THE VALUE of NOSTALGIA in a LAND of UPHEAVAL Psychology Is an Increasingly Relevant Discipline As the Destabilizing Effects of Rapid Social Change Take Hold in China

CHINA | NATURE INDEX JULIE GLASSBERG

Zhou Xinyue’s cash study showed that handling clean money elicits more benevolent thoughts and actions. THE VALUE OF NOSTALGIA IN A LAND OF UPHEAVAL Psychology is an increasingly relevant discipline as the destabilizing effects of rapid social change take hold in China.

BY FLYNN MURPHY The customer, Zhou’s student, is unaware of Over coffee in Beijing, Zhou says although the hypothesis. She will repeat the test with each she has spent a great deal of research time t a bustling farmers’ market in south vendor, priming on one occasion with a fresh focused on money, it is people that interest her. China, a woman buys half a kilo of banknote and on the other with a dirty note, “Money is a psychological resource for us to leafy vegetables. She hands over a leaving at least three days between each trans- buffer threats.” Agrubby ¥10 note. Then she pauses, takes back action. Each time, the student will ultimately This theme of managing threats is common the cash from the vendor, doubles her order, pay with a regular bill, before weighing her pur- to Zhou’s other research interests: nostalgia and and pays with a larger bill. chased goods to see if she’s been short-changed. social support. In the twelve years since Zhou It’s no regular transaction. The ¥10 note The study will find a “small but reliable” shift completed her PhD she has played a central is grubby by design — a psychological prop in vendor behaviour that links handling dirty role in the growing body of research that exam- soaked in mud by a professor of psychol- notes with overcharging customers. ines them. ogy named Zhou Xinyue at nearby Sun After six more experiments in her lab, Zhou Threat management is a fertile area of study Yat-sen University. The vegetable seller and her collaborators in China, the United in the world’s fastest-growing economy. “In and 15 others are subjects in a study to States and Portugal, conclude that touching China, everything is changing constantly and test Zhou’s hypothesis that touching clean and clean money elicits thoughts and actions asso- people don’t feel secure,” says Zhou, who took dirty banknotes can alter people’s financial ciated with fairness — and that touching dirty up a research post at Zhejiang University in behaviour. money elicits selfish, greedy behaviours. 2015. “Change brings its own threats.”

PSYCHOLOGY 1,400 China’s widescale PAPERS CLIMB population movement has The number of psychology 1,200 contributed to a sense of articles in the Web of social displacement and Source: InCites Source: Science (WoS) increased 1,000 uncertainty. signi cantly between 2005 and 2015. 800

600

Number of WoS articles Number of WoS 400

200

0 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

RESEARCH IMPACT 1.4 While China’s number of 1.2 psychology articles has Source: InCites Source: grown, the overall impact of that research 1.0 has declined slightly, and is still below world 0.8 average (1). 0.6 2005 2015 0.4

0.2 Category-normailzed citation impact

0 Mainland United United Japan China Kingdom States

American social psychologist and expert on Mao Zedong died five months before Zhou efforts to understand the restorative quality of willpower, Roy Baumeister, has collaborated was born. The worst excesses of China’s Cul- nostalgia, and how it protects and fosters men- with Zhou since 2008. He singled out her study tural Revolution died with him. But the psycho- tal health. on dirty money as demonstrating her creativ- logical scars her parents bore from the period, In a 2008 paper for Psychological Science, ity and experimental rigour. He helped to fine- and from an earlier famine that claimed some Zhou hypothesized that longing sentimentally tune the paper before it was published in the 30 million lives, spurred her interest in psychol- for the past was a natural mechanism to cope Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in ogy. “My parents had all these stories about how with loneliness. She proposed a homeostatic 2012, one of 39 papers and book chapters Zhou they were mistreated during their youth. How relationship between social support, loneliness has published in the past dozen years. and nostalgia. To Baumeister, Zhou is emblematic of Her team tested this with four studies, one a growing number of Chinese psychology on more than 750 children who had migrated researchers who are engaging international from rural areas to the manufacturing hub of collaborators to investigate topics with par- “EVEN WHEN THE Guangzhou, another on nearly 200 migrant ticular national relevance. Ripe for investiga- workers at a luggage factory in nearby Dong- tion are the social issues that come with an PAST IS SO HARD, guan, and two on smaller groups of undergrad- ageing population, a generation of children uate students in Shanghai. without siblings, the result of the one-child MEMORIES CAN STILL Participants were presented with multiple policy, and the mass migration of people from choice questions such as ‘How often do you villages to cities. BE CHERISHED.” feel completely alone?’ and researchers ranked their loneliness on the 10-item UCLA Lone- NATIONAL RELEVANCE liness Scale. Zhou’s group measured the par- Born in the riverside town of Fuling, Sichuan, people were fighting, opening fire in the streets. ticipants’ predisposition to feelings of nostalgia in 1977, Zhou grew up surrounded by litera- And how, during the famine, a lot of people using the seven-point Southampton Nostalgia ture. The only daughter of Mandarin-language died of starvation.” Scale, and graphed their levels of social support schoolteachers, she was entranced by Cao But it was a period they looked back to on the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Xueqin’s 18th-century classic Dream of the Red fondly, Zhou says. “I thought that was so inter- Social Support (MSPSS). They asked partici- Chamber, a love story that pitches a powerful esting. Even when the past is so hard, memo- pants if they could ‘count on their friends when family’s decline as an allegory for erosion of ries can still be cherished.” things went wrong’. China’s last imperial dynasty. Years later, she would play a central role in Combining the results of these measures,

PSYCHOLOGY TO THE FORE AS SOCIAL PRESSURES MOUNT AGENCY/GETTY ANADOLU

China has around 400 psychology schools and institutes — a steep increase from the five it counted in the 1980s. The expansion of the discipline is remarkable considering research ceased during the Cultural Revolution. Psychology schools and institutes were boarded up and psychologists banished to the countryside. Han Buxin, the deputy general of the Chinese Psychological Society, says the field’s roots in China stretch back more than two millennia to references in ancient texts such as the Analects of Confucius and Laozi’s Dao De Jing. Chinese polymath Chen Daqi opened the country’s first psychological laboratory in 1917 with the support of the education luminary, Cai Yuanpei. Cai studied under the German experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig in the early 1900s. When Cai was appointed head of Peking University in 1917, he supported Daqi’s plan to open the laboratory. More than a decade later Cai, as head of China’s peak science academy, helped found Zhou and colleagues found that feeling lonely rely on professional psychologists to help cope China’s Institute of Psychology, where reduced a person’s perception of social sup- with tragedy, whether a personal crisis or a Han now works. port, but triggered feelings of nostalgia. These natural disaster. Han says the impact of China’s feelings could in turn increase the perception Although Zhou collaborates with interna- modernization, and the accompanying of social support. They concluded nostalgia tional researchers, her nostalgia studies receive social stratification, have brought counteracts loneliness. the most interest in China. She attributes this mental health research to the fore. The paper was a collaboration with a col- to the Chinese milieu — the rapid, often unex- Researchers have focused on social league at Sun Yat-sen University in Guang- pected change, and the alienation of internal issues, suicide, divorce, and the impact zhou, and two leading nostalgia researchers migration, both experiences Zhou can relate to. of urbanization. Internet addiction and from the University of Southampton, who had In 2003, turbid water engulfed her family the one-child policy are also closely previously shown that this sentimental affec- home in Fuling, washing away the concrete studied, as is how China’s vast internal tion for the past could buffer one’s fear of death. remains of her childhood. “My old home migrant economy affects workers and Co-author, Constantine Sedikides, described is under the Yangtze river.” It was a planned those they leave behind. “People with Zhou as “remarkably talented”. flood, a stage in the construction of the world’s mental disorders now realize that Zhou’s work is part of the growing body largest hydroelectric dam downriver in Hubei psychology can be of help,” says Han, of psychology research being published in province. About 1.13 million Yangtze-river who works on mental health in the China. Between 2005 and 2015, the num- locals were uprooted by the project. “My old elderly. Psychologists are embedded in ber of articles in this discipline indexed in house, my old school — there’s no physical evi- schools, businesses, government and the Web of Science has increased from 98 to dence to prove they existed. That upsets me.” the military. Psychological organizations 1271. Han Buxin, deputy general of the Chi- Zhou is now examining how migration in and societies have proliferated, while nese Psychological Society, says that is partly early life affects people as adults, using data subfields such as neuropsychology, due to sustained investment from China’s from the Chinese General Social Survey, a management psychology and Natural Science Foundation and the Science national longitudinal study. Preliminary find- comparative psychology have also and Technology Ministry. But he says the dis- ings, as yet unpublished, link early-life migra- become popular. But, Han says, the cipline has gained legitimacy and relevance tion with geographical ‘restlessness’ as well as English language remains a significant as China has become more socially stratified. impaired self-control in later life. Forced and barrier to Chinese psychology research “Each class is facing more stress from either voluntary relocation may also have the same getting the recognition it deserves. “It’s life, or the working environment,” he says, impact. “My research helps me to understand a source of stress,” he says. ■ adding that people are increasingly willing to myself a little better.” ■