Ye Haosheng

Introduction

Ye Haosheng (叶浩生, born 1955) inherited Chinese psychology's historical memory — and then argued that the discipline's future lay in remembering the body. A doctoral student of Gao Juefu at Nanjing Normal University (PhD 1991), he became the standard-bearer of China's history-of-psychology tradition, editing the multi-volume History of Psychology (《心理学通史》) and the widely used History and Systems of Western Psychology that trained the discipline's middle generation. Then, from around 2010, he opened a second front: a stream of papers introducing and systematizing embodied cognition — the view that cognition is grounded in the body's sensorimotor systems — for Chinese cognitive science, making him the field's most visible advocate of a movement that has since spread through Chinese psychology departments. He has served as vice president of the Chinese Psychological Society and long chaired its theoretical psychology and history committee.

Early Life and Education

Ye was born on August 17, 1955, in Xuzhou, Jiangsu (family roots in Tai'an, Shandong). He entered Nanjing Normal College's education department after the restored gaokao, and took his master's and doctorate in the history of psychology at Nanjing Normal University, completing the PhD in 1991 under Gao Juefu — the discipline's chief historian — in the last years of the master's life.

Academic and Professional Career

At Nanjing Normal University he rose to professor (1997) and doctoral supervisor (1998), led its psychology discipline from 2000, and directed the Institute of Psychology in the School of Education Science. He later moved to Guangzhou University as professor of psychology and dean of its College of Education, directing the university's Center for Psychology and Brain Science. Within the Chinese Psychological Society he served as vice president and long chaired the theoretical psychology and history-of-psychology committee; he was an associate editor of Acta Psychologica Sinica and directed the national-level quality course "History of Psychology" (2006). He holds the State Council special allowance.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The discipline's memory

His textbooks and the multi-volume History of Psychology continued Gao Juefu's project for a new era: a Chinese account of Western psychology's schools and systems that treats them critically rather than as a gallery of heroes — the background knowledge against which Chinese psychologists read everything from behaviorism to the cognitive revolution.

Embodied cognition as research program

His 2010 paper "Embodied cognition: a new approach in cognitive psychology" and the books that followed introduced Chinese cognitive science to the embodied turn — cognition as shaped by bodily form and action — and organized it into a national research conversation, extending Gao's lesson that psychology's past shapes its future into a claim about what the discipline's next decade should study.