My research focuses on the interplay between cultural contexts and psychological processes. To understand dynamic ways in which culture and psychological processes mutually shape and sustain each other, the specific aims of my research programs are twofold: (1) to illuminate cultural differences in both cognition and communication (i.e., context-independence vs. context-dependence) and emotion (i.e., maximization of positives vs. middle-way), and (2) to elucidate proximal mechanisms through which distal cultural systems shape psychological processes.