Empirical and theoretical advances in human neuroscience have led to a reappraisal of the relationships between mind, brain and body, the implications of which are particularly relevant to understanding emotions, which is revealed to be embodied owing to the facts that they are on the one hand primarily arise from the internal bodily states controlled by interoceptive system, on the other they give rise to physiological reactions and physical action evoked by autonomic nervous system. More specifically, when considering the ‘embodied mind’ (i.e., how mental processes are inescapably contextualized by their location within the body), the brain, instead of the ‘master’ of the body, is increasingly revealed to function as the ‘servant’, with its primary goal to maintain the body’s homeostatic integrity. This is achieved through the control of interoceptive information concerning body’s physiological state, initially as ‘simple’ organ-level homeostatic reflexes and then through higher-order coordination across organ-systems allowing ‘allostatic policies’ to predict and maintain future health of the integrated whole ‘biological-self’. In this context, motivational and emotional feelings arise from interoceptive signals that accompany (motivational and emotional) internally-directed physiological responses, and externally-directed behaviors. Emotion concepts are thus the categorized embodied outcomes of bidirectional brain-body interactions and may arguably be differentiated into afferent interoceptive processes, i.e., from body to brain, and efferent/autonomic processes, i.e., from brain to body. When comparing emotion words used in Chinese and English languages, afferent/interoceptive processes seem to dominate conceptualization of embodied emotions in Chinese, while the efferent processes feature more commonly in English. The presence of distinct conceptual systems relating to emotions may, according to the linguistic relativity hypothesis as well as the theory of constructed emotion, significantly shape the distinct values and ‘national character’ of Chinese and English–speaking cultures. Correspondingly, it is argued that, in the expression of affective traits, Chinese-speaking people are biased towards being more receptive, reflective and adaptive, whereas native English speakers may tend to be more reactive, proactive and interactive. These patterns also encompass functions historically ascribed to bodily organs by traditional Chinese and ancient Greek medicine.

Background: Over the past two decades, various research teams have designed and applied instruments to measure the quality of life of families with a member who has a disability. A recent systematic review on the state of art of Family Quality of Life in early care identified that many of these studies collected data only from the mothers. The present study aimed to investigate whether there is a bias in participant selection in these types of studies. Method: A systematic review of the scientific literature was conducted in the 3 databases from the year 2000 to 2022. A total of 72 empirical studies have been identified. Results: The findings indicated that most studies examining the family quality of life were based on the information of a single informant per family unit. The profiles of participants according to the research objective is quite similar. In one third of studies the authors report that family members who participate cannot be represented by only mothers or one participant per household. Conclusions: Given the dynamic and collective nature of the construct, the application of a systemic approach is necessary.

The deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in decentralized environments is on the rise, yet representation of shared conceptualization in such scenarios remains a challenging issue. The absence of a shared understanding can lead to suboptimal performance of AI systems and hinders the ability to comprehend the knowledge and beliefs of agents in the domain. This paper proposes a formal model for modeling conceptualization in AI systems that integrates ontology, epistemology, and epistemic logic. The model aims to address the gap in representing shared conceptualization in decentralized environments and enhance the performance of AI systems operating in such environments. The proposed model is a hybrid structure that blends extensional and intensional structures and leverages logic-based languages for modeling purposes. A case study in the healthcare sector is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed model. The study contributes to the existing literature by providing a formal model for representing shared conceptualization in decentralized environments, which can be utilized to optimize the performance of AI systems in these environments.

In this study, reinforcement learning (RL) was used in factory simulation to optimize storage devices for use in Industry 4.0 and digital twins. First, we defined an RL environment, modeled it, and validated its ability to simulate a real physical system. Subsequently, we introduced a method to calculate reward signals and apply them to the environment to ensure the alignment of the behavior of the RL agent with the task objective. The stocker simulation model was used to validate the effectiveness of RL. The model is a storage device that simulates logistics in a manufacturing production area. The results revealed that RL is a useful tool for automating and optimizing complex logistics systems and increase the applicability of RL in logistics. We proposed a novel method for creating an agent through learning using the proximal policy optimization algorithm, and the agent was optimized by configuring various learning options. The application of reinforcement learning resulted in an effectiveness of 30% to 100%, and methods can be expanded to other fields.

Servitization or productization, indicating evolution from product to service economy or vice-versa, can be considered as a successful strategy to gain competitiveness based on novel combination of products and services. To decrease the risks of servitization and to support the sustainable development of its main outcome, being Product Service System (PSS), it is required not only to have a clear and common understanding of the core business and processes but also to share the same definitions on (PSS) concepts as the main outcome of servitization. For this purpose, managers could be supported by abstract models with a limited number and high ratio of known concepts in the early stages of PSS development. Through an extensive literature review on this subject, followed by a structured conceptualization approach and discussions with domain experts, this paper proposes a Conceptual Model (PSS-CM). To validate the results, PSS-CM and its elements were discussed in several iterations, from both academic and industrial points of view, in the frame of a European research project. In the frame of this project, a case study was also performed to illustrate the instantiation of PSS-CM.