成年女儿照料老年父母的心理体验及关系质量作用的研究

Previous researches about family caregiving revealed that caregiving has both negative and positive effects on caregivers’ well-being. Based on Lawton’s two-factor model, this study aims at examining how caring for old parents would affect adult daughters’ psychological well-being. According to Lawton, objective stressors as caregiving would arouse two different kinds of caregivers’ subjective appraisal, i.e., negative appraisal and positive appraisal, which in turn correlate with the negative and positive dimensions of caregivers’ psychological well-being, respectively. There were two main purposes of this study: a) to verify both the negative and positive paths in the two-factor model and their relatively independence; and b) to examine the effects of relationship quality between caregiver and care-recipient on those paths. The results are as follows: 1) Caregiving stressors have significant positive predictive effect on caregivers’ negative appraisal, but have no direct effect on caregivers’ positive appraisal. 2) Caregivers’ negative appraisal has significant positive predictive effect on their negative emotional experience, while caregivers’ positive appraisal has significant positive predictive effect on their positive emotional experience. 3) Certain dimensions of relationship quality, including the Appreciation and General Appraisal, have significant negative predictive effect on caregivers’ negative appraisal, and have significant positive predictive effect on caregivers’ positive appraisal. 4) The Appreciation dimension of relationship quality moderates the path from caregiving demands to caregivers’ burden; and the General Appraisal of relationship quality moderates the path from caregivers’ positive appraisal to life satisfaction. Based on the above results, the researcher concluded that a) both the negative path and positive path exist in caregiving process, and they are relatively independent from each other; and b) relationship quality does moderate certain paths in the model. Meanwhile, the main effect of relationship quality on caregivers’ experience is also significant and more remarkable. This study attempts to explain these results in terms of coping resources. Both relationship quality and many other factors might be explained as resources that caregivers utilize to cope with stress of caregiving. With more resources, caregivers tend to appraise more positively, and less negatively, and vice versa. However, the resources which might affect caregivers’ positive appraisal, as well as the ways they work, may be different from that affect caregivers’ negative appraisal.

A family of interesting exact solutions of the sine-Gordon equation

By using AKNS [Phys. Rev. Lett. 31 (1973) 125] system and introducing the wave function, a family of interesting exact solutions of the sine-Gordon equation are constructed. These solutions seem to be some soliton, kink, and anti-kink ones respectively for the different choice of the spectrum, whereas due to the interaction between two traveling-waves they have some properties different from usual soliton, kink, and anti-kink solutions.

A scheme for multiple sequences alignment optimization-an improvement based on family representative mechanics features

As a basic tool of modern biology, sequence alignment can provide us useful information in fold, function, and active site of protein. For many cases, the increased quality of sequence alignment means a better performance. The motivation of present work is to increase ability of the existing scoring scheme/algorithm by considering residue–residue correlations better. Based on a coarse-grained approach, the hydrophobic force between each pair of residues is written out from protein sequence. It results in the construction of an intramolecular hydrophobic force network that describes the whole residue–residue interactions of each protein molecule, and characterizes protein's biological properties in the hydrophobic aspect. A former work has suggested that such network can characterize the top weighted feature regarding hydrophobicity. Moreover, for each homologous protein of a family, the corresponding network shares some common and representative family characters that eventually govern the conservation of biological properties during protein evolution. In present work, we score such family representative characters of a protein by the deviation of its intramolecular hydrophobic force network from that of background. Such score can assist the existing scoring schemes/algorithms, and boost up the ability of multiple sequences alignment, e.g. achieving a prominent increase (50%) in searching the structurally alike residue segments at a low identity level. As the theoretical basis is different, the present scheme can assist most existing algorithms, and improve their efficiency remarkably.

Generating artificial homologous proteins according to the representative family character in molecular mechanics properties - an attempt in validating an underlying rule of protein evolution

The molecular mechanics property is the foundation of many characters of proteins. Based on intramolecular hydrophobic force network, the representative family character underlying a protein’s mechanics property is described by a simple two-letter scheme. The tendency of a sequence to become a member of a protein family is scored according to this mathematical representation. Remote homologs of the WW-domain family could be easily designed using such a mechanistic signature of protein homology. Experimental validation showed that nearly all artificial homologs have the representative folding and bioactivity of their assigned family. Since the molecular mechanics property is the only consideration in this study, the results indicate its possible role in the generation of new members of a protein family during evolution.