大家好，欢迎收听本期的Ace Radio爱思广播，我是Molly。今天我们节目非常荣幸地邀请到美国著名心理学家—朱利安·泰普林教授。泰普林教授是俄勒冈大学心理学博士，哈佛大学医学院及马萨诸塞州总医院社区脑力保健项目博士后研究员。自1982年首次来到中国参加第一届美中心理学研讨会以来，他就与中国结下了不解之缘。泰普林教授不顾年高体弱，先后26次来到中国。他40多年从事未成年人心理研究，已出版泰普林家庭教育系列丛书。他为中国父母和孩子写作了16本书，其中4本获得“2008冰心儿童文学奖”。开创了为中国家庭教育量身定做的TSP教育项目，走访了上百所学校和教育研究机构，成功举办了300多场关于现代教育全新理念的演讲。2010年泰普林教授推出了自传——《前世我是中国人》。他还拿出在中国出书的全部稿费以及动员亲友捐赠的资金，在四川条件相对艰苦的天全县、马边县兴建了两所希望小学，为中国贫困地区的孩子创造了接受良好教育的条件。他还是成都荣誉市民，如今更是成为了成都全球影响力人物评选特别奖候选人。这样一位充满大爱和智慧的美国老教授，有着怎样的故事呢？今天我们一起通过节目更近距离地来认识和了解泰普林教授吧。

节目收听地址：http://www.engbus.cn/aceradio/2011-11-03/131.html （上）
                           http://www.engbus.cn/aceradio/2011-11-07/132.html （下）

In My Previous Life: I was a Chinese — Interview of Prof.Taplin

Hello, everyone, welcome to today’s Ace Radio, I’m Molly. It’s our greatest honour to invite Prof. Julian Taplin to our programme! Prof.Taplin, a well-known American psychologist, graduated from University of Oregon with a doctorate degree of Psychology and served as a Post-doctoral Researcher on mental health care of community in both Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Taplin first came to China in 1982 as a delegate to the 1st US-Chinese Psychology Convention and he has been inseparable with China ever since. Regardless of his 74 year-old age and debilitated health condition, he has been to China for 26 times until now. For over 40 years, he has always engaged in the research work of juvenile psychology and has had Taplin family education book series published. Prof.Taplin has written 16 books for Chinese parents and children, four of which won the prize of “Bing Xin Children Literature Award” in 2008. What’s more, he has pioneered the Three Skills Program (TSP) tailored to Chinese family education, visited over one hundred schools and Education Research Institutions, and held more than 300 lectures about the new concepts of modern education successfully. In 2010,Prof.Taplin published his biography In My Previous Life: I was a Chinese, which tells the engrossing story of his remarkable relationship with China. Alongside mentoring youth through his expertise, he endowed a thrilling new project with the financial support of his relatives and friends and all his own remuneration of published books in China: two Hope Elementary Schools which had been built in comparatively very poor Tianquan County and Mabian County in Sichuan. He tries all his best to set the stage for the children in poverty-striken areas of China to receive better education. As a result of his earnest efforts, he has been awarded as both the Chengdu Honorary Citizen and the nominee of the Special Award for Globally-Influential Figure of Chengdu. What are the unvarnished stories of this American professor whose pure love and wisdom permeate our hearts? Let’s start to know more about the incredible life of Prof. Taplin through our programme!

Interview

Molly：Prof.Taplin, thank you so much for coming here. It's our greatest honor to invite you to be the guest of Ace Radio on www.engbus.cn.

Prof.Taplin: I'm happy to be here.

Molly: Thank you. Have you ever thought of being a psychologist or an educator in the future when you were a little child?

Prof.Taplin: No, actually not. My father was an engineer and a military man, my mother was a musician, so psychology and education never crossed my mind. I was educated in England, and they decided I should be a scientist.

Molly：So your childhood has a great impact on your final choice of this path, right?

Prof.Taplin: Yes, it did. For a whole lot of reasons, I had a very choppy, changing childhood. I went to 13 schools before the university. It was not clear what I would study in the university. But my parents said, “We will pay for 3 years not 4.”So I asked myself what I could do in 3 years in a 4-year university. And they think what I had preparation in was science physics in particular. And I did the physics major in my undergraduate study. Of course, people are not gifted in physics can do little with the Bachelor’s Degree of Physics. You have to be very gifted and you have to be able to go on. After I have finished military service and a technical job with missiles of  Rockets, I had to look around. I was rather depressed. I talked to a psychologist. His testing suggested psychology or public administration. And interestingly my career in the last 14 years was as the public administrator for the psychological service for children in the State of Delaware.

Molly: That psychologist who encouraged you and your own personal experience helped you figure out the lifelong career path, right?

Prof.Taplin: Yes. That fitted my interests and aptitudes very well.

Molly: How do perceive the importance and value of psychology in our daily life and our society?

Prof.Taplin: Psychology can begin to show us many of things about the equipment that we are equipped with, namely the brain. What does the brain do, how does it work and most of all how may we modify our own thinking and control our emotions. Psychology is now beginning to branch into the area of looking at happiness for functioning. It used to be preoccupied only with mental disease and mental difficulties, neurosis, psychosis, conduct disorders and so forth. Now it’s beginning to look at what is it to make people happy and how do people become fully function.

Molly: So according to your research, what are the most common psychological difficulties and problems occurred in the current days around the world?

Prof.Taplin: There are great statistics on the mobility rates of psychological problems. Depressions are very common. You name “a difficulty” and there is a technical rate for it. It rates “differ somewhat cross-societies”. Some societies experience more pressure, more tension, and more depression. Other societies experience more alcoholism,more drug abuse. So each society has its own particular profile but become a group of difficulties, depressions, neuroses, anxieties and psychotic disorders and so forth. Common to all people.

Molly: Yes. Sometimes people frequently keep saying about IQ(Intelligence quotient,), EQ(emotional quotient) and things like that. And some parents treat these notions really seriously. As a psychologist, how do you think of these terms? Do you favor any of them?

Prof.Taplin: Well, I don’t like any of those labels. IQ has been measured, measured and re-measured. And some of the latest findings suggest that it isn’t an IQ, there are several. And EQ was, in my judgment, a wonderfully effective marketing tool for what I talked about earlier, cognitive coping strategies. Of course, coping is a good thing, but the idea that might be measured and reduced to a number out of a hundred is absolutely ridiculous. We learn to cope and we learn in different ways. Cognitive coping and adaptation to the world is a great given gift of human life. We cope, we adapt, we do it better or not so well. And helping people learn to do it better is the psychological profession’s core in many ways.

Molly: I’ve learned that you have established a program called “TSP” which helps people who are under frustration and depression get through the difficulties and cope with the negative side-effects. Can you explain specifically about this program?

Prof.Taplin: It is simply a name that stands for Three Skills. And the background is this .when I came in 1998 with my colleague Professor Xiangrong from Sichuan  Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, I found that we were getting many of the same questions as a matter of rigid requirement. I always ask parents and teenagers whoever I’m talking to for written questions on scraps of paper at the end of the talk. That means I have a resource base that tells me what are their concerns, what are they interested in, what are they nervous about, what are they depressed about and so forth. Well, we got to look in through great bags of these questions and found that they sorted into 3 areas —questions that need answers about thinking and emotional control ; questions that are about the teaching and learning of behavior and questions that really need protecting the child and preventing difficulties. And so three skills – thinking, teaching & learning of behavior, protecting & preventing. And I would talk about a variety of very practical ideas from decent research that parents and youth can apply and be agent of their own helping because the idea that you should go see a licensed, experienced psychotherapist is nonsense for much of China. They aren’t such people and maybe people can help themselves,they should be such people.

Molly: Can you give us some examples? Let’s say, take a little kid for instance, who fails to perform what his parents supposed him to act. Of course, parents always want to give the best to their kid both emotionally and financially, and they try to teach their kid right from wrong,but in vain in the end. So what should the parents do under this circumstance?

Prof.Taplin: A lot depend on the age of the child. Let me give you a response for a young one. I got a question once that said, “My child insists on watching a whole lot of television and I don’t know what to do.” In the answer I said: “well, you know there is a button on the front of the television, you turn it off. And if for some reason that doesn’t work, pull the plug out of the wall. And afterwards, the mother came up to me, she was angry and said “You don’t understand. You don’t understand. If I do that, he’ll kick me and he’ll bite me and he will scream.” So the question is, who is the parent here? The child is ruling the mum! So we have to begin to think about that. So I teach the great old law of behavior —behavior that is followed by positive consequence occurs more often, and behavior that is followed by negative consequence occurs less often. We know that attention, power, touch are very positive consequences for children. So when mother comes and she says, “I have done everything. I have done everything but nothing changes. He gets worse and worse and worse.” When we go look and see what’s actually happening. We find that there he is:  it is 8 o’clock in the morning and he is supposed to be leaving for school and he is half-dressed. She starts to dress him, she combs his hair, and she gets the stuff for him. And she is doing opera all this time, “You bad boy, why are you doing this to me? It is so awful.” He is an opera star, why won’t he do anything differently. He is slow and he gets positive consequence. The treatment is slow. It’s as slow as long as it took him to learn to be slow and useless. It will take him to decide it is not worth it. She has to very consistent. She has to say something like, “It is 8 o’clock in the morning and you haven’t done what you should do. And so the negative consequences going to be that you don’t get something whatever at home, especially like the Internet, television, friends or something. That gets administered consistently until the child decides I would rather not be slow because when I do, the parent who is really the parent says the consequence that I don’t want. And that’s the difficulty always the parent doesn’t want to be firm or doesn’t want to be strong.

Molly: Sometimes they spoil the child even without noticing the fact, right?

Prof.Taplin: Yes, yes, that is an important point to make. When mother and father are making the child worse, they don’t mean to. Their hearts are not bad. They don’t mean to. It is inadvertent because they don’t understand that the positive consequence for the bad behavior will make it stronger. And they don’t understand that the attention and shouting and having opera is positive consequence for the child – he gets control.