Impact of Environmental Uncertainty on Depression and Anxiety Among Chinese Workers: A Moderated Mediation Model.

Purpose: Environmental uncertainty has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. While there is substantial knowledge about the connection between environmental uncertainty and organizational outcomes, limited attention has been devoted to investigating its impact on employees' depression and anxiety symptoms. Grounded in job demands-resources theory, this study aims to explore the relationship between environmental uncertainty and employees' depression and anxiety symptoms, and it further investigates the mediating role of work pressure and the moderating role of union practices. Methods: In September 2022, we undertook a cross-sectional survey study, gathering data from 1081 employees across various enterprises situated in Liaoning, China. Throughout this timeframe, notable global occurrences heightened the awareness of environmental uncertainty. Following the exclusion of participants who did not provide information on the main variables, the final valid sample comprised 940 employees. To test all hypotheses, a series of confirmatory factor analyses and path-analytic procedures were conducted using Mplus 7.0. Results: Our results confirm that environmental uncertainty, as a high job demand, increases employees' work pressure, thereby elevating rates of anxiety and depression; the indirect relationship between environmental uncertainty and employees' anxiety and depression through work pressure is stronger when union practices are lower. Conclusion: Our findings indicate the detrimental impact of environmental uncertainty on employees' mental health, and highlight the roles of work pressure and union practices. In light of this, organizations should take steps to mitigate employees' perceptions of environmental uncertainty and establish mental health programs, in cooperation with union practices, to protect employees' mental well-being.

The lack of PPARα exacerbated the progression of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis in mice with spleen deficiency syndrome by triggering an inflammatory response.

Background: In addition to abnormal liver inflammation, the main symptoms of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) are often accompanied by gastrointestinal digestive dysfunction, consistent with the concept of spleen deficiency (SD) in traditional Chinese medicine. As an important metabolic sensor, whether peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARα) participates in regulating the occurrence and development of NASH with SD (NASH-SD) remains to be explored. Methods: Clinical liver samples were collected for RNA-seq analysis. C57BL/6J mice induced by folium sennae (SE) were used as an SD model. qPCR analysis was conducted to evaluate the inflammation and metabolic levels of mice. PPARα knockout mice (PPARαko) were subjected to SE and methionine-choline-deficient (MCD) diet to establish the NASH-SD model. The phenotype of NASH and the inflammatory indicators were measured using histopathologic analysis and qPCR as well. Results: The abnormal expression of PPARα signaling, coupled with metabolism and inflammation, was found in the results of RNA-seq analysis from clinical samples. SD mice showed a more severe inflammatory response in the liver evidenced by the increases in macrophage biomarkers, inflammatory factors, and fibrotic indicators in the liver. qPCR results also showed differences in PPARα between SD mice and control mice. In PPARαko mice, further evidence was found that the lack of PPARα exacerbated the inflammatory response phenotype as well as the lipid metabolism disorder in NASH-SD mice. Conclusion: The abnormal NR signaling accelerated the vicious cycle between lipotoxicity and inflammatory response in NAFLD with SD. Our results provide new evidence for nuclear receptors as potential therapeutic targets for NAFLD with spleen deficiency.

Intelligent Identification Method of Geographic Origin for Chinese Wolfberries Based on Color Space Transformation and Texture Morphological Features.

Geographic origins play a vital role in traditional Chinese medicinal materials. Using the geo-authentic crude drug can improve the curative effect. The main producing areas of Chinese wolfberry are Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, and so on. The geographic origin of Chinese wolfberry can affect its texture, shape, color, smell, nutrients, etc. However, the traditional method for identifying the geographic origin of Chinese wolfberries is still based on human eyes. To efficiently identify Chinese wolfberries from different origins, this paper presents an intelligent identification method for Chinese wolfberries based on color space transformation and texture morphological features. The first step is to prepare the Chinese wolfberry samples and collect the image data. Then the images are preprocessed, and the texture and morphology features of single wolfberry images are extracted. Finally, the random forest algorithm is employed to establish a model of the geographic origin of Chinese wolfberries. The proposed method can accurately predict the origin information of a single wolfberry image and has the advantages of low cost, fast recognition speed, high recognition accuracy, and no damage to the sample.

How Fear of External Threats Plays Roles: An Examination of Supervisors' Trait Anger, Abusive Supervision, Subordinate Burnout and CCB.

In times of uncertainty, such as during COVID-19, many organizations experience profit decline, and employees develop a fear of external threats, such as organizational layoffs. However, most of the literature focuses on how people's fear influences their well-being. Less is known about how employees' fear of external threats influences their workplace behaviors. The current study proposes that supervisors' fear of external threats stimulates those who are high in trait anger to behave in a more abusive way. Simultaneously, subordinates' fear of external threats would strengthen the positive relationship between abusive supervision and their burnout and compulsory citizenship behaviors (CCB), as fear of external threats constrains their response options to abusive supervision. We tested the hypotheses with a multiwave and multisource survey study (N = 322 dyads) in China, and the results showed that supervisors' fear of external threats strengthened the positive effect of trait anger on abusive supervision. Subordinates' fear of external threats strengthens the positive relationships of abusive supervision with CCB and the mediating effect of abusive supervision in the relationship of supervisors' trait anger with subordinates' CCB. Our study enriches people's understanding of how supervisors' and subordinates' fear of external threats may play roles in workplace behaviors.

Atypical patterns of tone production in tone-language-speaking children with autism.

Speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are found to exhibit atypical pitch patterns in speech production. However, little is known about the production of lexical tones (T1, T2, T3, T4) as well as neutral tones (T1N, T2N, T3N, T4N) by tone-language speakers with ASD. Thus, this study investigated the height and shape of tones produced by Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers. A pronunciation experiment was conducted in which the participants were asked to produce reduplicated nouns. The findings from the acoustic analyses showed that although ASD children generally produced both lexical tones and neutral tones with distinct tonal contours, there were significant differences between the ASD and TD groups for tone height and shape for T1/T1N, T3/T3N, and T4/T4N. However, we did not find any difference in T2/T2N. These data implied that the atypical acoustic pattern in the ASD group could be partially due to the suppression of the F0 range. Moreover, we found that ASD children tended to produce more errors for T2/T2N, T3/T3N than for T1/T1N, T4/T4N. The pattern of tone errors could be explained by the acquisition principle of pitch, similarities among different tones, and tone sandhi. We thus concluded that deficits in pitch processing could be responsible for the atypical tone pattern of ASD children, and speculated that the atypical tonal contours might also be due to imitation deficits. The present findings may eventually help enhance the comprehensive understanding of the representation of atypical pitch patterns in ASD across languages.

Humble Leadership Benefits Employee Job Performance: The Role of Supervisor-Subordinate Guanxi and Perceived Leader Integrity.

Although humility is a hallmark of many beloved and respected leaders, yet little is known about the impact of humble leadership on employee job performance. Drawing on social exchange theory and attribution theory, the current study suggests a moderated mediation model to elucidate how and when humble leadership encourages follower job performance. Analyses of multilevel, multisource data from 204 subordinates and 68 supervisors showed that humble leadership and employee job performance via supervisor-subordinate guanxi is moderated by perceived leader integrity, such that the indirect and positive relationship between humble leadership and employee job performance via supervisor-subordinate guanxi would be strengthened when perceived leader integrity is high rather than low. Theoretical and practical implications as well as limitations and future directions are discussed.