Community group-buying platforms are increasingly relying on the interaction between the group-buying leader and consumers, thereby achieving the customer lock-in. In view of this, it is crucial to understand how the group-buying leader to establish a long-term transaction relationship with consumers. In this study, we construct a model based on the role theory and trust transfer theory, and identify two types of interactions of the group-buying leader and two types of consumer trust. Then, the mechanism that how different role interactions (...) of the group-buying leader can be transformed into the lock-in purchasing intention of consumers is further clarified. By interviewing 430 consumers with community group-buying experience in the community through offline questionnaire, the research model has been proven to be effective. To be specific, both role interactions of the merchant and friend can impose a positive impact on interpersonal trust, which will also lead to the trust in community group-buying, and thus enhance the lock-in purchasing intension of consumers from a fixed leader. Overall, this study has made certain contributions to the study of customer relationship. In theory, this study further explains the explanation mechanism of the “acquaintance marketing” phenomenon. Moreover, this study adopts the role theory to analyze the differences of different role interactions of the group-buying leader in relationship quality and purchase decision making, and employs the trust transfer theory to expand the trust transfer effect from the interpersonal trust of the group-buying leader to the trust in community group-buying. In practice, this study provides a new perspective and practical reference for community group-buying enterprises and the group-buying leader on how to better manage customers and maintain a long-term and stable customer relationship. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is objectivity in international human rights law, against which the justifiability of arguments can be determined, and which could advance the universality versus relativity of human rights debate. Revisiting the three schools of treaty interpretation and applying the three elements of Radbruch’s rule of law, I discuss how the interpreter’s job of balancing those schools has limited room for manoeuvre. I further propose an approach to help jurists detect unjustifiable arguments in treaty interpretation, (...) often in the disguise of relativism. That approach consists of: a non-justifiable argument contradicts all three schools of treaty interpretation; or ignores all three; a justifiable argument is supported by at least one of these schools; a better argument is a more balanced argument, i.e. supported by more elements of interpretation. Finally, I argue that there is a degree of objectivity in each school of treaty interpretation, which is supported by shared intention and speech act theory, and can therefore be held to apply to the whole process of treaty interpretation. I illustrate above arguments with a case, a doctrine, and a country. (shrink)

Particular reasoning is arguably the most common type of legal reasoning. Neil MacCormick proposed that, in a legal context, justifiable particular reasoning has to be universalizable. This paper aims to: investigate MacCormick’s thesis; explain how a particular can ever be universal by drawing inspiration from Scott Brewer’s formula on reasoning by analogy; further comprehend MacCormick’s thesis by considering some of the arguments advanced by its opponents; use the ‘pilot-judgement procedure’ developed by the European Court of Human Rights as an example (...) to illustrate the relevance of the universalizable particular thesis in today’s legal practices. (shrink)

Chinese e-commerce platforms have long helped to sell agricultural products through farmer-assisting marketing activities, effectively alleviating the problem of stagnant agricultural products in some areas, and have become a valuable cause-related marketing strategy. The ethical attributes of farmer-assisting agricultural products have unique value compared with other agricultural products. However, the existing research rarely pays attention to the influence of the ethical attributes of farmer-assisting agricultural products on consumers’ willingness to buy farmer-assisting agricultural products online. Based on collective efficacy theory and (...) risk perception theory, this study systematically explores the influence mechanism of ethical attributes on consumers’ willingness to buy farmer-assisting agricultural products online through three situational experiments. The results show that compared with functional ethical attributes, symbolic ethical attributes have a more positive impact on consumers’ willingness to buy farmer-assisting agricultural products online. In addition, it further reveals two mediating pathways of ethical effects and boundaries. This study helps to understand the ethical attributes of farmer-assisting agricultural products, and provides some practical suggestions for e-commerce enterprises implementing farmer-assisting marketing communication activities or marketers developing and promoting farmer-assisting agricultural products. (shrink)

BackgroundThe prognosis of hypertensive intracerebral hemorrhage is poor at high altitudes. The objective of this study was to explore whether hyperbaric oxygen can improve the results of computed tomography perfusion imaging and the neurological function of patients with HICH, and influence the hemoglobin concentration.MethodThe patients with HICH were treated with puncture and drainage. Twenty-one patients were treated with HBO after the operation, and the other patients received conventional treatment. CTP was performed twice, and all indices were measured. Scatter plots were (...) used to determine the effect of hemoglobin concentration on CTP imaging. Receiver operating characteristic curves were plotted to analyze the effects of hemoglobin concentration and hematoma volume on recovery results. The patients were followed up for 6 months.ResultsForty-one patients with HICH were treated with puncture and drainage. In total, 21 were treated with HBO after the operation, and 20 received conventional treatment as the control group. No significant differences in the CBV and CBF values of the two groups were noted before treatment. After 10 days, the values of CBV and CBF in the HBO group were significantly higher than those in the control group. A scatter diagram showed there was no significant in the HBO group, but significant correlation for the CBV and CBF values in the control group’s hematoma center and margin. The ROC curves showed that hematoma volume had an influence on prognosis of the control group. The Glasgow Coma Scale scores of the HBO group were significantly higher than those of the control group.ConclusionsHBO therapy can improve the postoperative CBV and CBF values of patients with HICH and ameliorate their prognoses. There was no significant correlation between HBO group and hemoglobin concentration on admission. (shrink)

Balanced time perspective is associated with optimal social functioning and facilitates adaptation to pressure and changes in the environment. Previous studies have found that mindfulness is positively associated with and might promote balanced time perspective. However, the mechanism through which mindfulness affects balanced time perspective remains unexplored. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the mediating role of self-compassion and subjective well-being in the relationship between mindfulness and balanced time perspective. A total of 754 Chinese college students, aged (...) 17–27 years, completed the Chinese versions of the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, Self-Compassion Scale, Subjective Well-Being Scale, and Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. There were significant positive correlations between mindfulness, self-compassion, subjective well-being, and balanced time perspective. Structural equation modeling indicated that in addition to the direct influence of mindfulness on balanced time perspective, self-compassion and subjective well-being played a partial mediating role. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that mindfulness has an important positive influence on balanced time perspective, and highlight the crucial role of the self-compassion in cultivating an individual's balanced time perspective. Limitations of the present study are also discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider the iterative algorithm for a boundary value problem of n -order fractional differential equation with mixed integral and multipoint boundary conditions. Using an iterative technique, we derive an existence result of the uniqueness of the positive solution, then construct the iterative scheme to approximate the positive solution of the equation, and further establish some numerical results on the estimation of the convergence rate and the approximation error.

This study investigated the role of theme-based blocks play in enhancing Chinese children’s language capacity with a quasi-experiment. Altogether 61 young children were assigned to the experiment group and the control group. The experiment group was engaged in a 12-week theme-based block play intervention programs, whereas the control group received no interventions but free block play during the parallel time sessions. All the children were tested with the Language Assessment for Preschool Children before and after the intervention. The ANCOVA results (...) indicated that the experimental group significantly improved in LAPC test, whereas the control group showed no significant change. The educational implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

The massive social change in urban China today has led to a decline in the adaptive implications of shyness for child adjustment, yet evidence of this trend in young children is limited. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms that help to explain the associations between shyness and maladjustment remains poorly understood. The primary goal of the present study was to explore the moderating role of conflict resolution skills in the links between shyness and socio-emotional and school adjustment among urban Chinese preschoolers. Data (...) were collected from 360 children in kindergartens using parent ratings, teacher ratings, and child interviews. The analyses indicated that the relations between shyness and adjustment were moderated by child conflict resolution skills, which served to buffer shy children from adjustment problems. The results were discussed in terms of the implications of conflict resolution skills for early adjustment of shy preschoolers in the Chinese context. (shrink)

The race among global firms to launch its respective products and services into the market sooner than the competitors puts pressure to equip its employees with job-related skills at the pace of business. Today’s global and dynamic business requires employees to develop highly complex cognitive skills such as decision-making, problem-solving, troubleshooting to perform their jobs proficiently. Traditional training models used by some organizations lead to a very slow speed at which employees gain an acceptable level of proficiency in the targeted (...) job skills. Also, these models have long and regimented instructional development cycle. Thus, traditional models are inherently counter-productive to the business and do not enable employees and organizations for today’s business needs. Therefore, business organizations need to explore new training models and strategies that could reduce the time an employee takes to reach target proficiency in complex skills without compromising the effectiveness or outcome. A comprehensive review of the literature shows a very limited amount of academic or practitioner research on this topic. This doctorate research study aims to find various training strategies that have proven successful in organizations for accelerating proficiency of employees in complex job skills. The researcher collected data primarily through 74 in-depth interviews with 86 training experts with known work experience of reducing time-to-proficiency in various settings. A total of 105 project cases have been collected across 42 industries to date. A grounded theory approach with constant comparison method is used to guide the theoretical saturation, analyze the data and to develop a theoretical model of training strategies. This unique study revealed a range of training strategies from non-training solutions to classroom instructions to workplace training to accelerate proficiency of employees in acquiring complex skills. This paper will specifically report the preliminary findings and conceptual model of major classroom-based instructional strategies only that has been found to hold the potential to shorten time-to-proficiency of employees at the workplace. This paper will also discuss the implications of the findings for the practitioners. Results in this study confirmed that classroom-based instructional strategies need to be designed and delivered the way the work is being performed in reality by the learners. Research findings suggest a pattern of five classroom-based instructional strategies that are more successful in reducing time-to-proficiency - 1) Contextualized learning 2) Performance analysis of star performer 3) Active processing and emotional involvement 4) Access to self-guided learning resources 5) Social interconnectivity and informal learning. (shrink)

This study examines the R&D investment behaviour of different types of family-controlled firms with the moderating role of ownership discrepancy between cash-flow rights and excess voting rights by using the sufficiency conditions’ theoretical framework of ability and willingness developed by De Massis. It uses data from family firms that have issued A-shares from 2008 to 2018. They used pooled OLS regression for data analysis and Tobit regression for robustness checks. This study classifies family firm types into two categories, namely, the (...) lone-controller family firms (LCFFs) and the multi-controller family firms (MCFFs), with each being further classified as “excess” or “no excess” voting rights. Both LCFFs without excess voting rights and MCFFs with excess voting rights have the “ability” and “willingness” toward R&D investment. LCFFs with excess voting rights and MCFFs without excess voting rights only have the ability but low willingness to invest in R&D. The study also establishes that Chinese family-controlled firms are heterogeneous toward risky investment. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to differentiate Chinese family firms by their unique ownership structure characteristics in investigating the effect of the family firm structure on R&D investment. The study is a novel attempt to test the willingness and ability framework of LCFFs and MCFFs. Previous studies based on agency theory have tacitly assumed that ability and willingness exist in family-controlled firms. However, this study challenges this implicit assumption. (shrink)

Body ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a (...) rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

Among the four reading-levels, the textual and exegetical levels of Zhuangzi ’s Hundun-story are problem-free, and so we focus expository-wise on its conspicuous hospitality with nine implications. Then, hermeneutically, we see Hundun instructing us against clarity toward unclarity—cosmological, self-composing, cognitive, and communal—of kindly humus, in cosmic confusion, sleep and idleness, mist and pond-dragonfly, and non-ruling people-sovereignty. Pan-hospitality is our Emperor Hundun’s non-arbitrary imperative to nurture life.

We explored the division of parenthood in Chinese families with adolescents by identifying the parental involvement patterns in the data obtained from 786 pairs of parents. Division-of-parenthood patterns were created via factor mixture modeling using self-reported three dimensions of father and mother involvement. Three differential division-of-parenthood patterns were identified: (a) parent-cooperation pattern, where moderate and equivalent involvement existed between mothers and fathers; (b) mother-dominated pattern, where mother involvement was particularly greater than father involvement; and (c) father-dominated pattern, where father involvement (...) was particularly greater than mother involvement. Families were more likely to be in the mother- or the father-dominated pattern as their levels of positive coparenting behaviors increased. By contrast, as the levels of paternal conflict behavior increased, families were likely to be in the mother-dominated pattern. This study highlighted parents’ individual parenting role, the diverse division-of-parenthood patterns in the family, and the important role of coparenting behavior. (shrink)

Social exclusion can cause negative changes on human beings both in the physiological and psychological aspects. Although considerable efforts have been devoted to study its effects on consumption behavior, little attention has been paid to the consequence that social exclusion might have on consumer’s color preference and the underlying mechanisms. Such social events can change individual’s behavior. This work examines the influence of social exclusion on consumers’ color preference as well as the moderation and mediation effects via three experiments: Experiment (...) 1 studies the impacts of social exclusion on consumer color choice. To further validate the robustness of the results, experiment 2 is designed by replicating the findings of experiment 1 in another product category and instructed the participants to choose products with different colors. Meanwhile, the mediation effect of self-threat is examined. In Experiment 3, the moderation effect of self-construal is investigated via a 2 × 2 × between-subjects design. Our results indicate that social exclusion makes people prefer warm colors rather than cold colors. However, these effects would be mediated by self-threat, which could be further moderated by self-construal. The present study establishes the relationship between social exclusion and consumers’ color preference, which is expected to provide guidance for companies to improve product design and promotion strategies to adapt to various contexts. (shrink)

Lentinus edodes sticks are susceptible to mold infection during the culture process, and manual identification of infected sticks is heavy, untimely, and inaccurate. Aiming to solve this problem, this paper proposes a method for identifying infected Lentinus edodes sticks based on improved ResNeXt-50 deep transfer learning. First, a dataset of Lentinus edodes stick diseases was constructed. Second, based on the ResNeXt-50 model and the pretraining weight of the ImageNet dataset, the influence of pretraining weight parameters on recognition accuracy was studied. (...) Finally, six fine-tuning strategies of the fully connected layer were designed to modify the fully connected layer of ResNeXt-50. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the method proposed in this paper can reach 94.27%, which is higher than the Vgg16, GoogLeNet, ResNet50, and MobileNet v2 models by 8.47%, 6.49%, 4.68%, and 9.38%, respectively, and the F1-score can reach 0.9422. The improved method proposed in this paper can reduce the calculation pressure and overfitting problem of the model, improve the accuracy of the model in the identification of Lentinus edodes stick mold diseases, and provide an effective solution for the selection of diseased sticks. (shrink)

Few studies have examined the relationship between personality traits and social networking sites (SNSs) with a dominant concentration on the personality alterations under SNSs influence. The relationship between personality and privacy control was less focused and discussed. In order to figure out the internal mechanism of such link among youth SNSs users, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was extended by including Five-Factor Model of Personality to explore how personality traits interact with privacy control behavior on SNSs. The investigation using (...) the theoretical method mentioned led to several hypotheses which were later assessed by an online study conducted within randomly chosen college students (N = 201) from two randomly chosen universities in China. This sampling strategy was designed to mimic the situation of targeted research population in the most reasonable way. The results suggested neuroticism and openness predicted SNSs privacy. Neuroticism and openness predicted “networked privacy” was also found. Theoretical implications of these findings were addressed. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate how visual–spatial ability predicted academic achievement through arithmetic and reading abilities. Four hundred and ninety-nine Chinese children aged from 10.1 to 11.2 years were recruited and measured visual–spatial, arithmetic, and reading abilities. Their mathematical and Chinese language academic achievements were collected for two consecutive school years, respectively, during the same year as cognitive tests and 1 year after the cognitive tests. Correlation analysis indicated that visual–spatial, arithmetic, and reading abilities and academic achievements were significantly correlated (...) with each other. The structural equation modelling analyses showed that there were two paths from visual–spatial ability to academic achievement: a major path mediated by arithmetic ability and a minor serial mediation path from visual–spatial ability to arithmetic ability to reading ability, then to academic achievement. Results shed light on the importance of visual–spatial ability in education. (shrink)

本书内容包括:传统价值观的整体透视、简论传统文化中各学派的价值理论、儒家价值理想及其现代意义论析、道家风骨和生命哲学的现代诠释等。.

This article puts forward a novel class of Bézier smooth semi-supervised support vector machines(BS4VMs) for classification. As is well known, semi-supervised support vector machine is introduced for dealing with quantities of unlabeled data in the real world. Labeled data is utilized to train the algorithm and then adapting it to classify the unlabeled data. However, the objective semi-supervised function is not differentiable globally. It is required to endure heavy burden in solving two quadratic programming problems with inversion matrix operation. To (...) solve this problem, the interpolation Bézier functions for replacing the non-smooth term have been investigated. Firstly, the development of the novel BS4VMs classifier is introduced. Then, the non-linear model and convergence analysis are presented. To show how the BS4VMs can be practically implemented, experiments on synthetic and real data sets are offered. The theoretical analysis and experiments comparisons clearly illustrate the BS4VMs are superior to the proposed methods in both cross-validation classification accuracy and calculating time. (shrink)

In this article, I elaborate on the approach to joy preserved in East Asian Yogācāra texts authored by Xuanzang and his disciple, Kuiji. I argue that these Yogācāra Buddhists propose a contextualist approach that does not presume joy to be an emotion with an essential property but rather perceives joy as always contextualized in lifeworlds at the personal and interpersonal levels. As such, Xuanzang and Kuiji outline two contrasting pictures of joy to capture how it is experienced in the lifeworld (...) of ignorance and the lifeworld of wisdom, respectively. Upon delineating what joy is and how it is experienced, I continue to explore what joy can promise. Since joy does not have an inherent property, people can always make a collaborative effort to recontextualize joy for inclusion and emancipation. As such, I hope to draw on the Yogācāra analysis of joy to enrich the feminist discussion on happiness. (shrink)

The current study mainly explored the influence of fluid intelligence and emotional intelligence on affective decision-making from a developmental perspective, specifically, during the transition from childhood into early adolescence. Meanwhile, their age-related differences in affective decision-making were explored. A total of 198 participants aged 8–12 completed the Iowa Gambling Task, the Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test and the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Child Form. Based on the net scores of IGT, the development of affective decision-making ability did not increase monotonically with (...) age, and there was a developmental trend of an impaired IGT performance in early adolescence, especially in the early learning phase of the IGT. More importantly, IQ and EI played different roles for children and early adolescents: IQ and EI jointly predicted the IGT performance for 8–10 years old children, whereas only EI contributed to the IGT performance of 11–12 years old early adolescents. The present study extends the evidence how cognitive processing and emotional processing interact in affective decision-making from the developmental perspective. Furthermore, it provides insights of future research and intervention with early adolescents’ poor affective decision-making. (shrink)

The current study aimed to investigate differences in theory of mind between left-behind children and non-left-behind children in rural China and to examine the potential protective role of general reasoning ability in left-behind children’s theory of mind. Participants included 213 children aged 7.10 to 13.67 years (111 boys and 102 girls, M = 10.51 years, SD = 1.33), 101 of whom were left behind in rural areas by one or both migrating parents for at least 6 months. The Strange Stories (...) task, a second-order false belief task and a faux pas task were used to measure children’s theory of mind, and Sessions B and C in Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices were used to test children’s general reasoning ability. The results showed that left-behind children scored lower on both the faux pas task and Strange Stories task. Additionally, on second-order false belief understanding, left-behind boys performed worse than non-left-behind boys, while left-behind girls scored higher than non-left behind girls. Moreover, children’s general reasoning ability moderated the relationship between parental migrant status and children’s faux pas understanding: For children with high levels of general reasoning ability, left-behind children performed similarly to non-left-behind children, while for children with low levels of general reasoning ability, left-behind children scored lower than non-left-behind children, indicating that general reasoning ability buffered the negative effect of being left behind on children’s theory of mind development. The implications of these findings for training directed at left-behind children are discussed. (shrink)

Resumen: En la antigua filosofía confuciana, el pensamiento de la “Armonía entre el Hombre y la Naturaleza” ocupa un lugar primordial. La noción confuciana tiene una arraigada y extensa historia, evolucionando y profundizándose a lo largo de sucesivas generaciones. Su contenido es profundo e intrincado, y abarca una perspectiva armoniosa e integrada de la naturaleza, una priorización de la rectitud sobre el interés personal y una perspectiva de desarrollo sostenible. Estas ideas tienen un valor significativo como punto de referencia para (...) el establecimiento y avance de los sistemas sociales contemporáneos. Este artículo pretende explorar los orígenes y el desarrollo del concepto de “Armonía entre el Hombre y la Naturaleza”, al tiempo que analiza y reflexiona sobre cómo influye esta ideología en la construcción de la sociedad actual. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the synchronization of a class of multiple neural networks with delay and directed disconnected switching topology based on state observer via impulsive coupling control. The coupling topology is connected sequentially, and the controller adjusts the state value through event-triggering strategies. Different from the related works on MNNs, its state in this paper is assumed to be unmeasurable, and the time delay is also unmeasurable. Therefore, the observer does not contain the time-delay term. The impulsive switching (...) controller and observer controller adjust the system through the observed value. By constructing the corresponding augmented matrix, the system can finally achieve quasi-synchronization. Through derivation, we give the sufficient conditions ensuring quasi-synchronization via the event-triggered impulse control mechanism. In addition, numerical simulation examples are given to test our results of the theorem. (shrink)

Individuals voluntarily internalize gender stereotypes and present personality characteristics and behaviors that conform to gender role requirements. The aim of the current study was to explore the reasons people internalize gender stereotypes. We conducted surveys with 317 college students in China to examine the relationship between gender self-stereotyping and life satisfaction. We also analyzed the mediating roles of relational self-esteem and personal self-esteem and the moderation role of gender. The results of path analysis showed that gender self-stereotyping directly affected life (...) satisfaction and indirectly affected life satisfaction through RSE and PSE in a serial pattern; however, the serial mediation model was only significant in the male sample. Higher gender self-stereotyping was associated with male participants’ higher level of RSE and PSE and further correlated with higher life satisfaction. This study addressed the questions: “What are the benefits of gender self-stereotyping?” and “What are the major barriers to counter-stereotyping?” The results enrich our understanding of these issues, especially relative to the collectivist culture in China, and may be used to create more effective interventions to help people break through the stereotypes. (shrink)

Cross-shareholding is a new type of strategic means for capital operation and is an important component of corporate governance. With the increasing complexity of business motivation, the structure of a cross-shareholding network is becoming more intricate, and it exposes various important local patterns with different economic functions. The goal of this paper is to uncover investment mechanisms and economic functions implied in cross-shareholding networks by analyzing the local characteristic patterns of company interactions. In this paper, we construct the CSNs of (...) listed companies and extract the directed triadic motifs to reveal the evolutionary characteristics of local investment patterns at the company and industry levels. On the company level, we find that companies tend to form V-shaped structures with other companies, but bidirectional shareholding patterns and circular relationships in the triads are scarce. On the industry level, we identify the characteristic linking patterns of some industries with a role analysis of the industries. Furthermore, we detect the evolutionary characteristics of industry interrelationships in three implied patterns. Such a motif evolution analysis may provide valuable information for investors and supervisory departments that make decisions about investment portfolios and policy. Meanwhile, this study is also helpful for exploring the implied information in other empirical networks. (shrink)

The study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the coronavirus anxiety scale during the coronavirus disease 2019 delta epidemic. A total of 2,116 participants on the Chinese mainland completed the online survey. We employed exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to investigate the factor structure. The findings showed that the one-factor model of the CAS Chinese version fitted perfectly with the data. The multigroup CFAs showed the measurement invariance across gender and age groups. We also examined the CAS’s (...) internal consistency and convergent and concurrent validity. The results demonstrated that the one-factor model had good reliability and convergent and concurrent validity. Overall, according to our findings, the CAS Chinese version was reliable for measuring coronavirus anxiety during the COVID-19 delta outbreak. (shrink)

In this study, for COVID-19, we divide people into four categories: susceptible S t, closely contacted C t, infective I t, and removed R t according to the current epidemic situation and then investigate two models: the SCIR models with immigration and without immigration. For the former, Model 1, we obtain the condition for global stability of its disease-free equilibrium. For the latter, Model 2, we establish the local asymptotic stability of its endemic equilibrium by constructing Lyapunov function. Afterwards, by (...) the bifurcation theory, we qualitatively analyze the properties of its Hopf bifurcations of the latter. Finally, numerical simulations are given to illustrate the obtained results of two models. The results imply the importance of finding closely contacted and overseas imports on epidemic control. It indicates that not only the incubation delay τ is crucial for the containment of the COVID-19 but also the scientific and rigorous containment measures are the key factors of the success of the containment. (shrink)

This study investigates the Proteus effect from the first-person perspective and during avatar embodiment in actual exercise. In addition to the immediate measurements of the Proteus effect, prolonged effects such as next-day perception and exercise-related outcomes are also explored. We theorized the Proteus effect as altered perceived self-concept and explored the association between virtual reality avatar manipulation and self-concept in the exercise context. While existing studies have mainly investigated the Proteus effect in a non-VR environment or after VR embodiment, we (...) aim to contribute to the literature by addressing this concern to explore how the Proteus effect works in actual VR exercise. Through a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment, the results partially support the Proteus effect. Regarding actual physical activity, embodying an avatar with a six pack during exercise creates fewer body movements. No significant effect was found for perceived exertion. We also explored the role of sex as a potential moderator in the association of the Proteus effect on exercise outcomes. The Proteus effect was supported by immediate and next-day self-efficacy for core-muscle exercise only among female participants. The between-subject design allowed us to probe how avatar manipulation of muscular body shape with a six pack as opposed to normal body shape influences participants’ self-concept and exercise outcomes, as limited VR studies have employed within-subject comparisons. This also contributes to the literature by providing an upward comparison as opposed to the previous downward comparison regarding body fitness. The overall results supported the Proteus effect in the context of core-muscle exercise when comparing normal and ideal body shape avatars. However, the Proteus effect as an altered self-concept and its effects on self-efficacy for exercise were supported among females but not males. Whereas the female participants who embodied avatars with a six pack associated themselves more with the muscular concept than other people, the male participants who embodied avatars with a six pack perceived themselves as more normal than others. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the tourism industry in various ways, including tourists’ travel motivations and intentions. Unlike previous studies that have focused on the dark side of the pandemic, this study adds the dimension of perceptions of positive information on COVID-19 to the Theory of Planned Behavior to explore their influence on travel motivation and intention. A total of 470 valid questionnaires were collected from a sample of Chinese university students. The results showed that the students’ perceptions of positive (...) COVID-19 information positively impacted their travel intentions through the variables of perceived behavioral control, travel attitudes, and travel motivations. Perceived behavioral control was the mediating variable that most explained the impact of perceptions of positive COVID-19 information on travel motivation and intention. This study contributes to the understanding of the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism and of university students’ travel motivations and intentions. It also offers implications for the tourism industry to formulate relevant recovery strategies during and after the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper studies the adaptive event-triggered finite-time tracking of output-constrained high-order nonlinear systems with time-varying powers. Due to the presence of multiple unknown powers and the consideration of event-triggered control, all the existing control methods of output-constrained nonlinear systems are inapplicable. By introducing nonlinear mappings, finite-time performance functions, and low-power and high-power terms into adding a power integrator technique and the relative threshold strategy, an adaptive state-feedback controller is designed to eliminate the effects caused by the output constraint and time-varying (...) powers. It is proved that all the closed-loop signals are bounded, the asymmetric time-varying output constraint is not violated, and the tracking error converges to a prescribed arbitrarily small region around zero in a preassigned finite time. Furthermore, the Zeno phenomenon can be avoided. Two simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of this control scheme. (shrink)

Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists’ views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, i.e., (...) word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units. (shrink)

With the rapid development of urbanization, the urban expansion morphology has been changing with complex driving mechanisms behind the urban evolution process. This article simulates the results of urban land development contingent upon decision-makers’ risk preferences and reveals the inherent law of the effect of risk preferences on urban expansion morphology. Results show that cautious decision-makers lead to the urban expansion morphology being relatively compact, and the reckless decision-makers lead the urban expansion to sprawl. Moreover, there are obvious differences in (...) strengths of planning constraints on the decision-makers with different risk preferences. The reckless decision-makers, driven by the economic interests, are more likely to break through the planning, especially when the planning is not reasonable. It is also found that enhancing executive ability of planning for the reckless decision-makers can promote compactness of the urban expansion morphology. However, the effect of enhancing executive ability of planning on the cautious decision-makers is limited. Thus, in the case of unreasonable planning, the executive ability of planning to the reckless decision-makers should be enhanced so as to avoid urban sprawl. (shrink)

China set the goal of expanding early childhood education in 2018, by encouraging the development of public interest kindergartens to provide high-quality, low-cost preschool services to the general public. This is in response to the challenges of accessibility, affordability, and accountability besetting China’s current ECE system. However, the transition toward PIK has been slow due to various complex problems, including the lackluster willingness of ECE providers to become PIK. To better understand the challenges leading to low participation, this study explores (...) the external pressures affecting ECE providers and evaluates the external factors that influence their level of social responsibility. A stratified-random sampling questionnaire survey solicited responses from 832 ECE personnel representing 261 kindergartens from across China. Our findings suggest that institutional pressure has a positive effect on social responsibility and inclusive participation. We also found that institution visibility positively regulates the relationship between institutional pressure and social responsibility. At the same time, the level of environmental perception positively governs the relationship between social responsibility and participation willingness. Kindergartens should have certain social values, including assuming certain behaviors and participating in social activities in the spirit of social service and ensure multiple subjects’ synergetic governance. (shrink)

In this paper, I scrutinize Mou Zongsan’s doctrine of Moral Metaphysics in which Mou fuses Kant’s architectonic of knowledge with Chinese philosophy. Through this doctrine, Mou contends that: 1) according to Chinese philosophy, humans do have access to intellectual intuition; 2) this possibility justifies the legitimacy and priority of Chinese philosophy. To examine Mou’s argument, I first present Mou’s reading of Kant’s conception of intellectual intuition; then, I elucidate the way in which Mou identifies intellectual intuition as the intuitive knowledge (...) in Confucianism; subsequently, I introduce Mou’s doctrine Moral Metaphysics and his critique of Kant and Heidegger; finally, I reflect on Mou’s readings of Kant by pinpointing issues in this interpretation. Nevertheless, this examination shall never negate Mou’s contribution to modernizing Chinese philosophy. (shrink)