Research Interests

Numerous psychology articles focus on obedience and conformity, the behaviors of 90% of participants in Milgram’s 1964 experiment. Yet, little has been said about the 10% that did not obey the experimenter. Milgram’s findings were highly statistically significant, of course, but does that mean this 10% that act and think differently from social norms are meaningless, or can be discarded as “error variance”? This notion reminds me of a painful experience in human history: under communist systems, thousands of those social dissenters had been sent to asylums, or reform camps!

What is the role of social conventions and personal beliefs in the emergence of moral norms? Moral sense may be developed at early childhood, but its applications to behavioral choice in each social situation become varying increasingly with age and across professional groups. The question of whether, and how, ethical rules develop from emotions is placed highly in my wish list of research topics. Within psychology, I am most interested, but not exclusively, in the area of emotion, motivation and cultural psychology.

Emotion and Motivations

Some may wonder why I study social psychology when I am interested in individual processes such as emotion and motivation. Strictly speaking, all individual psychological processes are “socially situated,” a term I am borrowing from Prof. Gun Semin, which means embedded in social situations. I argue that social interactions have a more profound significance at the core of the emotion process than is traditionally considered. Emotion is elicited by and within social situations. Shame and guilt, and even a ‘basic’ emotion as anger, have clear interpersonal implications. Most importantly, I posit that emotions contribute to the formation of social norms and conventional practices. For example, anger experienced by the majority of a group will give rise to a group norm toward the particular behavior that caused such anger. There is a need to integrate converging research on social implications of emotion into a theoretical model of the emotional process. To fulfill this ambition, I started by exploring a more basic topic: how actions arise from, or against emotions. My undergraduate thesis with Prof. Nico Frijda presented me with a unique opportunity to delve into a topic that truly fascinated me: exploring a non-structural approach to human motivation. One of my studies focuses on the affect regulation process under cognitive loads, in particular when the affective state is totally positive, or a mixture of positive and negative tones. To further this line of research, my goal is to study the mediating effect of emotions on our behavioral tendencies. As an application for PhD research with Prof. Wilco van Dijk, I aim at exploring the mechanism underlying the affective aspect of intergroup relations: how the effect of dual identities on social discrimination and prejudice is mediated by intergroup emotions. I argue that a dual layer of social identities can attenuate negative emotions toward outgroups and reduce ingroup bias, thus facilitating intergroup contacts and reducing prejudice and discrimination.

Cross-cultural psychology

Another research area that I am interested in is cultural differences (or similarities), and how culture acts as an important mediator between emotion and action. My ambition is to explore the basic paradigms of culture. A vast majority of cross-cultural research focuses on several dimensions of cultural differences in social relationships. In self-references for example, individualism-collectivism and abstract-specific are considered two parallel dimensions. Individualist, autonomous cultures adopt more abstract self-expressions than collectivist cultures and vice versa. The question is, to what extent are these dimensions reflected in psychological phenomena? Can we rely on these paradigms in explaining cultural variations of behaviors? My first study on Dutch and Vietnamese cultures suggests that the alignment of these dimensions might be superficial, despite a possible selection bias. While the Vietnamese students preferred specific and concrete self-references, they were evidently just as autonomous as the Dutch students, who represented an individualist culture and preferred abstract self-references.

My research is aimed at seeking well-rounded theoretical models of emotion, situated in social interactions, and mediated by cultural variations. I do believe that a full understanding of basic psychological processes requires combined knowledge of several disciplines, for which my broad research interests and experiences are well-suited.