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Volume 7, Issue 4 (December 2017)
Announcements
 

BSI Conference 2018 will be held on 6 February 2018 (Tuesday) at the Orchard Hotel. The conference theme is “Public Trust in Singapore”. Speakers and panelists in the conference include Peter Ho, Arnoud De Meyer, Mildred Tan, Lim Soo Ping, Christopher Tan, Debra Soon, Jeremy Lim, Lim Ee-Peng, Tan Kian Hoon, Chua Mui Hoong, Laurence Lien, Zainul Abidin Rasheed, Kanwaljit Soin and David Chan. Details will be available when registration opens in early January 2018.
   
In November 2017, BSI Director Professor David Chan received the Long Service Award from Minister K Shanmugam (Home Affairs and Law) in appreciation for his years of dedicated voluntary service to the Home Team.
 
BSI Outreach
 
The following are some BSI outreach activities that took place in October-December 2017.
 
At the Singapore Health and Biomedical Congress attended by 3500 scientists, practitioners and leaders, Professor David Chan delivered a plenary address where he shared the applications from behavioural sciences to healthcare and health in Singapore.
 
At the Ministry of Education Gifted Education Conference attended by 500 principals and teachers, Professor David Chan delivered the Keynote Address where he discussed the notions of success and failure in Singapore, and the development of future leaders.
 
Upcoming BSI Seminars
 
16 January 2018
Plebeian Bias: Selecting Crowdsourced Creative Designs for Commercialisation
Seminar by Anirban Mukherjee
Assistant Professor of Marketing, SMU
 
30 January 2018
Why Being Bored May Not be a Bad Thing After All - Effect of Boredom on Creativity and Deviant Behaviour
Seminar by Grace Park
Assistant Professor of Psychology, SMU
 
6 March 2018
Effects of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Social Network Density on Expression of Positive and Negative Emotions: A Large-Scale Study of Impression Management by Facebook Users

Seminar by Liu Pan
Research Fellow, BSI, SMU
 
13 March 2018
The Role of Self-Construal in Metaphorical Cleansing
Seminar by Albert Lee
Assistant Professor of Psychology, NTU
 
27 March 2018
Rising Inequality, Worsening Economic Status? Evidence from a Numeric Experiment and a Survey Study
Seminar by Chiang Yen-Sheng
Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
 
3 April 2018
How to Thrive Creatively with Conflicts: A Within- and Between-Culture Examination of the Creative Benefits of Paradoxical Frames
Seminar by Angela Leung
Associate Professor of Psychology, SMU
 
Highlights of Recent BSI Seminars
 
5 September 2017
Nai Ze Ling, Psychology PhD Candidate, SMU, presented a seminar titled “Perceiving More Benefits and Fewer Burdens: Grateful People Have More Satisfying Relationships”. She discussed her research on how gratitude may influence relationships through perceptions of benefits and burdens.
 
26 September 2017
Brandon Koh, Psychology PhD Candidate, SMU, presented a seminar titled “A Time for Creativity: How Future-Oriented Schemas Facilitate Creativity”. He discussed his research that examined how the way people conceptualise the future may influence their performance on tasks that involve creativity.

 
     
3 October 2017
Mike Cheung, Associate Professor of Psychology, NUS, presented a seminar titled “Analysis of Big Data in Social and Behavioural Sciences: A Theory-Driven Approach”. He discussed an approach that uses conventional multivariate statistics such as meta-analyses and path analysis to handle large datasets.
     
17 October 2017
Charles Abraham, Professor of Psychology Applied to Health, University of Exeter Medical School, presented a seminar titled “How Can Small Groups Promote Health and Well-Being?”. He discussed how group-based behaviour change interventions can be used to enhance people’s health and well-being.
     
24 October 2017
Andree Hartanto, Psychology PhD Candidate, SMU, presented a seminar titled “The Role of Experiential Factors in Shaping our Cognition: Evidence from Bilingualism and Video Games”. He discussed the factors involved in bilingualism and playing video games that may influence one’s cognitive functions.
     
31 October 2017
Serena Wee, Assistant Professor of Psychology, SMU, presented a seminar titled “Vocational Interest Congruence and Job Performance: Person X Occupation Cross-Level Interactions”. She discussed the issue of person-work fit and the relationships linking gender, vocational interests and job performance.
     
14 November 2017
Cheng Chi-Ying, Associate Professor of Psychology, SMU, presented a seminar titled “Multiculturalism and Creativity: The Application of an Affective-Cognitive Model”. She discussed how creative performance may be influenced by cultural primes, emotions and the ability to integrate different perspectives.
 
BSI Research
 
The following is a recent journal publication based on work associated with BSI and led by Associate Professor Lin Qiu from Nanyang Technological University.
 
Qiu., L., Chan, S. H.M., & Chan, D. (2017). Big data in Social and Psychological Science: Theoretical and Methodological Issues. Journal of Computational Social Science.
 
Insights from Behavioural Sciences
 
In this regular section on Insights from Behavioural Sciences, we feature an invited commentary where Professor David Chan explained the concept of psychological capital, how it works and why it is important to invest effort now to build it for individual well-being and a strong Singapore society. He emphasised the urgency given the current circumstances in Singapore relating to various major disruptions, the threats from terrorism and the negative climate from controversies. The article was published in The Straits Times on 30 September 2017. [Link]

We also share a Science Feature interview with Professor Chan, who recently became the first scientist in the world to attain Elected Fellow status of all six major international psychological associations. He shared how his police days helped shape his world views and research interests. He also shared about what it means to be part of translating science to practice and cautioned against an academic system that motivates scientists towards a narrow type of scholarly behaviour that does not make good use of their expertise to solve practical problems for society. The article was published in The Straits Times on 20 October 2017. [Link]

 
 
Applications from Behavioural Sciences
 
In this regular section on Applications from Behavioural Sciences, we feature an invited commentary in which Professor David Chan discussed the psychology of motivation and performance, and explained why it is important to take the time to reflect on why we do what we do. The article was published in The Straits Times on 4 November 2017. [Link]
 

About BSI
 
The Behavioural Sciences Institute (BSI) is a multi-disciplinary research institute for creating, disseminating and applying scientific knowledge about human behaviours in various social, organisational and cultural settings. For more information on BSI, please refer to our website. Should you have any further enquiries, do contact us via the email or phone contact details provided below.
 
:http://bsi.smu.edu.sg
:bsi@smu.edu.sg
:+65 6828 0300