Psychology reveals people’s psychological processes such as feelings, memories, thinking, emotions, needs, interests, motivations, and the general characteristics and laws of personality development. Educational psychology is the product of combining educational activities and psychologies. It is a science to explore the psychological laws in teaching and learning (Maestre, 2021). The research subjects of educational psychology are the psychological phenomena of students and teachers in education. It is not a subject that simply applies the general principles and methods of psychology to education (Priantini, 2021).

The psychology in IPE is the process of learning the basic political theories such as Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought, and correcting the ideological and moral character of educational subjects. Since the 1980s, the psychology in IPE has achieved systematic development and developed into an independent discipline. It comprehensively draws lessons from history, logic, pedagogy, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines, and becomes a discipline about Marxist theory. Its fundamental point is to explore people’s psychological changes (Tang and Shi, 2021). The differences between moral education and IPE are shown in Table 1.

The psychology in IPE is a science that analyzes the formation and development of people’s ideology and morality and gives the corresponding strategies (Sun and Wang, 2020). It is a subject that reveals the psychological mechanism and development laws. Educational psychology is widely used in all aspects of social production and life. Since psychology and IPE study people’s thoughts and consciousness, the research on the psychology in IPE also needs to discuss people’s thoughts and consciousness (Zhang, 2021).

Ideological and political education is an interdisciplinary subject of pedagogy and psychology. It belongs to the system of pedagogy and is a part of social ideology. It takes the Marxist Leninist Philosophy as the basis and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as the Centennial goal. It is used for IPE and is ready to be tested by the practice of socialist educational construction. It serves for implementing the policy of socialism with Chinese characteristics (Ail, 2021).

Cognition is how human beings accept or use knowledge or extract and process information. It is a basic thinking process. In detail, it is a process in which people convert the received stimulus into their psychological activities by brain processing to respond to the outside world after receiving external information. Feelings and perceptions are its foundation. Feeling is the understanding of the attributes and characteristics of things, while perception is the understanding of things as a whole and the relations of them. Therefore, it can be said that perceptions are based on feelings (Yang et al., 2020). Memory is perceptual experience and an essential basis for advanced cognitive processes such as thinking and language learning. When the external stimulus stops, the feeling or perception it brings will not necessarily disappear, but will be saved as individual experience (Kolobashkina and Alyushin, 2020). Thinking is complex, and it is produced by analyzing, synthesizing, comparing, abstracting, and summarizing the input information from the outside world. An analysis is the understanding of the attributes of things. Language is a symbol system formed by humans through highly structured sound combinations or writing symbols and gestures. It is also using the symbol system to exchange ideas (Shin, 2019). Figure 1 shows the cognitive process of human beings.

In Figure 1, cognition refers to the process of acquiring or applying knowledge, or the process of information processing, which is the most basic psychological process of people. In short, the cognitive process is the process of information addition, that is, the process in which people internalize the received external information into their own psychological activities after processing by the nervous system, and then dominate people’s external behavior. Cognitive activities include feeling, perception, memory, thinking and language. Modern cognitive psychology attaches great importance to and emphasizes the structural significance of cognition. The cognitive process is the process of processing new information and extracting and using stored information with the subject’s original knowledge structure to accept new knowledge.

The cognitive structure is the psychological expression of the concept, content, and structure. It is a psychological state when the external stimulus is received, and then correct cognition is formed. It falls into knowledge and experience (Boadu and Donnelly, 2019).

Cognitive psychology is a psychological trend and research direction in the West in the mid-1950s. It is a psychological branch targeted at how people obtain, store, transform, use and communicate information. Its main research subject is the cognitive process in human psychological phenomena. It is an essential branch of cognitive science (including computer science, communication science, linguistics, logic, and Anthropology) (Vada et al., 2020). Cognition is originally a common word in psychology. It is defined as a cognitive or knowledge process in a psychological dictionary, namely a rational and cognitive process relative to emotion, motivation, and will. It includes perception, representation, memory, and thinking, with thinking as its core (Bremer et al., 2020).

Cognitive psychology can be defined in broad and narrow senses. In a broad sense, it includes structuralism psychology, psychology, and information-processing psychology. In a narrow sense, it refers to information processing psychology. They emphasize the advanced process of research consciousness and understanding. Information processing psychology is the mainstream of American cognitive psychology, and it compares people with computers. The computer receives the input information from the surrounding environment and then processes, stores, and outputs it (Loth and Evans, 2019).

Cognitive psychology believes that the human system is the same as the computer, and human acquisition of knowledge is also the process of information input, transformation, and storage. The specific cognitive behaviors at different stages are different. Information is temporarily stored in the original sensory form in the sensory system. It passes through the control system and enters short-term and long-term memory areas. The information stored in the long-term memory is extracted into the short-term memory, and the task is completed through problem-solving and decision-making (Till and Sproesser, 2020). In addition to the transformation from sensory storage to long-term memory, human information processing also displays the influence of the latter processing on the former processing. The former is called bottom-up, and the latter is top-down. Information processing is carried out in chronological order and in both directions (Jiang and Han, 2020), as shown in Figure 2.

Scientists believe that memory can be divided into short-term, medium-term, and long-term. The essence of short-term memory is the repetition of the brain’s immediate physiological and biochemical reactions, while medium-term and long-term memory is the structural changes and fixed connections in brain cells. Short-term memory is the largest and most unstable memory.

Table 2 shows the elements of the cognitive structure, and Figure 3 shows its overview.

A model is an abstract representation of a system or a process. People’s information processing process model generally expresses people’s cognitive process. People’s response to external information usually needs to go through links like feeling, perception, memory, decision-making, response selection, and motor response. These links constitute a complete information processing system. Many researchers have proposed various models to express the human information processing process, and the more famous is the Broadbent model.

Value identity structure refers to the organic relationship between the main elements and their elements in the process of social members receiving value education and realizing value identity. It mainly includes four aspects: cognitive identity, emotional identity, internalized identity and behavioral identity. Cognitive identity is a process in which social members learn, accept, recognize, understand and comprehend some common values. It is a superficial knowledge understanding. In the process of IPE, it can be called theoretical indoctrination. Before making social members form core value identity, there should be a general stage of knowledge cognition, that is, the stage of feeling and perception mentioned in psychology. It has the characteristics of superficiality, transience and one-sidedness, which needs to be deepened in the process of continuous cognition. It is the starting point of value identity and the basis of emotional identity, internalization identity, and behavior identity. Emotional identity is social members’ emotional experience and subjective attitude based on cognitive values. From the perspective of psychology, people’s cognitive process and emotional processes are a process of mutual penetration and connection. In the cognitive stage, there will always be emotional interweaving. The formation of emotional identity is based on the knowledge of something. Generally, the identity subject can produce identity consciousness to the object that has a positive emotional experience. After the formation of emotional identity, it will greatly influence people’s cognition and become an important factor in cognitive activities. Internalized identity is that the value subject can actively and consciously accept and recognize some values and value objectives, and make them become their own value orientation. Internalized value concept is a core value concept based on specific value but beyond specific value.

Self-cognition is the observation and understanding of the cognitive subject. It includes self-observation and self-evaluation (Gorbunova, 2020). When the cognitive subject has correct self-cognition, it indicates that he has a mature personality. Correct self-cognition plays the most important role in developing self-consciousness and college students’ psychological quality. Because college students are adolescents, they have strong self-esteem and are incredibly eager for success. However, they are prone to arrogance when they make an achievement. On the contrary, some college students feel largely invisible and have no sense of self-worth. Under this condition, their confidence and self-esteem will be lost when they feel frustrated, and they begin to doubt the world and life (Proctor et al., 2020).

It is common for college students to have cognitive disorders when improving their psychological states. In modern times, the communist belief is easy to be ruined by some bad opinions, behaviors, and activities. Therefore, it is particularly important to reconstruct college students’ self-cognition and help them have correct outlooks on values and life (Wang, 2020).

The teaching objective of constructivism is to cultivate lifelong learners. Then, the learners can self-control the learning process and have the ability of self-analysis, self-evaluation, and self-reflection. The constructivist learning theory has a new view on knowledge and revolutionizes the traditional teaching mode. It transfers the teacher-centered teaching mode to the student-centered, which completely changes the traditional opinions on knowledge, learning, teaching, students, and teachers. Constructivism believes that the world exists objectively, but the understanding and meanings of the world are different among different people (Franco and Estevez, 2021). Everyone’s experience world is created with his own mind. Due to the difference in each person’s experience, each individual’s understanding of the external world is also very different (Kabir et al., 2021). Constructivists emphasize students’ active learning, but it also attaches importance to teachers’ help and guidance in the learning process. As for teachers, constructivists assign some new responsibilities for teachers (Pande and Bharathi, 2020), as shown in Table 3.

Figure 4 shows the cognitive construction process.

SWOT is an analysis method under the internal and external competitive environment and competitive conditions. It lists and arranges the internal strengths, weaknesses, external opportunities, and threats and analyzes the various factors to perform decision-making (Jiang, 2021). Table 4 shows the SWOT analysis.

Strengths in the above table are internal advantages, weaknesses are internal disadvantages, opportunities are external advantages, and threads are external disadvantages.

According to SWOT, the teaching strategies of college students’ IPE are analyzed, and the influencing factors of IPE are discussed by a questionnaire survey. Table 5 shows the evaluation indexes.

Ideological and political education content should pay attention to the guidance of values and the cultivation of the sense of mission. When teaching the road, theory and system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, college IPE teachers should focus on grasping the pulse of the times and combine it with the needs of social development and hot social issues. In this way, college students can deeply understand the rich connotation of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In the specific teaching of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, teachers should not stay at the macro level and excessively publicize the advantages of the socialist system. They should also let college students recognize the challenges faced in the road of socialist construction, let them dialectically analyze these problems, consciously and actively participate in the solution of practical problems, and enhance their sense of mission in participating in the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Besides, college teachers of theoretical courses should integrate the national spirit and the spirit of the times into IPE courses. Since China’s reform and opening up, the spirit of the times with rich connotation has been formed with the efforts of countless socialist builders. Teachers should take specific cases as the starting point, teach the spirit of the times, and let college students continue to remember their sense of responsibility and mission as the successor of socialist builders under the guidance of these predecessors. In the process of long-term historical development, China has formed a national spirit with patriotism as the core. IPE values should integrate the great national spirit of the Chinese nation, so that college students can arouse a sense of pride and achievement as a Chinese from the bottom of their heart, consciously take their family and country as their own responsibility and shoulder the important task of the times.

Ideological and political education should not be placed in a high position, but should move toward life and promote its value recognition. The needs of college students show the characteristics of multi-level and diversified development. IPE workers in colleges should grasp the common needs of college students and integrate IPE into them. The needs of college students in school are reflected in learning questions, life problems, and interpersonal relationships. Teachers should be good at actively integrating IPE methods and values education in the process of helping college students solve practical problems. For example, college students have poor pressure resistance and may lose confidence in the face of setbacks. IPE workers carry out necessary counseling after understanding the situation. Besides, they should integrate the thought of Marxist dialectics, so that college students can learn to dialectically analyze the two sides of setbacks, realize that the road is tortuous and the future is bright, and consciously establish firm ideals and beliefs.

Based on the structure of IPE value identity and the dimension characteristics of its psychological mechanism, IPE should follow the psychological mechanism of college students’ value identity: from cognitive identity to emotional identity, and then to internalized identity to behavioral identity. IPE should follow the psychological structure of college students’ value identity. In the process of cognitive identity, teachers should first clarify the meaning and content of IPE, eliminate the wrong cognition of college students, and let them have a clear and accurate positioning for IPE. Through the teaching of theory courses in colleges and the implicit education of college IPE workers, college students can accept ideological and political views. It is found that college students believe that IPE is useless. Given this phenomenon, it is considered that IPE should combine IPE content with life on the basis of scientization, strive to solve the practical problems of college students, enhance college students’ perceptual cognition of IPE, make college students change from passive acceptance to active acceptance, and establish the guiding significance of IPE for college students’ life. In the aspect of emotional identity, teachers should mobilize college students’ interests and hobbies in IPE. They should enhance college students’ emotional experience of IPE activities and make IPE move from rigid classroom mode to real colorful activities. In the stage of internalized identity, a link between IPE and college students should be established by combining projection and internalized identity theory.