The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the largest regional security and cooperation organization and has existed for nearly two decades. Since its inception China and Russia have acted as the driving force behind it, playing a leading role in its development. The main goals of the Big Two’s cooperation are to ensure the Eurasian corridor is developed, to promote collective security through regional cooperation organizations, including the United Nations, and to recast the world order on the basis of political dialogue, mutual (...) respect, equality and international law. Nonetheless there are disagreements between China and Russia and among the member states. China is keen to tackle terrorism, extremism and separatism and pursue economic collaboration, while Russia is more ambitious about transforming the SCO into a strategic counterbalance to U.S. hegemony. Looking forward, people may wonder how China, a rising economic power and military force, will continue to share liabilities within the SCO, particularly with Russia but also the other member states. There is no definite answer to that question at the moment. All we can say is that the SCO has steadily evolved into one of the most multilateral and dynamic organizations. But if progress is to be sustained, reforms and systematic change are necessary. (shrink)

Reproductive diseases are a long‐standing problem and have become more common in the world. Currently, 15% of the world's population suffers from infertility, and half of them are women. Maturation of oocytes, successful fertilization, and high‐quality embryos are prerequisites for pregnancy. With the development of assisted reproductive technology and advanced genetic assays, we have found that infertility in many young female patients is caused by mutations in various developmental regulators. These pathogenic factors may result in impediment of oocyte maturation, failure (...) of fertilization or early embryonic development arrest. In this review, we categorize these clinically‐identified, mutated genetic factors by their molecular characteristics: nuclear factors (PALT2, TRIP13, WEE2, TBPL2, REC114, MEI1 and CDC20), cytoplasmic factors (TLE6, PADI6, NLRP2/5, FBXO43, MOS and BTG4), a factor unique to primates (TUBB8), cell membrane factor (PANX1), and zona pellucida factors (ZP1‐3). We compared discrepancies observed in phenotypes between human and mouse models to provide clues for clinical diagnosis and treatment of related reproductive diseases. (shrink)

Innovative loss‐of‐function techniques developed in recent years have made it much easier to target specific genomic loci at transcriptional levels. CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) has been proven to be the most effective and specific tool to knock down any gene of interest in mammalian cells. The catalytically deactivated Cas9 (dCas9) can be fused with transcription repressors to downregulate gene expression specified by sgRNA complementary to target genomic sequence. Although CRISPRi has huge potential for gene knockdown, there is still a lack of (...) systematic guidelines for efficient and widespread use. Here we describe the working mechanism and development of CRISPRi, designing principles of sgRNA, delivery methods and applications in mammalian cells in detail. Finally, we propose possible solutions and future directions with regard to current challenges. (shrink)

The current study investigated how sad expressions during encoding affected recognition of facial identity in visual working memory and its electrophysiological correlates. Event-related poten...

The spread of sociobiology in China is not simply an internal event in the development of science. From the day it was introduced to China, its destiny was closely bound up with the development and change of Chinese society. Although it did not create as great a disturbance as in America, it did have a significant impact in academic circles. However, scholars have paid little attention to these historical events. Today, sociobiology seems outdated and Wilson's grand agenda seems to have (...) faded with the passing of time, but the mark that he made on the history of science is still striking. A review of the process of reception of sociobiology in China is helpful for understanding this theory as well as the society of China. (shrink)

The two event-related potentials studies investigated how verbs and nouns were processed in different music priming conditions in order to reveal whether the motion concept via embodiment can be stimulated and evoked across categories. Study 1 tested the processing of verbs primed by two music types, with tempo changes and without tempo changes while Study 2 tested the processing of nouns in the same priming condition as adopted in Study 1. During the experiments, participants were required to hear a piece (...) of music prior to judging whether an ensuing word is semantically congruent with the motion concept conveyed by the music. The results show that in the priming condition of music with tempo changes, state verbs and inanimate nouns elicited larger N400 amplitudes than action verbs and animate nouns, respectively in the anterior regions and anterior to central regions, whereas in the priming condition of music without tempo changes, action verbs elicited larger N400 amplitudes than state verbs and the two categories of nouns revealed no N400 difference, unexpectedly. The interactions between music and words were significant only in Tasks 1, 2, and 3. Taken together, the results demonstrate that firstly, music with tempo changes and music without tempo prime verbs and nouns in different fashions; secondly, action verbs and animate nouns are easier to process than state verbs and inanimate nouns when primed by music with tempo changes due to the shared motion concept across categories; thirdly, bodily experience differentiates between music and words in coding fashion but the motion concept conveyed by the two categories can be subtly extracted on the metaphorical basis, as indicated in the N400 component. Our studies reveal that music tempos can prime different word classes, favoring the notion that embodied motion concept exists across domains and adding evidence to the hypothesis that music and language share the neural mechanism of meaning processing. (shrink)

From 1979 to 1999, a heated dispute over the science or pseudoscience of extraordinary power or extrasensory perception took place in China. During these two decades, many so-called “grandmasters” of ESP and Qigong emerged, and millions of people across the country studied with them; this was known as “Qigong Fever” or “ESP Fever.” The supporters of ESP argued that ESP existed, people could cultivate ESP through specific Qigong training, and ESP was a science; whereas the opponents of ESP denied all (...) of these. Both sides of the dispute had many supporters. With the onset of Qigong Fever in China, some Qigong and ESP masters developed their Qigong organizations into Chinese-style religions. Qigong Fever ended when the religions were banned by the Chinese government. The rise of Qigong Fever demonstrated that basic questions about the boundaries between science and pseudoscience were not easy to answer. Different theoretical and practical consequences resulted from different answers to these questions. (shrink)

Traffic congestion is a common problem in many countries, especially in big cities. At present, China’s urban road traffic accidents occur frequently, the occurrence frequency is high, the accident causes traffic congestion, and accidents cause traffic congestion and vice versa. The occurrence of traffic accidents usually leads to the reduction of road traffic capacity and the formation of traffic bottlenecks, causing the traffic congestion. In this paper, the formation and propagation of traffic congestion are simulated by using the improved medium (...) traffic model, and the control strategy of congestion dissipation is studied. From the point of view of quantitative traffic congestion, the paper provides the fact that the simulation platform of urban traffic integration is constructed, and a feasible data analysis, learning, and parameter calibration method based on RBF neural network is proposed, which is used to determine the corresponding decision support system. The simulation results prove that the control strategy proposed in this paper is effective and feasible. According to the temporal and spatial evolution of the paper, we can see that the network has been improved on the whole. (shrink)

The symbol grounding problem (SGP) proposed by Stevan Harnad in 1990, originates from Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument” and refers to the problem of how a pure symbolic system acquires its meaning. While many solutions to this problem have been proposed, all of them have encountered inconsistencies to different extents. A recent approach for resolving the problem is to divide the SGP into hard and easy problems echoing the distinction between hard and easy problems for resolving the enigma of consciousness. This (...) however turns out not to be an ideal strategy: Everything related to consciousness that cannot be well-explained by present theories can be categorized as a hard problem which as a consequence would doom the SGP to irresolvability. We therefore argue that the SGP can be regarded as a general problem of how an AI system can have intentionality, and develop a theoretical direction for its solution. (shrink)

Head transplantation has ignited intense discussions about whether it should be done scientifically and ethically. This paper examines the ethics of head transplantation from a Confucian perspective and offers arguments against the permissibility of head transplantation. From a Confucian point of view, human beings are the most precious organisms in the world, and ren and li are the basic moral principles of human beings. As long as head transplant technology remains underdeveloped, this procedure should not be done because it will (...) pose a serious risk of harm to humans and thus violate the principles of Confucian ren and li. If head transplant technology matures to the point that it would be safe to try in humans, it still should not be performed because it would change the selfhood or identity of the head donor and the body donor and create a new person. Confucian personal virtues greatly depend on selfhood or personal identity, and selfhood or personal identity depend on one’s body cultivation and mind rectification. Through the hard effort of body cultivation and mind rectification, one transforms one’s selfhood or identity and personality. This selfhood, identity, and personality cannot be separated from one’s body but are embedded in one’s body. Thus, head transplant would destroy two persons’ identities and result in a new person, and the characteristics of this new person’s identity are still unknown. (shrink)

This work attempts to respond to Tomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument in a way that combines Set Theory with the idea of the ‘Book of Change’. The study defines the ith Cause Set on which to operate on, which leads to the ontological commitment of austerity that the ‘First Cause's Compromise with emergence’ cannot be avoided. It is argued in the present paper that the concept that ‘emergence only consists of Synchronic Emergence and Diachronic Emergence’ should be extended to a broader (...) notion of emergence, which is made up of the two discussed elements and a third one ‘No-Boundary Emergence’ (beyond the time dimension). The article defines the concept of No-Boundary Emergence, proves why it is a type of emergence that differs from the traditional two types, and asserts that it underlies the bottom layer of the cosmos. This study describes the common feature of all emergence as communication protocols between layers. The assemblage of all emergences behaves similar to a distributed system that cannot be restricted by Gödel's theorem. The paper provides evidence (in Big Bang Cosmology, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity) for this point of view, and notes that emergence (in the context of No-Boundary Emergence) is not only a simple scientific theory but also a progressive scientific research programme that can spontaneously grow from scientific theory based on Platonism at the expense of a degenerating shift to the ontological commitment of austerity. This paper proposes an improved model of Schrödinger Cat that provides a new explanation for quantum measurement and argues that there must be a forbidden zone of thought experiments. The study also introduces the implications of ancient Chinese thoughts (namely, the ‘Book of Change’ and Confucius). The paper comes to the conclusion that emergence (crossing the gap between ‘being’ and ‘nothing’, while ignoring the forbidden zone of thought experiments) relieves ‘cosmological insufficiency’ in the sense of Neo-Aristotelism. (shrink)

Recent theoretical advances describing consciousness from information and integration have highlighted the unique role of the thalamocortical system in leading to integrated information and thus, consciousness. Here, we examined the differential distributions of specific and nonspecific thalamocortical functional connections using resting-state fMRI in a group of healthy subjects and vegetative-state patients. We found that both thalamic systems were widely distributed, but they exhibited different patterns. Nonspecific connections were preferentially associated with brain regions involved in higher-order cognitive processing, self-awareness and introspective (...) mentalizing . In contrast, specific connections were prevalent in the ventral and posterior part of the prefrontal and precuneus, known involved in representing externally-directed attentions. Significant reductions of functional connectivity in both systems, especially the nonspecific system, were observed in VS. These data suggest that brain networks sustaining information and integration may be differentiated by the nature of their thalamic functional connectivity. (shrink)

Death with dignity is a significant issue in modern bioethics. In modern healthcare, the wide use of new technologies at the end of life has caused heated debate on how to protect human dignity. The key point of contention lies in the different understandings of human dignity and the dignity of death. Human dignity has never been a clear concept in Western ethical explorations, and the dignity of death has given rise to more confusions. Although there is no such term (...) as “dignity” in Confucian ethics, there are discussions of a number of ideas related to human dignity and the dignity of death. Therefore, Confucian bioethics can offer a new perspective for understanding the theoretical difficulties associated with the dignity of death and new methods for solving them. In this article, we attempt to reconstruct Confucian views on human dignity and the dignity of death and, based on those views, to analyze the following issues: the relationship between the dignity of death and biological life, the relationship between the dignity of death and suffering, the relationship between the dignity of death and the autonomy of human beings, and the relationship between the dignity of death and social justice. This article will also compare the Confucian views on these issues with the views of Western philosophers. Confucian ethics can offer distinct answers to the above issues and help resolve some confusions concerning concepts and theories in Western research on the dignity of death. (shrink)

Drawing on institutional and signaling theories, this study examines how environmental corporate social responsibility affects firm performance in a dysfunctional institutional environment. We extend the ECSR literature by suggesting that ECSR indirectly influences firm performance through the mediating effects of business and political legitimacy. Based on a dataset of 238 firms in China, we find that ECSR affects business and political legitimacy followed by firm performance. Moreover, legal incompleteness weakens and legal inefficiency strengthens the effects of ECSR on business and (...) political legitimacy. (shrink)

Although some cognitive studies provided reasons that children with low socioeconomic status (SES) showed poor mathematical achievements, there was no explicit evidence to directly explain the root of lagged performance in children with low SES. Therefore, the present study explored the differences in neural correlates in the process of symbolic magnitude comparison between children with different SES by the event-related potentials (ERP). A total of 16 second graders from low SES families and 16 from middle/high SES families participated in this (...) study. According to the results of anterior N1 (early attention) and P2 (extraction of numerical meaning) over frontal region, the differences among children with different SES were manifested as differences in general neural activities in terms of attention and top-down cognitive control. In the late stage of cognitive processing, there was no significant difference in the average amplitude of the LPC between the children with different SES, indicating that low SES did not influence the information encoding and memory updating of numerical representation responsible by the parietal lobe. The educational implications of this study were mentioned in the discussion. (shrink)

The development of biotechnologies has broadly interfered with a number of life processes, including human birth. An important moral question arises from the application of such medical technologies to birth: do biotechnological advancements violate human dignity? Many valid arguments have been raised. Yet bioethicists are still far from reaching a consensus on how best to protect the dignity of human birth. Confucianism is an influential ethical theory in China and presents a distinctive understanding of human dignity. In this paper, we (...) reconstruct the two Confucian concepts of dignity—namely, universal dignity and personal dignity. We then apply these concepts to human birth in the context of biotechnologies involving embryos and genetic enhancement. We conclude that the dual Confucian understanding of dignity contributes a valuable perspective to the question of whether biotechnologies related to human birth violate human dignity. (shrink)

本书包括:生命的本质;计算主义;时空本性;科学主义和人体主义哲学;科学技术与社会;学术互动访散记等内容。.

Aiming at suppressing harmful effect for building structure by surface motion, semiactive nonsmooth control algorithm with Deep Learning is proposed. By finite-time stable theory, the building structure closed-loop system’s stability is discussed under the proposed control algorithm. It is found that the building structure closed-loop system is stable. Then the proposed control algorithm is applied on controlling the building structural vibration. The seismic action is chosen as El Centro seismic wave. Dynamic characteristics have comparative analysis between semiactive nonsmooth control and (...) passive control in two simulation examples. They demonstrate that the designed control algorithm has great robustness and anti-interference. The proposed control algorithm is more effective than passive control in suppressing structural vibration. (shrink)

Grounded on the social exchange theory (SET), social cognitive theory (SCT), and self-determination theory (SDT), this study aims to explore the mediating role of self-efficacy (SE) and work engagement (WE) on the effect of social support (SS) on job satisfaction (JS) among Chinese ethnic minority kindergarten teachers (KTs). The results show that: (1) SS has a directly significant effect on JS; (2) WE mediates the relationship between SS and JS; and (3) SE mediates the relationship between SS and WE. Although (...) the mediation of SE on the relationship between SS and JS is not found, the posited multiple mediations of SE and WE on the relationship between SS and JS are totally accepted. The results reveal that SS mainland Chinese ethnic minority KTs received can not only have a direct effect on JS but also have an indirect impact through the one-path mediating role of WE and the chain mediating role of SE and WE. The results suggest that governments, supervisors, and sponsors should work together to provide ethnic minority KTs with more prioritized SS from both cultural psychology and financial material and opportunities for facilitating professional knowledge and skills in order to enhance their SE, inspire their WE, and eventually accumulate their JS. (shrink)

With the emergence of clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) as one of the most promising new gene-editing techniques, scientists are now endeavoring to apply it to various domains. Among all the possible applications, gene editing in human embryos has received the most attention. Against this background, this article carries out a philosophical study on the ethical problems of human embryo gene editing or designing. Arguments against human embryo gene designing include that parents should be prohibited (...) from deciding their children’s future; commodifying children should be prohibited; the natural reproductive process should not be disturbed; and human embryo gene designing might foster discrimination. Arguments for human embryo gene designing include that parents should have the freedom to design their own babies and this freedom should not be limited; designing babies can promote the happy life of the baby; and totally forbidding embryo gene editing would drive the practice underground, where it would be performed illegally. This article analyzes all of these arguments and points out that all of them have some flaws. In order to draw a thoughtful conclusion, we turn to Confucianism and find a new perspective to determine whether designing babies with CRISPR technology is ethically permissible. (shrink)

The definition of life is a very important issue in the philosophy of biology, but this issue has unfortunately been neglected by the mainstream philosopher of biology for many years. In this paper, the difficulties with and the reasons for defining life are illustrated, the characteristics of life on Earth are explored, ways of defining life are examined, the main definitions of life are explained and evaluated, and finally, a new information definition of life is proposed.

The study of voice behavior examines the inclination of staff and team members to speak up and contribute ideas to the team. In this article, we investigate how factors such as leader-member exchange (LMX), psychological safety and psychological empowerment influence such behavior. Our findings, which are based on a sample of 308 employees working for a state-owned telecommunications company on the Chinese mainland, indicate that ethical leadership promotes employees’ voice behavior through enhanced leader-member exchange, which also leads to greater feelings (...) of psychological safety and psychological empowerment. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

In evolutionary theory, we generally believe that the evolution of life is from simple to complex, from single to diverse, and from lower to higher. Thus, the idea of evolutionary progress appears obvious. However, in contemporary academic circles, some biologists and philosophers challenge this idea. Among them, Gould is the most influential. This paper first describes Gould’s seven arguments against evolutionary progress, i.e., the human arrogance argument, anthropocentric argument, no inner thrust argument, no biological base argument, extreme contingency argument, statistical (...) error argument, and bacteria (other than human beings) ruling the earth argument. Gould’s arguments against evolutionary progress have great influence in contemporary evolutionary theory. Thus, it is necessary to conduct a careful philosophical analysis of each of Gould’s arguments to reveal his philosophical mistakes. This research contends that Gould’s arguments against evolutionary progress are invalid. (shrink)

One of the central problems in philosophy of artificial life (AL) is whether the artificial life entities we create can be genuine life. Proponents of strong AL believe that the artificial life entities exhibiting characteristics of natural life in a physical or a virtual environment can be real life. Opponents of strong artificial life, however, think that artificial life entities are not real life or just simulation of natural life. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate which view of (...) strong artificial life is valid. The method is to use philosophical theory and logics to analyze the opponents’ arguments. The conclusion is that the opponents’ arguments for denying strong AL are insufficient to exclude the possibility of strong AL. (shrink)

本书共分九章内容：第一章论述了生命科学哲学兴起的背景，区分了生命科学哲学研究中的两种理论倾向，指出了生命科学哲学研究的主要问题，最后介绍了国内外生命科学哲学研究的进展；第二章分析了这种解释方式的合理性 及其与因果性解释方式的关系，并由此进一步讨论了生命科学的自主性问题；第三章从不同方面较详细地论述了正反两方面论证的依据，并对各种观点进行了比较，说明生物学理论缺少规律的原因；第四章讨论了还原概念和突现 概念的历史发展，分析了它们各自的认识论和本体论原因，指出了它们各自的优点和局限，最后指出了超越它们的途径；第五章着重讨论了进化论的统计特性与进化过程的决定论和非决定论问题；第六章讨论了生命难以定义的各 种原因，论述了定义生命的两种主要方法；第七章指出了人工生命提出的主要的哲学问题，从不同角度论证了强人工生命的可能性，分析了数字生命的实在论地位，揭示了人工生命所蕴含计算主义世界观；第八章分析了人类基因 组研究的价值及其所可能引起的伦理和法律问题；第九章总结了8年来关于人类克隆的主要争论和观点，并揭示了这些争论给我们的启示。.

The spread of sociobiology in China is not simply an internal event in the development of science. From the day it was introduced to China, its destiny was closely bound up with the development and change of Chinese society. Although it did not create as great disturbance as in America, it did have a significant impact in academic circles. However, scholars have paid little attention to these historical events. Today, sociobiology seems outdated and Wilson's grand agenda seems to have faded (...) with the passing of time, but the mark that he made on the history of science is still striking. A review of the process of reception of sociobiology in China is helpful for understanding this theory as well as the society of China. (shrink)

In recent years, many scientists and philosophers have begun to believe that a new theoretic revolution is occurring in cognitive science. The revolution is the rise of theoretical models of "4E+S" cognition. "4E" denotes "embodied", "embedded", "enacted", and "extended"; "S" denotes "situated". Differentiating from the traditional computational theory or representational theory of cognition, this branch of new cognitive scientists and philosophers have begun to claim that cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and situated. All of these five theories agree that (...) cognitive processes can proceed beyond the boundary of the brain. Thus we can synthesize them together as "transcranial cognition" or "transbrain cognition". The questions are: Are there common characteristics of these five models? Can we integrate them together with a new model of cognition? Is the "4E+S" model a real Copernicus style revolution of cognitive science? This article analyzes these questions and provides the following answers: There is a common characteristics of these cognitive theories and it is the characteristics of transcranialness, i. e. cognition or mind can exist beyond brain; We can integrate them together as transcranial cognition; The new theory of cognition or mind is a new big extended theory of traditional cognitive science. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr is a well-known biologist and philosopher in the twentieth century. Being a biologist, he is an important person in constructing the synthesis theory of evolution; being a philosopher, he has advocated a new philosophy, which, he claims, synthesizes the achievement of different biologies and physics, while at the same time getting rid of the influences of the traditional philosophy of science. In this essay, I will systematically investigate the main principles and the basic scheme of his new philosophy. (...) I find that Mayr’s new ideas of philosophy of biology can be summarized as the following five statements: The physical science is not the standard paradigm of the whole science; The historical narratives are more important than the explanation of laws; The explanation and the prediction are asymmetrical in life science; Concepts are more essential than laws in biology; There is no conflict between causality and teleonomy. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic severely hit small and micro-businesses. In the face of the impact of the pandemic, how to help entrepreneurs, especially small- and micro-businesses that are more sensitive to the impact of the pandemic, make decisions to reduce losses has become an issue worth paying attention to. From the perspective of personality approach, this article studied openness, which is the strongest predictor of entrepreneurial performance among the big five personality traits, and explored the impact of entrepreneurs’ openness on entrepreneurial (...) performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the inconsistent mediating role of strategic decision comprehensiveness on entrepreneurial performance. An online questionnaire survey was conducted among 238 entrepreneurs of small- and micro-businesses when China was recovering from the pandemic and starting to resume work and production. Entrepreneurial performance during the COVID-19 pandemic was measured by comparing the business conditions before and after the pandemic. The results showed that entrepreneurs’ openness positively impacted strategic decision comprehensiveness and entrepreneurial performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the two competing hypotheses proposed by summarizing previous research, the results supported that strategic decision comprehensiveness negatively affected entrepreneurial performance. It indicated that entrepreneurs who tend to collect and analyze information extensively and then make decisions during the pandemic could not seize opportunities and improve their entrepreneurial performance. The results further supported that strategic decision comprehensiveness was an inconsistent mediator between openness and entrepreneurial performance, showing that entrepreneurs with low openness can also reduce the loss of entrepreneurial performance during the pandemic by making incomplete but rapid strategic decisions. This study found that the openness of entrepreneurs had a positive impact on strategic decision comprehensiveness for the first time and provided more empirical evidence for the negative effect of strategic decision comprehensiveness on entrepreneurial performance in the context of information uncertainty and unanalyzable situations. The inconsistent mediating effect of strategic decision comprehensiveness revealed in this study also has practical significance for helping entrepreneurs make correct decisions to reduce the losses caused by the pandemic. (shrink)

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, the public keeps getting epidemic-related information on the media. News reports on the increasing number of fatalities have exposed individuals to death, which causes negative emotional experiences such as tension, anxiety, and fear. This study aimed to investigate whether creativity could serve as an anxiety-buffer when mortality is salient. Based on previous findings, the present study utilized type of creative task and personal search for meaning as moderators. In Study 1, a 2 × (...) 2 between-subject design was utilized, and 168 subjects were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions. In Study 2, 221 subjects were recruited. The experimental procedure was similar to Study 1, except that the priming paradigm of mortality was changed and search for meaning was included as an additional moderating variable. State anxiety was measured as the dependent variable in both studies. Results of Study 1 showed that, while the benevolent creative task could buffer anxiety in the mortality salience condition, the malevolent creative task did not have the same effect. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between mortality salience, type of creative task, and search for meaning in life on anxiety. In Study 2, the buffering function of benevolent creativity was more intense for participants with a higher level of search for meaning. Together, these findings reveal the influence of different types of creative tasks on individual anxiety levels under death priming conditions and the moderating effect of search for meaning in this relationship. Further, they suggest the need to focus on the role of creativity in terror management. (shrink)

As a new form of online reviews, Q&A reviews have been recently used by many e-commerce platforms to compensate for the weaknesses and problems related to trust and helpfulness found in traditional online reviews. This research documents what motivates people to share products or purchasing knowledge with others through Q&A reviews and why e-commerce platforms should place an emphasis on Q&A reviews. Importantly, our results provide evidence that, when receiving feedback, people are more likely willing to share knowledge with others (...) and will have a higher level of loyalty. We believe that this study contributes to knowledge sharing and the e-commerce literature, and also has practical implications. (shrink)

Named entity recognition is a subtask in natural language processing, and its accuracy greatly affects the effectiveness of downstream tasks. Aiming at the problem of insufficient expression of potential Chinese features in named entity recognition tasks, this paper proposes a multifeature adaptive fusion Chinese named entity recognition model. The model uses bidirectional long short-term memory neural network to extract stroke and radical features and adopts a weighted concatenation method to fuse two sets of features adaptively. This method can better integrate (...) the two sets of features, thereby improving the model entity recognition ability. In order to fully test the entity recognition performance of this model, we compared the basic model and other mainstream models on Microsoft Research Asia and “China People’s Daily” dataset from January to June 1998. Experimental results show that this model is better than other models, with F1 values of 97.01% and 96.78%, respectively. (shrink)

It is interesting to explore the effects of second language acquisition on anatomical change in brain at different stages for the neural structural adaptations are dynamic. Short-term Chinese training effects on brain anatomical structures in alphabetic language speakers have been already studied. However, little is known about the adaptations of the gray matter induced by acquiring Chinese language for a relatively long learning period in adult alphabetic language speakers. To explore this issue, we recruited 38 Indian overseas students in China (...) as our subjects. The learned group included 17 participants who had learned Mandarin Chinese for an average of 3.24 years and achieved intermediate Chinese language proficiency. The control group included 21 subjects who had no knowledge about Chinese. None of the participants had any experience in learning logographic and tonal language before Chinese learning. We found that the learned group had significantly greater gray matter volume in the left lingual gyrus compared with the control group; the Chinese characters’ reading accuracy was significantly and positively correlated to the GMV in the left LG and fusiform gyrus across the two groups; and in the learned group, the duration of Chinese learning was significantly and positively correlated with the GMV in the left inferior frontal gyrus after correction for multiple comparisons with small volume corrections. Our structural imaging findings are in line with the functional imaging studies reporting increased brain activation induced by Chinese acquisition in alphabetic language speakers. The regional gray matter changes reflected the additional requirements imposed by the more difficult processing of Chinese characters and tones. The present study also show that the biological bases of the adaptations induced by a relatively long period of Chinese learning were limited in the common areas for first and foreign language processing. (shrink)

Humans are born with the ability and the need for affection, but communicating affection as a social behavior is historically bound. Based on the digitized books of Google Ngram Viewer from 1960 through 2008, the present research investigated the affectionate communication (AC) in China and in the US, and its changing landscape along with social changes from collectivist to individualistic environments. In particular, we analyzed the frequency in terms of verbal affection (e.g., love you, like you), non-verbal affection (e.g., hug, (...) kiss), and individualism (indicated by the use of first-person singular pronouns, such as I, me, and myself) in Chinese and in American books. The results revealed a convergent increasing trend of AC over the past decades, although the frequency of affection words was lower in Chinese than in American books. Further, the individualism was found to be positively related to the frequency of affection words in both Chinese and American books. These results demonstrate the effect of cultural changes on AC, in that affection exchange becomes popular in adaptation to individualistic urban environments, which provide the evidence about the cross-cultural difference in love expression and the cultural universality of social change in Eastern and Western societies. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe large-scale epidemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 has triggered unprecedented physical and psychological stress on health professionals. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and risk factors of burnout syndrome, and the relationship between burnout and depressive symptoms among frontline medical staff during the COVID-19 epidemic in China.MethodsA total of 606 frontline medical staff were recruited from 133 cities in China using a cross-sectional survey. The Maslach Burnout Inventory was used to assess the level of burnout. Depressive symptoms were assessed (...) by the Patient Health Questionnaire Depression.ResultsDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, 36.5% of the medical staff experienced burnout. Personal and work-related factors were independently associated with burnout, including age, family income, having physical diseases, daily working hours, and profession of nurse. The correlation coefficients between the scores of each burnout subscale and the scores of depressive symptoms were 0.57 for emotional exhaustion, 0.37 for cynicism, and −0.41 for professional efficacy.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that the prevalence rate of burnout is extremely high among medical staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is associated with other psychological disorders, such as depression. Psychological intervention for medical staff is urgently needed. Young and less experienced medical staff, especially nurses, should receive more attention when providing psychological assistance. (shrink)

This study examines Chinese faculty ethical philosophy from a historical perspective. Historical perspective on Chinese faculty ethical philosophy embraces three major periods, including Ch...

Interval time-varying delay is common in control process, e.g., automatic robot control system, and its stability analysis is of great significance to ensure the reliable control of industrial processes. In order to improve the conservation of the existing robust stability analysis method, this paper considers a class of linear systems with norm-bounded uncertainty and interval time-varying delay as the research object. Less conservative robust stability criterion is put forward based on augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method and reciprocally convex combination. Firstly, the (...) delay interval is partitioned into multiple equidistant subintervals, and a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional comprising quadruple-integral term is introduced for each subinterval. Secondly, a novel delay-dependent stability criterion in terms of linear matrix inequalities is given by less conservative Wirtinger-based integral inequality approach. Three numerical comparative examples are given to verify the superiority of the proposed approach in reducing the conservation of conclusion. For the first example about closed-loop control systems with interval time-varying delays, the proposed robust stability criterion could get MADB about 0.3 more than the best results in the previous literature; and, for two other uncertain systems with interval time-varying delays, the MADB results obtained by the proposed method are better than those in the previous literature by about 0.045 and 0.054, respectively. All the example results obtained in this paper clearly show that our approach is better than other existing methods. (shrink)