Professor Sylvia Xiaohua CHEN

Limin Professor in Social and Cultural Psychology
Chair Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology
Director, Yan Oi Tong Au Suet Ming Child Development Centre

Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences
Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
Fellow of Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities
Fellow of Association for Psychological Science
Fellow of Society for Personality and Social Psychology
Senior Fellow of Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy), UK
Fellow of Hong Kong Psychological Society
American Psychological Association Outstanding International Psychologist Award

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Prof. Sylvia Xiaohua CHEN is Limin Endowed Professor in Social and Cultural Psychology and Chair Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, and Director of the Yan Oi Tong Au Suet Ming Child Development Centre and former Associate Dean of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is a member (academician) of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, 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 currently General Editor of Cambridge University Press Culture and Psychology Series.

Professor Chen's research areas include personality and social psychology, cultural psychology, as well as mental health. Specifically, her research focuses on 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 examines the influence of globalisation on the changes experienced by bilingual and bicultural individuals in terms of their mindsets, values, beliefs and identifications as a result of acculturation. Theoretically, she and her collaborators established a conceptual framework of immigration-based acculturation and globalisation-based acculturation, and developed the psychological construct termed Global Orientations and its measure, empirically extending the framework to 35 countries/regions and providing implications for the study of social integration and post-COVID cooperation.

Professor Chen received various academic awards, including 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 Research Grants Council (RGC), and 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.

Research Interests

The social psychology of bilingualism and biculturalism

Culture and globalisation

Personality and social behaviour in cultural contexts

Psychosocial and cultural aspects of mental health

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Professor Sylvia Xiaohua CHEN

Research Interests