
Liman Man Wai LiEducation University of Hong Kong | ied · Department of Psychology
Liman Man Wai Li
PhD
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86
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Publications (86)
Achievement motivation is fundamental for human flourishing. While numerous adaptive motivational constructs have been proposed, they are often examined in isolation without considering their shared contextual roots. To identify the contextual factors underlying different forms of adaptive achievement motivation, we conducted comprehensive analyses...
Social media is one of the major platforms for disseminating essential health messages. The present study examined the effect of message framing (self-interest motive, prosocial motive) on an online platform for parental intention to vaccinate against COVID-19. It also examined how the effect may vary across participants’ levels of parental identit...
We argue that the importance of family relationships for individual well-being varies across societies as a function of a society’s degree of cultural heterogeneity. To examine the role of family relationships, we analyzed the responses from 13,009 participants in 50 societies on their life satisfaction across societies varying in their levels of h...
Personal growth and self‐expressive goals have become increasingly important in modern marriages. In dual‐earner couples, sharing work‐related experiences with the partner can be particularly important in promoting mutual support for each other's personal growth. The current study examined dual‐earner couples' sharing of work‐related experiences an...
Background
Parents are often involved in their child's homework with the goal of improving their child's academic achievement. However, mixed findings were observed for the role of parental involvement in homework in shaping students' learning outcomes.
Aims
The present study examined whether and how the effect of parental involvement in homework...
Egoistic value is conceptualized as anti‐environmental in many environmental value theories, yet contradictory evidence exists for its relation with pro‐environmental attitude and behaviour. To provide insights into these inconsistent findings, this research examined the moderating role of the psychological distance of environmental problems on the...
Achievement motivation encompasses a well-establish distinction between the motive to avoid failure (e.g., fear of failure) and the orientation to improve competence (e.g., mastery goal). But how well do they generalize across cultures in understanding students’ performance and well-being? We argue that students’ achievement motivation is less pron...
Different single personality traits have been found to be closely related to well-being, and single personality traits and well-being shared multiple neural substrates. Yet little is known about how the multi-trait profile, which better reflects individual differences in terms of taxonomy, is related to multi-faceted well-being, and whether the spo...
This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity—a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher‐order space. By combining individual‐level measures of trust across domains and well‐being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations wi...
Previous meta‐analyses identified a gap between environmental concern and pro‐environmental behaviours. However, the failure to differentiate these behaviours and the influence of contextual factors may limit understanding of the gap. This pre‐registered meta‐analysis evaluated the magnitudes of the correlations of environmental concern, as measure...
In the present study, we adopted a global view for exploring how parent–adolescent dyads influence one another’s pro-environmental behaviors across 14 societies. We evaluated whether their own and the other’s familiarity with climate change are linked with their pro-environmental behaviors between parents and adolescents. We also explored the moder...
Background/aims:
Recent research on mindsets has shifted from understanding its homogenous role on performance to understanding how classroom environments explain its heterogeneous effects (i.e., Mindsets × Context hypothesis). Does the macro context (e.g., societal level of student mindsets) also help explain its heterogeneous effects? And does t...
The current research examined the effect of unethical and ethical acts on memory. We hypothesized that, compared with ethical acts, unethical acts, which threaten people’s self-image, would be more likely to dampen the general memory process. Three studies provided supports for the hypothesis. We found in Study 1 that an unethical act led to worse...
Individual priority of environmental protection over economic growth is predicted by macroeconomic contexts, demographics, and psychological processes. Corresponding supportive evidence exists for each category of predictors, but limited work has synthesized them. The present study attempted to build a parsimonious model to properly predict this pr...
Despite converging evidence for the importance of relational mobility on shaping people's social experiences, previous work suggested mixed findings for its influence on the structure of sociocentric networks, which lays the basis for the development of all types of social relationships. Additionally, as it is timely and economically intractable to...
Sharing what we know with others has an important role in facilitating people's social learning and communication across settings. To advance the understanding of when and how people share, the present study examined the role of inspiration, an emotion that contains strong motivational elements, on people's sharing tendencies in three studies. Stud...
To advance the understanding of the dynamic relationship between brain activities and emotional experiences, we examined the neural patterns of tension, a unique emotion that highly depends on how an event unfolds. Specifically, the present study explored the temporal relationship between functional connectivity patterns within and between differen...
National culture shapes people’s pro-environmental tendencies, yet its underlying psychological mechanisms are less clear. This study examined the mediating role of self-enhancement value on the relationship between culture and pro-environmental attitude. Using data from the World Values Survey (Wave 6; 78,542 participants from 52 countries/regions...
Public environmental concern is important for social transformations to sustainability. Previous findings regarding the temporal trend of environmental concern yielded inconsistent results. Their methodological divergence, however, prevented further result integration or moderation analyses. This cross-temporal meta-analysis used the New Environmen...
How does a society’s religious context affect the relationships between personal religiosity and well-being? To explore this question, we used two measures of personal religiosity, the absolute importance of religion, and the importance of religion relative to the importance of six life domains, viz., family, friends, work, politics, leisure, and r...
Natural disasters are highly adverse and unpredictable, which imposes great demands on people living with chronic vulnerability to natural disasters. The present study examined the relation between societal chronic vulnerability to natural disasters and individuals’ subjective well-being, including happiness and life satisfaction. We analyzed the d...
It has been revealed that intersubject variability (ISV) in intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) is associated with a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral performances. However, the underlying organizational principle of ISV in FC and its related gene transcriptional profiles remain unclear. Using resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connec...
To advance the understanding of the environment-human relation, the present research examined individuals’ emotional variability, which captures the fluctuation in negative and positive emotional states across environments. Specifically, we examined the relationship between holistic thinking and emotional variability across environments in three st...
The current research examined the influence of subjective loss on financial risk-taking tendency and negative emotional experience through inducing the experience of subjective loss in auction scenarios. In Study 1, we found that the subjective loss experience (compared to no-loss experience) in an auction scenario induced greater financial risk pr...
This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity - a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher-order space. By combining individual-level measures of trust across domains and well-being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations...
Studies have yielded inconclusive findings regarding the relationship between disaster experience and materialism. Whereas some have found a positive relationship, others have reported a negative relationship. To clarify the mechanisms underlying these mixed findings, we proposed and examined two mechanisms, namely mortality salience and gratitude....
Pandemics create many rapid changes and unstable situations to all individuals, which cause great fluctuations in emotional experiences among individuals. To further advance the understanding of the psychological impact of pandemics, the present study examined the relationship between the fluctuation of perceived stress and emotional variability du...
This research investigated how residential moves with versus without the companionship of significant others would affect people’s motivation to make new friends. Studies 1a and 1b showed that the companionship of significant others predicted fewer new friends among university students who moved within the same country (Study 1a) and to a different...
Identity is suggested to have profound environmental implications. However, the magnitude of the relationship between identity and environmental concern varied considerably in previous studies. As the first meta-analysis study to systematically review this topic, we followed previous conceptual discussions to evaluate the relations between four typ...
It has been revealed that intersubject variability (ISV) in intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) is associated with a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral performances. However, the underlying organizational principle of ISV in FC and its related gene transcriptional profiles remain unclear. Using resting-state fMRI data from the Human Connec...
(1) Background. Extending previous work, the present study examined whether marital satisfaction would magnify the dyadic effect of disabilities on life satisfaction among older married couples. (2) Methods. With responses collected from 11,694 participants (5847 couples; Mage = 63.36 years, median: 62 years) in a large-scale survey study in China...
The perception of the relationship between humans and nature is important for promoting not only pro-environmental behaviors but also psychological well-being. The present research explored how people’s self-construal would moderate the relationship between the need to belong, the desire for social acceptance and connectedness and perceived nature...
Facebook is a prevalent SNS platform used to express satisfaction in a romantic relationship. However, specific functions of Facebook that foster relationship satisfaction and the underlying mechanism of how the Facebook usage is perceived by a partner require further investigation. Relationship awareness, or paying attention to one’s romantic rela...
Dialectical thinking refers to a constellation of beliefs that consist of expectation of change, tolerance of contradiction, and holism. The current research explored whether dialectical thinking would affect people’s anticipation of climate change, which has been propagated globally. Study 1 compared the responses between Chinese participants, rep...
Research has noted well-being benefits to having a cultural fit between a person and the environment. The more a person fits the environment, the greater their reported well-being. We tested if cultural fit is also seen with neural patterns, which we term neural cultural fit. To address this question, we measured European Canadian (EC) and East Asi...
Ingroup bias could be a significant hindrance in a context where intergroup collaboration is crucial, which makes it essential to investigate ingroup bias during pandemics. This research investigated the influence of individuals' belief in fate control on ingroup bias in helping with COVID-19, and the mediating role of risk perception of COVID-19....
Previous work suggests that the experiences of online and offline self‐disclosure are heterogeneous among individuals. Yet little work has been done to identify the moderating role of individual characteristics and pre‐existing relationship characteristics on the diverse relational outcomes. The present study using a 7‐day diary design examined whe...
Self–esteem affects individuals in a variety of psychological processes substantially and extensively. While an increase in self–esteem over time was observed in the USA, different patterns of temporal change in self–esteem were observed in other societies. We analysed the responses ( n = 305 229) collected between 1993 and 2016 from 609 articles t...
Cultural research using a socioecological perspective has shown that residential mobility fosters familiarity-seeking behavior. In particular, residentially mobile individuals tend to purchase from national chain stores, which offer the same products across different locations. Positing this process as a reaction to a rapidly changing high mobility...
Impression management (IM) in the personnel selection context is traditionally seen as a dishonest response distortion that indicates maladaptive coping. However, it has recently been proposed as a personality trait that relates to better mental health and work performance. In the current investigation, we examined the role of IM in buffering depre...
Some studies indicated that different types of trust are qualitatively different psychological experiences, which may lead to different health outcomes. The present study examined the effect of two types of trust, i.e., generalized trust and interpersonal trust, on promoting physical health and subjective well-being in regions varying in societal r...
Moving within and across nations becomes a non-reversible increasing trend globally. The current research investigated the unique effect of residential mobility at different developmental stages (i.e., early childhood, late childhood, and adolescence) on university students’ mental health and academic performance. In addition, we investigated the r...
To advance the understanding of great individual variations in pro-environmental tendencies, the current research examined the role of holistic versus analytic thinking, which is non-specific to environmental issues, and explored the underlying mechanisms via both affective and cognitive determinants, i.e., affective affinity toward nature and awar...
Group, which involves collective actions for achieving shared goals, can be conceptually understood as an important source of agency and control. The current research investigated whether group identity salience can enhance sense of agency within the individual. Specifically, we examined whether an activated cultural group identity, through present...
Perfectionistic self‐presentation (PSP), which describes an expressive aspect of perfectionism in the interpersonal domain, is a defensive form of perfectionism that has been relatively understudied. Although existing evidence obtained from Western societies has consistently shown maladaptive functions of PSP, the question of whether these patterns...
This research examined the role of cultural similarity in community engagement of second-generation immigrants (SGIs). While previous findings examined the rate of community engagement in SGIs, it is still unclear what may be associated with a higher community engagement in SGIs. Based on previous research on cultural similarities, we proposed that...
Dialectical beliefs emphasize constant change, tolerance of contradiction, and holistic perception. This research examined the relationship between dialectical beliefs and proenvironmental behaviors. Study 1a showed that stronger dialectical beliefs were associated with fewer proenvironmental behaviors among Chinese participants; this result was re...
People sometimes prioritize helping ingroup members over outgroup members, but sometimes they do not. The current research investigated whether residential mobility, a socioecological factor, would reduce ingroup favouritism in prosocial behaviour. In three studies, we found evidence supporting the causal role of residential mobility in reducing in...
Loneliness results from lacking satisfied social connections. However, little is known how trait loneliness, which is a stable personal characteristic, is influenced by different types of social support (i.e., emotional and instrumental support) through the brain activity associated with loneliness. To explore these questions, data of resting state...
A wealth of research on resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI) data has revealed modularity as a fundamental characteristic of the human brain functional network. The modular structure has recently been suggested to be overlapping, meaning that a brain region may engage in multiple modules. However, not only the overlapping modular structure remains...
People have to make different decisions every day, in which culture affects their strategies. This research examined the role of analytic versus holistic thinking style on resource allocation across cultures. We expected that, analytic thinking style, which refers to a linear view about the world where objects’ properties remain stable and separate...
Background: Depression is one of the leading causes of work disability. Thus, it is important to explore possible ways to reduce its impact on employees.
Aims: The current research examined whether promoting job autonomy would attenuate the detrimental effect of depression on employees’ well-being.
Methods: Study 1 included the data from 5974 full-...
Independent versus interdependent self-construal is a concept that reflects how people perceive the relationship between self and other people, which has been extensively examined across disciplines. However, little evidence on the whole-brain functional connectivity pattern of independent versus interdependent self-construal has been reported. Her...
For over three decades, cultural psychologists have advocated the importance of cultural meaning systems and their effects on basic modes of perception and cognition. This chapter reviews findings which have demonstrated that culturally dominant ways of thinking influence people's basic perceptual and cognitive processes: East Asians are more likel...
Previous findings regarding the relationship between emotional valence and psychological distance were mixed. The current research examined whether emotional intensity moderates the influence of emotional valence on psychological distance. We manipulated intensity and valence by asking participants to describe a positive or negative event from eith...
People often experience a dilemma: whether we should invest now for a better future or save now for an unexpected future. The current research investigated the influence of dialecticism, a constellation of lay beliefs stating that the world is full of constant changes, coexisting contradictions, and interdependent relationships, on people's savings...
Background
A growing amount of research, primarily from Western developed countries, has suggested that generalised trust (ie, trust of others in general) is positively linked to psychological and physical health, and health behaviours. This study aimed to test if the relationship between generalised trust and health would be moderated by the level...
Prior research found that physical and psychological health are positively associated with generalized trust of others. This association is known to vary across societies, though the extent of this variation and its source remains poorly understood. The current research examined whether differences in development across societies describe why the e...
Implicit theories are an influential framework for understanding achievement motivation. Many studies have shown that incremental (positive-change) beliefs predict adaptive motivation and positive learning outcomes, whereas entity (no-change) beliefs predict maladaptive motivation and negative learning outcomes. This
research explores a new constr...
Generalized trust reflects whether individuals extend their trust to others in general and is important to health and well-being. This study examined the predictive effect of generalized trust on health, happiness, life satisfaction, health behaviors, and illnesses among older adults residing in six non-Western countries. We utilized a recent multi...
Enemyship occurs across societies, but it has not received as much attention as other types of relationships such as friendship in previous research. This research examined the influence of relational mobility on people's motivation to understand their personal enemies by measuring different dependent variables across three studies. First, a cross-...
We examined whether the broadened attentional scope would affect people's sad or depressed mood with two experiments, enlightened by the meaning of “seeing the big picture” and the broaden-and-build model. Experiment 1 (n = 164) is a laboratory-based experiment, in which we manipulated the attentional scope by showing participants zoomed-out or zoo...
To understand the influence of social capital (the size of local supportive networks and generalized trust) in facilitating success across societies varying in residential mobility, the data of 16,253 participants from 29 provinces/municipalities in China were examined. For the role of local supportive networks, the results showed that people with...
Extending past research on implicit theories of romantic relationships into a general interpersonal relationship domain, this research examined the sociocultural causes and psychological consequences of destiny beliefs (i.e., relationships with friends, family, romantic partners, and peers are destined to succeed or fail from the beginning) and gro...
Psychologists have debated two external factors that influence human behaviors: current socioeconomic changes and historically shared cultural meaning systems. By conducting triangular comparisons among Hong Kong Chinese, mainland Chinese, and European Canadians, the current study examined whether these two factors differentially influence people’s...
Past cross-cultural research studies in regulatory focus have showed that East Asians in general tend to be prevention-focused, whereas Westerners tend to be promotion-focused. Three studies extend these findings by investigating the role of regulatory focus on people's experiences in enemyshiphow people deal with their personal enemies. Study 1 de...
Research in cross-cultural psychology suggests that East Asians hold holistic thinking styles whereas North Americans hold analytic thinking styles. The present study examines the influence of cultural thinking styles on the online decision-making processes for Hong Kong Chinese and European Canadians, with and without time constraints. We investig...
In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgent focus on ecological features, especially various forms of mobility that afford social psychological processes. Extending this work, the current research examined whether relational mobility affects risk propensity. We conducted three studies using both correlational (Studies 1 and 3) and experimental (...
Previous research has contrasted patterns of cautious or prevention-oriented relationality in various West African settings with patterns of growth or promotion-oriented relationality in many North American settings. The present research draws upon the concept of relational mobility to test the hypothesis that different patterns of relationality ha...
Previous findings in cultural psychology suggest that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to view the world dialectically and that this dialectic view of the world affects their psychological tendencies. Extending these findings, our research examined the relationship between dialecticism and indecisiveness in European Canadians and Ho...
In this article, we extended the socioecological approach in cross-cultural psychology to the acculturation context. We focused on relational mobility among Asian Canadians and how it is related to their acculturation experience. Previous research shows that relational mobility, which is a feature of one's social environment, is generally higher in...
We studied the gender gap in life expectancy (GGLE), which currently favours women on average by 5 years. Individual data from 54 societies were extracted from the 1999-2004 wave of the World Values Survey. The GGLE was not predicted by the socio-economic factors of gross domestic product (GDP) or Gini coefficient, but was increased by national lev...
Past research showed that East Asians' belief in holism was expressed as their tendencies to include background facial emotions into the evaluation of target faces more than North Americans. However, this pattern can be interpreted as North Americans' tendency to downplay background facial emotions due to their conceptualization of facial emotion a...
This research examined whether individual differences in cultural identification can be discerned at zero acquaintance. This issue was examined in Hong Kong, where the idiosyncrasy of cultural identification is a salient social-psychological issue. The participants were able to perceive accurately the targets' identification with Western culture fr...
Cultural values and religious beliefs play a substantial role in adolescent development. Developmental scientists have shown increasing interest in how culture and religion are involved in the processes through which adolescents adapt to environments. This volume constitutes a timely and unique addition to the literature on human development from a...
This study was designed to examine the link between values and life satisfaction, examining the role of culture in this process.
Secularism was found to predict life satisfaction scores at a small but statistically very significant level in persons from
all nations participating in all four waves of the World Values Survey. The direction and streng...
Convergence or divergence are two plausible but different views on how local cultures respond to the forces of globalization. In the present study, a newly formulated value dimension of secularism was used to investigate the direction of value change induced in members of national groups over the last two decades by the forward march of recent hist...
The current research examined the effect of cultural fit, or the congruence between values that individuals endorse and values that are normative in their culture, as a predictor of life satisfaction. In a large international data set drawn from the World Values Survey (Study 1), the effect of cultural fit was found in collectivistic societies but...