心理科学协会会员聚焦：Boby Ho-Hong Ching 谈以共情连接科学与课堂

从课堂观察出发的问题

心理科学协会的会员聚焦介绍了研究者 Boby Ho-Hong Ching 的研究路径。他的科学好奇心来自对香港、澳门日常课堂生活的观察：在高度强调财富、地位与学业成就的环境里，年轻人可能逐渐把人的价值与物质财富、成绩或外貌绑定，形成物质主义、以金钱衡量自我价值等取向。文章同时提到，在中国文化语境中，学业成绩与家庭荣誉、孝道和社会地位紧密相连，父母也可能把自我价值寄托在孩子的成就上，即所谓以子女成就定义自我价值。

条件性自我价值与代际传递

Ching 团队用纵向研究考察把自我价值建立在外界认可上的心理代价。在家庭社会化研究中，他们追踪母亲以子女成就定义自我价值如何跨代传递：这种取向纵向预测更高水平的成就导向心理控制，而这种控制又使青少年形成脆弱的、以学业为条件的自我价值，并进一步与长期的数学焦虑相连，形成自我强化的循环。另一项为期三年的纵向研究则考察外貌领域，发现以体重为条件的自我价值预测自尊不稳定的增加。这些是纵向关联，而非实验证明的因果。

本质主义标签与欺凌

文章还描述了 Ching 关注的另一条线索：在强调和谐与规范的社会里，偏离预期的儿童容易被贴上本质主义标签，被视为天生有缺陷或不可改变。他指出一个悖论：即使出于善意的反污名宣传，若只强调注意缺陷多动障碍纯粹是生物遗传的，也可能强化本质主义思维，加深“我们”与“他们”的隔阂，并降低欺凌的心理门槛。基于此，他的团队设计课堂干预，例如用动物多样性挑战性别本质主义，试图从认知根源上拆解这些僵化分类。

I’ve always been fascinated by theoretical models in psychology, but my scientific curiosity was deeply animated by observing daily classroom life in Hong Kong and Macau. If you’ve ever lived in or visited Hong Kong and Macau, you know they are fascinating, hyper-intense environments: Hong Kong is a fast-paced global financial center, and Macau is famous as the casino capital of the world. In these cities, financial success, luxury, and social status are constantly on display. I began seeing how young people growing up in these environments internalize the message that their value as a person is tied to material wealth, sparking what we study as materialism and money-contingent self-worth.

At the same time, in Chinese culture, academic achievement is deeply tied to family honor, filial piety, and social standing. A report card isn’t just a child’s private business. It’s practically a topic of discussion at Sunday dim sum with the entire extended family! What fascinated me as a researcher was seeing that this pressure wasn’t just coming from the parents onto the children; Chinese parents themselves often stake their own self-worth on their child’s accomplishments—what we call child-based worth. When a parent’s own self-esteem depends on a child’s report card, academic performance becomes an emotionally charged arena where love and acceptance feel conditional.

As if academic and financial pressures weren’t enough, smartphones and social media are now also in the mix. I watched adolescents constantly bombarded by curated beauty standards, leading to deep anxieties about physical appearance, skin tone, and body weight.

Seeing all of this come together in local schools was a real turning point for me. I realized that whether it be grades, money, or body image, these young people were learning to evaluate their humanity through a single, fragile lens: “I am only worthy if—” If I get straight As, if I look like a social media influencer, if I come from a wealthy background. When a child’s self-worth is that contingent, any setback—such as a low test score, an appearance comment, or rejection by a peer—feels like an existential crisis. They freeze up, experience severe anxiety, or engage in defensive self-handicapping to protect their fragile ego.

I certainly didn’t set out with a master plan to solve all these societal pressures overnight. I simply wanted to understand why bright, wonderful kids were carrying such heavy psychological backpacks, and how we can help them put those weights down.

In a society that heavily values social harmony, order, and traditional norms, anyone who deviates from the expected mold stands out immediately. I began observing how subtly, yet deeply, marginalized children were stigmatized in classrooms and peer groups. Whether it was a child with ADHD who couldn’t sit still, a student who didn’t fit thinness ideals, or a child whose voice or behavior didn’t conform to rigid gender expectations, they were quickly hit with intuitive, essentialist labels: “That’s just how they are,” “They’re inherently defective,” or “They’re just not trying.”

What really fired up my scientific curiosity was noticing a profound paradox in how people tried to address stigma. Even well-intentioned antistigma campaigns, such as telling people ADHD is purely biogenetic often backfired! Instead of fostering empathy, these purely biological explanations could reinforce essentialist thinking. People walked away thinking the difference was discrete, permanent, and alienating, putting up an even bigger wall between “us” and “them.”

That essentialist wall wasn’t just an abstract idea. It manifested directly as peer bullying, relational aggression, and social exclusion in schools. When peers view a classmate through a rigid, essentialist lens as inherently defective or fundamentally alien, it lowers the psychological barrier to bullying. Whether it was weight-based teasing, mocking a child with a nonconforming voice, or ostracizing a student with ADHD, the bullying was effectively rationalized in the peers’ minds by these unyielding category labels.

I realized that if we want to stop bullying, we have to dismantle these essentialist walls at their cognitive roots. That curiosity is still what drives my research team today: We are designing classroom interventions—such as our work using animal diversity to challenge gender essentialism—that break down these rigid mental shortcuts and help schools build environments where human differences are understood and embraced rather than bullied.

Cultivating kids’ resilience

When I reflect on the empirical highlights of our lab’s work over the years, our findings really converge around two central questions: First, what are the psychological and cognitive costs of contingent self-worth, and how can we cultivate resilience? And second, what are the cognitive mechanisms driving social stigma, and how can we dismantle them?

In our first major line of research, conducted in close collaboration with my student researchers, we carried out longitudinal studies to map the psychological costs when young people base their self-worth on external validation. In our family socialization research, we traced how maternal self-worth transfers across generations. We demonstrated that when mothers stake their own self-esteem on their children’s accomplishments (a construct we term maternal child-based worth), it longitudinally predicts higher levels of achievement-oriented psychological control. This controlling parenting, in turn, instills fragile, academic-contingent self-worth in adolescents, which directly fuels long-term mathematics anxiety in a self-reinforcing loop. In a parallel 3-year longitudinal study, we examined these dynamics in the domain of physical appearance, showing that body-weight contingent self-worth predicts increments in self-esteem instability, which subsequently drives depressive symptoms in adolescent girls.

Beyond documenting these vulnerabilities, our team committed to identifying psychological tools to buffer young people against these pressures. In an experimental study, we examined how to disrupt behavioral self-handicapping—the tendency for academically contingent students to intentionally withhold practice effort before a difficult test to create a ready-made excuse for potential failure. We showed that when students are experimentally guided to adopt a failure-is-enhancing mindset (reframing failure as a valuable, informational learning opportunity rather than an ego threat), their state anxiety plummeted, task enjoyment increased, and behavioral self-handicapping was eliminated.

Building directly on this foundation, in our recent 2026 study, we explored how adolescents naturally develop these adaptive failure beliefs in high-pressure exam environments. Using a three-wave random-intercept cross-lagged panel model, we demonstrated that self-compassion serves as a vital affective catalyst. Specifically, when individual students experience a positive shift in self-compassion, it prospectively drives a subsequent increase in their adaptive beliefs about failure, which sequentially unlocks their academic buoyancy—their day-to-day capacity to bounce back from routine scholastic setbacks across the school year.

Challenging assumptions

Another line of research focuses on how essentialist thinking fuels social stigma, and how we can stop peer bullying at its cognitive roots. Across several projects, we uncovered a crucial paradox in antistigma messaging: Purely biogenetic campaigns (telling people that conditions like ADHD or gender nonconformity are “purely biological” or that people are “born that way”) frequently backfire. Although biological attributions slightly reduce personal blame, they trigger psychological essentialism, leading people to view differences as permanent, discrete, and alienating. Our research demonstrated that interactionist frameworks (combining biology and environment) and offset-effort framing (highlighting an individual’s active effort to manage their condition) successfully reduce stigma without erecting these essentialist walls.

Extending this work into subtle perceptual cues, we examined prejudice toward voice-based gender nonconformity in youth. We showed that reliance on the inherence heuristic (the intuitive mental shortcut explaining social patterns through intrinsic traits) directly feeds into gender essentialism, driving both explicit and implicit prejudice toward peers with nonconforming vocal pitch. To actively solve this problem in schools, our team developed and empirically evaluated a three-lesson natural science curriculum for 8- to 12-year-olds that used vivid examples of sex-related diversity in the animal kingdom, such as male seahorses giving birth or clownfish changing sex, to challenge rigid essentialist assumptions. In a randomized controlled trial, this intervention significantly reduced children’s gender essentialist beliefs and directly decreased prejudice toward gender-nonconforming peers.

Switching research gears

Looking ahead to the next chapter of our lab’s work, my research team and I are making an intentional, exciting shift in perspective. While much of our foundational work focused on identifying psychological vulnerabilities, such as fragile contingent self-worth, anxiety, and social threat, our future research agenda is dedicated to identifying the positive psychological assets and social cognitive levers that actively promote student motivation, deep engagement, and holistic well-being in schools.

In our work on learning and motivation, we are expanding our investigation into the rich interplay of mindsets, exploring how growth mindsets, stress mindsets, failure mindsets, strategic mindsets, and self-compassion work in tandem to cultivate intrinsic motivation, proactive learning engagement, sustained emotional well-being, and academic buoyancy. But the theoretical leap I am most excited about is shifting students’ motivational orientations from an egosystem to an ecosystem.

When students operate in an egosystem, their self-worth is hyper-focused on self-validation, meaning a peer’s high mark or success is immediately perceived as a threat to their own value. To break this destructive cycle, we are conducting research on appreciative joy (the capacity to feel genuine happiness for the success of others). By helping students cultivate an ecosystem mindset that values social interdependence and celebrates peers’ achievements, another student’s success no longer threatens their personal worth. This shift may fundamentally defuse the toxic impacts of contingent self-worth, allowing students to engage in learning out of authentic curiosity and joy rather than defensive ego-protection.

Concurrently, in our research on social stigma, we are extending our findings on the social cognitive origins of prejudice into actionable behavioral outcomes, specifically bystander intervention. It is not enough for us to simply understand why children hold essentialist biases or why peers stigmatize one another; we need to know what empowers a child to step up when they witness a classmate being bullied or excluded. Working alongside my student researchers, we are investigating how essentialist assumptions and category boundaries inhibit peer intervention, and how shifting children’s social cognitive reasoning can lower the psychological barriers to defending others.

Research is only half the battle

If I look back at my career so far, the biggest challenge hasn’t been crunching complex statistics or designing experiments, it was a lesson in human nature that really humbled me early on. Early in my research journey, I naïvely assumed that if you produce solid scientific data, schools and parents will naturally adopt it. But I quickly realized that gathering the data was only half the battle. The real hurdle was sitting down with deeply dedicated teachers and loving parents, and gently showing them that their most intuitive, well-meaning instincts were actually producing the exact opposite of what they intended.

I kept running into this intuitive backfire effect across both arms of my research. In our antistigma work, for example, I would talk with caring teachers who genuinely wanted to stop peer bullying, so they’d tell their students, “Don’t judge them, ADHD or human differences are purely biological, people are just born that way.” It sounds so compassionate on the surface, but our empirical data showed that this biogenetic messaging actually built essentialist walls in children’s minds, making them view their peers as permanently different, discrete, and alienating. Around the same time, in our parenting research, I would meet devoted parents who wanted to shield their children from every possible hardship. Yet, our longitudinal findings revealed that this helicopter parenting was actively eroding their children’s self-control and fueling school burnout. It was a real eye-opener for me as a young researcher: My job wasn’t just to publish findings, but to figure out how to help adults step away from comfortable, common-sense habits that were accidentally heightening anxiety and stigma in the kids they cared about so much.

Of course, navigating these conversations in high-stakes, exam-driven environments like Hong Kong and Macau was even more delicate. Schools operate under immense pressure to cover demanding curricula, and parents are understandably protective of their children’s time and family privacy. When you walk in to discuss sensitive topics like maternal psychological control, body-image anxieties, or peer prejudice, people can naturally feel vulnerable or defensive. I had to learn very quickly how to listen first, build deep personal trust with principals and families, and make sure our team was viewed not as outside academics coming in to critique them, but as empathetic partners sitting on the same side of the table, working together to help their children flourish.

Looking back, facing that challenge fundamentally changed who I am as a scientist. It taught me that scientific data without empathy and clear communication stays locked in an academic journal. It pushed our lab to move beyond just pointing out systemic problems, and instead start cocreating friendly, nonthreatening solutions, such as using fun animal-diversity stories to challenge essentialism, or helping families reframe failure as a growth opportunity. It’s been a delicate path to walk, but learning how to bridge rigorous science with human empathy has been a rewarding part of my career.

Advice for future researchers: Dig deep

If I were sitting down for coffee with a student researcher aspiring to build a career in educational psychology, the first piece of advice I would offer is to let your research questions be born out of real-world observations. It is very easy in academia to get caught up in abstract journal trends or theoretical debates, but educational psychology is fundamentally about human lives. Go into classrooms, talk to teachers, listen to parents, and observe daily life in your local community. When you ground your scientific inquiry in the actual lived realities of children (whether it’s observing a student freeze up during a math test or watching how peers interact on the playground), your research will not only have theoretical depth, but also genuine purpose and urgency.

My second piece of advice is to embrace methodological rigor and be brave when the data surprise you. In our field, what feels intuitive or common sense to adults often backfires empirically. Don’t be afraid to test counterintuitive ideas using robust, rigorous tools, whether multiwave longitudinal tracking or randomized controlled trials. When a finding challenges established wisdom or common intuition, don’t shy away from it; those counterintuitive discoveries are precisely where major scientific breakthroughs happen.

Third, I always tell my students that science is a relationship, not a data extraction process. In educational psychology, you are working with schools, families, and young people who are trusting you with their time, experiences, and vulnerabilities. Approach school communities with deep humility, respect, and empathy. Your goal should never be to critique from an ivory tower but to stand alongside educators and parents as a collaborative partner, cocreating nonthreatening, practical solutions that help children flourish.

Research is a collective journey, not a solo marathon. Surround yourself with generous mentors, and, as you advance, invest deeply in your own student team. The most rewarding part of my career hasn’t been any single publication or metric but working side by side with my student researchers and watching them grow into thoughtful, independent scholars. If you keep curiosity in your mind, empathy in your heart, and care for the people behind the data, you won’t just build a fulfilling academic career, you will do work that truly transforms young lives.

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment.