BackgroundThe evaluation of the surgical readiness of patients plays an important role in clinical care. Preoperative readiness assessment is needed to identify the inadequacy among surgical patients, which provides guide for interventions to improve patients’ preoperative readiness. However, there is a paucity of high-level, quality tool that evaluate surgical readiness of patients in China. The purpose of this study is to translate the Preoperative Assessment of Readiness Tool into Chinese and determine the reliability and validity of the Chinese version in (...) the population of surgical patients.MethodsUsing a standard translation-backward method, the original English version of PART was translated into Chinese. A convenient sampling of 210 surgical patients was recruited from 6 hospitals in Zhejiang Province to test the psychometric properties of this scale including internal consistency, split-half reliability, content validity, structure validity, and floor/ceiling effect.ResultsA total of 194 patients completed questionnaires. The Chinese version of PART achieved Cronbach’s alphas 0.948 and McDonald’s omega coefficient 0.947, respectively, for the full scale. The estimated odd-even split-half reliability was 0.959. The scale-level content validity index was 0.867, and the items content validity index ranged from 0.83 to 1.0.The output of confirmatory factor analysis revealed a two-factor model with no floor/ceiling effect.ConclusionThe Chinese version of PART demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity among surgical patients. It can be used to evaluate patients’ preoperative preparation and help health professionals provide proper preoperative support. (shrink)

Cyberloafing is prevalent in the workplace and research has increasingly focused on its antecedents. This study aims to extend the cyberloafing literature from the perspective of perceived overqualification among civil servants. Drawing on equity theory, we examined the effect of POQ on cyberloafing, along with the mediating role of harmonious passion on the POQ–cyberloafing relationship and the moderating role of the need for achievement on strengthening the link between POQ and harmonious passion. Using time-lagged data from a sample of 318 (...) civil servants in China, we found that POQ was positively related to cyberloafing; harmonious passion mediated this relationship; the need for achievement moderated the effect of POQ on harmonious passion as well as the indirect effect of POQ on cyberloafing via harmonious passion. Based on the findings, we discussed theoretical and managerial implications and provided future research avenues. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the imaginary has been regarded generally as an organic part of the crucial development of psychoanalytic theory in its post-Freudian stage. This article situates the Lacanian imaginary in the context of contemporary discussions of ‘theory after poststructuralism’, arguing that it moves radically beyond the poststructuralist terrains of deconstruction and discourse-analysis, and is able to off er new insights on various studies. Especially, it can help (re)examine some aporias in the field of Sinology. This article devotes its (...) main body to demonstrating that the Lacanian account of the imaginary is powerful in exploring the assumptions and expectations of modern Sinophone intellectual discourse. Deconstructive discourse-analysis alone is insufficient for understanding the underlying forces that have been fundamentally shaping the contours of modern Chinese intellectuality, and attention needs to be paid to the psychological dimension of Chinese thought. With the aim of tracing and interrogating these underlying forces, this article seeks to show how the fervor for discussing the ‘problem of China’ reveals a hidden psychical mechanism. (shrink)

In 1967 Guy Debord published the pamphlet-sized The Society of the Spectacle, a book written in the form of a collection of short theses. Debord was criticized for inventing the “spectacle” out of thin air by thinkers of his time such as Michel Foucault. We can, however, detect salient manifestations of the Debordian spectacular society in China of the 2010s. This paper demonstrates a deep and pervasive trend of spectacularization in China by analyzing (a) Taobao as a desire-creating machine producing (...) the buy-buy-buy fanaticism, (b) the beautifying operation that has engendered perverted effects in sexual relationship, (c) the spectacular dialectic epitomized by the celebrity culture, and (d) the reality-twisting effects of the spectacles. The paper further offers a comparative analysis of the contemporary spectacles vis-à-vis the Maoist spectacles of the 1960s, which sheds light in understanding the enactment of antientertainment actions in recent years. The spectacles in contemporary China, in the fashion depicted by Debord half a century ago, have effectively produced a specific worldview of commodity and consumption, and this worldview transforms itself, through blind trust, into a type of objective force. The social terrains needed for spreading and cultivating socialist values were heavily colonized by the such spectacles (consumption, beautification, celebrity culture, entertainment); the latter have significantly absorbed the masses’ attention in the last decade to such level that it has almost occupied all spaces for communication and played the leading role in regulating people’s daily lives. The “Beauty is justice!” slogan that has been extremely popular in contemporary China reveals one significant change in Chinese culture and its sociopolitical effect: the trend of spectacularization, through elevating spectacle to the supreme value and turning the country into a spectacular (un)reality, has not only homogenized China but also effectively depoliticized the country. (shrink)

This study examines why and when negative workplace gossip promotes self-serving behaviors by the employees being targeted. Using conservation of resources theory, we find that targets tend to increase their political acts as a result of ego depletion triggered by negative gossip. We also show that sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment and moral disengagement moderate this process. Specifically, we demonstrate that targets with high levels of sensitivity to interpersonal mistreatment are more likely to experience ego depletion, and that targets with high (...) levels of moral disengagement will find it easier to persuade themselves to engage in political acts. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged survey of 265 employees in Guangdong, China, to test our hypotheses. The results support our theoretical model and indicate that COR theory can be used to explain the impacts of negative workplace gossip. Alongside our important and timely theoretical contributions, we provide new perspectives on how managers can avoid or mitigate these political acts. (shrink)

China's Philosophical Studies: Rediscovery of Chinese Spiritual Essence collects essential research findings of China's philosophical studies conducted by the academics at East China Normal University (ECNU) in recent years. The book covers topics including thoughts in China's Spring and Autumn Period, Chinese virtue of trust, establishing morals, historical studies of Chinese philosophy, etc. This book is the fifth volume of the WSPC-ECNU Series on China. This Series showcases the significant contributions to scholarship in social sciences and humanities studies about China. (...) It is jointly launched by World Scientific Publishing, the most reputable English academic publisher in Asia, and ECNU, a top University in China with a long history of exchanges with the international academic community. (shrink)

New Waves of China's Philosophical Studies collects important research findings of China's philosophical studies conducted by the academics at East China Normal University (ECNU) in recent years. The book covers topics including Confucian ethics and virtue ethics, true value semantics vs. commonsensible reasoning semantics, criticisms of dogmatism, consequentialism, among others. This book is the first volume of the WSPC-ECNU Series on China. This Series showcases the significant contributions to scholarship in social sciences and humanities studies about China. It is jointly (...) launched by World Scientific Publishing, the most reputable English academic publisher in Asia, and ECNU, a top University in China with a long history of exchanges with the international academic community. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Western and non‐Western societies, it is a widely held belief that the concept of human rights is, by and large, a Western cultural norm, often at odds with non‐Western cultures and, therefore, not applicable in non‐Western societies. The Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights reflects this deep‐rooted and popular assumption. By using Chinese culture as an illustration, this article points out the problems of this widespread misconception and stereotypical view of cultures and human rights. It highlights the (...) often ignored positive elements in Chinese cultures that promote and embody universal human values such as human dignity and human rights. It concludes, accordingly, with concrete suggestions on how to modify the Declaration. (shrink)

In Western and non-Western societies, it is a widely held belief that the concept of human rights is, by and large, a Western cultural norm, often at odds with non-Western cultures and, therefore, not applicable in non-Western societies. The Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights reflects this deep-rooted and popular assumption. By using Chinese culture(s) as an illustration, this article points out the problems of this widespread misconception and stereotypical view of cultures and human rights. It highlights the (...) often ignored positive elements in Chinese cultures that promote and embody universal human values such as human dignity and human rights. It concludes, accordingly, with concrete suggestions on how to modify the Declaration. (shrink)

Since the late 1970s, American appraisals of Chinese medical ethics and Chinese responses to American bioethics range from frank criticism to warm appreciation, from refutation to acceptance. Yet in the United States as well as in China, American bioethics and Chinese medical ethics have been seen, respectively, as individualistic and communitarian. In this widely-accepted general comparison, the great variation in the two medical moralities, especially the diversity of Chinese experiences, has been unfortunately minimized, if not totally ignored. Neither American bioethics (...) nor Chinese medical ethics is a field with only one dominant way of thinking. Medical moralities in America and China--traditional and modern--have always been plural and diverse. For example, American and Chinese cultures and medical moralities both exhibit individualistic and communitarian traditions. For this reason, bioethics in general and cross-cultural bioethics in particular must be fundamentally interpretive. Interpretive cross-cultural bioethics appreciates the plurality of medical morality within any culture. It can serve as a vital means of social and cultural criticism through engaged interpretations. (shrink)

New Zealand is a multilingual and multicultural society, where English, Maori, and the New Zealand sign language are designated as its official languages. However, some heritage languages are also taught either within or outside the national education system. During the past decade, an increasing number of students have chosen Mandarin Chinese as an additional language because of its fast-growing importance. To date, studies regarding CAL are mainly based on the mainstream Chinese programs or online platforms, with less attention paid to (...) other types of teaching contexts where there also exist many potential challenges awaiting teachers. To fill in this gap, this study, based on a teaching program consisting of two families in New Zealand, explored the trajectories of a CAL teacher’s emotional labor for 47 weeks to understand how she managed her emotions when she taught the language as well as balanced the relationship among the three parties: the institution, the two families, and herself. Narrative inquiry was used as a methodological approach. The data involved written and spoken narratives. Using inductive and deductive thematic analysis, findings revealed her different understandings of the emotional labor in the two families, respectively, during the program. Further analysis of the data revealed some factors that impacted her emotional labor and how they impacted her teaching in a family-based context. We concluded our study with a discussion of the implications of these findings for teaching CAL in similar contexts. (shrink)

This research explores the harmful effects of negative workplace gossip (NWG) on targets and organizations, including its impacts on helping behavior and knowledge hiding. The mediating role of guanxi closeness and the moderating role of need for affiliation are also examined. The study, based on conservation of resources theory, collected data from 526 employees in the hospitality industry in China, using a three-wave survey design. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses. The empirical results showed that NWG (...) was a strong predictor of reduced helping behavior and increased knowledge hiding; and that guanxi closeness mediated both the negative relationship between NWG and helping behavior, and the positive relationship between NWG and knowledge hiding. Additionally, need for affiliation was shown to act as a moderator between NWG and guanxi closeness: high need for affiliation amplified the negative impact of NWG on guanxi closeness, and then further affected employees’ helping behavior and knowledge hiding. This study therefore offers an important new perspective for interpreting the detrimental effects of negative gossip in organizations, providing not just theoretical advances but practical ways in which managers can proactively reduce these impacts. (shrink)

In this study, we aimed to address three comments proposed by Ogihara on a recent study where we found that unique names in China have become increasingly popular from 1950 to 2009. Using a large representative sample of Chinese names, we replicated the increase in uniqueness of Chinese names from 1920 to 2005, especially since the 1970s, with multiple uniqueness indices based on name-character frequency and name-length deviation. Over the years, Chinese characters that are rare in daily life or naming (...) practice were more often used in given names, and the length of given names became more deviant from typical practice. Taken together, these findings not only reconfirmed the increasing prevalence of unique names but also demonstrated the validity of various indices in assessing name uniqueness in China. (shrink)

“Deathbots,” digital constructs that emulate the conversational patterns, demeanor, and knowledge of deceased individuals. Earlier moral discussions about deathbots centered on the dignity and autonomy of the deceased. This paper primarily examines the potential psychological and emotional dependencies that users might develop towards deathbots, considering approaches to prevent problematic dependence through temporary use. We adopt a hermeneutic method to argue that deathbots, as they currently exist, are unlikely to provide substantial comfort. Lacking the capacity to bear emotional burdens, they fall (...) short of meeting idealistic expectations. By repositioning deathbots, we aim to mitigate the risk of emotional dependency and respect the natural grieving process. Our goal is to propose the use of deathbots as a novel means of mourning through transitory use, rather than as a method to alleviate grief or as a patterns for communication with the deceased. (shrink)

Social networks have become an important way for users to find friends and expand their social circle. Social networks can improve users’ experience by recommending more suitable friends to them. The key lies in improving the accuracy of link prediction, which is also the main research issue of this study. In the study of personality traits, some scholars have proved that personality can be used to predict users’ behavior in social networks. Based on these studies, this study aims to improve (...) the accuracy of link prediction in directed social networks. Considering the integration of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction into the link prediction model of social networks, a four-dimensional link prediction model is proposed. Through comparative experiments, it is proved that the four-dimensional social relationship prediction model proposed in this study is more accurate than the model only based on similarity. At the same time, it is also verified that the matching degree of personality link preference and asymmetric interaction intensity in the model can help improve the accuracy of link prediction. (shrink)

Emotion recognition plays an important part in human-computer interaction. Currently, the main challenge in electroencephalogram -based emotion recognition is the non-stationarity of EEG signals, which causes performance of the trained model decreasing over time. In this paper, we propose a two-level domain adaptation neural network to construct a transfer model for EEG-based emotion recognition. Specifically, deep features from the topological graph, which preserve topological information from EEG signals, are extracted using a deep neural network. These features are then passed through (...) TDANN for two-level domain confusion. The first level uses the maximum mean discrepancy to reduce the distribution discrepancy of deep features between source domain and target domain, and the second uses the domain adversarial neural network to force the deep features closer to their corresponding class centers. We evaluated the domain-transfer performance of the model on both our self-built data set and the public data set SEED. In the cross-day transfer experiment, the ability to accurately discriminate joy from other emotions was high: sadness, anger, and fear on the self-built data set. The accuracy reached 74.93% on the SEED data set. In the cross-subject transfer experiment, the ability to accurately discriminate joy from other emotions was equally high: sadness, anger, and fear on the self-built data set. The average accuracy reached 87.9% on the SEED data set, which was higher than WGAN-DA. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TDANN can effectively handle the domain transfer problem in EEG-based emotion recognition. (shrink)

The digital revolution has become the driver of world development. However, it has given rise to a number of concerns of an ethical nature. These include challenges to privacy, the protection of copyright, problems of cultural imperialism, effects on social and family life, the monopolisation of information, the pollution of information, informational cheating and the vulnerability to viruses and hackers. The article suggests that ethicists must think seriously about ways by which ethical consciousness can be raised and ethical behaviours encouraged (...) in the network economy. (shrink)

Objective: The aim of the current study was to investigate the alterations in the neural networks of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy during working memory encoding.Methods: Patients with TLE and healthy volunteers completed a WM task, during which 34-channel electroencephalogram signals were recorded. The neural networks during WM encoding were calculated in TLE patients with and without WM deficits.Results: Functional connectivity strength decreased, and the theta network was altered in the TLE-WM group, although no significant differences in clinical features were (...) observed between the TLE-N and TLE-WM groups.Conclusions: Not all patients with TLE present with cognitive impairments and alterations in the theta network were identified in TLE patients with functional cognitive deficits.Significance: The theta network may represent a sensitive measure of cognitive impairment and could predict cognitive outcomes among patients with TLE. (shrink)

Higher education has a dual responsibility, both to the academy and to society at large, to effectively confront racism on campus. And yet, in the United States and perhaps elsewhere, it fails to effectively confront racism as the result of systemic flaws, expressed as organizational intransigence, even as new “supportive and protective” structures are created. Thus, the central question raised by the anonymized, composite narrative case study at the core of this paper is as follows: To what extent, if any, (...) do the familiar organizational structures of higher education, encompassing both leadership and management processes, reinforce or resist racism on campus? Consistent with other social science researchers, the authors believe that richly contextualized narrative cases help to bridge the world of ideas and conjecture and actual situations. We used an iterative process spanning three months for drawing our case, involving a back-and-forth communication of actual experiences involving campus racism. The resulting composite narrative provides a richly contextualized situation drawn from real life, while still preserving anonymity. We regarded this later aspect as crucial for making possible the close examination of an ethically challenging situation that might otherwise remain invisible due to sensitive information. Our analysis focused on campus responsiveness to the challenge of racism within a mechanistic organization, rooted in structuralism, versus an organic organization, rooted in post-structuralism. Four aspects of a more organic university design are identified as key to bringing about meaningful, ethically sound change within the academy: deep, reflective listening; a more horizontal, consensus-based leadership structure that empowers professionals at various ranks; freedom within a framework; and a broadly shared, continually reinforced focus on overarching principles, goals, and ideals. (shrink)

This study examined lexical bundles used differently by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics in their dissertation abstracts. Two corpora were built, with each having 700 dissertation abstracts produced by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics, respectively. The study then used lexical analysis software to retrieve frequently used three-word LBs, from which LBs having different frequencies at a significant level across the two corpora were identified and termed as bundles used differently. BUDs were then categorized and analyzed manually (...) in terms of structure, function, and distribution in rhetorical moves. The major findings were: 57.14% of the frequently used LBs were BUDs, of which 90.67% had occurrences in both corpora. The BUDs distributed inequivalently across categories and moves, with the text-oriented category and the move of Result having the most BUDs; and BUDs exhibited two major patterns: the Chinese and American students filled different constituents into structurally and functionally similar constructions, and used LBs of dissimilar functions to fulfill the same communicative purposes. These findings indicate that variations in LB use have a high pedagogic value and confirm the need for using corpora to identify and teach core genre-specific vocabularies to second/foreign language learners. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the promise and pitfalls of medium as environment by tracking the twin developments of environmental thinking and set design in China, considering it as a problematic of epistemology, technology, and aesthetics. I treat huanjing (environment) as a neologism, a new episteme, a dispositif, and a mode of power, taking set design as the companion medium that reconnects art and technology, aesthetics and politics. Reconceptualizing set, design, and environment at the intersection of industrial design and progressive (...) education, I focus on modernist and propagandistic practice of set design in China in the 1930s and ’40s, moving from set design in film and theater to the design and practice of human/environment that constitutes the landscape of the social. How these aesthetic and technical experiments rework the social will help us reconfigure the human in the reassemblage of our medium/environment complex. (shrink)

We present nine facets for the analysis of the past and future evolution of AI. Each facet has also a set of edges that can summarise different trends and contours in AI. With them, we first conduct a quantitative analysis using the information from two decades of AAAI/IJCAI conferences and around 50 years of documents from AI topics, an official database from the AAAI, illustrated by several plots. We then perform a qualitative analysis using the facets and edges, locating AI (...) systems in the intelligence landscape and the discipline as a whole. This analytical framework provides a more structured and systematic way of looking at the shape and boundaries of AI. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist DesireStories by Ding Ling, Alice Munro, and Eileen ChangYuhui Bao (bio) and Ian Dennis (bio)Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and dramatize—this is (...) the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly [End Page 131] designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, "Miss Sophie's Diary" (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 "Miss Sophie's Diary," to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie (莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian "underground woman," afflicted as well with a touch of the "nausea" later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and "frank" revelation "of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views," expressing an "outspoken and unrelenting individualism."5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's "novelistic" perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?"Miss Sophie's Diary" is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. "I was extremely confused at that time," she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. "On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery [End... (shrink)