Abusive supervision has long been found to have remarkably negative impacts on individual and organizational outcomes. Accordingly, prior studies have explored many organizational and supervisory predictors of abusive supervision and offered several interventions to reduce it. However, extant research lacks the bottom-up perspective to explore how employees can act to reduce abusive supervision, which is an important factor that enriches abusive supervision literature and helps employees protect themselves from being abused. Drawing on self-disclosure theory, we develop a model of whether (...) and how employee boundary blurring behavior may protect them from being abused by their supervisors. Specifically, we conducted two studies to test the theoretical model, including a scenario-based experimental study and a multi-source, multi-wave field study. The results reveal a negative indirect effect of employee boundary blurring behavior on abusive supervision via supervisor liking toward the employee. By uncovering employee boundary blurring behavior as an antecedent of abusive supervision, we enrich the abusive supervision literature with a bottom-up behavioral strategy for employees to proactively protect themselves from being abused. We hope our findings will encourage future studies to identify boundary conditions and other solutions for employees to minimize the risk of being abused. (shrink)

To reason about continuous processes in some areas of artificial intelligence and embedded systems one has to express real-time properties. For such purpose a real-time logic has to be considered. Various such logics have been proposed. Some of these formalisms interpret formulas over intervals of time. These are called interval logics. Zhou Chaochen and Michael Hansen have introduced one such first-order interval logic called Neighborhood Logic (NL) which has two expanding modalities ◊r and ◊l. They have shown the (...) adequacy of these modalities by deriving other unary and binary modalities from them; in particular, they show that chop can be expressed in terms of these modalities. The logic is subsequently expanded to get a Duration Calculus (called DC/nl) by expressing temporal variables as integrals of state variables. Liveness and fairness properties of a computing system can now be expressed in DC/nl by means of neighborhood (expanding) modalities. We take up an investigation of DC/nl in detail. We present a proof system for it. We further show that most of the results that hold in the original Duration Calculus continue to hold in our logic with some modifications. In this process we discuss soundness, completeness, and decidability results for DC/nl. Thus this paper establishes DC/nl as a useful formalism for specifying and verifying properties of real-time computing systems. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the method of genealogy in moral philosophy, with a focus on evaluating the credibility of moral progress judgments. Despite genealogy becoming a new trend in this field, I critique three types of defective grand narrative genealogies represented by the works of Peter Railton, Michael Huemer, and Nicholas Smyth. I argue that their genealogies fail to be adequate for evaluating moral progress judgments’ credibility. Railton’s genealogy lacks specificity regarding the relatum of the causal story he presents, (...) Huemer’s fails to withstand the scrutiny of historical evidence, and Smyth’s gives no clear verdict on the credibility of the moral progress judgments it explains. These failures, I argue, stem from grand narratives’ neglect of the particularities in each case of moral belief emergence. The disregard for details renders grand narratives generally inadequate for credibility evaluation. Instead, I propose a case study approach that takes into account four types of particulars in each case. I argue that this approach is more methodologically adequate in evaluating the credibility of moral progress judgments since these case-specific details are essential in determining the credibility of a moral belief. (shrink)

With regard to organ donation, Germany is an ‘opt-in’ country, which requires explicit consent from donors. The relatives are either asked to decide on behalf of the donors’ preferences, if these are unknown or if the potential donor has explicitly transferred the decision to them. At the core of this policy lies the sociocultural and moral premise of a rational, autonomous individual, whose rights require legal protection in order to guarantee a voluntary decision. In concrete transplantation practices, the family plays (...) an even more important role. Potential donors and their families decide while being embedded in relations, a point which does still not gain full recognition. This particular discrepancy between policy and practice creates conflicts, which remain taboos of academic inquiry and public discourse. Our analysis shows a plurality of the family’s role in the transplantation process, which reveals an inner tension of the organ donation system. This tension provokes epistemic opacity on the one hand and different collective strategies as responses to discursive exclusion on the other. In future deliberations about organ donation, it is important to create spaces for open discussion, but also practices of communicative engagement, which take care of the needs and emotions attached to taboos. (shrink)

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how the (...) most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics—recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (Synthese 174(1): 79-98 2010)—needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives. (shrink)

Many actions have instrumental aims, in which we move our bodies to achieve a physical outcome in the environment. However, we also perform actions with epistemic aims, in which we move our bodies to acquire information and learn about the world. A large literature on action recognition investigates how observers represent and understand the former class of actions; but what about the latter class? Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to learn? Here, (...) 5 experiments explore epistemic action understanding. We filmed volunteers playing a ‘physics game’ consisting of two rounds: Players shook an opaque box and attempted to determine (i) the number of objects hidden inside, or (ii) the shape of the objects inside. Then, independent subjects watched these videos and were asked to determine which videos came from which round: Who was shaking for number and who was shaking for shape? Across several variations, observers successfully determined what an actor was trying to learn, based only on their actions (i.e., how they shook the box)—even when the box’s contents were identical across rounds. These results demonstrate that humans can infer epistemic intent from physical behaviors, adding a new dimension to research on action understanding. (shrink)

Many studies have shown that about three biological motions can be maintained in working memory. However, no study has yet analyzed the difficulties of experiment materials used, which partially affect the ecological validity of the experiment results. We use the perspective of system anatomy to decompose BM, and thoroughly explore the influencing factors of difficulties of BMs, including presentation duration, joints to execute motions, limbs to execute motions, type of articulation interference tasks, and number of joints and planes involved in (...) the BM. We apply the change detection paradigm supplemented by the articulation interference task to measure the BM working memory capacity of participants. Findings show the following: the shorter the presentation duration, the less participants remembered; the more their wrist moved, the less accurate their memory was; repeating verbs provided better results than did repeating numerals to suppress verbal encoding; the more complex the BM, the less participants remembered; and whether the action was executed by the handed limbs did not affect the WMC. These results indicate that there are many factors that can be used to adjust BM memory load. These factors can help sports psychology professionals to better evaluate the difficulty of BMs, and can also partially explain the differences in estimations of BM WMC in previous studies. (shrink)

In this article, I map current conceptions of cosmopolitanism and sketch distinctions between the concept and humanism and multiculturalism. The differences mirror what I take to be a central motif of cosmopolitanism: the capacity to fuse reflective openness to the new with reflective loyalty to the known. This motif invites a reconsideration of the meaning of culture as well as of the relations between home and the world.

The old, controversial question of whether Confucianism is a religion or not has reemerged as a central issue in contemporary China's "Cultural Renaissance Movement." The papers in this issue offer a glimpse of some notable scholarly views in recent discussions on the religious properties of Confucianism and the possibility of the religious transformation of Confucianism. The major topics include the competition between Confucianism and Christianity, the necessity to establish Confucianism as a state religion, the conception of fashioning Confucianism as a (...) civil religion, the potential for Confucianism to provide the basis for a new Chinese cultural nationalism, and the role of Confucianism in the Chinese people's spirituality and daily lives. (shrink)

Richard Whately’s views of arguments involving authority are very different in his Elements of Rhetoric and his Elements of Logic. This essay begins by documenting these differences and wondering why they are. It then proceeds to take a broader and more historical view of Whately’s discussions of authority and finds him occupying an important developmental ground between his predecessor Locke and contemporary views of the argument from authority. In fact, some of the things we now think are important in a (...) good argument from authority are anticipated by Whately. (shrink)

The stories we tell of psychiatric disability1 and gender play a crucial role not only in the experience of psychiatric disorders, but in who disordered individuals are in the most literal sense. Recent theories of the self—so-called narrative self-constitution views, or “narrative theories”—contend that the self is, fundamentally, constituted by a narrative one tells about oneself. Furthermore, this narrative almost certainly absorbs elements from surrounding cultural scripts. Thus, narrative self-constitution views can shed light on some of the ways in which (...) cultural... (shrink)

Experimental therapies with embryonic stem cells and, more recently, human induced pluripotent stem cells are steadily gaining ground in clinical practice. The implementation of su...

Elucidating distinct morphological atrophy patterns of Alzheimer’s disease and its prodromal stage, namely, mild cognitive impairment helps to improve early diagnosis and medical intervention of AD. On that account, we aimed to obtain distinct patterns of voxel-wise morphological atrophy and its further perturbation on structural covariance network in AD and MCI compared with healthy controls. T1-weighted anatomical images of matched AD, MCI, and HCs were included in this study. Gray matter volume was obtained using voxel-based morphometry and compared among three (...) groups. In addition, structural covariance network of identified brain regions exhibiting morphological difference was constructed and compared between pairs of three groups. Thus, patients with AD have a reduced hippocampal volume and an increased rate of atrophy compared with MCI and HCs. MCI exhibited a decreased trend in bilateral hippocampal volume compared with HCs and the accelerated right hippocampal atrophy rate than HCs. In AD, the hippocampus further exhibited increased structural covariance connected to reward related brain regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex, the putamen, the caudate, and the insula compared with HCs. In addition, the patients with AD exhibited increased structural covariance of left hippocampus with the bilateral insula, the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal gyrus, and the cerebellum than MCI. These results reveal distinct patterns of morphological atrophy in AD and MCI, providing new insights into pathology of AD. (shrink)

Liberal egalitarianism is commonly criticized for being insufficiently sensitive to status inequalities and the effects of misrecognition. I examine this criticism as it applies to Ronald Dworkin’s ‘equality of resources’ and argue that, in fact, liberal egalitarians possess the resources to deal effectively with recognition-type issues. More precisely, while conceding that the distributive principles required to realize equality of resources must apply against a particular institutional background, I point out, following Dworkin, that among the principles guiding this background is a (...) ‘principle of independence,’ and that this principle, properly interpreted, requires government to protect people against the disadvantageous effects of wrongful prejudicial discrimination. Moreover, I give an account of wrongful prejudice which is grounded in a particular interpretation of the abstract egalitarian principle Dworkin requires for a government to be legitimate and which goes a long way toward acknowledging status inequalities. Finally, I suggest other resources within the theory for responding to residual problems of recognition not addressed by the principle of independence. (shrink)

People implicitly generalize the actions of known individuals in a social group to unknown members. However, actions have social goals and evaluative valences, and the extent to which actions with different valences (helpful and harmful) are implicitly generalized among group members remains unclear. We used computer animations to simulate social group actions, where helping and hindering actions were represented by aiding and obstructing another's climb up a hill. Study 1 found that helpful actions are implicitly expected to be shared among (...) members of the same group but not among members of different groups, but no such effect was found for harmful actions. This suggests that helpful actions are more likely than harmful actions to be implicitly generalized to group members. This finding was replicated in Study 2 by increasing the group size from three to five. Study 3 found that the null effect for generalizing harmful actions among group members is not due to the difficulty of detecting action generalization, as both helpful and harmful actions are similarly generalized within particular individuals. Moreover, Study 4 demonstrated that weakening social group information resulted in the absence of implicit generalization for helpful actions, suggesting the specificity of group membership. Study 5 revealed that the generalization of helping actions occurred when actions were performed by multiple group members rather than being repeated by one group member, showing group-based inductive generalization. Overall, these findings support valence-dependent implicit action generalization among group members. This implies that people may possess different knowledge regarding valenced actions on category-based generalization. (shrink)

External regulatory and normative pressures from both the Chinese central environmental protection inspection (CEPI) program and public participation can act together to influence corporate environmental governance behavior. This research uses the multiperiod Difference-In-Differences method to test the compound impact of CEPI and public participation on corporate environmental governance strategies and investigate the underlying influence mechanisms. The results show that CEPI and public participation have a positive compound effect on the corporate “source-control” strategy. A reasonable reduction in pollution charges and increased (...) environmental subsidies are essential to stimulate the green innovation potential of heavily polluting firms. Our research helps clarify the game relationship between the central and the local governments and analyzes how the relationship between the government, the public, and corporates affects environmental governance, thereby advancing principal-agent theory and expanding the current research on institutional pressures and corporate environmental governance. (shrink)

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, the public keeps getting epidemic-related information on the media. News reports on the increasing number of fatalities have exposed individuals to death, which causes negative emotional experiences such as tension, anxiety, and fear. This study aimed to investigate whether creativity could serve as an anxiety-buffer when mortality is salient. Based on previous findings, the present study utilized type of creative task and personal search for meaning as moderators. In Study 1, a 2 × (...) 2 between-subject design was utilized, and 168 subjects were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions. In Study 2, 221 subjects were recruited. The experimental procedure was similar to Study 1, except that the priming paradigm of mortality was changed and search for meaning was included as an additional moderating variable. State anxiety was measured as the dependent variable in both studies. Results of Study 1 showed that, while the benevolent creative task could buffer anxiety in the mortality salience condition, the malevolent creative task did not have the same effect. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between mortality salience, type of creative task, and search for meaning in life on anxiety. In Study 2, the buffering function of benevolent creativity was more intense for participants with a higher level of search for meaning. Together, these findings reveal the influence of different types of creative tasks on individual anxiety levels under death priming conditions and the moderating effect of search for meaning in this relationship. Further, they suggest the need to focus on the role of creativity in terror management. (shrink)

Slower perceptual alternations, a notable perceptual effect observed in psychiatric disorders, can be alleviated by antidepressant therapies that affect serotonin levels in the brain. While these phenomena have been well documented, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain to be elucidated. Our study bridges this gap by employing a computational cognitive approach within a Bayesian predictive coding framework to explore these mechanisms in depression. We fitted a prediction error (PE) model to behavioral data from a binocular rivalry task, uncovering that significantly higher (...) initial prior precision and lower PE led to a slower switch rate in patients with depression. Furthermore, serotonin‐targeting antidepressant treatments significantly decreased the prior precision and increased PE, both of which were predictive of improvements in the perceptual alternation rate of depression patients. These findings indicated that the substantially slower perception switch rate in patients with depression was caused by the greater reliance on top‐down priors and that serotonin treatment's efficacy was in its recalibration of these priors and enhancement of PE. Our study not only elucidates the cognitive underpinnings of depression, but also suggests computational modeling as a potent tool for integrating cognitive science with clinical psychology, advancing our understanding and treatment of cognitive impairments in depression. (shrink)

In this study, we comprehensively examine the relationships between ethical leadership, social exchange, and employee commitment. We find that organizational and supervisory ethical leadership are positively related to employee commitment to the organization and supervisor, respectively. We also find that different types of social exchange relationships mediate these relationships. Our results suggest that the application of a multifoci social exchange perspective to the context of ethical leadership is indeed useful: As hypothesized, within-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between organizational ethical leadership (...) and commitment to the organization) are stronger than cross-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between supervisory ethical leadership and commitment to the organization). In addition, in contrast to the “trickle down” model of ethical leadership (Mayer et al. in Org Behav Hum Decis Process 108:1–13, 2009), our results suggest that organizational ethical leadership is both directly and indirectly related to employee outcomes. (shrink)

Riassunto: La filosofia originale cinese è una sublimazione della coscienza culturale umana di base - la coscienza della vita e della riproduzione - che è l’unificazione del “Concetto di yin e yang” e del “Concetto di ciclo di vita “ in cui “lo yin e lo yang si uniscono per creare tutte le cose, e il ciclio dà una vita senza fine. La cultura originale cinese determina la visione filosofica, la visione artistica, il temperamento emotivo, la benessere psicologica e lo (...) spirito nazionale della nazione cinese. Il sistema filosofico cinese, che rappresenta l’unificazione della cosmologia, dell’epistemologia e della metodologia della nazione cinese, è un sistema filosofico completo e maturo che si è formato nella società tardo primitiva molto prima delle Dinastie Xia, Shang e Zhou. La cultura originale cinese, dalla cultura della ceramica dipinta di 7.000 anni fa fino ai giorni nostri, dalla cultura archeologica sotterranea alla cultura di massa terrestre, è un concetto ampio di belle arti, determinato da una visione filosofica dell’arte plastica di osservare gli oggetti e prendere immmagini. La cultura originale e la filosofia originale della Cina primitiva sono ancora conservate in un’eredità storica estremamente ricca e completa nella vita sociale della cultura di massa. Per questo motivo la Cina è l’unico Paese tra le civiltà antiche che non aver subito una frattura culturale. (shrink)

Certain events settle themselves in the collective memory of humankind where they keep functioning for decades as points of reference for future generations. The announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly was such an event. Every one of us will remember this thought-provoking occasion or will, at least, be confronted with the extended media coverage of this breakthrough in medical science. Immediately, world leaders reacted and the question was raised how long it would take before the shepherd was cloned. More (...) important is the sequel to this medical breakthrough: the successful Dolly experiment led to the possibility of human embryonic and adult stem cell research. In 2000, the Pontifical Academy for Life took a position on this additional and innovative research. At the same time, understanding these technological innovations takes a lot of time as a result of the immense scientific complexity of these new technologies. In this article, we want to clarify the technological possibilities as well as the moral, theological and ethical issues involved. To some, it seems that humans usurped the Divine Creator's place and, by doing this, crossed a border. To others, this medical breakthrough is in line with previous reproductive technological innovations. (shrink)

Os dois subgêneros epistolares desenvolvidos por Antônio Vieira entre 1646 e 1696, a carta familiar e a carta negocial, reatualizam os preceitos das artes dictaminis antigas. Escritas como imitação verossímil e decorosa de fala de pessoa natural, as canas produzem a presença do corpo e voz do remetente, reativando neo-escolasticamente as técnicas da sermocinatio latina. A comunicação tratará de categorias retóricas e teológico-políticas das articulações dos dois subgêneros: a - a enunciação ou o contrato enunciativo, em que caracteres e afetos (...) constantes qualificam o remetente como tipo discreto que se dirige ao destinatário aplicando decoros específicos da pessoa e da circunstância; b - o enunciado ou a narração, em que as tópicas da invenção e as partes da disposição constituem a verossimilhança adequada ao subgênero e à matéria exposta. (shrink)

I formulate the Zermelo-Russell paradox for naive set theory. A sketch is given of Zermelo’s solution to the paradox: the cumulative type structure. A careful analysis of the set formation process shows a missing component in this solution: the necessity of an assumed imaginary jump out of an infinite universe. Thus a set is formed by a suitable combination of concrete and imaginary operations all of which can be made or assumed by a Turing machine. Some consequences are drawn from (...) this improved analysis of the concept of set, for the theory of sets and for the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

The earth's temperature, with rapid global warming over the past 30 years, is now passing through a period of relatively stable climate that has existed for more than 10,000 years. Further warming of more than 1°C will make the earth warmer than it has been in a million years. "Business-as-usual" scenarios, with fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions continuing to increase approximately 2 percent annually for several more decades, yield additional warming of 2° to 3°C this century and imply changes that (...) constitute practically a different planet. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. The changes include not only loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale because of worldwide rising seas. Sea level will increase slowly at first, as losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating ice streams are partly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet thickening in the ice sheet interiors. But as Greenland and West Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by melt-water and as buttressing ice shelves disappear because of a warming ocean, the balance will tip to rapid ice loss, bringing multiple positive feedbacks into play and causing cataclysmic ice sheet disintegration. The earth's history suggests that with warming of 2° to 3°C, the new equilibrium sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising sea level of the order of 25 meters. (shrink)