Projects
Development of Mental Health Mindsets in Social Contexts
Example Projects:
Exploring Adolescent Growth Mindset of Mental Health: The Influence of Parental Beliefs, Practice, and Classroom and School Culture
Summary: Drawing on mindset theory and parental emotion socialization literature, it explores how parental beliefs and perceived classroom and school culture influence early adolescents' mindsets of mental health-related attributes amidst academic and social stress, from both parents' and children's perspectives.
Twenty parent-adolescent dyads from diverse backgrounds will be recruited to participate in virtual, semi-structured interviews (i.e., parent only, child only, and parent-child joint interviews). Thematic analysis will uncover patterns and insights, providing a comprehensive understanding of the research aims.
Student PI: Rahma Goran, funded by ASPP student research award
Status: ongoing (Data collection finished; coding and analysis)
The relations between social support and mindsets in adolescents
Summary: Implicit theories of mental health involve beliefs about the malleability of thoughts, emotions, and behavior (TEB; Schleider &Weisz, 2016). Social support is critical for adolescent mental health, providing emotional, informational, and practical assistance (Cohen & Wills, 1985; Rueger et al., 2016). However, what role social support plays in the origin and development of mindsets is not well understood. Understanding mindset beliefs associated with stress is important for stress coping. In Rahma’s study, she examined how support from three major sources, including family, friends, and teachers, related to adolescents’ mindsets of mental health attributes.
Despite emerging evidence of the benefits of having a growth mindset about stress, little is known about whether and how social factors predict stress mindsets. Jasmine examined the relations between social support from three sources (family, teacher, peer) and adolescents’ stress mindsets.
Status: Completed. Rahma and Jasmine presented two studies at the 2025 NASP annual conference
Understanding Mindsets in the Context of Stress and Mental Health
Example Projects
Adolescent Dual Factor Mental Health: The Role of Growth Mindset, Stress, and Gender
Summary: Stressful life events are significant risk factors for adolescent mental health issues. A mental health growth mindset, the belief that thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are malleable, fosters resilience and positive outcomes. Using self-report survey data from a diverse sample of high school students, we examined how mental health growth mindset and stress levels predicted life satisfaction and psychopathological symptoms.
Status: Completed, Rahma presented this study at the 2025 AERA annual convention
From Stress mindset beliefs to adolescent mental health: The mediating effect of personal growth initiative behavior
Summary: Stress mindset beliefs, considered a facilitator of adaptive stress coping, have been found to affect mental health outcomes. However, the mechanisms that may explain how stress mindsets work are not well understood. Based on a meaning making theory of mindsets, this study examined if two behavioral components of Personal Growth Initiative (i.e., Intentional Behavior and Use of Resources) mediated the relation between stress mindset beliefs and three mental health indicators.
Status: Completed, Jasmine presented this study at the 2025 SRCD annual conference
Selected Publications:
Jiang, X., Mueller, C. E., Zhang, Y-C., Califano, K. (2025). Exploring relations between family stress, growth mindset, and dual-factors of mental health among adolescents. Journal of Child and Family Studies. DOI:10.1007/s10826-025-03141-9
Jiang, X., Fang, L., & Mueller, C. (2024). Growth mindset: An umbrella for protecting socially stressed adolescents’ life satisfaction. School Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/spq0000584
Walker*, K. & Jiang, X. (2022). An examination of the moderating role of growth mindset in the relation between social stress and externalizing behaviors among adolescents. Journal of Adolescence, 94(1), 69-80. DOI: 10.1002/jad.12006
Exploring Stress-Related Growth in Adolescence
Example Projects
From meaning making to meaning made: Testing the mediation model of mindsets, behavior, and stress-related growth
Summary: Fostering SRG is especially relevant in adolescents as it indicates healthy adaptation after stress and supports their adaptive functioning through future stressful times. Previous research has identified some correlates of SRG, such as self-esteem, depressive symptoms, coping behaviors, and cognitive processing of the event. However, it is not well understood how different factors (e.g., beliefs and behaviors) contribute to SRG. In this study, we tested a plausible mechanism based on Park’s (2010) meaning-making model --the relations between global mindset beliefs about stress (meaning-making), personal growth initiative (behavioral change), and SRG (adjustment after meaning made) through a mediation model.
Status: Completed; Jasmine presented this study in a symposium at the 2025 APS annual conference.
Exploring the relations between stress-related growth and other variables in network analysis
Summary: Using network analysis, we examined the relations between stress-related growth (SRG) and four other clusters of variables, including psychological strengths, social support resources, stress, and mental health indicators. Results showed that SRG has very weak relations with support variables and mental health variables. SRG has strong associations with psychological strength variables in general, and among these variables, the strongest associations exist between SRG and growth mindset about mental health, personal growth initiative-intentional behavior, and self-care awareness.
Status: Completed; Dr. Jiang presented this study at 2024 APA annual convention and one manuscript is submitted and currently under review.
Exploring Kindness Development in Different Social-cultural Contexts
Example Projects
Socio-cultural pathways to kindness cultivation among Thai adolescents in the context of parental migration
Summary: Kindness is a pivotal character strength that significantly influences personal growth and social connectedness. Despite its importance, the exploration of kindness is often limited by Westernized definitions, leaving a gap in understanding their development in other parts of the world, such as the Global South. This project aims to investigate the influence of caregiving practices and socio-cultural intricacies on cultivating kindness among early adolescents in Thailand, a region deeply impacted by Buddhist cultural values. We will focus on adolescents from migrant families who have experienced parental migration during early childhood - a common social phenomenon in the Global South that results in family separation and non-parental caregiving. Adopting a life history perspective, we will employ a qualitative approach to obtain primary data (interviews) and use other types of data (i.e., survey and self-report questionnaire) to assist with participant selection and data triangulation.
PIs: Dr. Jiang and Dr. Fu at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Status: Ongoing. This project is funded by the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development Care Everywhere Grant, supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation
Adolescent social-emotional development in the Generative AI era
Generative AI (GenAI) use among adolescents is widespread. Is it a tool that accelerates the speed of information processing with unprecedented comprehensiveness and automatization, with all kinds of benefits to improve human functioning, or is it a Pandora's box that also brings explicit or hidden risks beyond what humans could envision before its release? Such a question is even more concerning and significant for GenAI's use among young users who have developmental characteristics that are different from adults, which increase their susceptibility to risks associated with GenAI, as the foundation design of GenAI does NOT embrace the necessary developmental and ethical considerations to meet children's and adolescents' needs or with healthy youth development in mind.
Based on emerging research evidence, there are fundamental pitfalls rooted in the current GenAI design. Despite its efficiency, GenAI's accessibility and convenience can bypass essential cognitive processes and reinforce passive information consumption in users, which can negatively affect social-emotional and cognitive development in young users. Instead of going against GenAI use, what can be the ways that adapt to this technology change at the societal level and mitigate the risks? This is a big question to which no single discipline or research group could adequately address -- interdisciplinary collaboration, cooperation from tech companies and AI designers, high involvement from stakeholders in policy, education, funding agencies, and the public in general will be needed.
As a youth well-being researcher, the current unmonitored and unregulated use of GenAI among youth concerns me, yet I am hopeful, as I believe in human adaptation and resilience in the time of change, including the young ones. We just need to catch up on understanding the mechanisms, consequences, and effective ways to combat the negativity while optimizing the benefits. The stone that I will skip into the water to see the ripple effect is an interdisciplinary collaborative project, in which I partner with researchers in computer engineering to design different intervention strategies embedded in the GenAI interface, and we will test if and how, any of these interventions would mitigate the likely cognitive risk in GenAI use by increasing active thinking among adolescent users.
