Know Thyself

If (hu)man is the measure of all things, what is the measure of human?

Meta-Self Lab

School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University

Home

Welcome to the Meta-Self Lab!

The lab is led by Prof., Dr., Hu Chuan-Peng at the School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China. We are interested in how human beings process self-related information, with a “3M” approach: meta-science, (cognitive) modeling, and (psychological) measurement. We are also trying to apply the “3M” approach to the mental health issues in the real world.

Openness, transparency, and reproducibility are core values in our research. We keep learning new methods and and adopting new practices to make our research as rigorous and robust as possible.

Equality is another core value of our lab. We are dedicated to fostering a culture where everyone involved is respected and every idea is valued.

Research Fields

Metascience

the use of scientific methodology to study science itself

Self-Cognition

A knowledge representation that contains knowledge about us

Modeling

a mathematical model that embodies a set of statistical assumptions concerning the generation of sample data

Team

Hu Chuan-Peng

the Principal Investigator of Chuanpeng Lab

Publications

Lulu Li, Qingrong Cheng, Hu Chuan-Peng

June, 2025 In Behav. Res. Methods

An Extended Chinese Social Evaluative Word List

Social evaluation, i.e., people’s views of self, others, and groups, is ubiquitous and embedded in our language. In turn, social evaluative words are used intensively in studies of human social evaluation. However, standardized Chinese word lists for social evaluation are under-developed; the only available word lists are based on the big-two model of social evaluation (i.e., agency and warmth) and cover small numbers of words. To fill the gap, we conducted a survey with a relatively large sample (n = 1270, 50% female) and a large number of words (1908) that might describe extended social evaluative dimensions: appearance, socioeconomic status, sociability, competence, and morality. The participants rated the extent to which each word described a certain social evaluation dimension and how positive/negative each word was. Based on this dataset, we selected words that dominantly describe one of the five above-mentioned dimensions. The final word list has 1040 words, including 245 appearance words (143 positive, 11 neutral, 91 negative), 108 socioeconomic status words (36 positive, 2 neutral, 70 negative), 93 sociability words (53 positive, 5 neutral, 35 negative), 261 competence words (185 positive, 4 neutral, 72 negative), and 333 morality words (149 positive, 1 neutral, 183 negative). This word list provides an extended Chinese social evaluative word list and will serve as a useful resource for researchers in social psychology, linguistics, sociology, and computational social science.

Wanke Pan, Haiyang Geng, Lei Zhang, Alexander Fengler, Michael J. Frank, Ru-Yuan Zhang, Hu Chuan-Peng

February, 2025 In AMPPS

dockerHDDM: A User-Friendly Environment for Bayesian Hierarchical Drift-Diffusion Modeling

Drift-diffusion models (DDMs) are pivotal in understanding evidence-accumulation processes during decision-making across psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychiatry.

See all publications