From Customizing Products to Possessive Bonds: The Role of Consumer Involvement and Consumer Privacy Concern

Despite the prevalence of customized products and service in the marketplace, little research has examined the impact of customization on consumers. The current research investigates the role of brand customization on consumers’ brand relationship and brand attitude. The findings from two experiments demonstrate that consumers with high involvement (vs. low) will have more positive brand relationship and brand attitude. In addition, consumer’s privacy concern moderates this relationship such that the identified positive effect exists only for those with a low privacy concern

Psychological Contract Breach and Customer Satisfaction: A Study of Online Shopping

Online shopping is becoming increasingly popular among customers in recent years. It offers customers numerous advantages and benefits, such as convenience in terms of time and place, better prices, and a variety of options. However, the number of customers who complain about online shopping is also increasing. Therefore, it is important for online retailers to better understand how customers respond to failures in customers’ online shopping. Prior research on service failures and customer complaints has largely used expectation-dissatisfaction model to explain the phenomenon (e.g., McCollough, Berry, and Yadav 2000) and suggests approaches to address customer complaints (e.g., Hess, Ganesan, and Klein 2003). The current study takes a psychological contracts perspective and investigates its role in customers’ reactions to service failures. We propose that psychological contracts are held by customers, representing customers’ beliefs about obligations between them and the company. In two experiments, we find that when customers encounter a service failure, they will perceive that there is a breach in the psychological contract, which leads to negative reactions. In addition, the findings from Experiment 1 show that customers’ attribution of breach to intentional rather than misunderstanding will accentuate the relationship between the perceived breach and customers’ negative reactions. Further, we show in Experiment 2 that customers will react less negatively to service failures when they are notified on how the company will handle the service failures than why the failures occurred. The current research will make several theoretical and practical contributions. It examines psychological contract breach as the underlying mechanism for why customers are dissatisfied with online service failures. Two moderators are identified to influence the strength of the relationship to address the inconsistent findings in previous research. Based on above findings, we proposed approaches for companies to communicate more effectively to customers to mitigate customers’ negative reactions to service failures

Auditory sensory attenuation effect in emerging psychosis

Sensory consequences of one’s own voluntary action are perceived as less intense than externally initiated sensations. This process is referred to as sensory attenuation. This sensory attenuation has been identified in humans and animals across various modalities, including visual, auditory and somatosensory domains. The auditory sensory attenuation is explored by comparing the auditory N/M100 amplitude between self- and external-initiated conditions. The focus of auditory sensory attenuation is mainly on the primary auditory cortex and the superior temporal cortex, while emerging evidence indicates that the sensory attenuation is present in broader brain area. Moreover, the generation of sensory attenuation relies upon the precise coordination of the motor system with sensory areas. However, sensory attenuation across the whole brain and the underlying neural interaction between brain areas remain underexplored. Importantly, failure in sensory attenuation is considered to play a role in clinical psychotic symptoms, such as auditory hallucination and illusion. This has been confirmed in chronic schizophrenia (ScZ), possibly resulting from disrupted frontal-temporal coordination during generating sensory attenuation. However, it currently remains unclear whether deficits in sensory attenuation emerge before the prodromal phase of psychosis, as well as what aberrant neural mechanism underlie emerging psychosis. Given previous studies based on electroencephalogram(EEG) technology, the current thesis aimed to employ magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine auditory M100 sensory attenuation. MEG-data were collected from 48 healthy controls (HC), 110 clinical high-risk psychosis (CHR), and 26 first-episode psychosis (FEP) participants during an auditory task in which pure tones were either elicited through a button press or passively presented. Auditory M100 event-related fields (ERFs) were recorded to assess auditory M100 sensory attenuation at the sensor- and source-level. The first aim was to map the sensory attenuation effect across the whole brain and further explore the association between motor-related activity and auditory sensory attenuation. Dynamic causal modelling (DCM) was also employed to determine the top-down and bottom-up modulation to determine the underpinning neural mechanism during sensory attenuation generation (Chapter 3). Subsequently, we focused on the auditory regions to address the sensory attenuation characteristics in emerging psychosis and its association with clinical features and cognitive functions. The goal was to address whether the sensory attenuation deficit could be regarded as a potential biomarker for early identification of psychosis (Chapter 4). Finally, DCM was employed to explore the alteration of neural interactions across the sensory attenuation network in emerging psychosis and investigate the aberrant neural mechanism of sensory attenuation (Chapter 5). The findings in Chapter 3 revealed that auditory M100 sensory attenuation was present in spatially distributed brain areas, involving various subcortical-cortical areas. In addition, the current results supported the modulation of motor-related activity with auditory sensory attenuation. The results from DCM further indicated the role of both top-down and bottom-up modulation of a thalamo-cortical network in generating auditory sensory attenuation. The results in Chapter 4 demonstrated impaired auditory M100 sensory attenuation in FEP and indicated that aberrant sensory attenuation emerged in the prodromal phase of psychosis. Moreover, the sensory attenuation effect in the auditory cortex was linearly associated with clinical symptom severity and cognitive performance. Finally, the DCM results in Chapter 5 suggested that the impaired sensory attenuation in FEP-participants originated from imprecise top-down control and subsequently enhanced bottom-up input (prediction error). The deficits in top-down control in CHR-individuals were not strong, while CHR participants were characterized by increased bottom-up inputs, which was intermediate between HC and FEP. Collectively, the results of this thesis suggested impaired auditory sensory attenuation in emerging psychosis, resulting from aberrant top-down and bottom-up interaction. This provides evidence that the auditory M100 sensory attenuation could be a potential candidate for the early detection of psychosis

Learning Spiking Neural Network from Easy to Hard task

Starting with small and simple concepts, and gradually introducing complex and difficult concepts is the natural process of human learning. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) aim to mimic the way humans process information, but current SNNs models treat all samples equally, which does not align with the principles of human learning and overlooks the biological plausibility of SNNs. To address this, we propose a CL-SNN model that introduces Curriculum Learning(CL) into SNNs, making SNNs learn more like humans and providing higher biological interpretability. CL is a training strategy that advocates presenting easier data to models before gradually introducing more challenging data, mimicking the human learning process. We use a confidence-aware loss to measure and process the samples with different difficulty levels. By learning the confidence of different samples, the model reduces the contribution of difficult samples to parameter optimization automatically. We conducted experiments on static image datasets MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR10, and neuromorphic datasets N-MNIST, CIFAR10-DVS, DVS-Gesture. The results are promising. To our best knowledge, this is the first proposal to enhance the biologically plausibility of SNNs by introducing CL

Cerebral vasomotor reactivity predicts the development of acute stroke in patients with internal carotid artery stenosis

Objective To investigate the relationship between cerebral vasomotor reactivity (VMR) and acute stroke in patients with internal carotid artery stenosis. Methods 54 patients with internal carotid artery stenosis were enrolled. VMR was calculated by transcranial Doppler monitoring of the velocity of blood flow. 3-Dimensional dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance angiography was used to detect stenosis, and diffusion weighted imaging was used to detect infarction. Results VMR value was significantly lower in patients with carotid artery stenosis than in control group (T=3.112, P=0.002), and significantly lower in patients with aortic atherosclerotic stroke than in non-infarct group (T=10.930, P=0.000). However, VMR value was significantly higher in patients with new-onset small-artery occlusion stroke than in non-infarction group (T=−2.538, P=0.013). Scatter plots showed that aortic atherosclerotic stroke occurred mainly in patients with severe internal carotid artery stenosis, and VMR value in cerebral artery significantly decreased. Conclusion Decreased VMR value is an important prognostic factor for the occurrence of aortic atherosclerotic stroke, and can be used as a reference for preoperative hemodynamic evaluation in patients with internal carotid artery stenosis

Cdc42-mediated supracellular cytoskeleton induced cancer cell migration under low shear stress

Tumor microenvironment is composed of biological, chemical and physical factors. Mechanical factors are more and more focused these years. Therefore, mimicking mechanical factors' contribution to cancer cell malignancy will greatly improve the advance in this field. Although the induced malignant behaviors are present under many stimuli such as growth or inflammatory factors, the cell key physical migration mechanisms are still missing. In this study, we identify that low shear stress significantly promotes the formation of needle-shaped membrane protrusions, which is called filopodia and important for the sense and interact of a cell with extracellular matrix in the tumor microenvironment. Under low shear stress, the migration is promoted while it is inhibited in the presence of ROCK inhibitor Y27632, which could abolish the F-actin network. Using cell imaging, we further unravel that key to these protrusions is Cell division cycle 42 (Cdc42) dependent. After Cdc42 activation, the filopodia is more and longer, acting as massagers to pass the information from a cell to the microenvironment for its malignant phenotype. In the Cdc42 inhibition, the filopodia is greatly reduced. Moreover, small GTPases Cdc42 rather than Rac1 and Rho directly controls the filopodia formation. Our work highlights that low shear stress and Cdc42 activation are sufficient to promote filopodia formation, it not only points out the novel structure for cancer progression but also provides the experimental physical basis for the efficient drug anti-cancer strategies

Towards a neurodynamical understanding of the prodrome in schizophrenia

The identification of biomarkers for the early diagnosis of schizophrenia that could inform novel treatment developments is an important objective of current research. This paper will summarize recent work that has investigated changes in oscillatory activity and event-related potentials with Electro/Magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) in participants at high-risk for the development of schizophrenia, highlighting disruptions in sensory and cognitive operations prior to the onset of the syndrome. Changes in EEG/MEG-data are consistent with evidence for alterations in Glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission as disclosed by Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and brain stimulation, indicating changes in Excitation/Inhibition Parameters prior to the onset of psychosis. Together these data emphasize the importance of research into neuronal dynamics as a crucial approach to establish functional relationships between impairments in neural circuits and emerging psychopathology that together could be fundamental for early intervention and the identification of novel treatments for emerging psychosis

Folate receptor-targeted mixed polysialic acid micelles for combating rheumatoid arthritis: in vitro and in vivo evaluation

Objective: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is associated with chronic inflammation. The suppression of inflammation is key to the treatment of RA. Glucocorticoids (GCs) are classical anti-inflammatory drugs with several disadvantages such as poor water solubility and low specificity in the body. These disadvantages are the reasons for the quick elimination and side effects of GCs in vivo. Micelles are ideal carriers for GCs delivery to inflamed synovium. We set out to improve the targeting and pharmacokinetic profiles of GCs by preparing a targeting micelle system. Methods: In this study, natural chlosterol (CC) and folic acid (FA) were used to fabricate polysialic acid (PSA) micelles for the targeted delivery of Dexamethasone (Dex). The biodistribution and therapeutic efficacy of the resulting micelles were evaluated in vitro and in vivo. Results: PSA-CC and FA-PSA-CC micelles showed a size below 100 nm and a moderate negative charge. PSA-CC and FA-PSA-CC micelles could also enhance the intracellular uptake of Dex and the suppression of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in vitro and in vivo. Arthritis mice showed reduced paw thickness and clinical arthritis index using PSA-CC and FA-PSA-CC micelle treatment. Micellized Dex demonstrated a 4 ∼ 5 fold longer elimination half-life and a 2 ∼ 3 folds higher bioavailability than commercial Dex injection. FA modification significantly improved the anti-inflammatory efficacy of PSA-CC micelles. Conclusion: FA-PSA-CC micelles demonstrated significant advantages in terms of the suppression of inflammation and the treatment of inflammatory arthritis. These reliable and stable micelles possess a high potential to be transferred for clinical use

Association Between Maternal Weight Gain in Different Periods of Pregnancy and the Risk of Venous Thromboembolism: A Retrospective Case–Control Study

BackgroundVenous thromboembolism (VTE) remains an important cause of maternal deaths. Little is known about the associations of specific periods of gestational weight gain (GWG) with the category of VTE, pulmonary embolism (PE), or deep venous thrombosis (DVT) with or without PE.MethodsIn a retrospective case–control study conducted in Shanghai First Maternity and Infant Hospital from January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2021, cases of VTE within pregnancy or the first 6 postnatal weeks were identified. Controls without VTE were randomly selected from women giving birth on the same day as the cases, with 10 controls matched to each case. Total GWG and rates of early, mid, and late GWG values were standardized into z-scores, stratified by pre-pregnant body mass index (BMI). The adjusted odds ratios (aORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated through multivariate logistic regression models.ResultsThere were 196 cases (14.4 per 10,000) of VTE within pregnancy or the first 6 postnatal weeks were identified. Higher total weight gain was associated with increased risks of PE (aOR, 13.22; 95% CI, 2.03–85.99) and VTE (OR, 10.49; 95% CI, 1.82–60.45) among women with underweight. In addition, higher total weight gain was associated with increased risk of PE (aOR, 2.06; 95% CI, 1.14–3.72) among women with healthy weight. Similarly, rate of higher early weight gain was associated with significantly increased risk for PE (aOR, 2.15; 95% CI, 1.05–4.42) among women with healthy BMI. The lower rate of late weight gain was associated with increased risks of PE (aOR, 7.30; 95% CI, 1.14–46.55) and VTE (OR, 7.54; 95% CI, 1.20–47.57) among women with underweight. No significant associations between maternal rate of mid GWG and increased risk for any category of VTE, PE, or DVT with or without PE were present, regardless of maternal pre-pregnant BMI.ConclusionThe GWG associations with the category of VTE, PE, or DVT with or without PE differ at different periods of pregnancy. In order to effectively improve maternal and child outcomes, intensive weight management that continues through pregnancy may be indispensable