The 7th Psychologists Forum of China and Applied Psychology Summit was held in Beijing on July 6th to 8th.

On July 6^th-8^th, the 7^th Psychologists Forum of China and Applied Psychology Summit took place in Beijing. The forum drew more than one thousand experts and scholars with backgrounds ranging across the social and natural sciences, including several nationally prominent psychologists. Presentations and discussions explored the insights of applying a psychological perspective to real-world situations such as education and management. These are pressing issues, attendees agreed, as applied psychology is playing an increasingly important role in social life. There was a general consensus that the discipline will only meaningfully contribute to society and make continuous advances if it is truly put into practice on a real world basis. 

“The future development of psychology is dependent on its integration with disciplines such as medicine and biology,” said Fan Daiming in his opening address. Fan, the vice president and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, stressed the importance of interdisciplinary integration for psychologists to generate new theories and expand the overall domain of their practice.

Dealing with practical issues

China’s ongoing social transformation presents many challenges. With its versatile employment of the principles of psychology, applied psychology can shed light on practical issues in areas ranging from the environment, the market and industry to the administration of justice, the military, and medicine.

Applied psychology not only includes major fields of psychology such as industrial and organizational psychology, forensic psychology, educational psychology, athletic psychology and family psychology, but also includes branches of psychology such as applied social psychology and applied cognitive psychology. With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, the quick pace of technological innovation and the simultaneous changes in society and culture, applied psychology is a discipline with bright prospects.

“Before, we did not really gauge that many areas from a psychological perspective,” said Sun Shijin, director of the Department of Psychology at Fudan University. “In fact, looking at individuals, groups and organizations from a psychological perspective in order to analyze the various problems Chinese society is encountering as it develops enables us to offer solutions to these problems and formulate plans to fix or mitigate them. Applied psychology has substantial real world impact.”

In the clinic, in the lab, in the world

Applied psychology emphasizes the practical application of basic psychological principles, so its research centers broadly on social, economic and cultural issues.

In light of the current challenges faced by the general model and philosophy of Chinese education, psychologists have been conducting extensive research at every level of education. Studies cover topics such as holistic or all-around education for primary and secondary school students (as opposed to ‘teaching to the test’ or exam-based education), adolescent learning and behavior, and college students’ physical and psychological health. In his well-received presentation on the last morning of the conference, Zhang Xuexin, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, discussed the potential to use the principles of adaptive testing in modern psychological testing theory to reform the gaokao (Chinese college entrance exam). Zhang proposed the “mass gaokao”, which would utilize the internet and computers to personalize questions to the individual test taker, greatly expanding the range of content that could be covered and completely revamping the form of the traditional gaokao.

Actually, computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has already been widely used for TOEFL and GRE, and Hanban, an organization based at Shandong University which develops Chinese language tests, has adopted CAT for the BCT (Business Chinese Test). Zhang Xuexin spoke optimistically about the potential of adaptive personalized exams to change the basic orientation of education, rendering mechanical memorization and extensive exercises obsolete. Scholars regard this sort of application of psychology principles in education as an avenue worth further exploration.

The importance of applied psychology has never declined in the field of social management, as can be seen from its relevance in analyzing group behavior on the Internet. Yue Guoan, chairman-designate of the Chinese Psychology Society and a professor at Nankai University, presented his findings on the psychosocial mechanisms of group behavior as part of a project for the 973 Program (a government program to develop basic research in technology and innovation, also called the National Basic Research Program) and a project for National Social Science Fund. Yue’s projects sought to reveal the mental processes of individuals participating in a group activity by discovering the effect of an individual’s emotional state, social identity, and sense of self and collective efficacy on his or her involvement in the group activity. His research design combined psychology and informatics to explore the correlations between emotional content of microblogs and the stock market in China.

Yue Guoan said: “The Internet is the opposite of real life. The laws of human psychology and behavior reflect those of the real world in some ways, but in other ways are very different, making the internet a readily available resource to study psychological variables.”

Scholars have also looked into the application of psychology in organizational management. Shi Kan, a professor at Renmin University of China, provided a systematic breakdown of psychology’s role in elevating leadership and managerial capacity.  Elaborating on the qualities he believes are essential to developing a future leader’s “psychological capital”, including the ability to inspire the dedication of personnel he or she supervises, Shi said that excellent leaders must possess  self-regulation and control, rational decision-making capabilities, communication skills, and strong competence in team building, conflict resolution and crisis management.

Applied psychology also plays an irreplaceable role in individual mental health. There are numerous clinical uses of applied psychology, such as interpreting a person’s spiritual motivation for committing suicide, using hypnosis to improve a students’ confidence, and stimulating a child’s creativity through educational games.

Christine Walsh, an American clinical psychologist, introduced an emotional therapy called Thermal Biofeedback, in which patients develop awareness of their stress level by monitoring skin temperature as an index of blood flow—lower temperatures indicate higher stress, as blood becomes directed to internal organs when a threat is perceived. In turn, this awareness helps patients manage tension and reduce anxiety. Biofeedback shows that human beings have the potential to develop the control over their body and consciousness, Walsh affirmed.

Strengthening integration

Fan Daiming insisted that the future of applied psychology is in integrative medicine. He said that the current system of specialization in medical practice has led to numerous issues, including doctors’ inability to see the overall picture of a patient’s medical condition, an over reliance on data for diagnosis and treatment, incompatibility of different sorts of healthcare—not to mention the inconsistencies of Chinese and Western medicine—and an emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. Part of remedying this situation is to start from the ideas, Fan advised, better integrating medical theory.

Integrative medicine involves combining the medical knowledge and latest ideas on physical and mental illness from psychology, environmental studies and other major fields, Fan continued. In channeling this comprehensive perspective, Fan envisions a system of diagnosis and treatment where doctors, clinicians and scholars take the entire body as its starting point. Likewise, he believes one of the future paths of applied psychology is increased collaboration with adjacent fields—medicine, biology, sociology, etc.—to expand and build upon its existing base of theory and further current, as well as innovate new practices.

“Theory that is not translated into corresponding practice is a ‘lame person’, but practice without a theoretical basis is a ‘blind person’,” Sun Shijin mused. “Psychologists in modern China need to combine theory and practice.”

Wang Weidong, a professor at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, agreed with Sun Shijin’s analogy. Chinese psychology should adapt to the broader trends in contemporary Chinese society, emerging trends in local Chinese psychology, and the integration of traditional and contemporary culture and Chinese and Western culture, Wang said. By so doing, Wang suggested that Chinese psychologists can ascertain the psychological underpinnings of the “Chinese Dream” and promote the transformation of clinical psychology, educational psychology and organizational psychology.

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 472, Jul. 8, 2013

                                                                                                                           Translated by Zhang Mengying

                                                                                                                            Revised by Charles Horne

Chinese link:

http://www.csstoday.net/xueshuzixun/guoneixinwen/82023.html