Amber Xuqian Chen

Graduate Student

Advisor

Research Area

Social Psychology

Biography

Amber completed her bachelor's degree in Sociology at Sun Yat-Sen University in 2016 and her master's degree in Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2017. She then worked as a Lab Manager in the Motivation and Emotion Lab at CUHK studying social behaviors and emotional experiences across the life span and across cultures before joining UCSB’s Ph.D. program in 2022.

Research

Amber is interested in the neurocomputational mechanisms of collective phenomena (e.g., moral evaluation, group polarization, cultural norms, etc.). She is exploring paradigms that apply techniques from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision to large-scale data from mass media and historical archives to study cultural variation and evolutions (e.g., age stereotypes, moral conceptions, etc.). In another line of her research, she focuses on why some emotions get polarized in social networks and others don't, how such (non-)polarization varies across cultures and the role of social network structure. Eventually, she aims to examine the underlying neural mechanisms that create moral judgments and emotional bias, and how they shape societies.