Meet Yilin, the newest addition to the PANGEA lab’s wonderful grad students. Yilin’s research interest lies in cultural psychology, and she will be spending her time at UBC pursuing that interest under the co-supervision of Dr. Friedrich Götz (PANGEA lab) and Dr. Steve Heine (Cultural and Self lab). Read on to learn more about Yilin and her research plans!
“My educational path has been a relatively typical one – I completed my undergraduate degree in Psychology at McGill University where I tried to acquire as much research experience as I could, and then took a gap year where I seized the opportunity to travel a bit around the world and to experience various cultures.”
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Yangyilin Guo, and people often just call me Yilin.
I originally came from a small city, Luoyang, from the province of Henan in China, and later grew up in Montreal since the age of eight. My educational path has been a relatively typical one – I completed my undergraduate degree in Psychology at McGill University where I tried to acquire as much research experience as I could, and then took a gap year where I seized the opportunity to travel a bit around the world and to experience various cultures. Then, I very recently came to Vancouver to start my new graduate journey at UBC!
Regarding my hobbies, while I am usually an introvert, I really enjoy hanging out with friends discovering great restaurants, playing basketball, and travelling, but I also love trying out new recipes and reading any culture-related books alone at home.
How did your journey lead you to the field of psychology, and what kept you in it?
I discovered my interest in psychology when I took my first social psychology class back in CEGEP, where I became fascinated by the various concepts that helped me better understand myself (e.g., personality-related concepts) and those that taught me to consider challenges and choices from different perspectives (e.g., self-fulfilling prophecy).
I became more and more determined to pursue further studies in psychological research after having involved myself in various research positions in psychology labs and after having completed my major in psychology at McGill, as I realized how I enjoyed working on all the tasks in my research positions and how more research should be conducted in the two fascinating fields of cultural and geographical psychology to better capture cultural and regional differences among people.
What brought you to UBC and to working with Dr. Götz and Dr. Heine?
Being particularly interested in investigating the cultural and regional differences in different psychological constructs, such as personality, between and within North American and East Asian countries, I was very excited to find out that UBC psychology has a special emphasis on cultural psychology. After having read into Fritz’s and Steve’s research, I was determined that my research interests were perfectly aligned with their research agenda, which is why I feel very honored and lucky to be able to conduct research with Fritz and Steve for the next six years and more.
“In the future, I hope to study the underlying reasons for cultural and regional differences in personality in addition to pinpointing the differences themselves.”
What project(s) are you currently working on?
Within Fritz’s and Steve’s labs, I am currently working on mapping out regional differences in the Big Five personality traits in multiple countries beyond the West using a Big Data approach, exploring the experiences of Third Culture Kids, and investigating the relationship between cultural distance and acculturative success.
In what future directions do you hope to take your research in?
In the future, I hope to study the underlying reasons for cultural and regional differences in personality in addition to pinpointing the differences themselves. I also wish to investigate whether differences in other demographic factors, such as gender, age, and SES, predict personality and psychological outcomes differently across people of different cultural backgrounds. Additionally, I plan to start working on topics such as cultural tightness-looseness in China, cultural fit, and wanderlust.