Yuqi Chen

This study presents the first large‐scale empirical analysis of how ghosts and spirits were debated during China's early twentieth‐century secular transformation. Using a novel dataset of over 2000 digitized texts—including newspapers, periodicals, and essays from 1890 to 1949—we combine close reading, AI‐assisted annotation, and statistical modeling to examine rhetorical strategies surrounding supernatural belief. We find a clear asymmetry: critics emphasized theoretical arguments (e.g., science, rationality, education), while defenders relied more on empirical or anecdotal evidence. These patterns reflect broader institutional and cognitive shifts, including the rise of science as a dominant epistemology and the increasing use of psychological explanations to pathologize belief. While reformist elites often cast ghost belief as superstition, we also identify agnostic, cautious, and reconciliatory positions. By situating these debates within the broader context of Chinese cultural modernization, the study sheds new light on how supernatural belief became a contested domain and offers fresh tools for studying the cultural evolution of religious cognition.

Previous studies have provided evidence that automatic emotion regulation, which is primed by control goals, can change emotion trajectory unconsciously. However, the cognitive mechanism and associated changes in depression remain unclear. The current study aimed to examine whether subliminal goal priming could change the emotional response inhibition among patients with major depressive disorder and their healthy controls. A group of patients with depression and a healthy control group were both primed subliminally by playing control goal related or neutral words for 20 ms each; afterward, they judged the gender of happy or angry faces in an emotional Go/No-Go task. A group of depressed patients and a healthy control group both were both primed subliminally with control goal-related words or neutral words, and they judged the gender of happy or angry faces in an emotional Go/No-Go task. Among patients with depression, there were fewer false alarms of the No-Go response to emotional stimulus after priming with control goal rather than neutral words. Meanwhile, patients with MDD in the subliminal regulation goal priming condition reacted faster to happy rather than angry faces; no significant difference was found in the subliminal neutral priming condition. These findings suggest the malleability of inhibitory control in depression using subliminal priming goals.

The global ecological crisis has posed unprecedented survival challenges to human being. Consequently, ecological issues have naturally become central concerns in philosophy. From the methodological perspective of constructive engagement in comparative philosophy, we have chosen to compare the ecological thoughts of two thinkers—Karl Marx and Lao Zi (老子)—who are separated by vast spans of time and cultural tradition. We argue that Karl Marx holds a mild anthropocentric ecological view, while Lao Zi holds a transcendental ecological view. In addressing ecological issues, Lao Zi’s transcendental methodological guiding principles can provide negative methodological constraints for Karl Marx’s constructive ideals, while Karl Marx’s constructive ideals can supplement Lao Zi’s transcendental methodological guiding principles with positive practical strategies. In this sense, both can jointly contribute philosophical wisdom to the resolution of contemporary ecological problems.