The Variation Theory and the New Pattern of International Development of Comparative Literature

As a prospective and global discipline, comparative literature is now confronted with a new round of crises. Cao Yina and Ma Zhijie discuss in this paper how to discover effective approaches to save current subject crises through analysing the issues themselves first. Proceeding from the current crises, Cao and Ma advocate effective ways to handle them and propose a new theory and pattern for the future development of this discipline.Como una disciplina prospectiva y global, ahora la literatura comparada se enfrenta a una nueva ronda de crisis. Cao Yine y Ma Zhijie discuten en este artículo enfoques efectivos para superar las crisis actuales. A continuación, abordan los modos efectivos para manejar estas crisis y proponen una nueva teoría y modelo para el futuro desarrollo de esta disciplina

Is the Self Always Better than a Friend? Self-Face Recognition in Christians and Atheists

Early behavioral studies found that human adults responded faster to their own faces than faces of familiar others or strangers, a finding referred to as self-face advantage. Recent research suggests that the self-face advantage is mediated by implicit positive association with the self and is influenced by sociocultural experience. The current study investigated whether and how Christian belief and practice affect the processing of self-face in a Chinese population. Christian and Atheist participants were recruited for an implicit association test (IAT) in Experiment 1 and a face-owner identification task in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 found that atheists responded faster to self-face when it shared the same response key with positive compared to negative trait adjectives. This IAT effect, however, was significantly reduced in Christians. Experiment 2 found that atheists responded faster to self-face compared to a friend’s face, but this self-face advantage was significantly reduced in Christians. Hierarchical regression analyses further showed that the IAT effect positively predicted self-face advantage in atheists but not in Christians. Our findings suggest that Christian belief and practice may weaken implicit positive association with the self and thus decrease the advantage of the self over a friend during face recognition in the believers

Negative Raising in Mandarin

Negative Raising (NR) refers to a construction in which the negation of a main clause predicate is semantically ambiguous between negating that predicate and negating a predicate of a subordinate clause. Two approaches to this construction have been pursued in the literature. One approach is syntactic. From this perspective, the negative in the matrix clause may originate in the main clause, or it may originate in the embedded clause and then moves (or ‘raises’) syntactically into the matrix clause. (Fillmore, 1963; Lakoff, 1969; Seuren, 1974; Collins & Postal, 2014). The semantic/pragmatic approach, on the other hand, argues that NR results from the Excluded Middle property of main predicates (Jackendoff, 1970; Bartsch, 1973; Horn, 1982, 1989, 2014; Tovena, 2000; Gajewski, 2005, 2007; Bošković, 2008). NR has been widely studied in numerous languages including English; however, few studies have investigated NR in Mandarin Chinese. Most of these studies have favored the semantic/pragmatic approach (Shen, 1989; Bošković, 2008; Liu, 2011; Zhang & Liu, 2011; Xiang, 2013, 2014). This may be because Li (1992) claimed that there is no positive evidence for a syntactic operation of NR in Mandarin. The semantic study of Bošković (2008) argues against NR in the context of a typology of nominal phrases cross-linguistically. As a result, it is still controversial whether NR exists in Mandarin. The existing literature contains no evidence that argues for NR in Mandarin, and there is also no syntactic analysis that argues explicitly that NR must be a syntactic movement in Mandarin. This study aims to fill these two gaps. It disposes of the putative evidence provided by Bošković (2008) against NR, and offers two new empirical arguments that suggest that NR exists in Mandarin. These arguments are based on the pattern of Negative Polarity Items in the language. Building on the recent syntactic analysis of English NR in Collins & Postal (2014), it argues that Mandarin NR is subject to general syntactic constraints such as the C-Command Condition, the Complex NP Constraint, wh-islands, and clause-internal clefts. In addition, the few differences between NR in English and Mandarin are attributed to parametric differences in the Subjacency Principle of Chomsky (1973). Mandarin NR is compared with other syntactic movements and it is argued that Mandarin NR shares fundamental characteristics with overt movements.Master of Art

Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans

Intergroup conflict contributes to human discrimination and violence, but persists because individuals make costly contributions to their group's fighting capacity. Yet, how group members effectively coordinate their contributions during intergroup conflict remains poorly understood. Here, we examine the role of oxytocin for (the coordination of) contributions to group attack or defense in multi-round, real-time feedback intergroup contests. In a double-blind placebo-controlled study with N = 480 males in Intergroup Attacker-Defender Contests, we found that oxytocin reduced contributions to attack and over time increased attacker's within-group coordination of contributions. However, rather than becoming peaceful, attackers given oxytocin better tracked their rival's historical defense and coordinated their contributions into well-timed and hence more profitable attacks. Our results reveal coordination of contributions as a critical component of successful attacks and subscribe to the possibility that oxytocin enables individuals to contribute to in-group efficiency and prosperity even when doing so implies outsiders are excluded or harmed. Editorial note: This article has been through an editorial process in which the authors decide how to respond to the issues raised during peer review. The Reviewing Editor's assessment is that all the issues have been addressed (see decision letter). Keywords: collective contribution; group coordination; human; intergroup conflict; neuroscience; out-group attack; oxytocin

Sestrin2 promotes LKB1‐mediated AMPK activation in the ischemic heart

The regulation of AMPK in the ischemic heart remains incompletely understood. Recent evidence implicates the role of Sestrin2 in the AMPK signaling pathway, and it is hypothesized that Sestrin2 plays an influential role during myocardial ischemia to promote AMPK activation. Sestrin2 protein was found to be expressed in adult cardiomyocytes and accumulated in the heart during ischemic conditions. Sestrin2 knockout (KO) mice were used to determine the importance of Sestrin2 during ischemia and reperfusion (I/R) injury. When wild‐type (WT) and Sestrin2 KO mice were subjected to in vivo I/R, myocardial infarct size was significantly greater in Sestrin2 KO compared with WT hearts. Similarly, Langendorff perfused hearts indicated exacerbated postischemic contractile function in Sestrin2 KO hearts compared with WT. Ischemic AMPK activation was found to be impaired in the Sestrin2 KO hearts. Immunoprecipitation of Sestrin2 demonstrated an association with AMPK. Moreover, liver kinase B1 (LKB1), a major AMPK upstream kinase, was associated with the Sestrin2‐AMPK complex in a time‐dependent manner during ischemia, whereas this interaction was nearly abolished in Sestrin2 KO hearts. Thus, Sestrin2 plays an important role in cardioprotection against I/R injury, serving as an LKB1‐AMPK scaffold to initiate AMPK activation during ischemic insults.—Morrison, A., Chen, L. Wang, J., Zhang, M., Yang, H., Ma, Y., Budanov, A., Lee, J. H., Karin, M., Li, J. Sestrin2 promotes LKB1‐mediated AMPK activation in the ischemic heart. FASEB J. 29, 408‐417 (2015). www.fasebj.orgPeer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154534/1/fsb2fj14258814-sup-0001.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154534/2/fsb2fj14258814.pd

Who's Afraid of the Boss: Cultural Differences in Social Hierarchies Modulate Self-Face Recognition in Chinese and Americans

Human adults typically respond faster to their own face than to the faces of others. However, in Chinese participants, this self-face advantage is lost in the presence of one's supervisor, and they respond faster to their supervisor's face than to their own. While this “boss effect” suggests a strong modulation of self-processing in the presence of influential social superiors, the current study examined whether this effect was true across cultures. Given the wealth of literature on cultural differences between collectivist, interdependent versus individualistic, independent self-construals, we hypothesized that the boss effect might be weaker in independent than interdependent cultures. Twenty European American college students were asked to identify orientations of their own face or their supervisors' face. We found that European Americans, unlike Chinese participants, did not show a “boss effect” and maintained the self-face advantage even in the presence of their supervisor's face. Interestingly, however, their self-face advantage decreased as their ratings of their boss's perceived social status increased, suggesting that self-processing in Americans is influenced more by one's social status than by one's hierarchical position as a social superior. In addition, when their boss's face was presented with a labmate's face, American participants responded faster to the boss's face, indicating that the boss may represent general social dominance rather than a direct negative threat to oneself, in more independent cultures. Altogether, these results demonstrate a strong cultural modulation of self-processing in social contexts and suggest that the very concept of social positions, such as a boss, may hold markedly different meanings to the self across Western and East Asian cultures

Mean RTs(ms) (SD) and difference in RTs in Experiment 2.

<p>Note: There were twenty participants in each group of participants.</p>*<p>p<0.05.</p