Welcome to the Relationships and Emotions in Adolescent Life (REALife) Lab at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

 

Research at REALife Lab focuses on the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships (e.g., parent-child relationships and friendships) in childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. We are particularly interested in how these processes are tied to developmental advancements in emotion regulation and emotional communication. Our work adopts theoretical perspectives and research methodologies from developmental psychology, social psychology, and communication sciences. We aim to foster international research collaborations and promote open, replicable science across disciplinary boundaries.

 

REALife Lab addresses the psychology and development of youth relationships, including close friendships, peer and family interactions, and social media behavior. We promote understanding of how emotional (e.g., subjective states, expressive behavior, and physiological reactions) and social-cognitive processes (e.g., relationship expectations, values, and schemas) influence the adolescents’ satisfaction with their family and peer relationships, subsequent behaviors, and emotional well-being.

 

Utilizing samples primarily from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Western Europe, REALife Lab explores how cultural values and practices might guide youths’ adaptive development. We combine a variety of methodologies, including experimental and longitudinal approaches. We study socio-emotional behavior and adjustment at multiple levels of analysis, using physiological measurements, observational coding, computer interaction tasks, lab-based priming paradigms, and self-/informant-reports.

 

Research questions currently being explored in our lab include:

 

• How do family communication processes unfold from early adolescence to emerging adulthood, particularly with regard to youths’ disclosure and secrecy behaviors? How does youths’ developing need for privacy help to shape these processes?
   

• What monitoring strategies do parents use to obtain information about their children’s activities, whereabouts, and associations? What are the relations between these different strategies and youth’s psychosocial adjustment, family relationship satisfaction, and communication behaviors?
   

• How do adolescents negotiate changing relationships with parents and peers as they move into adulthood, particularly during the transition to college?
   

• How do adolescents learn to adaptively regulate expressions of positive and negative emotions to fit with situational demands? In what ways is their use of different regulatory strategies associated with successes or failures in interpersonal relationships?
   

• What are the intrapersonal and interpersonal factors that motivate youths to engage in problematic self-presentational strategies (e.g., materialistic behavior, problematic social media behavior)? Do these factors vary by culture?
   

• How do environmental stressors such as unpredictability and social competition shape youths’ prosocial and selfish behaviors? Are these effects better explained as cognition-driven (e.g. utilitarian reasoning) or emotion-driven processes?