Zhu Ying

Introduction

Zhu Ying (朱滢, born 1939) produced one of the most cited discoveries in Chinese psychology with a design of almost domestic simplicity. The self-reference effect — memory is better for information related to oneself — was established in the West; Zhu and his students asked what happens in a culture where the self is understood as relational. Chinese participants, they found in 2001, remember words judged as descriptive of their mother just as well as words describing themselves, and both better than words describing a celebrity. Brain-imaging studies in 2006 and 2007 then showed the convergence inside the skull: self-referential and mother-referential judgments recruit similar medial prefrontal activation in Chinese participants. The self, in East Asian samples, includes the mother — a neural-level demonstration that the self is a cultural artifact as much as a cognitive one, and a founding result for Chinese social and cultural neuroscience. He spent his career at Peking University, edited the country's standard Experimental Psychology textbook, and in March 2026 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Chinese Psychology Research.

Early Life and Education

Zhu was born on January 2, 1939, in Liuzhou, Guangxi. He entered Peking University's psychology program in 1957, in the discipline's difficult middle decades, and later spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan (1983) as the borders reopened.

Academic and Professional Career

He taught at Peking University for his whole career, as professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Psychology (now the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences), building its memory and cognition program and, later, its cognitive neuroscience direction; he chaired the Department of Psychology from 1988 to 1996. He served on the State Education Commission's psychology teaching guidance committee from 1995 to 2000 and edited the national planning textbook Experimental Psychology (《实验心理学》, Peking University Press, in multiple editions). In March 2026, at the 14th Academic Conference of Chinese Psychologists, he received the field's Lifetime Achievement Award for the self and cultural-neuroscience research program.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The relational self, demonstrated

The self-reference/mother-reference studies turned a philosophical claim — that East Asian selves are interdependent, in the vocabulary of cultural psychology — into an experimental and neural result. Alongside the work of Kaiping Peng and Ying-yi Hong on culture as situated knowledge, it helped make China a place where questions about culture and mind are tested rather than merely asserted.

Experimental psychology as a discipline

His textbook standardized how Chinese students learn experimentation — design, psychophysics, signal detection, and the logic of inference — extending the tradition of careful method associated with Jing Qicheng's generation into the imaging era.