Qinglin Zhang

Southwest University in Chongqing | SWU · School of Psychology

Thought suppression, which is defined as an effort “not to think about” a particular thought, is essential to maintain good mental health. Despite previous functional imaging studies on thought suppression and related functional activity, the neural basis of thought suppression in individual difference is still unclear. Many studies have focused on...

The decoy effect arises when the ratio of choosing B from A and B options is lower than the ratio of choosing B from A, B, and D options, wherein D is dominated by B. This decision pattern is obviously unreasonable but quite common. Previous research suggested that impulsive people have stronger decoy effect. Rs806379, as a single-nucleotide polymo...

Creativity is very important and is linked to almost all areas of our everyday life. Improving creativity brings great benefits. Various strategies and training paradigms have been used to stimulate creative thinking. These training approaches have been confirmed to be effective. However, whether or not training can reshape the resting-state brain...

The anchoring effect is a well‐known decision bias, referring that initial irrelevant number (anchor) can impact late estimation. Anchoring effect can be explained as people starting from the anchor and stopping incremental adjustment too early—in other words, jumping into the conclusion impulsively. High impulsivity is associated with AA genotype...

Creativity is the ability to produce something novel and useful. Various tasks have been used to explore the neural bases of creativity. However, studies exploring the relationship between the brain regions during divergent thinking are still rare. Given that the brain works in networks, exploring the functional connectivity (FC) patterns during di...

Representation connection (RC) is a stable ability that significantly predicts the accuracy of scientific innovation problem solving while critical thinking has been strongly related to problem solving. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this relationship have not been assessed. Using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and scientific innovation p...

Evidence from a range of fields shows that representation-connection (RC) is the key step towards the solution of a real-world insight problem. However, no study has focused on the inter-individual variability in RC, and little is known about whether structural and resting-state functional signals can account for inter-individual differences in RC....

Loss aversion manifests itself in rejecting a gamble of gaining or losing the same amount of money with equal chance. Although loss aversion is a well-known and intensively studied phenomenon, whether individual differences in behavioural loss aversion can be predicted using scalp potentials (EEG) remains unclear. The current study measured scalp p...

Creativity was a special cognitive capacity which was crucial to human survival and prosperity. Remote associates test (RAT), identifying the relationships among remote ideas, was one of the most frequently used methods of measuring creativity. However, the structural characteristics associated with RAT remains unclear. In the present study, the re...

Creativity is the ability to see the world in new ways. Creative individuals exhibit the ability to switch between different modes of thinking and shift their mental focus. This suggests a connection between creativity and dynamic interactions of brain networks. We report here the first investigation into the relationship between the reconfiguratio...

The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique was used to investigate brain activations related to conflict control in a taste-visual cross-modal pairing task. On each trial, participants had to decide if the taste of a gustatory stimulus matched or did not match the expected taste of the food item depicted in an image. There were four...

As a high-level cognitive activity, humor comprehension requires incongruity detection and incongruity resolution, which then elicits an insight moment. The purpose of the study was to explore the neural basis of humor comprehension, particularly the moment of insight, by using both characters and language-free cartoons in a functional magnetic res...

Attentional bias toward negative stimuli has been observed in major depression disorders (MDDs). Imaging studies suggest the engagement of fronto-limbic regions like amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and lateral prefrontal cortex, is related to negatively biased attention. However, neural correlates of attentional bias for negative stimuli...

Rejection sensitivity (RS) can be defined as the disposition of a person to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to rejection. Individuals with high RS are likely to suffer from mental disorders. The association between individual differences in RS and spontaneous neuronal activity at resting state has not yet been investigated....

Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (mMRI) has been widely used to map the structure and function of the human brain, as well as its behavioral associations. However, to date, a large sample with a long-term longitudinal design and a narrow age-span has been lacking for the assessment of test-retest reliability and reproducibility of brain-behavi...

Creativity is imperative to the progression of human civilization, prosperity, and well-being. Past creative research tends to emphasize the default mode network (DMN) or the frontoparietal network (FPN) somewhat exclusively. However, little is known about how these networks interact to contribute to creativity and whether common or distinct brain...

Most people are exposed to at least one traumatic event during the course of their lives, but large numbers of people do not develop posttraumatic stress disorders. Although previous studies have shown that repeated and chronic stress change the brain’s structure and function, few studies have focused on the long-term effects of acute stressful exp...

Creative cognition is important to academic performance and career success during late adolescence and adulthood. However, there is a lack of longitudinal data on whether brain structural development could predict improvements in creative thinking, and how such changes interact with other cognitive abilities to support creative performance. Here we...

Although previous studies have suggested that conflict control can occur in the absence of consciousness, the brain mechanisms underlying unconscious and conscious conflict control remain unclear. The current study used a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging design to collect data from 24 participants while they performed a mas...

Creativity is commonly defined as the ability to produce something both novel and useful. Stimulating creativity has great significance for both individual success and social improvement. Although increasing creative capacity has been confirmed to be possible and effective at the behavioral level, few longitudinal studies have examined the extent t...

Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC), the temporal correlation of intrinsic activation between different brain regions, has become one of the most fascinating field in the functional imaging studies. To better understand the association between RSFC and individual creativity, we used RSFC and the figure Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (...

We used the functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging to explore the neural correlates of response to group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in mild depression. College students with mild depressive symptoms participated in our 4-week group CBT training. The behavioral results showed that depression symptoms decreased after participati...

Little is known about the effects of developmental trauma on the neural basis of cognitive control among adults who do not have posttraumatic stress disorder. To examine this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the effect of subliminal priming with earthquake-related images on attentional control during a Stroop task...

Evidence from a range of fields indicates that inventions are often inspired by drawing a parallel to solutions found in nature. However, the cognitive mechanism of this process is not well understood. The cognitive mechanism of heuristic prototype in scientific innovation was tested with 3 experiments. First, 84 historical accounts of important sc...

The frequent occurrence of uncontrollable negative thoughts and memories is a troubling aspect of depression. Thus, knowledge on the mechanism underlying intentional forgetting of these thoughts and memories is crucial to develop an effective emotion regulation strategy for depressed individuals. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that depressed...

Zeigarnik effect means that participants tend to recall the unfinished/ unsolved tasks more frequently than the finished/solved ones during a subsequent memory task. To get a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between Zeigarnik effect and insightful problem solving, we need to adopt more research methods to explore the brain mechanisms...

Background: Attention bias modification (ABM) training has been suggested to effectively reduce depressive symptoms, and may be useful in the prevention of the illness in individuals with subthreshold symptoms, yet little is known about the spontaneous brain activity changes associated with ABM training. Method: Resting-state functional MRI was...

The concept of unconscious emotion has developed from addressing subliminal emotional stimulus to emphasizing unawareness of emotional experience. To integrate the two different paths to explore unconscious emotion, Wiens model, an information-processing model of emotion was introduced. According to Wiens model, there exist two parallel approaches...

Efforts to identify meaningful functional imaging-based biomarkers are limited by the ability to reliably characterize inter-individual differences in human brain function. Although a growing number of connectomics-based measures are reported to have moderate to high test-retest reliability, the variability in data acquisition, experimental designs...

Although previous work has shown that conflict can be detected in the absence of awareness, it is unknown how different sources of conflict (i.e., semantic, response) are processed in the human brain and whether these processes are differently modulated by conflict awareness. To explore this issue, we extracted oscillatory power dynamics from elect...

Although cognitive and personality studies have observed gender differences in narcissism, the neural bases of these differences remain unknown. The current study combined the voxel-based morphometry and resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) analyses to explore the sex-specific neural basis of narcissistic personality. The VBM results showed...

Creative persons play an important role in technical innovation and social progress. There is little research on the neural correlates with researchers with high academic achievement. We used a combined structural (regional gray matter volume, rGMV) and functional (resting-state functional connectivity analysis, rsFC) approach to examine the neural...

Recently, our team found that category-selective attention could modulate tool processing at the partial awareness level and unconscious face processing in the middle occipital gyrus (MOG). However, the modulation effects in MOG were in opposite directions across the masked tool and masked face conditions in that study: MOG activation decreased in...

Neuroanatomical abnormalities in patients with major depression disorder (MDD) have been attracted great research attention. However, the structural alterations associated with subthreshold depression (StD) remain unclear and, therefore, require further investigation. In this study, 42 young women with StD, and 30 matched non-depressed controls (NC...

Mind pops or involuntary semantic memories refer to words, phrases, images, or melodies that suddenly pop into one's mind without any deliberate attempt to recall them. Despite their prevalence in everyday life, research on mind pops has started only recently. Notably, mind pops are very similar to clinical involuntary phenomena such as hallucinati...

Individual differences in self-monitoring, which are the capability to adjust behavior to adapt to social situations, influence a wide range of social behaviors. However, understanding of focal differences in brain structures related to individual self-monitoring is minimal, particularly when micro and macro structures are considered simultaneously...

The motive to achieve success (MAS) and motive to avoid failure (MAF) are two different but classical kinds of achievement motivation. Though many functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have explored functional activation in motivation-related conditions, research has been silent as to the brain structures associated with individual differen...

The concept of tolerance of ambiguity (AT) is defined as the way in which an individual tends to perceive and deal with confusing, vague, and unclear situations. AT is generally considered as an important personality trait, but the neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in AT have never been investigated. Using voxel-based morphometry...

Previous studies on insight problem solving using Chinese logogriphs as insight problems only investigated the time- and phase-locked changes of electrocortical responses triggered by Chinese logogriphs, but did not focus on what kind of brain state facilitates individuals to solve insight problems. To investigate this, we focused on participants'...

In this study, an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis was used to conduct a quantitative investigation of neuroimaging studies on divergent thinking. Based on the ALE results, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies showed that distributed brain regions were more active under divergent thinking tasks (DTTs) than th...

Many scientific inventions (SI) throughout history were inspired by heuristic prototypes (HPs). For instance, an event or piece of knowledge similar to displaced water from a tub inspired Archimedes' principle. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this insightful problem solving are not very clear. Thus, the present study explored the neural c...

Aims: Recently, using the fMRI method in a paradigm in which visible word cues were followed by masked faces at a completely unconscious level or masked tools at a partially conscious level, Tu, Qiu, Martens, & Zhang (2013) showed that the top-down modulation effects were in opposite directions for the two conditions. Because five different picture...

Previous behavioral studies have examined the correlation between personality and depression, and between negative automatic thoughts and depression. Little is known, however, about the relationships among these three factors. Even less is known about how variations in brain structure are related to negative automatic thoughts, which are thought to...

Psychological research frequently uses cognitive neuroscience technologies to reveal the brain mechanisms underlying the psychological structure of personality, cognition, and emotion. However, previous research has often been constrained by small samples and other features of the experimental design and data analysis. Additionally, individual diff...

Relatively few studies have focused on the connections between self-esteem and basic personality dimensions. The purpose of the present studies was to examine whether self-esteem level and self-esteem instability were associated with the Big Five personality dimensions and whether self-esteem instability moderated the associations that self-esteem...

A number of recent studies have investigated the neurological substrates of Emotional Intelligence (EI), but none of them have considered the neural correlates of EI that are measured using the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Scale (SSREIS). This scale was developed based on the EI model of Salovey and Mayer (1990). In the present study,...

Loneliness is an unpleasant and distressing feeling that a person experiences when he/she perceives that his/her social relationships are lacking in someway, either quantitatively or qualitatively; this can be linked to anxiety, depression, and suicide risk. Previous studies have found that certain personality traits (which are temporally stable an...

The behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and the behavioral activation system (BAS) are two fundamental motivational systems which are not only responsible for affective states, behavior and personality, but also related to predispositions for various forms of psychopathology. A wide range of previous studies revealed sex differences in both BIS/BAS...

The implicit positive association (IPA) theory attributed self-face advantage to the IPA with self-concept. Previous behavioral study has found that self-concept threat (SCT) could eliminate the self-advantage in face recognition over familiar-face, without taking levels of facial familiarity into account. The current event-related potential study...

Self-disclosure is an important performance in human social communication. Generally, an individual is likely to have a good physical and mental health if he is prone to self-disclosure under stressful life events. However, as for now, little is known about the neural structure associated with self-disclosure. Therefore, in this study, we used voxe...

Previous studies have provided insights into the representations of original and relative values and the influence of predictability on decision making. However, whether the predictability of outcomes can influence the processing manner of outcomes (i.e. whether the outcomes are processed in terms of original or relative values) is still unknown. T...

Although recent studies have elucidated cognitive and affective neural correlates of humor processing, they weren’t able to distinguish between the incongruity detection and incongruity resolution proposed by incongruity-resolution theory. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, using a new caption-cartoon paradigm, thre...

Raven's Matrices test (RMT) is a non-verbal test designed to assess individuals' ability to reason and solve new problems without relying extensively on declarative knowledge derived from schooling or previous experience. Despite a large number of behavioral studies that demonstrated gender differences in Raven's Matrices reasoning ability, no neur...

Somatic complaints can be important features of an individual’s expression of anxiety. Anxiety-related traits are also risk factors for somatic symptoms. However, it is not known which neuroanatomical mechanisms may be responsible for this relationship. In this study, our first step was to use voxel-based morphometry (VBM) approaches to investigate...

Creativity is crucial to the progression of human civilization and has led to important scientific discoveries. Especially, individuals are more likely to have scientific discoveries if they possess certain personality traits of creativity (trait creativity), including imagination, curiosity, challenge and risk-taking. This study used voxel-based m...

Rejection sensitivity (RS) can be defined as the disposition that one tends to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to rejection. High-RS individuals are more likely to suffer mental disorders. Previous studies have investigated brain activity during social rejection using different kinds of rejection paradigms and have provided...