Y Jiang

BackgroundCoronary heart disease is closely associated with cognitive impairment, especially in severe cases of heart failure. However, it is unclear whether cardiac systolic function plays a role in the relationship between pre-existing CHD and cognitive impairment in subjects without clinical heart failure.MethodsIn total, 208 subjects from the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University were recruited from June 2014 to January 2015, and were divided into CHD and non-CHD groups according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The global cognitive function of all subjects was assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination and cognitive impairment was defined as the score lower than the cutoff value. Left ventricular ejection fraction was measured using transthoracic echocardiograms. The relationship among pre-existing CHD, LVEF, and cognitive impairment was analyzed by multivariate logistic regression.ResultsIn total, 34 subjects met the criteria of cognitive impairment. Univariate analysis showed that the cognitive impairment prevalence in the CHD group was significantly higher than that in the non-CHD group. Multivariate logistic analysis revealed that CHD was significantly associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment after adjusting for confounds except for LVEF. However, the OR of CHD decreased when LVEF was further corrected as a continuous variable, and LVEF was negatively associated with the risk of cognitive impairment.ConclusionPre-existing CHD is associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment, and such an association can be considerably explained by reduced LVEF. An impaired cardiac systolic function may play a key role in the relationship between CHD and cognitive impairment among patients with pre-heart failure conditions.

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are characterized by attenuated pulmonary function and are frequently reported with cognitive impairments, especially memory impairments. The mechanism underlying the memory impairments still remains unclear. We applied resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brain local activities with static and dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations among patients with COPD and healthy controls. Compared with HC, COPD patients exhibited decreased sALFF in the right basal ganglia and increased dALFF in the bilateral parahippocampal/hippocampal gyrus. The reduced the left basal ganglia was associated with lower oxygen partial pressure. Besides, the increased dALFF in the left hippocampal/parahippocampal cortex was associated with poor semantic-memory performance and the increased dALFF in the left hippocampal/parahippocampal cortex was associated the forced vital capacity. The present study revealed the abnormal static and dynamic local-neural activities in the basal ganglia and parahippocampal/hippocampal cortex in COPD patient and its relationship with poor lung function and semantic-memory impairments.

This study adopted a positive psychology perspective to investigate positive emotion and foreign language enjoyment among Chinese as a second language learners in an emergency remote teaching context amid the COVID-19 pandemic. A set of 90 preparatory Chinese language students was assessed for their level of foreign language enjoyment using the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale. Participles' scores on self-perceived language achievement and actual test scores were adopted as the measurement of their Chinese language proficiency. The results revealed that: CSL learners experienced high level of FL enjoyment in an online learning context, no significant correlation was found between FLE and leaners' actual language achievement nor between FLE and their self-perceived achievement, female learners showed higher FLE than male learners and gender was found to have a significant effect on FLE-Private, participants' geological location, i.e., whether in China or at home countries, significantly influenced their FLE, participants' regional group was not a significant predictor of FLE, and teacher-related variables and learner self-perceptions of achievement were strong predictors of FLE among CSL learners. The findings highlight the importance of teacher's role in an online learning environment and suggest that FLE may not boost performance in the short term for language beginners but is still conducive in the long run. Implications for both teachers and learners, and suggestions for future researches are provided.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly restructured daily life, significantly impacting mental health. This negative event has been reported to alter subjective experience of time, such as the blending of days, reflecting distortions in long-term time perception over relatively coarse scales. However, the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on short-term time perception over fine scales has received much less attention. Here we delve into this underexplored territory, demonstrating that the pandemic, as a high-arousal negative event, lengthens our perception of short time intervals. Using a two-session duration discrimination paradigm, we showed that COVID-19 related images were perceived as significantly longer than neutral pictures of the same duration. Unlike emotion-induced temporal distortions, this dilation was consistent across sessions, correlated with heightened arousal, remained unaffected by anxiety, and exhibited a long-lasting effect – persisting even four years after the initial outbreak. Taken together, our findings highlight a temporal dilation induced by COVID-19 stimuli, extending our understanding of how high-arousal negative events interact with cognitive processes, particularly time perception.

Since 1995, Public-Private Partnerships mode has been applied in mainland China accompanied by the issuance of a series of PPPs policies. Taking 201 policy documents promulgated from 1995 till 2019 as a research sample, this paper explores PPPs policy entity network change and policy learning behind it in China. Research results show the following: China’s PPPs policy entity network has mainly gone through three stages: partial-focus network with bad stability, loose-multiactor network with general stability, and balanced-multiactor network with good stability; the key players are NPC in the first stage, MOF and NDRC in the second stage, and MOF and 8 other government entities in the third stage; policy learning behind PPPs policy entity network change is government learning in the first stage and lesson-drawing in the second and third stages.

Color harmony is the focus of many researchers in the field of art and design, and its research results have been widely used in artistic creation and design activities. With the development of signal processing and artificial intelligence technology, new ideas and methods are provided for color harmony theory and color harmony calculation. In this article, psychological experimental methods and information technology are combined to design and quantify the 16-dimensional physical features of multiple colors, including multi-color statistical features and multi-color contrast features. Eighty-four subjects are invited to give a 5-level score on the degree of color harmony for 164 multi-color materials selected from the screenshots of film and television scenes. Based on the multi-color physical features and the subjective evaluation experiment, the correlation analysis is firstly carried out, which shows that the overall lightness, difference of the color tones, number of multiple colors, lightness contrast, color tone contrast, and cool/warm contrast are significantly correlated with color harmony. On the other hand, the regression prediction model and classification prediction model of color harmony are constructed based on machine learning algorithms. In terms of regression prediction model, the prediction accuracy of linear models is higher than that of nonlinear models, with 63.9% as the highest, indicating that the multi-color physical features can explain color harmony well. In terms of classification prediction model, the Random Forest has the best prediction performance, with an accuracy of 80.2%.

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disease whose pathogenesis has not been fully elucidated. Its clinical evaluation and diagnosis still highly depend on the clinical experience of doctors. It is of great scientific value and clinical significance to study the inducing factors and neuropathological mechanism of schizophrenia. Based on the four research problems of schizophrenia, this paper analyzes the data types that need to be stored in clinical trials and scientific research, including basic information, case report data, neuropsychological and cognitive function evaluation, magnetic resonance data, electroencephalogram data, and intestinal flora data. Through the demand analysis of the system, including the data management part, data analysis part, the functional demand of the system management part, and the overall nonfunctional demand of the system, the overall architecture design, functional module division, and database table structure design of the system are completed. Adopting Browser/Server architecture and front-end and back-end separation mode and applying Java and Python programming language, based on spring framework and database, a multidimensional information management system for schizophrenia is designed and implemented, which includes four modules: data analysis, data management, system management, and security control. In addition, each functional module of the system is designed and implemented in detail, and the software operation flow of each module is illustrated with the sequence diagram. Finally, the multidimensional data of schizophrenia collected in our laboratory were used for system test to verify whether the system can meet the needs of clinical big data management of schizophrenia and the multidimensional information management system of schizophrenia can meet the needs of clinical big data management. The information management system helps schizophrenic researchers to carry out data management and data analysis. It also has advantages that are easy to use, safe, and efficient and has strong scalability in data management, data analysis, and scalability. It reflects the innovation of the system and provides a good platform for the management, research, and analysis of clinical big data of schizophrenia.

Actions are usually generalized among social group members. Importantly, the efficiency of an action with respect to achieving an external target determines action understanding, and it may have different degrees of social relevance to social groups. Thus, this study explored the role of action efficiency in action generalization. We used computer animations to simulate actions in social groups initiated by visual action cues or category labels, and we measured differences in response times between identifying actions that were and were not consistent with group members, without explicit requirements regarding generalization. It was found that in both visually introduced and explicitly labeled social groups, when the group members acted inefficiently toward the external object, perceivers identified group‐consistent actions faster than group‐inconsistent actions, indicating that the exemplars' common inefficient actions are generalized to the unknown ingroup member, accordingly facilitating the identification of expected consistent inefficient action (Experiment 1). As this effect was not present when removing social group cues, it was determined to be specific to social groups (Experiment 2). Importantly, such generalization was not observed when the identical action was deemed efficient toward the external object (Experiment 3) and was specific to the demonstration of the action being completed by multiple group members rather than being repeated twice by one group member, supporting the group‐based inference and ruling out the possibility of the increased memorability of inefficient actions leading to more generalization relative to efficient actions (Experiment 4). Therefore, the efficiency of an action bounds the generalization of the action across social group members through a process that is spontaneous and implicit. This constrained action generalization may be due to inefficient actions being represented as culture‐specific conventional forms.

For two millennia, the dominant approach to preventing the abuse of power in political philosophy has been structured around the logic of "checks and balances"—pitting power against power, ambition against ambition. Yet this paradigm faces a logical challenge: the supervisors themselves need to be supervised, generating a potential infinite regress of "who guards the guardians?" In response to this difficulty, this paper attempts to propose a testable theoretical conjecture: jurisdictional separation. Rather than assigning different powers to oversee one another in the same domain, this conjecture suggests drawing insurmountable boundaries of exclusive jurisdiction for distinct types of power, such that no power can structurally reach into another's domain. This paper does not claim to have found a fully established alternative. Rather, it offers a preliminary examination of the conjecture's logical coherence, theoretical advantages, and enabling conditions. Specifically, this paper provides a formal definition of jurisdictional separation, derives its three core corollaries (separation over balancing, boundary rigidity over power elasticity, temporariness over permanence), engages with the tradition of separation of powers, and argues for the conjecture's potential theoretical advantages in preventing jurisdictional overreach. The paper further deduces the concept of temporal jurisdictional separation and demonstrates the conjecture's potential applicability to states of exception, as well as its scope conditions, failure conditions, and cost function. Two forms of jurisdictional separation—pure institutional form and technology-enhanced form—are distinguished. The contribution of this paper lies in providing a preliminary formal articulation of a theoretical proposition that may be tested, revised, or refuted by subsequent research, rather than offering an already validated institutional scheme.

Intelligent technology introduces both opportunities and challenges in the realm of employee ethics. While intelligent technology is widely believed to combat employee unethical behavior by enhancing transparency and reducing discretionary decisions, it may also inadvertently promote unethical conduct by triggering awareness of job substitution (i.e., intelligent technology awareness [ITA]). This study investigates how ITA affects accountants’ unethical decision-making (i.e., UDM). Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress and self-regulation theory, we theorize a double-edged sword impact of ITA on UDM. Our results suggested that ITA could be appraised either as a challenge, leading to a reduction in self-regulation depletion and subsequent UDM, or as a threat, resulting in an increase in self-regulation depletion and subsequent UDM. Further, we found that organizational support for development attenuated the relationship between ITA and threat appraisal. However, the link was more pronounced when individual adaptability was high. This study offers vital insights for managing employee unethical behavior amid an evolving trend of intelligent technology-induced job replacement.

The inspiration for this collective writing project began with a digital conference entitled ‘Knowledge Socialism, COVID-19 and the New Reality of Education’ held at Beijing Normal University. In this conference and through this article, multiple researchers spread across six continents have engaged in the collaborative task of outlining emerging innovations and alternative contingencies towards education, international collaboration, and digital reform in this time of global crisis. Trends associated with digital education, knowledge openness, peer production, and collective intelligence as articulated by Michael A. Peters’ conception of Knowledge Socialism are given careful analysis and exploration. Some of the members of this collective endeavor to identify problems, others, begin to draw boxes around potential solutions. Overall, this article engages with real world challenges and innovations that look beyond dominant neoliberal trends in the knowledge economy to build bridges toward novel possibilities in this era of rapid digital change.

Size perception of visual objects is highly context dependent. Here we report a novel perceptual size illusion that the self-face, being a unique and distinctive self-referential stimulus, can enlarge its perceived size. By using a size discrimination paradigm, we found that the self-face was perceived as significantly larger than the other-face of the same size. This size overestimation effect was not due to the familiarity of the self-face, since it could be still observed when the self-face was directly compared with a famous face. More crucially, such illusion effect could be extended to a new cartoon face that was transiently associated with one's own face and could also exert further contextual influences on visual size perception of other objects. These findings together highlight the role of self-awareness in visual size perception and point to a special mechanism of size perception tuned to self-referential information.

Schizophrenia is considered as a self-disorder with disordered local synchronous activation. Previous studies have reported widespread dyssynchrony of local activation in patients with SZ, which may be one of the crucial physiological mechanisms of SZ. To further verify this assumption, this work used a surface-based two-dimensional regional homogeneity approach to compare the local neural synchronous spontaneous oscillation between patients with SZ and healthy controls, instead of the volume-based regional homogeneity approach described in previous study. Ninety-seven SZ patients and 126 HC were recruited to this study, and we found the SZ showed abnormal 2dReHo across the cortical surface. Specifically, at the global level, the SZ patients showed significantly reduced global 2dReHo; at the vertex level, the foci with increased 2dReHo in SZ were located in the default mode network, frontoparietal network, and limbic network ; however, foci with decreased 2dReHo were located in the somatomotor network, auditory network, and visual network. Additionally, this work found positive correlations between the 2dReHo of bilateral rectus and illness duration, as well as a significant positive correlation between the 2dReHo of right orbital inferior frontal gyrus with the negative scores of the positive and negative syndrome scale in the SZ patients. Therefore, the 2dReHo could provide some effective features contributed to explore the pathophysiology mechanism of SZ.

Despite growing attention to the environment decoupling behaviors of emerging market multinational enterprises (EM-MNEs) in reconciling the resource dilemmas of responding to institutional pressures and achieving profit maximization, there is limited focus on how different environmental management practices affect EM-MNEs’ international expansion. We argue that symbolic environmental protection of EM-MNEs can effectively balance institutional pressures and economic efficiency, thereby facilitating their international expansion. In contrast, substantive environmental protection introduces risks of sacrificing economic benefits in response to institutional pressures, thus inhibiting international expansion. Furthermore, drawing on recent research on the multi-dimensionality of digitalization in addressing resource dilemmas, we argue that higher digitalization intensity strengthens the positive impact of symbolic environmental protection on international expansion and mitigates the negative impact of substantive environmental protection by reducing both legitimacy and efficiency issues. Conversely, a broader digitalization scope weakens the positive effect of symbolic environmental protection on international expansion and amplifies the negative impact of substantive environmental protection by increasing legitimacy and efficiency challenges. Based on a sample of Chinese listed manufacturing MNEs from 2010 to 2020, we find support for our arguments. This study contributes to the international business (IB) literature at the intersection of EM-MNEs’ legitimation strategies, environmental management practices, and digitalization.

$\varTheta $ -$\varXi $ functions are the unified form of 0-overlap and 1-grouping functions. And the unified form of $0$-overlap and $1$-grouping functions via multiplicative generators on unit interval has been researched. In fact, either real number sets or interval-valued sets are special cases of posets or lattices and many questions in applications involve incomparable elements. Based of above questions, we continue to consider this topic and construct the unified form of $0$-overlap and $1$-grouping functions via multiplicative generators on a completely distributive lattice. Finally, we investigate some properties including extended migrativity and homogeneity of $\varTheta $-$\varXi $ functions constructed by generalized multiplicative generators triples.

Given the widespread occurrence of ethical dilemmas and moral distress in healthcare, it is crucial for educators to strengthen nursing students’ ethical education. However, there is little published research on the best practices for teaching nursing ethics. This study aims to determine whether the Presentation-Assimilation-Discussion (PAD) mode, compared to traditional lecture-based learning (LBL) teaching, increases nursing students’ moral sensitivity and ethical decision-making skills. A total of 100 eligible nursing students were randomized into two groups: the PAD model group (n = 50) and the LBL group (n = 50). Their moral sensitivity and ethical decision-making skills were evaluated using the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire-Revised Chinese Version (MSQ-R-CV) and the Chinese Version of Judgment About Nursing Decision (JAND-CV), both before and after the course, and again three months later. After the course, the PAD group showed significantly higher scores in moral sensitivity and ethical decision-making compared to the LBL group, both immediately and at the 3-month follow-up (p < 0.05). Specifically, the PAD group demonstrated greater improvements in total scores and in most subdimensions, including moral responsibility, moral burden, ethical choice, and ethical action. While both groups showed some degree of improvement after the intervention, the changes were more substantial and longer-lasting in the PAD group. This study confirms that the PAD model is an effective method for teaching nursing ethics and developing nursing students’ moral sensitivity and ethical decision-making skills. This randomized trial was registered in Chinese Clinical Registry Center, under code (ChiCTR2400086717) in 07/09/2024.

Post-pandemic witnessed the domestic movies in the Chinese film industry continuously capture an expanding market share, which further made the domestic movies more familiar to audiences. On the other hand, however, greater popularity created more interest, and hence created more special expectation towards localization among audiences. Conceptualization of the local films' localization implies two vital conditions: Firstly, native feature films are to create a sense of sympathy for their people, and it is built upon the ability of the movies to answer the needs and challenges of modern society's reality and currents, yet achieving at the same time an inner integrity between the form and the content. Second, it is assumed that local films should be able to portray Chinese cultural identity in international terms, with the spiritual and philosophical underpinnings of Chinese society. With the industry's maturity, audience expectations and aesthetic tastes are also evolving. The question then is: Can new mainstream blockbusters regularly innovate in both form and thematic substance and adhere to a systematic logic of localization? This paper aims to explore how new mainstream films can achieve significant leaps in emotional building, adapting to shifting cultural trends and viewer demands through the lens of localization.

Gender role congruity theory emphasizes the ubiquity of male-typed leadership schemas as barriers to female leaders’ career development (i.e., descriptive stereotypes); however, the expectation of female leaders’ fulfilling their gender role (i.e., prescriptive stereotypes) has received limited attention. Extending this line of research, we propose the concept of female-typed leadership schemas and suggest that the (mis)match between female CEOs’ gender-stereotyped behavioral differences (agentic vs. communal) and female-typed leadership stereotypes helps explain the prescriptive gender stereotypes that women face in the CEO post-succession stage. Using data from 251 female CEO succession events at publicly listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2007 to 2017 in China, we found that the risk-taking behaviors of new female CEOs may lead to a perceived mismatch between prescriptive gender-stereotyped expectations and the actual behaviors of female CEOs as top leaders, increasing their likelihood of being dismissed during the post-succession process. Moreover, gender inequality beliefs in local contexts and adverse selection at the time of succession amplify the gender-stereotyped attribution. This study contributes to the female leadership and ethics literature by developing a comprehensive theoretical framework to test how female-typed leadership stereotypes hinder the career development of women in top executive positions.