Do Negative Self-Evaluative Emotions Enhance Healthier Food Choices? Exploring the Moderating Role of Self-Affirmation

Negative self-evaluative emotions arise when an individual engages in behavior that is perceived as inadequate or inconsistent with personal or societal norms and values, leading to feelings of inadequacy, shame, and dissatisfaction with oneself. These emotions are a central motivating force for changing unhealthy behaviors. However, negative evaluative emotions may also direct individuals towards defensive reactions such as reactance and avoidance. This can cause negative self-evaluative emotions to be less effective in reducing unhealthy behavior. More importantly, empirical evidence is needed to explore strategies for enhancing the effectiveness of interventions. In this study, we used an online experiment with 100 student participants to examine if increasing self-affirmation can increase the effectiveness of negative self-evaluative emotions in reducing unhealthy food consumption. We found that negative self-evaluative emotions can significantly increase healthy food consumption. However, our analysis did not reveal a significant moderating impact of self-affirmation on the effectiveness of negative self-evaluative emotions in reducing unhealthy consumption. This is the first study to explore the moderating impact of self-affirmation on the effectiveness of negative self-evaluative emotions on health behavioral change, which opens new avenues for studying how to apply the combination of stimulating negative self-evaluative emotions and increasing self-affirmation to induce behavioral change regarding healthy diets and even a broader range of fields

Sugar Transporter Proteins (STPs) in Gramineae Crops: Comparative Analysis, Phylogeny, Evolution, and Expression Profiling

Sugar transporter proteins (STPs), such as H+/sugar symporters, play essential roles in plants’ sugar transport, growth, and development, and possess an important potential to enhance plants’ performance of multiple agronomic traits, especially crop yield and stress tolerance. However, the evolutionary dynamics of this important gene family in Gramineae crops are still not well-documented and functional differentiation of rice STP genes remain unclear. To address this gap, we conducted a comparative genomic study of STP genes in seven representative Gramineae crops, which are Brachypodium distachyon (Bd), Hordeum vulgare (Hv), Setaria italica (Si), Sorghum bicolor (Sb), Zea mays (Zm), Oryza rufipogon (Or), and Oryza sativa ssp. japonica (Os). In this case, a total of 177 STP genes were identified and grouped into four clades. Of four clades, the Clade I, Clade III, and Clade IV showed an observable number expansion compared to Clade II. Our results of identified duplication events and divergence time of duplicate gene pairs indicated that tandem, Whole genome duplication (WGD)/segmental duplication events play crucial roles in the STP gene family expansion of some Gramineae crops (expect for Hv) during a long-term evolutionary process. However, expansion mechanisms of the STP gene family among the tested species were different. Further selective force studies revealed that the STP gene family in Gramineae crops was under purifying selective forces and different clades and orthologous groups with different selective forces. Furthermore, expression analysis showed that rice STP genes play important roles not only in flower organs development but also under various abiotic stresses (cold, high-temperature, and submergence stresses), blast infection, and wounding. The current study highlighted the expansion and evolutionary patterns of the STP gene family in Gramineae genomes and provided some important messages for the future functional analysis of Gramineae crop STP genes

Thinking on Integrating Health Ethics into Health Education and Prospect of Its Practice Path

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s health care has made great progress, and the level of national health literacy has steadily improved. However, there is still a disconnect between the health literacy and healthy behavior of Chinese residents, and traditional health education has little effect on behavior change. Based on the limitations of current traditional health education on improving health level of the whole people, this paper explored more effective education methods, deeply discussed how to integrate health ethics into health education to achieve the purpose of effectively promoting individual health behaviors. At the same time, this paper systematically expounded how the theory of behavioral economics provides theoretical support for the rationality and feasibility of health ethics education to promote healthy behavior, further explained the internal psychological mechanism of health ethics education affecting people’s healthy behavior, and provided feasible solutions for how to integrate health ethics into the new model of health education in practical application. To sum up, the integration of health ethics into health education is conducive to disseminating health concepts, improving health literacy, as well as promoting health behaviors, and then promoting the effective implementation of individual health and Healthy China

Catalytic cracking of Swida wilsoniana oil for hydrocarbon biofuel over Cu-modified ZSM-5 zeolite

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Catalytic cracking of Swida wilsoniana oil over non-catalyst and various Cu-modified ZSM-5 catalysts doped with different concentration of Cu (0, 5, 10, 20 and 30 wt%) was studied. The physicochemical properties of the prepared catalysts were investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) model, Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and temperature-programmed desorption of ammonia (NH3-TPD) analysis. Results showed that the introduction of Cu did not change the crystalline structure of ZSM-5 and CuO might deposit on the surface or inside the pores. The numbers of ZSM-5 total acidic sites were increased after it was loaded with 5 wt% and 10 wt% concentration of Cu. The overall hydrocarbon biofuels yields obtained from Cu-modified ZSM-5 catalysts were improved relative to parent ZSM-5. Determination of composition of the hydrocarbon biofuels showed that the hydrocarbon fractions were the main components produced. The optimum Cu concentration used for ZSM-5 modification was 10 wt%, which obtained the highest hydrocarbon biofuels yield (68.20 wt%) and percentage of hydrocarbon fractions content (89.07 wt%). The reuse of Cu-modified ZSM-5 catalysts results showed acceptable levels of reusability after three times regeneration. In addition, the physical properties of the Cu-modified ZSM-5 catalysts produced hydrocarbon biofuels were improved compared to non-catalytic cracking of S. wilsoniana oil. This work showed that the newly developed 10 wt% concentration Cu-modified ZSM-5 was an efficient catalyst for cracking of S. wilsoniana oil for the production of hydrocarbon biofuels