Qi Wang

Cornell University | CU · Department of Human Development

I call the attention of psychologists to the pivotal role of cultural psychology in extending and enriching research programs. I argue that it is not enough to simply acknowledge the importance of culture and urge psychologists to practice cultural psychology in their research. I deconstruct five assumptions about cultural psychology that seriously...

Human memory, as a product of the mind and brain, is inherently private and personal. Yet, arising from the interaction between the organism and its ecology in the course of phylogeny and ontogeny, human memory is also profoundly collective and cultural. In this review, I discuss the cultural foundation of human memory. I start by briefly reflectin...

In this volume, Qi Wang traces the developmental, social, cultural, and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the community. Wang combines rigorous research, sensitive survey of real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal anecdotes into a s...

I propose a triangular theory of self to characterise the sense of selfhood in the era of social media. According to the theory, the self in the social media era comprises the represented self that is located in the private mind of the person, the registered self that is presented on social media platforms, and the inferred self that is constructed...

I describe in this article the creation of the Purposes of Online Memory Sharing Scale (POMSS). I provide an overview of the theoretical and empirical backgrounds against which the scale was developed. I then present data from a pilot sample that indicate that the scale as a whole is a reliable measure of the reasons for which people share their ex...

It has long been believed that individual human memory has been strengthened by the storage, representational, reproductive, and connective capacities of technologies and media. However, such views of how memory works are being challenged amidst today's digital maelstrom. In particular, the Internet, and social media platforms, have profoundly tran...

Can children accurately date their early memories? This question has important real-life consequences such as when jurors evaluate the credibility of child eyewitness testimony in court. Answering this question is difficult given that adults present at remembered events may be inaccurate themselves in retroactively dating the memories recalled by t...

This study examines how children attribute moral responsibilities to their past and future actions and what role culture plays in children’s temporal moral attribution. A total of 346 U.S. and Chinese 6–7 and 8- to 9-year-old children were randomly assigned to a past or future condition, in which they answered questions about their moral/immoral ac...

Wang and Conway (2006) posit that remembering takes place in a culturally modulated self-memory system in which working self-goals are shaped by society and, in turn, influence the encoding and construction of memories in a culturally canonical fashion. The current research examined the self-goal of competence, which manifests through self-enhancem...

The increasing use of social media has amplified the spread of false information. Yet little is known about the mnemonic consequences associated with exposure to different types of false information online. In two studies, we examined in a simulated online context how exposure to false information either central or peripheral in events affected mem...

Autobiographical memories for significant personal experiences constitute our sense of self and identity and have critical emotional impact on our mental health. In this chapter, we discuss the relation between memory, emotion, and mental health in developmental, cultural, and digital contexts. We first examine various cognitive processes involved...

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This study examines the cyber audience’s perception of social media users’ persona based on their online posts from a cognitive meaning-making perspective. Participants (N = 158) answered questions about their personal characteristics and provided their 20 most recent Facebook status updates. Two groups of viewers, who viewed either the text-only o...

Prior studies have shown that people imagine their personal future to be more positive than their country’s collective future. The present research extends the nascent literature by examining the valence and perceived control of personal and national future events in a new experimental paradigm, the cultural generalizability of the findings, and th...

This study examined among diverse ethnic groups in the U.S. individuals' memories about social distancing at the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic and how that was related to psychological well‐being. Participants recalled specific personal events related to social distancing in a memory fluency task and completed a battery of well‐being measures. Con...

The literature has established accumulated evidence on the negative consequences of social media anonymity on behaviors online (e.g., cyber-aggression). Yet the potential benefits of social media anonymity have been largely overlooked, especially when it comes to prosociality. In four studies, we examined the facilitating effect of perceived social...

The study is the first to examine the developmental trajectory of emotion knowledge as it relates to psychosocial adjustment in a cross-cultural context. European American (EA, n = 68, 28 boys) and Chinese American (CA, n = 62, 31 boys) children and their mothers participated. Children's emotion knowledge was assessed, and their psychosocial adjust...

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...

This research examined the impact of COVID-19 risk perception on sense of control, testing the hypotheses that COVID-19 risk perception would reduce sense of control and that this effect would be mediated by death anxiety and moderated by Confucian coping. A series of six studies were conducted with Chinese participants (N = 2202) and employed diff...

This study examines the cyber audience’s perception of social media users’ persona based on their online posts. Participants (N=158) answered questions about their personal characteristics and provided their 20 most recent Facebook status updates. Two groups of viewers, who viewed either the text-only or multimedia version of the status updates, an...

This study investigated the associations of narrative processing while recounting a past victimization experience with different forms (i.e., physical and relational) and functions (i.e., reactive vs proactive) of aggressive behavior. Moderating effects of respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity and gender were explored. Two hundred college student...

The current study examined the impact of social media as a retrieval context (in contrast to private recall) on the retention of autobiographical memory. At session 1, participants (N = 177) generated recent life events in response to cue words and then described the event details as if they were writing about the events either on WeChat or in thei...

Social media exposes people to selective information of what they have previously known. We conducted two laboratory studies to examine in a simulated online context the phenomenon of retrieval-induced forgetting, where information reposted on social media is likely to be later remembered and relevant but not reposted information may be forgotten....

Emotion socialization is a critical pathway via which children develop emotional competence valued in their cultural community. This article introduces a multi‐level analysis approach as a conceptual and methodological framework to study family emotion socialization in cultural context. Each of the studies in this Social Development Quartet is disc...

Autobiographical memory involves a constructive process in which individuals make sense of their experiences to form coherent life stories and a narrative identity. Adolescence is an important period for developing autobiographical memory and constructing a life story through narrative meaning-making. The ways in which adolescents remember and narr...

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...

Objectives Labels are used to describe people every day, and these labels can affect people's subjective health. However, little is known about how existing health identity (i.e., stable identification with being a healthy person) shapes these effects. This study examined the effect of health‐related labelling on subjective health, and the potentia...

Young adults recalled and dated their five earliest memories, and dates compared with independent parental dates. Participants also provided information about how they derived dates through a ‘thinking aloud’ procedure. All participants were also asked if they had experienced various landmark events when young. One group, the Priming cohort, was as...

The current study examined the impact of social media as a retrieval context (in contrast to private recall) on the retention of autobiographical memory. At session 1, participants (N = 177) generated recent life events in response to cue words and then described the event details as if they were writing about the events either on WeChat or in thei...

This special issue brings together the scholarship that advances our knowledge on remembering in the age of the Internet and social media. The studies reported in the ten articles address diverse topics in three broad areas prominent in current research: offloading memory and the associated costs, benefits, and boundary conditions, autobiographical...

The authors added missing author address and ORCID information to their article. Link to the article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360331866_What_Lies_Ahead_of_Us_Collective_Future_Thinking_in_Turkish_Chinese_and_Americans

Moral observer-licensing happens when observers condone actors’ morally questionable con-ducts due to the actors’ history of moral behaviors. We investigated in four studies (N = 808) this phenomenon in the context of cyberspace and its contributing factors and boundary conditions. The pilot study determined what participants perceived as typically...

Collective future thinking, namely, the anticipation of events for a group, is a relatively new research area in memory studies. Research to date with predominantly Western populations suggests that people tend to expect negative events for their country’s future. In two studies, we investigated the emotional valence and perceived control of antici...

This special issue brings together the scholarship that advances our knowledge on remembering in the age of the Internet and social media. The studies reported in the ten articles address diverse topics in three broad areas prominent in current research: offloading memory and the associated costs, benefits, and boundary conditions, autobiographical...

Moral observer-licensing happens when people condone others' morally questionable conducts due to their history of moral behaviors. We investigated in four studies (N = 808) this phenomenon in the context of cyberspace and its contributing factors and boundary conditions. Study 1 determined what participants perceived as typically moral and immoral...

Research has demonstrated the crucial role of culture in shaping how the self is represented and how autobiographical event information is organized, retained, and retrieved. Specifically, the style, accuracy, content, emergence, and general accessibility of autobiographical memories in children and adults have been found to vary across cultures, w...

The present study compared ways of storytelling in Western and Asian literature. Content analysis was performed on Amazon.com and New York Times best-selling fictions and memoirs (N = 102) by Western and Asian authors. Although authors of the two cultural groups described similar numbers of event episodes per chapter, Western authors depicted the e...

I present here a scale, "Things about memory," to assess the metacognitive knowledge of the functions of autobiographical memory. It consists of 13 statements about why people think about and share their personal memories, which are derived from prior research both within a single culture and across different cultural groups. The scale has an adult...

Social media has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous means by which individuals curate and share their life stories with the world at large. Not surprisingly then, researchers have started to examine the reasons why individuals post personal memories on social media and said individuals’ characteristics. Across two studies, we extended t...

Current understanding of visual perspectives (i.e., first person vs third person) in mental time travel and their relations to psychological well-being is largely based on research with Western populations. To examine whether culture moderates the processes, we asked European American (EA) and Asian or Asian American (AA) college students to recall...

The present research examined the effects of sharing different types of memories on perceived relationship closeness and how that is related to psychological well-being in a cross-cultural context. In two studies, European American and Asian participants (total N = 714) reported their feelings of closeness to a conversation partner in hypothetical...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The present study examined the longitudinal relation between mother–child reminiscing of emotionally negative events and children’s mental health. European-American and Chinese-American mothers discussed with their 4.5-year-old children an event that was emotionally negative to the child. At age 7, children’s mental health was assessed, including m...

The development of autobiographical memory is a culturally constructive process in which children learn to remember and share their personal experiences in culture-specific ways. In this article, I present a theoretical model that situates children’s independent recall and joint reminiscing with parents in the cultural context. Built on cross-cultu...

The current study examined the impact of social media as a retrieval context (in contrast to private recall) on the retention of autobiographical memory. At session 1, participants (N = 177) generated recent life events in response to cue words and then described the event details as if they were writing about the events either on WeChat or in thei...

The present study examined the longitudinal relation between mother-child reminiscing of emotionally negative events and children’s mental health. European-American and Chinese-American mothers discussed with their 4.5-year old children an event that was emotionally negative to the child. At age 7, children’s mental health was assessed, including m...

Air pollution has been shown to have detrimental effects on physical and mental health, yet little is known about how air pollution affects psychosocial functioning in everyday life. We conducted three studies that utilized experimental methods and web crawler technology to examine the ef-fect of hazy environmental conditions on perceived interpers...

Gender differences in autobiographical memory have been reported in many studies using narrative coding of features including emotion word use, connectedness to others, and event specific details, with women using more of these narrative features than men. The current pair of studies explored if these narrative tendencies are linked to a sense of s...

Although previous studies have documented that relational victimization serves as a risk factor for depressive symptoms across developmental periods, heterogeneity in effects highlights the possibility that some individuals may be especially vulnerable. This study examined two factors that may influence the link between relational victimization and...

A scale to assess parental reactions to children’s positive emotions (Song, Yang, Doan, & Wang, 2019). Both English and Chinese versions of the scale are provided here.

Task to assess children's emotion situation knowledge.

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120 Ch...

This document provides a description of the Emotion Judgment Task that was developed and used by Qi Wang and her Culture & Cognition Lab at Cornell.

Human memory entails an active transaction between the mind and the reality that takes place in the larger cultural context. There has been an increasing awareness among memory researchers of the pervasive and dynamic influences of culture on mnemonic processes and consequences (for a recent review, see Wang, 2021). Yet, despite advances made parti...

General Audience Summary Autobiographical memories are vital for our sense of self and well-being, and culture shapes how we integrate these personal memories into our personal identity. Intergenerational narratives from one’s family, such as the stories adolescents know and tell about their parents’ childhoods, also contribute to identity developm...

Biases perpetuate when people think that they are innocent whereas others are guilty of biases. We examined whether people would detect biased thinking and behavior in others but not themselves as influenced by preexisting beliefs (myside bias) and social stigmas (social biases). The results of three large studies showed that, across demographic gr...

General Audience Summary Nearly every facet of our lives—family, friendships, classrooms, workplace, social media interactions—is imbued with remembering with others. Here we ask how group composition in terms of ethnic diversity influences memory. This question has increasing applied significance as our work and social environments become global....

Everyday experience is divided into meaningful events as a part of human perception. Current accounts of this process, known as event segmentation, focus on how characteristics of the experience (e.g., situation changes) influence segmentation. However, characteristics of the viewers themselves have been largely neglected. We test whether one such...

Biases perpetuate when people think that they are innocent whereas others are guilty of biases. We examined whether people would detect biased thinking and behavior in others but not themselves as influenced by preexisting beliefs (myside bias) and social stigmas (social biases). The results of three large studies showed that, across demographic gr...

Social distancing worries Americans. Yale professor Nicholas Christakis warns that it asks us “to suppress our profoundly human and evolutionarily hard-wired impulses for connection,” for example. And journalist Greg Miller and others cite possible ramifications that include “heart disease, depression, dementia, and even death.” In striking contras...

People tend to perceive themselves more favourably than others, but the degree to which individuals exhibit this bias may be influenced by cultural upbringing. Korean ( n = 271) and American ( n = 503) participants were asked to evaluate current and future health expectations for themselves and others. Results showed that American participants rate...

Our previous studies have consistently shown a telescoping error in children’s dating of earliest childhood memories. Preschool children through adolescents systematically date their earliest memories at older ages, in comparison with the age estimates provided by their parents or by themselves previously. In the current study, we examined the dati...

This book brings together scholarship that contributes diverse and new perspectives on childhood amnesia – the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the book range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother–child conversations about memories for extende...

Biases perpetuate when people think that they are innocent whereas others are guilty of biases. We examined whether people would detect biased thinking and behavior in others but not themselves as influenced by preexisting beliefs (myside bias) and social stigmas (social biases). The results of three large studies showed that, across demographic gr...

This book brings together scholarship that contributes diverse and new perspectives on childhood amnesia – the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the book range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother–child conversations about memories for extended...

The present study investigated in a cross-cultural context whether sharing different types of memories would differentially influence perceived relationship closeness and how that, in turn, was related to psychological well-being. Participants (N = 410) from European American and Asian cultural backgrounds reported their feelings of closeness to a...

Biases perpetuate when people think that they are innocent whereas others are guilty of biases. We examined whether people would detect biased thinking and behavior in others but not themselves as influenced by preexisting beliefs (myside bias) and social stigmas (social biases). The results of three large studies showed that, across demographic gr...

This study examined the relations between maternal reactions to children’s negative emotions and children’s socio-emotional outcomes, including psychological adjustment, emotion knowledge, and coping strategies. European American and Chinese immigrant mothers reported on their reactions to children’s ( N = 117, M = 7.14 years) negative emotions and...

Our previous studies have consistently shown a telescoping error in children’s dating of earliest childhood memories. Preschool children through adolescents systematically date their earliest memories at older ages, in comparison with the age estimates provided by their parents or by themselves previously. In the current study, we examined the dati...

This study examined in cultural contexts maternal reactions to children’s positive emotions and the relations to children’s socio-emotional outcomes. European American (EA) and Chinese immigrant (CI) mothers reported their reactions to children’s (N = 117, M = 7.14 years) positive emotions. Children were interviewed for emotion knowledge and mother...

Emotion, although deeply rooted in biological and evolutionary origins and widely shared across species and cultures (Darwin 1965; Ekman and Friesen 1971), is cul- turally conditioned in its experience, expression, recognition, and regulation (Mat- sumoto and Hwang 2019; Yang and Wang 2019). Understanding the developmental origins of cultural influ...

This chapter outlines a cultural dynamic theory as the framework to understand and predict the effects of cultural variables on the organization of autobiographical memory. The theory posits that autobiographical memory takes place in the dynamic transaction between an active individual and his or her changing environment; it is situated in cultura...

Research on emotional development has been primarily focused on children from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic backgrounds. However, cultural beliefs and norms play an important role in the acceptability of children’s emotional expressions and emotion-related behaviors. In this chapter, we first provide a brief overview of ho...

Episodic thinking is involved in the representation of specific personal events occurring at a particular time and place. Although a fundamental human cognitive faculty directly associated with neurocognitive functioning, episodic thinking and its development is subject to sociocultural experiences. This study integrated experimental and longitudin...

This study examined mother–child discussion of children’s peer experiences in cultural contexts and its relation to children’s relational self-concepts. In all, 70 European American (EA) and Chinese immigrant mothers (CI) and their 9- to 11-year-old children were interviewed twice at home, with an interval of 1 year. During each interview, mothers...

Continuous sensory experience is divided into meaningful events as a part of human perception. Current accounts of this process, known as event segmentation, have focused on how it is influenced by characteristics of the experience, such as changes in the situation, or its similarity to prior experiences. However, characteristics of the viewers the...

At a kindergarten in Beijing, a researcher is playing a game of storytelling with a child,“Winter is coming. Wild geese are leaving for the South. Before they leave, the goose leader tells everybody that the journey will be full of dangers. So everyone should fly closely together. A little goose says to herself,‘Flying together will be very slow. I...

Human cognition is not simply a product of the mind or brain but a process of adaptation to the socio-ecological environment. One environmental influence that has profound effects on human cognition is culture - the systems of shared meaning and shared practice that cohere social groups. Indeed, a growing body of research has identified important c...

Emotional development, mediated by early socialization practices, is deeply situated in a variety of cultural settings and experiences from which children learn to understand, experience, and regulate their emotions in ways favored by their culture. This special issue of Culture and Brain (Volume 7, issue 2) brings together the scholarship of a gro...

I discuss in this article that the interaction between individuals and the Internet is a dynamic process that entails not just what individuals need to do and can do, but also what they want to do, or their personal agency. I argue that in the face of the overwhelming sea of information online—much of which maybe false—individuals are not completel...

This research examined the relations of social media addiction to college students' mental health and academic performance, investigated the role of self-esteem as a mediator for the relations, and further tested the effectiveness of an intervention in reducing social media addiction and its potential adverse outcomes. In Study 1, we used a survey...

This special issue brings together the scholarship that contributes diverse new perspectives on childhood amnesia – the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the special issue range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother–child conversations about mem...

This editorial provides an overview of the papers presented in this special issue of Developmental Review. This issue calls for the establishment of a cultural developmental science to understand the complexity and dynamics of human psychology and behavior. It highlights the importance that cultural psychological research needs to underscore develo...

This study examined in a cross-cultural context the prospective relation between children’s emotion knowledge and internalizing problems. European American (N = 33) and immigrant Chinese children (N = 22) and their mothers participated. Children’s emotion knowledge was assessed at three-and-a-half years of age using a task to elicit their understan...

This study examined the consistency of memories for the same events in mothers and children, and how that varied as a function of culture and organizational components of memories. European American (EA) and Chinese immigrant (CI) mothers and their 6-year-old children (N = 127) independently recalled two emotionally salient events. In both cultures...

Episodic memory for specific personal events is a fundamental human cognitive faculty. Yet it is variably valued across cultures and may thus have different implications for psychological well-being. In a series of studies, we investigated the consequences of cultural fit in detailed episodic recall for psychological well-being among healthy adults...

Social media has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous means by which individuals curate, share, and communicate information with their friends, family, and the world at large. Indeed, 90% of the American adolescents are active social media users, as well as 65% of American adults (Perrin, 2015; see also Duggan & Brenner, 2013). Despite th...

We investigated the role of mothers’ references to mental states and behaviors and children’s emotion situation knowledge (ESK) in a prospective, cross-cultural context. European American mothers (n = 71) and Chinese immigrant mothers (n = 60) and their children participated in the study. Maternal references to mental states and behaviors were asse...

This study examined children’s narrative representations of peer experiences in cultural contexts and its concurrent and long-term relations to psychological adjustment. Thirty-four European American and 30 Chinese immigrant 9-10 years old children completed a narrative task to tell stories based on two scenario stems. Children’s peer-related self-...

process and further give rise to cultural differences in FBM. In particular, means of information transmission across cultures, including newly developed communication technologies, may introduce variations in how and what types of public event news individuals receive. Cultural variables may further operate on the individual processes of perceivin...