Further evidence for mixed emotions.

Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested several alternative interpretations for prior evidence that happiness and sadness can co-occur in bittersweet situations (i.e., those containing both pleasant and unpleasant aspects). One possibility is that subjects who reported mixed emotions merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 1–3 by asking subjects to complete online continuous measures of happiness and sadness. Subjects reported more simultaneously mixed emotions during a bittersweet film clip than during a control clip. Another possibility is that subjects in earlier studies reported mixed emotions only because they were explicitly asked whether they felt happy and sad. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 4–6 with open-ended measures of emotion. Subjects were more likely to report mixed emotions after the bittersweet clip than the control clip. Both patterns occurred even when subjects were told that they were not expected to report mixed emotions (Studies 2 and 5) and among subjects who did not previously believe that people could simultaneously feel happy and sad (Studies 3 and 6). These results provide further evidence that positivity and negativity are separable in experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related affective modulation of the startle eyeblink response: Older adults startle most when viewing positive pictures.

Previous studies reveal age by valence interactions in attention and memory, such that older adults focus relatively more on positive and relatively less on negative stimuli than younger adults. In the current study, eyeblink startle response was used to measure differences in emotional reactivity to images that were equally arousing to both age groups. Viewing positive and negative pictures from the International Affective Picture System had opposite effects on startle modulation for older and younger adults. Younger adults showed the typical startle blink pattern, with potentiated startle when viewing negative pictures compared to positive pictures. Older adults, on the other hand, showed the opposite pattern, with potentiated startle when viewing positive pictures compared to viewing negative and neutral pictures. Potential underlying mechanisms for this interaction are evaluated. This pattern suggests that, compared with younger adults, older adults are more likely to spontaneously suppress responses to negative stimuli and process positive stimuli more deeply. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are the memories of older adults positively biased?

There is disagreement in the literature about whether a "positivity effect" in memory performance exists in older adults. To assess the generalizability of the effect, the authors examined memory for autobiographical, picture, and word information in a group of younger (17-29 years old) and older (60-84 years old) adults. For the autobiographical memory task, the authors asked participants to produce 4 positive, 4 negative, and 4 neutral recent autobiographical memories and to recall these a week later. For the picture and word tasks, participants studied photos or words of different valences (positive, negative, neutral) and later remembered them on a free-recall test. The authors found significant correlations in memory performance, across task material, for recall of both positive and neutral valence autobiographical events, pictures, and words. When the authors examined accurate memories, they failed to find consistent evidence, across the different types of material, of a positivity effect in either age group. However, the false memory findings offer more consistent support for a positivity effect in older adults. During recall of all 3 types of material, older participants recalled more false positive than false negative memories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related positivity enhancement is not universal: Older Chinese look away from positive stimuli.

Socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that with age, people are motivated to derive emotional meaning from life, leading them to pay more attention to positive relative to negative/neutral stimuli. The authors argue that cultures that differ in what they consider to be emotionally meaningful may show this preference to different extents. Using eye-tracking techniques, the authors compared visual attention toward emotional (happy, fearful, sad, and angry) and neutral facial expressions among 46 younger and 57 older Hong Kong Chinese. In contrast to prior Western findings, older but not younger Chinese looked away from happy facial expressions, suggesting that they do not show attentional preferences toward positive stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Divergent trajectories in the aging mind: Changes in working memory for affective versus visual information with age.

Working memory mediates the short-term maintenance of information. Virtually all empirical research on working memory involves investigations of working memory for verbal and visual information. Whereas aging is typically associated with a deficit in working memory for these types of information, recent findings suggestive of relatively well-preserved long-term memory for emotional information in older adults raise questions about working memory for emotional material. This study examined age differences in working memory for emotional versus visual information. Findings demonstrate that, despite an age-related deficit for the latter, working memory for emotion was unimpaired. Further, older adults exhibited superior performance on positive relative to negative emotion trials, whereas their younger counterparts exhibited the opposite pattern. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Finite-time stability and stabilisation of singular discrete-time linear positive systems with time-varying delay

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the problem of finite-time stability and stabilisation for positive singular discrete-time linear systems with time-varying delay is investigated. We first present novel delay-dependent sufficient conditions for positivity and finite-time stability of the unforced systems. We then apply the obtained results to solve finite-time stabilisation problem of the considered systems. The sufficient conditions for the positivity and finite-time stabilisable of such systems are formulated in terms of a standard linear programming (LP) problem. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness and advantages of our results.     

On splitting-based numerical methods for nonlinear models of European options

We present a large class of nonlinear models of European options as parabolic equations with quasi-linear diffusion and fully nonlinear hyperbolic part. The main idea of the operator splitting method (OSM) is to couple known difference schemes for nonlinear hyperbolic equations with other ones for quasi-linear parabolic equations. We use flux limiter techniques, explicit–implicit difference schemes, Richardson extrapolation, etc. Theoretical analysis for illiquid market model is given. The numerical experiments show second-order accuracy for the numerical solution (the price) and Greeks Delta and Gamma, positivity and monotonicity preserving properties of the approximations.     

《化工原理》教学中学生学习积极性的培养

化工原理是化学化工类专业的一门技术基础课,文章从结合学生所学专业与课本理论知识、加强学生参与意识、灵活运用教学法等方面着手,就如何激发学生学习积极性,提高教学效果作了一些有益的探讨。     

You never lose the ages you’ve been: Affective perspective taking in older adults.

Aging appears to be associated with a growing preference for positive over negative information (Carstensen, Mikels, & Mather, 2006). In this study, we investigated potential awareness of the phenomenon by asking older people to recollect material from the perspective of a young person. Young and older participants listened to stories about 25- and 75-year-old main characters and then were asked to retell the stories from the perspective of the main characters. Older adults used relatively more positive than negative words when retelling from the perspective of a 75- versus 25-year-old. Young adults, however, used comparable numbers of positive and negative words regardless of perspective. These findings contribute to a growing literature that points to developmental gains in the emotion domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On some explicit non-standard methods to approximate nonnegative solutions of a weakly hyperbolic equation with logistic nonlinearity

We introduce non-standard, finite-difference schemes to approximate nonnegative solutions of a weakly hyperbolic (that is, a hyperbolic partial differential equation in which the second-order time-derivative is multiplied by a relatively small positive constant), nonlinear partial differential equation that generalizes the well-known equation of Fisher-KPP from mathematical biology. The methods are consistent of order 𝒪(Δ t+(Δ x)²). As a means to verify the validity of the techniques, we compare our numerical simulations with known exact solutions of particular cases of our model. The results show that there is an excellent agreement between the theory and the computational outcomes.