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How do high-achieving students, productive employees, or top-notch athletes achieve success? It is often not just a person’s ability that makes the difference between success and failure. But it is also their beliefs and behaviors that make them effective. How can we identify these adaptive beliefs and behaviors, and how can we harness this knowledge to help people succeed at their goals?

My research focuses on the mindsets and behaviors that motivate high performance and well-being. I also study how people think strategically about how to best direct their efforts towards their goals. My work involves developing theories of motivation and strategic self-regulation, which I then use to design psychological interventions that promote the adoption of adaptive mindsets and behaviors in work, education, and health.

Joshua John Clarkson received his B.A. in Psychology and M.A. in General Psychology, both at the University of North Florida, before receiving a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Florida.

His research interests focus broadly on the social and meta- cognitive processes underlying human behavior and offers specific contributions to the areas of attitude strength and structure, persuasion, self-regulation, and expertise.

His work has been published in various journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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I am interested in the processes of self-regulation, specifically in the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. In most real-life situations, people hold and intend to pursue several concomitant goals (e.g., to enjoy various culinary delights while also wanting a slim figure, pursuing career objectives while also wanting to spend time with family and friends). Additionally, environmental cues, social opportunities and personal factors can activate these different and potentially inconsistent motivations. My ongoing research is set to explore the regulation of multiple goals in multiple goal systems.

A primary focus of my research is on the processes of self-control. I am interested in how people protect their long-term goals from the influence of short-term motives or temptations. My research assumes that when short-term motives threaten the attainment of long-term goals, people proactively employ self-control strategies designed to offset the influence of short-term motives on their behavior. Self-control is often an intentional process of committing to long-term goals and eliminating tempting alternatives. However, self-control may also be an unconscious process. My research explores some of these deliberative and implicit self-control processes.

My research generally concentrates on issues related to motivation and performance. My primary current line of research focuses on mental depletion and its pejorative consequences for subsequent performance and acts of self-control. Our work (Clarkson, Hirt, Jia, & Alexander, 2010) has illustrated how perceptions drive the experience of mental depletion, over and above actual levels of depletion. Furthermore, these perceptions of mental depletion lead to restricted working memory capacity and performance decrements on subsequent tasks requiring self-control and self-regulation. Recently, we have been investigating the experience of replenishment, and how perceptions of replenishment of these mental resources lead to the restoration of performance following depletion. The roles of perspective taking, lay theories, and embodiment cues on the experience of depletion and restoration are currently being explored, as well as the links between physical and mental depletion. Finally, we are examining whether people's perceptions of mental depletion initiate efforts at counteractive self-control, in order to avert the negative consequences of mental depletion on the pursuit of important goals.

Additional lines of research focus on the flexibility with which individuals maintain their self-conceptions. For many years, I have been researching the phenomenon of self-handicapping, specifically looking at the ways in which people sabotage their own performance by embracing handicaps which can later serve as viable excuses for poor performance. We have been addressing some fundamental questions about the effectiveness of this strategy for the individual, both in terms of maintaining favorable self-conceptions of ability (cf. McCrea & Hirt, 2001) as well as the interpersonal costs and benefits of this strategy for how others view the handicapper (Hirt, McCrea, & Boris, 2003). Clearly, the implications of this work suggest that the short-term attributional and self-esteem benefits of this strategy are outweighed by considerable long-term costs (both on interpersonal dimensions and on psychological well-being more generally). Our current work focuses on the social consequences of engaging in self-handicapping as well as self-handicappers' awareness of how their actions are perceived by others. Importantly, our work addresses the reasons for the consistent gender differences that are found in self-handicapping, serving to explain why women are more reluctant to employ this strategy relative to men (Hirt & McCrea, 2009).

I have another line of research that look at the effects that one's affective state has for performance. Specifically, we have focused on the contributions that positive affect consistently makes in facilitating creative performance (Hirt, Devers, & McCrea, 2008). Finally, we have work that investigates the development of allegiance and identification, particularly with regard to sports teams and fanship, and its consequences for personal and collective self-esteem as well as behaviors illustrative of one's commitment and loyalty to the team.

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Bob is the Associate Provost (Education) at NUS and the Director of ALSET. Prior to launching ALSET in 2016, he spent 10 years as the Vice Dean of Education at Duke-NUS Medical School, where he established an innovative pedagogical method called TeamLEAD, one of the first to incorporate the “flipped classroom” approach in medical education. He previously spent 17 years as the Director of Residency Training in Pediatrics at UCSF. He holds a B.S. in Human Biology from Stanford and an M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco.

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I'm an associate professor with research interests that span digital libraries, natural language processing and information retrieval. Specific interests include: scholarly digital libraries, definitional QA, statistical MT, text summarization, verb analysis, optimizing access to scientific literature, web crawling, and combining search and browsing user interfaces under human-computer interaction. I'm a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE, and a member of the ACL, NUS' NGS, and PREMIA. I graduated with my Ph.D. from Columbia University. Here's a link to my LinkedIn profile and my perennially outdated 1-page C.V. Please feel free to contact me about any synergies between your research interests and mine. Thank you!

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I am a husband of one beautiful wife and a father of three wonderful children. At the same time, I also lecture at the National University of Singapore in the Department of Psychology. I am interested in looking at how education shapes perceptions on learning and developing the youth holistically, especially in the areas of critical thinking, curiosity and creativity. Concurrently, I am also interested in innovations and advances in education, and how technology can be utilised to provide a more personalised form of education for individuals and support the development of good teaching.

My work examines how stereotype threat (worries people have about confirming negative stereotypes about their group's ability through their own performance) can negatively impact women's ability to learn and perform in the domain of math. Research in the lab has shown that the stereotype that "women are bad at math" can inhibit women's ability to learn by reducing their ability to encode math-related information; and it can even reduce or eliminate incidental learning (i.e., leaning that is unintended, but that is acquired naturally through repeating the same task several hundred times). The negative gender-based math stereotype also hurts women's ability to perform mathematical tasks that they have learned well. In our work, stereotype threat hurts performance by making women's gender identity more accessible in memory, thereby undermining the cognitive resources needed to solve difficult math problems.

In addition, my lab has conducted a large amount of work trying to understand when evaluations that are measured indirectly (by using implicit attitude measures that are based on response latency and difficult to control) are inconsistent with evaluations measured directly (by asking people their attitudes on a scale). My collaborators and I have found much support for the idea that directly and indirectly measured attitudes can be formed and changed by different processes. Specifically, directly measured attitudes seem most responsive to logic (although sometimes flawed) and verbalizable rules. Indirectly measured attitudes seem most responsive to pairing the attitude object with positive or negative information. When directly and indirectly measured attitudes are inconsistent, our work indicates that this state is uncomfortable and people are motivated to eliminate these negative feelings by, for instance, learning more about the attitude object.

I received my bachelor's degree (2001) in psychology from University of Arizona, and my M.A. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) in social psychology from Ohio State University. Currently, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at National University of Singapore.

Much of my research attempts to address the following questions: How do properties of attitudes influence persuasion? How does tailoring a persuasive message to the audience promote attitude change? What individual characteristics of an audience are relevant for message tailoring? To answer these questions, I investigate various structural properties of attitudes as well as subjective perceptions about such properties. People might have little knowledge about a policy but perceive themselves to be very knowledgeable; they might have many conflicting reactions toward an in-law but not be aware of their ambivalence; they might give to charities because doing so makes them feel happy but think that their giving is based on their beliefs about civic duty. My research suggests that understanding the differences between structural properties of attitudes and subjective perceptions of such properties helps us predict when and how message tailoring promotes attitude change.

I am also interested in examining intergroup attitudes under conditions of threat and anxiety. For instance, how do people react to an ingroup member who behaves poorly or an outgroup member who behaves well? This research has implications for how people judge others when they feel anxious or threatened.

Ramadhar Singh, an experimental social psychologist trained at Purdue University, served as a faculty member at Patna University (1968-73), Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1973-79), and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1979-88). He moved to Singapore in 1988 and retired as a Professor of Psychology from the National University of Singapore in 2010. He spent his sabbaticals at the University of Rochester and the University of Oxford (2003-04) and at Purdue University (2008). During 2010-16, he was the Distinguished Professor of Management at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

Singh’s articles on diversity and fairness, impression formation, interpersonal attraction, intergroup relations, job satisfaction, judgment and decision making, leadership, models of humans, prediction of performance, and research productivity have appeared in prime journals of applied, developmental, and social psychology and of management. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, British Psychological Society, National Academy of Psychology (India), Singapore Psychological Society, and Society of Personality and Social Psychology. The Association for Psychological Science, Washington DC lists him among the Faces and Minds of Psychological Science. Singh is currently a Consulting Editor of the Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology and the Review of General Psychology.

Eliot Smith is Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program. He received his PhD from Harvard University and is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He currently serves as Editor of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. Much of his current research focuses on the role of emotion in intergroup relations. With Diane Mackie, he has co-edited a book (From Prejudice to Intergroup Emotions) and published numerous articles on group-based emotions, prejudice, and intergroup conflict. Other research interests include the ways cognitive processes are shaped and altered by the individual’s social context, especially people’s networks of interpersonal relationships and group memberships.

Professor Strauman's research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological processes that enable self-regulation, conceptualized in terms of a cognitive/motivational perspective, as well as the relation between self-regulation and affect. Particular areas of emphasis include: (1) conceptualizing self-regulation in terms of brain/behavior motivational systems; (2) the role of self-regulatory cognitive processes in vulnerability to depression and other disorders; (3) the impact of treatments for depression, such as psychotherapy and medication, on self-regulatory function and dysfunction in depression; (4) how normative and non-normative socialization patterns influence the development of self-regulatory systems; (5) the contributory roles of self-regulation, affect, and psychopathology in determining immunologically-mediated susceptibility to illness; (6) development of novel multi-component treatments for depression targeting self-regulatory dysfunction; (7) utilization of brain imaging techniques to test hypotheses concerning self-regulation, including the nature and function of hypothetical regulatory systems and characterizing the breakdowns in self-regulation that lead to and accompany depression.

How do we conceptualize well-being and how can we improve the well-being of societies, organizations, and individuals? This question is of increasing concern to academics from many fields and policy makers. I seek to delineate the social, economic, and political determinants of well-being at both the micro- and macro-level with an eye toward public policy. Much of my research is currently based on psychological theories that I am seeking to integrate with other fields such as business, economics, and sociology.

Another question that drives my research is: how can we accurately quantify constructs of interest in individuals, organizations, and societies? This entails research on newer measurement models that are integrated with latent class and multilevel techniques. With latent class modeling, we can identify groups of individuals that have unique signature patterns (e.g., signature strengths); with multilevel models, key characteristics of collective units (e.g., organizations and societies) can be measured more effectively. At a more basic level, I seek to advance current measurement models and taxonometrics that impact construct validation techniques.

My hope is to contribute to the advancement of individual, organizational, and societal well-being, through well-being research, and to enhance scientific rigor through methodology.

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I am interested in positive emotion, appraisal theory, and religion processes.

Positive Emotion

In this decade, I have invested much of my research resources into the study of positive emotion. As a result of both serious contemplation and causal wonderings, and with the help of an able and dedicated team of students and expert collaborators, I have contributed papers specifically on hope (Tong, Fredrickson, Chang, & Lim, 2010), romantic love (Chan, Tong, Tan, & Joh, 2013), pride (Ho, Tong, & Jia, 2016), humility (Tong et al., 2016), and awe (Koh, Tong, & Yuen, accepted). My next paper will be about self-compassion.

Beyond these scattered findings, the bulk of my work on positive emotion centers on gratitude. Since obtaining tenure (2011), I have been developing and testing a new idea called the social alignment perspective of gratitude. This work examines how the grateful person responds to social forces, and predicts that gratitude makes a person more likely to align with the thoughts, emotions, behaviors, attitudes, and needs of other people. I have found preliminary evidence to support this view (Jia, Tong & Lee, 2014, Jia, Lee, & Tong, 2015; Ng, Tong, Sim, Teo, Loy, & Giesbrecht, 2017). Currently, I am pursuing and pushing this idea further, in a bid to uncover the conditions that render a grateful person more vulnerable to social influence.

Appraisal Theory

My Masters thesis (under Prof. George Bishop) and Ph.D. dissertation (Prof. Phoebe Ellsworth) examined the appraisal theory of emotion. Appraisal theory is a major theoretical framework that explains the elicitation, differentiation, and consequences of emotions by means of specific patterns of appraisals. My work has examined non-conscious appraisal-emotion processes (Yang & Tong, 2010; Tong, Tan & Tan, 2013; Tong & Teo, accepted), non-linear appraisal-emotion relationships (Tong, Ellsworth, & Bishop, 2009; Tong & Tay, 2011), personality influences (Tong, 2010, JoP), sufficiency and necessity relations (Tong, 2010, C&E), differentiation of positive emotions (Tong, 2015; Tong & Jia, 2017), meta-appraisal confidence (Tong, Teo, & Chia, 2014), temporal trajectories of appraisals (Tong et al., 2009), and the issue of methodological precision in measuring appraisals (Tong et al., 2005), among others. My collaborators and I have also examined the appraisal profile of self-anger (Ellsworth & Tong, 2006) and tested a novel construct called appraisal differentiation (Tong & Keng, 2017). Hence, my research tests the boundaries of appraisal theory and goes beyond examining appraisal structures to investigating complex appraisal-emotion processes.

Religion

I am new to the science of religion. I often wonder how people might respond under the influence of religion. History shows us that both good and bad things can come out of it. I have made some modest headways by showing how religious factors affect or are related to risk assessment (Chan, Tong, & Tan, 2014), prosociality (Lin, Tong, Lee, Low, & Gomes, 2016), and emotion (Tong, 2017; Tong & Teo, accepted). I am now embarking on an ambitious project with Dr. Paul Reddish that contrasts different theories on religion and bridges the science of religion with the science of emotion.

Dr. Yu received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, M.S. from Peking University, and B.S. from Nankai University. He is currently affiliated with Department of Management, School of Business and also Department of Sport, Physical Education and Health, School of Social Science, and Department of Physics, School of Science. Prior to joining HKBU, Dr. Yu served as an Assistant Professor at the department of psychology, National University of Singapore.



His research interests include Neuroeconomics, Social neuroscience, Computational Psychiatry, Aging, and Child Development. His lab mainly uses brain imaging methods (fMRI/EEG/fNIRS) combined with experimental tasks to study the neuropsychological mechanisms of economic and social decision making. He has published more than 120 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, with over 3500 citations. He serves as the associate editor of Neurobiology of Stress (IF=7.2).