A growing body of business ethics research has shown that firms are beginning to embrace the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community with internal organizational policies and temporary activism activities. Despite these positive developments, little research has examined firms’ LGBT inclusion strategy at the product level and whether adding LGBT representation to products helps, hurts, or has no impact on corporate products’ market performance. Prior studies have examined LGBT-themed and LGBT-vague representations and identified limitations of both. The current research (...) presents an alternative LGBT-inclusive representation in which heterosexual and LGBT imagery are both presented, with the former receiving more exposure than the latter. A secondary analysis of 4216 movies and a controlled experiment reveal converging evidence: movies with LGBT-inclusive representation outperform those with no LGBT representation or with LGBT-themed representation. The superiority of LGBT-inclusive representation comes from its ability to appeal to consumer segments holding favorable and unfavorable LGBT attitudes. While cultural and entertainment products often play profound roles in changing society’s ethical standards and moral attitudes, they are rarely studied in the business ethics literature. Our findings fill this gap while answering a multimillion-dollar question for the entertainment industry. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis which has witnessed consumers experiencing significant anxiety provoked by the threats to their health and even lives. Meanwhile, consumers have been observed to make more ethical purchases since the start of the pandemic. Drawing on literature on terror management and negotiable fate, this research employs a moderated moderating model to investigate how consumers’ perception of the pandemic severity leads to ethical consumption as a defensive mechanism against death-related anxiety, as well as the differential (...) role of consumers’ belief in negotiable fate in moderating this pandemic impact across tight and loose cultures. We conducted two cross-cultural studies with 592 and 423 respondents, respectively, at different times during the pandemic. Results consistently show that perceived pandemic severity increases consumers’ intention to consume ethically. Consumers’ belief in negotiable fate directly enhances ethical consumption, but it alleviates the effect of pandemic severity on ethical consumption among consumers who live in a tight culture. Our findings reveal the existential meaning of ethical consumption as a buffer against pandemic-triggered mortality salience, identify the positive psychological functions of negotiable fate in promoting ethical consumption but mitigating consumers’ need to buffer death-related concerns, and advances the importance of investigating the cultural variances in the terror management process toward ethical consumption. The findings offer insights for marketers and policy makers to develop effective strategies to support consumers’ ethical coping during societal crises. (shrink)

PurposeThis study aims to develop and validate a stigma scale for Chinese patients with breast cancer.MethodsPatients admitted to the Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, for breast cancer treatment participated in this study. Development of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale involved the following procedures: literature review, interview, and applying a theoretical model to generate items; the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale’s content validity was assessed by a Delphi study and feedback from patients with breast cancer ; (...) exploratory factor analysis was used to assess the construct validity; convergent validity was assessed with the Social Impact Scale ; internal consistency Cronbach’s α, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability were used to identify the reliability of the scale.ResultsThe final version of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale consisted of 15 items and showed positive correlations with the Social Impact Scale. Exploratory factor analysis revealed four components of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale: self-image impairment, social isolation, discrimination, and internalized stigma, which were strongly related to our perceived breast cancer stigma model and accounted for 69.443% of the total variance. Cronbach’s α for the total scale was 0.86, and each subscale was 0.75–0.882. The test–retest reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients of the total scale was 0.947, and split-half reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients of the total scale was 0.911. The content validity index was 0.73–1.0.ConclusionThe newly developed Breast Cancer Stigma Scale offers a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the perceived stigma of patients with breast cancer in clinical and research settings. It may be helpful for stigma prevention in China. (shrink)

A major requirement for humans is a breathable atmosphere. In microgravity, despite environmental life support systems regulating air exchange, astronauts complain about air quality, with elevated CO2-levels resulting in detrimental health and performance effects. We extend extant accounts of human respiration to include the role of gravity and buoyancy. Using computational fluid dynamics, we demonstrate that the absence of biothermal convection in microgravity reduces airflow around the human body. This impairs gas exchange by creating an environmental breathing deadspace in front (...) of the face, leading to significant CO2-rebreathing, with implications for astronaut health and countermeasures. In 1g, increasing ambient air temperature can also reduce efficient respiratory exchange, resulting in breathing conditions equivalent to those in microgravity, with implications for treating respiratory disease on Earth. (shrink)

The field of emotion understanding is replete with measures, yet lacks an integrated conceptual organizing structure. To identify and organize skills associated with the recognition and knowledge of emotions, and to highlight the focus of emotion understanding as localized in the self, in specific others, and in generalized others, we introduce the conceptual framework of Emotion Understanding in Recognition and Knowledge Abilities. We then categorize 56 existing methods of emotion understanding within this framework to highlight current gaps and future opportunities (...) in assessing emotion understanding across the lifespan. We hope the EUReKA model provides a systematic and integrated framework for conceptualizing and measuring emotion understanding for future research. (shrink)

Studies have shown that internal whistleblowing could be utilized as an effective way to stop an organization’s unethical behaviors. This study investigates the relationship between ethical leadership and internal whistleblowing by focusing on the mediating role of employee-perceived organizational politics and the moderating role of moral courage. An analysis of data collected at three phases indicates that employee-perceived organizational politics partly mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and internal whistleblowing. Also, moral courage is found to moderate the effect of employee-perceived (...) organizational politics on internal whistleblowing and the indirect effect of ethical leadership on internal whistleblowing via employee-perceived organizational politics. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundUp-to-date information about the trends of age-related hearing loss and how this varies between countries is essential to plan for an adequate health-system response. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the research hotpots and trends in ARHL and to provide the basis and direction for future research.Materials and methodsThe Web of Science Core Collection database was searched and screened according to the inclusion criteria during 2002–2021. Bibliometric analyses were conducted by CiteSpace software and VOSviewer software.ResultsThe query identified 1,496 publications, which (...) showed a growth trend of this filed. These publications were from 62 countries, the United States of America showed its tremendous impact on this field in publication outputs, total citations, and international collaborations, China following in second. The Journal of Hearing Research was the most productive journal. Weijia Kong published the most papers, and the most productive institution was Washington University. The keyword “presbycusis” ranked first in research frontiers and appeared earlier, and the keywords “age-related hearing loss,” “risk,” “dementia,” “auditory cortex,” “association,” and “decline” began to appear in recent years.ConclusionThe annual number of publications has grown rapidly in the past two decades and will continue to grow. Epidemiological investigation and laboratory research are lasting hot spots, besides future research will focus on the association between ARHL and cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. (shrink)

Maker education mainly involves “hands-on” as the core concept and combines various educational theories to redefine interactions between learners and teachers in a learning environment. Identification of meaningful “hands-on” behaviors is crucial to evaluate students’ learning performance, although an instructor’s observation of every student is not feasible. However, such observation is possible with the aid of the artificial intelligence image processing technique; the AI learning behavior recognition system can serve as the second eyes of teachers, thus accounting for individual differences. (...) However, in previous studies, learning behavior recognition was applied to the traditional or static classroom. A behavior recognition system for identifying “hands-on” actions in the learning context has still not been developed. Therefore, this study designed a human posture evaluation system, obtained human articulation node information from learning field images, and built a learning behavior recognition model suitable for maker education based on the AI convolutional neural network. A learning behavior model was defined, along with a number of student behavior indexes. Subsequently, the effectiveness of the model and behavior indexes was verified through practical learning activities. The model evaluation results indicated that the proposed model achieved a training accuracy of 0.99 and a model accuracy of 0.83. Thus, the model can be applied to dynamic maker activity learning environments. (shrink)

Background. Herpes zoster is a disease that mainly causes severe segmental neuralgia and vesicles after infection with herpes zoster virus. At the same time, more than 9 to 34 percent of patients have postherpetic neuralgia present with chronic pain for months or even years. Moxibustion has been used to treat herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia for many years; however, there has been no comprehensive study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of moxibustion in the treatment of herpes zoster and postherpetic (...) neuralgia. More studies evaluated the combined effects of acupuncture and moxibustion. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to evaluate their efficacy and safety, so as to provide an evidence-based basis for the clinical application of moxibustion in the treatment of HZ and PHN. Method. The literature search was conducted in nine Chinese and English databases, and randomized controlled trials were pooled from their inceptions to June 2020. The included literature was screened, and data were extracted. RevMan 5.3 software and Stata software were used for statistical analysis. The primary outcome was the total effect. The secondary outcomes include VAS, NRS, and time of analgesia. Outcomes. From a total of 1957 identified studies, 31 were included in analysis. 31 RCTs contained the experimental sample of 1185 cases and the control sample of 1149 cases reported efficiency of different moxibustions in the treatment of herpes zoster, statistical heterogeneity inspection without heterogeneity. So, we used the fixed-effects model, merge effect quantity OR = 3.89, Z = 8.86, and it suggested sample merger analysis was statistically significant. Also, the moxibustion, compared to other methods in the treatment of herpes zoster and herpes zoster neuralgia efficiency, increased significantly. The VAS scales, WMD = 1.69, and the time of analgesia, WMD = 2.41, indicated that moxibustion surpassed others in the relief of pain. NRS was just reported in one study. It was not statistically significant. There was no significant difference in adverse effects OR = 0.61, Z = 1.56. Conclusion. Moxibustion has obvious advantages over other therapies in the treatment of HZ and PHN. However, due to the obvious publication bias, the interpretation of the results should be cautious, and more rigorous randomized controlled clinical studies should be included to further confirm the results in the future. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. Section (...) 2 explains how attention and fixation weigh in these debates, and argues that Dretske’s hyper-rich view fails precisely because he overlooks certain effects of attention and fixation. Section 3 explains why Tye’s view is also unsatisfying, mainly because he misconceives the degree of access. Section 4 then puts forward the positive model covariance, which has it that the degree of cognitive access tracks the degree of phenomenology, and contrasts it with Block’s view on the Sperling iconic memory paradigm. The paper ends with a discussion of levels of seeing, which involve crowding, indexing, and other visual phenomena. Change ‘blindness’ is a set of phenomena that was discovered about two decades ago, yet an entirely satisfying understanding is still lacking. To move forward, a more detailed understanding of attention and fixation is called for. (shrink)

The term “consciousness” is very often, though not always, interchangeable with the term “awareness,” which is more colloquial to many ears. We say things like “are you aware that ...” often. Sometimes we say “have you noticed that ... ?” to express similar thoughts, and this indicates a close connection between consciousness (awareness) and attention (noticing), which we will come back to later in this chapter. Ned Block, one of the key figures in this area, provides a useful characterization of (...) what he calls “phenomenal consciousness.” For him, phenomenal consciousness is experience. Experience covers perceptions, e.g., when we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, we typically have experiences, such as seeing colors and smelling odors. It also covers bodily awareness, e.g., we typically have experiences of our own bodily temperature and positions of limbs. Consciousness is primarily about this experiential aspect of our mental lives. (shrink)

Recently, we found that the Pseudomonas aeruginosa type II secreted protease IV functions as a unique Arabidopsis innate immunity elicitor. The protease IV‐activated pathway involves G protein signaling and raises the question of how protease elicitation leads to the activation of G protein‐mediated signaling, because plants do not appear to have metazoan‐like G protein‐coupled receptors. Importantly, our data suggest that Arabidopsis has evolved a mechanism to detect the proteolytic activity of a pathogen‐encoded protease, supporting the host‐pathogen arms race model. In (...) the case of opportunistic multi‐host pathogens like P. aeruginosa, however, it is not plausible that P. aeruginosa is simultaneously co‐evolving in a gene‐for‐gene manner with all of its potential hosts, which include plants, nematodes, insects, and mammals. This prompts us to ask what is the driving force for co‐evolution of defense response in Arabidopsis and pathogenesis of P. aeruginosa, which might not have been subject to iterative cycles of evolutionary selections. (shrink)

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. In this article, first of all, I shall identify the strengths of these two aspects of the hermeneutic in the main development of hermeneutics in Western world. Heidegger and Gadamer take ontological receptivity as the source of the meaning of existence as well as the meaningfulness of texts. In my view such a form of receptivity has shaped the predominant paradigm of hermeneutic thinking in Contemporary Europe or West. (...) Therefore, I move to the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy, namely the Yijing《易經》 philosophy in Chinese tradition. In these two contrasts we shall not only notice the strong divergence between the two paradigms but come to see how receptivity and creativity of the hermeneutic could be divergently identified and located in concrete understanding of nature of reality and nature of the human being. (shrink)

This paper is about compositionality, belief reports, and related issues. I begin by introducing Putnam’s proposal for understanding compositionality, namely that the sense of a sentence is a function of the sense of its parts and of its logical structure (section 1). Both Church and Sellars think that Putnam’s move is superfluous or unnecessary since there is no relevant puzzle to begin with (section 2). I will urge that Putnam is right in thinking that there is indeed a puzzle with (...) a discussion of translation and belief individuation (section 3). Later Salmon (2001/ 2007) reinforces Church’s position, but I will argue that it is still possible to make my case by clarifying the nature of my proposal, i.e., understanding explanations of action from the third-person point of view (section 4). Now, Fine (2007) agrees with Putnam that there is indeed a puzzle to be solved, but he argues that Putnam’s solution of it is problematic, and that his own semantic relationism is a better view. In response to this, I will recast the notion of compositionality based on a certain conception of belief individuation, namely that the semantic content of a sentence is a function of the semantic contents of its parts and of the structure of intensional discourses (sections 3 and 5). Finally the paper will end with a reconsideration of the recalcitrant Kripke’s puzzle about belief (1979/1988), since it might seem to put some pressure on my account. It turns out that my understanding of this puzzle is again different from Fine’s perspective (section 6). (shrink)

Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits has been highly influential since the beginning of this century. It can be read as a systematic response to scepticism. One of the most important notions in this response is the notion of «evidence,» which will be the focus of the present paper. I attempt to show primarily two things. First, the notion of evidence invoked by Williamson does not address the sceptical worry: he stipulates an objective notion of evidence, but this begs the (...) question against his opponent. Second, his related thesis «Evidence equals Knowledge» does not sit well with his own content externalism: he promises to relate epistemology to philosophy of mind, but he fails to live up to this commitment in his crucial chapter on scepticism. Other minor problems concerning evidence will also be discussed in due course. (shrink)

The validity of the confinement limit obtain by Unanyan et al. (Phys Rev A 79:044101, 2009) is extended by including non-symmetric vector and scalar potentials. It shows that the confinement limit of one-dimensional Dirac particles in vector and scalar potentials is \(\lambda _C/\sqrt{2}\) , with \(\lambda _C\) being the Compton wavelength.

Objectives: To study the attitudes of both medical and non-medical students towards the do-not-resuscitate decision in a university in Hong Kong, and the factors affecting their attitudes.Methods: A questionnaire-based survey conducted in the campus of a university in Hong Kong. Preferences and priorities of participants on cardiopulmonary resuscitation in various situations and case scenarios, experience of death and dying, prior knowledge of DNR and basic demographic data were evaluated.Results: A total of 766 students participated in the study. There were statistically (...) significant differences in their DNR decisions in various situations between medical and non-medical students, clinical and preclinical students, and between students who had previously experienced death and dying and those who had not. A prior knowledge of DNR significantly affected DNR decision, although 66.4% of non-medical students and 18.7% of medical students had never heard of DNR. 74% of participants from both medical and non-medical fields considered the patient’s own wish as the most important factor that the healthcare team should consider when making DNR decisions. Family wishes might not be decisive on the choice of DNR.Conclusions: Students in medical and non-medical fields held different views on DNR. A majority of participants considered the patient’s own wish as most important in DNR decisions. Family wishes were considered less important than the patient’s own wishes. (shrink)

In East Asia, there has been a long tradition of using graphs and diagrams to express abstract ideas. This paper is to give an account of the East Asian methodsfor representing body, mind and the universe. The fundamental ideas of East Asian graphic interpretation mostly originated from the Yijing (I Ching, Zhouyi), and were later developed by Confucian and Daoist thinkers to describe the universe, the mind, and the body as an organic totality. By comparing different approaches to portraying the (...) universe, this paper offers a critical analysis of East Asian semiotics. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease at the beginning of December 2019, there have been more than 28.69 million cumulative confirmed cases worldwide as of 12th September 2020, affecting over 200 countries and regions with more than 920,463 deaths. The COVID-19 pandemic has been sweeping worldwide with unexpected rapidity. In this paper, a hybrid modelling strategy based on tessellation structure- configured SEIR model is adopted to estimate the scale of the pandemic spread. Building on the data pertaining to (...) the global pandemic transmission over the last six months around the world, key impact factors in the transmission and control procedure have been analysed, including isolation rate, number of the infected cases before taking prevention measures, degree of contact scope, and medical level, so as to capture the fundamental factor influencing the pandemic. The quantitative evaluation allowed us to illustrate the magnitude of risks of pandemic and to recommend appropriate national health policy of prevention measures for effectively controlling both intra- and interregional pandemic spread. Our modelling results clearly indicate that the early-stage preventive measures are the most effective action to be taken to contain the pandemic spread of the highly contagious nature of the COVID-19. (shrink)