Darius Chan is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also the director of the Assessment and Training Center. His current research aims to explore the interplay of psychological, social, and political factors on family interactions and career development.

Qian Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she leads the Laboratory of Social and Personality Development. Qian and students collaborate with researchers across China and overseas to examine youth’s academic and socioemotional functioning, and in particular, the role of parents in youth development

Fiona Ho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the Director of the Public Mental Health Laboratory and the Founder of a social enterprise, Wellness Travellers. Her current work strives to improve access to evidence-based psychological interventions for common mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances for the general public.

Winton Au is Associate Professor in Department of Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the Founder of One Month One Art (一月一藝術) with the aim to promote arts and culture. He has been supporting research of various arts and government organizations to examine the impact of arts and culture.

Prof. Tomohiro Inoue obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) in 2012. He stayed in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Alberta (Canada) as a Visiting Professor from 2016 to 2018. Prof. Inoue’s current research focuses on cognitive and environmental correlates of academic achievement across languages and cultures; risk and protective factors for learning disabilities; reading instruction and interventions.

Dwight Tse is a postdoctoral researcher at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Claremont Graduate University, USA in 2019. Dwight’s research interests include topics ranging from positive psychology and well-being science to aging and lifespan developmental psychology. Broadly defined, his work examines the impact of flow experiences, meaningfulness, and prosocial acts on psychological and physical well-being, using diverse methods such as experience sampling and lab-based psychophysiological experiments. His publications can be found in specialized, peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and The Journal of Positive Psychology.

Dwight Tse is a postdoctoral researcher at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Claremont Graduate University, USA in 2019. Dwight’s research interests include topics ranging from positive psychology and well-being science to aging and lifespan developmental psychology. Broadly defined, his work examines the impact of flow experiences, meaningfulness, and prosocial acts on psychological and physical well-being, using diverse methods such as experience sampling and lab-based psychophysiological experiments. His publications can be found in specialized, peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and The Journal of Positive Psychology.

Hoi-Wing Chan is now a postdoctoral fellow at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2018. He has a broad interest in understanding the reciprocal relationship between people and the environment. His major research interests include pro-environmental behavior, socioecological influence, climate change opinions, and conspiracy beliefs. His work suggests the need to consider the influences of the broader cultural and socioecological contexts in understanding how people respond to environmental issues. 

Hoi-Wing Chan is now a postdoctoral fellow at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2018. He has a broad interest in understanding the reciprocal relationship between people and the environment. His major research interests include pro-environmental behavior, socioecological influence, climate change opinions, and conspiracy beliefs. His work suggests the need to consider the influences of the broader cultural and socioecological contexts in understanding how people respond to environmental issues. 

Michael Yeung is a postdoctoral researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018 before moving to Canada. Michael’s research focuses on understanding functions of the human frontal lobe especially in the context of development and aging. He is particularly interested in using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), and the lesion method to find out the role of the frontal lobe in specific aspects of executive function, emotion recognition, and decision-making. His work has suggested a relationship between frontal lobe dysfunction and cognitive deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder and older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

Michael Yeung is a postdoctoral researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018 before moving to Canada. Michael’s research focuses on understanding functions of the human frontal lobe especially in the context of development and aging. He is particularly interested in using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), and the lesion method to find out the role of the frontal lobe in specific aspects of executive function, emotion recognition, and decision-making. His work has suggested a relationship between frontal lobe dysfunction and cognitive deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder and older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

Rongjun Yu is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the National University of Singapore since 2014. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science from MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge in 2011 and his M.S. in Psychology from Peking University in 2007. His research interests focus on decision biases and social cooperation. In his work, he applies a wide range of methods, including behavioural experiments, pharmacological manipulation, computational modelling, and brain imaging (fMRI/EEG/fNIRS). He also studies these topics through developmental and clinical lenses. 

Rongjun Yu is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the National University of Singapore since 2014. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science from MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge in 2011 and his M.S. in Psychology from Peking University in 2007. His research interests focus on decision biases and social cooperation. In his work, he applies a wide range of methods, including behavioural experiments, pharmacological manipulation, computational modelling, and brain imaging (fMRI/EEG/fNIRS). He also studies these topics through developmental and clinical lenses. 

Xianmin Gong is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Zurich, Switzerland. He received his master’s degree from Beijing Normal University in 2013 and PhD degree from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017. He has a broad interest in various aspects of adulthood development and aging. Using multiple methods, his current research particularly focuses on how goals in different life domains change with age, why they change, and what the consequences are.

Xianmin Gong is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Zurich, Switzerland. He received his master’s degree from Beijing Normal University in 2013 and PhD degree from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017. He has a broad interest in various aspects of adulthood development and aging. Using multiple methods, his current research particularly focuses on how goals in different life domains change with age, why they change, and what the consequences are.

Prof. Hui is currently an assistant professor of psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Northwestern University. His key research areas are self-regulation and close relationships. His work appears in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Social Psychological and Personality Science. 

Alan Wong is an associate professor at the Department of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He had his undergraduate and master training at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before receiving his PhD degree from Vanderbilt University. His research interests concern expert object recognition, perceptual training, and multitasking.

Werner Sommer received his PhD degree from the University of Konstanz and was Professor for Biological Psychology and Psychophysiology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin until his retirement in 2018. His current research interests are cognitive control, face processing, individual differences in socio-emotional processes, language, eating/meals, and hypnosis, using mainly (but not exclusively) event-related brain potentials as research tool. Prof. Sommer currently engages in several international research cooperations, including partners at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

There is emerging consensus that psychological intervention does help. However, demand is fast outgrowing the supply. In recent years, there is a determined effort to enhance the efficiency of psychological intervention so that more needy individuals can share the limited resources. In this talk, I will present three preliminary clinical trials which represent three different approaches of driving efficiency, including shortening the intervention, transdiagnostic treatment of multiple disorders, and internet-based therapy minimizing therapist's involvement. The burning question is whether these efforts compromise or trade effectiveness/efficacy for efficiency. 

Prof. Patrick W L Leung is a trained clinical psychologist. Before joining the academic world, he had 10 years of full-time clinical practice at a local children's hospital. This clinical experience leads to his research interests in child and adolescent psychopathology, such as ADHD and ASD. Recently, he develops a second line of research, i.e., establishing and validating treatment protocols for various common mental disorders for evidence-based clinical practice.

Dissociation is a common symptom of a group of mental disorders with an intimate relation with psychological trauma. Yet, this role of psychological trauma in the pathogenesis of dissociation is under heated debate, for the varying strength of the relationship between trauma and dissociation in the nonclinical and clinical populations. In the current talk, I will introduce a new framework for the link between trauma and dissociation. I argue that there may be a neurocognitive diathesis that moderates the response to traumatic stress. The sociocognitive experiments conducted in our laboratory to examine this hypothesis will be reviewed.  

Prof. Chui-De Chiu obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at National Taiwan University. He stayed in Leiden University (The Netherlands) and Central Institute of Mental Health at Mannheim (Germany) as a visiting scholar and then as a post-doctoral scientific researcher from 2012 to 2013. He has been appointed as assistant professor at the Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong since December, 2013.

Chronic pain can impose immense personal and societal costs. The pain itself is only part of the problem: anxiety about pain in the future also contributes. Functional imaging shows that related, yet separate, brain circuits underlie these different aspects of painful experiences. Signals that an impending event could be particularly painful make subjects more anxious and enhance perceived pain intensities, through yet further circuits. Might signals that reduce anxiety about impending pain therefore reduce perceived pain intensity? Finally, could understanding the neural basis of phantom limb pain lead to interventions that ameliorate this highly distressing, yet treatment-resistant, condition.

Professor Nick Rawlins became Master of Morningside College in December 2018. He is a behavioural neuroscientist whose research spans areas including the neural basis of memory, brain degeneration, pain and anxiety. He completed his BA and DPhil at University College, Oxford and was appointed to a series of posts there before becoming Watts Professor of Psychology in 2007 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Development and External Affairs in 2010. On leaving Oxford in 2017 he became Vice-President (Development and International) of the Toulouse School of Economics. He is Emeritus Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Oxford where he also holds Emeritus Fellowships at University College and Wolfson College. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

Liqiang Huang works in the Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on visual attention and its role in visual perception, visual awareness, and visual working memory. His undergraduate training was in Optical Engineering at Zhejiang University, followed by a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, and postdoctoral research at Princeton University.

Even from a brief exposure to an artificial spoken language, infants and adults can identify candidate word forms and other adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies present in the acoustic input. Among the influential theories resulting from this research is the proposal that humans compute conditional probabilities of adjacent and non-adjacent elements to discover underlying structure. However, there exist findings in the literature, including the results presented here, that are not consistent with such accounts. We propose that the perception of rhythm played an important role in prior studies, and in general that rhythm perception plays a critical role in determining which dependencies listeners can identify. We created a novel experimental paradigm to introduce a rhythm in the language stream that allowed us to manipulate the rhythm systematically. We showed that even learning adjacent dependencies with conditional probabilities of 1.0 depends on rhythm perception. We also developed a computational model to explain word segmentation in terms of rhythm perception, and we present simulations showing that the model captures patterns of human data from multiple experiments. We argue that the perception of rhythm holds explanatory power not only to our experiments and other dependency learning studies, but it is likely to be a fundamental mechanism that is ubiquitous in language and other auditory domains.

Felix Wang received his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Southern California in 2016 with Dr. Toben Mintz and Jason Zevin. After graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, with Dr. Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work focuses on two broad themes, statistical learning of how elements are structured in a sequence and the learning of the meaning of words. His work on statistical learning uses artificial language studies to simulate how children discover the structure of their language, when properties of the language are controlled. His work on word learning focuses on two Quinian problems: the problems of referential ambiguity and semantic ambiguity. Methodologically, he builds computational models of language acquisition and conduct behavioral experiments with infants, children, and college students. His goals in these work is to try to identify the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the process of language acquisition.

While we are all experts in “experiencing time”, introspection provides us with very little intuition regarding the neural mechanisms supporting time perception and temporal cognition. In this talk, I will discuss the importance of clocking mechanisms for the biology of the mind, and how oscillations help reframing temporalities from the perspective of the brain itself (as generator-observer of events) in opposition to that of the external observer (as information reader). I will illustrate this point by focusing on the role of oscillatory activity in low-level temporal logistics of information processing, yielding temporal order and behavioral precision. Second, I will focus on the notion that conscious timing does not linearly map onto neural timing – i.e., that psychological temporalities are represented abstractly and intelligibly - and exemplify this with recent work focused on the generative nature of the psychological time arrow (mental time travel), and the ability to introspect about one’s self-generated timing productions (temporal metacognition).

Virginie van Wassenhove received her PhD in Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences (NACS program, 2004) at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) under the direction of Prof David Poeppel and Dr Ken W. Grant. During her graduate training, she focused on the perception (psychophysics) and cortical bases (MEG, EEG, fMRI) of audiovisual speech as a specific case of multisensory integration and predictive coding. In 2005, she worked with Prof Srikantan Nagarajan (UCSF) on learning and plasticity in audition and in audiovisual perception with combined psychophysics and MEG. From 2006 to 2008, she was implicated in various projects at UCLA (Dr Ladan Shams, Dr Dean Buonomano) and at Caltech (Prof Shinsuke Shimojo) which included implicit multisensory statistical learning, time perception, gesture communication, and interpersonal interactions. Late 2008, she joined the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit directed by Prof Stanislas Dehaene to build NeuroSpin MEG. In 2012, she became an INSERM group leader of the Brain Dynamics research team. In 2013, she obtained her HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches; highest degree achievable in France) and became CEA Director of Research (DR). Her research interests focus on temporal cognition and multisensory integration.

We may have heard of flipped classroom, blended learning, micro-modules, and MOOCs. We might have used uReply, Blackboard, Panopto, KEEP, etc. Are they helpful for teaching and learning of psychology? Do they support our teaching or take away our jobs? Do students learn better or enjoy the class more with the help of eLearning approaches? In this seminar, several teachers from the Department of Psychology will share with you our attempts of applying eLearning approaches in our teaching. As we reflect on our successes and failures, we hope to re-visit how we may teach and learn psychology better.

Dr Suzanne So is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, CUHK. She obtained her BSc in University of Oxford, MSSc (Clinical Psychology) in CUHK, and PhD in King’s College London. With the support of the UGC Teaching Award and the CUHK Micro-module Courseware Development Grant Scheme, she has developed two sets of micro-modules on clinical psychology and clinical supervision.

Dr Letty Kwan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, CUHK. She obtained her BSc in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her PhD in University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interest is to understand how psychological theories can be used to understand and improve creativity and innovation.