To explore whether the generation of new protein folds could be linked to metallic cofactor recruitment, we identified the oldest examples of folds for manganese, iron, zinc, and copper proteins by analyzing their fold‐domain mapping patterns. We discovered that the generation of these folds was tightly coupled to corresponding metals. We found that the emerging order for these folds, i.e., manganese and iron protein folds appeared earlier than zinc and copper counterparts, coincides with the putative bioavailability of the corresponding metals (...) in the ancient anoxic ocean. Therefore, we conclude that metallic cofactors, like organic cofactors, play an evolutionary role in the formation of new protein folds. This link could be explained by the emergence of protein structures with novel folds that could fulfill the new protein functions introduced by the metallic cofactors. These findings not only have important implications for understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of protein architectures, but also provide a further interpretation for the evolutionary story of superoxide dismutases. (shrink)

Protein redox reactions are one of the most basic and important biochemical actions. As amino acids are weak redox mediators, most protein redox functions are undertaken by protein cofactors, which include organic ligands and transition metal ions. Since both kinds of redox cofactors were available in the pre‐protein RNA world, it is challenging to explore which one was more involved in redox processes of primitive proteins? In this paper, using an examination of the redox cofactor usage of putative ancient proteins, (...) we infer that organic ligands participated more frequently than transition metals in redox reactions of primitive proteins, at least as protein cofactors. This is further supported by the relative abundance of amino acids in the primordial world. Supplementary material for this article can be found on the BioEssays website. BioEssays 30:766–771, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

BackgroundNurses working in the intensive care unit clung tenaciously to their job during the COVID-19 pandemic in spite of enduring stressed psychological and physical effects as a result of providing nursing care for the infected patients, which indicates that they possessed a high degree of professionalism and career calling. The aim of this study was to explain the associations between resilience, thriving at work, and ethical leadership influencing the calling of ICU nurses.MethodsFrom December 2020 to January 2021 during the COVID-19 (...) pandemic, a cross-sectional survey of 15 provinces in China was conducted using an online questionnaire. A total of 340 ICU nurses completed sufficient responses to be used in the study. Sociodemographic factors, job demographic factors, resilience, calling, thriving at work, and ethical leadership were assessed using the questionnaire. General linear modeling, hierarchical linear regression analysis, and generalized additive model were performed to examine all the considered research hypotheses.ResultsResilience was positively and significantly associated with calling. Moreover, thriving at work partially mediated the relationship between resilience and calling. The indirect effect of resilience on calling was 0.204, and the direct effect of resilience on calling through thriving at work was 0.215. The total effect of resilience on calling was 0.419. In addition, ethical leadership played a moderating role in the relationship between resilience and calling.ConclusionGreater resilience can positively predict increased calling among Chinese ICU nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, thriving at work is a mechanism that partly transmits the positive effects of resilience on calling. Overall, nurses possessing greater resilience tend to maintain thriving at work in the face of such adversity, further resulting in subsequently increased calling. Besides, findings suggest that there is stronger influence of resilience on calling among nurses working in an organization managed by an ethical leader. The current findings may offer two insights for nursing practitioners and policymakers in the postpandemic world. First, resilience training and intervention are necessary to foster nurses' sense of thriving at work in the nursing industry, further promoting career calling. Second, better training and effort on the development of ethical leadership for leaders in nursing practice are essential to encourage followers to engage in social learning of ethical behaviors and abiding by normatively appropriate conduct, further enacting prosocial values and expressing moral emotions. (shrink)

Brand rumors can harm brands’ image and bring significant impacts on customers’ decision-making and sharing behavior. Finding practical strategies for preventing the spread of brand rumors continues to be a challenge. Building on the social contagion theory, the current research enriches the discussion on understanding why people spread rumors and how to deal with the spreading of rumors. Sharing brand rumors is motivated by a variety of complex psychological reasons, but prior research didn’t adequately analyze the problem from a complexity (...) perspective. Therefore, using a sample of 416 interviewers within eight types of brand rumors, this study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the combination of rumor psychological communication motivations in brand activities and solutions to prevent the spread of brand rumors. The current study discoveries three and two first-level configurational solutions, respectively, that can promote positive and negative rumor spreading. To summarize, emotional stimulation is a key component in the spread of rumors; altruism and relationship management motivation can coexist at times; and untrusted rumors are disseminated through other motivation factors. Solutions to prevent rumors from spreading are also provided. Furthermore, the findings help to understand the psychology of configurational motivation and how it can help brands reduce the spread of brand rumors. Finally, these discoveries’ theoretical contributions and practical implications are presented. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Compared with the large number of studies on reading of children with hearing loss in alphabetic languages, there are only a very limited number of studies on reading of Chinese-speaking children with HL. It remains unclear how phonological, orthographic, and semantic skills contribute to reading fluency of Chinese school-age children with HL. The present study explored this issue by examining the performances of children with HL on reading fluency and three linguistic skills compared with matched controls with normal hearing. Specifically, (...) twenty-eight children with HL and 28 chronological-age-matched children with NH were tested on word/sentence reading fluency, phonological awareness which was composed of onset/vowel/lexical tone awareness, orthographic knowledge, and semantic competence which comprised animal word identification, pseudo-homophone detection, and word segmentation. Results showed that children with HL lagged behind their peers with NH in WRF/SRF and most of the phonological, orthographic, and semantic subskills except onset awareness and pseudo-homophone detection. Furthermore, the significant contributors to WRF differed between the two groups with PA being the significant contributor in the children with NH while OK being the significant contributor in the children with HL. However, the significant contributor to SRF did not differ between the two groups with SC being the only significant contributor. These results revealed not only between-group differences but also similarities in the relative contributions of PA, OK, and SC to reading fluency at both word and sentence levels, which has practical implications for developing better training programs to improve reading for children with HL. (shrink)

This study explores the impact of teachers? perception of trust in colleagues on their sense of empowerment in Mainland China, with a particular focus on the mediating role of teacher efficacy. The results of a survey of 1646 teachers indicate that although teachers scored positively on trust in colleagues, efficacy and empowerment, they had relatively lower scores on general teaching efficacy (GTE) and participation in decision-making. Trust in colleagues was a significant predictor of teacher empowerment. In addition, personal teaching efficacy (...) had a significant mediation effect on the relationship between trust in colleagues and teacher empowerment, while GTE had not. These findings lead to some implications for understanding the nature of GTE and the relationship between trust and teacher empowerment. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chronological-age-matched control children were tested on the recognition of words in normal sentences versus wordlist sentences with natural versus flat F0 contours against single-talker interference. The dyslexic children had overall poorer recognition performance than non-dyslexic (...) children. Furthermore, semantic context differentially modulated the effect of F0 contours on the recognition performances of the two groups. Specifically, compared with flat F0 contours, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of dyslexic children less than non-dyslexic children in the wordlist condition. By contrast, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of both groups to a similar extent in the sentence condition. These results indicate that access to semantic context improves the effect of natural F0 contours on word recognition in adverse listening conditions by dyslexic children who are more impaired in the use of natural F0 contours during isolated and unrelated word recognition. Our findings have practical implications for communication with dyslexic children when listening conditions are unfavorable. (shrink)

This paper uses the Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory to investigate the fatigue status of pilots, and the reliability and validity of the scale are tested by Cronbach’s α and exploratory factor analysis. The founding shows that mild fatigue and above accounted for 67.7%. For further quantify the impact of different flights on pilots’ fatigue, research improves the fatigue coefficient model based on the results of pilot fatigue feeling questionnaire. Combined with multifactor analysis of variance and multiple linear regression, it is found (...) that the independent variables have different and positive effects on the dependent variables, and there is no multicollinearity. Through the actual test, its accuracy is improved by 16.7% compared with the original model. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo investigate the short-term effect of music therapy combined with binaural frequency difference therapy on patients with consciousness disorder.Materials and methodsNinety patients with definite diagnosis of disorders of consciousness were selected. These patients were randomly divided into control group, experiment 1 group and experiment 2 group, with 30 patients in each group. The control group was treated with routine clinical treatment and rehabilitation. In experiment 1 group, music therapy was added to the control group. In experimental group 2, music therapy (...) combined with binaural α frequency difference therapy was added to the control group. All patients were assessed before and after 30 treatments. The assessment items included Glasgow Coma Scale, Coma Recovery Scale revised, electroencephalogram, upper somatosensory evoked potential, and brainstem auditory evoked potential.ResultsBefore treatment, there were no significant differences in GCS score, CRS-R score, USEP, BAEP, and EEG scores among the three groups. After 30 times of treatment, GCS score, CRS-R score, USEP, BAEP, and EEG scores in 3 groups were significantly higher than those before treatment. And the consciousness rate of experimental group 2 was better than experimental group 1, experimental group 1 was better than the control group and the difference was statistically significant.ConclusionMusic therapy combined with binaural α frequency difference therapy is more effective in stimulating DOC patients. (shrink)

Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) Each (...) of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right, and their specifications yield the varied notions of emergence that we discuss below. There has been renewed interest in emergence within discussions of the behavior of complex systems and debates over the reconcilability of mental causation, intentionality, or consciousness with physicalism. (shrink)

The following framework of theses, roughly hewn, shapes contemporary discussion of the problem of mental causation: (1) Non-Identity of the Mental and the Physical Mental properties and states cannot be identified with specific physical properties and states. (2) Causal Closure (Completeness) of the Physical The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and laws alone. (This thesis is sometimes expressed in terms of explanation: In tracing the causal history of any physical event, one need not (...) advert to any non-physical events or laws. To the extent that there is any explanation available for a physical event, there is a complete explanation available couched entirely in physical vocabulary. We prefer the probability formulation, as it should be acceptable to any physicalist, though some reject the explanation formulation.) (3) Causal Exclusion There is at most one complete and wholly independent explanation for any given event or sequence of events. (shrink)

Dreams were a topic of study even in ancient times, and they are a special spiritual phenomenon. Generations of literati have defined the meaning of dreams in their own way, while Zhu Xi was perhaps the most outstanding one among them. He made profound explanations of dreams from aspects such as the relationship between dreams and the principles li and qi, the relationship between dreams and the state of the heart, and the relationship between dreams and an individual’s moral improvement. (...) He summarized previous generations’ understanding of dreams and infused a new dimension from the School of Principles, pointing out a direction for individuals’ moral cultivation and spiritual pursuit. Zhu Xi also examined the opinions of Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Hu Hong and other thinkers on Confucius not dreaming of Duke Zhou in his later years, revealing differences between thinkers in the School of Principles. An analysis of Zhu Xi’s thoughts on dreams will provide deeper insight into the research on the School of Principles. (shrink)

Is bodily awareness a condition on bodily action? I approach this question by weaving an argument based on considerations from action theory, the phenomenology of embodied agency, and from the psychology and neuroscience of action. In this paper, I discuss two accounts on which bodily awareness is a condition on bodily action. The first is an influential philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy, which claims that bodily awareness is necessary for the online control of bodily action. I argue that there are empirical (...) counterexamples to O'Shaughnessy's account. Instead I propose an account on which the capacity for bodily awareness is a condition on our capacity for ordinary bodily action. This alternative account does justice to the causal and functional character of ordinary bodily action as well as its phenomenology. It is also consistent with the psychology and neuroscience of action. I provide a two-stage argument for my view. The first stage shows that a sense of the spatial possibilities of one's body is a condition on intentionally acting with one's body. The second stage demonstrates that bodily awareness is a condition on a normal afferented agent's sense of the actions open to him through examining the role of bodily awareness in motor imagery and the role of motor imagery in preparatory processes for everyday actions. (shrink)

What is the significance of bodily awareness for bodily action? The orthodox philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy claims that bodily awareness is necessary for bodily action. Whilst O'Shaughnessy's account appears to be consonant with the phenomenology of ordinary agency, it falls afoul to empirical counterexamples. The failure of O'Shaughnessy's account and its cousins might suggest that bodily action does not depend on bodily awareness. On the contrary, I argue that the contrast between the character of afferented and deafferented agency shows that (...) bodily awareness is crucial to explaining the distinctive character of bodily action in neurologically normal agents. In particular, the capacity to feel one's body ‘from the inside’ appears to be a condition on the capacity to act with one's body in a way that is not like remote control. This dependency of capacities is at once empirically adequate and in tune with the phenomenology of ordinary agency. (shrink)

Recent research on proprioception reveals that it relies on a systematically distorted model of bodily dimensions. This generates a puzzle about proprioception in action control: action requires accurate bodily parameters. Proprioception is crucial for ordinary action, but if it relies on a systematically distorted body model, then proprioception should contain systematic errors. But we cannot respond by discarding proprioception from motor control, since we know from the severe problems deafferented agents face in acting that ordinary action requires proprioception. The solution (...) is that the possibility of bodily action is provided for by multimodal body representations for action. (shrink)

After the COVID-19 outbreak, the health status of the general population has suffered a huge threat, and the health system has also encountered great challenges. As critical members of human capital in the health sector, medical students with specialized knowledge and skills have positively fought against the epidemic by providing volunteer services that boosted the resilience of the health system. Although volunteer behavior is associated with individual internal motivation, there is sparse evidence on this relationship among medical students, especially regarding (...) potential mechanisms. Therefore, this study had two main objectives: to examine the influence of prosocial motivation of medical students on their VB; and to verify the chain-mediating role of calling and vocation as well as social responsibility in the relationship between PM and VB. Study I: a total of 2454 Chinese full-time medical students were invited to complete an online survey. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, and multiple linear regression analysis. The results demonstrated that PM significantly affected VB in medical students ; CV as well as SR chain-mediated the relationship between PM and VB. PM promoted the formation of SR by positively evoking CV of medical students, further resulting in increased VB. Study II: A 28 person qualitative interview was conducted. Qualitative data are added to reduce the limitations of online questionnaires. At the same time, we can also critically study the VB of Chinese medical students during COVID-19. The results showed that there were various reasons for medical students to volunteer in the process of fighting against COVID-19, and the experience of volunteer service and the impact on their future life were different. Lastly, the current findings suggest that fostering volunteerism among medical students requires the joint effort of the government, non-profit organizations, and medical colleges. (shrink)

This is a critical discussion of Paul Humphreys's fusion view of emergence, focusing on the basal loss feature of his ontology. The discussion yields some general morals for special science ontology.

There is a wide range of things we do out of emotion. For example, we smile with pleasure, our voices drop when we are sad, we recoil in shock or jump for joy, we apologize to others out of remorse. It is uncontroversial that some of these behaviors are actions. Clearly, apologizing is an action if anything is. Things seem less clear in the case of other emotional behaviors. Intuitively, the drop in a sad person’s voice is something that happens (...) to her, rather than something she actively performs. Perhaps more interestingly, even jumping for joy can seem a problematic case: although its execution involves the active performance of certain movements, it has been argued to contrast, e.g., with an act of apology, in that it is not performed in order to achieve some end, such as repairing a relationship. This can make this behavior seem considerably different from paradigm actions. Our central concern in this paper is with which emotional behaviors should be classed as actions and why... (shrink)

Dreams were a topic of study even in ancient times, and they are a special spiritual phenomenon. Generations of literati have defined the meaning of dreams in their own way, while Zhu Xi was perhaps the most outstanding one among them. He made profound explanations of dreams from aspects such as the relationship between dreams and the principles li and qi, the relationship between dreams and the state of the heart, and the relationship between dreams and an individual’s moral improvement. (...) He summarized previous generations’ understanding of dreams and infused a new dimension from the School of Principles, pointing out a direction for individuals’ moral cultivation and spiritual pursuit. Zhu Xi also examined the opinions of Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Hu Hong and other thinkers on Confucius not dreaming of Duke Zhou in his later years, revealing differences between thinkers in the School of Principles. An analysis of Zhu Xi’s thoughts on dreams will provide deeper insight into the research on the School of Principles. (shrink)

Member selection to form an effective collaboration new product development team is crucial for a successful NPD. Existing researches on member selection mostly focus on the individual attributes of candidates. However, under the background of collaboration, knowledge complementarity and collaboration performance among candidates are important but overlooked. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization model for member selection of a Co-NPD team, considering comprehensively the individual knowledge competence, knowledge complementarity, and collaboration performance. Then, to solve the model, an improved (...) adaptive genetic algorithm is developed. Finally, a real case is provided to illustrate the application of the model, and the IAGA is implemented to select the desired team members for optimal team composition. Additionally, the standard generic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are used to compare with the IAGA to further verify the effectiveness of the IAGA. (shrink)

This commentary challenges Railton’s claim that the affective system is the key source of control of action. Whilst the affective system is important for understanding how acting for a reason is possible, we argue that there are many levels of control of action and adaptive behaviour and that the affective system is only one source of control. Such a model seems to be more in line with the emerging picture from affective and movement neuroscience.

When engaging with magic, we are moved by seemingly impossible events that contradict what we believe to be possible in the real world. We are surprised, curious, and baffled when we cannot explain how the magic we are witnessing is possible. We generally understand the events to be illusions. But how is it possible to be moved by something we know to be unreal? This problem is related to the paradox of fiction in aesthetics. Here, we introduce the problem in (...) the domain of theatrical magic, discuss possible solutions, and present a tentative account that allows us to accommodate inconsistent, seemingly incompatible beliefs at different representational levels in the viewers’ mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most scholars' comprehension on labour are ambiguous because of the variety of philosophical contradictions embedded in their plausible theories being not explicitly stated but irrationally taken for granted. We, therefore, inquisitively direct sole attention to social spacetime in which, and by which, labour in totality takes place. And then consider the division of labour in natural spacetime as just the appearance of the alienation of labour in social spacetime by our Marxist renewal of the notion of labour - thus (...) manifesting its benefaction to an essential up-to-date explanation of human being, on which a labourer could struggle to survive as still a human being within social spacetime, to fight against the almighty empire of capitalism in the era of globalisation. RESUMO A compreensão da maioria dos estudiosos acerca do trabalho é ambígua em razão da variedade de contradições filosóficas embutidas no fato de suas teorias plausíveis não serem explicitamente declaradas, mas presumidas de modo irracional. Nós, assim, inquisitivamente, dirigimos nossa total atenção ao espaço-tempo social no qual, e através do qual, o trabalho ocorre, em sua totalidade. Em seguida, consideramos a divisão de trabalho em espaço-tempo natural como apenas uma aparência da alienação do trabalho em espaço-tempo social, segundo nossa renovação marxista da noção de trabalho - assim manifestando seu benefício em uma explicação atualizada do ser humano, segundo a qual um trabalhador deve lutar para sobreviver como um ser humano parado dentro do espaço-tempo social, lutar contra o todo-poderoso império do capitalismo na era da globalização. (shrink)

Slagging-off is an important preprocessing operation of steel-making to improve the purity of iron. Current manual-operated slag removal schemes are inefficient and labor-intensive. Automatic slagging-off is desirable but challenging as the reliable recognition of iron and slag is difficult. This work focuses on realizing an efficient and accurate recognition algorithm of iron and slag, which is conducive to realize automatic slagging-off operation. Motivated by the recent success of deep learning techniques in smart manufacturing, we introduce deep learning methods to this (...) field for the first time. The monotonous gray value of industry images, poor image quality, and nonrigid feature of iron and slag challenge the existing fully convolutional networks. To this end, we propose a novel spatial and feature graph convolutional network module. SFGCN module can be easily inserted in FCNs to improve the reasoning ability of global contextual information, which is helpful to enhance the segmentation accuracy of small objects and isolated areas. To verify the validity of the SFGCN module, we create an industrial dataset and conduct extensive experiments. Finally, the results show that our SFGCN module brings a consistent performance boost for a wide range of FCNs. Moreover, by adopting a lightweight network as backbone, our method achieves real-time iron and slag segmentation. In the future work, we will dedicate our efforts to the weakly supervised learning for quick annotation of big data stream to improve the generalization ability of current models. (shrink)

BackgroundMethamphetamine addicts can experience severe emotional processing disorders, with abnormal responses to emotional and drug-related stimuli. These aberrant behaviors are one of the key factors leading to relapse. Nevertheless, the characteristics of addicts’ responses to drug-related stimuli and their responses to emotional stimuli remain controversial.Methods52 methamphetamine addicts from China passively viewed three different categories of images: Drug-related; positive emotional; and negative emotional. In the first task, participants completed a 9-point Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale, rating the valence of each image. In (...) the second, they performed a cued-action task while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded.ResultDrug-related images were rated negatively, with an average rating of 3.57. However, reaction times to drug-related stimuli were significantly faster than for negative stimuli (p = 0.030), and were indistinguishable from positive stimuli (p > 0.99). Similarly, EPN amplitudes evoked by drug-related images were significantly larger than those evoked by negative stimuli (p 0.99). LPP amplitudes evoked by drug-related stimuli were significantly smaller than those evoked by negative (p < 0.001) and positive stimuli (p = 0.004).ConclusionDespite negative self-assessments of drug-related imagery, MA-addicts reaction times were no slower than positive reactions. Similarly, drug-related and positive imagery EPN amplitudes were indistinguishable. Together, these results suggest increased attentional resources were allocated to the processing of drug-related stimuli and the pathways responsible partially overlap with the those recruited in processing positive emotional imagery in addicts. Moreover, in the late stage of visual processing, MA-addicts showed reduced brain activity in response to drug-related stimuli, suggesting reverse inhibition in response preparation and emotional appraisal. These findings may provide a reference for clinicians treating drug-taking behavior and for the development of new models of rehabilitation therapy. (shrink)

PurposeCOVID-19 pandemic is a significant threat toward the public health. However, the discussion of the mechanism of media literacy’s effect in fighting against pandemic is limited. Thus, this study aims to explore the mechanism with a sociocognitive perspective.MethodsA survey was administrated to 420 college students in China. PROCESS macro of SPSS was applied to analyze the data and test the moderated mediation effect.ResultsThe moderated mediation model of media literacy, proxy efficacy, self-efficacy, and official media use was tested and supported. Official (...) media use was a negative moderator on the association between media literacy and proxy efficacy.ConclusionThe study explored the media literacy’s role as a determinant of proxy efficacy and self-efficacy, which contributed to the sociocognitive theory. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the role of culture on early adolescents’ social reasoning about peer exclusion. A total of 80 U.S. and 149 Taiwanese early adolescents independently completed a social reasoning essay about peer exclusion. Analyses of the essays based on social-moral theories showed that U.S. students tended to reason about peer exclusion based on social conventional thinking whereas Taiwanese students were more attentive to personal and moral issues. Despite this difference, both groups of students referred to some common (...) social-moral concepts while reasoning about peer exclusion, including consideration of personal benefit, harming others’ welfare, personal concern, and punishment. The use of social reasoning strategies was similar across the two groups of students except that Taiwanese students relied more on judgment whereas U.S. students generated more alternative hypotheses. (shrink)

This theoretical study examines the ethics of international nurse recruitment from the conceptual framework of stakeholder interests. It argues that there are stakeholders at individual, institutional, national and international levels, with overlapping but, more often, different or even conflicting interests. Depending on the interests of given stakeholders, different conclusions regarding the ethics of international nurse recruitment may be reached. There is no right or wrong with these varying ethical positions because they reflect different beliefs and philosophies that are not amenable (...) to value judgment. To illustrate and support this line of argument, this article analyzes the underpinnings of two ethical standards published by the International Council of Nurses and the UK Department of Health. In addition, a case study on China augments the argument by demonstrating limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach to the issue. The most important question in understanding and evaluating the ethical standards of international nurse recruitment is to know whose interests they are designed to represent and protect. (shrink)

While online medical consultations have become increasingly popular, not least in times when epidemics make access to medical facilities difficult, research exploring the interactive value of OMC is still in its infancy. This study examines patients’ disalignment with speculative diagnosis and its management by doctors in OMC interactions, which to my best knowledge are not examined. From a discourse analytic perspective, this study adopts Du Bois’s notion of stance-taking to approach text-based interactions collected from a widely used OMC website in (...) China. This study finds that patients’ disalignment is often based on hard evidence, which is different from the major findings of previous studies. When addressing such disalignment, doctors adopt varied discursive strategies, which are hardly mentioned in prior studies, in particular, strategies that address the affective aspect of patients’ disalignment. This study thus provides a different perspective on disalignment and its management in the clinical context. (shrink)

This paper proposes a revision of our understanding of causation that is designed to address what Hartry Field has suggested is the central problem in the metaphysics of causation today: reconciling Bertrand Russell’s arguments that the concept of causation can play no role in the advanced sciences with Nancy Cartwright’s arguments that causal concepts are essential to a scientific understanding of the world. The paper shows that Russell’s main argument is, ironically, very similar to an argument that Cartwright has put (...) forward against the truth of universal laws of nature. The paper uses this insight to develop an account of causation that does justice to traditional views yet avoids the arguments of Russell. (shrink)

BackgroundCompassion fatigue is often associated with moral distress in the nursing practice among registered nurses. Moral resilience is an important ability to maintain, restore, or promote their...