In January 2019, What is Peppa?, a promotional video for a Chinese New Year movie, received widespread attention in China immediately after its release. This paper explains the success of the video from the perspective of visual framing, and employs Systemic Visual Grammar to analyze how visual semiotics are applied to frame prominent topics so as to achieve promotional purposes. The results show that: (i) visual semiotics are used to frame the topic of empty nesters, implying that this issue brings (...) negative consequences and evoking the audience’s empathy and concern; (ii) visuals frame the topic of family love, in which the main protagonist’s actions are highlighted; and (iii) the topic of family reunion is mainly framed and realized by delicate compositional arrangements. Using various visual semiotics at the denotative, stylistic-semantic, connotative, and ideological levels, this video establishes both visual and emotional communication between the main character and the audience, making the promotional purpose more successful. The results highlight and specify the important roles of visual frames in promotional videos, and the integration of Peppa with traditional Chinese culture, love, and family reunion represents a visual approach to glocalization. (shrink)

As Paulo Freire’s education theory for social change and emancipation is being continually studied and disseminated in East Asia, it has faced skepticism as some educators are unfamiliar with its critical pedagogy or education for freedom concepts. In light of this, scholars have attempted to compare Freirean philosophies with concepts in Chinese philosophy of education as a way of bridging East and West. Diverging from previous studies that use popular Chinese philosophies (such as Confucianism) to connect with Freirean theory, this (...) paper introduces an understudied but compatible Chinese philosophical thought, Mohism, for comparison with Freirean theory. Mohism is a political philosophy for the working class that expanded into grassroots movements for people’s welfare in ancient China. The Mohist bottom-up approach echoes the grassroots emancipatory pedagogy that underlies Freirean philosophy. A comparative analysis of education concepts in both philosophies reveals that despite differences in the educational content of Freirean theory and Mohism, there are similarities in their conceptualization of education for anti-oppression and praxis for social change. Implications for utilizing Mohist philosophy to contemplate Freirean philosophy within the East Asian educational context are also explored. Ultimately this paper revives educational concepts of Mohism that aligns with Freirean philosophy to a broader audience of scholars and educators. (shrink)

Incivility among employees in frontline encounters is prevalent, but little is known about its impact on customers’ ethics-related perceptions and behaviors. Drawing upon the stimulus–organism–response paradigm, this study examines how witnessing incivility among employees can serve as a social atmospheric cue to influence customers’ perceived ethicality of an organization and their subsequent behaviors. According to our results, in response to employee-to-employee incivility witnessed during frontline encounters, customers perceive the uncivil employees’ organization to have a lower level of ethicality. In turn, (...) customers engage more in unethical behavior and less in customer citizenship behavior. We further demonstrate that the negative effect of uncivil employee-to-employee interactions on customers’ perception of the ethicality of an organization is amplified when customers have an a priori perception that the organization is competent. The findings hold theoretical and practical implications for the management of employee-to-employee incivility and unethical customer behavior during frontline encounters. (shrink)

This article systematically surveys the history of Anglo-American philosophy in Taiwan since the late nineteenth century. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it argues that pragmatism remained influential given the dominance of continental philosophy in Japanese colonized Taiwan, where the universal values assumed by pragmatists were used to resist the Empire’s ideology, after WWII, immigrated Chinese scholars brought in more novelty to Taiwanese philosophy than the Vienna circle diasporas brought to their Anglo-American counterparts, in which liberal scholars’ emphasis on science and democracy (...) challenged Chiang’s dictatorship and Chinese nationalism, and analytic philosophy thrived with the advance of democratizing in the 1980s, which, in turn, diversified the philosophy in 1990s Taiwan. Accordingly, Anglo-American philosophy was never confined to the academic ivory tower but had positive impacts on Taiwan’s centennial social transformation. (shrink)

How do corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and innovation investment co-evolve with organizational forms to affect firm market value? To address this question, we draw on the co-evolutionary perspective and theorize that the contingency effect of CSR reporting is more pronounced for firms with high uncertainty and low legitimacy by comparing start-up firms vs. established firms and privately owned enterprises (POEs) versus state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, taking a dynamic approach, we propose that the effects of CSR and innovation investment on (...) market value change when the organizational form transitions over time. Specifically, we argue that when start-up firms transitioned to established firms or when POEs were transformed from SOEs, the strengthening effects of CSR reporting become less pronounced. We test our theory using panel data on 2204 Chinese listed firms for the period of 2008–2017. (shrink)

Philosophy in Taiwan can be traced to the age of discovery, when Dutch colonists preached the monotheism of Calvinism.1 This was followed by the introduction of Neo-Confucianism by Koxinga's regime. Buddhism and Daoism, and, later, Scottish Presbyterianism, were imported during the Manchu Qing period. Starting in 1895, Japan significantly modernized its first colony in Taiwan, bringing in European philosophy and the Kyoto School. When the communists took over China in 1949, the best liberal and Confucian scholars fled to Taiwan, which (...) has imported analytic philosophy since the 1960s. Recently, epistemology and environmental ethics based on Austronesian... (shrink)

Extant studies on private regulation have not reached a sufficient understanding about the interplay between private and public regulations, due to underdeveloped theoretical framework and the lack of large-sample empirical investigations. Leveraging ISO 14001 adoption among Chinese firms as the research context, the current research draws on the institutional theory to examine how firm’s adoption of ISO 14001 standard, as a specific form of private regulation, affects the incidence of public environmental inspections. To test our arguments, we conduct two empirical (...) studies. Study 1 uses the first-hand data of a corporate social responsibility survey on Chinese manufacturing firms, whereas Study 2 deploys the second-hand longitudinal archival data of the government environmental inspections on Chinese listed firms. Both of the two studies reveal consistent findings that ISO 14001 adoption decreases the incidence of government environmental inspections, and that the effect of ISO 14001 adoption becomes stronger in state-owned enterprises and firms with top management team’s political ties. Our findings are suggestive of a complementary relationship between private and public regulations, in a sense that private regulations can compensate for the weaknesses of public regulations by offering faster, more flexible and cost-efficient means of enforcement, which allows the public authorities to economize on the deployment of public resources to monitor the rest non-compliant firms. (shrink)

Despite intensive debates regarding action imitation and sentence imitation, few studies have examined their relationship. In this paper, we argue that the mechanism of action imitation is necessary and in some cases sufficient to describe sentence imitation. We first develop a framework for action imitation in which key ideas of Hurley’s shared circuits model are integrated with Wolpert et al.’s motor selection mechanism and its extensions. We then explain how this action-based framework clarifies sentence imitation without a language-specific faculty. Finally, (...) we discuss the empirical support for and philosophical significance of this perspective. (shrink)

With the idea of analyzing awareness as potential for knowledge, we propose a novel semantics for awareness logic. Expressivities of languages with different combinations of modalities for this semantics are investigated. We explore the properties of our semantics and compare our model with Fagin & Halpern model and the model by Heifetz et al. in partitional settings. A series of equivalence results are established from the comparison. Finally, we provide two axiomatizations for implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge, respectively, and prove (...) soundness and completeness for them. (shrink)

This paper examines the success of corporate communication in voluntary sustainability reporting. Existing studies have focused on the perspective of the communicators but lack an understanding of the perspective of information recipients to clearly evaluate this interactive communication process. This paper looks at the issue of a credibility gap perceived by external stakeholders when they doubt the authenticity of communicated information due to the reporting company’s governance structure. The paper uses family businesses to exemplify the emergence of such a gap (...) when outsiders become concerned about the potential agency problem of the integrated ownership and management controlled by a few members of the same family. Following source credibility theory, these concerns raise a credibility gap associated with a family firm’s trustworthiness and goodwill, even if the family has the expertise to carry out sustainability reporting. The findings of two experimental studies indicate that family businesses suffer a greater credibility gap than non-family businesses. An external and independent assurance service can mitigate such gaps, especially when the service is comprehensive and targets family businesses. The paper provides a complete view evaluating corporate communication by looking at the interaction between the communicating company and the information recipients. (shrink)

Alcohol addiction can lead to health and social problems. It can also affect people's emotions. Emotion plays a key role in human communications. It is important to recognize the people's emotions at the court and infer the association between the people's emotions and the alcohol addiction. However, it is challenging to recognize people's emotions efficiently in the courtroom. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, no existing work is about the association between alcohol addiction and people's emotions at court. In (...) this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for predicting people's emotions based on sound perception, named ResCNN-SER. The proposed model combines several neural network-based components to extract the features of the speech signals and predict the emotions. The evaluation shows that the proposed model performs better than existing methods. By applying ResCNN-SER for emotion recognition based on people's voices at court, we infer the association between alcohol addiction and the defendant's emotion at court. Based on the sound source data from 54 trial records, we found that the defendants with alcohol addiction tend to get angry or fearful more easily at court comparing with defendants without alcohol addiction. (shrink)

Proper and regular physical activity plays an important role in improving people’s health. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has posed a serious threat to individual health, residents’ PA has aroused deep concern. Based on the theory of planned behavior, this study examines the impact of residents’ PA intention and behavior in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from a sample of 961 residents in Wuhan in China using a questionnaire survey. The results show that residents’ (...) PA intention and behavior have been affected significantly by residents’ PA attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. The COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on both residents’ PA intention and behavior. In addition, there were gender and region differences in this impact. The findings are of great significance in promoting residents’ PA intention and PA behavior, which are of positive significance to the development of residents’ physical and mental health in the period of global serious health crisis. (shrink)

Background Moral courage is a recognized virtue. Researchers have focused on various aspects of nursing moral courage, such as its conceptualization and influencing factors. Within these studies, various literature reviews have been conducted, but to our knowledge, bibliometric mapping has not been utilized. Aim This article aims to analyze the production of literature within nursing moral courage research. Research Design To investigate publication patterns, we employed VOSviewer and CiteSpace software, focusing on publication dynamics, prolific research entities, and most cited articles. (...) Additionally, we forecasted future research trends. Ethical considerations In our study, ethical review was not required. Results A total of 105 information sources were identified in the WoS database. Overall, there has been a significant increase in research volume after 2020. The most prolific countries are the United States, Finland, and China, while the most prolific source title is “Nursing Ethics.” Keywords are also related to moral dilemmas and ethics. However, there are further improvements needed in international cooperation. Conclusions The results proposed in this paper can serve as a starting point for comprehensive or systematic literature reviews and seek more detailed data, information, and knowledge in the field of nursing moral courage. It can enable outsiders to quickly understand research on nursing moral courage, whether for in-depth exploration or simply to facilitate more effective collaboration with nursing ethics experts. (shrink)

Reorienting the Political examines the reception of two controversial German philosophers, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, in the Chinese-speaking world. This volume explores the powerful resonance of both thinkers in Chinese political thought from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective.

_ This scholarly article explores the pivotal role of green technologies and innovation in shaping a sustainable future. With the growing concern over environmental degradation and climate change, there is an increasing need for transformative solutions. This article investigates the current landscape of green technologies, their potential impact on sustainability, and the role of innovation in driving positive change. By examining case studies and emerging trends, it aims to provide insights into the promising avenues for creating a more environmentally conscious (...) and resilient world._. (shrink)

Background The urgency of ensuring adequate moral courage in clinical nursing practice is evident. However, currently, there are few formal intervention plans targeted at enhancing the moral courage of nurses. Aim To develop a training program for improving the moral courage of nurses using the modified Delphi method. Research design A modified Delphi study. Participants and research context From November to December 2022, a literature review and expert group discussion were conducted to develop a preliminary training plan framework. From January (...) to March 2023, a two-round Delphi survey was performed, and a consensus was reached regarding the plan through online questionnaires. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the institutional ethics committee (No. 138, 30 August 2021). All participants provided written informed consent. Results Consensus was reached on eight themes and 33 items to strengthen the moral courage training program for nurses. Conclusions Guided by a unified goal of moral education, a multi-level and acceptable intervention plan was designed to enhance the moral courage of nurses. (shrink)

Academic engagement describes students’ involvement in academic learning and achievement. This paper reports the psychometric properties of the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI) with a sample of 3992 university students from nine different countries and regions from Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. The USEI operationalizes a trifactorial conceptualization of academic engagement (behavioral, emotional and cognitive). Construct validity was assessed by means of confirmatory factor analysis and reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega coefficients. Weak measurement (...) invariance was observed for country/region, while strong measurement invariance was observed for gender and area of graduation. The USEI scores showed predictive validity for dropout intention, self-rated academic performance, and course approval rate while divergent validity with student burnout scores was also evident. Overall, the results indicate that the USEI can produce reliable and valid data on academic engagement of university students across the world. (shrink)

This paper selected Vanke as the case to study the governance problems of Vanke and the protection of the interests of small and medium shareholders under the situation of equity disputes. At the same time, the study further explored the advantages and disadvantages of the dispersed ownership structure, the long-term impact on the company’s development and the choice of the involved corporate governance methods under the current Chinese capital market conditions. This paper adopted the event research method and selected the (...) period from June 2015 to June 2017 as the observation period to analyze the market performance impact of Vanke in the equity disputes. At the same time, this paper also measured Vanke’s individual stock rate of return and market rate of return, and calculated Vanke’s normal rate of return [E], abnormal rate of return, and cumulative abnormal rate of return during different event windows. Vanke’s shareholding was too dispersed and the stock price had been sluggish for a long time, which had greatly reduced the acquisition difficulty and cost of Baoneng, thus triggering the “barbarian invasion” of Baoneng. In the struggle for control, whether it was Vanke’s anti-takeover measures or China Resources, Baoneng, and Evergrande’s competition for equity, their actions had harmed the interests of small and medium shareholders. The market supervision department was too lenient to supervise and punish the interests of small and medium shareholders, and opportunism made behaviors that infringe on the interests of others more reckless. However, small and medium shareholders cannot actively participate in the company’s management decision-making to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests, which intensifies the violations of all parties in the equity disputes, thus forming a vicious circle. Therefore, the protection of the interests of small and medium shareholders required the joint efforts and consciousness of regulators, small and medium shareholders, and acquirers. (shrink)

Although the relationship between prejudice and predictive coding has attracted more attention recently, many important issues remain to be investigated, such as why prejudice is so persistent and how to accommodate seemingly conflicting studies. In this paper, we offer an integrated framework to explain the functional-computational mechanism of prejudice. We argue that this framework better explains (i) why prejudice is somewhat immune to revision, (ii) how inconsistent processing (e.g. one’s moral belief and biased emotional reaction) may occur, (iii) the dispute (...) over the content of ‘alief’ (unconscious belief), and (iv) conflicting data reported in disinformation studies. Finally, we briefly review the main intervention strategies and offer recommendations. (shrink)

We report that upon excitation by a single pulse, a classical harmonic oscillator immersed in the classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation exhibits a discrete harmonic spectrum in agreement with that of its quantum counterpart. This result is interesting in view of the fact that the vacuum field is needed in the classical calculation to obtain the agreement.

BackgroundTinnitus is a common disease, and sound therapy is an effective method to alleviate it. Previous studies have shown that notched sound not only changes levels of cortical blood oxygen, but affects blood oxygen in specific cerebral cortical areas, such as Brodmann area 46, which is associated with emotion. Extensive evidence has confirmed that tinnitus is closely related to emotion. Whether notched sound plays a role in regulating the emotional center is still unclear.MethodsThis study included 29 patients with newly diagnosed (...) chronic tinnitus who were treated with notched sound. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was conducted before and after treatment to observe bilateral changes in cortical blood oxygen in the cerebral hemispheres. We compared the changes in connectivity between the two regions of interest, as wells as other cortical regions before and after treatment.ResultsThe results showed That global connectivity between the bilateral auditory cortex of the superior temporal sulcus and the ipsilateral cortex did not change significantly between baseline and the completion of treatment, and That the connectivity between channel 14 and the right superior temporal sulcus decreased after treatment. The overall connectivity between the right BA46 region and the right cortex decreased after treatment, and decreases in connectivity after treatment were specifically found for channels 10 and 14 in the right parietal lobe and channels 16, 20, 21, and 22 in the frontal lobe, while there was no significant change on the left side. There were no significant changes in the questionnaire measures of tinnitus, anxiety, or depression before and after treatment.ConclusionThe results of the study indicate that cerebral cortex reorganization occurs in tinnitus patients after submitted to treatment with notched sound for 1 month, and that notched sound decreases the connectivity between the auditory cortex and specific brain regions.SignificanceNotched sound not only regulates the auditory center through lateral inhibition, but also alleviates tinnitus by reorganizing the emotional control center. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the development and piloting of a new methodology for illuminating the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows as data move between different sites of practice. The data journeys approach contributes to the development of critical, qualitative methodologies that can address the geographic and temporal scale of emerging knowledge infrastructures, and capture the ‘life of data’ from their initial generation through to re-use in different contexts. We discuss the theoretical development of the data journeys methodology (...) and the application of the approach on a project examining meteorological data on their journey from initial production through to being re-used in climate science and financial markets. We then discuss three key conceptual findings from this project about: the socio-material constitution of digital data objects, ‘friction’ in the movement of data through space and time and the mutability of digital data as a material property that contributes to driving the movement of data between different sites of practice. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the effects of parental phubbing on learning burnout in elementary and secondary school students and its mechanism of action. A questionnaire method was applied to investigate parental phubbing, parent–child attachment, ego depletion, and learning burnout among 2090 elementary and secondary school students in Anhui Province, China. The results are as follows: Parental phubbing was significantly correlated with parent–child attachment, ego depletion, and learning burnout; Parental phubbing has an indirect impact on learning burnout in elementary and (...) secondary school students through three pathways: a separate mediating effect on parent–child attachment, a separate mediating effect on ego depletion, and a chain mediating effect on both. Parental phubbing is a risk factor for Learning Burnout, which can positively affect Learning Burnout in elementary and secondary school students. The findings of the study contribute to revealing the influence mechanism of parental phubbing on learning burnout in elementary and secondary school students. (shrink)

We develop a series of small infinitary epistemic logics to study deductive inference involving intra-/interpersonal beliefs/knowledge such as common knowledge, common beliefs, and infinite regress of beliefs. Specifically, propositional epistemic logics GL are presented for ordinal α up to a given αo so that GL is finitary KDn with n agents and GL allows conjunctions of certain countably infinite formulae. GL is small in that the language is countable and can be constructive. The set of formulae Lα is increasing up (...) to α = ω but stops at ω We present Kripke-completeness for GL for each α ≤ ω, which is proved using the Rasiowa–Sikorski lemma and Tanaka–Ono lemma. GL has a sufficient expressive power to discuss intra-/interpersonal beliefs with infinite lengths. As applications, we discuss the explicit definability of Axioms T, 4, 5, and of common knowledge in GL Also, we discuss the rationalizability concept in game theory in our framework. We evaluate where these discussions are done in the series GL, α ≤ ω. (shrink)

The influence of attachment style—anxious and avoidant attachment—on subjective responses to socially excluded experiences termed “Need-Threat” remains inconsistent. Need-Threat is a composite score of four fundamental needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. Individuals with high AX tend to spend much effort maintaining strong connections with others, while those with high AV tend to maintain high levels of self-esteem by distancing themselves from others. Therefore, attachment style is most likely to influence the need associated with each style. In addition, since (...) individuals with high AV satisfy their needs by keeping independence from others, they would experience the Need-Threat against excessive inclusion from others. This study aimed to investigate the influence of attachment style on each Need-Threat response to various inclusionary statuses. A total of 133 undergraduate students were equally assigned to low or high groups for each attachment style. Participants played one of the three types of the cyberball task : excluded, included, or over-included situation. The high AV group felt fewer threats to self-esteem than the low AV group in the excluded situation. Furthermore, only in the over-included situation did the high AV group feel more threats to belonging and self-esteem than the low AV group. AX did not influence any situation. These findings suggest that individuals with high AV would have a restrictive alleviation effect on adverse subjective responses to socially excluded experiences but demonstrate maladaptive subjective responses to over-included experiences. (shrink)

To improve sustainable practices and attract investors, companies in emerging markets have increasingly embraced strategies for inclusion in rapidly expanding sustainability indices. However, most early studies on socially responsible investment or sustainability investment have only focused on exploring the relationship between corporate sustainability and firm value. Moreover, little has been done to explore the practices of emerging market companies for engaging with a sustainability index. To address this research gap, we employed the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method to identify (...) critical factors that influence the inclusion of emerging market companies in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Five critical factors and best practices were identified based on the analysis of seven Taiwanese electronics companies that have been listed in the DJSI for several consecutive years. Our results provide insights on the critical factors and best practices that reinforce the sustainable practices of emerging market companies for inclusion in the DJSI. This study also contributes to the literature by investigating the engagement of emerging market companies with the DJSI. (shrink)

The existing differential item functioning detection approaches relying on item difficulty or item discrimination are limited for understanding the associates of DIF items, and consequently, DIF items were conventionally either deleted or ignored. Given the importance of minimizing DIF items in test construction, teachers or testing practitioners need more information regarding possible associates of DIF items. Using an example of a teacher-made mathematics achievement test, this study aimed to examine how the Poly-BW indices contributed to the properties of gender-related DIF (...) items. Data from a 34-item mathematics achievement test that involved 1,439 seventh-grade students from Taiwan showed that the differences of the defenselessness and power indices between men and women served as salient predictors of the DIF measures estimated by the Poly Simultaneous Item Bias Test procedure and with satisfactory accuracy of hit rates. Items with relatively large defenselessness for men were likely to present male-favoring DIFs, whereas items with relatively large power for men were likely to present female-favoring DIFs. The Poly-BW indices yielded directions for modifying items for teachers in practice. (shrink)