Recent studies on the effects of mandatory online teaching, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, have widely reported low levels of satisfaction, unwillingness to continue online teaching, and negative impacts on the psychological well-being of teachers. Emerging research has highlighted the potential role of psychological need thwarting, in terms of autonomy, competence, and relatedness thwarting, resulting from online teaching. The aim of this study was to evaluate the immediate and delayed effects of PNT of online teaching on teachers’ well-being, intention to (...) continue online teaching, and job satisfaction. Moreover, data collected from both cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys allowed for a systematic validation of an important instrument in the field of teacher psychology, the Psychological Need Thwarting Scale of Online Teaching, in terms of longitudinal reliability and validity. The data reveal the usefulness of the construct of PNT in terms predicting and explaining teachers’ willingness to continue using online teaching as well as the degree of burnout after a period of 2 months, such that PNT is positively associated with burnout and negatively associated with willingness to continue online teaching. As such, the PNTSOT is recommended for future research evaluating the long-term psychological, affective, and intentional outcomes stemming from teachers’ PNT. Moreover, based on our findings that the impact from PNT of online teaching is persistent and long-term, we suggest that school leaders provide flexible and sustained professional development, model respectful and adaptive leadership, and create opportunities for mastery for the development of community of practice that can mitigate the thwarting of teachers’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness during times of uncertainty. Additionally, in terms of the psychometric properties of the PNTSOT instrument, our empirical findings demonstrate internal reliability, test–retest reliability, measurement invariance, and criterion validity based on cross-sectional and longitudinal data. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to analyze nurses' experiences of role strain when taking care of patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). We adopted an interpretive/constructivist paradigm. Twenty-one nurses who had taken care of SARS patients were interviewed in focus groups. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The self-state of nurses during the SARS outbreak evolved into that of professional self as: (1) self-preservation; (2) self-mirroring; and (3) self-transcendence. The relationship between self-state and reflective practice is discussed.

Discussing the relations between ethics and aesthetic judgement.

The purpose of this study is to extend prior research on this topic by investigating whether the impact of ownership concentration moderates the link between corporate social performance and financial performance. This study uses a set of unique, hand-collected pollution control data to measure CSP, based on a sample of Taiwanese listed companies during the period from 1996 to 2006. The results of the empirical analysis provide firm support for the idea that the divergence between control rights and the cash (...) flow rights of controlling owners negatively moderates the link between social and short- and long-run FP. (shrink)

While translation competence assessment has been playing an increasingly facilitating role in translation teaching and learning, it still failed to offer fine-grained diagnostic feedback based on certain reliable translation competence standards. As such, this study attempted to investigate the feasibility of providing diagnostic information about students’ translation competence by integrating China’s Standards of English with cognitive diagnostic assessment approaches. Under the descriptive parameter framework of CSE translation scales, an attribute pool was established, from which seven attributes were identified based on (...) students’ and experts’ think-aloud protocols. A checklist comprising 20 descriptors was developed from CSE translation scales, with which 458 students’ translation responses were rated by five experts. In addition, a Q-matrix was established by seven experts. By comparing the diagnostic performance of four widely-used cognitive diagnostic models, linear logistic model was selected as the optimal model to generate fine-grained information about students’ translation strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, relationships among translation competence attributes were discovered and diagnostic results were shown to differ across high and low proficiency groups. The findings can provide insights for translation teaching, learning and assessment. (shrink)

This paper is to inform the recent situations of work by the foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong through the lens of Covid-19. Through the interviews with seven informants — two employers and five FDWs, stories describing the changes in their working conditions, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment related to the impacts of Covid-19 were collected. They were analysed through three theoretical tools — visibility/invisibility, mobility/immobility, and work boundary. The findings show that under the Covid-19 crisis, the (...) FDWs experienced more hardships and struggles in both the home country and host country. The paradoxes of visibility/invisibility and mobility/immobility together with blurred work boundary were found in their experience of work, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment. On one hand, the employers’ power of controlling FDWs has increased, but the agency to resist by the FDWs has decreased making them to turn to more passive means of resistance which could harm the FDWs’ physical and mental health and wellbeing. (shrink)

Background: Healthcare workers in the front line of diagnosis, treatment, and care of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 are at great risk of both infection and developing mental health symptoms. This study aimed to investigate the following: whether healthcare workers in general hospitals experience higher mental distress than those in psychiatric hospitals; the role played by religion and alexithymic trait in influencing the mental health condition and perceived level of happiness of healthcare workers amidst the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic; (...) and factors that influence the resilience of healthcare workers at 6 weeks' follow-up.Methods: Four-hundred and fifty-eight healthcare workers were recruited from general and psychiatric hospitals, and 419 were followed-up after 6 weeks. All participants filled out the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, five-item Brief-Symptom Rating Scale, and the Chinese Oxford Happiness Questionnaire.Results: Under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, 12.3% of frontline healthcare workers in general hospitals reported having mental distress and perceived lower social adaptation status compared with those working in psychiatric hospitals. Christians/Catholics perceived better psychological well-being, and Buddhists/Taoists were less likely to experience mental distress. The results at 6 weeks of follow-up showed that the perceived lower social adaptation status of general hospital healthcare workers was temporary and improved with time. Christian/Catholic religion and time had independent positive effects on psychological well-being; however, the interaction of Christian/Catholic religion and time had a negative effect.Conclusions: Collectivism and individualism in the cultural context are discussed with regard to alexithymic trait and Buddhist/Taoist and Christian/Catholic religious faiths. Early identification of mental distress and interventions should be implemented to ensure a healthy and robust clinical workforce for the treatment and control of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This study set out to investigate intellectual domains as well as the use of measurement and validation methods in language assessment research and second language acquisition published in English in peer-reviewed journals. Using Scopus, we created two datasets: a dataset of core journals consisting of 1,561 articles published in four language assessment journals, and a dataset of general journals consisting of 3,175 articles on language assessment published in the top journals of SLA and applied linguistics. We applied document co-citation analysis (...) to detect thematically distinct research clusters. Next, we coded citing papers in each cluster based on an analytical framework for measurement and validation. We found that the focus of the core journals was more exclusively on reading and listening comprehension assessment, facets of speaking and writing performance such as raters and validation, as well as feedback, corpus linguistics, and washback. By contrast, the primary focus of assessment research in the general journals was on vocabulary, oral proficiency, essay writing, grammar, and reading. The secondary focus was on affective schemata, awareness, memory, language proficiency, explicit vs. implicit language knowledge, language or semantic awareness, and semantic complexity. With the exception of language proficiency, this second area of focus was absent in the core journals. It was further found that the majority of citing publications in the two datasets did not carry out inference-based validation on their instruments before using them. More research is needed to determine what motivates authors to select and investigate a topic, how thoroughly they cite past research, and what internal and external factors lead to the sustainability of a Research Topic in language assessment. (shrink)

Employee innovation is the cornerstone of the organization, and the motivation for employee innovative behavior largely depends on the leadership style of the leader. With the economic development of society, the traditional authoritative style of leadership can no longer adapt to the psychological characteristics of employees, who use new-era work concepts, techniques, and social rules (hereafter, new generation workers). Inclusive leadership is based on the concept of “fully inclusive and equitable” in traditional Chinese culture, and it can adapt to the (...) independent needs of new generation employees. At present, the research on the relationship between the traditional leadership style and employee innovative behavior is relatively extensive, but there is little research on the relationship between inclusive leadership style and employee innovative behavior, and this needs further exploration. This paper takes new generation employees as the sample and uses psychological capital as an intermediary variable to explore the influence of inclusive leadership style on the innovative behaviors of new generation employees. We found that inclusive leadership is significantly and positively related to new generation employees’ innovative behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Indonesia is recognized as a nurse exporting country, with policies that encourage nursing professionals to emigrate abroad. This includes the country’s adoption of international principles attempting to protect Indonesian nurses that emigrate as well as the country’s own participation in a bilateral trade and investment agreement, known as the Indonesia–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement that facilitates Indonesian nurse migration to Japan. Despite the potential trade and employment benefits from sending nurses abroad under the Indonesia–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, Indonesia itself is suffering (...) from a crisis in nursing capacity and ensuring adequate healthcare access for its own populations. This represents a distinct challenge for Indonesia in appropriately balancing domestic health workforce needs, employment, and training opportunities for Indonesian nurses, and the need to acknowledge the rights of nurses to freely migrate abroad. Hence, this article reviews the complex operational and ethical issues associated with Indonesian health worker migration under the Indonesia–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. It also introduces a policy proposal to improve performance of the Indonesia–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement and better align it with international principles focused on equitable health worker migration. (shrink)

Pylyshyn's effort in establishing the cognitive impenetrability of early vision is welcome. However, his view about the role of attention in early vision seems to be oversimplified. The allocation of focal attention manifests its effect among multiple stages in the early vision system, it is not just confined to the input and the output levels.

Employees with self-perceived misattributed culpability or incompetence are on the receiving end of complaints, reprimands, or accusations which, from their perspective, incorrectly assume that that they have fallen short of required standards or outcomes. We analyzed an archive of 23 personal stories featuring SMCI, which had been provided by 16 Hong Kong Chinese employees. The stories indicated that the most severe impacts on employee morale had arisen from punitive and targeted feedback based on misrepresentations by superiors, who had engaged in (...) blame deflection, politicking and manipulation, conflict and retaliation, and/or prejudice and stereotyping. We also identified organizational processes, such as soliciting and accepting voice and engaging in problem solving discussions that could attenuate any adverse emotional impact. (shrink)

This study investigated students? perceptions of their own and their peers? academic dishonesty (AD), their reasons for this dishonesty, their achievement goals, and their willingness to report AD (WRAD) within a Chinese cultural context. The results identified students? belief that their peers had a greater likelihood of engaging in AD and had more motivation to do so than did the students themselves. Gender and academic major did not affect students? WRAD. However, students were significantly more willing to report classmates than (...) friends. In terms of the participants? self-perceptions and peer perceptions concerning motivations for AD, more female students cited the lack of penalties as the reason for their own and their peers? AD, whereas male students more frequently cited their lack of attention to schoolwork as the reason for their own AD. In contrast to students in the social sciences, business students more frequently cited inadequate capabilities as the reason for their AD, and engineering students more frequently attributed their AD to self-interest. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated that three motivations for AD (opportunism, inadequacy, and self-promotion) could positively predict AD, whereas mastery-approach goals could negatively predict AD. (shrink)

Moral issues have been included in the studies of consumer misbehavior research, but little is known about the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment on the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. This study aims to understand the consumer’s use intention of pirated software in Taiwan based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) proposed by Ajzen (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179, 1991). In addition, moral intensity and moral judgment are adopted as a joint (...) moderator to examine their combined influence on the proposed research framework. The results obtained from this Taiwan case reveal that the antecedent constructs proposed in the TPB model–an individual’s attitude and subjective norms toward using pirated software, and perceived behavioral control to use pirated software–indeed have positive impacts on the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. In addition, the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment is manifested in the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. The results of this study not only could substantiate the results of consumer misbehavior research, but also could provide some managerial suggestions for Taiwanese government authorities concerned and the related software industries devoted to fighting pirated software. (shrink)

Moral issues have been included in the studies of consumer misbehavior research, but little is known about the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment on the consumer's use intention of pirated software. This study aims to understand the consumer's use intention of pirated software in Taiwan based on the theory of planned behavior proposed by Ajzen. In addition, moral intensity and moral judgment are adopted as a joint moderator to examine their combined influence on the proposed research (...) framework. The results obtained from this Taiwan case reveal that the antecedent constructs proposed in the TPB model–an individual's attitude and subjective norms toward using pirated software, and perceived behavioral control to use pirated software–indeed have positive impacts on the consumer's use intention of pirated software. In addition, the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment is manifested in the consumer's use intention of pirated software. The results of this study not only could substantiate the results of consumer misbehavior research, but also could provide some managerial suggestions for Taiwanese government authorities concerned and the related software industries devoted to fighting pirated software. (shrink)

Previous studies have identified the critical role of the left fusiform cortex in visual word form processing, learning, and memory. However, this so-called visual word form area's other functions are not clear. In this study, we used fMRI and the subsequent memory paradigm to examine whether the putative VWFA was involved in the processing and successful memory encoding of faces as well as words. Twenty-two native Chinese speakers were recruited to memorize the visual forms of faces and Chinese words. Episodic (...) memory for the studied material was tested 3. h after the scan with a recognition test. The fusiform face area and the VWFA were functionally defined using separate localizer tasks. We found that, both within and across subjects, stronger activity in the VWFA was associated with better recognition memory of both words and faces. Furthermore, activation in the VWFA did not differ significantly during the encoding of faces and words. Our results revealed the important role of the so-called VWFA in face processing and memory and supported the view that the left mid-fusiform cortex plays a general role in the successful processing and memory of different types of visual objects. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

This study examines whether human gaze lacking the confounding factor of eye whites can be processed unconsciously and explores the critical aspects for such process. Utilizing the continuous flash suppression paradigm, a schematic face—with direct or averted gaze, and with neutral, fearful or happy expressions—was presented to one eye while dynamic masks rendered it invisible to the other eye. Schematic faces were used to avoid unwanted influence from salient eye whites. Participants’ detection time of anything other than the masks was (...) used as an index of unconscious processing time. Faster detection was found for faces with direct gaze than those with averted gaze. However, there was no difference between detection times for different facial expressions and upright-face, inverted-face, and eyes-only conditions . These results confirm that, with schematic faces, gaze can be processed unconsciously regardless of facial expression, and eyes alone are sufficient for such process. (shrink)

Background: Individuals’ information processing includes automatic and effortful processes and the latter require sustained concentration or attention and larger amounts of cognitive “capacity.” Event-related potentials reflect all neural activities that are related to a certain stimulus. Investigating ERP characteristics of effortful cognitive processing in people with schizophrenia would be helpful in further understanding the neural mechanism of schizophrenia.Methods: Both schizophrenia patients and health controls completed ERP measurements during the performance of the basic facial emotion identification test and the face-vignette task. (...) Data of ERP components, BFEIT and FVT performances were analyzed.Results: Schizophrenia patients’ accuracies of face emotion detection in the BFEIT and vignette emotion detection in the FVT were both significantly worse than the performance of the HC group. Repeated-measures ANOVAs performed on mean amplitudes and latencies revealed that the interaction effect for group × experiment × site was significant for N250 amplitude. In FVT experiment, N250 amplitudes at prefrontal and frontal sites in schizophrenia group were larger than those of HC group; the maximum N250 amplitude was present at the prefrontal site in both the groups. For N250 latency, the interaction effect for group × experiment was significant; N250 latencies in the schizophrenia group were longer than those of the HC group.Conclusion: Schizophrenia patients present effortful cognitive processing dysfunctions which reflect in abnormal ERP components, especially N250 at prefrontal cortex and frontal cortex sites. These findings have important implications for further clarifying the neural mechanism of effortful cognitive processing deficits in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Assisted reproductive technology treatment tends to involve significant physical and emotional commitments that can impact maternal, infant, and family health and well-being. An in-depth understanding of experiences is necessary to provide adequate support for women and their families during pregnancy and transition to parenthood following ART treatment. The aim of this study was to explore first-time mothers’ experiences of pregnancy and transition to parenthood following successful ART treatment in Taiwan. Twelve first-time mothers who conceived and gave live birth using ART (...) treatment were purposively selected from a fertility centre in Taipei, Taiwan. Women’s experiences in pregnancy and in their transition to motherhood were explored using semi-structured in-depth interviews. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using the Colaizzi strategy. The mothers’ accounts reflected three main themes: ‘being different from mothers who became pregnant naturally’, ‘ensuring health and safety of the foetus’, and ‘welcoming new lives with excitement’. The difference mothers felt about themselves was evident in four subthemes: becoming pregnant after a long wait, feeling vulnerable during pregnancy, relying on family’s assistance and support, and worrying about the impact of ART on health. The theme on ‘ensuring health and safety of the foetus’ encompassed three subthemes: activities to protect the unborn baby, monitoring foetal movement constantly to maintain peace of mind, and receiving foetal reduction for the sake of the pregnancy. Narratives around ‘welcoming new lives with excitement’ reflected four subthemes: overcoming hardship for worthwhile results, realising one’s life and dreams, proving to be fertile enough to give birth, and return to normal life track. Findings indicate the need for educational and psychosocial interventions to support women and their families physically and psychologically during ART treatment. The stigma related to infertility and the psychosocial support from family are aspects to consider while planning intervention programmes. (shrink)

To assist Chinese high school students in improving their career readiness and tackling career decision-making difficulties, we designed a synchronous online career intervention based on the Cognitive Information Processing theory during the Covid-19 pandemic. The online career intervention consisted of a series of career courses to develop high school students’ knowledge and skills in career planning, career assessments for exploring their vocational interests and academic self-concept, and a database providing basic information about university majors. To evaluate the intervention’s effectiveness, 957 (...) 10th grade students were recruited in the study, 601 participants were randomly assigned to the experimental group, and 356 participants were randomly assigned to the control group. All participants completed a pre- and post-intervention assessment of their career maturity, vocational identity and career decision-making difficulties. Results indicated that the online intervention significantly increased high school students’ career readiness and reduced their career decision-making difficulties. The practical implications of this research for online career interventions directed at Chinese high school students are also discussed. (shrink)

Interpersonal responsibility is an indigenous Chinese personality construct, which is regarded to have positive social functions. Two studies were designed to explore the relationship among interpersonal responsibility, proposal allocation ratio, and responders’ hostile decisions in an ultimatum game. Study 1 was a scenario study using a hypothetical ultimatum game with a valid sample of 551 high school students. Study 2 was an experimental study which recruited 54 undergraduate students to play the incentivized ultimatum game online. The results of the two (...) studies showed a significantly negative correlation between interpersonal responsibility and responders’ rejection responses only when the proposal allocation ratio was 3:7. In addition, in study 2, interpersonal responsibility had negative effects on responders’ rejection responses under the offer of 3:7, even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits. Taken together, proposal allocation ratio might moderate the effects of interpersonal responsibility on hostile decision-making in the ultimatum game. The social function of interpersonal responsibility might be beyond the Big Five. Keywords: interpersonal responsibility, proposal allocation ratio, hostile decision-making, moderator, ultimatum game, Big Five personality. (shrink)

A survey was conducted on the advertising practitioners in Taiwan concerning their experiences of ethical challenges at work. Among 120 respondents, while 32.5 percent responded that ethical problems did not exist, 67.5 percent admitted that ethical problem was a commonplace at work. According to these respondents, the most frequently mentioned ethical problems area representing unethical products or services, the message of advertisements, agency-client relationship, the creditability of research, undertable rebate, and the quality of service. Suggestions for international advertising managers were (...) also provided by comparing the finding from the present study with earlier studies in the United States. However, due to its preliminary nature, the present study should be considered exploratory and descriptive rather than conclusive, with the hope to inspire more research on advertising ethics in Taiwan as well as in other countries in the world. (shrink)

Antoni Tàpies’ essays and interviews display how his conception of art is impregnated with an Oriental nondualistic aesthetics.1 I argue that, among them, the Chinese aesthetics of qi 氣 plays the most pivotal role and leaves an indelible imprint in his corpus. Tàpies’ encounter with this Asian thinking probably came through the translated writings of Laozi 老子, Confucius 孔子, Mencius 孟子, Zhuangzi 莊子, Mozi 墨子, and Lin Yutang 林語堂, among others, thanks to the publications of different Western-based Sinologists.2 However, instead (...) of the term qi, Tàpies was prone to using the words “energy” or “spirit” to designate this element, which he understood as a cosmological principle and force, as was mentioned... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:258 Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy: Evidence from Taiwan’s Cross-Border Marriages When Lin Ping was interviewed by the first author of this article at a detention center in the southern city of Tainan, Taiwan, in September 2006, she was forty-three. At that time, she had been married to a Taiwanese (...) man for five years and had successfully obtained a permit for employment at a factory, earning NT$27,000 a month for working ten hours a day. However, before having obtained the work permit, Lin managed to find jobs in informal sectors as a cleaner, a care worker, and a stall vendor’s helper, earning NT$15,000 a month. By the time of our interview, Lin had gone to work at a brothel because she could not put up with her husband anymore. Lin’s husband is twenty years older than she is and, as she described their relationship, the huge age gap makes communication between the couple difficult. They fought often and fiercely. During those fights, Lin’s husband would threaten to divorce her and to not renew her application for residency, which would result in her immediate deportation to China. This did happen once when Lin’s husband refused to renew her work permit. As a result, Lin overstayed her visa and lost her job at the factory. Being thus unemployed, Lin had to dip into her savings and risked going into debt. Her dire financial situation caused her anxiety. Losing the regular income provided by her factory job meant not only having nothing to live on but also being unable to send money back home to China. Given that her marriage failed to provide her the work permit she needed, Lin wanted to leave her husband Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang 259 and “go out” for her own good. When asked what she thinks of the stigma attached to commercial sex, Lin replied, “I need to be able to feed myself first. But if you don’t have a work permit and a job, it [sex work] is the only way out. So, I thought I would do it.” She continued: “Once I had the money, I would be able to run a small business such as a noodle stall or selling steam dumplings.” Lin Ping’s stories serve to sketch out the interconnectedness between cross-border sex work and cross-border marriage. As her experiences show, cross-border sex work and marriage tend to overlap in certain spheres; however, they are more often than not conceptualized as two separate institutions. Both are grouped under already dichotomized migratory categories such as marriage migrants and economic migrants, real marriage and fake marriage, legal workers and workers without permits, and legal and illegal migrants, etc. Such dichotomization downplays the fact that many marriage migrants, like economic migrants, invest great economic interests in cross-border marriages; it also downplays the fact that migrant sex workers might also be involved in having intimate relationships with someone. Apart from the entanglement of monetary exchange and intimacy, cross-border marriage and cross-border sex work are also parts of a global intimate economy in which the Global North appropriates southern women’s reproductive and intimate labor. Seen in this light, it becomes urgent to theorize how women from the South manage to survive in the global intimate economy by shifting between cross-border marriage and cross-border sex work in the North. Admittedly, such a Global North-and-South framework fits awkwardly when it comes to understanding Taiwan’s situation because economic development is the sole barometer used to define the North and the South, and economically, Taiwan should be in the North camp. Politically, however, due to the majority of nations not recognizing its sovereignty, Taiwan is much more peripheral than most southern countries, let alone China. Therefore, compared to countries in Southeast Asia, Taiwan is economically North but politically South. This semi-peripheral position in the North-South framework, in our view, makes Taiwan a unique case to theorize the global intimate economy. As a tactic... (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to introduce an orthogonal experimental design to improve the efficiency of building and optimizing models for freezing of gait prediction.MethodsA random forest model was developed to predict FOG by using acceleration signals and angular velocity signals to recognize possible precursor signs of FOG. An OED was introduced to optimize the feature extraction parameters.ResultsThe main effects and interaction among the feature extraction hyperparameters were analyzed. The false-positive rate, hit rate, and mean prediction time were 27%, (...) 68%, and 2.99 s, respectively.ConclusionThe OED was an effective method for analyzing the main effects and interactions among the feature extraction parameters. It was also beneficial for optimizing the feature extraction parameters of the FOG prediction model. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, China has launched a nationwide endeavor to push domestic firms up the value chain. This article explores why, in some localities, Chinese firms had significant success in upgrading, while in other localities, firms were paradoxically trapped in a race-to-the-bottom competition. Drawing on national economic census data, a firm-level survey, and in-depth interviews, the article conducts a controlled comparison of China’s largest electronics manufacturing bases in the Yangtze and the Pearl River Deltas. It argues that the (...) local government’s choice of global business allies shaped the upgrading behavior of domestic firms. When local governments allied with large multinational corporations at the top of the value chain, they reinforced the hierarchical structure of production, shrank the upgrading space for domestic firms, and squeezed them to the bottom of the value chain. In contrast, alliances with small foreign invested firms at the bottom helped break the hierarchical segregation and held more potential for local learning and innovation. The article sheds new light on the question of when industrial policies succeed or fail to facilitate domestic upgrading in a globalized era. (shrink)

Online music sharing, deemed illegal for invading intellectual property rights under current laws, has become a crucial issue for the music industry in the modern digital age, but few have investigated the potential costs and utilities for individuals involved in such online misbehavior. This study aimed to fill in this gap to predict consumers' intentions to engage in online music sharing and further consider consumers' online music sharing knowledge as a moderator in the research model. The results of repeated measures (...) analysis of variance of costs and utilities of online music sharing not only give more detailed information to grasp empirical implications but also provide some suggestions to the music industry in Taiwan. (shrink)

Following the idea of L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems as introduced by Zhao et al., we will give the join-complete lattice structures of lower and upper approximation operators based on L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems. In particular, as special approximation operators based on L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems, we will give the complete lattice structures of lower and upper approximation operators based on L -fuzzy relations. Furthermore, if L satisfies the double negative law, then there exists an order isomorphic mapping (...) between upper and lower approximation operators based on L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood systems; when L -fuzzy generalized neighborhood system is serial, reflexive, and transitive, there still exists an order isomorphic mapping between upper and lower approximation operators, respectively, and both lower and upper approximation operators based on L -fuzzy relations are complete lattice isomorphism. (shrink)

BackgroundDepression is common psychiatric morbidity in breast cancer survivors, seriously affecting patients’ quality of life and mental health. A growing body of research has investigated depression in breast cancer. However, no visual bibliometric analysis was conducted in this field. This study aimed to visualize the literature to identify hotspots and frontiers in research on breast cancer and depression.MethodsThe publications related to depression in breast cancer were retrieved in the Web of Science Core Collection between 1 January 2002 and 17 March (...) 2022. VOSviewer was used to identify co-occurrences and collaborations among countries, institutions, and keywords. CiteSpace was used to detect keyword bursts.ResultsA total of 7,350 articles and reviews related to depression in breast cancer were identified. From 2002 to 2022, the United States and the People’s Republic of China were the most productive countries in this field. The University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Toronto were the most productive institutions in this field. The Journal of Psycho-oncology, followed by Supportive Care in Cancer and the Journal of Clinical Oncology, had the most publications on depression in breast cancer. Of the top 10 journals, seven were from the United States, two were from England, and one was from Germany. Five research hotspots of depression in breast cancer were identified by co-word analysis. Research on post-traumatic growth, spiritual interventions, cognitive-behavioral therapy, physical activity, and symptom cluster management of depression in breast cancer was relatively mature in the core hotspots. Burst detection of keywords on depression in breast cancer showed the latest hotspots, such as mental health, cancer survivor mortality, and activity.ConclusionThe research on depression in breast cancer is growing. Attention should be paid to the latest hotspots, such as mental health, cancer survivor, mortality, exercise, and physical activity. (shrink)

We propose a signaling pathway in which cell‐extracellular matrix (ECM) adhesion components PINCH‐1 and kindlin‐2 sense mechanical signals from ECM and link them to proline biosynthesis, a vital metabolic pathway for macromolecule synthesis, redox balance, and ECM remodeling. ECM stiffening promotes PINCH‐1 expression via integrin signaling, which suppresses dynamin‐related protein 1 (DRP1) expression and mitochondrial fission, resulting in increased kindlin‐2 translocation into mitochondria and interaction with Δ1‐pyrroline‐5‐carboxylate (P5C) reductase 1 (PYCR1). Kindlin‐2 interaction with PYCR1 protects the latter from proteolytic degradation, (...) leading to elevated PYCR1 level. Additionally, PINCH‐1 promotes P5C synthase (P5CS) expression and P5C synthesis, which, together with increased PYCR1 level, support augmented proline biosynthesis. This signaling pathway is frequently activated in fibrosis and cancer, resulting in increased proline biosynthesis and excessive collagen matrix production, which in turn further promotes ECM stiffening. Targeting this signaling pathway, therefore, may provide an effective strategy for alleviating fibrosis and cancer progression. (shrink)