My specialties are personality, indigenous and family psychologies. My research interests and topics include: Chinese filial piety, intergenerational interactions, autonomy development, emotional regulation, socialization processes, parent-child conflict and its positive transformation, and family adjustment in an aging society. I am author of the books The Filial Piety of Chinese People: A Psychological Perspective and Cultivation of Chinese Character from the Perspective of a Parent-Child Network. I am editor-in-chief of the books Family Psychology: Exploration and Application of Systemic Thinking Perspective, Affect, Emotion, and Culture: Anthropological and Psychological Studies in Taiwanese Society, Chinese Indigenous Psychology in Global Context: Reflections and Future Direction, and Asian Indigenous Psychologies in the Global Context.
Over the past fifteen years, I have formulated three original theories: the “dual filial piety,” “dual autonomy,” and "parent-child conflict process” models. These are aimed at answering important questions such as How does filial piety influence the individual's psychological and behavioral adaptation? How does Chinese youth's autonomy develop in comparison to Western youth? and “What mechanism in parent-child conflict benefits the psychological growth of young adolescents? Follow-up empirical verification of the three models has focused on their integration and on exploring the impact of other Chinese cultural factors (such as family ethics) and family interactions on individuals’ psychological and behavioral adjustment and family relationship quality.
The dual filial piety model (DFPM) integrates the literatures of social science and the humanities to describe two distinct but intertwined aspects, the “reciprocal” and the “authoritarian,” that clarify the meaning and define attributes of Chinese filial piety. This model aims to replace the vague general concept and explains characteristics that can be clearly separated in the conception and the function of filial piety, thereby resolving the inconsistent results of previous filial piety research.
The dual autonomy model (DAM), which considers Chinese cultural tradition and family interaction patterns, combines autonomous perspectives based on self-determination theory and cross-cultural psychology’s agency theory, to correct the psychoanalytic view that defines autonomy as a kind of detachment from parents.
The parent-child conflict process model claims that negative emotion arousals are key mediating variables that help show how parent-adolescent conflict can lead to adolescents’ problem behaviors. In my recent works, the model incorporates the core appeals of “positive psychology” by introducing “functional appraisal at conflict,” and it has further explained how and why parent-adolescent conflict can lead to constructive outcomes.
During the last five years, I have been working on strengthening my own two original theories---dual filial piety model and dual autonomy model. What I have been doing is expanding models’ applications by including more relevant issues and deepening models’ validity by showing more empirical evidence. In addition, I have started a new research topic---constructive transformation of parent-adolescent conflict---since 2011. This new topic is much associated with Chinese filial piety and adolescents’ autonomous development; it is aiming to build an inclusive model that could contain the main ideas of my two established models--- dual filial piety model and dual autonomy model.
Based upon the perspective of positive psychology, this new topic investigates some possibly beneficial effects of parent-adolescent conflict on parental/adolescent adjustment and quality of relationship. From the viewpoint of the process perspective, this inclusive model suggests that there are at least four key components they could transfer a parent-adolescent conflict into a constructive outcome; they are：how to evaluate the conflict event, how to regulate the negative emotion, how to discuss the conflict, and how to resolve the conflict. As to the role of Chinese filial piety on a constructive transformation of the parent-adolescent conflict, it can be done by using the dual filial piety model which could discern the subtle difference between reciprocal and authoritarian filial piety concepts. On the theoretical level, the aims of the new topic hope to develop a comprehensive model of so called “constructive parent-adolescent conflict process” and how it could link with some positive individual outcome variables, such as adolescent autonomy (no matter to individuating autonomy or relating autonomy), resilience, and closeness of the parent-adolescent relationship etc; on the research level, the goals of the new topic hope to develop some valid scales for measuring some related concepts, such as functional evaluation, antecedent-focused emotion regulation, supportive discussion, and integrated conflict solution strategy, for future empirical studies.