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Off DeWall: Class Has Begun!

            What a first day! With all of its excitement, anticipation, and curiosity, we began our class yesterday. There are about 50 students in the course. They’re all 2nd or 3rd year students. At Sun Yat-Sen University, they have a separate campus for the 1st-3rd year students. It’s located in a small, sleepy town called Zhuhai (CHEW-HI). Mountains surround the town, rivers snake through campus, and there are luscious trees adorned with Spanish moss. Very pretty!

We began with course introductions and a brief lecture on how to think like a social psychologist. We focused on how social psychologists use the same scientific method that the “hard sciences” use, but that what we measure is often subjective. For example, you can’t go the local supermarket and order a six-pack of self-esteem. How, then, do you measure self-esteem when you can’t put your hands on it and toss it your backseat? It takes work, but you can devise clever and nifty ways to measure most psychological things you’re interested in.

To increase engagement with the material, the students broke up into small discussion groups that they’ll have over the next week. They’ll discuss the readings and write small makeshift “blog” entries each day to gauge their reactions. For their final assignment, they’ll write a short proposal on a student they would want to conduct. It should be a blast!

            I’m deeply grateful to get the opportunity to come and teach here. I’m picking up a few Mandarin phrases to help me get around (e.g., hello, how are you?, thank you, my name is…), sampling the authentic Chinese food, and just soaking in what a wonderful treat it is to connect with students who have never been to the United States. 

Off DeWall: Connected to Kentucky in China

Travelling to China takes a long time. After 24 hours of travelling (and two seriously delayed flights), I’m finally here! What, you might ask, was the first thing that I saw in the airport after getting off of my airplane? A Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant! KFC was the first American fast-food restaurant to open in China. I mentioned the KFC spotting to my hosts, who quickly pointed out how much they loved the Colonel’s recipe. I’m literally on the other side of the globe, yet I still feel very connected to my Kentucky roots.  

In 8 hours, I’ll start teaching my research methods in social psychology course. It has a lot in common with the 8-week courses that we’ll be offering in A&S Wired, with the exception that the course only lasts a week. The course has a small enrollment to facilitate connections with students and the faculty instructor. The course utilizes interactive features in which students respond to course readings in a public “open thread” format, which will enable other students to read and comment on their classmates’ thoughts. Finally, students get hands on experience participating and conducting social psychological research. Like all of you, they will learn the value and excitement of discovering completely new information. Thus, the students will gain knowledge about new scientific information and they get hands-on experience creating new scientific information through taking part in research, learning how to ask questions using the scientific method, and collecting data on questions that interest them. Very cool!    

Off DeWall: Wired co-Director Goes to China

Off DeWall: Wired co-Director Goes to China (July 20, 2011)

Wired has the mission of connecting members of the UK family with each other and our local and global communities. This is my first blog entry to show you how I live this mission. I’m in the air right now, on my way to China. I’ll be there for a month doing a bunch of different things devoted to connecting members of the UK family to the global community.

First, I’ll be teaching a short course to Chinese students at Sun Yat-Sen University, which is located in a town called Guangzhou (pronounced GWAN-JOE). It’s in the Southern Part of China, making it something like the Miami of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I’ll teach psychology students about social psychological research—how to do it, how to evaluate it, and how to get excited about it. I’ll focus on my areas of interest: interpersonal relationships, self-control, and aggression.

Second, I’ll give a speech to the School of Psychology on my research program on how people respond to social exclusion. I relish the opportunity to share the research we’ve conducted at the University of Kentucky with the Chinese faculty and students.

Third, I’ll have lots of meetings with my collaborator and host Xinyue Zhou, along with many other faculty and students. Xinyue and I have written a couple of papers together based on our mutual interest in social exclusion, the psychology of money, and aggression. When it comes to sharing knowledge and information, it’s truly a small world!  

Fourth, I’ll be staying in touch with all of you each day. Blogs are like sharks—if they don’t stay moving they die. I’ll snap pictures and keep you updated about my adventures. I can’t wait to share this experience with each of you.