Baoding University

While dual-process theory has advanced our understanding of moral decision-making, traditional research has relied heavily on text-based scenarios. These paradigms fail to elicit genuine behavioural responses, thereby obscuring the underlying mechanisms of moral action. The present study employed two experiments to investigate the interactive effects of ego depletion and emotion on moral decision-making, as well as the underlying physiological mechanisms, within a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Study 1 revealed that, compared to text-based conditions, VR elicited heightened physiological arousal-manifested as accelerated heart rate and respiratory rate-reflecting a state of high somatic engagement. Under low ego depletion, this immersion resulted in increased utilitarian tendencies. However, this facilitating effect of VR was nullified under high ego depletion conditions. Study 2 demonstrated that positive emotion effectively buffers the negative impact of ego depletion on moral decision-making, preserving utilitarian tendencies even under high depletion. These results suggest that moral decision-making in realistic contexts is not a purely cognitive exercise in abstract reasoning; rather, it is a resource-dependent process characterised by a dynamic interplay between cognition, emotion, and situational context. Beyond validating positive emotion as a buffer against cognitive depletion, this study underscores the critical importance of ecological validity.

To address the challenge of abnormal tobacco shred detection in cigarette production lines, this study proposes an improved lightweight YOLOv8-based model that balances model efficiency and detection accuracy. First, the C3Ghost and GhostConv structures from GhostNet are integrated into the YOLOv8n backbone network, thereby reducing the number of model parameters. Second, a Context Anchor Attention mechanism is introduced to enhance feature extraction performance. In addition, a progressive feature pyramid network is constructed to improve multi-scale detection capabilities, and the WIoU v3 boundary loss function is adopted to optimize bounding box regression performance. Finally, validation on a dataset of anomalous tobacco shreds demonstrates the lightweight nature and competitive performance of the proposed method. The results show that: (1) compared with four other models, the proposed model exhibits advantages in terms of speed and accuracy; compared with the original model, detection precision is improved by 9.5%, and recall is increased by 10.6%; (2) the detection model achieves 86.27 frames per second for tobacco production line image detection, enabling real-time detection of abnormal tobacco shreds during the production process. This study offers a promising technical approach for intelligent quality detection in cigarette production lines under the studied conditions. This study addresses the challenge of detecting abnormal tobacco shreds in high-speed cigarette production lines, where traditional inspection methods are inefficient and unreliable. The proposed lightweight detection model achieves improved accuracy while maintaining real-time performance, making it suitable for industrial deployment on resource-constrained devices. Experimental validation demonstrates significant performance improvements over existing methods, enabling automated quality control in cigarette manufacturing processes.

Trypsin, a canonical serine protease in crustaceans, plays a crucial role in ontogeny and antibacterial defense. Whether these biological functions correlate with its catalytic characteristics remains unresolved in the freshwater shrimp Neocaridina denticulata sinensis. To address this gap, we characterized a trypsin gene from N. denticulata sinensis (NdTryp) and assessed both its biological roles and its prospective utility. NdTryp was predominantly expressed in the hepatopancreas, where it localized to storage cells (R-cells) and tubule-lining epithelial cells (ECTs). Across development, NdTryp transcripts were essentially absent during early embryogenesis but rose sharply at late stages, temporally coincident with hatching and the onset of feeding. After a challenge with Vibrio parahaemolyticus, the expression of NdTryp was induced, with the expression level significantly increased relative to the baseline expression level. RNA interference-mediated knockdown rendered shrimp more susceptible to infection and was accompanied by extensive hepatopancreatic injury, including epithelial detachment and disruption of the basement membrane. Biochemically, recombinant NdTryp (rNdTryp) displayed proteolytic activity over a broad temperature and pH span. Activity was differentially tuned by metal ions, with several divalent cations producing marked enhancement, whereas ferric iron exerted strong inhibition. Overall, our results showed that NdTryp functions as a multifunctional protease involved in both late embryonic development and innate antimicrobial defense. Furthermore, the robust stability of rNdTryp underscores its potential as an aquafeed additive and candidate for enzymatic biotransformation.