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Formaldehyde (HCHO) is identified as the most toxic chemical among 45 organic compounds found in industrial wastewater, posing significant harm to both the environment and human health. In this study, a novel approach utilizing the Lanthanum-manganese complex oxide (LaMnO3)/peroxymonosulfate (PMS) system was proposed for the effective removal of HCHO from wastewater. Perovskite-Type LaMnO3 was prepared by sol-gel method. The chemical compositions and morphology of LaMnO3 samples were analyzed through thermogravimetric analysis (TG), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The effects of LaMnO3 dosage, PMS concentration, HCHO concentration, and initial pH on the HCHO removal rate were investigated. When the concentration of HCHO is less than 1.086 mg/mL (5 mL), the dosage of LaMnO3 is 0.06 g, and n(PMS)/n(HCHO) = 2.5, the removal rate of HCHO is more than 96% in the range of pH = 5–13 at 25 °C for 10 min. Compared with single-component MnO2, the perovskite structure of LaMnO3 is beneficial to the catalytic degradation of HCHO by PMS. It is an efficient Fenton-like oxidation process for treating wastewater containing HCHO. The LaMnO3 promoted the formation of SO4•− and HO•, which sequentially oxidized HCHO to HCOOH and CO2.

Social exclusion has been found to impair working memory (WM). However, the emotional mechanism underlying this adverse effect remains unclear. Besides, little is known about how to alleviate this adverse effect. In the current study, 128 participants were randomly assigned to a social excluded group or an included group while they received anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) or sham tDCS over the right ventrolateral pre-frontal cortex (rVLPFC), then they completed the 2-back task. ANOVA results showed that under the sham tDCS condition, mood rating score and 2-back task accuracy of excluded participants were both lower than included participants, and after anodal tDCS, mood rating score and 2-back task accuracy of excluded participants were both higher compared to sham tDCS. Besides, the mediation model showed that negative emotion mediated the relationship between social exclusion and WM under the sham tDCS condition, while the mediating effect disappeared under the anodal tDCS condition. Based on these results, we argued that anodal tDCS over the rVLPFC could alleviate the adverse effect of social exclusion on WM by reducing negative emotion. These findings contributed to further understanding of the emotional mechanism underlying the adverse effect of social exclusion on WM, and providing a clinical treatment in response to social exclusion.

Abstract Background Common walnut (Juglans regia L.) is one of the top four most consumed nuts in the world due to its health benefits and pleasant taste. Despite its economic importance, the evolutionary history and genetic control of its adaptation and agronomic traits remain largely unexplored. Results We report a comprehensive walnut genomic variation map based on whole-genome resequencing of 815 walnut accessions. Evolutionary analyses suggest that Chinese J. regia diverged from J. sigillata with extensive hybridizations after the split of the two species. In contrast to annual crops, the genetic diversity and heterozygous deleterious mutations of Chinese common walnut trees have continued to increase during the improvement process. Selective sweep analyses identify 902 genes uniquely selected in the improved common walnut compared to its progenitor population. Five major-effect loci are identified to be involved in walnut adaptations to temperature, precipitation, and altitude. Genome-wide association studies reveal 27 genomic loci responsible for 18 important agronomic traits, among which JrFAD2 and JrANR are the potentially major-effect causative genes controlling linoleic acid content and color of the endopleura of the nut, respectively. Conclusions The largest genomic resource for walnuts to date has been generated and explored in this study, unveiling their evolutionary history and cracking the genetic code for agronomic traits and environmental adaptation of this economically crucial crop tree.

Mobile payment has emerged as a popular payment method in many countries. While much research has focused on the antecedents of mobile payment adoption, limited research has investigated the consequences of mobile payment usage relating to how it would influence consumer behaviors (e.g., purchase intention or willingness to pay). Here, we propose that mobile payment not just reduces the “pain of paying,” a traditional view explaining why cashless payment stimulates spending, but it also evokes the “pleasure of paying,” raising from the enhanced processing fluency in completing transactions. We tested this new conceptualization of “pleasure of paying” using EEG, complementing other behavioral measures. In two studies, we found that mobile payment effectively enhanced purchase likelihood (study 1, N = 66) and such an enhancement is generalizable to both hedonic and utilitarian products (study 2, N = 29). By employing EEG measures, we provided the first neural evidence of “pleasure of paying” in addition to the signal of “pain of paying.” Critically, we demonstrated that the “pleasure of paying” is a distinctive psychological mechanism that is induced by mobile payment usage and that the “pleasure of paying” joins the “pain of paying” to mediate the increased purchase intention. We discuss the contributions and implications of these results to the ongoing evolution of cashless payment societies.

Pain and reward have crucial roles in determining human behaviors. It is still unclear how pain influences different stages of reward processing. This study aimed to assess the physical pain’s impact on reward processing with event-related potential (ERP) method. In the present study, a flash sale game (reward-seeking task) was carried out, in which the participants were instructed to press a button as soon as possible to obtain the earphone (a reward) after experiencing either electric shock or not and finally evaluated the outcome of their response. High-temporal-resolution electroencephalogram data were simultaneously recorded to reveal the neural mechanism underlying the pain effect. The ERP analyses revealed that pain affected the feedback processing reflected by feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300. Specifically, participants in the nopain situation exhibited greater FRN discrepancy between success and failure feedbacks relative to that in the pain situation. Moreover, the P300 amplitude was enhanced in the nopain condition compared to the pain condition regardless of the feedback valence. These results demonstrate that the pain reduced the sensitivity to the reward valence at the early stage and weakened the motivational salience at the late stage. Altogether, this study extends the understanding of the effect of pain on reward processing from the temporal perspective under a purchasing situation.

Adaptive control (e.g., conflict adaptation) refers to dynamic adjustments of cognitive control processes in goal-directed behavior, which can be influenced by incentive rewards. Recently, accumulating evidence has shown that adaptive control processes can operate in the absence of conscious awareness, raising the question as to whether reward can affect unconsciously triggered adaptive control processes. Two experiments were conducted to address the question. In Experiment 1, participants performed a masked flanker-like priming task manipulated with high- and low-value performance-contingent rewards presented at the block level. In this experiment conflict awareness was manipulated by masking the conflict-inducing stimulus, and high- or low-value rewards were presented at the beginning of each block, and participants earned the reward contingent upon their responses in each trial. We observed a great conflict adaptation for high-value rewards in both conscious and unconscious conflict tasks, indicating reward-induced enhancements of consciously and unconsciously triggered adaptive control processes. Crucially, this effect still existed when controlling the stimulus-response repetitions in a rewarded masked Stroop-like priming task in Experiment 2. The results endorse the proposition that reward modulates unconsciously triggered adaptive control to conflict, suggesting that individuals may enable rewarding stimuli to dynamically regulate concurrent control processes based on previous conflict experience, regardless of whether the previous conflict was experienced consciously.

Baeyer–Villiger oxidation can synthesize a series of esters or lactones that have essential application value but are difficult to be synthesized by other methods. Cycloketones can be oxidized to lactones using molecular oxygen, peroxy acids, or hydrogen peroxide as an oxidant. Hydrogen peroxide is one of the environmental oxidants. Because of the weak oxidation ability of hydrogen peroxide, Bronsted acids and Lewis acids are used as catalysts to activate hydrogen peroxide or the carbonyl of ketones to increase the nucleophilic performance of hydrogen peroxide. The catalytic mechanisms of Bronsted acids and Lewis acids differ in the Baeyer–Villiger oxidation of cyclohexanone with an aqueous solution of hydrogen peroxide as an oxidant.

It is widely known that the feedback from a decision outcome may evoke emotions like regret, which results from a comparison between the gain the decision-maker has made and the gain he/she might make. Less is known about how search behavior is linked to feedback in a sequential search task such as searching for jobs, employees, prices, investments, disinvestments, or other items. What are the neural responses once subjects decide to stop searching and receive the feedback that they stopped too early or too late compared with the optimal stopping time? In an experimental setting of a search task, we found that the feedback-related negativity (FRN) induced by the feedback from stopping too late was more negative than stopping too early, suggesting that subjects might experience stronger regret when stopping too late. Subjects preferred to stop searching earlier if the last feedback was that they stopped too late, and vice versa, although they did not always benefit more from such adjustment. This might reflect general patterns of human learning behavior, which also manifests in many other decisions. Gender differences and risk attitudes were also considered in the study.

The effect of information sentiment on popularity is meaningful to understand the information content on social media. The present research examined whether emotion values of information could predict the potential of popularity in two psychoinformatic experiments. A prime task was used with popular/unpopular information as prime and high/low sentiment stimuli as targets. In Experiment 1, we observed that unpopular information survived better than popular information. In Experiment 2, the electrophysiological priming effect was observed for unpopular and popular information. According to the findings, sentiment of information on social media plays a key role in information popularity.

Abstract Background Observations of precocious (early bearing) genotypes of walnut (Juglans regia L.) under natural conditions encouraged us to study the origin and genetic control of these fascinating traits. Results In this study, the self-fertility, progeny performance, and simple sequence repeat (SSR) locus variation of iron walnut (Juglans sigillata Dode), an ecotype of J. regia, were investigated. The average self-pollinated fruit set rate of J. sigillata cv. ‘Dapao’ (DP) was 7.0% annually from 1979 to 1982. The average germination rate of self-pollinated seeds was 45.2% during the 4-year period. Most progeny had inbreeding depression. Nine representative self-pollinated progeny (SP1–SP9), with special or typical traits of DP, were selected. SP1–SP4 were precocious because they initiated flowers as early as 2 years after germination, compared to the 7–10-yr period that is typical of DP. SP9 had not flowered since 1980. Twelve SSR markers were used to analyze the SP and DP. The genome of SP had a tendency toward high levels of homozygosity. The high levels of homozygosity reported in 18 additional precocious walnut genotypes complemented the results of this study. Conclusions These results provide evidence of precocious phenotypes and genomes with high levels of homozygosity that might be generated from self-pollinating walnut. This suggests that self-pollination might facilitate the generation of unique homozygous parents for subsequent use in walnut-breeding programs. The results also indicate that more attention should be focused on adequate management of precocious walnut to avoid early depression in the production of nuts.

It was meaningful to predict the customers' decision-making behavior in the field of market. However, due to individual differences and complex, non-linear natures of the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, it was hard to classify the EEG signals and to predict customers' decisions by using traditional classification methods. To solve the aforementioned problems, a recurrent t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) neural network was proposed in current study to classify the EEG signals in the designed brand extension paradigm and to predict the participants' decisions (whether to accept the brand extension or not). The recurrent t-SNE neural network contained two steps. In the first step, t-SNE algorithm was performed to extract features from EEG signals. Second, a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) layer, fully connected layer, and SoftMax layer was established to train the features, classify the EEG signals, as well as predict the cognitive performance. The proposed network could give a good prediction with accuracy around 87%. Its superior in prediction accuracy as compared to a recurrent principal component analysis (PCA) network, a recurrent independent component correlation algorithm [independent component analysis (ICA)] network, a t-SNE support vector machine (SVM) network, a t-SNE back propagation (BP) neural network, a deep LSTM neural network, and a convolutional neural network were also demonstrated. Moreover, the performance of the proposed network with different activated channels were also investigated and compared. The results showed that the proposed network could make a relatively good prediction with only 16 channels. The proposed network would become a potentially useful tool to help a company in making marketing decisions and to help uncover the neural mechanisms behind individuals' decision-making behavior with low cost and high efficiency.

Motivation is a key topic that comprises considerable theoretical and practical implications, and its study is gaining increasing traction in recent years. Employing both behavioral and neural techniques, previous studies examined the extent to which intrinsic and extrinsic motivations collectively shape individual decision making. Investigations found that both processes play indispensable and interactive roles in choice behavior. However, despite its importance, little is known respecting the role of extrinsic social factors in contributing to individual variations in intrinsic motivation. Toward elucidating the role of extrinsic social factors in motivated decision making, the current study implements the stop watch task, combined with hyper-recording electrophysiological measurements. With the electrophysiological toolkit, our goal is to bring to light how extrinsic social signals impact intrinsic motivation and shape the reward processing over success and failure at the succeeding stage. Empirically, we show that, following social outcome presentation, there is an increased divergent feedback-related negativity (FRN), which reflects the failure/success discrepancy at the outcome stage of choice behavior. In summary, this study demonstrates the saliency of social information in intrinsic motivational processes that underpin success-failure outcomes.

To cope with self-threat being induced by personal setbacks in daily life, compensatory consumption, especially on symbolic product, has been found to do valuable help to resolve discrepancies between ideal and actual self-concept. Conforming to symbolic self-completion theory, the current study adopted event-related potentials to explore the objective information processing stages in self-concept-impaired status (the defeat group) on a neural level. The behavioral results replicated previous findings that the defeat group gained stronger purchase intention for symbolic products than utilitarian products. The electrophysiological data demonstrated that perceptual difficulties for products in preliminary stage (N1) were steady among conditions, and after that, information processing separation emerged. In contrast to the individuals with a draw experience, those with a defeat experience raised highly focused attention (P2) and eager expectation (N2) for products, especially for symbolic ones. Meanwhile, symbolic (vs. utilitarian) products also evoked a higher emotional arousal level and slowed the diminishment of involved attentional resource (late positive potential) at late cognitive processing stage. Taken together, the sequential integration of multiple neural indicators contributes to elucidating the processing stages of compensatory consumption behavior.

Abstract Background Juglans is a difficult-to-root tree. In the present study, we successfully rejuvenated stock plants by grafting and then burying them horizontally. Results Rooting rates of rejuvenated shoots were 98.1% 20 days after cutting. We recorded spatial and temporal variation in endogenous indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), abscisic acid (ABA), gibberellin A3 (GA3) and zeatin-riboside (ZR) under root induction. The four types of endohormones were mainly confined to the phloem sieve and companion cells (S&Cs) at the base of either rejuvenated or mature soft shoots. IAA and ABA levels were higher in rejuvenated shoots than in mature shoots, whereas the opposite was true for GA3 and ZR. During rooting induction, GA3 was the first hormone to be observed outside phloem S&Cs, followed by IAA, ABA and ZR. In rejuvenating soft shoots, IAA accumulated in the cross-sectional areas of the cambium and phloem, where root primordia were evident. Conclusions The improvement in the rooting ability that was evident after rejuvenation most likely results a transformation of the plant to a juvenile form, from elevated IAA levels in phloem S&Cs and from a promotion of all four endohormones outside phloem S&Cs, in particular, from an accumulation of IAA in the cross-sectional areas of the cambium and phloem.

Abstract In business practice, companies prefer to find highly attractive commercial spokesmen to represent and promote their products and brands. This study mainly focused on the investigation of whether female facial attractiveness influenced the preference attitudes of male subjects toward a no-named and unfamiliar logo and determined the underlying reasons via neuroscientific methods. We designed two ERP (event-related potential) experiments. Experiment 1 comprised a formal experiment with facial stimuli. The purpose of experiment 2 was to confirm whether the logos that were used did not present a significant difference for the subjects. According to the behavioural results of experiment 1, when other conditions were not significantly different, the preference degree of the logos correlated with attractive female faces was increased compared with the logos correlated with unattractive faces. Reasons to explain these behavioural phenomena were identified via ERP measures, and preference cross-category transfer mainly caused the results. Additionally, the preference developed associated with emotion. This study is the first to report a novel concept referred to as the “Preference Cross-Category Transfer Effect”. Moreover, a three-phase neural process of the face evaluation subsequently explained how the cross-category transfer of preference occurred and influenced subject preference attitude toward brand logos.

Herding behavior refers to the social phenomenon in which people are intensely influenced by the decisions and behaviors of others in the same group. Although several recent studies have explored the neural basis of herding decisions in people’s daily lives (e.g., consumption decisions), the neural processing of herding decisions underlying enterprise behavior is still unclear. To address this issue, this study extracted event-related potentials (ERPs) from electroencephalographic data when participants (i.e., top executives in real enterprises) performed a choice task in which they judged whether to let their enterprises settle in an industrial zone when the occupancy rate of the industrial zone was either low or high. The behavioral results showed that participants had a higher acceptance rate in the high occupancy rate condition than in the low one, suggesting the existence of herding tendency in top executives’ business decisions. The ERP results indicated that anticonformity choices induced a larger N2 amplitude than herding choices, demonstrating that participants might experience larger perceived risk and more decision conflict when they processed anticonformity choices. In contrast, we observed that herding choices induced a larger LPP amplitude than anticonformity choices, hinting that participants might experience better evaluation categorization and higher decision confidence when they processed herding choices. Based on these results, this study provides new insights into the neural basis of herding decisions made by top executives in business.

The tendency of customers’ preference to their local brands over the foreign ones is known as consumer ethnocentrism, and it is an important issue in international marketing. This study aims at identifying the behavioral and neural correlates of Consumer Ethnocentrism in the field of brand preference, using event-related potential (ERP). We sampled subjects from two ethnic groups, a Chinese ethnic group and a sub-Saharan Black African group from Zhejiang University. The subjects faced two sequential stimuli, S1 followed by S2. S1 consisted of 40 pictures of 20 Chinese and 20 Black Africans people wearing traditional clothes, and S2 consisted of 40 fake brand-logos which were divided randomly into two groups of 20 each. The subjects were informed that the people in S1 purchased and recommended the products with the brand-logos presented in S2, and the subjects were asked to rate their preference degree toward these logos. The brand-logos were called the “in-group recommended logos” if the recommenders in S1 were the same race as the subjects, otherwise, the “out-group recommended logos.” The results revealed that the race of the brand-logo recommender highly impacted the Chinese subjects’ preference for the brand-logos. The N200 component elicited by the in-group recommended logos were significantly lower than those elicited by the out-group recommended logos. Additionally, there was evidence that being familiar with foreign cultures reduced consumer ethnocentrism. The African subjects were familiar with Chinese people and adopted a Chinese culture, as a result, they did not differ in showing preferences between the in-group and out-group recommended logos.

Walnuts (Juglans, Juglandaceae) are known throughout the world as economically important trees that provide fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals as a food source, and produce high-quality timber. We have amended the purpose section to say “However,” the omics resources are limited, which hampered the elucidation of molecular mechanisms resulting in their economically important traits (such as yield, fertility alternation, oil synthesis, and wood formation). To enrich the omics database of walnut, there is great need for analyses of its genomic and transcriptomic characteristics. In this study, we reported for the first time of the transcriptome landscape of six important organs or tissues in walnut interspecies hybrid using next-generation sequencing technology. Over 338 million clean reads were obtained. This yielded 74,072 unigenes with an average length of 782.71 bp. To develop an understanding of gene functions and regulatory pathways, 66,355 of the unigenes were identified as homologs of annotated genes and classified into three general categories with 61 functional subcategories. 2,288 out of 2,549 unmapped unigenes had at least one BLAST hit against the public databases. A total of 1,237 transcription factor-encoding genes (TFs) and 2,297 tissue-specific unigenes were identified. Interestingly, in the new shoot between an adult seedling and a grafted tree, the expression of 9,494 unigenes were significantly different, among which 4,388 were up-regulated and 5,106 were down-regulated. Of these, 195, 177, 232, 75, 114, and 68 unigenes were related to transcription factors, cell wall, defense response, transport, plant hormone biosynthesis, and other cambial activity-related functions, respectively. The obtained sequences and putative functional data constitute a resource for future functional analyses in walnut and other woody plants. These findings will be useful in further studies addressing the molecular mechanisms underlying grafting-related cambial activity.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0154479.].

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182892.].

Surrounding shape is a very important component of warning signs. Unlike colors, signal words, and pictorials that can directly convey the surface meaning, the surrounding shapes of warning signs convey warning information somewhat obscurely. Most of the researchers who studied this topic investigated the individuals' hazard perception of the surrounding shapes of warning signs by using questionnaires. In addition, the scholars' points about the role of the surrounding shapes are inconsistent. This study, therefore, decided to use Event-Related Potentials (ERP) technology to explore the impact of the shapes on the perception of warning signs to find the evidences of the hazard perception of the shapes from the electrophysiological perspective. Using the Oddball paradigm, we found four components caused by different shapes of warning signs. Specifically, P200 amplitude characterizes the attraction to attention of surrounding shapes in the early automatic perception stage, the N300 components represented the emotional valance and arousal level, the P300 and the LPP connoted uneasy/unsafe information and reflected the inhibition strength on the uneasy/unsafe information. Experimental data indicated that the shape of UPRIGHT TRIANGLE had larger arousal strength and more negative valence than the shape of CIRCLE. People get stronger negative information from the UPRIGHT TRIANGLE shapes than from the CIRCLE. This finding might be helpful for designing the surrounding shapes of warning signs.

Price played an important role in most purchases. Buying behavior was strongly determined by consumers' price expectations. Emotion as a research hotspot was demonstrated to be ubiquitous in marketing and influenced purchase processing as well. This study addressed interests upon whether emotion arousal would influence consumers' price perceptions and their willingness to purchase. Compared to such emotion researches which normally adopted emotional pictures as priming stimuli, we creatively employed a two-player “Finger Play” (FP) game without monetary gains or losses to arouse subjects' emotion in the experiment. A 2 (FP Game Results: Continuous Win vs. Continuous Lose) by 2 (Price Conditions: High Price vs. Low Price) Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) experiment was designed to investigate whether game results would arouse different emotions and influence subjects' perception of product price. Both behavioral and ERP results indicated that subjects' price perception was deeply impacted by emotions induced from continuous win/lose experiences.

Against the background of an increasingly competitive market environment, the current study aimed to investigate whether and how victory and defeat, as two critical factors in competition outcomes, would affect consumers’ preference of unfamiliar brands. In the experiment, participants’ status of victory or defeat was induced by a pseudo-online game, followed by a main task of brand preference rating. Using the precise and intuitive attributes of neuroscientific techniques, we adopted event-related potentials to analyze brain activity precisely during brand information processing when individuals experienced victory or defeat. Behavioral data showed that individuals had a stronger preference for unfamiliar brands in victory trials than in defeat trials, even if the brand was completely unrelated to the competition; this indicated a transfer of valence. Three emotion-related event-related potential components, N1, P2 and later positive potentials, were elicited more negatively in victory trials than in defeat trials, indicating the existence of incidental emotions induced by victory or defeat. No significant correlation was found between any pair of ERP components and preference scores. These results suggest that the experience of victory and defeat can evoke corresponding incidental emotions without awareness, and further affect the individual’s preference for unfamiliar brands. Therefore, playing a game before presenting brand information might help promote the brand by inducing a good impression of the brand in consumers.

Understanding the process by which consumers evaluate the designs of experience goods is critical for firms designing and delivering experience products. As the implicit process involved in this evaluation, and given the possible social desirability bias inherent to traditional methods of product design evaluation in certain conditions, neuroscientific methods are preferred to gain insight into the neural basis of consumers’ evaluation of experience good designs. We here used event-related potentials (ERPs) and a revised go/no-go paradigm to investigate consumers’ neural responses to experience good designs. Personalized product designs and neutral landscape pictures were randomly presented to 20 student participants; they were asked to view these product designs without making any decisions. The paired t-test and repeated-measures analysis of correlation showed that the P200 and late positive potential (LPP) elicited by the most-preferred experience good designs were significantly higher than that elicited by least-preferred designs, and the two ERP components were positively correlated with the personalized rating scores. Thus, P200 and LPP might be the early and late indices of consumers’ evaluation of experience good designs, respectively, and may facilitate an understanding of the temporal course of this evaluation. Furthermore, these two ERP components can be used to identify consumers’ preferences toward experience good designs. In addition, given the use of personalized experimental stimuli, these findings may help to explain why customized products are preferred by consumers.

Online ratings impose significant effects on the behaviors of potential customers. Thus, online merchants try to adopt strategies that affect this rating behavior, and most of these strategies are connected to money, such as the strategies of returning cash coupons if a consumer gives a five-star rating (RI strategy, an acronym for “returning” and “if”) or returning cash coupons directly with no additional requirements (RN strategy, an acronym for “returning” and “no”). The current study explored whether a certain strategy (RN or RI) was more likely to give rise to false rating behaviors, as assessed by event-related potentials. A two-stimulus paradigm was used in this experiment. The first stimulus (S1) was the picture of a product with four Chinese characters that reflected the product quality (slightly defective vs. seriously defective vs. not defective), and the second stimulus (S2) displayed the coupon strategy (RN or RI). The participants were asked to decide whether or not to give a five-star rating. The behavioral results showed that the RI strategy led to a higher rate of five-star ratings than the RN strategy. For the electrophysiological time courses, the N1, N2, and LPP components were evaluated. The slightly defective products elicited a larger amplitude of the N1 component than the seriously defective and not-defective products, reflecting that perceptual difficulty was associated with the processing of the slightly defective products. The RI strategy evoked a less negative N2 and a more positive LPP than the RN strategy, indicating that the subjects perceived less conflict and experienced stronger incentives when processing the RI strategy. These findings will benefit future studies of fake online comments and provide evidence supporting the policy of forbidding the use of the RI strategy in e-commerce.

Stereotypes from the major nationality toward minorities constitute a widely concerning problem in many countries. As reported by previous studies, stereotypes can be activated by media information that portrays the negative aspects of the target group. The current study focused on the neural basis of the modulation of negative media information on Han Chinese stereotypes toward Uyghurs by using event-related potentials. We employed the lexical decision task, in which participants were asked to categorize the presented word as positive or negative. Behavioral result showed that participants had a shorter reaction time to positive adjectives than to negative adjectives. The data of brain activity showed that compared with the Han condition, the Uyghurs condition elicited smaller N400 differences in the media priming group, whereas there was no significant N400 deflection difference between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in the control group. The current results suggested that the negative media information might influence their judgments toward other groups reflected in the deflection of N400 amplitude. Therefore, in order to mitigate or even eliminate stereotypes about national minorities, the effort of the media is important.

Trust and trustworthiness contribute to reciprocal behavior and social relationship development. To make better decisions, people need to evaluate others’ trustworthiness. They often assess this kind of reputation by learning through repeated social interactions. The present event-related potential (ERP) study explored the reputation learning process in a repeated trust game where subjects made multi-round decisions of investment to different partners. We found that subjects gradually learned to discriminate trustworthy partners from untrustworthy ones based on how often their partners reciprocated the investment, which was indicated by their own investment decisions. Besides, electrophysiological data showed that the faces of the untrustworthy partners induced larger feedback negativity (FN) amplitude than those of the trustworthy partners, but only in the late phase of the game. The ERP results corresponded with the behavioral pattern and revealed that the learned trustworthiness differentiation was coded by the cue-elicited FN component. Consistent with previous research, our findings suggest that the anterior cue-elicited FN reflects the reputation appraisal and tracks the reputation learning process in social interactions.

Humans experience more stress about uncertain situations than certain situations. However, the neural mechanism underlying the uncertainty of a negative stimulus has not been determined. In the present study, event-related potential was recorded to examine neural responses during the dread of unpredictable pain. We used a cueing paradigm in which predictable cues were always followed by electric shocks, unpredictable cues by electric shocks at a 50/50 ratio and safe cues by no electric shock. Visual analogue scales following electric shocks were presented to quantify subjective anxiety levels. The behavioral results showed that unpredictable cues evoked high-level anxiety compared with predictable cues in both painful and unpainful stimulation conditions. More importantly, the ERPs results revealed that unpredictable cues elicited a larger P200 at parietal sites than predictable cues. In addition, unpredictable cues evoked larger P200 compared with safe cues at frontal electrodes and compared with predictable cues at parietal electrodes. In addition, larger P3b and LPP were observed during perception of safe cues compared with predictable cues at frontal and central electrodes. The similar P3b effect was also revealed in the left sites. The present study underlined that the uncertain dread of pain was associated with threat appraisal process in pain system. These findings on early event-related potentials were significant for a neural marker and development of therapeutic interventions.

Deceptive behavior is common in human social interactions. Researchers have been trying to uncover the cognitive process and neural basis underlying deception due to its theoretical and practical significance. We used Event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural correlates of deception when the participants completed a hazard judgment task. Pictures conveying or not conveying hazard information were presented to the participants who were then requested to discriminate the hazard content (safe or hazardous) and make a response corresponding to the cues (truthful or deceptive). Behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded during the entire experiment. Results showed that deceptive responses, compared to truthful responses, were associated with longer reaction time (RT), lower accuracy, increased N2 and reduced late positive potential (LPP), suggesting a cognitively more demanding process to respond deceptively. The decrement in LPP correlated negatively with the increment in RT for deceptive relative to truthful responses, regardless of hazard content. In addition, hazardous information evoked larger N1 and P300 than safe information, reflecting an early processing bias and a later evaluative categorization process based on motivational significance, respectively. Finally, the interaction between honesty (truthful/deceptive) and safety (safe/hazardous) on accuracy and LPP indicated that deceptive responses towards safe information required more effort than deceptive responses towards hazardous information. Overall, these results demonstrate the neurocognitive substrates underlying deception about hazard information.

The current study delineated how male proposers' facial attractiveness affect female responders' fairness considerations and their subsequent decision outcome during the Ultimatum Game (UG). Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 17 female subjects, who played the role as responders and had to decide whether to accept offers from either attractive or unattractive male proposers. Behavioral data (Acceptance Ratio and Response time) revealed that, more offers were accepted from attractive-face conditions; subjects typically responded quicker to unfair offers from unattractive proposers as compared with slower to unfair offers from attractive proposers. The ERP data demonstrated similar N2 amplitudes elicited by both attractive and unattractive faces, and a larger early frontal LPP elicited by the attractive faces compared with unattractive ones, but no significant differences of both late posterior LPP and typical parietal LPP amplitudes were observed between these two face conditions, which was different from our previous study with similar paradigm but male participants. The results suggest that, in comparison to males, females might not experience the potential attention bias towards unattractive opposite-sex faces and are less likely to possess an enhanced processing and evaluation of those faces. This phenomenon might be explained by endogenous gender differences in mate preference. The feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300 responses during an offer presentation were further measured in both attractive-face and unattractive-face conditions and the results demonstrated that the amplitudes elicited by fair and unfair offers were not statistically different in the former condition, but were different in the latter condition. More specifically, unfair offers generated larger FRN and smaller P300 than fair ones in the unattractive-face condition. Findings suggest that, although females tend to possess less salient evaluation of male's facial attractiveness, the attractiveness of male proposers would still attenuate female responders' fairness consideration during the UG.

The appropriate enforcement phrases used during occupational health and safety (OHS) inspection activities is a crucial factor to guarantee the compliance with OHS regulations in enterprises. However, few researchers have empirically investigated the issue of how enforcement phrases are processed. The present study explored the neural features of processing two types of enforcement phrases (severe-and-deterrent vs. mild-and-polite phrases) used during OHS inspections by applying event-related potentials (ERP) method. Electroencephalogram data were recorded while the participants distinguished between severe-and-deterrent phrases and mild-and-polite phrases depicted in written Chinese words. The ERP results showed that severe-and-deterrent phrases elicited significantly augmented P300 amplitude with a central-parietal scalp distribution compared with mild-and-polite phrases, indicating the allocation of more attention resources to and elaborate processing of the severe-and-deterrent phrases. It reveals that humans may consider the severe-and-deterrent phrases as more motivationally significant and elaborately process the severity and deterrence information contained in the enforcement phrases for the adaptive protection. The current study provides an objective and supplementary way to measure the efficiency of different enforcement phrases at neural level, which may help generate appropriate enforcement phrases and improve the performance of OHS inspections.

The present study explored the neural mechanism underlying the effect of moderate and transient hypoxic exposure on mental rotation of two-dimensional letters in both normal and mirror versions. Event-related potential data and behavioral data were acquired in the task of discrimination between normal and mirrored versions separately in conditions of normoxia (simulated sea level) and hypoxia conditions (simulated 5000 meter altitude). The behavioral results revealed no significant difference between the normoxia and hypoxia conditions both in response time and error rate. However, obvious differences between these two conditions in ERP were found. First, enlarged P300 and Rotation-related Negativity (RRN) were observed in the hypoxia condition compared to the normoxia condition only with normal letters. Second, the angle effect on the amplitude of RRN was more evident with normal letters in the hypoxia condition than that in the normoxia condition. However, this angle effect nearly disappeared with the mirrored letters in the hypoxia condition. Third, more bilateral parietal activation was observed in the hypoxia condition than the normoxia condition. These results suggested that the compensation mechanism existed in the hypoxia condition and was effective with normal letters but had little effect on the mirrored letters. This study extends the research about the hypoxic effect on spatial ability of humans by employing a mental rotation task and further provides neural evidence for this effect.

An individual's willingness to share resources declines as the social distance between the decision maker and the recipient increases, which is known as social discounting. This social-distance-dependent prosocial behavior is likely to be influenced by the region in which individuals were raised. Based on previous studies on social discounting, this research focuses on the differing social distance-dependent prosocial behaviors between rural- and urban-reared participants in China. Our data showed that both groups' behaviors conform to the social discounting function and fit the hyperbolic model, as reported in previous studies about social discounting. Interestingly, individuals who were raised in rural areas yielded a smaller discount rate than those who were raised in urban areas, which indicated that a rural upbringing produced people who were more generous than those with an urban upbringing. Furthermore, this distinct type of generosity occurred notably among individuals with greater social distance, such as strangers or distant acquaintances. The reason may be due to the difference in dominant culture, production mode and lifestyle between rural and urban people.

Promise is one of the most powerful tools producing trust and facilitating cooperation, and sticking to the promise is deemed as a key social norm in social interactions. The present study explored the extent to which promise would influence investors' decision-making in the trust game where promise had no predictive value regarding trustees' reciprocation. In addition, we examined the neural underpinnings of the investors' outcome processing related to the trustees' promise keeping and promise breaking. Consistent with our hypothesis, behavioral results indicated that promise could effectively increase the investment frequency of investors. Electrophysiological results showed that, promise induced larger differentiated-FRN responses to the reward and non-reward discrepancy. Taken together, these results suggested that promise would promote cooperative behavior, while breach of promise would be regarded as a violation of the social norm, corroborating the vital role of non-enforceable commitment in social decision making.

Previous researchers have tried to predict social and economic phenomena with indicators of public mood, which were extracted from online data. This method has been proved to be feasible in many areas such as financial markets, economic operations and even national suicide numbers. However, few previous researches have examined the relationship between public mood and consumption choices at society level. The present study paid attention to the "Diaoyu Island" event, and extracted Chinese public mood data toward Japan from Sina MicroBlog (the biggest social media in China), which demonstrated a significant cross-correlation between the public mood variable and sales of Sony cameras on Taobao (the biggest Chinese e-business company). Afterwards, several candidate predictors of sales were examined and finally three significant stepwise regression models were obtained. Results of models estimation showed that significance (F-statistics), R-square and predictive accuracy (MAPE) all improved due to inclusion of public mood variable. These results indicate that public mood is significantly associated with consumption choices and may be of value in sales forecasting for particular products.

Preference for beauty is human nature, as previous behavior studies have supported the notion of "beauty premium" in which attractive people were more easily to get promoted and receive higher salaries. In the present study, 29 males were recruited to participate in a three-person ultimatum game (UG) including a proposer, a responder and a powerless third player. Each subject, playing as the responder, had to decide whether to accept an offer from the allocator both for himself and a female third person. We aimed to elucidate how the facial attractiveness of the female subject affected the male subjects' fairness and decision-making in social exchanges. Frontal feedback-related negativity (FRN) in response to four offers in an attractive-face condition revealed no significant differences between offers; however, when the companion was an unattractive female, an "unfair/fair" offer, which assigned a lower share to the responder and a fair share to the third player, elicited the largest FRN. Furthermore, when the third player was offered the smallest amount ("fair/unfair" offer), a larger FRN was generated in an attractive-face condition than unattractive-face condition. In the "unfair/fair" offer condition in which subjects received a smaller allocation than the third person, the beauty of their female counterparts attenuated subjects' aversion to inequality, resulting in a less negative FRN in the frontal region and an increased acceptance ratio. However, the influence of the third player's facial attractiveness only affected the early evaluation stage: late P300 was found to be immune to the "beauty premium". Under the two face conditions, P300 was smallest following an "unfair/fair" offer, whereas the amplitudes in the other three offer conditions exhibited no significant differences. In addition, the differentiated neural features of processing facial attractiveness were also determined and indexed by four event-related potentials (ERP) components: N170, frontal N1, N2 and late positive potentials (LPPs).

Previous research regarding anchoring effects has demonstrated that human judgments are often assimilated to irrelevant information. Studies have demonstrated that anchors influence the economic valuation of various products and experiences; however, the cognitive explanations of this effect remain controversial, and its neural mechanisms have rarely been explored. In the current study, we conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment to investigate the anchoring effect on willingness to accept (WTA) for an aversive hedonic experience and the role of anchors in this judgment heuristic. The behavioral results demonstrated that random numbers affect participants' WTA for listening to pieces of noise. The participants asked for higher pay after comparing their WTA with higher numbers. The EEG results indicated that anchors also influenced the neural underpinnings of the valuation process. Specifically, when a higher anchor number was drawn, larger P2 and late positive potential amplitudes were elicited, reflecting the anticipation of more intensive pain from the subsequent noise. Moreover, higher anchors induced a stronger theta band power increase compared with lower anchors when subjects listened to the noises, indicating that the participants felt more unpleasant during the actual experience of the noise. The levels of unpleasantness during both anticipation and experience were consistent with the semantic information implied by the anchors. Therefore, these data suggest that a semantic priming process underlies the anchoring effect in WTA. This study provides proof for the robustness of the anchoring effect and neural evidence of the semantic priming model. Our findings indicate that activated contextual information, even seemingly irrelevant, can be embedded in the construction of economic value in the brain.

Fans of celebrities commonly exist in modern society. Researchers from social science have been concerned with this problem for years. Furthermore, such researchers have attempted to measure people's involvement with celebrities in various ways. However, no study measured the degree of addiction to a specific celebrity at the neurological level. Therefore, the current study employed visually evoked event related potentials (ERPs) to examine people's attitude toward celebrities by comparing different brain activities of fans and non-fans when they were shown a set of photos. These photos include a specific celebrity, a familiar person, a stranger and a butterfly. Furthermore, to examine the validity of the detected neural index, we also investigated the correlation between brain activity and the score of the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), which was a questionnaire used to explore people's attitude toward celebrities at behavioral level. Two groups of subjects were asked to complete an implicit task, i.e., to press a button when a picture of a butterfly appeared. Results revealed that fans showed significant positive N2 and P300 deflection when viewing the photos of their favorite celebrity, whereas in the non-fan group, the subjects only showed larger P300 amplitude as a response to the celebrity's photos. Furthermore, a positive correlation between P300 amplitude elicited by the stimuli of a celebrity face and CAS scores was also observed. These findings indicated fan attitude to a specific celebrity can also be observed at the neurological level and suggested the potential utility of using ERP component as an index of fandom involvement.

A brand name can be considered a mental category. Similarity-based categorization theory has been used to explain how consumers judge a new product as a member of a known brand, a process called brand extension evaluation. This study was an event-related potential study conducted in two experiments. The study found a two-stage categorization process reflected by the P2 and N400 components in brand extension evaluation. In experiment 1, a prime-probe paradigm was presented in a pair consisting of a brand name and a product name in three conditions, i.e., in-category extension, similar-category extension, and out-of-category extension. Although the task was unrelated to brand extension evaluation, P2 distinguished out-of-category extensions from similar-category and in-category ones, and N400 distinguished similar-category extensions from in-category ones. In experiment 2, a prime-probe paradigm with a related task was used, in which product names included subcategory and major-category product names. The N400 elicited by subcategory products was more significantly negative than that elicited by major-category products, with no salient difference in P2. We speculated that P2 could reflect the early low-level and similarity-based processing in the first stage, whereas N400 could reflect the late analytic and category-based processing in the second stage.

The Simon effect refers to the phenomenon that reaction time (RT) is faster when stimulus and response location are congruent than when they are not. This study used the priming-target paradigm to explore the influence of induced negative emotion on the Simon effect with event-related potential techniques (ERPs). The priming stimuli were composed of two kinds of pictures, the negative and neutral pictures, selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The target stimuli included chessboards of two color types. One was red and black the other one was green and black. Each chessboard was presented on the left or the right of the screen. The participants were asked to press the response keys according to the colors of the chessboards. It was called the congruent condition if the chessboard and the response key were on the same side, otherwise incongruent condition. In this study, the emotion-priming Simon effect was found in terms of RT and P300. Negative emotion compared with neutral emotion significantly enhanced the Simon effect in the cognitive process, reflected by a larger difference of P300 latency between the incongruent and congruent trials. The results suggest that the induced negative emotion influenced the Simon effect at the late stage of the cognitive process, and the P300 latency could be considered as the reference measure. These findings may be beneficial to researches in psychology and industrial engineering in the future.

Fear could be acquired indirectly via social observation. However, it remains unclear which cortical substrate activities are involved in vicarious fear transmission. The present study was to examine empathy-related processes during fear learning by-proxy and to examine the activation of prefrontal cortex by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. We simultaneously measured participants’ hemodynamic responses and skin conductance responses when they were exposed to a movie. In this movie, a demonstrator (i.e., another human being) was receiving a classical fear conditioning. A neutral colored square paired with shocks (CSshock) and another colored square paired with no shocks (CSno-shock) were randomly presented in front of the demonstrator. Results showed that increased concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin in left prefrontal cortex was observed when participants watched a demonstrator seeing CSshock compared with that exposed to CSno-shock. In addition, enhanced skin conductance responses showing a demonstrator's aversive experience during learning object-fear association were observed. The present study suggests that left prefrontal cortex, which may reflect speculation of others’ mental state, is associated with social fear transmission.