Research Interests and Current Projects

STEM Education

Purpose Reflection in the Classroom

STEM is a challenging journey, but students’ reflection on their purpose of being in STEM may improve their psychological experience and persistence in STEM. How can the benefits of purpose reflection be applied to a real STEM classroom?

Uncertainty in Education: a Community Cultural Wealth Perspective

In uncertain times and phases of life, does tapping into one’s community cultural wealth provide even greater benefits to student’s belonging, motivation, enjoyment, and certainty in STEM? For whom does community cultural wealth help?

AI in STEM Education

With the rise of AI in STEM education, do students perceive different goal affordances for STEM? Does that relate to students’ psychological experiences of being in STEM?

Stereotyping and Prejudice

Roles and Stereotypes about Asian Subgroups

Social role theory posits that stereotypes arise from the roles groups occupy in society. However, broad racial categories can obscure important differences across subgroups. How do stereotype content and judgments of occupational fit differ across Asian subgroups?

Revisiting Dynamic Stereotypes

How have dynamic stereotypes changed since they were first documented 25 years ago?

Dynamic Agentic Stereotypes

As the gender distribution of social roles change over time, men and women are increasingly believed to have agentic characteristics to different degrees. Yet agency includes multiple dimensions that might differentially relate to underlying role shifts, and thus show divergent dynamic stereotype trends. How do current-day perceivers’ believe different dimensions of agency apply to men and women of the past, present, and future?

Gender Stereotypes in Human-Generated Texts

What does human-generated texts reveal about how English-users collectively conceptualizes what is a man or a woman?

Bicultural Identity Integration

Multicultural individuals may experience lower well-being, having to navigate multiple sets of (sometimes conflicting) cultural cognitions, practices, and value systems. The process of synthetizing one’s multiple cultural frames is called bicultural identity integration (BII). Despite culture being social structurally shaped systems, bicultural identity integration (BII) had mostly been treated as an individual difference. Nevertheless, BII may be also influenced by larger ecological, historical, political, and cultural factors too. How do social structural factors influence experiences of bicultural identity integration among Asian subgroups?

Face Perception

A Drift Diffusion Model of Trustworthiness Inferences from Faces

What can drift diffusion modeling reveal about the decision making process in which people make judgments whether someone is trustworthiness or not based on their faces?

Social Structures and Face Perception

Perceivers infer dominance and trustworthiness from targets’ faces. Previous research demonstrates that both target’s facial cues and perceiver’s social knowledge (e.g., stereotypes) influence these face-based trait impressions. Does social structures, specifically structural economic equality, also actively influence these trait impressions from faces?