The Academic Salon of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences is held every Thursday afternoon. Welcome to all students and faculty members from every department!
Time: May 15 (Thursday) afternoon 13:00
Location: Room 1110, 11th floor, Lv Dalong Building
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences LI Hong's Research Group Academic Salon
Report One
The Relationship Between Optimization and Involution:
The Moderated Mediation Role of Cultural Orientation and Social Comparison
Presenter: Liangliang Ma
Content:
Liangliang Ma's research focuses on the relationship between optimization tendency and involution. He further explores the mediating role of social comparison in this relationship, as well as the moderating effect of cultural orientation on this mediation pathway, thereby revealing how individuals influence their involution levels through optimization motivation under different cultural backgrounds.
Report Two
Social Comparison and Self-Evaluation:
The Moderated Mediation Role of Temporal Self-Comparison
Presenter: Yang Wang
Content:
Against the backdrop of increasingly intensified competition, exploring how individuals evaluate themselves is of great significance for promoting mental health and self-identity. Based on social comparison theory, temporal self-comparison theory, and possible selves theory, this study explores the dynamic interactive effects of social comparison and two types of retrospective temporal self-comparison (comparison with past self, comparison with past expected self) on self-evaluation in the Chinese cultural context through four experimental studies. This study reveals how social comparison affects self-evaluation by changing the reference point of internal evaluation standards through the constructed moderated mediation model. Meanwhile, this study also corrects the traditional view of self-discrepancy theory and reveals the social approval dependence of self-evaluation in the Chinese environment.
Report Three
How Power Affects Power Construal:
The Mediating Role of Psychological Entitlement
Presenter: Xinyue Wang
Content:
Power Construal refers to individuals' understanding and views of the meaning and value of power and how power should be used. As a core element in social systems and organizational management, power construal plays an important shaping role in real power interactions. However, existing research mostly focuses on the behavior of the powerful while neglecting the exploration of power construal itself; meanwhile, current power theories are mainly based on the perspective of the powerful, lacking attention to the perspective of the powerless. Therefore, the question of how power affects power construal has not received sufficient attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring how individuals construct power under different power states and revealing the psychological processes behind it. This study gradually verifies the impact of power on power construal and its internal processes through three progressive studies (N = 1851). This study finds that power significantly affects individuals' power construal methods, with powerless individuals more inclined to construct power as personalized rather than socialized. The differences in power construal between the powerful and powerless stem from their different perceptions of psychological entitlement of power holders. Based on this, this paper proposes the "socialization halo of power."
Report Four
How Does Power Affect Optimization Decision-Making?
Presenter: Jiaju Jing
Content:
This study systematically examines how power affects individuals' optimization—a decision-making strategy characterized by exhaustive search for the best option—through five preregistered experiments (N = 1470). Results consistently show that power significantly enhances individuals' optimization behavior in personal decision-making (Study 1a) and organizational decision-making (Study 1b). In Studies 2a and 2b, we further discover the mediating role of construal level between power and optimization. Study 3 constructs and validates a moderated mediation model, finding that the mediation effect in organizational decision-making contexts is significantly stronger than in personal contexts. This study expands the research perspective on power, revealing its systematic impact on optimization decision-making, emphasizing how sense of power drives individuals to generate strong goals for seeking "optimization," while simultaneously producing high time investment and deep search in decision-making. Meanwhile, it also enriches optimization theory by extending its research paradigm from ordinary decision-makers to key decision-makers with power, having both theoretical value and practical significance.
Report Five
On the Cognitive Process Model from a Buddhist Perspective
Presenter: He Huang
Content:
Current cognitive processing models constrain the in-depth development of cognitive theory due to ambiguous definitions of basic concepts. This paper proposes that such "theoretical crises" largely stem from the limitations of categorical scientific thinking, while the holistic perspective of Buddhist philosophy can provide new pathways for breaking through this predicament. Inspired by Buddhist classical thought, this study reconstructs cognitive processing models, aiming to re-extract core cognitive concepts such as sensation, consciousness, perception, and attention, as well as their interactive relationships. The new model emphasizes: sensory input needs to form perception through memory activation and consciousness integration; attention, as a top-down conceptualization process, depends on the regulation of psychological frameworks; consciousness and perception have inherent unity, and cognitive activities are essentially dynamic constructions of subject-object interaction. By integrating the holistic thinking of Buddhist philosophy with cognitive science theory, this study provides potential solutions for resolving pending problems in existing theories (such as sensation-perception boundaries, consciousness mechanism, etc.).
