Qian Zhang

Medical psychology equips future health professionals with concepts for understanding health, illness, adaptation, communication, and care, but knowledge alone does not ensure sound judgment under uncertainty and value conflict. This conceptual article develops a Situated–Dispositional Wisdom Development Framework linking psychological wisdom, adaptive intelligence, and practical wisdom in medicine. Dispositional wisdom denotes the relatively enduring, modifiable organization of wisdom-related resources and generative person–situation processes. Situated wise reasoning regulates thought through monitoring of epistemic limits, uncertainty, perspectives, and self-involvement, as well as adjustment of attention, information search, confidence, and integration. Its quality concerns context-sensitive, proportionate adjustment rather than monitoring frequency. Wise professional judgment is evaluated independently through its evidential, contextual, ethical, and practical adequacy. Professional commitments constrain deliberation, while case-specific aims are specified and revised within it. Reflection, feedback, meaning-making, and varied practice are proposed as pathways through which judgment episodes may alter later readiness. Comparable immediate gains may yield different maintenance and unprompted transfer depending on how episodes are processed. Regulatory burden and recovery are considered alongside judgment quality. Broader wisdom development requires converging affective and motivational evidence. A fictional teaching case illustrates the framework, which distinguishes elicitation from development and process from outcome, yielding testable implications for wisdom-oriented medical psychology education.

This study investigated how social-pragmatic cues modulate causal inference during Chinese discourse comprehension, bridging social cognition and language processing. Two self-paced reading experiments manipulated causal strength (Strong vs. Weak) and respect consistency (Respect “nin” vs. Disrespect “ni”) across coherent five-sentence discourses. Experiment 1, using an explicit causal judgment task, found that weak causality elicited longer reading times than strong causality. Notably, this causal strength effect was amplified under respectful address but reduced under disrespectful address. We interpret this finding as suggesting that the cognitive cost of processing a sociopragmatic violation—driven by mechanisms such as attentional diversion, emotional arousal, or pragmatic reanalysis—interferes with causal inference. Experiment 2, using an implicit reading paradigm, showed a persistent causal strength effect without modulation by respectfulness, and no spillover to subsequent sentences. This pattern indicates that sociopragmatic influences on inference may depend on task context and processing goals. Overall, the results suggest that while causal inference can occur automatically, its interaction with social cues appears constrained by cognitive resources and task demands. These findings offer new insights for how social-pragmatic norms interact with cognitive mechanisms in language comprehension, with implications for cross-cultural pragmatics and models of discourse coherence.

Anaphora is an essential means of maintaining textual coherence, the phenomenon of replacing one word or phrase in the preceding part of a discourse with another. At least two crucial stages are involved in anaphor processing: bonding and resolution. The links between the anaphor and potential antecedents are established in the former stage, which would be evaluated and integrated into the latter stage. We reviewed relevant event-related potential (ERP) studies that examined the time course of anaphor processing and neural oscillation studies that explored energy changes in alpha, theta, and gamma frequency bands, which were associated with attention, working memory retrieval, and integration, respectively. The existing neuroimaging studies revealed the involvement of language processing networks and the Theory of Mind (ToM). Further research should explore the neural correlates and the effects of potential factors on anaphor processing, which could help gain a more comprehensive picture from multiple perspectives.

Using original texts of Confucian and Taoist primary classics as materials, we conducted an eight-week educational intervention experiment combining classroom teaching and post-class reflection as cultural manipulation. Ninety-four sixth-grade students from three parallel mainstream classes were randomly assigned to three intervention groups, comprising two experimental groups (Confucian and Taoist values interventions) and a control group (natural science intervention). The results suggest that the Confucian intervention had a positive effect on interdependent self and holistic thinking, the Taoist intervention had a positive effect on independent self and holistic thinking, and the natural science intervention promoted analytical thinking.

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effect of contextual arousal on emotional word integration during discourse comprehension. We used two-sentence discourses as experimental materials. The first sentence served as an emotional context and described a high-arousal positive event, a low-arousal positive event, a high-arousal negative event, or a low-arousal negative event. The second sentence contained one negative word as the critical word, which was identical among different conditions. Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: high-arousal inconsistent, low-arousal inconsistent, high-arousal consistent, and low-arousal consistent. The ERP results showed that inconsistent emotional words elicited larger P200 and LPC than consistent words in the high-arousal context. However, only a P200 effect was observed for inconsistent emotional words in the low-arousal context. Our results indicate that a high-arousal context could lead to more elaborated emotional evaluation in the later stage of emotional word integration and suggest an important role of contextual arousal on the processing of emotional words during discourse processing.