This manuscript explores the relationship between positive psychology and political philosophy, revealing an inter-disciplinary approach that speaks to the concerns of the common good. Since positive ...psychology has been expanding its reach into social and political spheres, its relationship to philosophical arguments has been worthy of exploration. Positive psychology is associated with utilitarianism, and aspects of hedonic psychology. However, an alternative concept of eudaimonic well-being has enabled this psychology to have links to other political philosophies. Therefore, this manuscript provides an overview of contemporary political philosophies: first, it discusses the debate between liberalism and communitarianism, and secondly, it summarizes the subsequent developments of liberal perfectionism, capability approach, and deliberative democracy. Then, the configuration of these political philosophies is indicated by the figure of two axes of "individual/collective" and "ethical/non-ethical." The following section compiles the inter-relationships between the conceptions of citizenship, justice, and well-being, regarding the main political philosophies: egoism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, and conservatism. Utilitarianism is associated with happiness, while liberalism and libertarianism rely on the concept of rights, which is almost equal to the idea of justice. Accordingly, utilitarianism is a philosophy of well-being, while liberalism and libertarianism are philosophies of justice. However, there is little connection between well-being and justice in these philosophies because the two kinds of philosophies are incompatible. The latter kind criticizes the former because the maximization of happiness can infringe on people's rights. Moreover, these philosophies do not particularly value citizenship. In contrast, communitarianism is intrinsically the political philosophy of citizenship most attuned to increasing well-being, and it can connect an idea of justice with well-being. The final part offers a framework to develop an inter-disciplinary collaboration. Positive psychology can provide the empirical basis of the two axes above concerning political philosophies. On the other hand, the correspondence makes the character of political philosophies clearer. While libertarianism and liberalism correspond to psychology as usual, utilitarianism and communitarianism correspond to positive psychology, and the latter can be regarded as positive political philosophies. This recognition leads to the interdisciplinary framework, enabling multi-disciplinary collaboration, including work with the social sciences, which could benefit the common good.
This paper examines assumptions concerning the relationship between citizenship, justice, and well-being, based on representative political philosophies, including egoism, utilitarianism, ...libertarianism, liberalism, and communitarianism. A previous paper raised the possibility of an inter-disciplinary framework for collaboration between psychology and political philosophy. This study picks up that thread and attempts to actualize a collaborative research effort based on a framework grounded in positive political psychology. The first part of this study reflects on the methodology situated between empirical psychology and philosophy in reference to the debates caused by psychological and philosophical situationism. In response to its criticism against virtue ethics, the possibility of reconstructing it on empirical psychology has paradoxically emerged. Similarly, this study validates assumptions on political philosophies employing the psychological method concerning well-being. Accordingly, the central part examines the plausibility of the assumptions by empirical evidence obtained from two internet surveys (2020,
= 5000; 2021,
= 6885) in Japan. The relationships between citizenship, justice, and well-being are the most substantial in the communitarian assumption. The exploratory factor analysis of the two surveys illuminates that the correlations between citizenship, justice, and well-being (or political well-being) are substantial. This relationship denies the egoism assumption. Moreover, almost all correlations between the three are higher based on virtue-related indicators than hedonic ones. These findings are not in tune with the utilitarian assumption and are most congruent to the communitarian assumption. In addition, citizenship and justice correlate more with political well-being than overall well-being. As these are more directly associated with political well-being in the communitarian assumption, this result aligns with the assumption. Furthermore, the positive relationship between disparity elimination and well-being fits the liberal rather than the libertarian assumption. Nevertheless, the substantial correlation between ethical justice and well-being is higher by virtue-related indicators than hedonic indicators, suggesting distributive justice is associated with the ethical dimension. Again, this fits the communitarian assumption rather than the liberal assumption. Thus, philosophical psychology empirically verifies the interdependence of the three conceptions and the relative plausibility of the communitarian assumption. Moreover, as the relationship between the three is essential for political philosophies, the result increases the reliability of communitarianism.
In this study, the effect of the proposed binarization method on the topology optimization analysis of two-fluid flows with free surfaces was investigated. The oscillation of the liquid content of a ...vessel, referred to as sloshing, was numerically analyzed, and density-based topology optimization analysis was performed to suppress sloshing. In density-based topology optimization, the emergence of grayscale, which is neither a structural nor a fluid domain, is problematic. Therefore, in this study, the hyperbolic tangent function used in the sigmoid transformation to represent the structural and fluid domains was improved. In the early stages of the topology update, grayscale is allowed and the curves of the sigmoid transformation are loosely connected; however, as the number of iterations increases, the curves become steeper to eliminate grayscale. The optimization analysis was performed using a grayscale elimination method previously described in the research by Aage et al. (2008) and the proposed stepwise binarization method. The governing equations for the flow field consisted of the Navier-Stokes equations for unsteady incompressible viscous flow and the continuity equation. The interface was determined using the density function method. When dealing with incompressible viscous flow, caution should be exercised during the discretization process owing to the numerical instabilities caused by advection dominance and incompressibility conditions. To eliminate numerical instabilities, the governing equations were discretized based on the Lagrange-Galerkin and penalty methods. The numerical results confirmed that the grayscale was eliminated when the stepwise binarization method was employed.
This article addresses citizens' psychological health disparities in pandemic-stricken Japan from the perspective of positive psychology with a collective/political perspective. Our analysis of three ...internet surveys in 2020 and 2021 in Japan indicates most people's well-being declined continuously during this period, while some people's well-being increased. As previous studies of health inequality proved about physical health, the objective income/assets level has influenced psychological inequality. This paper demonstrated this relation in Japan, although it is often mentioned as an egalitarian country with comparatively better health conditions. Moreover, psychological levels and changes have been associated with biological, natural environmental, cultural, and social factors. Social factors include economic, societal-community, and political factors, such as income/assets, stratification, general trust, and fairness/justice. Accordingly, multi-dimensional disparities are related to psychological health disparity; tackling the disparities along the multi-layered strata is desirable. Furthermore, subjective perception of fairness/justice is significantly associated with the level of psychological health and mitigating its decrease. Thus, fairness and justice are found to be dynamic and protective factors against the decline of psychological health. While relatively little literature on health inequality analyzes fairness/justice philosophically, this paper highlights these together with income/assets by clarifying the significance of multi-dimensional factors: natural environmental, cultural, socioeconomic, and political.
Structurally diverse carbazole alkaloids are valuable due to their pharmaceutical properties and have been isolated from nature. Experimental knowledge on carbazole biosynthesis is limited. The ...latest development of in silico analysis of the biosynthetic gene clusters for bacterial carbazoles has allowed studies on the biosynthesis of a carbazole skeleton, which was established by sequential enzyme-coupling reactions associated with an unprecedented carbazole synthase, a thiamine-dependent enzyme, and a ketosynthase-like enzyme. This review describes the carbazole biosynthetic mechanism, which includes a key step in enzymatic formation of a tricyclic carbazole skeleton, followed by modifications such as prenylation and hydroxylation in the skeleton.
Carquinostatin A (CQS), a potent neuroprotective substance, is a unique carbazole alkaloid with both an ortho‐quinone function and an isoprenoid moiety. We identified the entire gene cluster ...responsible for CQS biosynthesis in Streptomyces exfoliatus through heterologous production of CQS and gene deletion. Biochemical characterization of seven CQS biosynthetic gene products (CqsB1–7) established the total biosynthetic pathway of CQS. Reconstitution of CqsB1 and CqsB2 showed that the synthesis of the carbazole skeleton involves CqsB1‐catalyzed decarboxylative condensation of an α‐hydroxyl‐β‐keto acid intermediate with 3‐hydroxybutyryl‐ACP followed by CqsB2‐catalyzed oxidative cyclization. Based on crystal structures and mutagenesis‐based biochemical assays, a detailed mechanism for the unique deprotonation‐initiated cyclization catalyzed by CqsB2 is proposed. Finally, analysis of the substrate specificity of the biosynthetic enzymes led to the production of novel carbazoles.
Magnificent seven: The total biosynthetic pathway of the carbazole alkaloid carquinostatin A (CQS) was established through biochemical characterization of seven CQS biosynthetic gene products CqsB1–7. The crystal structure of CqsB2, which catalyzes the cyclization step, provides mechanistic insights into the intricate reactions involved in the enzymatic synthesis of carbazoles.
We showed that single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) could be grown on SiO2/Si substrates by alcohol catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CVD) with an Os catalyst in a cold-wall CVD system. At a ...growth temperature of 700 °C, web-like SWCNTs were grown with diameters distributed below 0.9 nm. At a growth temperature of 800 °C, the SWCNT density increased and vertically aligned SWCNTs (VA-SWCNTs) 70 nm thick were grown on the SiO2/Si substrates after growth for 30 min. Raman and transmission electron microscope results showed that the diameters of the grown SWCNTs were distributed between 0.65 and 1.0 nm, and were much smaller than those of VA-SWCNTs obtained from conventional catalysts such as Fe and Co. Furthermore, compared with Ir, which has been reported to be a suitable catalyst for growth of small-diameter SWCNTs, we showed that Os could grow SWCNTs with even smaller diameters. Additionally, neither an alumina buffer layer nor cocatalyst were necessary to grow VA-SWCNTs with the Os catalyst. We consider that highly efficient suppression of aggregation and the relatively strong carbon-Os bond strength contributed to growth of small-diameter SWCNTs from the Os catalyst. Our studies are the first to report on Os as a catalyst for SWCNT growth, leading to SWCNTs with diameters less than ~1 nm. Hence, period 6 platinum-group metals are likely to be good catalysts for highly efficient growth of small-diameter SWCNTs.
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•We used Os nanoparticles as catalysts for single-walled carbon nanotube growth by CVD.•We attained vertically-aligned SWCNT growth from Os catalysts at 800 °C.•The SWCNT diameters were below 1.0 nm.
Increasing the yield of plant oil is an important objective to meet the demand for sustainable resources and energy. Some attempts to enhance the expression of genes involved in oil synthesis in ...seeds have succeeded in increasing oil content. In many cases, the promoters of seed-storage protein genes have been used as seed-specific promoters. However, conventional promoters are developmentally regulated and their expression periods are limited. We constructed a chimeric promoter that starts to express in the early stage of seed development, and high-level expression is retained until the later stage by connecting the promoters of the
(
) gene encoding the BCCP2 subunit of acetyl-CoA carboxylase and the
(
) gene from
. The constructed promoter was ligated upstream of the
gene encoding diacylglycerol acyltransferase 1 and introduced into
. Seeds from transgenic plants carrying
under the control of the chimeric promoter showed increased oil content (up by 18⁻73%) compared with wild-type seeds. The novel expression profile of the chimeric promoter showed that this could be a promising strategy to manipulate the content of seed-storage oils and other compounds.
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