Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the moderating role of work-related stressors on the relationship between voice behavior and the voicer’s creative performance. Design/methodology/approach The sample comprised 781 full-time employees from 16 companies covering six industries in the central region of China. Hierarchical moderated regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses. Findings Results showed that voice behavior had significant positive effect on creative performance. The positive relationship between voice behavior and creative performance was stronger for employees with low challenge stressors as well as for employees with high hindrance stressors. Research limitations/implications This study employs a cross-sectional design with data collected from the same source. Practical implications The findings suggest that employees should be encouraged to voice out their opinions and ideas. Work-related stressors should be treated differently to expand the effects of voice behavior on creative performance. Originality/value This study is one of the few to establish boundary conditions from the contextual perspective on the effect of voice behavior on employee performance. Considering whether work-related stressor is a challenge or a hindrance could possibly result in a better understanding of the role of work-related stressors in the voice behavior-creative performance relationship. An empirical evidence is provided for the positive relationship between voice behavior and employee performance outcomes.

Globally, gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common types of cancer and the third leading cause of cancer‑related death. In China, gastric and liver cancers have the highest mortality rates. Melatonin, also known as N-acetyl‑5-methoxytryptamine, is a hormone that is produced by the pineal gland in animals and regulates sleep and wakefulness. Melatonin has been shown to inhibit various carcinomas, including GC. There are many different hypotheses to explain the anticancer effects of melatonin, including stimulation of apoptosis, inhibition of cell growth, regulation of anticancer immunity, induction of free-radical scavenging, and the competitive inhibition of estrogen. However, the underlying mechanism by which these effects are elicited remains elusive. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of melatonin on human GC cells and determine the underlying molecular mechanism. We treated SGC-7901 GC cells with melatonin and analyzed the resulting protein changes using protein chip technology. Several proteins related to cell apoptosis and proliferation were identified and further tested in SGC-7901 GC cells. We found that melatonin induced cell cycle arrest and the downregulation of CDC25A, phospho-CDC25A (at Ser75), p21 (p21Cip1/p21Waf1) and phospho-p21 (at Thr145). Melatonin also induced upregulation of Bax, downregulation of Bcl-xL, an increase in cleaved caspase-9 level and activation of caspase-3, which confirmed the involvement of the mitochondria in melatonin‑induced apoptosis. Upstream regulators of the above proteins, MDM2, phospho-MDM2 (at Ser166) and AKT, phospho-AKT (at Thr308) were all attenuated by melatonin, which led to an increase in p53. The present study demonstrated that the oncostatic effects of melatonin on SGC-7901 GC cells are mediated via the blockade of the AKT/MDM2 intracellular pathway.

A novel high-capacity protocol for deterministic secure quantum communication with four-qubit symmetric W state is proposed. In the presented protocol, the secret messages can be encoded on the four-qubit symmetric W states by employing four two-particle unitary operations and directly decoded by utilizing the corresponding measurements in Bell basis or single particle basis. It has a high capacity as each W state can carry two bits of secret information, and has a high intrinsic efficiency because almost all the instances are useful. The security of this communication can be ensured by the decoy photon checking technique and the order rearrangement of particle pairs technique. Furthermore, this protocol is feasible with present-day technique.

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