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Racial minority status in the face of workplace ostracism : a double-edged sword?
No full textNearly 70% of American employees experience ostracism at work, where they are ignored or excluded. This situation is particularly pronounced among employees from racial minority backgrounds, partly due to the devaluation of their racial membership in society. However, little is known about how racial minority employees interpret, respond, and cope with workplace ostracism, posing a tremendous challenge for business leaders to promote an inclusive workplace in an increasingly diverse environment. While racial minority employees face more workplace ostracism than their majority counterparts, we predict that their racial minority status may also help them rationalize this subtle form of mistreatment. In a ten-week weekly diary study, we found that racial minority employees experience more workplace ostracism than racial majority employees, supporting Hl. Based on Weiner\u27s (1986) attribution theory, we conducted a vignette-based experimental study to examine internal (e.g., blaming oneself for poor performance) versus external attributions (e.g., attributing ostracism to discrimination) of workplace ostracism. Data were collected from 415 participants (195 White, 220 non-White) across four conditions (inclusion, exclusion with performance cue, exclusion with race cue, and exclusion with no cue). We found that exclusion with performance cues led to higher feelings of guilt than exclusion with no cue (supporting H2). Additionally, racebased attribution resulted in less guilt than exclusion with no cue (supporting H3). Understanding these attributions can help minority employees interpret exclusion without unnecessary selfblame, encouraging more proactive coping strategies. Our findings underscore the need for organizations to promote inclusive practices and create a diverse environment where all employees feel a sense of belonging and acceptance
新書發佈會 : 《大明穿越時空記》
No full text大明穿越時空的故事即將展開！本活動將正式發佈「古刻薪傳」跨學科研究項目及展覽的教育延伸成果——繪本《大明穿越時空記》。
發佈會邀請繪本創作者分享研究及創作的過程。以一本少雪齋私人收藏的由明成祖仁孝皇后所編纂的《大明仁孝皇后勸善書》為出發點，以穿越時空的敘事手法，深入淺出地展現中國書籍及刻印技術的歷史演變和多元面貌，藉此培養小朋友對中華文化和中國藝術史的興趣。
Photo Gallery:https://gallery.ln.edu.hk/lib/booklaunch-20250624
Beyond east and west : rethinking cultural psychology through Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textIn two recent publications-one in American Psychologist (Kitayama et al., 2022) and another in Annual Review of Psychology (Kitayama & Salvador, 2024)-my colleagues and I have argued that, outside of the Western world (e.g., Western Europe and North America), many cultures are deeply interdependent, meaning that members of these cultures define themselves through their commitment to their group and embeddedness within social relationships. However, the form of this interdependence varies widely, shaped by long-standing ecological and historical factors. One region that has been largely overlooked in cultural psychology is Sub-Saharan Africa. In this context, we identify a unique form of interdependence: self-promotive interdependence. Within this cultural system, within-group competition is not merely tolerated but embraced as a mechanism for skill development and group success. Individuals see their identification with the group and their competitive engagement as mutually reinforcing. Moreover, success is viewed as a shared social experience. As a result, people express both socially disengaging positive emotions (e.g., pride, self-esteem) and engaging emotions (e.g., connection, warmth) in response to both personal and ingroup success. This emerging evidence challenges existing frameworks of interdependence and opens new avenues for cultural psychology research. I will discuss these insights and explore their implications for future studies
戴君鳳以「臆」解《詩》研究
No full text晚明文人戴君恩（1570-1636）的《讀風臆評》以「臆」解讀《詩經》，是明代中後期《詩經》的解讀經學向文學轉向思潮的具體體現。本文在學界研究的基礎上，以戴氏《讀風臆評》為核心，結合其《剩言》《繪孟》等著作，探討其解《詩》體系的生成背景、方法論特徵及詩學意義。第一章梳理晚明思想文化背景，指出戴氏受心學運動、文學復古及制藝風潮的影響，並補充其師承關係；第二章聚焦以「臆」解《詩》的理論建構，分析戴氏將莊子「天籟」說與「以意逆志」的理解論相融合，強調直覺體悟與主體想像，打破傳統美刺框架，顛覆傳統經學解《詩》框架；第三章通過分析戴氏對《詩經》的評點實踐，闡釋戴氏如何將前人理論融入詩歌審美分析中，提出「情與景會」的創作論，並重構情景關係，進一步揭示戴氏對清代情景觀的啟發；第四章通過分析戴氏總結的「格法」，解構詩歌內容，融合莊子超驗哲學與心學理論，建立以「虛」解詩的向度，推動《詩經》解讀從附會現實走向文學審美的轉向
Essays on economic behaviour
No full textMy PhD thesis comprises three studies. The first study examines prosocial behavior; the second analyzes vaccination behavior; and the third investigates communicative behavior in the context of trade. Specifically, the first study investigates the impact of donation visibility on individual prosocial behavior. It develops a sequential-move model based on the prosocial behavior framework proposed by Benabou and Tirole (2006). In Stage 1, individuals decide whether to attend a charity event, and if so, in Stage 2, decide on the amount to donate. In this model, an individual’s decision to engage in prosocial behavior is influenced by three main factors: intrinsic motivation to do good for others, the cost of prosocial behavior, and considerations of social image. The study finds that increasing the visibility of donations in Stage 2 can raise the average donation amount in that stage, but it also leads to more participants opting out in Stage 1. This, in turn, may result in a decrease in total donations.
The second study empirically examines how behavioral preferences—such as prosociality, risk tolerance, and omission bias—influence individuals’ decisions to take COVID-19 vaccines for themselves and their children. Vaccines are widely acknowledged as one of the most efficient and effective strategies for preventing infectious diseases. This study analyzes real-world vaccination behavior using a combination of incentivized experiments and survey data collected in three waves. The incorporation of these diverse methodologies is designed to enhance both the internal and external validity of this study. The results show that individuals with higher prosociality are more likely to receive the initial vaccine dose, a pattern consistent across both student and general population samples. In the context of parental decision-making, the study finds that greater risk tolerance and lower omission bias predict a higher likelihood of vaccinating children.
The third study is coauthored with my supervisor Professor HONG Fuhai. Historical accounts suggest that language evolves with the expansion of trade, particularly in the East-West encounters over recent centuries. In this context, this study experimentally examines how trade benefits influence the development of a common language between individuals with different linguistic backgrounds, using a communication game in a highly abstract trade context. First, laboratory evidence shows that when individuals with different languages communicate, effective information transmission occurs, leading to the emergence of a stable common language. More importantly, trade benefits significantly influence the emergent languages when two groups meet: the party that benefits more from the trade is more likely to adopt the language of the other. Moreover, trade gains encourage bilingualism, with those benefiting more being more likely to attain proficiency in both languages. Additionally, international trade could be one of the driving factors for people adopting a foreign language as their primary means of communication. The mechanisms behind this native language shift can be attributed to psychological and cognitive cost considerations. The third study provides new insights into how asymmetrical trade benefits shape the emergent languages when two groups with different language backgrounds interact
Essays on operational issues of online medical consultation platforms
No full textThe increased demand for Online Medical Consultation (OMC) services has accelerated the development of Online Medical Consultation Platforms (OMCPs). OMCPs are third-party digital platforms on which patients can access medical consultation services with comparatively less effort and lower cost, while physicians can expand their service coverage and benefit financially from the provision of paid OMC services in their spare time. Although OMCPs have attracted a growing interest in academia, the role of various decision-making behaviors of physicians on these platforms on their patients and themselves remains unclear. To fill this research gap, we conduct two empirical studies based on proprietary datasets from a prominent OMCP to investigate the impacts of physicians\u27 online operations management strategies and provide decision supports for enhancing patient satisfaction and demand for physicians in OMCP settings.
The first study aims to understand the impact of response times in different stages of an OMC service process on patient satisfaction. Specifically, it builds on signaling theory to investigate the joint effect of positive and negative signals that response time has on patient satisfaction. Using a transaction-level consultation service dataset from an OMCP in China, we find inverted U-shaped relationships between response times before and during the service process and two dimensions of patient satisfaction (attitude and efficacy). We also apply construal level theory to investigate the moderating effects of professional status, familiarity level, and regional affiliation, offering insights into how psychological distance factors shape the relationship between response time and patient satisfaction. Our findings demonstrate that a patient\u27s regional affiliation and familiarity with a physician strengthen the curvature of response time-satisfaction relationship, while the physician\u27s professional status has the opposite effect. Our findings provide decision support for managing response time and enhancing service quality in OMCP settings.
The second study aims to understand the impact of service flexibility on OMC demand. Building on prior research regarding transaction cost, the study considers three types of technology-enabled service flexibilities and investigates their roles in bolstering OMC demand as well as the moderating influences of physician- and market-related factors. To validate our hypotheses, we conduct regression analysis on a proprietary dataset from a prominent OMCP. Owing to four-way interactions derived from analysis, we employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify how configurations of service flexibility types and physician- and market-related factors lead to high and low levels of OMC demand. Findings from this study contribute to the e-healthcare operations literature by not only attesting to the importance of service flexibility in boosting OMC demand, but also uncovering configurations among service options, service providers, and market factors in determining the level of OMC demand outcome
Self-interested cooperation in humans : an agent-based model of self-interest and an experimental investigation of cooperation willingness
No full textCooperation is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour, enabling us to achieve goals that would be impossible to accomplish individually. However, its success relies on the willingness of the group members to contribute to the collective effort. This thesis investigates self-interested cooperation in group decision-making tasks under diminishing reward functions. In these tasks, a few cooperators can significantly improve the group decision quality, generating rewards that outweigh the costs of cooperation. However, as more individuals cooperate, the marginal increase in group reward diminishes, which eventually causes the cooperation costs to exceed the benefits. This dynamic results in an equilibrium of cooperators and free-riders.
In three agent-based simulation studies, we investigated factors affecting the equilibrium of cooperators and free-riders. Therefore, we conducted evolutionary simulations based on a group decision-making metaphor, where the group was given a set of alternatives, each representing a specific reward and had to choose one based on noisy cues that were assessed with decreasing validity. The first study focussed on environmental effects. We found that the cooperation rate was increased under lower costs, more alternatives to choose from, and when cues followed a non-compensatory structure. Our second study investigated the impact of group structure. Building on the simulation from Study 1, we introduced diversity in group members. Results showed that diversity in cognitive styles and information sources led to increased cooperation rates, whereas diversity in ability had no such effect. In the third study, we investigated how different costs in the acquisition of cue information would affect the cooperation rates and depth of information acquisition of cooperators. We designed the simulation with noisy cues with steeply increasing validities, where the first cue was the least valid and the cheapest. The setup incentivised the group to achieve the highest rewards when cooperators fully informed themselves. We found that high information costs hindered the sustainability of fully informed decision-making, especially when acquiring richer information was significantly more expensive.
In two experimental studies, we investigated how humans follow the equilibrium predicted by self-interested cooperation. In Study 4, individual subjects played a game where they chose between cooperating and free-riding within a group of preprogrammed agents. Cooperation consistently increased the other group members’ rewards, while the choice of cooperating and free-riding offered varying rewards for the participants themselves under different conditions. The participants were explicitly informed of the reward for both options. Participants generally cooperated when it aligned with their self-interest. In the fifth study, groups of actual participants played a game where everyone had to choose between cooperation and free-riding. The reward had a diminishing increase with more cooperators. We found that the equilibrium between cooperators and free-riders affected group cooperation rates, showing that selfinterested cooperation plays a key role in group cooperation.
This thesis provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical investigation of self-interested cooperation in humans. Through simulations, we have shown that environmental and group-structural factors affect the equilibrium of cooperators and free-riders. Furthermore, we prove this equilibrium shapes human decision-making in group cooperation contexts
Scientific multimodal summarization : integrating knowledge across textual, visual and auditory content
No full textAs scientific publications increasingly incorporate multimodal content, ranging from textual descriptions to figures, tables, presentation videos, and audio, there is a growing need for summarization systems that can effectively process and integrate information across these diverse modalities.
This work presents a comprehensive exploration of Scientific Multimodal Summarization, introducing a series of novel architectures and datasets aimed at advancing this emerging field. 1): We begin by introducing CMT-Sum, which integrates multimodal scientific source content (i.e., primarily paper text and figures) to generate high-quality textual summaries and identify representative graphical abstracts. We refer to this task as Scientific Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output, SMSMO. To validate the proposed model, we construct two datasets and introduce a new benchmark that combines automated and human evaluations to assess SMSMO performance. 2): We then extend our approach to handle richer multimodal input (i.e., paper text, figures, video frames, and audio tracks) and propose Hier-SciSum, a hierarchical fusion architecture that fuses the multimedia sources with a two-layer strategy: the first layer performs pairwise fusion between text and each other modality (e.g., text-video, text-audio, text-figure), while the second layer integrates these enriched representations through cross-modal fusion. The hierarchical design enables a deeper and more nuanced understanding of multimodal relationships. 3): To address the high computational cost associated with modeling four scientific modalities (text, figures, videos, and audios), we introduce Uni-SciSum, a lightweight yet effective transformer-based framework. This model employs a Query-Transformer-based BridgeNet as a modality-aware intermediary between modality-specific encoders and a large language model (LLM) decoder. By using cross-modal summary contrastive learning during pretraining and prompt-based learning during fine-tuning, the model efficiently learns to align and summarize across modalities. We release two benchmark datasets that include textual, visual, and auditory features along with the corresponding summaries. 4): To better capture the structured nature of long-form scientific content, particularly in multimedia documents following the structure of IMRaD (i.e., Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion), we propose localize-then-summarize LENS, a structure-aware summarizer. This model includes a Video Facet Localizer (VFL) to identify presentation video segments corresponding to specific paper sections and a Memory-enhanced Multifacet Summarizer (MMS) to generate structured-aware summaries. By employing cross-modal memory, LENS effectively captures faceted information and retrieves salient details across sections, thereby generating a comprehensive summary that preserves fine-grained, section-aware details.
Together, this work offers a robust foundation for the future exploration of scientific multimodal summarization systems that aim to produce comprehensive, visually enriched, and structured summaries to enhance the efficiency of scientific communication
The relations between online communication, social capital and well-being in Chinese preadolescents
No full textIn the digital era, preadolescents (aged 9–12 years) increasingly use social media platforms for communication and social interactions. However, research on whether online communication contributes positively or negatively to preadolescents’ well-being is inconclusive. Moreover, the underlying mechanism linking preadolescents’ online communication and well-being remains unclear. Hence, the research objectives are twofold. First, based on the concepts of social enhancement perspectives and self-determination theory, this study investigates the bidirectional relations and potential mechanisms between preadolescents’ online communication factors (including frequency, online self-disclosure, online perceived responsiveness) with four targets (family members, real-life friends, online friends, and online strangers) and well-being (including subjective and psychological needs satisfaction). Second, based on social capital theory, it explores the mechanism behind the links, testing the indirect effect of online communication on well-being via social capital. Using a three-wave longitudinal design, this study recruited a sample of Chinese preadolescents (n = 758, aged 9–13 years, Mage = 10.03, SD = 0.74, 44% girls) who completed the assessments at three time points with six-month intervals.
The Cross-Lagged Panel Model (CLPM) was used to test the main hypotheses. First, the results showed some bidirectional associations between online communication indicators and well-being indicators in different relational contexts. For example, among family members, bidirectional relationships were found between (1) frequency and life satisfaction; (2) frequency and psychological needs satisfaction; (3) online self-disclosure and subjective well-being (life satisfaction, positive affect); and (4) online perceived responsiveness and subjective and psychological needs satisfaction. Among real-life friends, bidirectional relationships were found between online perceived responsiveness and (1) subjective well-being (life satisfaction and negative affect) and (2) psychological needs satisfaction. Among online friends, a bidirectional relationship was found between online perceived responsiveness and psychological needs satisfaction. Among online strangers, bidirectional relationships were found between frequency and psychological needs satisfaction.
Second, the mediation effect of social capital was found only among family members, with no significant effects observed in other target groups. The results indicated that social capital from family members mediated the following relationships: (1) Life satisfaction, positive affect, and psychological needs satisfaction at Time 1 positively predicted social capital from family members at Time 2, which positively predicted online self-disclosure to family members at Time 3. (2) Negative affect at Time 1 negatively predicted social capital at Time 2, and social capital at Time 2 positively predicted online self-disclosure and online perceived responsiveness with family members at Time 3. (3) Psychological needs satisfaction at Time 1 positively predicted social capital at Time 2, which positively predicted online perceived responsiveness from family members at Time 3. Additionally, there was a positive reciprocal mediation effect of social capital from family members between online perceived responsiveness from family members and life satisfaction.
These findings indicate the importance of differentiating communication roles when constructing theories about the relationship between online communication and preadolescents’ well-being. They also highlight the important role of online communication with family members in fostering positive development for preadolescents in the digital era. Therefore, it is recommended that families facilitate supportive online communication with preadolescents to enhance their well-being
《紅高粱家族》中男性角色的尋根與民族認同：以余佔鰲為中心的分析
No full text本論文聚焦於莫言長篇小說《紅高粱家族》中男性角色，特別是核心人物余佔鰲的形象建構，探討其在「尋根文學」脈絡下的民族認同與文化身份再現。作為中國當代文學中尋根潮流的重要代表，莫言通過現代敘事策略重新審視歷史與個體身份。《紅高粱家族》以強烈的民間敘事色彩與語言張力，揭示個體生命與家國命運的緊密聯繫，並透過男性角色的敘事視角提供了對民族文化精神的深入反思。
本文首先從尋根文學與民族認同理論出發，探討其與男性敘事之間的關聯，並分析莫言如何通過對高密東北鄉文化的書寫，將「尋根」視為對傳統文化的回溯與現代民族身份的重構。其次，文章將深入分析余佔鰲在小說中的行動模式與文化象徵，探討其與土地、高粱、暴力與戰爭等元素的深層互動，如何展現出一種原始而激烈的陽剛生命力，進而成為民族精神與歷史記憶的承載者。
本研究旨在補足現有莫言作品研究中偏重女性角色與母權書寫的視角，強調男性角色在尋根敘事中作為文化主體的重要性。透過對文本的細讀與文化符號的深入分析，本文試圖揭示《紅高粱家族》如何在尋根文學框架中展現民族認同與文化身份的建構，並進一步探討莫言如何透過男性角色的形象塑造，對當代文化及民族認同的多重性與其轉型過程進行深層反思與詮釋