ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4871-4796
Web of Science Researcher ID K-4491-2019
PREVIOUS RESEARCH PROJECTS
Project | 01
Regulatory Focus Theory, Feedback and Achievement Motivation
Is success always motivating? How about failure? Histories tell us that many successful people have encountered setbacks and failures in their lives, but what makes them persistent and keep motivating? Regulatory Focus Theoy (Higgins, 1997) provides a clue that failure acts as a driving force for people with a prevention focus, compared with people with a promotion focus.
Based on this framework, my dissertation supervisor and I have investigated the moderating effects of regulatory focus between feedback and achievement motivation in the educational setting. Cultural difference resembles the moderating effect of regulatory focus.
More details can be found in our papers:
-
Shu, T.-M., & Lam, S.-F. (2011). Are success and failure experiences equally motivational? An investigation of regulatory focus and feedback. Learning and Individual Differences, 21, 724-727. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2011.08.002
-
Shu, T-M., & Lam, S.-f. (2016). Is it always good to provide positive feedback to students? The moderating effects of culture and regulatory focus. Learning and Individual Differences, 49, 171-177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2016.06.012
Project | 02
Criminal Justice and Psychology
Using psychology to study issues in criminal justice is also my interest. Attribution theory (Weiner, 1986) has been found to predict people's attitudes/behaviors on others' transgressions. My collaborators and I have studied the public's attitudes on the death penalty and severity of sentencing using the mock crime paradigms. Public's mindset matters and this is the antecedent of the attribution people make on others' transgressions.
More details can be found in our paper:
-
Tam, K.-P., Shu, T.-M., Ng, H. K.-S., & Tong, Y.-Y. (2013). Belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43, 603-611. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01041.x
My recent research interests focus on studying the psychological aspects of certain issues, such as the media's portrayal of mental illness, fear of crime, punitiveness, vulnerable suspects, insanity and genetic defense etc. Some of my students have been working on these topics...
Project | 03
Narcissism
Being one of the "dark triad" in personality psychology (the other two are Machiavellianism and Psychopathy), people scoring on the high ends of this dimension is believed to possess some "bad" attributes, such as grandiosity, egotism, lack of empathy etc. They are also found to be aggressive and punitive under some conditions. My collaborator and I have studied some attributes exhibited by the narcissists (both overt and covert types).
More details can be found in our papers:
-
Ng, H. K.-S., Tam, K.-P. & Shu, T.-M. (2011). The money attitude of covert and overt narcissists. Personality and Individual Differences, 51, 160-165. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.036
-
Ng, H. K.-S., Tam, K.-P., & Shu, T.-M. (2013). Narcissism and punitiveness in a non-ego-threatening condition. Personality and Individual Differences, 54, 442- 446. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.10.015
Some other new directions to understand more about narcissists are to understand the "true" self-esteem and the mechanism of their "enhanced self-concept". When putting narcissism into criminal justice, we can also use it as a variable in profiling.