The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of emotional labor on job performance and satisfaction, as well as to examine the mediating effect of sleep problems and the moderating effects of personality traits. A time-lagged study was conducted on 864 health professionals. Scales for emotional labor, sleep, personality traits, and job satisfaction were used and job performance data was obtained from records maintained by human resources. Structural equation modeling was performed to investigate the relations. Sleep problems only (...) partially mediated the relationship between surface acting and job satisfaction but completely mediated the relationship between surface acting and job performance. Several personality traits were shown to moderate the relationship between surface acting and sleep problems. The effects were stronger for people with low agreeableness and high neuroticism. The relationship between high levels of deep acting and low levels of sleep problems was more pronounced in individuals with low extraversion. Supervisors should be conscious of emotional labor in the work context and provide necessary deep acting training to facilitate emotional regulation. (shrink)

BackgroundThe rating of perceived exertion scales with respiratory and muscular illustrations are recognized as simple and practical methods to understand individual psychometric characteristics in breathing and muscle exertion during exercise. However, the implementation of respiratory and muscular RPE to quantify training load in futsal training camps has not been examined. This study investigates respiratory and muscular RPE relationships during domestic training camps and overseas training camps in an under 20 futsal national team.MethodsData collected from eleven field players were used for (...) comparison in this study. All players reported Borg CR10 RPE and 7-scales respiratory RPE and muscular RPE after training sessions and matches. Additionally, total distance covered and training impulse were used to quantify external and internal loads via the Polar Team Pro system. Paired-sample t-tests were used to compare the RPECR10, RPErespiration, RPEmuscle, TD, and TRIMP between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression was performed to determine the relationships among all RPE scales, TD, and TRIMP.ResultsThe RPECR10, TD, and TRIMP showed significant difference between DTC and OTC. Furthermore, linear regression analyses showed significant correlation between RPErespiration and RPEmuscle, RPECR10 and RPErespiration, and RPECR10 and RPEmuscle.ConclusionPictorial RPErespiration or RPEmuscle can be used as an alternative to quantify perceived measures of internal loads during DTC and OTC in futsal players. Interpretation of perceived measures of training load and cardiac-related responses in association with external training loads during short-term training camps would be useful in further understanding the demands of futsal players’ experience in these circumstances. (shrink)

The question of what determines brain laterality for auditory cognitive processing is unresolved. Here, we demonstrate a swap of hemisphere dominance from right to left during semantic interpretation of Chinese lexical tones in native speakers using simultaneously recorded mismatch negativity response and behavioral reaction time during dichotic listening judgment. The mismatch negativity, which is a brain wave response and indexes auditory processing at an early stage, indicated right hemisphere dominance. In contrast, the behavioral reaction time, which reflects auditory processing at (...) a later stage, indicated a right ear listening advantage, or left hemisphere dominance. The observed swap of hemisphere dominance would not occur when the lexical tone was substituted with a meaningless pure tone. This swap reveals dependence of hemisphere labor division initially on acoustic and then on functional cues of auditory inputs in the processing from sound to meaning. (shrink)

Problematic smartphone use is an expanded public health heed that requires more study to clarify the influence elements of different populations. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between smartphone use, and sleep quality, self-perceived health, and exercise participation in university students. A total of 1,575 Taiwanese undergraduate students from 7 universities participated in the study. Three questionnaires were completed by the study individuals. The results show the overall PSU rate was 11.8%. Average smartphone users were more (...) likely to feel in good health, better sleep quality and less unsatisfactory exercise participation than those who were problematic smartphone users. Multiple logistic regression analysis indicated that PSU, low weekly exercise frequency, and poor sleep quality were significant indicators of poor self-perceived health. We concluded that both low physical activity and PSU did have negative impacts on self-perceived health and sleep quality for undergraduate students. (shrink)

Replication protein A (RPA) is the main eukaryotic single‐stranded DNA (ssDNA) binding protein, having essential roles in all DNA metabolic reactions involving ssDNA. RPA binds ssDNA with high affinity, thereby preventing the formation of secondary structures and protecting ssDNA from the action of nucleases, and directly interacts with other DNA processing proteins. Here, we discuss recent results supporting the idea that one function of RPA is to prevent annealing between short repeats that can lead to chromosome rearrangements by microhomology‐mediated end (...) joining or the formation of hairpin structures that are substrates for structure‐selective nucleases. We suggest that replication fork catastrophe caused by depletion of RPA could result from cleavage of secondary structures by nucleases, and that failure to cleave hairpin structures formed at DNA ends could lead to gene amplification. These studies highlight the important role RPA plays in maintaining genome integrity. (shrink)

The behavior of somatic stem cells is regulated by their niche. Interaction between hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and their niches are a representative model to understand stem cell‐niche interplay. Here, we provide an overview of crosstalk between HSCs and their niches in bone marrow and extramedullary organs following the life journey of HSCs from emergence, development, maturation until aging. We highlight the unique differences of HSC niches in different life stages within various organs focusing on recent literature to propose new (...) speculations and hypotheses. (shrink)

In this paper, finite-time tracking problem of nonholonomic mobile robots for a moving target is considered. First of all, polar coordinates are used to characterize the distance and azimuth between the moving target and the robot. Then, based on the distance and azimuth transported from the sensor installed on the robot, a finite-time tracking control law is designed for the nonholonomic mobile robot by the switching control method. Rigorous proof shows that the tracking error converges to zero in a finite (...) time. Numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed control method. (shrink)

With the advancement of human microbiome research, it is inevitable that a growing number of biobanks will include a collection of microbiota specimens to characterize the microbial communities that inhabit the human body and explore the relationships between the microbiota and their human hosts. Biobanks of human microbiota and their associated genetic information may become a valuable health resource. But, this area of research also presents ethical and social problems, some of which are distinct from those faced by biobanks that (...) store human tissue samples. This paper examines four core issues which are considered highly relevant to microbiome biobanking: the nature of human microbiome samples and how different understandings have an impact on benefit/risk evaluation, privacy, informed consent, and returning the result to participants. We argue that these issues should be addressed early on in microbiome research projects and also call for adjusting or developing new governance mechanism to better accommodate these changes. (shrink)

In this paper, the stabilization problem of nonholonomic chained-form systems is addressed with uncertain constants. In this paper, the active disturbance rejection control is designed to solve this problem. The proposed control strategy combines extended state observer and adaptive sliding mode controller. The control of nonholonomic chained-form systems with dynamic nonlinear uncertain terms and uncertain constants is first discussed in this paper. In comparison with existing methods, the proposed method in this paper has better performance. It is proved that, with (...) the application of the proposed control strategy, semiglobal finite-time stabilization of the systems is achieved. An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

A formalism is developed that treats a robot as a subject that can interpret its own experience rather than an object that is interpreted within our experience. A regulative definition of a meaningful experience in robots is proposed in which the present sensible experience is considered meaningful to the agent, as the subject of the experience, if it can be related to the agent's temporal horizons. This definition is validated by demonstrating that such an experience in evolutionary autonomous agents is (...) embodied, contextual and normative, as is required for the maintenance of phenomenological accuracy. With this formalism it is shown how a dialectic similar to that described in Hegelian phenomenology can emerge in the robotic experience and why the presence of such a dialectic can serve as a constraint in the further development of cognitive agents. (shrink)

Our understanding of the complexity of the oral biome and of the role of the various constituent bacteria in the aetiology of dental disease is growing. Probiotics and their relationship with prebiotics, as well as other microbiome‐based interventions, could be useful in preventing and treating dental disease and in promoting oral health. However, given the promise and early stage of this treatment approach, there are also a number of ethical, social and regulatory issues associated with innovative probiotic therapy. In this (...) article, a brief update is given on contemporary theories of the aetiology and management of the two commonest dental diseases, and on the roles of pre‐ and probiotics and oral biome transplant in the management of these diseases. The focus is primarily on four core issues: informed consent, risk–benefit assessment, how to determine suitable healthy donors, and commercialization and regulation. We discuss the safety and benefits of oral probiotics, not only concerning the products and quality control during their manufacture, but also regarding the depth of public knowledge about this topic. We point out that the requirement of listing ingredients honestly might be insufficient, and that the prevalent rhetoric of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ as well as some health claims in the translational, innovative probiotic industry and markets are themselves misleading and should be carefully scrutinized. Finally, we suggest an ethical imperative to find a balance between scientific research and industry, and public health in the regulation of probiotics. (shrink)

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)

BackgroundThe therapeutic effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) for Parkinson's disease (PD) is related to the modulation of pathological neural activities, particularly the synchronization in the β band (13–35 Hz). However, whether the local β activity in the STN region can directly predict the stimulation outcome remains unclear.ObjectiveWe tested the hypothesis that low-β (13–20 Hz) and/or high-β (20–35 Hz) band activities recorded from the STN region can predict DBS efficacy.MethodsLocal field potentials (LFPs) were recorded in (...) 26 patients undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery in the subthalamic nucleus area. Recordings were made after the implantation of the DBS electrode prior to its connection to a stimulator. The maximum normalized powers in the theta (4–7 Hz), alpha (7–13 Hz), low-β (13–20 Hz), high-β (20–35 Hz), and low-γ (40–55 Hz) subbands in the postoperatively recorded LFP were correlated with the stimulation-induced improvement in contralateral tremor or bradykinesia–rigidity. The distance between the contact selected for stimulation and the contact with the maximum subband power was correlated with the stimulation efficacy. Following the identification of the potential predictors by the significant correlations, a multiple regression analysis was performed to evaluate their effect on the outcome.ResultsThe maximum high-β power was positively correlated with bradykinesia–rigidity improvement (rs = 0.549, p < 0.0001). The distance to the contact with maximum high-β power was negatively correlated with bradykinesia–rigidity improvement (rs = −0.452, p < 0.001). No significant correlation was observed with low-β power. The maximum high-β power and the distance to the contact with maximum high-β power were both significant predictors for bradykinesia–rigidity improvement in the multiple regression analysis, explaining 37.4% of the variance altogether. Tremor improvement was not significantly correlated with any frequency.ConclusionHigh-β oscillations, but not low-β oscillations, recorded from the STN region with the DBS lead can inform stimulation-induced improvement in contralateral bradykinesia–rigidity in patients with PD. High-β oscillations can help refine electrode targeting and inform contact selection for DBS therapy. (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)

This study proposed a children’s digital art ability training system with artificial intelligence-assisted learning, which was designed to achieve the goal of improving children’s drawing ability. AI technology was introduced for outline recognition, hue color matching, and color ratio calculation to machine train students’ cognition of chromatics, and smart glasses were used to view actual augmented reality paintings to enhance the effectiveness of improving elementary school students’ imagination and painting performance through the diversified stimulation of colors. This study adopted the (...) quasi-experimental research method and designs the pre-test and post-test for different groups. The research subjects are the Grade 4 students of an elementary school in Taitung City, Taiwan. The test tools included an imagination test and an evaluation of painting performance ability. The test results of a total of 30 students before and after the experiment included the experimental group that received the children’s digital art ability training system with AI-assisted learning and 30 students in the control group that had not received the teaching were analyzed by covariance. These results were supplemented by the description and interpretation of student feedback, teachers’ reflection notes, and other qualitative data to understand the performance of the students in the experimental group in terms of imagination and painting performance. (shrink)

The idea of a purgatorial journey to the Ten Kings of the Ten Hells is a distinctive feature of funerals and ancestral worship in Chinese Buddhism and Chinese popular religions. In Indian Buddhism ideas emerged of chief deities presiding over others in a few of many heavens and of various hells with different tortures governed by Yama and his messengers, yet the idea that each hell was governed by a ‘king’ is not found in early Indian Buddhist sources. This article (...) examines what is probably the earliest enumeration of hell-kings, in the S?tra on Questions on Hells. This very early example derives from an extraordinary story about how King Bimbis?ra and his eighteen ministers became Yama and kings of eighteen hells after a disastrous defeat in battle. My analysis will illustrate how this account was probably consciously formulated by an author familiar with two sources: the story of the Buddha’s concern about the fate of his followers in the Shenisha jing, and the popular Chinese belief in sacrificial cults of ‘defeated armies and dead generals’. (shrink)

Lukas Nickel’s article “The First Emperor and Sculpture in China” in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies has drawn significant attention to the issue of Hellenistic influence on the making of the terracotta warriors excavated from the mausoleum of the First Emperor of China. In the perspective of textual evidence, Nickel attaches much importance to the connection between the Chinese report of the twelve da ren 大人 in Lintao 臨洮 in the Hanshu and the account of (...) the construction of “altars” to the twelve Olympian gods by Alexander the Great at the easternmost point of his expedition to India in the Bibliotheca Historica. This coincidence suggests to Nickel that the twelve Big Men are a possible reference to large sculptural figures erected on the western border of the empire. This article aims to question this interpretation of the twelve da ren as sculptures in the Hanshu. A twofold examination of the textual and other historical sources will make clear that the twelve Big Men were mentioned not as huge statues but as exceptionally tall visitors, an exemplary omen related to human illness manifested in physical abnormality. (shrink)

Since the late 1990s, the dynamics of welfare reform in Taiwan have gradually shifted to tackling new social risks emerging from economic globalization and labor market changes. This article analyzes these structural changes and the relevant institutional features of the labor market. The rise of atypical work has generated wide concern regarding its low wage income and insufficient social protection, triggering debates about which policy measures can effectively tackle the problem of the working poor. Drawing on the quantitative data from (...) a social quality survey conducted by the Social Policy Research Center in National Taiwan University (NTUSPRC) in 2009, our analysis explores the social exclusion differences between regular and atypical workers for their objective and subjective experiences. The objective experiences include current financial situations, negative events, living conditions and political activities of the workers, whereas the subjective experiences refer to their feelings in family position, welfare assessment, discrimination, and autonomy. Our analysis helps explain the effects of work status on the degrees of social exclusion, both in the private and public spheres. The social exclusion experiences of working conditions shed light on social quality in Asia. (shrink)

SummaryThis study estimates the effect of dysgenic trends in Taiwan by exploring the relationships among intelligence, education and fertility. Based on a representative adult sample, education and intelligence were negatively correlated with the number of children born. These correlations were stronger for females. The decline of genotypic intelligence was estimated as 0.82 to 1.33 IQ points per generation for the Taiwanese population.

The gaze cueing effect is characterized by faster attentional orienting to a gazed-at than a non-gazed-at target. This effect is often enhanced when the gazing face bears an emotional expression, though this finding is modulated by a number of factors. Here, we tested whether the type of task performed might be one such modulating factor. Target localization and target discrimination tasks are the two most commonly used gaze cueing tasks, and they arguably differ in cognitive resources, which could impact how (...) emotional expression and gaze cues are integrated to orient attention. In a within-subjects design, participants performed both target localization and discrimination gaze cueing tasks with neutral, happy, and fearful faces. The gaze cueing effect for neutral faces was greatly reduced in the discrimination task relative to the localization task, and the emotional enhancement of the gaze cueing effect was only present in the localization task and only when this task was performed first. These results suggest that cognitive resources are needed for gaze cueing and for the integration of emotional expressions and gaze cues. We propose that a shift toward local processing may be the mechanism by which the discrimination task interferes with the emotional modulation of gaze cueing. The results support the idea that gaze cueing can be greatly modulated by top-down influences and cognitive resources and thus taps into endogenous attention. Results are discussed within the context of the recently proposed EyeTune model of social attention. (shrink)

A new theory of the neuropsychological underpinnings of phenomenal consciousness, “asynchronous introspection theory,” is proposed that emphasizes asynchrony between different neurocognitive processes. We provide a detailed explanation of how a mind might arrive at a cognitive structure isomorphic to the cognitive structure that would emerge from experiential qualia. The theory suggests that a temporal illusion is created because of the mismatch between the real physical timeline and the neurally constructed timeline composed inside a person’s brain. This temporal illusion leads to (...) the origination of a thought that one has had a certain experience wherein the thought and the feeling seem synchronous to the person but, in fact, are not. This leads to the thought, “I had a feeling.” The theory is elaborated via a metaphorical “robot supervisor model” and is shown to explain many current problems of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 自產生伊始，生命倫理學就成為普遍主義和特殊主義論爭的重要場域。這種論爭表現在理論闡釋、實踐路徑，涉及生命倫理學原則衝突的處理、生物科技運用的倫理問題。在本質上是，普遍主義是對生命倫理學認識論、本體論和 方法論的思考。譚傑志教授延續了西方關於生命倫理學跨文化研究的路徑，結合個人豐富的學術歷程和社會實踐，剖析全球生命倫理學境遇下面臨的普遍主義與多元主義、權利和義務的東方—西之別、跨文化對話達成共識以及科 技信念的傳統-現代等(Tham2022)，核心是普遍主義與特殊主義的思考。(撮要取自內文首段) The narrative essence of bioethics universalism advocates a universal normative system and practical model, neglecting inherent cultural elements and falling into the trap of homogenization. Cultural pluralism and value pluralism are the original state of society, and the dynamic imbalance of social development drives the diversity of bioethics practice.

Working memory performance affects children’s learning. This study examined objective, subjective, and physiological cognitive load while children completed a spatial working memory complex span task. Frist, 80 Taiwanese 11-year-olds who participated in Experiment 1 confirmed the suitability of the materials. Then, 72 Taiwanese 11-year-olds were assigned to high and low complexity groups to participate in Experiment 2 to test the study hypothesis. Children had to recall at the end of a dual-task list and answer two questions regarding the difficulty and (...) mental effort involved in processing and storage. Their pupil diameters were recorded using an eye-tracker. Two-way mixed ANOVA found that the processing requirements and memory load reduced storage and aggravated the subjective CL of storage; the subjective CL of processing was higher under highly complex conditions. Stepwise regression analysis indicated that subjective CL of processing predicted memory performance in low CL conditions, and physiological CL of processing predicted it in high CL conditions. (shrink)

In this study, two modified gradient descent algorithms are proposed for time-delayed models. To estimate the parameters and time-delay simultaneously, a redundant rule method is introduced, which turns the time-delayed model into an augmented model. Then, two GD algorithms can be used to identify the time-delayed model. Compared with the traditional GD algorithms, these two modified GD algorithms have the following advantages: avoid a high-order matrix eigenvalue calculation, thus, are more efficient for large-scale systems; have faster convergence rates, therefore, are (...) more practical in engineering practices. The convergence properties and simulation examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the two algorithms. (shrink)

The longitudinal, qualitative study aimed to explore the lived experiences of Chinese university emerging adults by analyzing their personal life stories, reflective journals, and semi-structured interview data collected over a 2-year period. A qualitative content analysis was used to identify five themes: maturity, academic performance, interpersonal communication skills, social support network, and sense of loss. The study found that the growth in emerging adulthood was dynamic, positive, and multifaceted. The study demonstrated that writing personal life stories, as a practice of (...) meaningful literacy instruction in EFL contexts, helped students to record a memorable past, reconcile with the past, and strive for personal growth. These findings suggest that emerging adults’ personal growth be stressed in foreign language teaching to promote Chinese university emerging adults’ growth and development. It is also suggested that personal life stories be used in foreign language teaching under the guidance of meaningful literacy instruction. (shrink)