Stephen Chen

Stephen Chen serves as Associate Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College, where his research examines how cultural and family processes influence mental health and development across the lifespan, with emphasis on underrepresented and at-risk populations including Chinese American immigrant families.

He holds a B.A. from Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Ph.D. from University of California-Berkeley, informed by prior experience as a K-12 school counselor in Shanghai. His teaching portfolio includes Asian American Psychology, Cultural Psychology, and Culture and Emotion seminars.

Dr. Chen's research program investigates two interconnected domains: (1) emotion-language-self-regulation dynamics in Chinese American immigrant family development, and (2) children's conceptualization of social status/mobility as extensions of cultural frameworks. This work consistently addresses socioemotional outcomes in ethnic minority contexts through developmental lenses.

Recent 2024 publications demonstrate cohesive thematic progression across developmental psychology subfields, with three papers examining wealth bias mechanisms, parental love expressions in immigrant contexts, and ethnic-racial socialization patterns. These works collectively advance understanding of how cultural positioning shapes children's socioemotional development.

He maintains active professional engagement through the Association for Psychological Science, Asian American Psychological Association, and Society for Research in Child Development (serving on Asian Caucus and Teaching Committee), while contributing to editorial boards of Child Development, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, and Asian American Journal of Psychology.

As a mentor, Dr. Chen supervises graduate and undergraduate researchers including Aya Williams (doctoral dissertation leading to Developmental Science publication) and Michelle Wang '17 (undergraduate honors thesis resulting in Developmental Psychology first-authorship). His Family Development Project lab maintains active research operations with dedicated social media outreach through an Instagram channel.