Meet Our Academicians

 

Prof. Sylvia Xiaohua CHEN is Chair Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences and Director of the Yan Oi Tong Au Suet Ming Child Development Centre at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, Association for Psychological Science and Society for Personality and Social Psychology; a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now Advance HE), United Kingdom; a Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society; and a Registered Psychologist and Fellow of the Hong Kong Psychological Society. She has served as President of the Asian Association of Social Psychology, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and General Editor of Cambridge University Press Culture and Psychology Series. She is also a member of the Research Grants Council (RGC) Humanities and Social Sciences Panel (Psychology and Linguistics Sub-Panel) and the Social Sciences Panel for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2026, as appointed by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

Professor Chen's research focuses on personality and social psychology, cultural psychology, and mental health. She investigates the social psychology of bilingualism and biculturalism, culture and globalisation, personality and social behaviour in cultural contexts, as well as psychosocial and cultural aspects of mental health. She has been developing a programme of research to examine the influence of globalisation on the changes experienced by bicultural individuals in terms of their mindsets, values, beliefs and identifications as a result of acculturation.  She and her collaborators established a framework of immigration-based acculturation and globalisation-based acculturation, and developed the theoretical construct termed Global Orientations, empirically extending the framework to 35 countries/regions and significantly contributing to the study of social integration and post-COVID cooperation. 

Professor Chen was a recipient of the Jung-heun Park Young Scholar Award (2005) and Michael Harris Bond Award for Early Career Research Contributions (2013) conferred by the Asian Association of Social Psychology, Early Career Award (2016) conferred by the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, a Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship (2018/19) awarded by the RGC, the Outstanding International Psychologist Award (2022) from the American Psychological Association, and was selected as a winner of the JESSICA Most Successful Women Award 2025. She has been invited to be a keynote speaker at various international conferences, including the 32nd (ICP2020+) and 33rd (ICP2024) International Congress of Psychology, held every four years.