Title:

In this talk, I will present the arc of my current thinking about age similarities and differences in emotion regulation. Until recently, I argued that there might be substantial similarity among adult age groups in emotion regulation. But, we recently have conducted several studies that have added some nuance to my thinking. First, we have worked to distinguish emotion regulation strategies from tactics. There seem to be slight, but consistent age differences not in emotion regulation strategies but in tactics - how a strategy is implemented in a particular situation. Certain tactics are common across strategies; for example, some tactics involve upregulating positive aspects of situations, such as focusing on positive aspects of the environment or positive reappraisal, whereas others, such as distraction and detached reappraisal involve downregulating negativity. Second, we have considered concrete aspects of emotional contexts in more detail, such as how tactics vary as a function of objective and subjective situational characteristics and how their use changed during COVID-19. We also have tested specific effects of context on age-related positivity effects in attention by comparing eye tracking in the home to the lab: divergent patterns of age differences in the home as compared to the lab suggest the importance of context in this behavior as well. Together, recent findings have changed my thinking, so that I now believe there are small age differences in emotion regulation but perhaps larger effects of context; future work will continue to investigate specific dimensions of context that may be most important, as well as how to leverage these age and context effects to understand and perhaps intervene on emotion regulation difficulties in cognitively-impaired older adults.

About the Speaker:

 Click here for the seminar replay. Link will be valid until March 13th, 2023

Title:

Research and clinical innovations for young people's mental health have lagged far behind that in adults. Many researchers and clinicians are searching for the right 'recipe' to help, but the complexity of the issue means that we are unlikely to find a magical recipe. Our research group has a strong focus on identifying bio-psycho-social risk and resilience factors. In addition to conventional research studies, we have been piloting Citizen Science methods involving young people as active co-producers of research rather than passive recipients. Project Soothe has collected over 800 soothing photographs and engaged with citizen scientists from over 40 countries. We have also launched an app feature during COVID lockdown, co-curated a Pioneers in Practice: User Guide with a range of charity organisations, and more recently delivered workshops to over 200 children and young people and co-produced wellbeing tools with 9 teams of citizen scientists across schools and other youth groups. Our experience suggests that citizen science methodology offers an empowering experience for young people. More recently, we have also launched a Reading Resilience Network, building bridges between researchers and practitioners to advance our understanding of and intervention for young people’s mental health. We have further launched the Resilience Rucksack initiative, organising ‘Resilience Fairs’ in local schools. In this talk, I will share our findings and the working process of these projects with the audience and hope to inspire a lively discussion on mental health and service provision in which we can share experience between Hong Kong and the UK.

About the Speaker:

Click here for the seminar replay. Link will be valid until March 13th, 2023

Title:

Children’s literacy and mathematical competencies are a critical platform for their successful functioning as individuals in society. However, many children are at risk of not reaching sufficient competence levels; in particular those with low socioeconomic status backgrounds who may not receive the home support needed to develop to their full potential. Consequently, we are in need of intervention approaches that support young children’s mathematical and literacy competencies directly, so that they are ready to start school with the ability to learn adequately. In this presentation, I will provide information about children’s development in their home learning environment and discuss findings of (digital) intervention studies in the family context.

About the Speaker:

    Click here for the seminar replay. Link will be valid until March 7th, 2023.

Title:

Neuroimaging studies compare activation between conditions or groups to make inferences about brain processes. More activation is typically seen as increased sensitivity or engagement of a particular brain process. For example, less brain activation during reading in children with dyslexia would indicate a processing deficit. In some cases, however, less activation is interpreted as more efficient processing, such as in research on intelligence. In our previous research, we have shown that print tuning increases at the beginning of learning to read, but then decreases in later years, presumably reflecting newly emerging sensitivity for visual words in the beginning and more efficient processing later on. In this talk, I will present several recent EEG studies that look at facilitation effects in visual word processing that occur, after a word is repeated, primed, or visible in the parafoveal area. Facilitation may also explain differences between typically developing children and those with dyslexia in Chinese. Implications for neurobiological models of reading are discussed.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Imitation in human newborns is widely cited as evidence of an inborn Mirror Neuron System that underpins human social behaviour, even though its existence has been debated for decades. The possibility that newborns do not imitate was reinvigorated in recent years by research from our lab at the University of Queensland.  In this talk I will present original data from the largest-ever longitudinal study of newborn imitation and the first-ever meta-analysis.  I will also discuss international findings from infant EMG experiments which further challenge the claim that newborn humans can imitate.  All of this leads to alternative accounts of the development of imitation and its role in human sociality.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Why are some students striving to learn and carrying on their motivation? What makes students persistent? What are the critical reasons behind those phenomena? In this talk, I will introduce my recent work on curiosity and grit with the help of longitudinal design, meta-analysis, and network analysis. Particularly, how curiosity is distinct from the interest in facilitating motivation and learning; and why (recently) grit failed, and how to fix it. In sum, the findings highlight the critical roles of curiosity and grit in the motivational process and in achievement.

About the Speaker:

Many countries worldwide experience shifts in the age composition of their workforces. As the workforce ages and becomes increasingly age-diverse, it is critical to understand how aging and age differences in social interactions influence intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. In this talk, I present a series of research projects in which I investigate how knowledge transfer among age-diverse coworkers, self-affirmation after a job loss, and a positive uncertainty mindset contribute to enduring employment and successful aging at work (i.e., the ability and motivation to continue working). Grounded in the self-regulatory model of successful aging at work, the first project investigates how older employees’ knowledge seeking from younger coworkers affects their motivation and ability to continue working. I find that knowledge seeking from younger coworkers is a net contributor to successful aging at work. In the second project, I conducted two longitudinal experiments to examine the effects of a self-affirmation intervention on the reemployment success of individuals who lost their job. I find that engaging in self-affirmation increases the number of job offers and the probability and speed of reemployment. Importantly, the intervention was equally beneficial for individuals below and above the age of 50 years, suggesting that self-affirmation can be a useful means to help older individuals overcome job search challenges. In the third project, I develop and apply the concept of uncertainty mindsets. I find that a positive uncertainty mindset (i.e., recognizing opportunities in uncertainty) can explain unique variance in career planning and individuals’ occupational future time perspective above and beyond chronological age and other established predictors. Together, my research highlights individual and social strategies to promote successful aging at work.

Lecture: Job satisfaction: Why it’s important to keep your employees happy (10:45am-11:30am)

One of the enduring questions that bedevil managers is whether employee satisfaction, the degree to which people like their jobs, really matters. Is a satisfied employee a more productive employee? In this lecture, you will learn more about the definition, different facets, and measurements of job satisfaction. Moreover, you will get an overview of factors that influence job satisfaction and learn why job satisfaction is so important for employees and organizations. Keeping your employees happy, it turns out, is critical for many reasons.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Over the past decades, the development of advanced neuroimaging technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and electroencephalography (EEG), have enabled psychologists to explore a wide range of brain functions with more objective measures and expand our current understanding of the underlying mechanisms associated with a variety of typical and atypical human behaviors. In this talk, I will briefly introduce our recent work using functional brain imaging techniques to study the brain-behavior association in young girls with Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), a single-gene mutation brain disorder that stands as the most common cause of Autism. Moreover, I will present methods we have developed to enhance our ability to study brain dynamics with high spatial and temporal resolution.

Lecture: Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Even Human Beings Do It: The Neuroscience of Human Cooperation and communication (11:15am-12:00nn)

Human cooperation and communication is a key factor driving economic growth and social progress. In particular, group cooperation between two or more individuals can facilitate complex problem-solving and creativity. This type of social interaction has been recognized as one of the pivotal characteristics that fundamentally distinguish us from other species. In this lecture, I will briefly introduce the basic concepts of human interaction interaction, and what methods and brain imaging techniques can used for assessing human interaction (i.e., inter-brain synchrony). Finally, I will provide perspectives on the future research of this topic. I hope this lecture will inspire students a preliminary thought of what they can do with such methodology in psychological research.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Developmental dyslexia is a common learning disability affecting the acquisition of fluent reading skills despite normal intelligence and schooling. It is increasingly acknowledged as a genetically influenced disorder with a neurological basis, which in turn engenders cognitive deficits affecting the behavior of reading acquisition. In this talk, I will present my main works on the cognitive, neuroanatomical, and genetic determinants of developmental dyslexia published during the past five years. Moreover, I will also present some of our recent findings regarding how environmental factors influence reading skills and moderate neural and genetic underpinnings of reading dis/ability. These studies lead to our future research on imaging genetics of developmental dyslexia with an interdisciplinary approach.

Lecture: Memory (3:45pm-4:30pm)

What is memory? How do we form memories? How do we retrieve memories? Why does memory sometimes fail us? In this lecture, I will give answers for all these questions.  The goals of this lecture are to elucidate the definition of memory, explain the characteristics of different kinds of memory, discuss various explanations for forgetting, discuss how and why memories change over time, describe and explain the brain structures and regions that are the bases for memory, and explain the special types of memory: autobiographical memory, flashbulb memories, eyewitness testimony.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Title:

In this talk, I will review the development of photobiomodulation, and its recent application to cognitive disorders.  I will also talk about our studies examining the fundamental mechanism of this type of brain stimulation and its application to older adults with mild cognitive impairments. 

About the Speaker:

Title:

In this study, 3-dimensional (3-D) enhanced brain-function-map generation and estimation methodology is presented. Optical signals were modelled in the form of numerical optimization problem to infer the best existing waveform of canonical hemodynamic response function. Inter-channel activity patterns were also estimated. The estimation of activation of inter-channel gap depends on the minimization of generalized cross-validation. 3-D brain activation maps were produced through inverse discrete cosine transform. The proposed algorithm acquired significant results for 3-D functional maps with high resolution, in comparison with that of 2-D functional t-maps. A comprehensive analysis by exhibiting images corresponding to several layers has also been appended.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a non-invasive optical imaging technique to measure cerebral hemodynamics has seen rapid development and increasing use in studying the human brain. fNIRS measures relative changes of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin in the local tissues as a surrogate measurement of neuronal activity, similar to the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which is the current golden standard of functional neuroimaging. Compared with fMRI, fNIRS offers competitive advantages, including low cost, portability, and compatibility with medical electronic devices implanted in patients. However, fNIRS has its limitations and faces several challenges. To facilitate the achievement of fNIRS’s tremendous potential in research and clinical applications, my Ph.D. work aimed to tackle several methodological challenges, mainly regarding preprocessing, cross-modal validation with fMRI, and control of movement-related artifacts. The outcomes of my research work have made significant advancements in paving the pathway for using fNIRS as a broadly accessible and noninvasive neuroimaging technique in various clinical applications, such as measuring auditory response in cochlear implant users, mapping resting-state functional connectivity, and monitoring the deterioration of the brain function in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease. The portable and accessible fNIRS will become a powerful tool complementary to fMRI for purposes such as home-based imaging for remote patient monitoring and long-lasting recordings for studying the sleep stages.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Dementia is traditionally understood from a deficit-based approach, focusing on the presence and management of cognitive impairment and behavioSocial Wofural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). More recently, person-centred care and positive psychology concepts have been introduced to understand the experience of living with dementia, acknowledging the importance of maintaining and enhancing well-being in people with dementia. In this seminar, I will present my research journey from identifying the pattern of BPSD across dementia stages to exploring Hong Kong dementia carers’ understanding and response to BPSD. Its implications for future research on positive psychology in the growing Chinese dementia population will also be discussed.

About the Speaker:

Click here for the seminar replay (Link valid until November 28th, 2022) 

Title:

Executive control is a diverse group of functions that play an important role in many situations. In recent studies we have explored a new paradigm, the face emotion Stroop task that measures the inhibition component of executive control in social contexts. In this new paradigm emotional facial expressions have to be executed to a verbal prompt vis a vis congruent and incongruent background images. The response latencies and accuracies are quantified frame by frame by a machine classifier. We have explored the fruitfulness of this paradigm in mothers and non-mothers vis a vis pictures of angry and happy infants and adults and in adolescents with different amounts of adverse childhood experiences and different degrees of violent behavior. In all these studies the face emotion Stroop has proven sensitive to social factors and in the case of violent behaviour may be more sensitive than the classic colour Stroop test. Therefore we suggest that the face emotion Stroop task may be a suitable instrument to measure inhibition in emotionally loaded social situations.

About the Speaker:

Title:

This study examined the gender differences in the main and interactive effects of subjective social status and area deprivation on mental health among older adults in Hong Kong. Data for this study came from the baseline of MrOs and MsOs studies, including 4000 Chinese men and women ≥ 65 in Hong Kong. Our results reaffirm that subjective social status is an independent indicator of health after adjusting for objective SES measures. Although area-level social deprivation was not significantly associated with the health of older people, it may moderate the effect of subjective social status on health. Women with a lower perceived status in the community were more likely to experience depressive symptoms when living in more deprived neighborhoods. The findings suggested that subjective social status provides important information for mental health of the older population. Policymakers may implement interventions to enhance the subjective social status of older adults. 

About the Speaker:

Title:

The role of parents and caregivers in children’s early language and literacy development is undeniable. Through our research with children and families from different societies, we have examined how parental influences can be transmitted to children’s outcomes and whether their developmental dynamics are comparable across different family contexts. In this seminar, I will present some of our recent studies on the environmental correlates of early language and literacy development. A particular focus will be placed on the mediating and moderating factors in the associations between parental factors and children’s skills. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings will be discussed.

About the Speaker:

 Original picture books mentioned in the talk

Title:

“Virtual Exchange (VE) is a technology facilitated pedagogy that offers students the opportunity to interact in substantial ways, either synchronously or asynchronously, with peers in other parts of the world, while engaging in disciplinary focused work. Instructors at two partner institutions, in different parts of the world, agree on a set of learning outcomes and learning activities to engage students in collaborative work, embedded in a multicultural setting” (Continuing and Professional Education, DePaul University). This seminar is to share the teaching and learning experience involving VE in the elective undergraduate course of Human Development and Education in Cultural Contexts in Term 2, 2021-22 at the Department of Psychology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

About the Speaker:

Title:

How children understand the concepts of teaching and learning is associated with their developing theory of mind, the ability to attribute desire, belief, intention, emotion, and knowledge, to self and others. In three empirical studies, I will introduce a set of purposefully designed tasks to assess children’s teaching and learning comprehension, a psychometrically validated scale of the Preschool Teaching and Learning Comprehension Index (PTLCI), and a new theory of mind training study to enhance children’s teaching and learning comprehension through shared picture book reading. I will also debut a set of research-based original picture books in Chinese for training purpose.

About the Speaker:

Title:

About six years ago, the Department established a new concentration area in its undergraduate programme, Guided Self-help, drawing on then a new form of psychological intervention, Low-intensity Cognitive-behavioral Therapy (LiCBT). It is an adapted form of CBT designed for delivery by graduates with only a Bachelor's degree, frequently in psychology. It differs from the traditional CBT which is delivered by fully trained clinical psychologists with at least a Master's or doctoral degree. Research in UK and Australia has documented promising evidence for the effectiveness of the LiCBT, while it has the inherent advantages of being cost-saving and thus increasing accessibility of psychological intervention to the community. This is the background which leads the Department to establish the new concentration area. Yet, one important question remains: Does LiCBT deliver its promises when practiced in Hong Kong? This talk is going to present data from two local cohorts of clients receiving LiCBT, the first cohort involving 300+ clients while the second cohort 1,000+ clients. Besides post-treatment outcomes, follow-up data are also available from the second cohort. It is high time that the Department examines whether its education delivers.

About the Speaker:

The frontal lobes are the executive centers of the brain. Compared with the rest of the brain, these regions are the last to reach full maturity but are the first to undergo deterioration with aging. Clarifying how frontal lobe functions change throughout the lifespan, both typically and atypically, can give us invaluable insights into alterations in higher-order cognitive functions over time. In this talk, I will be presenting on my work with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) that addresses the development and aging of frontal lobe functions. Specifically, I will highlight fNIRS evidence that informs neurocognitive development and aging in healthy individuals, and that demonstrates associations between frontal lobe dysfunction and cognitive impairment in autism spectrum disorder and mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Research implications and future research directions will be discussed.

Understanding functions of the frontal lobes and associated networks (11:45am-12:30pm)

The frontal lobes are known to be involved in a variety of cognitive functions. In this lecture, I will introduce several models that have been proposed to explain functions of the frontal lobes and associated networks. These models, which are based on different theoretical perspectives and research methodologies, will be compared and contrasted. The implications of these models will also be mentioned.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is often viewed as a largely technical, practical, and industry-centered field of study focusing on the usability and design aspects of technological products or services. Although that is partly true, HCI is really a psychological, social, and ethical integration that requires theoretical thinking of why and how humans interact with technology in certain ways. This talk will give an overview of how Ki Joon Kim, as a transdisciplinary HCI scholar, utilizes a multitude of theories not only from his home fields of HCI and communication, but also from the disciplines of design, engineering, psychology, and sociology, to synthesize broad theoretical lenses for examining the use and effect of the latest emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, and social robots.

Lecture: Defining and Assessing Interactivity: How Interactive Media Shape Our Psychology (11:45am - 12:30pm)

What does it mean to be interactive, how do we measure interactivity, and how does interactivity affect our psychology? We are all familiar with the term “interactivity” or “interactive media,” but answering these questions can be difficult for many of us because there exist multidimensional and cross-disciplinary views on interactivity. This lecture will provide a quick overview of how interactivity is defined and assessed in the field of communication and explore how interactive communication technology influences user psychology.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is often viewed as a largely technical, practical, and industry-centered field of study focusing on the usability and design aspects of technological products or services. Although that is partly true, HCI is really a psychological, social, and ethical integration that requires theoretical thinking of why and how humans interact with technology in certain ways. This talk will give an overview of how Ki Joon Kim, as a transdisciplinary HCI scholar, utilizes a multitude of theories not only from his home fields of HCI and communication, but also from the disciplines of design, engineering, psychology, and sociology, to synthesize broad theoretical lenses for examining the use and effect of the latest emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, and social robots.

Lecture: Defining and Assessing Interactivity: How Interactive Media Shape Our Psychology (11:45am - 12:30pm)

What does it mean to be interactive, how do we measure interactivity, and how does interactivity affect our psychology? We are all familiar with the term “interactivity” or “interactive media,” but answering these questions can be difficult for many of us because there exist multidimensional and cross-disciplinary views on interactivity. This lecture will provide a quick overview of how interactivity is defined and assessed in the field of communication and explore how interactive communication technology influences user psychology.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Current social science research has constantly highlighted the significance of understanding the human factor within virtual ecology. The emergence of Metaverse, AI, XR and other virtual technologies provide researchers with an opportunity to study the human-computer experience (HCE) for diverse research purposes. This research seminar is going to share some of my previous investigations and findings about studying user experiences in XR from various perspectives. My studies had covered the use of XR in the areas of social science, business, organizational studies, education, and most significantly in design thinking and creativity education. This seminar is also trying to explore the future research domains on HCE in response to the rapid change of digital landscape and technologies.

Lecture: The Virtual Ecology: Virtuality, Mobility & Share -- The Future Challenges to User-Computer Experiences (11:45am - 12:30pm)

The entire virtual ecology has much bigger and complicated then what we think that overturns the ways of human interactions and user-computer experiences. As the “Metaverse” concept is starting to incorporate Web3 technology enabled through blockchain technology, this virtual platform is expected to play a huge role in re-shaping the virtual landscape as well as human interactions. Thus, this introductory online lecture is going to provide audiences with a clear picture of what virtual ecology is, and its attributes as well as the future challenges to human-computer experiences.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Title:

Privacy helps to regulate both interpersonal interactions and intrapersonal states. As adolescence is a sensitive period for both social relationship and self-regulation development, it is perhaps not surprising that many family conflicts involve disagreements about the limits and value of young people’s privacy. This colloquium examines whether adolescents’ experiences of privacy invasion are associated with problems in interpersonal and intrapersonal functioning, devoting special attention to difficulties in family communication and youth emotion regulation. Incorporating data from both Eastern and Western contexts, this talk will also address whether the regulatory functions of adolescent privacy transcend cultural differences in family power structures and interpersonal boundary construction.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Characterised by involuntary and intense love-hate dynamics, sibling relationships can be impactful: Siblings can shape child development directly, by being warm and conflictual with each other. Siblings can also shape child development indirectly, by allowing parental differential treatment to happen in the family. Interestingly, few studies have been conducted on sibling relationships in Asia—a region well-known for its strong emphasis on the family. In this talk, the speaker will talk about how longitudinal data collected on two siblings from each of 200 Chinese families could be used to explore the contribution of sibling relationships to child adjustment. 

About the Speaker:

Gender Studies Programme and Department of Psychology (by courtesy), CUHK

Title:

Gender is an important factor in human development. In children, behavioral gender expressions can be found in occupational aspirations, appearance, play and activities, and traits. While traditional theories and studies have attempted to explain normative gender development, there is increasing recognition of diversity in gender expression, coupled with increasing reports of gender dysphoria and gender nonconformity in the West. This seminar will present findings on children’s appraisals of gender nonconformity and new data on prevalence of childhood gender nonconformity and its mental health correlates in a Chinese community sample. Discussion will focus on how these findings compare to known patterns in Western cultures, as well as the potential to drive forward research on gender nonconformity and apply a screening tool for gender dysphoria in Chinese communities.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Recent studies have suggested a strong relation between spatial ability and mathematical problem-solving, but we have less knowledge about why this is the case. In this talk, I will demonstrate three possible mechanisms that may explain the relation between spatial ability and mathematical problem-solving, and they are the representation of numerical magnitude (i.e., knowing what numbers represent), the understanding of arithmetic operation (i.e., knowing how +, -, × and ÷ work), and the conversion from word problems to numerical expressions. I will also report a study that provides empirical support to all three pathways. Potential theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

About the Speaker:

Title:

This presentation highlights the bidirectional relationship between cardiovascular disease (CVD) and behavioural and psychological factors. Most of the risk-factors are behavioural, and after a CVD event the challenges for rehabilitation and secondary prevention are to a large extent behavioural and psychological. To investigate how emotional distress affects risk-factor management and survival, and to identify patients at risk for emotional distress after a myocardial infarction (MI), large national quality registers were utilized. The results will be presented and discussed. As will results from clinical trials investigating interned-based psychological treatments for MI patients experiencing emotional distress. A certain focus will be put on the specific challenges of internet interventions.

About the Speaker:

Title:

In recent years, more researchers have become aware of the unique characteristics of online communication that promote deindividuation. As a result, some researchers argue that automatic processes play a more significant role in cyberbullying than controlled processes, but findings on the role of automatic processes remain mixed. In this seminar, I will present an overview of my research on the automatic processes (fun and thrill) and controlled processes (moral disengagement and normative beliefs) in cyberbullying with a focus on how the interaction between online and offline factors may explain individual and group differences (age and cross-cultural differences) in cyberbullying. The role of psychosocial development in human-computer interactions will be highlighted. Implications on how a systematic account for online and offline factors in cyberbullying can fill gaps in current research and intervention designs will be drawn.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Chinese has long been considered a difficult second language, due to its unique and complex writing system. Differing from alphabetic languages, Chinese is morpho-syllabic, having Chinese characters as its basic units. A fluent Chinese reader and writer must acquire a rich repertoire of Chinese characters and be well versed in these orthographic characteristics. This is a hurdle for Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners and, henceforth, developing literacy skills has been a major concern in CSL education. This is also true for the ethnic minority children who are learning CSL in Hong Kong. They find acquiring literacy skills a difficulty, and its implications for their academic advancement and social integration have aroused much social concern. In this seminar, I will present the findings of my studies on the students’ CSL literacy acquisition and development, covering topics such as influences of metalinguistic awareness on character reading and spelling, role of decoding played in reading comprehension, and reading–writing relationship. I will argue that, for the young CSL learners, acquiring a good Chinese orthographic knowledge is crucial for their literacy development.

About the Speaker:

Title:

A strong preference for fair skin appears to be the norm across the Asian continent and may pervade many aspects of social life. Yet scholarly work on this ubiquitous phenomenon is (a) rare within psychological science, and (b) predominantly treats it as situated only within the individual, abstracted from the social context. In this talk, I argue that colorism has firm systemic roots as a result of the sociohistorical trajectories of different Asian societies that have attached cultural meanings to skin color. Consequently, similarities and differences in such trajectories may account for variability in the expression of colorism within contemporary Asian societies.

About the Speaker:

Title:

Humans, like many other social animals, naturally engage in friendly physical contact with conspecifics. Research suggests such contact has a number of regulatory effects concerning, for example, internal bodily processes as in the context of stress and the way we relate and bond with others. As such physical contact may be compared to essentials like food and water for which consumption excites pleasure, which in turn drives the consumatory behavior. Our current understanding of the somatosensory system links the pleasure arising from physical contact to a specific mechanoreceptor called the C-tactile afferent. In this talk, I will introduce this receptor and detail work conducted by others and my own group elucidating receptor properties, central-nervous system projections, and modulatory effects on brain structure and function. Moreover, I will compare and contrast the C-tactile afferent with other mechanoreceptors asking to what extent its processes are especially relevant for keeping us “in touch” with each other.

About the Speaker:

Click here to replay the seminar (link valid until April 27th, 2021)

Title:

In social science research, the analysis of moderation, mediation, and conditional process (models that combine both mediation and moderation processes) has become increasingly popular.  These models are important because they allow researchers to understand, describe, and explain complex social phenomenon and human behavior in a more accurate way.  Traditionally, conditional process models are analyzed by the regression-based approach.  This approach, however, does not provide the goodness-of-fit test and therefore there is no way to tell if a hypothesized model fits the data adequately.  In this seminar, a structural equation modeling (SEM)-based approach is proposed as an alternative.  In addition, I will introduce the VS, a computer software program that implements the proposed SEM approach for conditional process analysis.

About the Speaker:

Psychologists have provided abundant evidence demonstrating individual variations in cognition and social behaviors across the human lifespan. Two important sources of individual differences in cognition are age and socio-cultural environment, each of which has been closely investigated. With increased age, adults show declined performance in many neurocognitive domains, including memory, spatial navigation, and inhibitory control. With respect to socio-cultural environment, there are considerable individual variations in the way people process contextual information, including attention, motivation, and self-presentation. The interaction between age and environment provides various implications for psychological researches as age represents the effect of biological processes whereas environment represents the effect of sustaining experiences. In this talk, I will review the different research lines and interdisciplinary approaches we are carrying out in the lab to understand how cognitive functions and social behavior change and adapt as we age in different socio-cultural settings on the behavioral and neural levels. Despite age-related declines in behavior and cognition were reported as a dominant picture of the aging mind, our compelling evidence from cognitive and social neuroscience of aging are stimulating new hypotheses and provide a more integrative view of the aging mind.

Lecture: Aging Gracefully: The Contribution of Psychology (3:45pm - 4:30pm)

Biological aging faces the potential storm of physiological and psychological deterioration that can heavily impact individuals’ ability to perform everyday cognition and behavior. While there is a large amount of work on age-related neurodegenerative and mental disorders, it is often conceptualized from the genetic, biochemical, and clinical perspectives, and less from the cognitive, psychological, and social sides. This one-sided depiction of aging limits how a society views the healthy aging process, and limits the elderly’s maintenance of vital components for staying active and aging gracefully. This lecture will provide an introductory overview of how the psychology of aging contributes to promote mental health, improve neurocognitive vitality, and enhance positive emotional functioning. I hope this lecture will provide students a psychological view of the healthy aging mind, thus helping develop the sustainable age-friendly communities in Hong Kong.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Neural specialization is characterized by increased neural activity for relevant tasks and decreased neural activity for irrelevant tasks. The brain becomes more specialized during the acquisition of expertise. I study neural specialization in the case of reading acquisition and development. I will show evidence of neural specialization from cross-linguistic comparisons of reading development, and second language learning, as well as altered neural specialization in reading disability. Future research is sorely needed to understand how neural specialization and learning can be facilitated.

Lecture: Introduction to Developmental Neurological Disorders (11:45am - 12:30pm)

In this undergraduate level lecture, I will introduce developmental cognitive disorders (DCD), including essential characteristics of DCD, the relationship between genes, brain and behaviors in DCD, etc. I will also discuss one type of DCD in more detail, namely, developmental dyslexia. I will introduce its definition, its diagnosis and interventions, as well as what we need to study about developmental dyslexia.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Conventional wisdom in education states that the best way to enhance learning is to provide additional study opportunities and that the role of tests is merely to measure what has been learned during study. Although assessment is certainly one function of testing, the importance of testing, per se, for improving learning has received greater attention of late. While researchers have conducted numerous studies to understand the nature of the testing effect, there has been far less research investigating the neural mechanisms underlying this effect and it is less clear how to maximize the effect of testing and expand the benefits to non-tested but related information. The goal of this talk is to shed light on these questions by examining the key factors that define the boundary of the testing effect. In particular, empirical experiments and computational models will be reported to address the issue of what it is about attempting to retrieve the answer from memory that enhances learning more than study.

Lecture: The mechanisms of memory and what affects it (11:45am - 12:30pm)

Other than that which is genetically coded, everything we know is derived from and reflects memory for our past experiences. Memory is at the heart of virtually all other psychological processes and behaviors, from the ability to temporarily remember a phone number or where you placed your keys to the acquisition of language and the ability to reason. This lecture will provide an introductory overview of classic and current issues in human memory, examining how people acquire, retrieve, and use information. After this lecture, you will probably forget more than 90% of the theories, experiments, and names presented to you, but hopefully you will think more critically about memory in your everyday lives.

~ All CUHK PSY faculty members and students are welcome ~

Title:

In the past decades, numerous research studies have proliferated in studying the effects of mindfulness on well-being. Although secularized, mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism, which has a web of interrelated constructs in explaining the human condition and ways to improve well-being. The presentation will share some of the efforts of our lab in conceptualizing and empirically investigating the effects of Buddhism-derived constructs (i.e., interconnectedness, stillness) on both individual (e.g., mental health) and collective (e.g., social justice) well-being.

About the Speaker:

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The relationship between handedness and language/cognitive abilities is a controversial topic. Despite the popular belief that left-handers are more intelligent and have cognitive benefits, many studies failed to find the difference or reported opposite findings. The study to be shared in this seminar will try to dispel some of the myths by addressing four research questions related to handedness in Hong Kong school-aged children, including: 1) What is the prevalence of left-handed children in Hong Kong? 2) Is handedness heritable and what is its heritability in Chinese? 3) Is there an association between hand preference and children’s language abilities? (4) Does handedness skill predict children’s reading and mathematical performance?

About the Speaker:

Worldwide, social and political issues have brought along numerous questions and challenges, and Hong Kong is no exception. In this seminar, I will discuss findings from our recent research on psychological factors associated with Hong Kong people’s attitudes toward issues such as wealth inequality and unemployment and their potential consequences. Conceptual and applied implications of the findings will also be presented.

 Click here to replay the seminar (link valid until November 24th, 2020)

Adolescence as a distinct developmental stage receives much attention from both the academic community and the general public. Culturally shaped conceptions of adolescence not only are widely held by individuals in a given society, but also have notable implications for youth’s functioning as they navigate the teen years. This seminar presents findings from a short-term longitudinal study with early adolescents in Hong Kong and Chongqing (an inland metropolis in the Mainland of China) that show in the two regions: 1) mean-level differences in conceptions of adolescence held by youth, and 2) relation-level similarities in reciprocal pathways between youth’s conceptions and their socioemotional functioning

In the past few decades, digital technologies have accelerated research interest within the field of psychology. This seminar will provide an overview of currently available technological developments, primarily, wearable devices which continuously monitor physical and physiological changes (e.g., activity, sleep, and heart rate variability) outside laboratory settings, and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) which collects real-time data from current states and behaviours within natural environments. Furthermore, a practical guide to usage and implementation in behavioural and mental health research will be provided.

Arts has various benefits beyond a form of entertainment, yet arts participation remains low. “Not understanding art” has been a prevalent barrier to arts participation. Past studies have examined various methods to enhance cognitive understanding to enhance interest in arts. This seminar examines if cognitive understanding could be conceptualized differently. Results on appreciation of visual arts, music, dance and drama will be presented to suggest if misunderstanding, amateurish understanding, or purposefully not understanding could enhance art experience..

Does culture moderate the relations between cognitive skills and children’s academic achievement? To what extent the relation between home environment and academic achievement appears to be similar across languages and cultures? In this seminar, I will present my recent research on the cognitive and environmental correlates of academic achievement (literacy and numeracy) across diverse languages and cultures. A particular focus will be placed on a longitudinal study contrasting literacy acquisition in two logographic orthographies in East Asian contexts, Chinese and Japanese. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings will be discussed.

Well-being theorists have long debated whether human flourishing is achievable through deriving pleasure (hedonism) or achieving purpose in life and personal growth (eudemonism). Flow is a subjective state characterized by intense engagement, concentration, and enjoyment, and it is considered to be an optimal experience that fits both the hedonic and eudemonic paradigms. In this seminar, I will present my work regarding the situational and dispositional antecedents as well as the outcomes of flow. I will also present my newest findings on meaningful engagement and its association with psychological well-being in multiple settings.

~ CUHK PSY/GLSD PG students and faculty members are welcome ~

Amid the global pandemic of COVID-19, will the world be happier in 2020? While it is nearly impossible to make precise forecasts about the future, psychologists and social scientists have conducted ample research on societal well-being in different countries. In this lecture, I will introduce the importance of population well-being to society and the relationship between money and well-being at the national and individual levels. Using classical and contemporary psychological theories, I will demonstrate how various societal factors, such as income inequality and social unrest, are associated with well-being. This lecture will end with a discussion on the happiness levels of Hong Kong people and what we can do to promote population well-being.

~ CUHK PSY/GLSD students and staff are welcome ~

Research studies have found how various personal factors (e.g., gender, political orientation, values) relate to people’s concerns for environmental issues and their support for environmental protection. However, most of these studies overlooked the influence of the broader socioecological contexts (e.g., culture, economic condition, quality of governance) on these individual processes, which limits the understanding and promotion of environmentalism– a global issue that involves diverse populations. We address this limitation by investigating how societal-level factors influence individual processes in shaping environmentalism. This seminar will showcase our studies that use this approach to advance the understanding of environmental concern and behavior, and discuss how to apply this approach to address other global issues in the future.

~ CUHK PSY/GLSD PG students and faculty members are welcome ~

The threat of global climate change becomes more pressing when time goes by. Climate change mitigation necessitates people’s willingness to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle (e.g., eat less meat, reduce car travel). In this lecture, I will talk about how psychology contributes to addressing climate change mitigation through understanding biases in the human mind and behavior.   

~ CUHK PSY/GLSD students and staff are welcome ~

Compared to the rest of the brain, the frontal lobe is the last to reach full maturity but is the first to undergo deterioration with aging. Finding out how frontal lobe functions change with development and aging would thus give us invaluable insights into changes in cognition over time. In this talk, I will present on the application of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study the development and aging of frontal lobe functions. First, I will review its application in research on healthy development and aging. I will then highlight how the application of fNIRS has enhanced our mechanistic understanding of some developmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder, and aging-related diseases, including mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Finally, the potential utility of fNIRS in the rehabilitation of people with developmental and aging-related diseases will be discussed.

~ CUHK PSY PG students and staff are welcome ~

The frontal lobe has been considered as the central executive of the brain and controls important cognitive skills in humans. In this lecture, I will first introduce several methods that scientists frequently use to study functions of the human frontal lobe. Then I will talk about the role of the frontal lobe in various cognitive abilities, such as executive function and decision-making. Finally, I will present several ways that one can do to maintain or improve their frontal lobe functions.

~ CUHK PSY students and staff are welcome ~

The pervasiveness of irrational decision-making in almost every area of human endeavor highlights the importance of understanding the neurobiological and computational basis of reward-based decision-making. Contradicting with utility maximization principles, our research has shown that choices are susceptible to influences from exogenous and endogenous contexts. Using neuroeconomic methods, we demonstrate that the striatum and vmPFC seem to encode decision parameters in a context-dependent fashion, which may explain a range of decision biases. I will also showcase our findings in the application of neuroeconomics to the study of aging and psychiatry disorders.

~ CUHK PSY PG students and staff are welcome ~

It may come as a surprise the first time parents hear their child lying. Learning how to lie is actually a critical part of a child’s development. In this lecture, I will talk about the emergence of lying in very young children and how children progressively learn to tell good lies. We will also discuss what caregivers/educators can do about children’s dishonesty.

~ CUHK PSY students and staff are welcome ~

Personal goals change across adulthood: People primarily focus on goals towards striving for growth/gains (e.g., acquiring new knowledge and skills) in early adulthood, but increasingly focus more on goals towards maintenance (e.g., maintaining emotional satisfaction) and loss avoidance (e.g., avoiding health problems) in late adulthood. In this seminar, I will present my research on why such changes occur (antecedents) and how the changes influence people’s cognitive processes, social behaviors, and well-being (consequences).

~ CUHK PSY PG students and staff are welcome ~

This lecture is envisaged being part of a Psychology of Aging or Developmental Psychology course targeting undergraduate students. In this lecture, I will spend 30 minutes introducing emotional/ psychological well-being and common mental health problems of older adults. The following will be a 30-minute discussion about this topic among all attendees.

~ CUHK PSY students and staff are welcome ~

In close relationships, conflict is inevitable such that relationship partners have to work on the balance between their needs and their relationship’s interests.  To manage conflict situations, individuals may ideally want to show responsiveness to the partner’s needs and stay calm. These outcomes can often be achieved via the joint efforts of both partners. In this presentation, I will present my works about the dyadic processes involved in communication of responsiveness and emotion regulation during conflict resolution.

With electroencephalogram (EEG) data, we often adopt event-related potential (ERP) analysis, i.e., averaging the activation across the trials of a condition for a certain channel or group of channels. When an ERP component reveals higher activation for one condition over another, a question arises as to what this means. For example, does higher activation mean more engagement of the brain, or does it mean less efficient processing? In the past 15 years, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of neuroimaging data has shown that the variation of activation across brain recording locations and time can reveal more information than traditional univariate analysis. However, compared with studies using fMRI, it is much less common for EEG studies to adopt MVPA. In this talk I will give a conceptual introduction of multivariate analysis of neuroimaging data, and share our recent experience in using this technique in three EEG studies of perception. These studies involved different modalities (visual and auditory), participants (novices and experts of a domain), and data specifics (e.g., 20-128 channels). I will discuss how MVPA helps inform object recognition in these studies, and also the strengths and weaknesses of the technique.

Fast and accurate processing of faces (person identity, emotion, eye gaze, speech movements, gender, attractiveness) is essential for human communication and interaction. During the last 10 years my colleagues and I have studied differences between persons and the underlying neural mechanisms in a number of large-scale experiments. I will first summarize our results about the cognitive structure of face cognition and whether it is affected by age and gender. Then I will report our research on the neural mechanisms of individual differences in face cognition, as reflected in event-related brain potentials.