Confucian teachings, Fred Dallmayr worries that Bell's political thinking for an East Asian context may "point beyond democracy tout court/' For Sor-hoon Tan, (...) Bell's chapter 6, "Taking Elitism Seriously: Democracy with Confucian Characteristics" may not be so much an alternative to liberalism as it is a challenge to the democratic value of equality that overlooks the dangers of an imperfect meritocracy. Chenyang Li, on the other hand, approaches Bell's proposal of combining a Confucianism-inspired Upper House of Talent and Virtue selected through competitive examinations with a lower house of democratically elected representatives from the concern that it surrenders the Confucian requirement of virtuous leadership. This feature review also concludes with a spirited reply from Daniel Bell. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether physical cleansing can reduce the mindset effect in problem-solving in two experiments. Both experiments followed the same procedure. In the first stage, participants formed a mindset through the Luchins’ water-jar task (Experiment 1) or the idiom maze task (Experiment 2). The second stage is cleansing manipulation. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to clean their hands with wipes (cleansing condition) or examine the packaging of the wipes (no-cleansing condition). In Experiment 2, participants were asked to (...) watch a washing-hands video (cleansing condition) or watch an examining-pen video (no-cleansing condition). At last, all participants completed the mindset effect test problems. The results showed that the participants in the cleansing condition were less affected by the mindset than those in the no-cleansing condition, indicating that physical cleansing reduced the mindset effect. Our results provide new evidence for the clean-slate effects and support the hypothesis that physical cleansing is an embodied process of psychological separation. (shrink)

Previous research has established that people can implicitly learn chunks, which do not require a memory buffer to process. The present study explores the implicit learning of nonlocal dependencies generated by higher than finite-state grammars, specifically, Chinese tonal retrogrades and inversions , which do require buffers . People were asked to listen to and memorize artificial poetry instantiating one of the two grammars; after this training phase, people were informed of the existence of rules and asked to classify new poems, (...) while providing attributions of the basis of their judgments. People acquired unconscious structural knowledge of both tonal retrogrades and inversions. Moreover, inversions were implicitly learnt more easily than retrogrades constraining the nature of the memory buffer in computational models of implicit learning. (shrink)

Background:The right of children to have their voice heard has been accepted by researchers, and there are increasing numbers of qualitative health studies involving children. The ethical and methodological issues of including children in research have caused worldwide concerns, and many researchers have published articles sharing their own experiences.Objectives:To systematically review and synthesise experts’ opinions and experiences about ethical and methodological issues of including children in research, as well as related solution strategies.Research design:The research design was a systematic review of (...) opinion-based evidence, based on the guidelines by Joanna Briggs Institute.Methods:A search of five computerised databases has been conducted in April 2014 and 2271 articles were found. After screening the titles, abstracts, full texts and appraising the quality, 30 articles were finally included in the review. A meta-aggregative approach was applied in the data analysis and synthesis process.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval is not needed as it is a systematic review of published literature.Results:Six themes were identified, including evaluating potential risks and benefits, gaining access, obtaining informed consent/assent, protecting confidentiality and privacy, building rapport and collecting rich data. The similarities and differences between research involving children and that involving adults were indicated.Conclusion:All potential incentives should be justified when designing the study. Further studies need to research how to evaluate individual capacity of children and how to balance protecting children’s right to participate and their interests in the research. Cultural differences related to researching children in different regions should also be studied. (shrink)

Digitalization and advanced technologies are replacing human jobs. Around the world, many people have lost their jobs due to increasing digitalization. Similarly, Chinese expatriates associated with the manufacturing sector in emerging countries such as Vietnam face similar challenges. Therefore, Chinese expatriates need to bring competitiveness in their competencies. This competitiveness brings sustainability to their career. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of career competencies on career sustainability. Moreover, we test the mediating effect of lifelong learning in (...) the relationship between career competencies and career sustainability. A questionnaire survey approach was used in this study. The target population was the Chinese expatriate managers working at China-invested manufacturing multinational organizations in Vietnam. To estimate the proposed relationships, we use structural equation modeling. The results are confirmed that in the direct relationship career competence has a positive impact on career sustainability. The findings of this study also indicate that career competencies have a positive impact on lifelong learning. Furthermore, outcomes confirmed that lifelong learning has a positive impact on career sustainability. Similarly, results are also confirmed that lifelong learning is positively mediating between career competencies and career sustainability. Therefore, the empirical results of this article identify that lifelong learning has a critical impact on sustainable careers. Specifically, this study is useful for mid-level managers who are associated with multinational organizations. At the end of this article, we also explained the practical implications, limitations, and future research directions. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Previous research demonstrates the critical role moral disengagement plays in unethical decision-making. This study investigates the relationships among moral endorsement, shareholder-value orientation, moral disengagement, and moral judgment on issues of different moral intensities. The results of a scenario-based survey conducted in China confirm the negative (positive) impact of moral disengagement (moral intensity) on moral judgment. The findings reveal that both moral endorsement and shareholder-value orientation of decision-makers significantly influence moral judgment and that moral intensity moderates the relationships between moral endorsement (...) and moral judgment, and between shareholder-value orientation and moral disengagement. The study’s theoretical contributions, managerial implications, and limitations are discussed. (shrink)