My Research Interests
My research in psychology comes through a cultural lens. I have a broad interest in everyday coping. How people use different strategies to deal with challenging situations in everyday life? How can we provide the best support to people that we care about to go through difficult moments in life? Do existing psychological theories apply to a different population? Why or why not?
Specifically, I conduct research in the following areas: 1) emotion-related coping, such as emotion regulation, emotional support, etc.; 2) problem-related coping, such as advice giving, self-sacrifice, etc.; 3) socialization of cultural beliefs with children through cultural products (e.g., children’s storybooks).
I employ methods of experimentation, open-ended reasoning, and qualitative analysis of cultural artifacts and practices.
Research Projects
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Storybook Reading
Storytelling
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Advice Giving
Self-Sacrifice
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Emotion regulation
Emotional Support
My Professional Missions
As a researcher, I have two missions: 1) To correct the sample bias in existing psychology. Psychological research to date has been mainly based on samples from WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) population (Thalmayer, Toscanelli & Arnett, 2020). To what extent are existing psychological theories applicable to non-WEIRD sample, which makes 95% of the real world population? 2) To gain a more nuanced understanding of culture by going beyond a dichotomous framework. Cultural psychology has made its way so far by dividing the world into individualism-collectivism or independent-interdependent dichotomy (Miller, Akiyama & Kapadia, 2017 ). To what extent do such dichotomous dimension successfully capture nuanced cultural differences within collectivist or individualist cultures?