Cheng Wang

Previous research has demonstrated that duration of implied motion (IM) was dilated, whereas hMT+ activity related to perceptual processes on IM stimuli could be modulated by their motion coherence. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to examine whether subjective time perception of IM stimuli would be influenced by varying coherence levels. A temporal bisection task was used to measure the subjective experience of time, in which photographic stimuli showing a human moving in four directions (left, right, toward, or away from the viewer) were presented as probe stimuli. The varying coherence of these IM stimuli was manipulated by changing the percentage of pictures implying movement in one direction. Participants were required to judge whether the duration of probe stimulus was more similar to the long or short pre-presented standard duration. As predicted, the point of subjective equality was significantly modulated by the varying coherence of the IM stimuli, but not for no-IM stimuli. This finding suggests that coherence level might be a key mediating factor for perceived duration of IM images, and top-down perceptual stream from inferred motion could influence subjective experience of time perception.

Chris Fraser's new book, Zhuangzi: Ways of Wandering the Way (hereafter Ways of Wandering), carries a poetic title that echoes the style of the pre-Qin Daoist classic it explores, the Zhuangzi 莊子 or "Book of Master Zhuang." The term "wandering" (you 遊), which appears prominently in the opening chapter of the Zhuangzi ("Freely Wandering About") and recurs throughout the text, is crucial for grasping the Daoist ideas of spontaneity and the ever-changing nature of existence.Fraser's exploration of this theme in Ways of Wandering builds on his earlier work, particularly his article "Wandering the Way," published a decade ago and now included as Chapter 3 in the book. The volume brings together seven interrelated essays... Read More.

The principle of xieju 絜矩 (measuring square), originating from the Confucian classic Great Learning, represents a foundational ethical-political concept in Chinese philosophy that emphasizes moral reciprocity and social harmony. Although its influence declined during the modern era, interest in this principle has revived over the past decades. Scholars have traced the evolution of the concept of xieju, from its integration into Neo-Confucian ethics by Zhu Xi 朱熹, to its pragmatic expansion for institutional governance by Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 and its empathetic and relational dimensions as interpreted by Dai Zhen 戴震 and Jiao Xun 焦循, to its application in international relations by Guo Songtao 郭嵩燾. By bridging traditional Chinese philosophy with modern ethical and political thought, the principle of xieju provides a valuable framework for understanding the relationship between individual virtue, effective governance, and collective well-being in an interconnected world. Contemporary scholarship calls for reconsideration of the ethical essence of xieju to meet with such urgent topics as moral disagreements, social inequality, ethics of leadership, and global cooperation. This article reviews current studies on the major developments of the concept across historical periods, examining its criticisms and scholarly debates in diverse intellectual contexts. It also explores contemporary reinterpretations of xieju, highlighting its theoretical richness and enduring relevance in our rapidly changing world.

Advance care planning (ACP), a cornerstone of ethical end-of-life care, upholds patient autonomy. However, its practice in Confucian-influenced societies, like China, is significantly shaped by cultural norms where family preferences often precede individual choice. This study explored cultural and ethical barriers to ACP implementation among oncology nursing professionals, focusing on tensions between patient-centered care and deeply rooted social norms. A qualitative thematic analysis was conducted on open-ended responses from oncology hospitals across 22 provinces, 4 municipal cities, and 5 autonomous regions in China. Data were collected via a cross-sectional online survey and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s framework to identify patterns in cultural, ethical, and communicative challenges. A total of 838 oncology nursing professionals participated in the study. Three main interdependent barriers emerged: (1) Cultural norms, including filial piety (15.6% of codes) and death-related taboos (11.0%), often led to family-mediated decision-making (33.1%) over patient autonomy; (2) Ethical dilemmas involved neglecting patient preferences (24.3%) and conflicts between life-prolonging treatments and quality-of-life considerations (8.1%); (3) Communication challenges arose from information asymmetry (7.9%) and power imbalances, which often silenced patient voices. These factors collectively created systemic obstacles to ACP implementation. Context-specific ACP strategies in China should integrate Confucian ethics into nursing education, support ethics consultation, and develop culturally sensitive communication models. Future research must assess these interventions’ impact on balancing cultural values and patient autonomy, advancing equitable end-of-life care in culturally diverse healthcare systems. Not applicable.

Benevolent leadership as a typical human-centered leadership pattern has been constantly advocated but often sacrificed to the prevailing performanceism in today’s organizations. However, it still remains unclear on how to effectively facilitate the emergence of benevolent behavior for leaders, which would potentially hinder the adoption of benevolent leadership and its attainment of high priority. In the current research, we go beyond the workplace to explore one deliberate way leaders can bring family resources into their leadership practice to emerge more benevolent behaviors at work. From the experience-based leadership development perspective, supported by the theory of role accumulation across domains, we take a mixed-method approach to uncover the effect of positive parenting experience on benevolent leadership behavior via parent-leader role enrichment. In Study 1, we conduct a qualitative analysis based on the text content and interview provided by parent-role leaders to preliminarily reveal that being a parent makes a leader perform more behaviors with benevolent nature. In Study 2, we draw from the benefits of being a parent generated in Study 1 and the cross-role accumulation perspective to develop a theoretical model to delineate how the positive parenting experience yields benefits for benevolent leadership behavior. Results show that positive parenting experience can benefit parent-role leaders’ benevolent leadership behavior via perspective-taking ability. Meanwhile, both the positive parenting experience’s direct effect on perspective taking and its indirect effect on benevolent leadership behavior are stronger for individuals involved in high-quality co-parenting with their spouse, highlighting the important collaboration effects in the process of achieving parent-to-leader enrichment across domains.

Benevolent leadership as a typical human-centered leadership pattern has been constantly advocated but often sacrificed to the prevailing performanceism in today’s organizations. However, it still remains unclear on how to effectively facilitate the emergence of benevolent behavior for leaders, which would potentially hinder the adoption of benevolent leadership and its attainment of high priority. In the current research, we go beyond the workplace to explore one deliberate way leaders can bring family resources into their leadership practice to emerge more benevolent behaviors at work. From the experience-based leadership development perspective, supported by the theory of role accumulation across domains, we take a mixed-method approach to uncover the effect of positive parenting experience on benevolent leadership behavior via parent-leader role enrichment. In Study 1, we conduct a qualitative analysis based on the text content and interview provided by parent-role leaders to preliminarily reveal that being a parent makes a leader perform more behaviors with benevolent nature. In Study 2, we draw from the benefits of being a parent generated in Study 1 and the cross-role accumulation perspective to develop a theoretical model to delineate how the positive parenting experience yields benefits for benevolent leadership behavior. Results show that positive parenting experience can benefit parent-role leaders’ benevolent leadership behavior via perspective-taking ability. Meanwhile, both the positive parenting experience’s direct effect on perspective taking and its indirect effect on benevolent leadership behavior are stronger for individuals involved in high-quality co-parenting with their spouse, highlighting the important collaboration effects in the process of achieving parent-to-leader enrichment across domains.

This paper reflects mainly on three ideas of “political Ruism” in modern China. We first review Mou Zongsan’s idea of “selfnegation of innate moral consciousness良知坎陷,” which embraces universal values and tries to bridge them with Chinese culture. We then re-examine Jiang Qing’s “political Confucianism,” which, while criticizing universal values, attempts to establish a political system based on the Kingly Way. Finally, we discuss the “Kang Youwei-ism康有为主义”, which calls on us to return to Kang Youwei’s idea of state construction and national construction. The three ideas offer some new perspectives into Confucianism, but all turn out unrealistic and unpragmatic. We believe that Confucianism in modern China can still work in both the private sphere and the public sphere, and examine politics from a human, cultural or moral perspective.

Most observers of the Chinese consumer market have seen its linear evolution from a traditional culture toward a more Westernized consumer society during the country's three-decade experimentation of the free market. Recent development, however, shows a cultural renaissance in China wherein Chinese people have increasingly demanded their traditional culture components to be part of their consumption experience, coinciding with China's re-emergence as a country of economic and political power. We identify this shift, explore its causes, and discuss its managerial and theoretical implications

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.Peer and parental influences are critical socializing forces shaping adolescent development, including the co-evolving processes of friendship tie choice and adolescent smoking. This study examines aspects of adolescent friendship networks and dimensions of parental influences shaping friendship tie choice and smoking, including parental support, parental monitoring, and the parental home smoking environment using a Stochastic Actor-Based model. With data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health of youth in grades 7 through 12, including the In-School Survey, the first wave of the In-Home survey occurring 6 months later, and the second wave of the In-Home survey, occurring one year later, this study utilizes two samples based on the social network data collected in the longitudinal saturated sample of sixteen schools. One consists of twelve small schools, and the other of one large school. The findings indicated that reciprocity, choosing a friend of a friend as a friend, and smoking similarity increased friendship tie choice behavior, as did parental support. Parental monitoring interacted with choosing friends who smoke in affecting friendship tie choice, as at higher levels of parental monitoring, youth chose fewer friends that smoked. A parental home smoking context conducive to smoking decreased the number of friends adolescents chose. Peer influence and a parental home smoking environment conducive to smoking increased smoking, while parental monitoring decreased it in the large school. Overall, peer and parental factors affected the coevolution of friendship tie choice and smoking, directly and multiplicatively.

The kappa effect is a well-reported phenomenon in which spatial distance between discrete stimuli affects the perception of temporal distance demarcated by the corresponding stimuli. Here, we report a new phenomenon that we propose to designate as thelexical kappa effectin which word distance, a non-magnitude relationship of discrete stimuli that exists in the lexical space of the mental lexicon, affects the perception of temporal distance. A temporal bisection task was used to assess the subjective perception of the time interval demarcated by two successively presented words. Word distance was manipulated by varying the semantic (Experiment 1) or phonological (Experiment 2) similarity between the two words. Results showed that the temporal distance between the two words was perceived to be shorter when the corresponding two words were lexically closer. We explain this effect within the internal clock framework by assuming faster detection of the word that terminated timing when it is preceded by a semantically or phonologically similar word.

Previous research has indicated that frontal midline theta reflects a domain-general cognitive control mechanism of the prefrontal cortex. Brain imaging studies have shown that the inhibition of implicit stereotypes was dependent on this domain-general cognitive control mechanism. Based on this knowledge, the present study investigated the neural oscillatory correlates of implicit gender stereotype control in an extrinsic affective Simon task using electrophysiological methods. Participants in this task conducted verification to white gender names and colored gender traits, and their behavioral response and electroencephalogram were recorded during their performances. As predicted, stereotype-inconsistent trials resulted in reduced response accuracies and slower response times than stereotype-consistent trials. For the event-related potential results, the enhanced performance of stereotype-inconsistent trials was accompanied by an enhanced N400 amplitude but an attenuated late positive potential amplitude. In contrast, early attentional components such as P2 and N2 as well as their amplitudes were impacted by the experimental manipulations and individual differences in gender factors. In addition, based on time–frequency analysis, we found that the enhanced performance of stereotype-inconsistent trials was also accompanied by an event-related synchronization on the frontal theta oscillation. This frontal theta appeared at a late processing stage and persisted across a time window from N400 to late positive potential. Additionally, this enhanced frontal theta effect was not modulated by the experimental manipulations and individual differences in gender factors. Based on these findings, the feature of frontal theta oscillation in the implicit gender stereotype control process was discussed.

To avoid the one-sidedness and abuse of the rule of xieju 絜矩, Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 redefines zhong-shu 忠恕, the Confucian golden rule, as two separate yet complementary principles, the idea of which is most manifestly drawn from Zhuangzi’s 莊子 “Qiwulun 齊物論”. Zhang’s association of zhong-shu and qiwu 齊物 is based upon his vision of equality premised on recognition of and respect for differences. In Zhang’s reading of the Zhuangzi in light of Yogācāra, the crucial “concept matching” is the explanation of cheng xin 成心 as seeds in the ālaya consciousness. Cheng xin in this sense not only refers to the natural pattern of things and so is the basis for inference and deduction, but also serves as the means to deal with the diversity of opinions. In moral practice, Zhang proposes the liang xing 兩行 approach of his qiwu philosophy: to recognize the equal worth of all beings on one hand, and to take the particular characteristics and desires of individuals into account on the other. Thus, it requires the dual practice of zhong and shu: to acquire firsthand observation through personal experience, and to imagine oneself in the position of the other.

Balancing self‐renewal and differentiation of stem cells is an important issue in stem cell and cancer biology. Recently, the Drosophila neuroblast (NB), neural stem cell has emerged as an excellent model for stem cell self‐renewal and tumorigenesis. It is of great interest to understand how defects in the asymmetric division of neural stem cells lead to tumor formation. Here, we review recent advances in asymmetric division and the self‐renewal control of Drosophila NBs. We summarize molecular mechanisms of asymmetric cell division and discuss how the defects in asymmetric division lead to tumor formation. Gain‐of‐function or loss‐of‐function of various proteins in the asymmetric machinery can drive NB overgrowth and tumor formation. These proteins control either the asymmetric protein localization or mitotic spindle orientation of NBs. We also discuss other mechanisms of brain tumor suppression that are beyond the control of asymmetric division.