Boolean-valued models generalize classical two-valued models by allowing arbitrary complete Boolean algebras as value ranges. The goal of my dissertation is to study Boolean-valued models and explore their philosophical and mathematical applications.In Chapter 1, I build a robust theory of first-order Boolean-valued models that parallels the existing theory of two-valued models. I develop essential model-theoretic notions like “Boolean-valuation,” “diagram,” and “elementary diagram,” and prove a series of theorems on Boolean-valued models, including the (strengthened) Soundness and Completeness Theorem, the Löwenheim–Skolem Theorems, (...) the Elementary Chain Theorem, and many more.Chapter 2 gives an example of a philosophical application of Boolean-valued models. I apply Boolean-valued models to the language of mereology to model indeterminacy in the parthood relation. I argue that Boolean-valued semantics is the best degree-theoretic semantics for the language of mereology. In particular, it trumps the well-known alternative—fuzzy-valued semantics. I also show that, contrary to what many have argued, indeterminacy in parthood entails neither indeterminacy in existence nor indeterminacy in identity, though being compatible with both.Chapter 3 (joint work with Bokai Yao) gives an example of a mathematical application of Boolean-valued models. Scott and Solovay famously used Boolean-valued models on set theory to obtain relative consistency results. In Chapter 3, I investigate two ways of extending the Scott–Solovay construction to set theory with urelements. I argue that the standard way of extending the construction faces a serious problem, and offer a new way that is free from the problem.Abstract prepared by Xinhe Wu.E-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the relationship between workplace negative gossip, as perceived by the targets, and proactive behavior by focusing on the mediating role of the target’s emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of the target’s traditionality. Our results from dyadic data on 234 supervisor–subordinate relationships in China revealed that workplace negative gossip was negatively related to proactive behavior; emotional exhaustion mediated this relationship; and traditionality strengthened both the relationship between workplace negative gossip and emotional exhaustion and the indirect (...) effect of workplace negative gossip on proactive behavior via emotional exhaustion. Our findings have a number of theoretical and practical implications for the research on mistreatment and proactive behavior. (shrink)

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of news discourse analysis using CiteSpace to sketch its scientific landscape based on journal articles in English in the Scopus database from 1988 through 2020. The statistical analysis provides evidence for the interdisciplinarity of this area, and shows an upward trend in general over these years as well as an accelerating growth rate in the past decade. Findings also indicate that the problem-oriented CDA has gained the most popularity in this area since its emergence, (...) and the appraisal framework, multimodality analysis, and discursive news values have become three hotspots of news discourse analysis. In addition, the authors in the West have contributed most in this area, but those from Chinese Mainland, Malaysia, South Africa, and Indonesia have gradually been an emerging powerhouse, which has added diversity in topics and will enhance equality and promote dialogue between different communities, ethnics, and races across the globe. (shrink)

Theoretical studies suggest that, when determining the workplace safety level, CEOs face a trade-off between ex ante safety-improving expenditures and the expected losses due to ex post injury and illness occurrences. We examine whether firms with higher CEO inside debt holdings have safer workplaces. Using establishment-level employee workplace injury and illness data, we find that CEOs’ inside debt holdings are negatively associated with employee workplace injury and illness cases. This relationship is more pronounced if workers’ compensation premiums are more sensitive (...) to injury claims and for firms with more government business and less pronounced for firms with higher levels of secured debt. We provide some evidence that our main result stems from CEOs increasing safety investments. Our empirical results are shown to be robust under a batch of robustness tests and when considering potential endogeneity problems. Our findings suggest that CEOs with higher levels of inside debt holdings are more sensitive to wealth loss due to employee injury and illness, leading to a safer workplace. (shrink)

In this study, an accurate convergence time of the supertwisting algorithm is proposed to build up a framework for nonaffine nonlinear systems’ finite-time control. The convergence time of the STA is provided by calculating the solution of a differential equation instead of constructing Lyapunov function. Therefore, precise convergence time is presented instead of estimation of the upper bound of the algorithm’s reaching time. Regardless of affine or nonaffine nonlinear systems, supertwisting control provides a general solution based on virtual control law (...) skill ensuring the output of the systems converges to the origin point at exact time. Benchmark tests are simulated to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. (shrink)

While it is widely believed that bribery is ubiquitous among Asian firms, few studies have offered systematic evidence of such activities, and the dynamics of bribery in Asian firms have not been well understood. The research reported here used World Business Environment Survey data to examine some distinct characteristics of bribery in Asian firms and to empirically test 10 hypotheses on determinants of bribery. We find that firm characteristics such as firm size, growth rate, and corporate governance are important determinants (...) of bribery activities at the firm level, and that Asian firms are more likely to bribe when faced with fierce market competition, corrupted court systems, convoluted licensing requirements, nontransparent interpretation of laws and regulations, inefficient government service delivery, and high taxes. (shrink)

This study, which is based on survey data provided by 445 employees of a Chinese enterprise, examines the impact of authentic leadership on the proactive behavior of subordinates, in particular the mediating effect of subordinate psychological capital and the moderating effect of the compassion at work. The results of our structural equation model reveal that: (1) There is a significant positive correlation between authentic leadership and the proactive behavior of subordinates; (2) Psychological capital plays a full mediating role between authentic (...) leadership and subordinate proactive behavior; (3) Compassion at work has a moderating effect on the positive relationship between authentic leadership and subordinate psychological capital and proactive behavior. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher education institutions to shift their teaching activities from traditional face-to-face to online learning. This brings a great challenge to the creativity training of vocational college students, who not only learn theoretical knowledge but also cultivate technical skills. Therefore, it is very important to explore the influencing factors of online learning on students’ creativity during the epidemic. By relying on the related literature review, an extensive model is developed by integrating the expectation confirmation model, technology (...) task fit model, and the technology acceptance model to illustrate key factors that influence creativity. Based on the proposed model, theory-based hypotheses are tested through structural equation modeling employing empirical data gathered through a survey questionnaire of 229 students from different vocational colleges in China. In addition, to extend the analysis results, this paper performs a comparative analysis based on gender. The findings demonstrate that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness significantly influence knowledge sharing; knowledge sharing significantly affects creativity. However, there is no substantial relationship between perceived usefulness and attitude, and no relationship between attitude and knowledge sharing. Moreover, a multi-group comparison shows that there is a significant gender difference between perceived ease of use and attitude. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

In March 2010, China launched a pilot programme of deceased donor organ donation in 10 provinces and cities. However, the deceased donor donation rate in China remains significantly lower than in Spain and other Western countries. In order to provide incentive for deceased donor organ donation, five pilot provinces and cities have subsequently launched a financial compensation policy. Financial compensation can be considered to include two main forms, the ‘thank you’ form and the ‘help’ form. The ‘thank you’ form is (...) an expression of gratitude on behalf of the Red Cross Society of China for consenting to donation. The ‘help’ form is social welfare support for needy families. (shrink)

Three hundred and seventy-six middle school students in Wenchuan County were assessed three and one-half years after the Wenchuan earthquake to examine the effects of rumination on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and posttraumatic growth (PTG). The results revealed that recent intrusive ruminations partly mediated the relationship between intrusive rumination soon after the earthquake with PTSD but not with PTG. Recent deliberate rumination partly mediated the relationship between intrusive rumination soon after the earthquake and PTG but not PTSD. Moreover, recent deliberate (...) rumination also partly mediated the relationship between recent intrusive rumination with PTG but not with PTSD. Overall, intrusive rumination soon after the earthquake had an effect on PTSD but not on PTG through recent intrusive rumination and affected PTG but not PTSD through deliberate recent rumination. Furthermore, intrusive rumination soon after the earthquake affected PTG but not PTSD by recent deliberate rumination following recent intrusive rumination. More importantly, the present study also found that PTSD exhibited no relation to PTG. These results suggest that PTSD and PTG are influenced by different mechanisms, which further indicates that PTSD and PTG represent two separate dimensions of experience after adversity. (shrink)

Purpose: This study used a moderated mediation model to test the mediating effect of general self-efficacy on the relationship between post-traumatic growth and creativity and the moderating effect of deliberate rumination in the second path of the indirect mediation path during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods: A sample of 881 university students from Guangdong Province, China, was surveyed with the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory, the Runco Ideational Behavior Scale, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Deliberate Rumination Inventory. SPSS and PROCESS were used for (...) correlation analyses, mediation analysis, and moderated mediation analysis.Results: PTG was positively correlated with creativity, self-efficacy, and deliberate rumination. Creativity was positively correlated with self-efficacy and deliberate rumination. Deliberate rumination was positively correlated with self-efficacy. Self-efficacy mediated the relationship between PTG and creativity. Deliberate rumination moderated the second half of the path of “PTG → self-efficacy → creativity.”Conclusions: PTG affected creativity directly and also indirectly through self-efficacy. In particular, deliberate rumination moderated the relationship between self-efficacy and creativity, such that the association was stronger when the incidence of deliberate rumination was low. These results provide a more comprehensive understanding of the positive link between PTG and creativity. (shrink)

This paper considers two kinds of stochastic reentrant job shop scheduling problems, i.e., the SRJSSP with the maximum tardiness criterion and the SRJSSP with the makespan criterion. Owing to the NP-complete complexity of the considered RJSSPs, an effective differential evolutionary algorithm combined with two uncertainty handling techniques, namely, DEA_UHT, is proposed to address these problems. Firstly, to reasonably control the computation cost, the optimal computing budget allocation technique is applied for allocating limited computation budgets to assure reliable evaluation and identification (...) for excellent solutions or individuals, and the hypothesis test technique is added to execute a statistical comparison to reduce some unnecessary repeated evaluation. Secondly, a reentrant-largest-order-value rule is designed to convert the DEA’s individual to the SRJSSP’s solution. Thirdly, a conventional active decoding scheme for the job shop scheduling problem is extended to decode the solution for obtaining the criterion value. Fourthly, an Insert-based exploitation strategy and an Interchange-based exploration strategy are devised to enhance DEA’s exploitation ability and exploration ability, respectively. Finally, the test results and comparisons manifest the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed DEA_UHT. (shrink)

Shared beliefs, collective Emotionscollective and joint intentions are widely recognized to be at the core of the social world. Beliefs, emotions and intentions, however, largely depend on Experience. It is hard to see how the former could be joint, shared, or collective, without any possibility of togetherness at the experiential level. Sharing experiences is thus a key for human sociality.

This study aimed to analyze the relations between class competition and primary school students’ academic achievement, considering the possible mediating roles of learning anxiety and learning engagement. Participants were 1,479 primary school students from four primary schools in Zhejiang, China. We analyzed participants’ scores for class competition, learning anxiety, and learning engagement and their last two final exam scores. Class competition did not directly predict academic achievement, but indirectly affected academic achievement through learning anxiety and learning engagement. There were three (...) effect paths: class competition negatively predicted academic achievement by increasing learning anxiety; class competition positively predicted academic achievement by promoting learning engagement; and class competition affected academic achievement through multiple mediating effects of learning anxiety and learning engagement. This study highlights the important roles of learning anxiety and learning engagement in class competition and academic achievement, which have theoretical and practical significance. (shrink)

This paper deals with the ethical perceptions of business people and the current state of business ethics in east China. After surveying 800 business people in 59 enterprises and interviewing 42 chief executive officers, chairs and senior managers among them, thefollowing conclusions can be drawn: First of all, business ethics has become a new and popular topic in east China. Second, quite a lotof business people are pessimistic about the ethical standards of their superiors and co-workers, and about the ethical (...) climate of theirenterprises. Third, more and more business leaders begin to realize the importance of business ethics. Finally, in east China, theestablishment of the market economy and the improvement of business ethics will depend on each other. In short, business peoplein east China have various ethical perceptions, and the current state of business ethics in east China is also complex and changeable. (shrink)

Poverty alleviation by consumption is a powerful way to help the poor people get rid of poverty, which plays a significant role in China's rural revitalization. However, the achievement of poverty alleviation by consumption mostly depends on government procurement, and the enthusiasm of customers to participate is low, facing the severe challenge of poor sustainability. Helping the poor is the most common motivation for customers to buy poverty-alleviation agricultural products. However, as the negative events of poverty alleviation such as “tragic (...) marketing” constantly appear in news reports, customers' trust in sellers has been seriously damaged. The psychological protection system for fear of being cheated hinders customers' purchase intention. Therefore, we believed that trust is an important factor in enhancing customers' purchase intention of PAAP. Customers buy PAAP mainly through online channels, and institution-based trust is the most important way to generate trust in online channels. Thus, this study investigated the institutional mechanisms that affect customers' trust in the sellers of PAAP and discussed the influence of trust on the online purchase intention of PAAP. Data were obtained through a questionnaire survey and tested empirically. The results showed that the effectiveness of the user feedback mechanism, platform supervision mechanism, product traceability mechanism, and product certification mechanism can enhance customers' purchase intention by enhancing their trust. Individual trust tendency positively regulated the relationship between the effectiveness of institutional mechanisms and consumer trust. The conclusion can not only provide new theoretical guidance for the practice of poverty alleviation by consumption in China but also offer new ideas for the poverty alleviation undertakings in other countries. (shrink)

Articulated arm coordinate measuring machine is a specific robotic structural instrument, which uses D-H method for the purpose of kinematic modeling and error compensation. However, it is difficult for the existing error compensation models to describe various factors, which affects the accuracy of AACMM. In this paper, a modeling and error compensation method for AACMM is proposed based on BP Neural Networks. According to the available measurements, the poses of the AACMM are used as the input, and the coordinates of (...) the probe are used as the output of neural network. To avoid tedious training and improve the training efficiency and prediction accuracy, a data acquisition strategy is developed according to the actual measurement behavior in the joint space. A neural network model is proposed and analyzed by using the data generated via Monte-Carlo method in simulations. The structure and parameter settings of neural network are optimized to improve the prediction accuracy and training speed. Experimental studies have been conducted to verify the proposed algorithm with neural network compensation, which shows that 97% error of the AACMM can be eliminated after compensation. These experimental results have revealed the effectiveness of the proposed modeling and compensation method for AACMM. (shrink)

While the proliferation of social media technologies in China has empowered the public with new opportunities for public expression and political engagement in a ‘virtual public sphere’, Chinese Internet censorship has meant that users have to develop creative ways to engage in political criticism. In a context where both mechanical and human censors are employed, Chinese users have become adept at utilizing the affordances of technology, Chinese language and cultural resources to express their opinions through social media. Drawing upon data (...) from the Chinese microblogging website, Weibo, surrounding the major chemical explosions in 2015 in Tianjin, the study explores three discursive techniques of indirection by Chinese social media users to express political criticism in the context of censorship. The study highlights that through the creative use of quotation, allusion and irony, users challenged the authority’s official narratives of the event. The study not only demonstrates the pluralization and dynamics of Chinese online expression, but also points to a better understanding of Chinese censoring as a continuingly evolving interplay between technology and cultural forms and between layers of government and users. (shrink)

This paper presents a bioinspired lower extremity exoskeleton robot. The proposed exoskeleton robot can be adjusted in structure to meet the wearer’s height of 150–185 cm and has a good gait stability. In the gait control part, a method of identifying different locomotion modes is proposed; five common locomotion modes are considered in this paper, including sitting down, standing up, level-ground walking, ascending stairs, and descending stairs. The identification is depended on angle information of the hip, knee, and ankle joints. (...) A deep locomotion mode identification model based on long-short term memory architecture is proposed in this paper for exploiting the angle data. We conducted two experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the DLMIM is capable of learning inherent characteristics of joint angles and achieves more accurate identification than the other models. The last experiment demonstrates that the DLMIM can recognize transitions between different locomotion modes in time and the real-time performance varies with each individual. (shrink)

Music not only regulates mood but also promotes the development and maintenance of empathy and social understanding. Since empathy is crucial for well-being and indispensable in social life, it is necessary to develop strategies to improve empathy and prosocial behaviors. To fulfill this aim, researchers have extensively investigated the effect of intensive musical training on the development of empathy. Here, we first summarize evidence showing the powerful influence of musical training on the development of empathy and then discuss psychological mechanisms (...) responsible for those observations. The conclusions drawn from most previous studies were mainly based on behavioral measurements, while the neural basis of musical training in the development of the empathic brain is still unclear. Fortunately, brain imaging research has contributed greatly to our understanding of the neural underpinnings associated with musical training and its possible connection to the development of the empathic brain. One of the most distinctive signatures of musical training is structural and functional changes of multiple brain regions, and such changes might be related to some of the empathic behaviors observed in musically trained children. Therefore, intensive musical training in childhood may increase levels of empathy, and applied research is required to optimize the training strategy before implementing music education in empathy regulation. Moreover, future longitudinal studies are needed to better understand neural mechanisms underlying the causal effect of musical training on empathy development. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of the empathic brain and for improving prosocial behaviors. (shrink)

Purpose:The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has had a significant impact on people’s lives, has apparently increased the incidence of depression. Although the topic of how depression affects creativity is contested, previous research has revealed a significant relationship between the two. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the relationship and the mechanisms that operate between depression and creativity.Methods:A total of 881 students at an independent college in China completed a questionnaire consisting of the Self-Reported Depression (...) Scale, Runco Ideational Behavior Scale, Psychological Resilience Scale, Deliberate Rumination Scale and demographic information. Among the respondents, 317 (36.0%) were male and 564 (64.0%) were female, all of whom were from the same grade. Correlation analyses were conducted, and then the researchers carried out mediation analysis and developed a moderated mediation model.Results:The results indicated that (a) depression was positively related to creativity (r= 0.085,p< 0.05); (b) psychological resilience mediated the relationship between depression and creativity; specifically, psychological resilience was negatively related to depression (r= −0.462,p< 0.01), which in turn was positively related to creativity (r= 0.198,p< 0.01); and (c) deliberate rumination moderated the relationship between depression and psychological resilience, showing a significant negative correlation with depression (r= 0.138,p< 0.01), psychological resilience (r= 0.078,p< 0.05), and creativity (r= 0.288,p< 0.05); specifically, higher levels of deliberate rumination strengthened the negative correlation between psychological resilience and depression.Conclusion:The results suggest that depression is a positive predictor of creativity and may promote creativity to some extent. Further, individuals with greater psychological resilience are more creative than those with less psychological resilience, as it is a question of whether they can and to what extent they can effectively use depression as an emotional resource. Last, an individual’s level of deliberate rumination moderates the mediating process, especially at the stage where depression is associated with psychological resilience. These findings advance understanding of the mechanisms that operate between depression and creativity. (shrink)

Ever since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease, people have been flooded with vast amounts of information related to the virus and its social consequences. This paper draws on social amplification theory and the extended parallel process model and assesses the following: how two amplification stations—news media and peoples’ personal networks—influence the risk-related perceptions of people and how these risk-related perceptions impact people’s health-protective behaviors. This study surveyed 1,946 participants. The results indicate that peoples’ exposure to news media significantly and (...) positively predicted both perceived efficacy and perceived threat. It also shows that peoples’ exposure to risk-related information through their personal networks negatively predicted their perceived efficacy, but it positively predicted their perceived threat. The mediating effect of fear was examined, and the result was contradictory to the EPPM. In short, this study reveals the underlying mechanism of individuals’ exposure to risk information, processing, and precautionary measures. (shrink)

Numerous studies had found that creativity is not only associated with low effort and flexible processes, but also associated with high effort and persistent processes especially when defensive behavior being induced negative emotions. The important role of self-esteem is to buffer the negative emotions and low self-esteem are prone to instigate various forms of defensive behaviors. Thus, we thought that the relationships between trait creativity and executive control brain networks might be modulated by self-esteem. The resting-state electroencephalogram (RS-EEG) microstates can (...) divided into four classical types (MS1, MS2, MS3 and MS4) which can reflect the brain networks as well as the dynamic characteristic of them. Thus, Williams creative tendency scale (WCTS) and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) were used to investigate the modulating role of self-esteem on the relationships between trait creativity and the RS-EEG microstates. As our results showed, self-esteem consistently modulated the relationships between creativity and the duration and contribution of MS2 related to visual or imagery processing, the occurrence of MS3 related to cingulo-opercular networks, as well as transitions between MS2 and MS4 which was related to frontoparietal control networks. Based on these results, we thought that Moreover, individuals with low self-esteem might be more prone to influenced by negative emotions and develop low trait creativity; bottom-up information from vision or visual imagery might be beneficial to develop trait creativity for individuals with high self-esteem to improve trait creativity, while inhibition of irrelevant information could facilitate trait creativity for individuals with low self-esteem. (shrink)

Lumbar Exoskeleton, as an important instance of wearable exoskeleton, has broad application prospects in logistics, construction, and other industries. Specifically, in the working scenarios that require long-term and repeated bending and rising movements, active lumbar exoskeleton can provide effective protection and flexible assistance to wear’s waist muscles and bones, which will significantly reduce the risk of lumbar muscle strain. How to improve the human-machine coupling and enhance the assistance performance are the main challenges for ALE’s development. Based on the biomechanical (...) analysis of the movement of lifting heavy objects from bottom up, this paper proposes a lightweight but powerful ALE, named as SIAT-WEXv2, which can output maximum assistive force of 28 N. Additionally, we use robust fuzzy adaptive algorithm to improve SIAT-WEXv2’s antidisturbance ability, so that it can provide continuous and supple assistance for wearer. Electromyography signals of the lumbar erector spinae from ten subjects in two experimental cases were collected to evaluate the effectiveness of our new ALE. The experimental results indicate that the reduction of iEMG signal at LES decreased monotonically from 60% ± 5.5% to 40.5% ± 6.5% as the weight of lifting load increased from 0 to 25 kg. (shrink)

Boolean-valued models for first-order languages generalize two-valued models, in that the value range is allowed to be any complete Boolean algebra instead of just the Boolean algebra 2. Boolean-valued models are interesting in multiple aspects: philosophical, logical, and mathematical. The primary goal of this paper is to extend a number of critical model-theoretic notions and to generalize a number of important model-theoretic results based on these notions to Boolean-valued models. For instance, we will investigate (first-order) Boolean valuations, which are natural (...) generalizations of (first-order) theories, and prove that Boolean-valued models are sound and complete with respect to Boolean valuations. With the help of Boolean valuations, we will also discuss the Löwenheim-Skolem theorems on Boolean-valued models. (shrink)

Since the bilateral commerce between the USA and China changes greatly and Chinese government continues to reform and delegate power in the economic field, it is of importance to study the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA. The study specifically studies the features of modal verbs in the UCC through the comparison with the United States Code and Frown. With the help of Antconc, the distribution of modal verbs, the modal value of the three sets of corpora are examined and (...) analyzed based on the theory of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. The results show that there are significant differences between the three sets of corpora and the three main features of modal verbs in the UCC are: the high frequency use of may, the relatively lower frequency use of legal modal verb shall, and the much higher frequency of must and may not. The seemingly contrary usages within the UCC are discussed and explained with the background of the legislation and the legal thoughts of the major legislator in a sociosemiotic approach. With both the quantitative and qualitative analysis combining the examples, the study hopes to shed light on the related legal translation and further enhance the understanding of the modal verbs in the UCC as well as legal discourse in a more general context. (shrink)

Most ordinary objects - cats, humans, mountains, ships, tables, etc. - have indeterminate mereological boundaries. If the theory of mereology is meant to include ordinary objects at all, we need it to have some space for mereological indeterminacy. In this paper, we present a novel degree-theoretic semantics - Boolean semantics - and argue that it is the best degree-theoretic semantics for modeling mereological indeterminacy, for three main reasons: (a) it allows for incomparable degrees of parthood, (b) it enforces classical logic, (...) and (c) it is compatible with all the axioms of classical mereology. Using Boolean semantics, we will also investigate the connection between vagueness in parthood and vagueness in existence/identity. We show that, contrary to what many have argued, the connection takes neither the form of entailment nor the form of exclusion. (shrink)

The use of social media is becoming a necessary daily activity in today’s society. Excessive and compulsive use of social media may lead to social media addiction. The main aim of this study was to investigate whether demographic factors, impulsivity, self-esteem, emotions, and attentional bias were risk factors associated with SMA. The study was conducted in a non-clinical sample of college students, ranging in age from 16 to 23 years, including 277 females and 243 males. All participants completed a survey (...) measuring impulsivity, self-esteem, anxiety, depression, social anxiety, loneliness, and attentional bias. The final hierarchical regression model indicated significant risk factors for SMA with an accuracy of 38%. The identified set of associated risk factors included female gender, impulsivity, self-esteem, anxiety, social anxiety, and negative attentional biases. Finally, a discussion of the results is presented, followed by corresponding recommendations for future studies. (shrink)

To solve a series of pension problems caused by aging, based on the emotional recognition of the Internet of Things, the control method and system research of smart homes are proposed. This article makes a detailed analysis and research on the necessity, feasibility, and how to realize speech emotion recognition technology in smart families, introduces the definition and classification of emotion, and puts forward five main emotions to be recognized in speech emotion recognition based on smart family environment. Then, based (...) on this, it analyses the acquisition methods of emotional speech data. On this premise, this article discusses and analyses the related problems of voice data acquisition in smart homes, such as the voice characteristics and acquisition methods, puts forward three rules for voice text design, and determines the relatively suitable hybrid recording acquisition method applied in a smart home environment. At the same time, the design and establishment process of intelligent family emotional speech database is described in detail. The related problems of feature extraction in speech emotion recognition are studied. Starting from the definition of feature extraction, this article expounds on the necessity of feature extraction in the process of recognition and analyses the characteristics of the speech signals. For the specific environment of the smart family, the speech signal required to be processed needs to be close to the auditory characteristics of the human ears, and the speech signal contains enough information. Finally, the Mel frequency cepstrum coefficient is selected as the feature parameter applied in this article, and the extraction process of MFCC is introduced in detail. (shrink)

The no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and release times is a typical NP-hard problem. This paper proposes an enhanced differential evolution algorithm with several fast evaluating strategies, namely, DE_FES, to minimize the total weighted tardiness objective for the NFSP with SSTs and RTs. In the proposed DE_FES, the DE-based search is adopted to perform global search for obtaining the promising regions or solutions in solution space, and a fast local search combined with three presented strategies is designed (...) to execute exploitation from these obtained regions. Test results and comparisons with two effective meta-heuristics show the effectiveness and robustness of DE_FES. (shrink)

This study employs quantitative and qualitative methodologies mainly to examine how UNFCCC Executive Secretaries use concessive but-constructions and linguistic polyphony to implicitly argue points of view and convey stance in speeches on climate change. Our findings indicate that, in order to achieve its goals for global climate governance while adhering to humanitarian and diplomatic principles, UNFCCC speeches delivered to the Parties to the Convention and the Stakeholders emphasize the urgent need for concerted action on climate change while implicitly expressing discontent (...) and mild criticism of various Parties and Stakeholders for failing to do their fair share in support of such action. This style of discourse aims to promote group unity, solidarity, and transparency while minimizing the possibility of offending any Parties or Stakeholders. Nevertheless, given the urgency of addressing climate change challenges, we advise that UNFCCC speakers utilize more explicit linguistic methods that exert more direct pressure on specific Parties or Stakeholders who fail to assume their share of responsibility. In addition, we suggest that the UNFCCC focus on enabling the implementation of practical actions to limit the effects of global warming, while continuing to urge affluent countries to provide developing countries with much-needed financial and technological help. (shrink)