Several theories, both ancient and recent, suggest that having the time to contemplate a decision should increase moral awareness and the likelihood of ethical choices. Our findings indicated just the opposite: greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions. Post-hoc analyses and a followup experiment suggested that decision makers act as if their previous choices have created or lost moral credentials: after an ethical first choice, people acted significantly less ethically in their subsequent choice but after an unethical first (...) choice, people acted significantly more ethically in their subsequent choice. These findings provide the basis for a model of compensatory ethics. (shrink)

Spermiogenesis is an important physiological process of mammalian fertilization. The germ cells are susceptible to the harmful effects of either psychological or physiological stress, which could induce male infertility. Our previous studies have found that chronic psychological stress could decrease sexual motivation. However, molecular mechanisms underlying male reproductive toxicity induced by chronic stress remain elusive. Recently, autophagy is proven to be involved in regulating the survival of germ cells, which is related to apoptosis. Herein, we established a chronic psychological stress (...) model and a chronic pain model (physiological stressor) to explore the roles of autophagy in germ cells. Thirty-two male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups, including the control group, the chronic psychological stress group, the SNI-sham group, and the chronic pain stress group. After exposure to stress for 35 days, open field test and the unconditioned sexual motivation test were performed. Following the behavioral experiment, autophagy in the rat testis was detected by Western blot and immunohistochemistry. We found both chronic psychological stress and chronic pain stress reduced total travel distance, the frequency of central crossing and increased the sensitivity to mechanical pain. While chronic psychological stress, but not the chronic pain stress declined sexual motivation. Chronic psychological stress prompt the expression of LC3-II with the decreased expression of p62, indicating that chronic psychological stress induced autophagy in rat testis. However, there was no significant difference between the expression of LC3-II and p62 in male rats under chronic pain stress. Therefore, chronic psychological stress and chronic pain stress have common behavior changes, but due to its unpredictability, chronic psychological stress leads to a decline in sexual motivation in male rats and induced the autophagy in testicular tissues. (shrink)

Comparison of behavioural measures of consciousness has attracted much attention recently. In a recent article, Szczepanowski et al. conclude that confidence ratings predict accuracy better than both the perceptual awareness scale and post-decision wagering when using stimuli with emotional content . Although we find the study interesting, we disagree with the conclusion that CR is superior to PAS because of two methodological issues. First, the conclusion is not based on a formal test. We performed this test and found no evidence (...) that CR predicted accuracy better than PAS . Second, Szczepanowski et al. used the present version of PAS in a manner somewhat different from how it was originally intended, and the participants may not have been adequately instructed. We end our commentary with a set of recommendations for future studies using PAS. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to create an understanding of how the UN sustainable development goals can be used to steer stakeholder engagement for transformative change, meeting global challenges, and navigate a new business-societal practice driven by a values-based business model. The article is a conceptual study with case studies of the role that the SDGs play in multi-stakeholder dialog via the kind of sustainable business-societal practice that takes corporate social responsibility to the next level, where it is embedded (...) in a values-based business model, creating a new meaning to effect real business-societal transformation. Multi-stakeholder dialog implies interactive and communicative engagement with the full range of stakeholders in order to create value for all, employing a societal perspective and using the value network as a basis for effective decision-making. We explain our methodological approach by presenting multi-stakeholder dialog in practice, in the form of multiple case studies. These empirical settings consisted of two values-driven privately owned companies with a strong reporting mechanism and a clear transformation agenda based on the SDG challenges: IKEA and Löfbergs. The empirical study provides the basis for our proposed model. This article makes an original contribution to the study of the use of SDGs in management and service research. It investigates steering and navigating processes in specific contexts in order to determine what should be subject to legal enforcement and what comprises moral and/or ethical value, particularly at the societal level. (shrink)

Recent studies have found abnormal levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in a variety of central nervous system diseases. This suggests that BDNF may be involved in the pathogenesis of these diseases. Moreover, regulating BDNF signaling may represent a potential treatment for such diseases. With reference to recent research papers in related fields, this article reviews the production and regulation of BDNF in CNS and the role of BDNF signaling disorders in these diseases. A brief introduction of the clinical application status (...) of BDNF is also provided. (shrink)

The topics of serious leisure and subjective well-being have been discussed extensively in previous research. It is generally acknowledged that people prefer to experience deeper satisfaction and happiness through serious participation in leisure-time physical activities. However, it is essential to examine the relationship between serious leisure and subjective well-being in an urban setting as well as the mediating effect of leisure satisfaction. Data were collected from 447 recreational runners at the 2018 Wuxi International Marathon event in China. The study results (...) showed that serious leisure was positively associated with leisure satisfaction and subjective well-being, that leisure satisfaction was positively associated with subjective well-being, and that leisure satisfaction completely mediated the relationship between serious leisure and subjective well-being. Running group membership significantly affected the path from serious leisure to leisure satisfaction, while other demographic variables (e.g., gender and education) did not moderate any paths. These results help explain the intricate relationship between serious leisure and subjective well-being and offer theoretical and managerial implications for serious leisure. (shrink)

In The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 , Alexander Bird raises an objection against the conditional analysis of dispositions: where an ‘antidote’ is present all the supposed conditions for manifestation of a disposition are fulfilled but the manifestation does not occur. But Bird’s argument suffers from equivocation. If we spell out properly whether the disposition's conditions are to include the presence of the antidote or not, the apparent counter‐examples disappear. So his examples do not undermine the conditional analysis of dispositions; they show (...) merely that we need to be careful about describing the examples consistently. (shrink)

In the traditional system of Chinese families, individuals are embedded in the institution of the family with defined obligations to enhance family development. As a consequence of the male-biased sex ratio at birth in China since the 1980s, an increasing number of surplus rural males have been affected by a marriage squeeze becoming involuntary bachelors. Under China’s universal heterosexual marriage tradition, family development of rural involuntary bachelors has largely been ignored, but in China’s gender-imbalanced society, it is necessary to adopt (...) a family-based approach to identify and study the plight of rural involuntary bachelors. Studies on gender imbalance indicate that these men face multiple risks from the perspectives of their life course, the family life cycle, and the family ethic. To a certain extent, these risks are caused by a conflict between the individual’s family life and family ethics and are mainly reflected in problems concerning marriage, health, and old-age support. Not only do these vulnerabilities affect the individual and family development across the whole life cycle but also pose major risks to social development in the face of strong gender imbalance. In order to deal with risks faced by rural involuntary bachelors, core ethical principles, including autonomy, beneficence, and justice, need to be adopted. Through adjustments to informal support provided by the family and formal support provided by policy-makers, risk of uncertainty in family development faced by rural involuntary bachelors could be reduced. (shrink)

A dam is a complex and important water-retaining structure. Once the dam is broken, the flood will cause immeasurable damage to the lives and properties of the downstream people, so it is particularly important to have the dam risk management. Since the dam-break flood is a severe-consequence low-frequency event, the corresponding fatalities caused by it are difficult to estimate due to the lack of relevant data and poor data continuity. This paper analyzes the direct and indirect factors affecting the risk (...) of life loss in dam failures and studies the characteristics, distribution rules, and membership functions of each factor. An adaptive differential evolution method is constructed through an optimization of the mutation factors and cross factors of the differential evolution method. This proposed evaluation method also combines with the fuzzy clustering iterative method that is capable of evaluating the similarity of life loss in dam accidents. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by 16 dam-break case studies. (shrink)

Kant's "posthumous" contains Kant's metaphysics of reason from the natural sciences to experience the philosophy of unfinished transition plan, "Kant's Complete Works," and some non-critical version of the Central Plains there are many gaps, so the new layout using the genetic structure analysis, through the study of Kant's work, but to reproduce Kant's messy manuscript by dense text written in chronological order and the resulting logic, thus maximizing the reduction of Kant This whole thought process issue.

Based on the global urban economic competitiveness data in 2017, this study conducts coupling analyses of the competitiveness indicator system. The comprehensive study on the coupling coordination degree among explanatory indexes of urban economic competitiveness concludes that the city with higher economic competitiveness rankings has a higher degree of coupling coordination ; the city ranked lower in the economic competitiveness has a lower DCC. The cities with higher DCC are mainly those global cities or metropolis known for financial and technological (...) innovations, while cities with bare coupling coordination are mainly in underdeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Based on the findings, the paper employs a model that combines linear regression and quantile regression to identify the specific driving factors that affect the cities’ competitiveness around the world. Therefore, every city should act according to local conditions, focus on the key drivers of urban development, and address the inadequacies to balance the economic development so as to enhance its competitiveness. (shrink)

The present study aimed to examine whether a self-related stimulus produces a self-related process bias between pathological-tendency internet users and ordinary internet users. Participants were asked to judge the color of the target stimulus’ frame (internet pictures) in an implicit priming task, which enclosed the prime of self/other-related words and the target of the online image in sequence. Results from Experiment 1 showed that the main effect of priming type and the interaction of the priming type and the subject group (...) were significant. Further analysis revealed that response time (RT) under the self-related condition was significantly longer than that of the other related conditions. Simple effect analysis indicated that RT under the self-related condition was significantly longer than that under the other-related conditions for pathological-tendency internet users but not for ordinary internet users. In Experiment 2, behavior results demonstrated the main effects of priming type and subject group. Further analysis suggested that RT under the self-related condition was significantly longer than that in the other-related tasks for both groups, and the RT of the pathological-tendency internet users was shorter than that of ordinary internet users. ERP data showed that the amplitudes of late positive components under the self-related condition were smaller than that under the other-related conditions. The N2 amplitude was larger under the self-related condition than under the other-related conditions for pathological-tendency internet users but not for ordinary internet users. This finding suggested that internet use influenced the inhibition control and was automatically retrieved during the processing of self-related stimuli. (shrink)

PurposeThis study investigated the impact of age and myopia on visual form perception among Chinese school-age children.MethodsThis cross-sectional study included 1,074 students with a mean age of 12.1 ± 4.7 years. The mean spherical equivalence refraction of the participants was −1.45 ± 2.07 D. All participants underwent distance visual acuity, refraction measurement and local and global visual form perception test including orientation, parallelism, collinearity, holes and color discrimination tasks.ResultsThe reaction times of emmetropes were slower than those of myopic and high (...) myopic groups on both local and global discrimination tasks. A reduction in reaction times was found with increasing age on both local and global discrimination tasks. Age was significantly associated with both local and global visual perception performance after adjusting for gender, visual acuity and SER.ConclusionsThis study revealed that both local and global visual perception improve with age among Chinese children and that myopes seem to have better visual perception than emmetropes. (shrink)

Aim To examine the hypothesis that knowledge about physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia is associated with a more restrictive attitude towards PAS. Design A questionnaire about attitudes towards PAS, including prioritisation of arguments pro and contra, was sent to Swedish veterinary surgeons. The results were compared with those from similar surveys of attitudes among the general public and physicians. Participants All veterinary surgeons who were members of the Swedish Veterinary Association and had provided an email address (n=2421). Main outcome measures (...) Similarities or differences in response pattern between veterinary surgeons, physicians and the general public. Results The response pattern among veterinary surgeons and the general public was almost similar in all relevant aspects. Of the veterinarians 75% (95% CI 72% to 78%) were in favour of PAS, compared with 73% (95% CI 69% to 77%) among the general public. Only 10% (95% CI 5% to 15%) of the veterinary surgeons were against PAS, compared with 12% (95% CI 5% to 19%) among the general public. Finally, 15% (95% CI 10% to 21%) of veterinarians were undecided, compared with 15% (95% CI 8% to 22%) among the general public. Physicians had a more restrictive attitude to PAS than the general public. Conclusions Since veterinary surgeons have frequent practical experience of euthanasia in animals, they do have knowledge about what euthanasia really is. Veterinary surgeons and the general public had an almost similar response pattern. Accordingly it seems difficult to maintain that knowledge about euthanasia is unambiguously associated with a restrictive attitude towards PAS. (shrink)

Die Erforschung Kants ist langst zu einem weltumspannenden Unternehmen geworden. Welch reiche Frucht der Wissenschaft dadurch zufallt, zeigen die Beitrage dieser Festschrift, die dem Nestor der deutschen Kantforschung, Norbert Hinske, gewidmet ist. Bekannte Vertreter der italienischen, japanischen, russischen und deutschen Kantforschung kommen zu Wort. Von besonderer Bedeutung fur die - in diesem Punkt ganzlich neu zu schreibende - Lebens- und Entwicklungsgeschichte Kants ist ein neu entdeckter, erstmals im Faksimile abgedruckter Brief von J. E. Biester an J. N. Tetens, der belegt, (...) dass der preussische Kultusminister v. Zedlitz zunachst nicht etwa Kant, sondern Tetens nach Halle berufen hat. Hinskes vollstandige Bibliographie rundet den Band ab - und zeigt eindrucksvoll, wie viel die Kantforschung weltweit gerade ihm zu verdanken hat. The study of Kant has long been a global undertaking. The articles in this Festschrift for the leading German expert on Kant, Norbert Hinske, show how richly productive this has been for scholars. Leading Italian, Japanese, Russian and German representatives of research on Kant have provided contributions to it. What is particular significant for the history of Kant's life and development, which has to be completely rewritten in this regard, is a newly discovered letter, reprinted in facsimile for the first time, from J. E. Biester to J. N. Tetens, which proves that Prussian Minister of Culture v. Zedlitz initially did not appoint Kant but rather Tetens to the position in Halle. Hinske's complete bibliography is included in the volume and is impressive evidence of how much Kant research worldwide owes to him. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage rend hommage à différents « Maîtres à penser » qui, par leur oeuvre, ont notablement enrichi leur discipline. Les juristes, historiens, politistes, philosophes, économistes étudiés ici ont en commun de réfléchir sur le pacte démocratique. Comment articuler liberté et égalité, économie et politique, religion et laïcité, violence et norme coercitive... pour qu'advienne une harmonie synonyme de paix sociale? Chacun - Sturzo, Cuche, Pocock, Quesnay, Zagrebelsky, Makhno, Fanon, Rivero, Albert, Bataille, Desjardins - apporte sa propre réponse. La diversité des (...) auteurs est à l'image de la dimension résolument pluridisciplinaire de ce nouvel opus du Bulletin annuel de Villetaneuse. (shrink)

Conventional methods for fault diagnosis typically require a substantial amount of training data. However, for equipment with high reliability, it is arduous to form a large-scale well-annotated dataset due to the expense of data acquisition and costly annotation. Besides, the generated data have a large number of redundant features which degraded the performance of models. To overcome this, we proposed a feature transfer scenario that transfers knowledge from similar fields to enhance the accuracy of fault diagnosis with small sample. To (...) reduces the redundant information, data were filtered according to manifold consistency. Then, features were extracted based on CNN and feature transfer was conducted. For adequate fitness, the joint adaptation of conditional distribution and marginal distribution was used between the two domains. Minimum structural risk and MMD of adaptation were two indicators weighted for training the model. To test the efficiency of the model, we built an airborne fuel pump testbed, and contributed a new dataset that contained 15 categories of fault data, which serves as the small sample dataset in this research. Then the proposed model was applied in our experimental data. As a result, the fault diagnosis rate increases by 28.6% through our proposed model, which is more precise than other classical methods. The results of feature visualization further demonstrate that the features are more distinguished through the proposed method. All code and data are accessible on my GitHub. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo explore the relationship between adolescents’ social mobility belief and their learning engagement, as well as the mediating effect of achievement goal orientation and the moderating effect of psychological capital.MethodA sample of 895 adolescents from Hunan, Jiangxi, Hainan, Henan, and Guangdong provinces were assessed using the social mobility belief questionnaire, the achievement goal orientation questionnaire, the adolescents’ psychological capital questionnaire, and the adolescents’ learning engagement questionnaire.ResultsFirst, adolescents’ social mobility belief was positively related to their learning engagement ; Second, the two (...) achievement goal orientations-mastery goal orientations and performance goal orientations-had mediating effects between social mobility belief and learning engagement ; Third, the relationship between achievement goal orientation and learning engagement was regulated by psychological capital. Adolescents with high psychological capital had higher learning engagement.ConclusionAdolescents’ social mobility belief can directly affect their learning engagement, and it can also indirectly affect their learning engagement through achievement goal orientation moderated by their level of psychological capital. Our findings highlighted the importance of providing adolescents with guidance in setting up positive social values and definitions of success while stimulating their psychological capital as a part of the teaching process. (shrink)

With the rapid economic growth and increased national income year by year, individuals and families have an increasingly greater demand for financial products. Banks’ sales of financial products have become a new economic profit growth point for major banks. Based on consumers’ psychological perception, the influencing factors of consumers’ behavior in purchasing bank financial products are studied. The influencing factor model path of consumer purchase behavior is constructed to find out the factors affecting consumers’ purchase of bank financial products and (...) formulate appropriate promotion strategies according to the influencing factors. Through the research methods of literature analysis, small-scale in-depth interview, questionnaire surveys, and statistical analysis, this exploration selects four variables: independent variable, mediator, control variable, and dependent variable. They are influencing factors of purchasing bank financial products, consumers’ willingness to buy bank financial products, consumers’ personal characteristics and consumers’ behavior of purchasing bank financial products. Meanwhile, based on 196 valid questionnaires, regression analysis is carried out through a regression model. The results show that the three influencing factors of consumers’ purchase of bank financial products–perceived convenience, risk value of bank financial products, and satisfaction with the purchase communication process significantly impact consumers’ purchase of bank financial products. They can put forward specific promotion suggestions for banks. This exploration aims to study the optimization of bank financial product promotion strategy from the perspective of consumer psychological perception to provide a reference for subsequent related research. (shrink)

Due to the large-scale mining of mineral resources, the surface strata in many areas have collapsed and even developed into deformation and subsidence. Based on the conventional geotechnical deformation monitoring technology, the surface deformation prediction and disaster caused by the conventional geotechnical deformation monitoring technology can be avoided. In this paper, based on GIS, combined with the analysis of surface settlement, the surface settlement, slope value, curvature deformation value, horizontal displacement, and corresponding horizontal deformation formula are comprehensively analyzed and studied. (...) In order to make the surface deformation visualization and realize the high approximation processing with the subsidence area, this paper innovatively introduces the 3D visualization settlement data analysis and realizes the calculation result analysis and corresponding retrieval multiple visualization in the subsidence area depth prediction process. On this basis, the prediction data of subsidence area can be optimized and analyzed so as to master the efficient and accurate law of surface deformation. In the experimental part, a mine is taken as the experimental object, and the 3D visual monitoring processing is carried out. In this paper, the main method to prevent electromagnetic leakage of the computer system is the source suppression method. The source suppression method solves the problem fundamentally by reducing or eliminating the emission of computer electromagnetic leakage source. In the actual experiment, the effect of this method is very effective. The experimental results show that the prediction results and corresponding early warning accuracy of the system are significantly improved compared with the traditional scheme, which provides practical significance for disaster prevention and corresponding environmental impact assessment. (shrink)

Previous studies with Westerners have found that both the mouth and eyes are crucial in identifying and interpreting smiles. We proposed that Easterners (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) evaluate the role of the mouth and eyes in smiles differently from Westerners. Individuals in collectivistic Eastern society heavily rely on information from the eyes to identify and interpret the meaning of smiles.