Yunn-Wen Lien
Associate Professor of Psychology, National Taiwan University
Trace a path from Yunn-Wen Lien →About
Yunn-Wen Lien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at National Taiwan University, where she earned her PhD in cognitive psychology after doctoral study at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research spans reasoning, rule discovery, attribution, creativity, mind-wandering and mindfulness, and the influence of culture on cognition. In recent years her work has centered on how body awareness shapes cognition and emotion regulation, leading her to develop a locally grounded Body-Mind Axial Awareness (BMAA) method drawn from classical Chinese ritual dance. Taught at NTU for over a decade, the course studies its effects on interoception, psychological resilience, sense of agency, and well-being. Her work argues that the body, not the brain alone, is foundational to psychological functioning.
Key Contributions
- Developed the Body-Mind Axial Awareness (BMAA) method, a decade-long NTU course showing measurable gains in sleep, attention, emotion regulation, and resilience
- Bridges Western cognitive psychology with Eastern contemplative practice, studying how body awareness cultivates higher-order reflective thinking
- Researches dual-process cognition, asking when and why people engage deliberate 'System 2' reasoning
- Investigates mind-wandering and mindfulness, including their definition, measurement, and predictors
- Argues that psychological well-being is grounded in the body, offering a counterpoint to brain-centric and model-centric views of the mind
Videos & Interviews
Connections
Daniel Kahneman
Influenced byPsychologist & Nobel Laureate
Lien builds her research on the dual-process theory of cognition that Kahneman made famous: a fast associative System 1 and a slow, rule-following System 2. Her question is the practical one Kahneman left open, namely what makes a person actually switch System 2 on. Her answer moves from the head to the body. Awareness is what regulates the switch, and in East Asian practice that awareness has been trained through the body.
humanityisland.nccu.edu.tw
Francisco Varela
KindredBiologist, Philosopher & Neuroscientist
Varela's The Embodied Mind (1991) argued that cognitive science needed a disciplined practice of attending to experience, and found one in Buddhist mindfulness. Lien makes a parallel move from inside experimental psychology, using a tradition closer to home: Body-Mind Axial Awareness grows out of East Asian ritual dance (雅樂舞), and she tests its effects with the field's own measures. For both, the body is where a mind learns to notice itself, and that noticing can be trained.
humanityisland.nccu.edu.tw · The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991)
Su-Ling Yeh
KindredDean of Science & Distinguished Professor, National Taiwan University
This is a pairing, not a documented collaboration: no co-authored paper or co-taught course between them turned up. They are colleagues in NTU's psychology department, and both came out of the experimental study of attention and reasoning before turning toward awareness and well-being. Yeh argues that the experiencing self is what AI cannot reach. Lien's body-mind practice is a decade-long attempt to strengthen exactly that self.
