Korea University · 心理学
Professor Eun-Soo Choi's research lab specializes in cross-cultural psychology, with a focus on cultural influences on mental health, emotional expression, and psychosocial adaptation. The lab investigates how cultural contexts shape psychological well-being, somatization of distress, body image, and responses to global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Key research directions include the development and validation of culturally sensitive psychological assessment tools, emotion recognition in masked faces, and the role of parental support in adolescent mental health across East Asian and Western societies. The lab emphasizes translational research to inform mental health practice and policy in diverse cultural settings.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
The perception of one's body image becomes particularly important in adolescence. Body dissatisfaction has been associated with negative psychological functioning, such as self-esteem and depression. Previous findings showed that the decreased self-esteem due to body dissatisfaction explained the association between negative attitude toward body and psychological well-being in different cultural contexts. The present study examined adolescents from the US (N = 1002) and Korea (N = 3993) and repl
In response to the current COVID-19 pandemic, the Obsession with COVID-19 scale (OCS) and the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS) were developed as screening tools for dysfunctional anxiety associated with the coronavirus. These scales have not yet been validated in the East Asia. The present study examined the validity of the OCS and the CAS with a sample of 329 Korean adults. We found that the OCS-Korean and CAS-Korean showed good psychometric properties and construct validity. Developing such val
Previous research has documented that Asians tend to somatize negative experiences to a greater degree than Westerners. It is posited that somatization may be a more functional communication strategy in Korean than American context. We examined the effects of somatization in communications of distress among participants from the US and Korea. We predicted that the communicative benefits of somatic words used in distress narratives would depend on the cultural contexts. In Study 1, we found that
Due to the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, wearing masks has become essential for social interaction, disturbing emotion recognition in daily life. In the present study, a total of 39 Korean participants (female = 20, mean age = 24.2 years) inferred seven emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise, and neutral) from uncovered, mask-covered, sunglasses-covered faces. The recognition rates were the lowest under mask conditions, followed by the sunglasses and uncovered cond
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose an unprecedented challenge for the world as people strive to cope with this significant threat to their well-being. This intensive longitudinal study of the first 94 days of the COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea (Phase 1: initial outbreak, Phase 2: intense social distancing) examined individuals’ changes in well-being, in relation to their use of coping strategies and fear of infection. A sample of 10,464 South Koreans participated in surveys during Phase 1
Previous research has shown that parental support has beneficial effects on the psychological well-being of adolescents. Going beyond prior research, the present study made distinctions between information, emotional, and financial parental support and examined adolescents from United States (<i>N</i> = 1,002), China (<i>N</i> = 1,172), South Korea (<i>N</i> = 3,993), and Japan (<i>N</i> = 1,112). The frequency and impact of different types of perceived parental support on adolescents' positive
Previous research indicates that social relatedness is beneficial to physical health; however, findings on the relative strength of the relationship between these variables have been inconsistent. The present study employed cross-sectional survey (Study 1) and a daily diary survey (Study 2) to examine the link between social relatedness and physical health by age. Using a representative sample of Korean adults (<i>N</i> = 371) aged from 20 to 69, Study 1 examines the link between social relatedn
The present results provide new insight into the role of individual differences in essentialist lay theories of happiness in motivational state in well-being domain.
Cultural differences in the emphasis on positive and negative emotions suggest that the impact of these emotions on well-being may differ across cultural contexts. The present study utilised a momentary sampling method to capture average momentary emotional experiences. We found that for participants from cultural contexts that foster positive emotions (European Americans and Hispanic Americans), average momentary positive emotions predicted well-being better than average momentary negative emot
Social enterprises, organizations that pursue social purposes while generating profits, have garnered attention recently as potential key players for a sustainable economy. However, research on the perception of social enterprises by lay people has been ignored even though positive reception of social enterprises is an important condition for their sustainability. In the present study, we compared for-profit enterprise employees (n = 200) and social enterprise employees (n = 162) and examined th
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00353.].
The present study examined the difference between women and men in perceiving leadership roles. Two experiments, one conducted online and the other in a lab, investigated the subjective experiences of Japanese men and women when they are assigned with different roles (e.g., leader vs. subordinate). Both studies revealed that women perceived their role as less legitimate when they were assigned leader role (vs. subordinate role). In contrast, men did not differ in their perceived legitimacy accor
As with other cognitively determined emotional experiences, regret is shaped by and expressed in a particular cultural milieu. However, past research on regret has primarily been conducted in Western cultures, especially the United States, and cross‐cultural research has been limited. In three studies, we employed various methods (survey, social media data, and experiment) to examine how regret is experienced differently in South Korea (a collectivistic culture) and in the United States (an indi
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