Dr. Hae Yeon Lee
Improving Adolescents’ Stress Resilience and Health Under Ubiquitous Status Threats By Targeting Mindsets
5 April 2022 (Tuesday), 4pm
Abstract:
Achieving social status is a developmentally salient goal during adolescence. Therefore, experiences that threaten social status can cause stress and escalate the risk for stress-induced internalizing problems. In this talk, I argue that status threats are harmful because of what they mean to adolescents: how status threats portend a negative social future, or not. In this view, adolescents’ beliefs about the social world—their mindsets—can shape the subjective meaning of status threats, and therefore predict resilient versus maladaptive stress responses. Across three streams of studies, I either measure or manipulate status threats in various social domains, and then test whether adolescents’ mindsets can causally shape their stress resilience and health outcomes. In a first study, I show that individual differences in adolescents’ entity theory—the belief that people cannot change—was robustly associated with negative psychological and hormonal stress responses to status threats in academic contexts. Next, a large-scale, pre-registered randomized field experiment showed that an incremental theory of personality intervention improved adolescent stress appraisals in daily life and affective responses to status threats in a social media interaction. Finally, in a longitudinal social belonging intervention study, buttressing first-year college students’ beliefs about their potential to belong to college environments reduced the number of university health center visits over four years, among socially disadvantaged groups of students. Taken together, this research paints a picture of developmental implications of status threats and challenges in adolescent stress and health outcomes. Importantly, findings highlight that this process can be improved with theoretically-informative intervention approaches.
Biography:
Dr. Hae Yeon Lee is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale-NUS College who will be joining NUS Psychology Department in Fall 2022. Dr. Lee is a developmental psychologist by training, specializing in adolescent development with a particular focus on social emotional development, stress resilience, and mindset interventions. She earned a B.A. in Psychology from Seoul National University in South Korea, and then completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Before moving to Singapore, Dr. Lee worked at Stanford Psychology Department as a postdoctoral scholar working with Drs. Gregory Walton and Carol Dweck. In 2019, she was named as Jacobs Foundation Young Scholars. To date, her research has been published at the leading academic journals, including Child Development, Psychological Science, Development and Psychopathology, and Emotion Review.
