The outbreak of COVID-19 is a public health crisis that has had a profound impact on society. Stigma is a common phenomenon in the prevalence and spread of infectious diseases. In the crisis caused by the pandemic, widespread public stigma has influenced social groups. This study explores the negative emotions arousal effect from online public stigmatization during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on social cooperation. We constructed a model based on the literature and tested it on a sample of (...) 313 participants from the group being stigmatized. The results demonstrate: (1) relevance and stigma perception promote negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, and grief; (2) the arousal of anger and grief leads to a rise in the altruistic tendency within the stigmatized group; and (3) stigmatization-induced negative emotions have a complete mediating effect between perceived relevance and altruistic tendency, as well as perceived stigma and altruistic tendency. For a country and nation, external stigma will promote the group becoming more united and mutual help. One wish to pass the buck but end up helping others unintentionally. We should not simply blame others, including countries, regions, and groups under the outbreak of COVID-19, and everyone should be cautious with the words and actions in the Internet public sphere. (shrink)

To analyze the influence of the integration of piano art and media on long-term care of the elderly in the aging society, and to improve the living standard and happiness of the elderly, based on educational psychology, several scales of self-compiled personal information, the Ackerson personality inventory, and the memorial university of Newfoundland happiness scale were introduced for statement, and questionnaire method was adopted for information collection. Then, the mechanism of the integration of piano art and media on the happiness (...) of the elderly was summarized. The results showed that there were significant differences in the happiness of the elderly in terms of monthly average income, economic pressure, health status, and living conditions. The happiness of the elderly with a monthly income of more than 5,000 yuan was significantly higher than that of the elderly with a monthly income of <3,000 yuan. The happiness of the elderly with low economic pressure was significantly higher than that of the elderly with high economic pressure. The happiness of the elderly with good living conditions was significantly higher than that of the elderly with ordinary living conditions. The happiness score and positive experience of the elderly with learning over 5 years were significantly higher than those with learning <5 years and the non-piano learning group. The total score of happiness in the piano learning group was significantly positively correlated with positive affection and PE, and negatively correlated with neuroticism and psychosis. It is concluded that the piano art learning process based on educational psychology can improve the subjective well-being of the elderly. In addition, the elderly who have been exposed to piano art for a long time are more active in life. Piano art edification is an important factor affecting the psychological well-being of the elderly. The research has a good guiding significance for improving the happiness of the elderly. (shrink)

Objective: Automatic detection of auditory stimuli, represented by the mismatch negativity, facilitates rapid processing of salient stimuli in the environment. The amplitude of MMN declines with ageing. However, whether automatic detection of auditory stimuli is affected by visually perceived negative emotions with normal ageing remains unclear. We aimed to evaluate how fearful facial expressions affect the MMN amplitude under ageing.Methods: We used a modified oddball paradigm to analyze the amplitude of N100 and MMN in 22 young adults and 21 middle-aged (...) adults.Results: We found that the amplitude of N1 elicited by standard tones was smaller under fearful facial expressions than neutral facial expressions and was more negative for young adults than middle-aged adults. The MMN amplitude under fearful facial expressions was greater than neutral facial expressions, but the amplitude in middle-aged adults was smaller than in young adults.Conclusion: Visually perceived negative emotion promotes the extraction of auditory features. Additionally, it enhances the effect of auditory change detection in middle-aged adults but fails to compensate for this decline with normal ageing.Significance: The study may help to understand how visually perceived emotion affects the early stage of auditory information processing from an event process perspective. (shrink)

Psychological well-being indicates individuals’ positive psychological functioning and well-being. A growing body of literature, largely based on adults and old people, suggests that volunteering and charitable donations are related to individuals’ psychological well-being. As emerging adulthood is a vital time for lifespan development, the aim of this study is to examine the effects of volunteering and charitable donation on individuals’ psychological well-being on college students. Relying on theories of altruism and the warm-glow theory, this study estimates the relationships among hours (...) of volunteering, amount of charitable donations, and psychological well-being from 1,871 Chinese college students. The linear regression results indicate that students’ hours of volunteering and the amount of charitable donations in the past year were positively associated with their psychological well-being. Volunteering, compared to charitable donations, had a slightly stronger association with psychological well-being. This study provides a rationale for academic institutions to integrate social service activities into the curriculum as a potential tool to promote students’ psychological well-being. (shrink)

Emotional design is an important development trend of interaction design. Emotional design in products plays a key role in enhancing user experience and inducing user emotional resonance. In recent years, based on the user's emotional experience, the design concept of strengthening product emotional design has become a new direction for most designers to improve their design thinking. In the emotional interaction design, the machine needs to capture the user's key information in real time, recognize the user's emotional state, and use (...) a variety of clues to finally determine the appropriate user model. Based on this background, this research uses a deep learning mechanism for more accurate and effective emotion recognition, thereby optimizing the design of the interactive system and improving the user experience. First of all, this research discusses how to use user characteristics such as speech, facial expression, video, heartbeat, etc., to make machines more accurately recognize human emotions. Through the analysis of various characteristics, the speech is selected as the experimental material. Second, a speech-based emotion recognition method is proposed. The mel-Frequency cepstral coefficient of the speech signal is used as the input of the improved long and short-term memory network. To ensure the integrity of the information and the accuracy of the output at the next moment, ILSTM makes peephole connections in the forget gate and input gate of LSTM, and adds the unit state as input data to the threshold layer. The emotional features obtained by ILSTM are input into the attention layer, and the self-attention mechanism is used to calculate the weight of each frame of speech signal. The speech features with higher weights are used to distinguish different emotions and complete the emotion recognition of the speech signal. Experiments on the EMO-DB and CASIA datasets verify the effectiveness of the model for emotion recognition. Finally, the feasibility of emotional interaction system design is discussed. (shrink)

Travel route preferences can strongly interact with the events that happened in networked traveling, and this coevolving phenomena are essential in providing theoretical foundations for travel route recommendation and predicting collective behaviour in social systems. While most literature puts the focus on route recommendation of individual scenic spots instead of city travel, we propose a novel approach named City Travel Route Recommendation based on Sequential Events Similarity by applying the coevolving spreading dynamics of the city tour networks and mine the (...) travel spatiotemporal patterns in the networks. First, we present the Event Sequence Similarity Measurement Method based on modelling tourists’ travel sequences. The method can help measure similarities in various city travel routes, which combine different scenic types, time slots, and relative locations. Second, by applying the user preference learning method based on scenic type, we learn from the user’s city travel historical data and compute the personalized travel preference. Finally, we verify our algorithm by collecting data of 54 city travellers of their historical spatiotemporal routes in the ten most popular cities from Mafeng.com. CTRR-SES shows better performance in predicting the user’s new city travel sequence fitting the user’s individual preference. (shrink)

One heated argument in recent years concerns whether requiring real names supervision on social media will inhibit users' participation in discoursing online speech. The current study explores the impact of identification, perceived anonymity, perceived risk, and information credibility on participating in discussions on moral/ethical violations event on social network sites (SNS) in China. In this study, we constructed a model based on the literature and tested it on a sample of 218 frequent SNS users. The results demonstrate the influence of (...) identification and perception of anonymity: although the relationship between the two factors is negative, both are conducive to participation in discussion on moral/ethical violation topics, and information credibility also has a positive impact. The results confirmed the significance of risk perception on comments posted about moral/ethical violation. Our results have reference value for identity management and internet governance. Policies regarding users’ real names on the internet need to take into account the reliability of the identity authentication mechanism, as well as netizens’ perceptions of privacy about their identity and the necessity of guaranteeing content and information reliability online. We also offer some suggestions for future research, with a special emphasis on applicability to different cultures, contexts, and social networking sites. (shrink)

Most studies have examined the outcomes of patients supported by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as a life-sustaining treatment. It is unclear whether significant social events are associated with the use of life-sustaining treatment. This study aimed to compare the trend of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use in Taiwan with that in the world, and to examine the influence of significant social events on the trend of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use in Taiwan.

Hengxian, one of the bamboo books of the Chu State during the Warring States Period that is kept in the Shanghai Museum, was collected by the museum in 1994, and is an important piece of literature that discusses cosmic issues prior to Huainanzi. Based on Li Ling's work on the text, as well as hermeneutic work by some other scholars, this essay represents another attempt to determine the words and meanings of the Hengxian, with a focus on its cosmological commentary. (...) /// "恒先" 是上海博物馆藏战国楚竹书中的一篇， 1994年入藏上海博物馆。该 文是 "淮南子" 之前讨论宇宙问题的重要文献。依据李零整理的本子与其他学者的 释读，可以对 "恒先" 文义重新加以梳理，并从宇宙论的角度进行新的思想阐释。. (shrink)

As heritage is the precious treasure of human society, heritage also carries the genes of culture. It is of vital importance to effectively develop heritage tourism resources and explore the mechanisms that influence tourists’ cultural identity. This study has integrated the stimulus-organism-response framework with the attitude-behavior-context theory to construct a hypothetical model of heritage tourism aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity so as to figure out their relationships. The questionnaires were collected to investigate the impact paths and mechanisms (...) between heritage aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity. The structural equation model was used to examine the relationship between heritage tourism aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity. The main findings include: the positive impact of aesthetics driving mental experience and cultural identity is significant; the impact of tourist involvement on mental experience and cultural identity is also significant; the impact of aesthetics on cultural identity is not significant, but mental experience mediates the relationship between aesthetics and cultural identity in heritage tourism. This study provides a new research framework and perspective for the aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity of tourists in heritage tourism. This study also provides practical implications for government culture sectors to propagandize culture and for heritage destination managers to better manage heritage sites. (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

Research shows that entrepreneurial activities significantly promote economic development, which enhances the importance of the innovative entrepreneurial potential of college students. This study analyzes the effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention from the perspective of planned behavior theory. By examining the significant role of entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities on economic and social development, we established a conceptual model. To understand the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, the hypotheses propose the intermediary role of entrepreneurial ability, and (...) the study provides evidence from China the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. Improving entrepreneurial intention and encouraging college students to establish businesses through entrepreneurship education in universities is crucial. This study proposes a hypothetical model of the relationship between entrepreneurial competence and entrepreneurial intention in entrepreneurship education at universities. Using a questionnaire survey of college students with practical experience in the Yangtze River Delta of China, the bootstrap method in the SPSS macro program process software verifies the hypotheses. The results show that entrepreneurial teaching, business plan competition, and entrepreneurial practice support positively affect entrepreneurial competence. In addition, entrepreneurial competence plays an intermediary role in the relationship between entrepreneurial teaching, business plan competition, entrepreneurship practice support, and entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurship education improves the ability to establish a business in the present and in entrepreneurial activities in the future. Entrepreneurial competence obtained through entrepreneurship education continuously affects entrepreneurial intention. (shrink)

Autonomous learning capacity is a key competency that supports teachers’ professional development. In this study, a stratified sampling method was used to recruit 396 junior and senior high school mathematics teachers in T city, one of the provincial city in China. A questionnaire with high reliability and validity developed prior to the study by the researchers was employed to measure their autonomous learning capacity and differences across groups. Twelve teachers were then selected for interviews. The results showed satisfactory overall performance. (...) By subdimension, teachers’ performance was the best in the development of study plans, followed by evaluation of learning outcomes, while they needed improvement in learning habit formation and proficiency in using learning methods. Furthermore, the analysis of differences across groups indicated that for autonomous learning capacity, female teachers were significantly better than their male peers; junior high school teachers were better compared to those in senior high school; teachers aged 41–50 underperformed those aged 51 and above; teachers who work in rural areas and townships did not perform worse than urban teachers; and those with doctoral degrees did not demonstrate considerable advantage over others. There were no significant differences in the overall autonomous learning capacity across years of teaching and job title groups. However, in the subdimensions, those with 21–30 years of teaching experience had lower proficiency in using learning methods and evaluation of learning outcomes, and teachers with senior titles did not demonstrate expected advantages in learning habit formation. (shrink)

Evidences are important proofs to support judicial trials. Automatically extracting evidences from judgement documents can be used to assess the trial quality and support “Intelligent Court”. Current evidence extraction is primarily depended on sequence labelling models. Despite their success, they can only assign a label to a token, which is difficult to recognize nested evidence entities in judgment documents, where a token may belong to several evidences at the same time. In this paper, we present a novel evidence extraction architecture (...) called ATT-MRC, in which extracting evidence entities is formalized as a question answer problem, where all evidence spans are screened out as possible correct answers. Furthermore, to address the data imbalance problem in the judgement documents, we revised the loss function and combined it with a data enhancement technique. Experimental results demonstrate that our model has better performance than related works in evidence extraction. (shrink)

In the context of the COVID-19, we examined the relationship between college students’ ego depletion and their prosocial behavior. We explored the mediating role of social self-efficacy between ego depletion and prosocial behavior, we also examined the moderating role of personal belief in a just world in this relationship. 1,122 college students completed the ego depletion questionnaire, prosocial behavior questionnaire, social self-efficacy questionnaire, and personal belief in a just world questionnaire. The current findings suggested that: Social self-efficacy mediated the relationship (...) between college students’ ego depletion and their prosocial behaviors. The ego depletion of college students could be used to predict their prosocial behavior through social self-efficacy. Personal belief in a just world moderated the relationship between social self-efficacy and prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Inspired by the application of CycleGAN networks to the image style conversion problem Zhu et al., this paper proposes an end-to-end network, DefogNet, for solving the single-image dehazing problem, treating the image dehazing problem as a style conversion problem from a fogged image to a nonfogged image, without the need to estimate a priori information from an atmospheric scattering model. DefogNet improves on CycleGAN by adding a cross-layer connection structure in the generator to enhance the network’s multiscale feature extraction capability. (...) The loss function was redesigned to add detail perception loss and color perception loss to improve the quality of texture information recovery and produce better fog-free images. In this paper, the novel Defog-SN algorithm is presented. This algorithm adds a spectral normalization layer to the discriminator’s convolution layer to make the discriminant network conform to a 1-Lipschitz continuum and further improve the model’s stability. In this study, the experimental process is completed based on the O-HAZE, I-HAZE, and RESIDE datasets. The dehazing results show that the method outperforms traditional methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM on synthetic datasets and Avegrad and Entropy on naturalistic images. (shrink)

The whale optimization algorithm is a powerful swarm intelligence method which has been widely used in various fields such as parameter identification of solar cells and PV modules. In order to better balance the exploration and exploitation of WOA, we propose a novel modified WOA in which both the mutation strategy based on Levy flight and a local search mechanism of pattern search are introduced. On the one hand, Levy flight can make the algorithm get rid of the local optimum (...) and avoid stagnation; thus, it is able to prevent the algorithm from losing diversity and to increase the global search capability. On the other hand, pattern search, a direct search method, has not only high convergence rate but also good stability, which can boost the local optimization ability of the WOA. Therefore, the combination of these two mechanisms can greatly improve the capability of WOA to obtain the best solution. In addition, MWOA may be employed to estimate parameters in single diode model, double diode model, and PV modules and to identify unknown parameters of two different types of PV modules under diverse light irradiance and temperature conditions. The analytical results demonstrate the validity and the practicality of MWOA for estimating parameters of solar cells and PV modules. (shrink)

An efficient intelligent fault diagnosis model was proposed in this paper to timely and accurately offer a dependable basis for identifying the rolling bearing condition in the actual production application. The model is mainly based on an improved butterfly optimizer algorithm- optimized kernel extreme learning machine model. Firstly, the roller bearing’s vibration signals in the four states that contain normal state, outer race failure, inner race failure, and rolling ball failure are decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions using the complete (...) ensemble empirical mode decomposition based on adaptive noise. Then, the amplitude energy entropies of IMFs are designated as the features of the rolling bearing. In order to eliminate redundant features, a random forest was used to receive the contributions of features to the accuracy of results, and subsets of features were set up by removing one feature in the descending order, using the classification accuracy of the SBOA-KELM model as the criterion to obtain the optimal feature subset. The salp swarm algorithm was introduced to BOA to improve optimization ability, obtain optimal KELM parameters, and avoid the BOA deteriorating into local optimization. Finally, an optimal SBOA-KELM model was constructed for the identification of rolling bearings. In the experiment, SBOA was validated against ten other competitive optimization algorithms on 30 IEEE CEC2017 benchmark functions. The experimental results validated that the SBOA was evident over existing algorithms for most function problems. SBOA-KELM employed for diagnosing the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings obtained improved classification performance and higher stability. Therefore, the proposed SBOA-KELM model can be effectively used to diagnose faults of rolling bearings. (shrink)

Earthquake is a kind of natural disaster, which will have a great impact on the building structure. In the vibration control field of building structures, the timeliness of system stability is extremely important. In traditional control methods, the timeliness is not paid enough attention for systems with uncertain seismic waves. For setting this problem, fuzzy adaptive compensation control for uncertain building structural systems by sliding-mode technology is proposed. It is combined with fuzzy adaptive control and sliding-mode control to ensure that (...) the system can be stable with satisfied timeliness. Also, saturation function is used to ensure the feasible physical implementation of the control system. Compared with the traditional LQR control, the simulation results showed that the proposed method can make the system reach a stable state with rapid convergence performance and has a feasible physical implementation. (shrink)

PurposeThyroid-associated ophthalmopathy is a vision threatening autoimmune and inflammatory orbital disease, and has been reported to be associated with a wide range of structural and functional abnormalities of bilateral hemispheres. However, whether the interhemisphere functional connectivity of TAO patients is altered still remain unclear. A new technique called voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity combined with support vector machine method was used in the present study to explore interhemispheric homotopic functional connectivity alterations in patients with TAO.MethodsA total of 21 TAO patients and 21 (...) wellmatched healthy controls, respectively, underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning in the resting state. We evaluated alterations in the resting state functional connectivity between hemispheres by applying VMHC method and then selected these abnormal brain regions as seed areas for subsequent study using FC method. Furthermore, the observed changes of regions in the VMHC analysis were chosen as classification features to differentiate patients with TAO from HCs through support vector machine method.ResultsThe results showed that compared with HCs, TAO patients showed significantly lower VMHC values in the bilateral postcentral gyrus, lingual gyrus, calcarine, middle temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus and angular. Moreover, significantly decreased FC values were found between the right postcentral gyrus/lingual gyrus/calcarine and left lingual gyrus/cuneus/superior occipital gyrus, left postcentral gyrus/lingual gyrus/calcarine and right lingual gyrus/ middle temporal gyrus, right middle temporal gyrus and left cerebellum-8/lingual gyrus/middle occipital gyrus/supplementary motor area, left middle temporal gyrus and right middle occipital gyrus, right middle occipital gyrus/angular and left middle temporal pole. The SVM classification model achieved good performance in differentiating TAO patients from HCs.ConclusionThe present study revealed that the altered interhemisphere interaction and integration of information involved in cognitive and visual information processing pathways including the postcentral gyrus, cuneus, cerebellum, angular, widespread visual cortex and temporal cortex in patients with TAO relative to HC group. VMHC variability had potential value for accurately and specifically distinguishing patients with TAO from HCs. The new findings may provide novel insights into the neurological mechanisms underlying visual and cognitive disorders in patients with TAO. (shrink)

Abstract Chinese culture has remained steady, stretching through time as long and unbroken as the Great Wall. In thousands of years, Chinese culture has exhibited a remarkable ability to assimilate foreign intrusions. Even though several times throughout Chinese history minority nationalities have been in military and political control of China, they were gradually assimilated by Chinese culture. Christianity has spent more than a thousand years attempting to convert the Chinese with only negligible success. However, why was Marxism able to become (...) the dominant ideology in only 30 years? This article discusses the critical cultural roots of the different destinies of Marxism and Christianity within the Great Wall. (shrink)

In recent years, the research of chaos theory has developed from simple cognition and analysis to practical engineering application. In particular, hyperchaotic systems with more complex and changeable chaotic characteristics are more sensitive and unpredictable, so they are widely used in more fields. In this paper, two important engineering applications based on hyperchaos pseudorandom number generator and image encryption are studied. Firstly, the coupling 6D memristive hyperchaotic system and a 2D SF-SIMM discrete hyperchaotic mapping are used as the double entropy (...) source structure. The double entropy source structure can realize a new PRNG that meets the security requirements, which can pass the NIST statistical test when the XOR postprocessing method is used. Secondly, based on the double entropy source structure, a new image encryption algorithm is proposed. The algorithm uses the diffusion-scrambling-diffusion encryption scheme to realize the conversion from the original plaintext image to the ciphertext image. Finally, we analyze the security of the proposed PRNG and image encryption mechanism, respectively. The results show that the proposed PRNG has good statistical output characteristics and the proposed image encryption scheme has high security, so they can be effectively applied in the field of information security and encryption system. (shrink)

This study examines whether human gaze lacking the confounding factor of eye whites can be processed unconsciously and explores the critical aspects for such process. Utilizing the continuous flash suppression paradigm, a schematic face—with direct or averted gaze, and with neutral, fearful or happy expressions—was presented to one eye while dynamic masks rendered it invisible to the other eye. Schematic faces were used to avoid unwanted influence from salient eye whites. Participants’ detection time of anything other than the masks was (...) used as an index of unconscious processing time. Faster detection was found for faces with direct gaze than those with averted gaze. However, there was no difference between detection times for different facial expressions and upright-face, inverted-face, and eyes-only conditions . These results confirm that, with schematic faces, gaze can be processed unconsciously regardless of facial expression, and eyes alone are sufficient for such process. (shrink)

The growing prevalence of health care ethics consultation (HCEC) services in the U.S. has been accompanied by an increase in calls for accountability and quality assurance, and for the debates surrounding why and how HCEC is evaluated. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of HCEC as indicated by several novel outcome measurements in East Asian medical encounters.

Reluctance to adopt mask-wearing as a preventive measure is widely observed in many Western societies since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemics. This reluctance toward mask adoption, like any other complex social phenomena, will have multiple causes. Plausible explanations have been identified, including political polarization, skepticism about media reports and the authority of public health agencies, and concerns over liberty, amongst others. In this paper, we propose potential explanations hitherto unnoticed, based on the framework of epistemic injustice. We show how (...) testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice may be at work to shape the reluctant mask adoption at both the societal and individual levels. We end by suggesting how overcoming these epistemic injustices can benefit the global community in this challenging situation and in the future. (shrink)

Extensive empirical work has examined ethical perceptions of different occupational groups in marketing. Additionally, researchers have explored ethical apperceptions of industrial customers and retail consumers. Minimal effort, though, has been directed at investigating differences in ethical perceptions between buyers and sellers, notwithstanding considerable theoretical arguments for doing so. This paper reports the results of a study that focused on differences between retail customers’ and retail salespeople’s perceptions of questionable buying and selling behaviors. Findings indicate that the two groups differ in (...) some respect depending on which group is engaging in the questionable conduct. Managerial and future research implications are provided. (shrink)

Background: High ethical sensitivity positively affects the quality of nursing care; nevertheless, Chinese nurses’ ethical sensitivity and the factors influencing it have not been described. Research objectives: The purpose of this study was to describe ethical sensitivity and to explore factors influencing it among Chinese-registered nurses, to help nursing administrators improve nurses’ ethical sensitivity, build harmony between nurses and patients, and promote the patients’ health. Research design: This was a descriptive, cross-sectional study. Participants and research context: We recruited 500 nurses (...) from several departments in three tertiary hospitals. The Chinese Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire–Revised version and the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Professionals were used to assess the nurses’ ethical sensitivity and empathy ability, respectively. Fifteen sociodemographic variables were included in the questionnaires. Ethical considerations: Informed consent was obtained from the participants regarding participation and data storage and handling. This program has been examined and supported by the research center of medical ethics and professional ethics of Guilin Medical University. The Approval No. was 2016RWYB04. The whole research process is conducted strictly according to ethical requirements. Results: The valid response rate was 84.40%. The total score of Chinese Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire–Revised was 35.82 ± 8.17. The subscale scores of moral responsibility and strength and sense of moral burden were 21.50 ± 4.91 and 14.33 ± 3.98, respectively. Significant differences were found among age groups, gender, years of working, category of profession, and quality of family communication regarding nurses’ ethical sensitivity. Regression analysis showed that the main factors influencing nurses’ ethical sensitivity were gender, years of working, quality of family communication, career satisfaction, and empathic ability. Discussion: Our findings suggest that Chinese nurses’ ethical sensitivity in tertiary hospitals in Guilin is at a medium level. Conclusion: The director of nursing schools and hospitals in China should pay attention to nurses’ ethical sensitivity and should intensify education and training to improve nurses’ ethical sensitivity. Further studies should focus on interventions aimed at improving Chinese nurses’ ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

The high turnover of nurses has become a global problem. Several studies have proposed that nurses' perceptions of the ethical climate of their organization are related to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and thus lead to lower turnover. However, there is limited empirical evidence supporting a relationship between different types of ethical climate within organizations and facets of job satisfaction. Furthermore, no published studies have investigated the impact of different types of ethical climate on the three components of organizational (...) commitment. This study attempts to explore the different types of ethical climate that exist in hospitals, and the degree of job satisfaction and organizational commitment of nurses in Taiwan. It uses path analysis to understand which types of ethical climate influence different facets of job satisfaction. The study also examines the impact of different types of ethical climate and facets of job satisfaction on the three components of organizational commitment. Questionnaires were distributed to 352 nurses. The relationships among variables were assessed by factor analysis, reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations, and regression. The important conclusion is that hospitals can increase job satisfaction and organizational commitment by influencing an organization's ethical climate. Hospital administrators can foster within organizations the climate types of caring, independent, and rules climate that increase satisfaction, while preventing organizations from developing the type of instrumental climate that decreases it. (shrink)

Employees often experience ethical dilemmas throughout their service in an organization. This study utilized a multilevel standpoint to address employees’ differences in ethical reasoning. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze responses from 40,485 full‐time employees across 54 countries. Drawing from Durkheim's concepts of the homo duplex, socialization process, and social conditions, this study found a positive relationship between employees’ income level and unethical reasoning. Furthermore, the results indicate that modern social regulation, technological advancement, economic development, and economic change moderate (...) the relationship between income and ethical judgment. The study findings contribute to the Durkheimian model by validating the effects of individual‐ and country‐level factors on employees’ ethicality. Considering that the results contradict Durkheim's initial propositions, another concept and theory are proposed, which may complement Durkheim's arguments. Practical implications for organizations and society are further discussed to reinforce employees’ ethics. (shrink)

BackgroundDrawing from Erikson’s theory, Domino and Affonso constructed the Inventory of Psychosocial Balance, a scale with satisfactory reliability and validity. However, the lack of a credible Chinese version of the scale may hinder research on ego development in Taiwan. The aim of the present study was to construct a short form Chinese IPB. In addition, factor analysis was employed to shorten the original 120-item scale to make it suitable for application in the older adults in the future.MethodsThe study involved three (...) steps: The first step was to establish the 120-items of the Chinese Inventory of Psychosocial Balance, and we conducted translation, back-translation, expert validity, and reliability of pilot study for this step. Following the first step was to construct the short-form C-IPB in the second step, and the CIPB-SF was developed via item analysis and factor analysis. Finally, we assessed the reliability and validity of the CIPB-SF via structural equation model in the third step.ResultsThree hundred eight older adults without cognitive disorder completed the IPB. The 40-item CIPB-SF was completed through item analysis and factor analysis. The internal consistency test of CIPB-SF and the eight stages were good. The CIPB-SF had acceptable validity, except in the intimacy and identity stages, in which validity was only fair. Compared with the IPB, the CIPB-SF had good reliability and acceptable validity. However, because of its conciseness, the 40-item CIPB-SF was more suited for application among the Chinese elderly population because its application avoids physical overload.ConclusionThe CIPB-SF served as a concise scale for assessing ego development in our study. This scale can also serve as a useful tool for convenient screening in the future. (shrink)

Publicly-funded health systems, including those national health services and social or National Health Insurances, are institutionalized solidarity in health. In Europe, solidarity originated from the legacies of labor movements, the Judeo-Christian traditions, and nationalist sentiments in the re-construction Era after the WWII. In middle-to-high income East Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the health systems were built on different grounds and do not have such ethical origins of solidarity. As health systems in Europe and East Asia are both facing (...) sustainability crises due to aging population, stagnant economy, changing boundaries, and advancing medical technologies, how those systems with the European solidaristic ethical traditions can be revived and how those without the European traditions could survive become a matter of theoretical interests and an urgent policy problem to be addressed. Drawing on contemporary theories of solidarity, this essay analyzes the boundary problem and its impact on the sustainability of the health system in Taiwan. It then considers two plausible origins of solidarity in Taiwan. One is the re-emerged civic nationalism, and the other is an ethos of common life. It is argued that after years of implementation, the National Health Insurance in Taiwan might have shaped the social values and people’s habits and formed an ethos of common life. Such ethos could be an ethical origin of solidarity in non-western societies and help the health systems endure the prolonged sustainability crises. (shrink)

After the USSR collapsed, the Russian economy underwent serious changes from being plan-based to a market economy. These changes, together with political instability, created a business environment where no attention was paid to ethics. Russian managers have little experience operating in a market economy, which created many misunderstandings with foreign partners, especially regarding ethical issues of doing business. This study examined the factors influencing the ethical judgments of Russian employees to understand how they perceive ethical issues and make ethical or (...) unethical decisions at work. The Ferrell and Gresham framework was employed in this study to understand the process of making ethical decision by an individual. Transparency was proposed as a moderator of the relationship between opportunity factors and employees’ ethical judgments. Findings of this study show that Russian employees tend to be more tolerant towards ethically questionable behaviors at a workplace. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that transparency moderates the influence of opportunity to behave unethically on ethical judgments. (shrink)