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)

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)

The identification and analysis of the spatiotemporal dynamic traffic patterns in citywide road networks constitute a crucial process for complex traffic management and control. However, city-scale and synchronal traffic data pose challenges for such kind of quantification, especially during peak hours. Traditional studies rely on data from road-based detectors or multiple communication systems, which are limited in not only access but also coverage. To avoid these limitations, we introduce real-time, traffic condition digital maps as our input. The digital maps keep (...) spatiotemporal urban traffic information in nature and are open to access. Their pixel colors represent traffic conditions on corresponding road segments. We propose a stacked convolutional autoencoder-based method to extract a low-dimension feature vector for each input. We compute and analyze the distances between vectors. The statistical results show different traffic patterns during given periods. With the actual data of Chongqing city, we compare the feature extraction performance between our proposed method and histogram. The result shows our proposed method can extract spatiotemporal features better. For the same data set, there is little difference in the number distribution of red pixels found in the statistics result of the histogram, while differences do exist in the results of our proposed method. We find the most fluctuated morning is on Friday; the most fluctuated evening is on Tuesday; and the most stable evening is on Wednesday. The distance captured by our method can represent the evolution of different traffic conditions during the morning and evening peak hours. Our proposed method provides managers with assistance to sense the dynamics of citywide traffic conditions in quantity. (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)

Facial expression recognition plays a significant part in artificial intelligence and computer vision. However, most of facial expression recognition methods have not obtained satisfactory results based on low-level features. The existed methods used in facial expression recognition encountered the major issues of linear inseparability, large computational burden, and data redundancy. To obtain satisfactory results, we propose an innovative deep learning model using the kernel entropy component analysis network and directed acyclic graph support vector machine. We use the KECANet in the (...) feature extraction stage. In the stage of output, binary hashing and blockwise histograms are adopted. We sent the final output features to the DAGSVM classifier for expression recognition. We test the performance of our proposed method on three databases of CK+, JAFFE, and CMU Multi-PIE. According to the experiment results, the proposed method can learn high-level features and provide more recognition information in the stage of training, obtaining a higher recognition rate. (shrink)

Background Morality is a fundamental component of nurses’ daily work. Nurses’ cognitive tendencies toward moral disengagement in high-stress work environments can easily lead them to engage in counterproductive work behaviors that are not conducive to the organization. However, there is limited research on how to mitigate the impact of moral disengagement on counterproductive work behavior. Objective The objective was to explore the impact of moral disengagement on counterproductive work behavior, as well as the reverse regulatory mechanism of moral identity on (...) the relationship between moral disengagement and counterproductive work behavior. Research design This was a quantitative, cross-sectional study. Participants and research context From September to October 2023, nurses from emergency departments of major hospitals in Hunan Province were recruited, and 500 questionnaires were distributed and collected using the WeChat app Credamo Seeing Numbers. Ethical consideration All study procedures were approved by the Ethics Committee of Hunan Normal University (No. 2023-388). Findings Moral disengagement had a positive effect on counterproductive work behavior directed at the organization (CWB-O) as well as counterproductive work behavior directed at individuals (CWB-I). Moral identity was not significant in moderating the relationship between moral disengagement and CWB-O. Moral identity had an inverse moderating effect on the mechanism of action between moral disengagement and CWB-I. Conclusion Counterproductive work behavior guided by moral disengagement is detrimental to organizations, and moral identity can inhibit the effect of moral disengagement on CWB-I. Nursing administrators should focus on improving nurses’ moral identity and improving the healthcare workplace environment so that moral identity can better exert its inhibitory effect on counterproductive work behavior among nurses. (shrink)

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)

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)

Purpose: The cognitive effects of total sleep deprivation on the brain remain poorly understood. Electroencephalography is a very useful tool for detecting spontaneous brain activity in the resting state. Quasi-stable electrical distributions, known as microstates, carry useful information about the dynamics of large-scale brain networks. In this study, microstate analysis was used to study changes in brain activity after 24 h of total sleep deprivation.Participants and Methods: Twenty-seven healthy volunteers were recruited and underwent EEG scans before and after 24 h (...) of TSD. Microstate analysis was applied, and six microstate classes were identified. Topographies and temporal parameters of the microstates were compared between the rested wakefulness and TSD conditions.Results: Microstate class A showed lower global explained variance, frequency of occurrence, and time coverage in TSD than RW, whereas microstate class D displayed higher GEV, frequency of occurrence, and time coverage in TSD compared to RW. Moreover, subjective sleepiness was significantly negatively correlated with the microstate parameters of class A and positively correlated with the microstate parameters of class D. Transition analysis revealed that class B exhibited a higher probability of transition than did classes D and F in TSD compared to RW.Conclusion: The observation suggests alterations of the dynamic brain-state properties of TSD in healthy young male subjects, which may serve as system-level neural underpinnings for cognitive declines in sleep-deprived subjects. (shrink)

With the development of China’s higher education, China has become increasingly popular as an education destination for international students. To explore the rationale and the influencing factors for them to attend Chinese universities, this research adopted a questionnaire survey and interviews with international students from a top university in China. The data were analyzed from four aspects: home countries’ push factors, China’s pull factors, university attractiveness factors and personal choice factors. The findings show that university attractiveness factors are more significant (...) than the China’s pull factors and the home countries push factors; China’s pull factors have significant influence on the university attractiveness factors; For students from different regions, the factors of China’s pull, home country’s push and university attractiveness play significantly different role in affecting their choice of university, with Asian students much more affected than those from other parts of the world. Besides, individual subjective norms and individual value choices also affect students’ choices to study abroad. (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)

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)

Higher education policy and manpower training fail to meet the requirement of rapidly-changing society and employers' expectation in Taiwan, resulting in the great gap between university education and employment. Students employability is also what all higher education institutions should focus whether a high degree of student learning outcomes can represent a high degree of students employability or not, this still unclarified. This study aims to explore the relationships among pedagogy for employability, problem-based teaching mode, absorptive capacity and student employability in (...) higher education institutions (HEIs). In terms of analyzing a total sample of 553 undergraduates from 12 Taiwanese HEIs by using structural equation model (SEM), the results show that the influences of pedagogy for employability and problem-based teaching mode on absorptive capacity and student employability are statistically positive significant. Based on the findings, specific suggestions and managerial implications for HEIs, curriculum and instruction planning, and future research are provided. (shrink)

BackgroundPost-stroke depression is one of the most common neuropsychiatric diseases in patients with stroke, and it can increase the disability rate, mortality, and recurrence rate of stroke. Currently, many clinical studies have indicated that traditional Chinese medicine, such as acupuncture and herbs, Western medicine, rehabilitation, repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation, and other treatment methods, are effective in treating PSD. However, no study has formulated a comprehensive treatment plan that integrates TCM, Western medicine, and rehabilitation for PSD. Thus, this trial aims to (...) assess the efficacy and safety of integrative medicine for treating PSD.MethodsThis multicenter, prospective, randomized, controlled study aims to form a set of effective clinical treatment schemes that integrate TCM, Western medicine, and rehabilitation for PSD. A total of 202 participants recruited from four centers will be randomized into either the integrative medicine or standard care group. Standard care—basic treatment, general nursing care, and exercise therapy—will be provided to all participants. The integrative medicine group will also receive acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation. Participants will receive acupuncture and rTMS treatments five times per week for 4 weeks and will be administered Chinese herbs, basic treatment, general nursing care, and exercise therapy for 4 weeks. The primary outcomes include the Hamilton Depression Scale, Self-Rating Depression Scale, and Activity of Daily Living Scale. And the secondary outcomes include the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scale, the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Scale, and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. All outcome measures will be evaluated at baseline, week 4, and week 8. Safety assessments will be performed throughout the study.DiscussionThis study is expected to verify the efficacy and safety of integrative medicine for treating PSD, providing an evidence-based clinical reference for the future development of a standardized scheme.Clinical trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov, identifier: NCT05187975. (shrink)

Anxious major depressive disorder is a common subtype of major depressive disorder; however, its unique neural mechanism is not well-understood currently. Using multimodal MRI data, this study examined common and specific alterations of amygdala subregions between patients with and without anxiety. No alterations were observed in the gray matter volume or intra-region functional integration in either patient group. Compared with the controls, both patient groups showed decreased functional connectivity between the left superficial amygdala and the left putamen, and between the (...) right superficial amygdala and the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex and medial orbitofrontal cortex, while only patients with anxiety exhibited decreased activity in the bilateral laterobasal and superficial amygdala. Moreover, the decreased activity correlated negatively with the Hamilton depression scale scores in the patients with anxiety. These findings provided insights into the pathophysiologic processes of anxious major depressive disorder and may help to develop new and effective treatment programs. (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)

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)

This article analyses which propositions of the original hard news texts are replicated in their summaries written by competent readers, with a view to observing the strategies they use to write summaries for this text type and analysing the linguistic devices involved when they implement the strategies. Three strategies, namely deletion, selection and abstraction, are used by summary writers to boil down the original texts to their main points. Implementing these strategies requires readers to make of the relationships holding between (...) the propositions of text. Teaching linguistic devices such as subordinators, conjuncts, lexical signals, lexical repetitions and parallelism is crucial because they assist students to analyse the relationships between the propositions. (shrink)

Model RB is a model of random constraint satisfaction problems, which exhibits exact satisfiability phase transition and many hard instances, both experimentally and theoretically. Benchmarks based on Model RB have been successfully used by various international algorithm competitions and many research papers. In a previous work, Xu and Li defined two notions called i-constraint assignment tuple and flawed i-constraint assignment tuple to show an exponential resolution complexity of Model RB. These two notions are similar to some kind of consistency in (...) constraint satisfaction problems, but seem different from all kinds of consistency so far known in literatures. In this paper, we explicitly define this kind of consistency, called variable-centered consistency, and show an upper bound on a parameter in Model RB, such that up to this bound the typical instances of Model RB are variable-centered consistent. (shrink)

Squashed entanglement :829–840, 2004) is a monogamous entanglement measure, which implies that highly extendible states have small value of the squashed entanglement. Here, invoking a recent inequality for the quantum conditional mutual information :575–611, 2015) greatly extended and simplified in various work since, we show the converse, that a small value of squashed entanglement implies that the state is close to a highly extendible state. As a corollary, we establish an alternative proof of the faithfulness of squashed entanglement. We briefly (...) discuss the previous and subsequent history of the Fawzi–Renner bound and related conjectures, and close by advertising a potentially far-reaching generalization to universal and functorial recovery maps for the monotonicity of the relative entropy. (shrink)

Since the publication of Metaphors We Live by and Metonymy in Language and Thought, fruitful achievements have been made in metonymy research, both...

With the rapid development of Internet of Things technology, RFID technology has been widely used in various fields. In order to optimize the RFID system hardware deployment strategy and improve the deployment efficiency, the prediction of the RFID system identification rate has become a new challenge. In this paper, a neighborhood rough set and random forest combination model is proposed to predict the identification rate of an RFID system. Firstly, the initial influencing factors of the RFID system identification rate are (...) reduced using neighborhood rough set theory combined with the principle of heuristic attribute reduction of neighborhood weighted dependency, thus obtaining a kernel factor subset. Secondly, a random forest prediction model is established based on the kernel factor subset, and a confusion matrix is established using out-of-bag data to evaluate the prediction results. The test is conducted under the constructed RFID experimental environment, whose results showed that the model can predict the identification rate of the RFID system in a fast and efficient way, and the classification accuracy can reach 90.5%. It can effectively guide the hardware deployment and communication parameter protocol setting of the system and improve the system performance. Compared with BP neural network and other prediction models, NRS-RF has shorter prediction time and faster calculation speed. Finally, the validity of the proposed model was verified by the RFID intelligent archives management platform. (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)