Repeatedly performing a submaximal motor task for a prolonged period of time leads to muscle fatigue comprising a central and peripheral component, which demands a gradually increasing effort. However, the brain contribution to the enhancement of effort to cope with progressing fatigue lacks a complete understanding. The intermittent motor tasks closely resemble many activities of daily living, thus remaining physiologically relevant to study fatigue. The scope of this study is therefore to investigate the EEG-based brain activation patterns in healthy subjects (...) performing IMT until self-perceived exhaustion. Fourteen participants repeated elbow flexion contractions at 40% maximum voluntary contraction by following visual cues displayed on an oscilloscope screen until subjective exhaustion. Each contraction lasted ≈5 s with a 2-s rest between trials. The force, EEG, and surface EMG data were simultaneously collected. After preprocessing, we selected a subset of trials at the beginning, middle, and end of the study session representing brain activities germane to mild, moderate, and severe fatigue conditions, respectively, to compare and contrast the changes in the EEG time-frequency characteristics across the conditions. The outcome of channel- and source-level TF analyses reveals that the theta, alpha, and beta power spectral densities vary in proportion to fatigue levels in cortical motor areas. We observed a statistically significant change in the band-specific spectral power in relation to the graded fatigue from both the steady- and post-contraction EEG data. The findings would enhance our understanding on the etiology and physiology of voluntary motor-action-related fatigue and provide pointers to counteract the perception of muscle weakness and lack of motor endurance associated with ADL. The study outcome would help rationalize why certain patients experience exacerbated fatigue while carrying out mundane tasks, evaluate how clinical conditions such as neurological disorders and cancer treatment alter neural mechanisms underlying fatigue in future studies, and develop therapeutic strategies for restoring the patients' ability to participate in ADL by mitigating the central and muscle fatigue. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in non-invasive stimulation interventions as treatment strategies to improve functional outcomes and recovery after spinal cord injury. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is a neuromodulatory intervention which has the potential to reinforce the residual spinal and supraspinal pathways and induce plasticity. Recent reviews have highlighted the therapeutic potential and the beneficial effects of rTMS on motor function, spasticity, and corticospinal excitability modulation in SCI individuals. For this scoping review, we focus on the stimulation parameters used in (...) 20 rTMS protocols. We extracted the rTMS parameters from 16 published rTMS studies involving SCI individuals and were able to infer preliminary associations between specific parameters and the effects observed. Future investigations will need to consider timing, intervention duration and dosage that may depend on the stage, the level, and the severity of the injury. There is a need for more real vs. sham rTMS studies, reporting similar designs with sufficient information for replication, to achieve a significant level of evidence regarding the use of rTMS in SCI. (shrink)

Detailed summary in vernacular field only.

ObjectiveTo investigate the effects of cell phone dependence on mental health among undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic and further identify the determinants that may affect their mental health in China.MethodsThe data were collected from 602 students at a medical school in Shanghai via an online survey conducted from December 2021 to February 2022. The Mobile Phone Addiction Index and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale were applied to evaluate CPD and mental health, respectively. Independent sample t-test and one-way analysis of variance were (...) employed to compare the means of continuous variables among categorical groups. Correlations between continuous variables were detected using Pearson's correlation analysis. Univariable and multivariable logistic regressions were employed to identify the determinants of mental health.ResultsAmong the 402 eligible students, 73.88% were women with an average age of 20.19 ± 2.36 years. On average, the DASS score was 32.20 ± 11.07, the CPD score was 36.23 ± 11.89, and the cell phone use duration was 7.67 ± 3.61 h/day. CPD was found to have a negative effect on mental health among college students in Shanghai. Additionally, cell phone use duration, age, being senior students, faculty-student relationship, insomnia, tobacco use, obesity, and life satisfaction were clarified as contributing factors to mental health among college students.ConclusionHigh degree of CPD could have a negative effect on college students' mental health, which might lead to some psychological problems. Appropriate actions and effective interventions are highly needed to prevent severe psychological injuries among college students in China. (shrink)

Background and purposeThis study aimed to analyze the feasibility and safety of endovascular therapy (EVT) in patients with acute posterior circulation stroke and vertebrobasilar dolichoectasia (VBD).Materials and methodsBASILAR was a national prospective registry of consecutive patients with symptomatic and imaging-confirmed acute stroke in the posterior circulation within 24 h of symptom onset. We evaluated EVT feasibility and safety in patients with VBD. Primary outcomes included improvement in modified Rankin Scale scores (mRS) at 90 days and mortality within 90 days. The (...) secondary outcome was the rate of favorable functional outcome, defined as mRS ≤ 3 (indicating independent ambulation) at 90 days. Safety outcomes included surgery-related complications and other serious adverse events.ResultsA total of 534 cases were included: 159 with VBD and 375 controls. No significant difference in mRS at 90 days was found between groups, but patients with VBD had a higher baseline National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score [30 (19–33) vs. 25 (15–32)] and were older [65 (59–74) vs. 63 (55–72) year]. After propensity score matching, there were no significant differences in baseline NIHSS score between the two groups, and the efficacy and safety of EVT were similar between patients with or without VBD. Furthermore, the prognostic effect of puncture-to-recanalization time on the probability of mortality within 90 days in EVT-treated patients with VBD was significant {adjusted odds ratio, 1.008 [95% confidence interval (1.001–1.015)]}.ConclusionEndovascular therapy is safe and feasible in patients with acute posterior circulation stroke and VBD. The puncture-to-recanalization time is important for predicting the prognosis of EVT-treated patients with VBD. (shrink)

Ethical Politics and Modern Society introduces and critically examines British idealist philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, his practical philosophy and its reception in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. As a response to the modernity issue in Great Britain, Green's philosophy, in particular his ethical politics, anticipated a practical solution to the individual alienation issue in modern society. Witnessing the resemblance between Green's ethical politics and classical Chinese ethical and political thought, some Chinese scholars became inclined (...) to take Green's thought as an intellectual approach to assimilate Western modernity. While Green and the Chinese scholars both intended to articulate an ethical conception of modern politics in response to the issue of modernity, their results were very different. In this book, James Jia-Hau Liu analyses why modern Chinese scholars introduced Green's philosophy to China and why the studies of Green's philosophy in China have since faded away. Modern Chinese scholars, such as Gao Yi-Han, Chin Yueh-Lin, Tang Jun-Yi, Chang Fo-Chuan and Yin Hai-Guang, are explored in greater detail. The contradictory standings towards modernity between Green and Chinese scholars illustrate how to understand the difference forms of modernity that can be embodied therein. Ethical Politics and Modern Society is a valuable resource to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, history of social and political thought, British Idealism and the work of Thomas Hill Green. (shrink)

Guidelines for a model bride in Islam based on Islamic teachings; includes stories of six exemplary Muslim wives during Prophet Muhammad's time.

The outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019 has become the most devastating public health event of the 21st century. The different performances of governments and people in different countries and regions show that national values may play an important role in the prevention and control of COVID-19. Based on data from the seventh wave of World Values Survey and the Human Freedom Index report in 2020, three national value factors are extracted in this manuscript, including religious belief, government (...) satisfaction and individual freedom. Then ordinary least squares regression regression model is constructed to explore the influence of these three value factors on the prevention and control of COVID-19 and some heterogeneity analysis is implemented. The results show that religious belief and individual freedom significantly increased the COVID-19 infection rate, while government satisfaction significantly reduced the COVID-19 infection rate. The study findings have the ability to hold up after a range of robustness. For countries and regions with different COVID-19 testing policies, the influence of national values is different. Only in countries and regions with high testing rate policies and complete systems of the prevention and control of COVID-19, the influence of national values is significant. Based on these findings, a series of targeted policy recommendations for building national values in the post-epidemic era are proposed. (shrink)

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies' open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)

Svirsky, Howard, and Berman have enumerated a variety of U.S. FDA roles, arguing that although the public possess a “right to information” about health risks,...

Revealing the general status quo of teacher curriculum leadership has great theoretical, policy, and practical significance. However, large-scale empirical investigations in this area are rare, and there is even less attention to the current situation of rural teacher curriculum leadership. Based on the survey of 2,966 rural teachers in 20 provinces of China, this paper presented the status quo of rural teacher curriculum leadership and examined influencing factors through multiple linear regression analysis. It was found that curriculum leadership of rural (...) teachers was at a low level with backward leadership views, lack of practical ability, and low sense of identity. Regression analysis demonstrated that individual field factors had a significant impact on teachers’ curriculum leadership. Specifically, the higher the teachers’ leadership willingness, trust in others, and self-efficacy, the higher the curriculum leadership. The school field was also an important influential aspect. In particular, the formation of a common vision and teacher community by the school and the appropriate empowerment of the principal had a significant positive impact on the curriculum leadership of rural teachers. Based on these key findings, several improvement suggestions are put forward at the end, which can be used as references for other countries to develop improvement plans on rural teacher curriculum leadership. (shrink)

Job-search is considered as a developmental task for college students to move from campus to workplace. Based on the self-determination theory, 859 Chinese college students were selected as the study sample and hierarchical regression analysis was used to explore the effects of perseverance per severance of effort and consistency of interest on job-search intensity and clarity. The survey showed that the perseverance of effort has a significant positive effect on the job-search intensity, while it has no significant positive effect on (...) job-search clarity. Consistency of interest has a significant negative effect on job-search intensity and a significant positive effect on job-search clarity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed and the directions for future research are outlined in this study. (shrink)

Transportation cyber-physical systems are constrained by spatiality and real-time because of their high level of heterogeneity. Therefore, applications like traffic control generally manage moving objects in a single-machine multithreaded manner, whereas suffering from frequent locking operations. To address this problem and improve the throughput of moving object databases, we propose a GPU-accelerated indexing method, based on a grid data structure, combined with quad-trees. We count object movements and decide whether a particular node should be split or be merged on the (...) GPU. In this case, bottlenecked nodes can be translated to quad-tree without interfering with the CPU. Hence, waiting time of other threads caused by locking operations raised by object data updating can be reduced. The method is simple while more adaptive to scenarios where the distribution of moving objects is skewed. It also avoids shortcomings of existing methods with performance bottleneck on the hot area or spending plenty of calculation resources on structure balancing. Experiments suggest that our method shows higher throughput and lower response time than the existing indexing methods. The advantage is even more significant under the skewed distribution of moving objects. (shrink)

Theoretical researchers of manager psychology have excellent potential to extend its research framework to more enterprise application areas, such as innovation, performance, and safety in production. Research in these areas has also been increasing in the past 10 years. Psychological capital is composed of four aspects: self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and tenacity. It plays an essential role in stimulating organizational growth and improving organizational performance. In safety management work, managers, as the core members of the organization, have a relationship between their (...) psychological capital and employees’ safety performance. Nevertheless, the closeness of the relationship between psychological capital and employee safety performance has not been fully demonstrated by academic circles. Based on positive psychology theory, this paper conducts a questionnaire survey of 157 managers and 314 employees related to safety work in manufacturing enterprises. From the new perspective of organizational emotional capability, this paper investigates the complex and extensive social-psychological role in organizations and combs, analyzes, and integrates relevant psychological research to construct the influence mechanism of managers’ psychological capital and employee safety performance. Finally, the three important issues found based on data analysis were: Managers’ psychological capital has a significant positive impact both on employee safety performance and organizational emotional capability; Organizational emotional capability has a significant positive impact on employee safety performance; organizational emotional capability plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between managers’ psychological capital and employee safety performance. (shrink)