The predominant use of junk food in our societies is continuously held responsible for the obese body physiques and overweight among the kids and adolescents. The current supportive environments where organic foods are limited, and new processed foods have been brought to the market with more variant tastes and acceptability for the kids and adolescents that have diverged their eating patterns. It has significantly contributed to the health issues and growth discrepancies of the users. However, the awareness of the food (...) contents is an important milestone for understanding the risks associated with the usage of junk foods. A quantitative approach has been used in this study to measure the effect of perceived severity, vulnerability and fear on the junk food eating behaviors and ultimately on the obesity. The moderating role of product knowledge hiding has also been measured on the relationship of junk food eating and obesity. Structural equation modeling is used using the software Smart-PLS for measuring the hypothesis with a sample size of 228 selected through purposive sampling. The sample consisted of kids and adolescents who were reached on purpose for data collection. The current study has explored the role of perceived severity, vulnerability and the fear of using junk foods which have been found as a negative effect on junk food eating behavior which is positively associated with obesity among the kids and adolescents. The result of study shows that perceived threat has a negative effect on the junk food eating behavior of the adolescents. However, the positive relationship of junk food eating behavior with obesity can be decreased if the information about the products is not hidden. This study will be useful for making the consumers aware of the product knowledge hiding of the junk food usage. Moreover, it will help the users in creating understanding of risks allied with the use of junk food which may be addressed in order to avoid obesity issues in the kids and adolescents globally. (shrink)

Firms worldwide are increasingly required to disclose their carbon emissions due to the environmental damage associated with climate change. Because there has been no previous literature focusing on the determinants of corporate carbon disclosure integrating environmental legitimacy and green innovation, the present study attempted to develop an original framework to fill the research gap. This study explored the influence of environmental legitimacy on corporate carbon disclosure, and investigated the role of green innovation as a mediator. With the samples of Carbon (...) Disclosure Project in China from 2008 to 2012, the results demonstrate that environmental legitimacy significantly negatively influences the likelihood of corporate carbon disclosure, and that green process innovation mediates the relationship, while green product innovation has no significant mediating effect. It means that environmental legitimacy not only directly affects the likelihood of corporate carbon disclosure, but also indirectly affects it via green process innovation. Hence, companies must increase both informal and formal mechanisms, i.e., external environmental legitimacy and internal green process innovation, to engage in carbon information disclosure and ensure sustainability. (shrink)

ObjectiveWith the improvement in health awareness, humanistic care ability of nurses has become a focus of public attention. The aim of the study was to confirm the relationship between psychological capital and humanistic care ability of nurses, and to provide suggestions on improving the humanistic care ability of nurses.MethodsA cross-section survey was conducted. Three hundred thirty-nine nurses were recruited from a tertiary general hospital in Taizhou, China. Psychological capital and humanistic care ability were measured using a self-reported questionnaire. Correlation analysis (...) and stepwise multiple regression analysis were performed to analyze the correlation between psychological capital and humanistic care ability.ResultsThe psychological capital and humanistic care ability scores were 91.57 ± 13.96 and 189.08 ± 20.37, respectively. Differences in psychological capital scores across professional titles, departments, years of work, and marital status were statistically significant. There were statistical differences for the humanistic care ability scores among nurses based on marital status. The total psychological capital scores and the four sub-dimensions scores were positively correlated with the humanistic care ability scores among nurses. Self-efficacy was the main predictor of nurses’ humanistic care ability.ConclusionPsychological capital positively affected the humanistic care ability of nurses. Self-efficacy was the main predictor of humanistic care ability. Nursing managers can formulate strategies from the perspective of positive psychology to improve humanistic care ability of nurses. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of emotional context on the semantic memory of subsequent emotional words during discourse comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Four-sentence discourses were used as experimental materials. The first three sentences established an emotional or neutral context, while the fourth contained an emotional target word consistent with the preceding emotional context's valence. The discourses were presented twice using the text change paradigm, where the target words were replaced with strongly - or weakly-related words during the second presentation. (...) Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: Emotional-strongly-related, Emotional-weakly-related, Neutral-strongly-related and Neutral-weakly-related. In Experiment 1, negative contexts and negative target words were used, whereas in Experiment 2, positive contexts and positive target words were used. The results revealed a semantic relatedness effect, whereby the strongly-related words have lower change detection accuracy, longer reading times and more fixations in both Experiments 1 and 2. Furthermore, across both experiments, the magnitude of the semantic relatedness effect was greater in the emotionally congruent contexts than in the neutral contexts. These results suggest that emotional context could increase efforts to change the discrimination of subsequent words and demonstrate an important role of emotional context on semantic memory during discourse processing. (shrink)

This study focuses on CEO hubris and its effect on corporate unethical behaviour—pollution in particular, and in addition examines critical institutional contingencies [state ownership, political connection and industrial competition] which may moderate this effect. With data from over-polluting listed firms based on the real-time pollution monitoring system in transitional China from 2015 to 2017, we find that CEO hubris is significantly positively related to firm pollution, and that the moderating role of SO is not significant, that PC positively moderates the (...) hubris–pollution relationship and that industrial competition negatively moderates this relationship. These findings contribute to research on the upper echelon theory, institutional theory and the growing literature on emerging economies. (shrink)

To improve the problems of inconvenient communication in the manufacturing industry, the ineffective use of resources, and the inability to efficiently complete manufacturing tasks, resource sharing has become an important model to promote the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. We used multiagent modeling to construct a resource-sharing model and take Baosteel as the micro background and the manufacturing industry as the macro background. Under this model, we discovered the effect of resource sharing on the efficiency of intelligent manufacturing (...) under network collaboration through system dynamics research. We built and simulated a dynamic model of system dynamics that couples the two backgrounds and have given policy suggestions according to the simulation result. (shrink)

With the rapid development of mobile devices, users can now read on the screen. Electronic reading has become a common reading style with the growth in online learning or electronic learning. E-book applications are widely developed and applied for reading on a screen. However, it is difficult for readers to change their reading habits or preference from paper-printed books to digital devices. The study of readers' continuance intention to use e-book APPs is the first step to improving e-reading. This study (...) focuses on the influential factors on undergraduates' continuance intention of e-book APPs, which analyzed and summarized the literature related to the electronic book applications and undergraduates' continuous intention, combined with the characteristics of the e-book APPs, introduced relevant theories and variables, and established the factors that influence undergraduates' continuous intention of using e-book APPs. On this basis, the paper analyzed the relationship between various influencing factors and their influence on continuous intention. A model composed of five hypotheses was constructed to test the factors influencing undergraduates' continuous intention in e-book APPs. The results indicated that of all research variables, satisfaction is the most important factor that affects continuous intention; Perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness have an indirect effect on continuous intention through satisfaction; personalization has direct effects on perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness, so it also has an indirect effect on continuous intention. The findings of the study will be helpful for designers and developers of e-book APPs and provide e-book APP suggestions for readers as well. (shrink)

This paper claims that palliative care is a suitable approach for offering comprehensive support to patients with life-threatening illness and unavoidable asthenia, to enhance their quality of life in aging and chronic illness. There are however some conceptual barriers to accessing that care on the Chinese Mainland: Death-denying culture and society; Misguidance and malpractice derived from the biomedical model; Prejudice against PC and certain deviant understandings of filial piety culture. To counter these obstacles, the study introduces the philosophy of Chinese (...) Taoist Chuang-tze to enlighten the public from ignorance and remove some illusions about death and dying; inspire people to face and accept illness and death calmly, and keep harmony and inner peace of mind to alleviate suffering, with the aim of providing wisdom and a shift of attitude toward life and death. Chuang-tze’s thoughts are consistent with the provision of palliative care, and to a certain degree, can promote its acceptability and delivery, and the conception of good death in practice. (shrink)

This seventh volume of Collected Papers includes 70 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2013-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 122 co-authors from 22 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel-Nasser Hussian, C. Alexander, Mumtaz Ali, Yaman Akbulut, Amir Abdullah, Amira S. Ashour, Assia Bakali, Kousik Bhattacharya, Kainat Bibi, R. N. Boyd, Ümit Budak, Lulu Cai, Cenap Özel, Chang Su Kim, Victor Christianto, Chunlai Du, Chunxin Bo, Rituparna Chutia, Cu Nguyen Giap, Dao The (...) Son, Vinayak Devvrat, Arindam Dey, Partha Pratim Dey, Fahad Alsharari, Feng Yongfei, S. Ganesan, Shivam Ghildiyal, Bibhas C. Giri, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Ahmed Refaat Hawas, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, Hongbo Wang, Hongnian Yu, Mihaiela Iliescu, Saeid Jafari, Temitope Gbolahan Jaiyeola, Naeem Jan, R. Jeevitha, Jun Ye, Anup Khan, Madad Khan, Salma Khan, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Kifayat Ullah, Kishore Kumar P.K., Sujit Kumar De, Prasun Kumar Nayak, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luong Thi Hong Lan, Anam Luqman, Luu Quoc Dat, Tahir Mahmood, Hafsa M. Malik, Nivetha Martin, Mai Mohamed, Parimala Mani, Mingcong Deng, Mohammed A. Al Shumrani, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohamed Talea, Kalyan Mondal, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Farshid Mofidnakhaei, Muhammad Shoaib, Muhammad Riaz, Karthika Muthusamy, Nabeela Ishfaq, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Sumera Naz, Nguyen Dinh Hoa, Nguyen Tho Thong, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Noor ul Amin, Dragan Pamučar, Gabrijela Popović, S. Krishna Prabha, Surapati Pramanik, Priya R, Qiaoyan Li, Yaser Saber, Said Broumi, Saima Anis, Saleem Abdullah, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Abdulkadir Sengür, Seyed Ahmad Edalatpanah, Shahbaz Ali, Shahzaib Ashraf, Shouzhen Zeng, Shio Gai Quek, Shuangwu Zhu, Shumaiza, Sidra Sayed, Sohail Iqbal, Songtao Shao, Sundas Shahzadi, Dragiša Stanujkić, Željko Stević, Udhayakumar Ramalingam, Zunaira Rashid, Hossein Rashmanlou, Rajkumar Verma, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Desmond Jun Yi Tey, Selçuk Topal, Naveed Yaqoob, Yanhui Guo, Yee Fei Gan, Yingcang Ma, Young Bae Jun, Yuping Lai, Hafiz Abdul Wahab, Wei Yang, Xiaohong Zhang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Lemnaouar Zedam. (shrink)

This ninth volume of Collected Papers includes 87 papers comprising 982 pages on Neutrosophic Theory and its applications in Algebra, written between 2014-2022 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 81 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 19 countries: E.O. Adeleke, A.A.A. Agboola, Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Akbar Rezaei, S.A. Akinleye, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Rajab Ali Borzooei , Assia Bakali, Cenap Özel, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Rakhal Das, Bijan Davvaz, R. Dhavaseelan, B. Elavarasan, Fahad Alsharari, T. (...) Gharibah, Hina Gulzar, Hashem Bordbar, Le Hoang Son, Emmanuel Ilojide, Tèmítópé Gbóláhàn Jaíyéolá, M. Karthika, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Huma Khan, Madad Khan, Mohsin Khan, Hee Sik Kim, Seon Jeong Kim, Valeri Kromov, R. M. Latif, Madeleine Al-Tahan, Mehmat Ali Ozturk, Minghao Hu, S. Mirvakili, Mohammad Abobala, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohammed Abdel-Sattar, Mohammed A. Al Shumrani, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Aslam, Muhammad Aslam Malik, Muhammad Gulistan, Muhammad Shabir, G. Muhiuddin, Memudu Olaposi Olatinwo, Osman Anis, Choonkil Park, M. Parimala, Ping Li, K. Porselvi, D. Preethi, S. Rajareega, N. Rajesh, Udhayakumar Ramalingam, Riad K. Al-Hamido, Yaser Saber, Arsham Borumand Saeid, Saeid Jafari, Said Broumi, A.A. Salama, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Songtao Shao, Seok-Zun Song, Tahsin Oner, M. Mohseni Takallo, Binod Chandra Tripathy, Tugce Katican, J. Vimala, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiaoyan Mao, Xiaoying Wu, Xingliang Liang, Xin Zhou, Yingcang Ma, Young Bae Jun, Juanjuan Zhang. (shrink)

Capitalist reforms usually drive outmigration of peasants to cities, while elders, children, and women responsible for their care are “left behind” in the countryside. The plight of these “left behind” populations is a major focus of recent agrarian studies in China. However, rural women are not merely passive victims of these transformations. Building on ethnographic research in Guangxi and Henan provinces from 2013 to 2017, and drawing on critical gender studies and feminist political ecology, I show how the food safety (...) crisis in China creates conditions for peasant women to increase control and income from organic food production, often establishing alternative food networks with the support of female scholars and NGO organizers. Thus, I shift focus of scholarship on rural women from “left behind” to leaders in struggles for justice and food sovereignty. (shrink)

A set of sentential revision operations can be generated in a select-direct way within a new framework for belief change named descriptor revision firstly introduced in Hansson [8]. In this paper, we adopt another constructive approach to these operations, based on a relation \ on sentences named believability relation. Intuitively, \ means that the subject is at least as prone to believe or accept \ as to believe or accept \. We demonstrate that so called H-believability relations and basic believability (...) relations, the second of which the is axiomatically characterized with a set of weak postulates, are faithful alternative models for two typical select-direct sentential revision operations. Then we investigate additional postulates on believability relations that correlate with properties of the generated revision operations. Finally, we show that traditional AGM revision operations can be reconstructed from a strengthened variant of the basic believability relation and there is a close connection between this relation and the standard epistemic entrenchment relation. (shrink)

We present a theoretical rationale and supporting studies revealing how unethical leader behavior fosters an unethical climate within workgroups that increases member turnover intentions and malfeasance. Drawing on the attraction–selection–attrition model of organizational behavior, we propose a selective attrition effect whereby unethical leader behavior results in the retention of group members who are more comfortable with dishonesty and, consequently, more likely to engage in unethical behavior toward their group. In two experiments, exposure to unethical leader behavior increased group members’ likelihood (...) of choosing to leave the group. Members who chose to remain in a group with an unethical leader were more likely than those who chose to leave to cheat their group in a subsequent task. A two time-period survey replicated these findings and identified psychological distress as the mechanism driving group members’ turnover intentions. This research extends our understanding of the complex relationships between unethical leadership and follower turnover intentions, psychological distress, and malfeasance. We contribute to the behavioral ethics literature by identifying a previously underappreciated form of selective attrition that produces internal costs to groups and organizations, independent of reputational consequences and whether the unethicality is publicized. (shrink)

This book is a study of twelve major Confucian philosophical concepts and related issues. These are dynamic harmony (he和), care-centered virtue(ren仁), ritual propriety(li禮), filial care (xiao孝), differentiated gender equilibrium (bie别), friendship (you友), longevity (shou壽), sagehood (sheng聖), equality (qi齊), freedom (ziyou自由), politics (zheng政), and education (jiao教). Each chapter presents something new: a novel interpretation from a fresh angle, an insight that has been neglected in scholarship, or a reformed idea that connects tradition with modern sensibilities. Collectively they serve as a general (...) introduction to progressive Confucian philosophy in the twenty-first century. To facilitate classroom use, each chapter concludes with a set of study questions to assist students to comprehend key points and to develop their own views. (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic called for a new ethical climate in the designated hospitals and imposed challenges on care quality for anti-pandemic nurses. Less was known about whether hospital ethical climate and nurses’ ethical sensitivity were associated with care quality. This study examined the association between the perceived hospital ethical climate and self-evaluated quality of care for COVID-19 patients among anti-pandemic nurses, and explored the mediating role of ethical sensitivity in this relationship.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted through an online survey. A (...) total of 399 anti-pandemic nurses from ten designated hospitals in three provinces of China were recruited to fill out an online survey. Multiple linear regression analysis and a bootstrap test were used to examine the relationships between ethical climate, ethical sensitivity and care quality.ResultsNurses reported mean scores of 4.43 ± 0.577 (out of 5) for hospital ethical climate, 45.00 ± 7.085 (out of 54) for ethical sensitivity, and 5.35 ± 0.661 (out of 6) for self-evaluated care quality. After controlling for covariates, perceived hospital ethical climate was positively associated with self-evaluated care quality (direct effect = 0.710, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.628, 0.792), and was partly mediated by ethical sensitivity (indirect effect = 0.078, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.002, 0.145).ConclusionsChinese nurses who cared for COVID-19 patients perceived high levels of hospital ethical climate, ethical sensitivity, and self-evaluated care quality. Positive perceptions of hospital ethical climate were both directly associated with a higher level of self-evaluated care quality and indirectly associated, through the mediation effect of ethical sensitivity among anti-pandemic nurses. (shrink)

The present paper provides a critical edition of basic verses of Madhyamakāvatāra chapter 6. The verses are extracted from the Sanskrit manuscript of the Madhyamakāvatārabhāṣya preserved at Potala Palace. The Madhyamakāvatāra is one of Candrakīrti’s major works and clearly establishes his own doctrinal position. Chapter 6 contains most important doctrinal discussions of the work.

Previous studies argue that religious firms are more ethical and thus engage less in accrual earnings management. At odds with the ethical view, we use a sample of Chinese listed firms and show that firms in religious regions use more real earnings management. We postulate that besides ethics, religion also proxies for risk aversion, which motivates firms to substitute accrual earnings management with real earnings management. Consistent with this view, we show that the positive association between religiosity and real earnings (...) management is more pronounced for firms with lower litigation risk and for firms with less reputable auditors. In addition, we use a mediation model introduced by Baron and Kenny :1173–1182, 1986) to show that religiosity affects earnings management through the channel of risk aversion. We conclude that firms choose real earnings management over accrual-based earnings management because of risk aversion, rather than ethical reasons. (shrink)

The paper attends to the increasingly heated debate on the local, the global versus the glocal approaches in transcultural brand communication with an examination of how Disneyland performs emotional branding on social media across US to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Integrating insights from brand communication with linguistics, the present study develops a framework to examine how Disneyland builds emotional attachment of the public to the brand via brand personality appeals and use of interactional features. It is found that on a (...) global-local continuum, brand personality traits exhibit strong globalization propensity whereas interactional features demonstrate strong localization tendency in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Variations also exist in the means of emotional branding between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Finally, the paper provides an account for the differences between Hong Kong and Shanghai and concludes that neither the local approach nor the global approach but the glocal approach can tackle the challenge of transcultural brand communication and that future studies in this area should be oriented further to uncovering the global-local nexus in the process. (shrink)

This study takes the mountainous villages in central Shandong as the research object, which becomes the entry point for studying the concepts of cultural landscape and revitalization. This study examines some villages with special cultural landscapes due to their unique physical space. Later, due to industrialization, they suffered a cultural crisis and then revitalized after restoration, and then reused it to generate value. It explores the interdependent relationship between the natural environment, people, and society in the mountainous area, including the (...) spatial production and value reuse of the village cultural landscape. Through this study, not only the theoretical connotation of concepts such as cultural landscape and spatial production is enriched, but also the intrinsic connection between the characteristics of village cultural landscape and revitalization is revealed. At the same time, the study also proposed new knowledge about value reuse and revitalization, that is, things in the past can not only retain their old value in the present but also generate new value. This study will further enrich the content of the theoretical research on cultural landscape and revitalization and help to understand the revitalized villages worldwide. (shrink)

Choice revision is a sort of non-prioritized multiple revision, in which the agent partially accepts the new information represented by a set of sentences. We investigate the construction of choice revision based on a new approach to belief change called descriptor revision. We prove that each of two variants of choice revision based on such construction is axiomatically characterized with a set of plausible postulates, assuming that the object language is finite. Furthermore, we introduce an alternative modelling for choice revision, (...) which is based on a type of relation on sets of sentences, named multiple believability relation. We show without assuming a finite language that choice revision constructed from such relations is axiomatically characterized with the same sets of postulates that we proposed for the choice revision based on descriptor revision, whenever the relations satisfy certain rationality conditions. (shrink)

As professional football stadiums continue to grow in popularity worldwide, fans are able to watch the game in closer proximity, but the design of professional football stadiums to shorten the distance between fans and the playing field also exacerbates the impact of the home advantage on the referee’s decision to call a penalty. Studies have confirmed the existence of the home advantage and found that experienced referees can reduce the impact of this interference, but the neural mechanisms behind this phenomenon (...) have not been adequately investigated. In this study, we designed a soccer referee decision making task based on a home field effect scenario in a real soccer game, and used event-related potentials to compare the decision making and EEG differences between individuals with different experience levels when faced with foul actions under spectator noise interference. The experiments showed that individuals with different experience levels triggered a significant ERN EEG component when performing the penalty decision task under the home field effect factor, suggesting that the interference of the home field effect may lead referees to correct their previous decision-making behavior patterns in the penalty decision and reduce unfavorable calls against the home team. In contrast, referees with officiating experience elicited smaller ERN amplitudes compared to other subjects, suggesting that experience factors may inhibit this tendency to change behavioral patterns. This study suggests that in response to the increasing trend of professional football stadiums, policy makers should place more emphasis on enhancing the experience level of referees in the training of referees to ensure the fairness of the game. (shrink)

Lithium-ion batteries have been widely used as energy storage systems and in electric vehicles due to their desirable balance of both energy and power densities as well as continual falling price. Accurate estimation of the state-of-charge of a battery pack is important in managing the health and safety of battery packs. This paper proposes a compact radial basis function neural model to estimate the state-of-charge of lithium battery packs. Firstly, a suitable input set strongly correlated with the package SOC is (...) identified from directly measured voltage, current, and temperature signals by a fast recursive algorithm. Secondly, a RBF neural model for battery pack SOC estimation is constructed using the FRA strategy to prune redundant hidden layer neurons. Then, the particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to optimize the kernel parameters. Finally, a conventional RBF neural network model, an improved RBF neural model using the two stage method, and a least squares support vector machine model are also used to estimate the battery SOC as a comparative study. Simulation results show that generalization error of SOC estimation using the novel RBF neural network model is less than half of that using other methods. Furthermore, the model training time is much less than the LSSVM method and the improved RBF neural model using the two-stage method. (shrink)

Traffic congestion is a common problem in many countries, especially in big cities. At present, China’s urban road traffic accidents occur frequently, the occurrence frequency is high, the accident causes traffic congestion, and accidents cause traffic congestion and vice versa. The occurrence of traffic accidents usually leads to the reduction of road traffic capacity and the formation of traffic bottlenecks, causing the traffic congestion. In this paper, the formation and propagation of traffic congestion are simulated by using the improved medium (...) traffic model, and the control strategy of congestion dissipation is studied. From the point of view of quantitative traffic congestion, the paper provides the fact that the simulation platform of urban traffic integration is constructed, and a feasible data analysis, learning, and parameter calibration method based on RBF neural network is proposed, which is used to determine the corresponding decision support system. The simulation results prove that the control strategy proposed in this paper is effective and feasible. According to the temporal and spatial evolution of the paper, we can see that the network has been improved on the whole. (shrink)

We discuss a simple logic to describe one of our favourite games from childhood, hide and seek, and show how a simple addition of an equality constant to describe the winning condition of the seeker makes our logic undecidable. There are certain decidable fragments of first-order logic which behave in a similar fashion and we add a new modal variant to that class of logics. We also discuss the relative expressive power of the proposed logic in comparison to the standard (...) modal counterparts. (shrink)

This book explores and elaborates three theories of public reason, drawn from Rawlsian political liberalism, natural law theory, and Confucianism. Drawing together academics from these separate approaches, the volume explores how the three theories critique each other, as well as how each one brings its theoretical arsenal to bear on the urgent contemporary debate of medical assistance in dying. The volume is structured in two parts: an exploration of the three traditions, followed by an in-depth overview of the conceptual and (...) historical background. In Part I, the three comprehensive opening chapters are supplemented by six dynamic chapters in dialogue with each other, each author responding to the other two traditions, and subsequently reflecting on the possible deficiencies of their own theories. The chapters in Part II cover a broad range of subjects, from an overview of the history of bioethics to the nature of autonomy and its status as a moral and political value. In its entirety, the volume provides a vibrant and exemplary collaborative resource to scholars interested in the role of public reason and its relevance in bioethical debate. (shrink)

SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED that water is H2O. Water is H2O is true. But is it a necessary truth? In other words, is it true in all possible worlds? Some people think it is. For example Hilary Putnam, in his well-known Twin Earth argument, concludes that "water is H2O" is necessarily true; thus a liquid which phenomenally resembles H2O and fits the description of water in almost all aspects, but has the chemical formula XYZ, cannot be water. Saul Kripke has made (...) a similar claim about the necessary identity between water and H2O. Because this type of truth is based on empirical discoveries, Kripke calls truths of this sort "necessary a posteriori." The thesis shared by Putnam and Kripke has two premises: a realist view that natural kinds exist independently of human cognition, and a theory of direct reference of natural kind terms. Opposing the view that natural kind terms pick out objects through descriptions, Putnam and Kripke hold that natural kind terms pick out natural kinds in the world in a direct way. Based on these two premises, they argue that, if two natural kind terms, A and B, designate the same thing in the world, "A = B" expresses a necessary identity. (shrink)

Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension-based measures suggest that polysemes’ senses share lexical representations, whereas homophones’ meanings correspond to distinct lexical representations. Less is known about the lexical representations of polysemes compared to homophones in language production. In this study, speakers named pictures after reading sentence fragments that primed polysemes and homophones either as direct competitors to pictures, or as indirect-competitors to pictures. Polysemes elicited equal numbers of intrusions to picture names compared to in control conditions whether (...) primed as direct competitors or as indirect-competitors. This contrasted with the finding that homophones elicited more intrusions to picture names compared to in control conditions when primed as direct competitors than when primed as indirect-competitors. These results suggest that polysemes, unlike homophones, are stored and retrieved as unified lexical representations. (shrink)

Affect plays an important role in the consumer decision-making process and there is growing interest in the development of new technologies and computational approaches that can interpret and recognize the affects of consumers, with benefits for marketing described in relation to both academia and industry. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this paper aims to review past studies focused on electroencephalography (EEG)-based affective computing (AC) in marketing, which provides a promising avenue for studying the mechanisms underlying affective states and developing recognition computational (...) models to predict the psychological responses of customers. This review offers an introduction to EEG technology and an overview of EEG-based AC; provides a snapshot of the current state of the literature. It briefly presents the themes, challenges, and trends in studies of affect evaluation, recognition, and classification; and further proposes potential guidelines for researchers and marketers. (shrink)