Huixian is a doctoral student working with Professor Arie Kruglanski. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Master’s degree in Social Psychology from Beijing Normal University. Huixian is broadly interested in emotion and motivation and how they might impact the development of the self. She won her first independent research fund as a junior student for a project investigating between and within-persons associations among autonomy, vitality, and everyday creativity and got the results published in a top-ranked journal. She conducted experiments and interventions to examine whether compassion cultivation can promote forgiveness in her bachelor’s thesis research and received an award for outstanding thesis research from BNU. For her master’s thesis research, Huixian carried out a longitudinal study applying the measurement-burst design to investigate the influence of special emotional events on individuals’ authenticity development, following two hundred participants for six months and collecting their two-week daily diaries every three months.

Years of research exploration have led Huixian to ponder on what help psychological research can really do to individuals’ growth and well-being. This question brings her to the field of self-regulation and habit formation. I believe that the more we know of laws of self-regulation and habit formation, the more we are able to render the individual their control of life.

Areas of Interest

  • motivation science
  • emotion science
  • self-regulation
  • habit formation

Degrees

  • M.Ed.
    Social Psychology, Beijing Normal University, 2019-2022
  • B.S.
    Psychology, Beijing Normal University, 2015-2019

Awards

  • The National Scholarship, 2020
  • Excellence award for bachelor’s thesis, 2019
  • Excellence award for Outstanding Undergraduate Scientific Research, 2018

Conferences

  • the 7th International Conference of the Self-determination Theory, 2019
  • the 7th Internal Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) World Congress, 2021
Huixian
Email
xian213 [at] umd.edu