Shyness and Learning Adjustment in Senior High School Students: Mediating Roles of Goal Orientation and Academic Help Seeking

Learning maladjustment is a common phenomenon in the context of examination-oriented education system in china, especially among high school students who experience intense pressure when preparing for the national college entrance examination. Previous literature suggests that shyness may negatively affect ones’ cognition, emotion, and behavioral performance and lead to academic and social maladjustment. Therefore, learning adjustment among shy high school students is a critical and practical point of inquiry. With a sample of 677 Chinese senior high school students, this study aims to assess the association between shyness and learning adjustment and related mechanisms of goal orientation (i.e., mastery-approach goals, mastery-avoid goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoid goals) and academic help seeking (i.e., instrumental help seeking from teacher, instrumental help seeking from classmate, executive help seeking, and avoidance of help seeking). Self-report measures were adopted to collect information on: demographic characteristics, the level of shyness, goal orientation, academic help seeking, and learning adjustment. Results indicated that shyness was negatively correlated with learning adjustment, and this association was mediated by the dimensions of goal orientation and dimensions of academic help seeking. Specifically, shyness not only predicted learning adjustment through mastery-approach goals, and instrumental help seeking (teachers) but also predicted learning adjustment through the multiple mediating effects of the dimensions of goal orientation and the dimensions of academic help seeking (i.e., mastery-approach goals and instrumental help seeking from teachers, mastery-approach goals and executive help seeking, mastery-avoid goals and instrumental help seeking from classmates, mastery-avoid goals and executive help seeking, and performance-avoid goals and executive help seeking). Identifying these mediators further enables us to work out effective measures to promote shy high school students’ learning adjustment

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells Attenuate Cigarette Smoke-Induced Cardiac Remodeling and Dysfunction

The strong relationship between cigarette smoking and cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been well-documented, but the mechanisms by which smoking increases CVD risk appear to be multifactorial and incompletely understood. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are regarded as an important candidate for cell-based therapy in CVD. We hypothesized that MSCs derived from induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC-MSCs) or bone marrow (BM-MSCs) might alleviate cigarette smoke (CS)-induced cardiac injury. This study aimed to investigate the effects of BM-MSCs or iPSC-MSCs on CS-induced changes in serum and cardiac lipid profiles, oxidative stress and inflammation as well as cardiac function in a rat model of passive smoking. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly selected for exposure to either sham air (SA) as control or 4% CS for 1 h per day for 56 days. On day 29 and 43, human adult BM-MSCs, iPSC-MSCs or PBS were administered intravenously to CS-exposed rats. Results from echocardiography, serum and cardiac lipid profiles, cardiac antioxidant capacity, cardiac pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines and cardiac morphological changes were evaluated at the end of treatment. iPSC-MSC-treated group showed a greater effect in the improvement of CS-induced cardiac dysfunction over BM-MSCs-treated group as shown by increased percentage left ventricular ejection fraction and percentage fractional shortening, in line with the greater reversal of cardiac lipid abnormality. In addition, iPSC-MSCs administration attenuated CS-induced elevation of cardiac pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as restoration of anti-inflammatory cytokines and anti-oxidative markers, leading to ameliorate cardiac morphological abnormalities. These data suggest that iPSC-MSCs on one hand may restore CS-induced cardiac lipid abnormality and on the other hand may attenuate cardiac oxidative stress and inflammation via inhibition of CS-induced NF-κB activation, leading to improvement of cardiac remodeling and dysfunction. Thus, iPSC-MSCs may be a promising candidate in cell-based therapy to prevent cardiac complications in smokers

In vivo and in vitro studies on pathogenic mechanisms linking cigarette smoking to cardiovascular disease : what are the effects of human mesenchymal stem cells?

abstractMedicineDoctoralDoctor of Philosoph

Towards Fire Prediction Accuracy Enhancements by Leveraging an Improved Naïve Bayes Algorithm

To improve fire prediction accuracy over existing methods, a double weighted naive Bayes with compensation coefficient (DWCNB) method is proposed for fire prediction purposes. The fire characteristic attributes and attribute values are all weighted to weaken the assumption that the naive Bayes attributes are independent and equally important. A compensation coefficient was used to compensate for the prior probability, and a five-level orthogonal testing method was employed to properly design the coefficient. The proposed model was trained with data collected from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fire database. Simulation comparisons show that the average prediction accuracy of the proposed method is 98.13%, which is 5.08% and 2.52% higher than the methods of naive Bayes (NB) and double weighted naive Bayes (DWNB), respectively. The experimental results show that the average accuracies of the DWCNB method for test fire and interference sources were 97.76% and 98.24%. Prediction accuracies were 5.06% and 3.74% higher than those of the NB and DWNB methods

Response of MG63 osteoblast cells to surface modification of Ti-6Al-4V implant alloy by laser interference lithography

The response of human osteoblast-like osteosarcoma cells (MG63) to surface modification of Ti-6Al-4V implant alloy was investigated by Laser Interference Lithography (LIL). In this work, laser interference lithography was employed to fabricate the microstructures of grooves, dots and dimples onto the surfaces of Ti-6Al-4V samples. Two and three beam LIL systems were developed to carry out the experiments. The laser treatment resulted in the increases of the roughness and the contact angle of water on the implant alloy surfaces. The proliferation of osteoblasts was analyzed by MTT (3-(4,5-dimethyl-2-thiazolyl)-2,5-diphenyl-2-H-tetrazolium bromide) assay for the time periods of 4 hours, 2 days, 3 days, and 6 days. The MTT test results demonstrated that the laser treatment surfaces had a positive impact on the proliferation of osteoblast cells after 24 hours. The alloy surface morphology and the morphological changes of MG63 cells cultured on the laser textured Ti-6Al-4V surface were observed by Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The SEM results indicated that the osteoblast cells were aligned on grooved surfaces and they were prolonged with the structures. Enzymatic detachment results showed that the 20 µm grooved structures provided the better cell adhesion to the textured Ti-6Al-4V surfaces

RNA-Seq Reveals the Angiogenesis Diversity between the Fetal and Adults Bone Mesenchyme Stem Cell

<div><p>In this research, we used RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to analyze 23 single cell samples and 2 bulk cells sample from human adult bone mesenchyme stem cell line and human fetal bone mesenchyme stem cell line. The results from the research demonstrated that there were big differences between two cell lines. Adult bone mesenchyme stem cell lines showed a strong trend on the blood vessel differentiation and cell motion, 48/49 vascular related differential expressed genes showed higher expression in adult bone mesenchyme stem cell lines (Abmsc) than fetal bone mesenchyme stem cell lines (Fbmsc). 96/106 cell motion related genes showed the same tendency. Further analysis showed that genes like ANGPT1, VEGFA, FGF2, PDGFB and PDGFRA showed higher expression in Abmsc. This work showed cell heterogeneity between human adult bone mesenchyme stem cell line and human fetal bone mesenchyme stem cell line. Also the work may give an indication that Abmsc had a better potency than Fbmsc in the future vascular related application.</p></div

The general results of the RNAseq.

<p>a) The distribution of genes in single cell sample and bulk cell sample with the FPKM≥1, red: Fetal bmsc bulk cell, blue: Fetal bmsc, green: Adult bmsc, orange: Adult bmsc bulk cell; b-e) The Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficient were calculated between different groups. b) Abmsc and hESC; c) Abmsc and Fbmsc, d) Fbmsc and hESC; e) Adult bmsc bulk cell and Fetal bmsc bulk cell; e) Unsupervised clustering of the transcriptome of single cell sample. All RefSeq genes expressed in at least one of the samples with FPKM ≥ 1 were used for the analysis, with the order of hESC, Fbmsc and Abmsc.</p