Yanjie Su

Peking University | PKU · Department of Psychology

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

This study aims to explore the pivotal roles of environmental resources (ER) and grit in fostering creativity, while meticulously examining the diverse effects of motivation on creativity across various educational stages, ranging from primary school to university. A large random sample of 47,278 Chinese students was examined for ER, grit, motivat...

Left‐behind children, as a large‐scale disadvantaged group, encounter an array of risk factors that impede their academic development because of parental migration. The current study aimed at investigating the roles of left‐behind cumulative risk and growth mindset on academic adjustment and exploring whether growth mindset moderated the associatio...

Intuitive statistical inferences refer to making inferences about uncertain events based on limited probabilistic information, which is crucial for both human and non-human species’ survival and reproduction. Previous research found that 7- and 8-year-old children failed in intuitive statistical inference tasks after heuristic strategies had been c...

Parental burnout refers to exhaustion caused by the parenting role. This devastating negative emotion can have repercussions for adolescent social development. Nevertheless, much remains unclear about the association between parental burnout and adolescent prosocial behavior and the potential mechanisms underlying this relationship. Based on theore...

Rooted in our evolutionary past, psychological security, encompassing cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology, plays a critical role in shaping human interactions and individual well-being. This manuscript delves into the intricate tapestry of individual and group variations in psychological security, underscoring the influences of genetic mak...

Parents are under pressure to perform well in both professional and family life while simultaneously remaining involved in their children’s development. This pressure is reflected by the prevalence of parental burnout, which is of concern in numerous societies. Drawing upon the demands-resources framework, we investigated parental burnout, parental...

Theory of mind (ToM) represents a complex ability, while persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) encounter difficulties in the processing of ToM. The present ToM-focused studies on adults with ASD report inconsistent results, possibly owing to the differences between tasks. For instance, different ToM-related tasks involve different cognitive a...

We explore individual differences in tiger personality. We first asked—is there evidence of personality dimensions (analogous to the Big Five in human personality research) in the Amur tiger? We then asked, are any discoverable personality dimensions associated with measured outcomes, including group status, health and mating frequency? 152 of our...

The relation between empathy and morality is a widely discussed topic. However, previous discussions mainly focused on whether and how empathy influences moral cognition and moral behaviors, with limited attention to the reverse influence of morality on empathy. This review summarized how morality influences empathy by drawing together a number of...

Short-term memory is implicated in a range of cognitive abilities and is critical for understanding primate cognitive evolution. To investigate the effects of phylogeny, ecology and sociality on short-term memory, we tested the largest and most diverse primate sample to date (421 non-human primates across 41 species) in an experimental delayed-resp...

Mind wandering refers to task‐unrelated thoughts that can interfere with ongoing tasks and could be sleep‐driven across childhood. The present study investigated the mechanisms of the association between early adolescents' sleep and mind wandering with emotional symptoms and executive function as potential mediators. A total of 257 early adolescent...

The present work examines how culture and age interact to influence self-continuity and life satisfaction. Specifically, we compared Canadian and Chinese young (17–26 years old) and older adults (60–88 years old) in their sense of self-continuity and life satisfaction (N = 424). Consistent with past research, older adults reported greater self-cont...

Regret is a negative emotion that individuals experience when they perceive the actual outcome of a given situation to be less desirable than the counterfactual outcome. Experiences of regret generally manifest in the form of both sadness (emotional regret) and a tendency to change associated decision-making (behavioral regret). Prior studies emplo...

Previous findings on the association between theory of mind (ToM) and aggression in children are mixed. The social skills deficit view regarded ToM as a single‐edged sword and proposed that a lack of ToM can lead to aggression, while the double‐edged sword view proposed that children with advanced ToM can still show much aggression because children...

Previous studies suggested that the degree of pupil dilation distinguishes between different levels of flight cadets, particularly, in terms of task performance. In other words, pupil dilation is heavily influenced by cognitive load, and, therefore, may reflect flight ability. However, few researches paid attention to this correlation. In this stud...

Existent studies have demonstrated that being physically attractive leads to preferences and rewards in various scenarios involving performance evaluation. In this study, we explored whether a photographer’s physical attractiveness could affect others’ assessment of a photograph’s aesthetic value. Participants ([Formula: see text]) accomplished an...

Forests are essential common‐pool resources. Understanding children's and adolescents’ motivations for conservation is critical to improving conservation education. In 2 experiments, we investigated 1086 school‐aged children and adolescents (6–16 years old) from the United States, China, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Testing participants in...

Reciprocity is a potential issue in college teaching if professors benefit students in return for better student evaluation results. The reciprocity in college teaching is framed as kind intention and consequence, including teaching styles, attendance requirement, delivery mode, grading and course difficulty. This study explored whether and to what...

Exploring the genetic foundation of morality can help people further understand the evolution and development of human morality. This paper reviews the genetic contribution to moral performance of East Asians and compares the genetic effects between East Asians and Westerners. Genes related to the oxytocin (OXTR, CD38), dopamine (COMT, DRD3, DRD4),...

The current research aimed to investigate gender-related preferences of youths with different sexual orientations and examine the effects of gender role and sexual attraction. In Study 1, participants from China recalled the gender composition of their friends at different times, and data from 216 of them aged 17-24 were analyzed. Growth curve mode...

Forests are essential common-pool resources. Understanding school-aged children and adolescents’ motivations to conserve forests is critical for improving conservation education. In two experiments with school age children and adolescents (age range: 6-16; N=1088), we demonstrate that extrinsic, rather than intrinsic motivations lead to successful...

Socialization in adolescence refers to a bunch of elements such as coordinating the relationship between self and others and inferring the unstated intents underlying social communication. Beyond these socio-cognitive processes, primary cognitive control may function as a regulator reconciling the conflicts in a goal-directed communicative context....

Adults show less empathy toward immoral individuals' misfortune than moral individuals' misfortune. However, only few studies explored children's empathic responses toward targets with different moral characters (see Mendes et al., 2018; Schindler et al., 2015; Schulz et al., 2013). Here we present the first investigation of both positive and negat...

Most prior studies on children's polite lie-telling have focused on cognitive correlates but neglected emotional correlates. This study examined 115 preschoolers' polite lie-telling in relation to both cognitive (inhibitory control (IC), false-belief understanding) and emotion-related abilities (emotional theory of mind (ToM), affective empathy). A...

Children care about how others evaluate them. In East Asia, children aged 8 and up tend to downplay their own merit by actively concealing their good deeds. This has been regarded as modest behavior. As a way of self‐presentation, modest behavior may be triggeredby the presence of other people in young children. A child may show modesty through a d...

Evaluating others’ actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A seminal study published in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life, considerably earlier than previously thought (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). In this study,...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00915-8

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to infer others’ mental states. In our everyday lives, we need to constantly and appropriately interact with others. Not only is ToM involved in understanding of others’ mental states (other-oriented mental inferences), but it also helps to keep our own mental states (self-oriented mental inferences). In t...

We aimed to explore the potential mechanism that how social-communicative contexts activate preoperational children's heuristic system in everyday reasoning. Through 3 studies, with 192 4–7-year old children recruited, we found that in social-communicative contexts, given the complex social cues and high-level social interaction, children are incli...

We aimed to investigate the neural and cognitive changes related to communicative signal interpretation from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Our findings suggest separable neurodevelopmental trajectories whose interplay contributes to the maturation of the ability to understand other’s u...

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) refers to a euphoric and relaxing tingling sensation in the back of the scalp, the neck, and throughout the body that some people experience in response to certain auditory/visual stimulations. The tingling sensation may be caused by the high activation of the brain areas responsible for sensation and mus...

To feel other’s pain would elicit empathy. Some theorists hypothesized that observing other’s pain may activate the primary emotion of maternal care instinct, which may function as a precursor of empathy. The maternal care instinct and empathy share the same genetic background and neuroendocrine underpinnings. An extensive body of research has show...

Social short-form video platforms, a new form of social networking sites, are popular among youth. However, the influence of social networking sites on individuals’ subjective well-being remains unrevealed. By using objective measures among Chinese youth, the present study (N = 1,254) sought to investigate the relationship between different types o...

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to infer others’ mental states, undergoes an ongoing development from adolescence to early adulthood. The present study investigated how self-other control (SOC), the ability to distinguish self- and other-related representations, contributed to individual differences in false-belief inference (a common measure of...

In the field of social influences on Theory of Mind (ToM), more research has focused on the role of parents, but less research has examined the impact of siblings on children’s social understanding. We review existing research related to what factors might affect sibling–ToM association and how these potential factors affect ToM. Based on the liter...

Culture has an extraordinary influence on human behavior, unparalleled in other species. Some theories propose that humans possess learning mechanisms biologically selected specifically for social learning, which function to promote rapid enculturation. If true, it follows that information acquired via observation of another's activity might be res...

The present study aimed to delineate the characteristics of empathy and mental health in preschool teachers and to examine the role of empathy in preschool teachers’ mental health. The sample in this study consisted of 4348 preschool teachers, who were divided into four groups according to their years of teaching experience (less than 2, 2–5, 5–10,...

Background: The German Questionnaire to Assess Resources for Children and Adolescents (QARCA; Lohaus & Nussbeck, 2016) is a diagnostic questionnaire that estimates six personal resources and four environmental resources. This study aimed to develop a Chinese version of the QARCA. Due to the important cultural differences between China and Western c...

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a special perceptual phenomenon in which some people can experience a tingling, static-like sensation in response to some certain auditory/visual stimulations. This study compared the performance of executive function (working memory, set shifting, and inhibitory control) between ASMR participants and...

Studies on the development of prosociality in adolescents have largely been based on Western populations and those studies mainly focused on the development of prosocial behavior. The current study regarded prosociality as a personal trait and examined changes in the emotional, cognitive and behavioral aspects of prosociality during adolescence in...

The role of theory of mind (ToM) in children's aggressive behaviors has been widely discussed, while previous findings were mixed and inconsistent. A meta-analysis was conducted and the moderating roles of age, time interval, and aggression type were examined. Overall, the current analysis found a small negative relation between children's ToM and...

Sometimes children imitate actions that are causally irrelevant to the goal, which is called over-imitation. This article reviewed evidence of the generality and variation of children's over-imitation under different cultures and discussed the possible underlying mechanism of over-imitation. Over-imitation was found on children from different cultu...

Empathy for pain in daily life is more complex than in lab settings and involved higher cognitive abilities. In order to investigate the role of executive function in preschoolers’ empathy for pain, we investigated the role of three subcomponents of executive function (inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility) in children’s empa...

The current meta‐analysis was designed to determine the relationship between executive function (EF) and empathy, as well as to identify any moderators. A search of Chinese and English databases yielded 18 studies and 67 effect sizes involving a total of 6006 participants. Results with the random effects model showed that EF was significantly posit...

Creativity plays an important role in human society as well as in individual development, and creativity in the domain of science is a specific form. A body of research had demonstrated the role of divergent thinking in creativity. The role of convergent thinking had also been recognized, but more empirical evidence was needed. To investigate the i...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between preschoolers' cognitive abilities and their fairness-related allocation behaviors in a dilemma of equity-efficiency conflict. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 99) decided how to allocate five reward bells. In the first-party condition, preschoolers were asked to choose amo...

The German Questionnaire to Assess Developmental Resources for Children and Adolescents (FRKJ; Lohaus & Nussbeck, 2016b) is a theoretically-based and empirically-validated diagnostic questionnaire which estimates six personal resources (empathy, self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-control, sense of coherence, optimism) and four environmental resources...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between preschoolers' cognitive abilities and their fairness-related allocation behaviors in a dilemma of equity-efficiency conflict. Four- to 6-year-olds in Experiment 1 (N = 99) decided how to allocate 5 reward bells. In the first-party condition, preschoolers were asked to choose amon...

The moderating role of preschoolers' affective empathy between theory of mind and their social behaviors (prosocial behaviors, aggressive behaviors)

Abstract: We focus our review on the cross-cultural studies on the development of theory of mind. We present evidence that the acquisition and development of theory of mind is cultural-universal as well as cultural-specific. Although children from different cultural backgrounds pass false belief task at about 4 years old, they show significant diff...

Objective: The aim of this research was to examine how candidates’ spatial working memory (WM) and visual perspective taking (VPT) skills could predict their training success. Background: To make pilot selection more effective, a body of research has focused on selection criteria. WM and VPT might be highly relevant to pilot training. However, very...

Studies have confirmed a variety of physical and psychological benefits of physical exercise in children, but it remains unclear if there is a relation between physical exercise and children’s social competence. Considering that social interactions are often involved when children do physical exercise, we speculated that physical exercise might pre...

Empathy for pain is evolutionally important and context-dependent. The current study explored the effect of physical cue on 4- to 5-year-old children’s empathy for pain with two experiments. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of valid and invalid physical cue as compared to baseline (without cue) in pain evaluation task (evaluating the pain inten...

已有研究表明个体心理理论的获得和发展既有文化普遍性, 又表现出文化特异性。为了探讨儿童心 理理论发展的影响因素, 越来越多的研究者开始关注社会交流的作用。亲子交流是儿童早期社会交流中很重要的组成部分, 与儿童心理理论的获得和发展密切相关。文章分别比较了抚养者的亲子谈话和儿童情景记忆的中西文化差异, 以及它们与心理理论发展的关系来理解中国儿童心理理论获得与发展的特异性, 最后提出了一些未来研究需要进一步探讨的关键问题。

The present research explores how culture influences individuals’ psychological proximity to the past and future, which may predict differences in perceived self‐continuity across time. In Studies 1 and 2, we hypothesized and found that Chinese participants saw the past and future as more connected and subjectively closer to the present compared to...

For centuries, scholars have been puzzled by the distinct human prosociality. A variety of explanations have been proposed to unveil the mystery of it and nearly all these explanations have focused on the role of complex cognitive processes. In this paper, we propose a novel hypothesis that human prosociality is touch-scaffolded. We argue that earl...

Humans are the most prosocial primate species and they often exhibit high levels of prosocial behavior toward genetically unrelated individuals. Traditional evolutionary theories are not sufficient to explain the individual differences and mechanisms related to prosociality. In this study, we focused on the gene–situation interaction in prosocial b...

In this investigation of cultural differences in the experience of obligation, we distinguish between Confucian Role Ethics versus Relative Autonomy lay theories of motivation and illustrate them with data showing relevant cultural differences in both social judgments and intrapersonal experience. First, when judging others, Western European herita...

Four groups of undergraduates identified by Span of Short-term Memory( STM) and General Self-Efficacy(GSE) were recruited to examine their metamemory monitoring of materials varying in level of difficulty. The materials were semantically related or unrelated pairs of Chinese word. The results showed the ratings of JOL, FOK and JOC and the accuracy...

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to compute and attribute mental states to ourselves and other people. It is currently unclear whether ToM abilities are universal or whether they can be culturally influenced. To address this question, this research explored potential differences in engagement of ToM processes between two different culture...

Previous research shows that the recipient's verbal communication about desires increases young children's sharing behavior. The current study examined how an adult partner's non-verbal communication through eye gaze influenced sharing behavior in children from different cultures. We presented one hundred forty-six 3- to 5-year-old American and Chi...

The function of empathic concern to process pain is a product of evolutionary adaptation. Focusing on 5- to 6-year old children, the current study employed eye-tracking in an odd-one-out task (searching for the emotional facial expression among neutral expressions, N = 47) and a pain evaluation task (evaluating the pain intensity of a facial expres...

The Chinese phonograms consist of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The two types of radicals have different functional contributions to their host phonogram. The semantic radical typically signifies the meaning of the phonogram, while the phonetic r