Ring Joyce Pang Shu Min

I received my B.A. training in psychology from Smith College, MA, USA, and my PhD in personality psychology from The University of Michigan, MI, USA. As a personality psychologist, I am broadly interested in the influences of multiple social identities and individual differences on well-being, performance, and health psychology outcomes within different social contexts. In all my research, I adopt a person x situation perspective to understand how individual differences predict different reactions within different social contexts, which in turn lead to important personal and social outcomes. To this end, I have two major lines of research. First, I am a motivation researcher who develops, validates, and refines methods of assessing implicit motives. In this line of work, I publish and investigate best practices for using the Picture Story Exercise, the most commonly used measure of implicit motives. I have also explored the use of machine learning for automating the laborious content coding process that is involved in scoring implicit motives in text. Second, I investigate how individual differences (such as in motivation and in social identities) can affect performance, interpersonal outcomes, and physiological and emotional changes during motive-relevant contexts. I have explored the intersection between the person and the situation on a wide range of personal and social outcomes such as addictive behaviors, body image, internet radicalization, consumerism, medical adherence, adolescent aggression, and inter-group relations.