Seeing students achieve and set off for a bright future bring joy to people in the education sector. In this issue, let us see how recent CLASS graduate Janet CHEUNG Yan-lok thrills her teachers and the supporting staff at the Department of Social and Behaviourial Sciences (SS) by receiving an international research award and kicking off a career which matches her skills and aspirations.
Photo2: Her final year project on the emotion regulation strategies adopted by people with different cultural backgrounds was selected for an international research award.
Janet is a 2020 graduate of CityU’s psychology programme with an academic interest in intercultural research and emotion regulation strategies. She received the Student International Research Award from the Division of International Psychology (Division 52) of the American Psychological Association prior to her graduation. Representing a group of psychologists that are actively engaged in multicultural research and practice, Division 52 recognises Janet’s research, which was also her final year project, titled Cultural Differences in Psychological Well-being: The Sequential Mediating Effects of Cultural Values, Experiential Avoidance, and Self-compassion.
Her interest in understanding cultural diversity stemmed from her high school education when she studied alongside classmates from over 150 different countries. She found that those from foreign countries are more likely to accept and embrace themselves even when life was very stressful. With this personal experience, she started to wonder why people from different cultural backgrounds deal with life adversities differently. Thus, she intended to investigate how values and emotion regulation strategies could have an effect on Hong Kong Chinese and American’s psychological well-being through this research study.
By administering structured questionnaire on 81 Americans and 80 Hong Kong Chinese participants from 18 to 30 years of age, she found that the former emphasised more on universalism-tolerance, which increased the use of self-compassion to regulate their emotions and resulted in higher psychological well-being. In contrast, the latter emphasised more on conformity, which increased the use of experiential avoidance and resulted in lower psychological well-being. The results suggest that the difference in the level of psychological well-being between Americans and Hong Kong Chinese is due to the emphasis of different cultural values and the adoption of different emotion regulation strategies.
Janet would like to express gratitude to Dr Dannii YEUNG, Associate Professor at SS, for her guidance, motivation and patience throughout this challenging but fruitful research process. She encourages current students who are working on a final year project to be curious about what they are passionate and be patient even though it is not happening as they expected. Only then they will overcome all the difficulties and find the solutions to the questions they set out to answer.
Aspired to utilising her knowledge to create positive impacts on society, Janet is currently working as a behavioural therapist trainee to provide behavioural therapy for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to enhance their language, social, cognitive and play skills. She is also planning to pursue future study in clinical psychology.
Cover photo: Janet Cheung Yan-lok, a recent graduate of CityU's psychology programme, is currently a behavioural therapist trainee. She is planning to pursue future study in clinical psychology.
