Nigel Mantou Lou

Nigel Mantou Lou
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Nigel verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Nigel verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University of Victoria | UVIC · Department of Psychology

Doctor of Psychology

About

80
Publications
74,105
Reads
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2,179
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2021 - present
University of Victoria
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
May 2020 - May 2021
McGill University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
February 2019 - April 2020
University of Alberta
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
September 2012 - June 2019
University of Alberta
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (80)
Chapter
In this study, we examined whether metacognitive activities could increase the growth mindset of students and lead to increased motivation as expressed through increased motivational intensity. We observed a statistically significant increase over the course of the semester in metacognitive skills, growth (vs. fixed) mindset, and motivation. Althou...
Article
Asian university students in North America faced intensified discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic, impacting their well-being and academic outcomes. This study explored how group discrimination, when intertwined with protective factors including low internalized racism, social support, and resilience, relate to well-being and academic outcom...
Preprint
Intuition often guides our thinking effectively, but it can also lead to consequential reasoning errors, underpinning poor decisions and biased judgments. Little is known about how people globally self-correct such intuitive reasoning errors and what enhances their correction. Defying prevailing models of reasoning, recent research suggests that pe...
Book
This book is the first volume devoted to mindset theory and practice in language education, offering interdisciplinary investigations into the motivation, competencies, emotions and wellbeing of language learners and teachers. Presenting studies from a vast array of language learning environments, the chapters explore topics such as students' attit...
Preprint
Intuition often guides our thinking effectively, but it can also lead to consequential reasoning errors, underpinning poor decisions and biased judgments. Little is known about how people globally self-correct such intuitive reasoning errors and what enhances their correction. Defying prevailing models of reasoning, recent research suggests that pe...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
From a positive psychology perspective, adopting a growth mindset in language learning cultivates positive learning goals and sustains motivational drive. However, the extent to which these motivational benefits translate into tangible language learning outcomes remains controversial. Drawing from the language learning motivational process model, t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cultural logic is a set of cultural scripts and patterns organized around a central theme. The cultural logics of dignity, honor, and face describe different ways of evaluating a person’s worth and maintaining cooperation. These cultural logics vary in prevalence across cultures. In this study, we collaboratively develop and validate a measure capt...
Article
Full-text available
In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sample achieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scar...
Preprint
Full-text available
Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...
Article
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Perseverance of effort is essential for success in learning a second language (L2). While past research has examined how motivational beliefs (e.g., growth mindset) influence L2 learners’ perseverance, their generalisability and underlying motivational mechanisms remain unclear. This study investigated the relationship between growth language minds...
Article
Minority history education can support perspective-taking which is linked to decreasing stereotypes and prejudice. A pre-test post-test randomized control trial study with 114 pre-service teachers was conducted to examine the role of queer history instruction to improve learners' self-reported perspective-taking toward LGBTQ + minorities and knowle...
Preprint
Full-text available
In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sampleachieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scarc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...
Preprint
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Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...
Article
Full-text available
Second language (L2) learners’ beliefs about the nature of language learning, specifically language mindsets, is a recent productive line of L2 research. Researchers argue that language mindsets are key factors for language learning success. However, the association between language mindsets and different language learning outcomes is inconsistent...
Article
Full-text available
With the growing number of immigrants, refugees, and international students, it is important to provide students with learning opportunities that embrace the diverse experiences of migrants. Despite the wealth of research in the psychology of migration, there is a lack of teaching resources and guides, which may contribute to the exclusion and marg...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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Social exclusion can exacerbate newcomers’ language difficulties and undermine their social integration. We examined whether language mindsets induce mixed attitudes towards migrants with limited proficiency in the target language, and indirectly affect willingness to interact with migrants and attitudes toward migrants’ language education. Across...
Article
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How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...
Article
Full-text available
Language mindsets and second language motivational self system (L2MSS) are two important motivational frameworks in understanding second language (L2) engagement. We argue that whether and how mindsets predict academic engagement can be explained by L2MSS components (ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self, and learning experience). Using a multi-stage clu...
Preprint
Full-text available
How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on s...
Article
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...
Article
Learning a second language (L2) is a prolonged process full of challenges and struggles. Resilience is an important capacity to help learners to deal with challenging situations and cope with daily setbacks and struggles. This study examined the antecedents and consequences of resilience in language learning contexts. The participants of the study...
Article
Evidence generally supports a positive association between growth mindset and academic outcomes, even if the experimental evidence for growth mindset interventions is somewhat more tenuous. From an applied perspective, the concept of growth mindsets has grown in popularity with a proliferation of materials readily available to teachers and school a...
Chapter
Language mindsets are individual beliefs about whether the ability to learn a language is changeable or not. Psychological research has shown that learners’ mindsets are linked to a wide range of psychological processes (e.g., attributions, effort beliefs, goal orientations, beliefs about mistakes/failures, self-regulatory tendencies, and emotions)...
Article
Issue: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was evidence of challenges surrounding the psychological well-being of health care professionals (HCPs). HCPs already frayed psychological ability to cope risks being further compromised by COVID-19- related stresses. Critical Theoretical Analysis: Most research on stress, psychological distress, and cop...
Chapter
Full-text available
A good deal of research has underscored the utility of Self-Determination Theory for understanding students’ and teachers’ motivational processes in the language classroom. However, learning and using a new language also takes place beyond formal educational contexts during interactions with members of the target language community, where motivatio...
Article
The COVID-19 pandemic's differential impact on ethnic minorities, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples (e.g., mortality and infection rate, as well as psychological well-being) may exacerbate existing disparities. This study examined some psychological mechanisms that might explain the apparently more negative emotional experiences of ethnic minority...
Article
Full-text available
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists and scholars noted differences between Asians and North Americans in their support for public mask use. These differences were primarily assumed to be due d to variations in ethnocultural norms and practices. To better ascertain people’s motives for wearing masks and potential cultural differences in thes...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has amplified preexisting racism and xenophobia. In this study, we investigated (a) whether perceived personal and group discrimination make distinct contributions to Chinese Canadians’ negative affect and concern that the heightened discrimination they experienced during the pandemic will cont...
Article
Full-text available
Many Chinese Canadians (CCs) have experienced increased racism and xenophobia since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study focused on how this rise of anti-Chinese discrimination, in addition to the threats posed by the pandemic itself, affects not only CCs’ well-being, but also their Chinese and Canadian identities. We surveyed 874 CC...
Chapter
This chapter proposes that the relation between attributions and mindsets in psychology can usefully be extended to better explain motivation in second-language acquisition (SLA). It reviews the attributional literature in SLA in light of the proposed relation between attributions and mindsets in SLA, so as to provide directions for future research...
Article
Full-text available
Grit–the ability to maintain effort and interest for long-term goals –is argued to be an important individual factor for achievement, especially in the face of obstacles. However, little research has examined the possible fluctuations of effort and interest and how challenges may trigger the changes of effort and interest. In this study, we measure...
Article
Despite the challenges faced by sexual orientation minority (SOM) individuals, many SOM individuals are able to persist and develop resiliency over the course of their lives. The present study explored how prominent SOM elders perceived the LGBTQ+ community as developing hope and resiliency in relation to major events of lesbian, gay, bisexual, tra...
Article
Full-text available
The mainstream acculturation research focuses on international students and immigrants’ settlement in a new cultural environment, but little is known about the adaptation process of people from postcolonial areas relocating to their home country. Drawing from research on acculturation and postcolonial studies, this research examined the importance...
Article
Full-text available
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians faced much ambiguity in the public health messages around face mask use. As public health messaging plays a pivotal role in the provision of directives during a health crisis, this study examines Canadians’ opinions on the early messaging they received regarding personal protection, especially around mask u...
Article
Full-text available
Although recent research suggests that language mindsets (i.e., fundamentalbeliefs aboutthe fixedness and malleability of language learning ability) are important for L2 learners’ motivation and learning behaviors, much research has focused on quantitative approaches and static individual differences, with little emphasis on its student-centered an...
Article
Language learners' mindsets -- their beliefs about whether language is a fixed aptitude that is immutable or a malleable capacity that can be developed -- are associated with achievement goals, language-use anxiety, reappraisals of challenges, and persistence. This study integrates these mindset-related constructs to identify mindset-system profile...
Article
Full-text available
We argue that growth (vs. fixed) mindsets are important for positive emotions and self-development because growth mindsets can foster adaptability, referring to the ability to adjust oneself in different circumstances. This study examines the role of mindsets in adaptability and whether adaptability, in turn, predicts learning emotions (anxiety and...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
This study examined the effects of praise for intelligence and praise for effort on Iranian EFL learners’ language mindsets, perceived communication competence, speaking anxiety, and willingness to communicate (WTC). The students in three English classes (N = 63, all junior high school students) in a private language institute filled in self-report...
Preprint
Full-text available
Lou, N.M., Chaffee, K.E., & Noels, K. A. (in press). Growth, fixed and mixed mindsets: Mindset system profiles in foreign language learners and their role in engagement and achievement. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. _____________________________________Abstract__________________________________ Language learners’ mindsets–their beliefs...
Article
Full-text available
Increased stressful experiences are pervasive among healthcare providers (HCPs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Identifying resources that help mitigate stress is critical to maintaining HCPs’ well-being. However, to our knowledge, no instrument has systematically examined how different levels of resources help HCPs cope with stress during COVID-19....
Article
Objectives: Healthcare providers (HCPs) have experienced more stress and burnout during COVID-19 than before. We compared sources and levels of stress, distress, and approaches to coping between nurses and physicians, and examined whether coping strategies helped mitigate the negative impact of stress and intentions to quit. Methods: Using a cross-...
Article
Users’ experiences in mental health assessment are multifaceted, including their emotional experiences. Yet, studies of mobile apps for psychiatric assessment have centered on diagnostic accuracy and perceived usability, with little consideration of the impact of user emotional experiences. In this study, we focused on users’ perceived usability an...
Article
Growth language mindsets, the beliefs that language-learning ability can be cultivated through effort, are argued as a motivational resource that guides learners to focus on improvement and learning processes. However, little is known about how classroom learning contexts predict predict language-mindsets, and whether language-mindsets are linked t...
Article
It is possible that individuals do not endorse a general mindset or theory of intelligence and that their mindset is specific to particular domains. There is currently a dearth of evidence to support this possibility. It is also not known how these two types of mindset influence learning behaviors and outcomes. This study investigates the roles of...
Article
Although the effectiveness and experiences of computer-based examinations is a widely investigated area of research, the question of whether and how computer-based assessment limits or heightens the experience of negative test emotions remains largely unexamined. Drawing from the control-value theory of achievement emotions, we investigated undergr...
Article
Full-text available
Growth language mindsets (i.e., beliefs that language ability can be improved) are found to sustain learners’ motivation and resilience in challenging situations. Considering that migrants who are speakers of languages other than the dominant ones often face challenging daily communications, we examined important but understudied questions of ‘how’...
Preprint
Full-text available
People rely on their lay theories, or mindsets, to make meaning of their experience in intercultural contact. Given that proficiency in the local language is a crucial social marker of immigrants’ integration, we argue that language mindsets (i.e., beliefs about whether language learning ability is fixed or changeable) guide members of the receivin...
Article
Full-text available
Supporting students’ growth mindsets (i.e., beliefs that ability can be improved) and basic psychological needs (i.e., needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness) is an important way to sustain their motivation and resilience after challenging situations. We argue that others’ feedback may support or undermine mindsets and need satisfaction si...
Article
Full-text available
Boys and men tend to underperform in language education, and they are also underrepresented in language-related fields. Research suggests that stereotypes can affect students’ performance and sense of belonging in academic subjects and test settings via stereotype threat. For example, girls and women sometimes underperform on math tests following r...
Article
Full-text available
Mindset is believed to influence students' learning outcomes but there is a paucity of research examining its relationship to students' learning choices (e.g., critical feedback-seeking and revision choices) as a pathway to improving learning and performance. This study examines the relationships between mindset, critical feedback-seeking, and lear...
Article
Full-text available
Design-thinking strategies are believed to enhance performance and learning, but it is unclear whether these strategies have any relation to the types of learning measured by tests of academic achievement. This study examines the relations between students' prior academic achievement, their choices to use design-thinking strategies of seeking criti...
Article
Full-text available
For migrant students enrolled in a postsecondary institution where the language of instruction is not their native language, experiencing anxiety using a new language can manifest in their daily social interactions, and lead them to avoid using the target language, thereby undercutting their academic and social adaptation. We propose that this vici...
Chapter
For some people, learning a new language is an exciting adventure into a fascinating linguistic realm and the ideal medium for exploring new cultures. For others, it feels pointless and boring, like a tedium to be endured. Most people likely lie between these extremes, perhaps occasionally experiencing one or the other pole, but mostly persisting w...
Chapter
Full-text available
“Mindset”, or beliefs concerning whether a psychological characteristic is more or less malleable, is an influential psychological concept that has had a wide impact on motivation research and educational practices. This chapter surveys research on mindsets in language learning, which shows that mindsets predict how learners make sense of their lea...
Article
Full-text available
People’s mindsets and goals regarding social relationships affect their relationship quality and psychological well-being. We employed multiple group path modeling to examine how perceived relational mobility affects mental and physical health through relationship mindsets (destiny and growth mindsets) and relationship goals (approach and avoidance...
Preprint
Full-text available
Currently, boys and men tend to underperform in language domains in school and on standardized tests, and they are also underrepresented in language-related fields of study. Stereotype threat is one way in which psychologists have found that stereotypes can affect students’ performance and sense of belonging in academic subjects and test settings R...
Cover Page
Full-text available
The special issue offers a new, up-to-date look on a plurality of non-cognitive individual difference factors with the potential to meaningfully influence language learning in formal educational settings. For the purpose of this discussion, we use the commonly accepted operational definition of non-cognitive individual difference factors as specifi...
Article
Full-text available
Learners' mindsets have received much attention in psychology and education research, but only recently have foreign/second language acquisition (SLA) researchers begun to study these beliefs. Mindsets refer to lay people's beliefs about whether human attributes (e.g., intelligence, personality, language aptitude) are essential, pre-determined trai...
Article
Large gender disparities in participation still exist across many university subjects and career fields, but few studies have examined factors that account for gender gaps in female-dominated disciplines. We examine one possible cause: threatened masculinity among men who hold traditional gender ideologies. Past research has linked endorsement of t...
Article
Full-text available
Internalizing Western culture can facilitate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ motivation to learn and confidence to use English. However, the role of heritage cultural internalization and the interactive impact of Western and heritage cultural internalizations on English learning are unclear. We surveyed 172 EFL students from Macao and...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research conceptualizes language mindsets as a 'lens' through which learners view language challenges as either deficits of aptitude (i.e. entity beliefs) or opportunities to improve (i.e. incremental beliefs). Extending this meaning-system approach in an intercultural context, we proposed that language mindsets influence migrants' experienc...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
Some people ascribe successful language learning to an innate aptitude that cannot be further developed, at least after a certain young age (i.e., an entity mindset), while other people believe that language learning ability can be improved (i.e., an incremental mindset). The purpose of this research is to (a) introduce the Language Mindsets Invent...
Article
Full-text available
This study examined how priming an entity language theory (i.e., the belief that language intelligence is fixed) or an incremental language theory (i.e., the belief that language intelligence can be improved) can orient language learners' goals and, in turn, influence their reactions in failure situations and their intention to continue learning th...
Article
Full-text available
People hold diverse ideas about language learning, but a particularly important belief is whether the ability to learn a new language is fixed or malleable. In the research described herein, we consider how (a) people who ascribe successful language learning to a natural talent that cannot be further developed (i.e., a fixed mindset) and (b) people...

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