This article presents and analyzes the basic features of wellbeing competence. Following a procedural approach to wellbeing, I propose wellbeing competence as a significant object of focus in the philosophical debate on wellbeing. Instead of being concerned one-sidedly with abstract ideals and explicit, theoretical knowledge about what constitutes wellbeing, wellbeing competence is the ability to handle the concrete process of living well and helping others live well in a generally qualified way. This article presents a theory that considers wellbeing competence (...) a complex form of knowing how. Further, it outlines central aspects and components of wellbeing competence. I suggest four components to play central functional roles in wellbeing competence when supplementing each other: empathy, emotional awareness, flexible perspective, and metacognition. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model of retrieval of intentions from long-term memory. We model retrieval as a stochastic race between a plurality of potentially relevant intentions stored in long-term memory. Psychological theories are dominated by two opposing conceptions of the role of memory in temporally extended agency – as when a person has to remember to make a phone call in the afternoon because, in the morning, she promised she would do so. According to the Working (...) Memory conception, remembering to make the phone call is explained in terms of the construction and maintenance of intentions in working-memory. According to the Long-Term Memory conception, we should explain the episode in terms of an ability to store intentions in long-term memory. The two conceptions predict different processing profiles. The aim of this paper is to present a new mathematical model of the type of memory mechanism that could realise the long-term memory representations of intentions necessary for the Long-Term Memory conception. We present and illustrate the formal model and propose a new type of experimental paradigm that could allow us to test which of the two conceptions provides the best explanation of the role of memory in temporally extended agency. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic creates an unprecedented threatening situation worldwide with an urgent need for critical reflection and new knowledge production, but also a need for imminent action despite prevailing knowledge gaps and multilevel uncertainty. With regard to the role of research ethics in these pandemic times some argue in favor of exceptionalism, others, including the authors of this paper, emphasize the urgent need to remain committed to core ethical principles and fundamental human rights obligations all reflected in research regulations and (...) guidelines carefully crafted over time. In this paper we disentangle some of the arguments put forward in the ongoing debate about Covid-19 human challenge studies (CHIs) and the concomitant role of health-related research ethics in pandemic times. We suggest it might be helpful to think through a lens differentiating between risk, strict uncertainty and ignorance. We provide some examples of lessons learned by harm done in the name of research in the past and discuss the relevance of this legacy in the current situation. (shrink)

The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages.

Ample attention is being paid in the higher education literature to promoting active learning among students. However, critical examination of educational purposes and ends is largely lacki...

Evidence suggests that English speakers use pronouns when referring to the grammatical subject and predictable thematic role. We tested how grammatical role and thematic role predictability affect different types of referential forms, namely, overt pronouns and null pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. We found that both overt and null pronouns were sensitive to grammatical role. However, we did not find any evidence that overt and null pronouns were sensitive to thematic role predictability. Although null pronouns were influenced by grammatical role, the (...) rate of null pronouns for subject reference was very low compared to that of overt pronouns. Given the frequent occurrence of null pronouns in Mandarin, our results suggest that the use of null pronouns may not be explained by a simple grammatical role mechanism. (shrink)

In this paper, a data-driven superheating control strategy is developed for organic Rankine cycle processes. Due to non-Gaussian stochastic disturbances imposed on heat sources, the quantized minimum error entropy is adopted to construct the performance index of superheating control systems. Furthermore, particle swarm optimization algorithm is applied to obtain optimal control law by minimizing the performance index. The implementation procedures of the presented superheating control system in an ORC-based waste heat recovery process are presented. The simulation results testify the effectiveness (...) of the presented control algorithm. (shrink)

New medical technologies provide us with new possibilities in health care and health care research. Depending on their degree of novelty, they may as well present us with a whole range of unforeseen normative challenges. Partly, this is due to a lack of appropriate norms to perceive and handle new technologies. This article investigates our ways of establishing such norms. We argue that in this respect analogies have at least two normative functions: they inform both our understanding and our conduct. (...) Furthermore, as these functions are intertwined and can blur moral debates, a functional investigation of analogies can be a fruitful part of ethical analysis. We argue that although analogies can be conservative; because they bring old concepts to bear upon new ones, there are at least three ways in which they can be creative. First, understandings of new technologies are quite different from the analogies that established them, and come to be analogies themselves. That is, the concepts may turn out to be quite different from the analogies that established them. Second, analogies transpose similarities from one area into another, where they previously had no bearing. Third, analogies tend to have a figurative function, bringing in something new and different from the content of the analogies. We use research-biobanking as a practical example in our investigations. (shrink)

To help retailers gain consumers’ trust, many studies have investigated antecedents of consumer trust. However, distrust, a concept closely related to trust, has attracted only sporadic research attention. As a result, whether factors that increase consumer trust can eliminate consumer distrust is unclear. To deepen understanding of trust and distrust, this study applies the critical incident technique to identify and compare the antecedents of trust and distrust of Chinese consumers. The results show that the antecedents of distrust differ from those (...) of trust, indicating different formulation mechanisms of both. Therefore, on the one hand, retailers should pay attention to increasing consumer trust, and on the other hand, they should develop marketing activities to reduce consumer distrust. (shrink)

Social-bots-mediated information manipulation is influencing the public opinion environment, and their role and behavior patterns in news proliferation are worth exploring. Based on the analysis of bots' posting frequency, influence, and retweeting relationship, we take the diffusion of The New York Times' coverage of Xinjiang issue on the overseas social platform Twitter as an example and employ the two-step flow model. It is found that in the role of second-step diffusion, unlike posting news indiscriminately in first-step diffusion, social bots are (...) more inclined to postcontroversial information in second-step diffusion; in terms of diffusion patterns, although social bots are more engaged in first-step diffusion than in second-step diffusion and can trigger human users to retweet, they are still inferior to humans in terms of influence. (shrink)

The rational allocation of functional areas is the foundation for addressing the sustainable development of cities. Efficient and accurate identification methods of urban functional areas are of great significance to the adjustment and testing of urban planning and industrial layout optimization. Firstly, by employing multisource geographic data, an identification method of urban functional areas was developed. A quantitative measurement approach of the urban functional area was then established considering the comprehensive effects of human-land, space-time, and thematic information to present the (...) covering area of ground objects, public awareness, and empirical research. Finally, the Zhengzhou city, which locates in Henan province of central China, was used to test the method. The results show that the developed method is efficient, accurate, and universal and can identify urban functional areas quickly and accurately. We found that the overall distribution of Zhengzhou’s functional areas presents a spatial pattern of single and multimixed coordinated development. The city’s commercial functional areas and commercial-based mixed functional areas are located in the city’s central area. The green square’s function area occupies relatively low and is mainly distributed in the city’s fringe. (shrink)

Discussions about the role of universities have long been framed in terms of questions of what is good for the public, as well as how and whether higher education serves that good. Today, the language of societal impact has become an accepted way for policymakers to frame the matter, but just who is included in the underlying definition of society that this formulation presupposes? In this paper, we consider how society has been constructed in discussions of the societal impact of (...) humanities research in Denmark, through an engagement with legislation, national political commentary, and institutional policy. We draw on the work of Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil to analyse the vision of society these policies construct. We conclude with proposals for alternative societies and forms of policy that these philosophers make possible. (shrink)

ObjectiveNumerous studies have demonstrated that religious belief is associated with prosocial behavior. However, how do they maintain cooperation in societies with a predominating atheist population, such as China? Different primings and a quasi-experiment are used to examine the link between communist authority and prosocial behaviors among college students in China.Materials and methodsIn Study 1, the subjects’ communist authority in the university lab was primed by a communist-authority video. In Study 2, we compared the priming effects of communist authority and religion (...) on prosocial intention. Study 3 investigated the priming effect of communist authority on prosocial behaviors by employing a scrambled sentence task in the university lab. A quasi-experiment was conducted in Study 4.ResultsResults showed that communist-authority, a reminder of secular authorities, increased prosociality among college students. And empathy moderated the relationship between secular authorities and prosociality in Study 3 and Study 4.DiscussionCommunist authority, a secular authority prime, has a positive effect on promoting prosocial behaviors. These results provided a feasible yet novel way to reveal the mechanism of the relationship between secular authorities and prosociality in China. (shrink)

As global warming becomes increasingly prominent, countries worldwide advocate for a low-carbon economy to cope with the pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Chinese government has proposed a “dual carbon” goal of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon neutral by 2060. The disclosure of carbon information by Chinese enterprises has attracted widespread attention from society. This study selects the constituents of the Social Responsibility Index of China Shanghai Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2020 as samples to empirically (...) analyze the relationship between the level of carbon information disclosure and corporate value, and the moderating effect of greenwashing behavior. Results indicated that the quality of carbon disclosure is positively correlated with the enterprise value. Greenwashing behavior promotes the positive impact of carbon disclosure quality on enterprise value in the short run, but this promoting effect fades in the long run. We further found that the carbon information disclosure of non-heavy-pollution enterprises has a more obvious positive impact on enterprise value than that of heavily polluting enterprises. Additionally, the positive impact of carbon information disclosure on enterprise value is more visible among enterprises in a good legal environment than those in a poor legal environment. This study enriches the relevant literature on carbon information disclosure and enterprise “greenwashing” behavior and has practical significance for promoting China’s low-carbon development in the context of ecological civilization and improving the enthusiasm for the quality of enterprise carbon information disclosure. (shrink)

Enhancing teacher leadership is not only one of the approaches to improving teaching and learning, but it is also essential to the success of education reform. Based on leader-member exchange theory, 294 preschool teachers in China were surveyed, and a structural equation model was established to explore the relationship between the participating teachers' principal leadership style, teacher leadership and psychological capital. The findings revealed a significant positive correlation between transformational and transactional leadership styles and preschool teacher leadership. The laissez-faire leadership (...) style had no correlation with preschool teacher leadership. The transformational leadership style and transactional leadership style were significantly and positively correlated with psychological capital, while the laissez-faire leadership style was significantly and negatively correlated with psychological capital. The transformational leadership style can positively influence preschool teacher leadership directly and indirectly through psychological capital; and the transactional leadership style can only positively influence preschool teacher leadership indirectly through the mediating role of psychological capital. Preschool teachers' leadership can neither be directly influenced by a laissez-faire leadership style nor be indirectly influenced through the mediating role of psychological capital. (shrink)

Is it fair for employers to select candidates partly based on how the employers think customers react to the candidates’ appearances, that is, based on candidates’ reaction qualifications? Both philosophically (in the literature on wrongful discrimination) and empirically, this question has recently been getting attention. Here, we focus on a theory of unfair disadvantages emphasizing: (i) whether the possession of the appearance feature in question reflects choices on the part of the candidate, and (ii) whether the appearance feature in question (...) reflects values or convictions of importance to the candidate. We scrutinize the theory by evaluating how well these factors map on to folk intuitions about wrongful discrimination using an experimental-philosophical approach and data from the US. We do so on the presumption that coherence with folk intuitions is one desideratum for a philosophical theory, and that attention should be given to potential discrepancies between philosophical theories and folk intuitions. Our central finding is that there is only general support for factor (i) in the American population. Our study also adds to the extant empirical literature on reaction qualifications that tend to focus on the employer’s side of the matter, not the candidate’s as we do. (shrink)

Creative association is inherent and essential to creativity and insight. Here we utilised a Chinese compound Remote Associates Task (cRAT) to identify the potential impact of word order (i.e., solution position hereinafter) and word frequency on creative association across two behavioural experiments. Experiment 1 identified the effects of (a) word order and word frequency on cRAT-induced association without considering the specific strategies used during solving such problems and (b) their interaction not only on performance in solving the cRAT, including solution (...) time and accuracy, but also on difficulty rating. Following a coarse-to-fine approach, Experiment 2 examined the effect of both factors on creative association determined according to each participant’s trial-by-trial reports regarding insight solution strategies. Main effects of word order and word frequency, and a two-way interaction, were found on the accuracy and self-rated difficulty. These findings shed light on creative association, multiply-constrained problem solving and constructing compounds. (shrink)

The issue of COVID-19 vaccine allocation is still highly controversial on the international as well as on the national level, and policy-makers worldwide struggle in striking a fair balance between different ethical principles of vaccine allocation, in particular maximum benefit, reciprocity, social justice and equal respect. Any political decision that implements these principles comes at a cost in terms of loss of lives and of loss of life years that could potentially have been prevented by a different vaccination strategy. This (...) article illustrates these trade-offs using quantitative analysis and shows how this approach can contribute to providing a rational and transparent grounding of political decisions on COVID-19 vaccine allocation. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a health crisis of a scale unprecedented in post-war Europe. In response, a large amount of healthcare resources have been redirected to Covid-19 preventive measures, for instance population-wide vaccination campaigns, large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing, and the large-scale distribution of protective equipment to high-risk groups and hospitals and nursing homes. Despite the importance of these measures in epidemiological and economic terms, health economists and medical ethicists have been relatively silent about the ethical rationales underlying the large-scale (...) allocation of healthcare resources to these measures. The present paper seeks to encourage this debate by demonstrating how the resource allocation to Covid-19 preventive measures can be understood through the paradigm of the Rule of Rescue, without claiming that the Rule of Rescue is the sole rationale of resource allocation in the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This study investigates the association between work-family conflict and organizational citizenship behavior and examines the mediated role of subjective happiness between and the moderated part of family support. A moderated mediation model is established based on the Conservation of Resources theory. We collected data from 386 employees of nine companies in China. This study shows that the work-family conflict of female professional employees is negatively correlated with organizational citizenship behavior, and that the relationship is mediated by subjective well-being. Furthermore, female (...) professional employees’ family support moderates the effects of work-family conflict on subjective happiness and organizational citizenship behavior, with the relationship weaker when family support is higher. This study enriches the literature on work-family conflict by using family support as a mediating mechanism for work-family conflict. It enhanced our understanding of the influencing mechanisms of organizational citizenship behavior by constructing a more detailed model. (shrink)

The capacitive voltage transformer is a special measuring and protecting device, which is commonly applied in high-voltage power systems. Its measurement accuracy is affected seriously by the stray capacitances of the capacitance voltage divider to ground and other charged parts. In this study, based on the boundary element method, a mathematical model was established firstly to calculate the stray capacitance. Then, the voltage distribution of the CVD was obtained by the CVD’s equivalent circuit model. Next, the effect of stray capacitance (...) on the voltage distribution and the voltage difference ratio of CVD was analysed in detail. We finally designed three types of shield and optimized their structure parameters to reduce VDR. The results indicated that the average deviation rate between calculated and experimental measured voltages is only 0.015%; that is to say, the method has high calculation precision. The stray capacitance of the CVD to ground is far larger than that of the CVD to the high-voltage terminal. It results in the inhomogeneous distribution of voltage and the increase of VDR. For the test CVT, its VDR exceeds the requirement of class 0.2. Among all of the three types of shield, the C type reduced the VDR of the test CVT the most. After optimizing the structure parameters of C-type shield, the VDR is further reduced to 0.08%. It is not only in accord with the requirement of class 0.2 but also has an adequate margin. (shrink)