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Faculty Profile

Highlights
These highlights are AI-generated using the faculty's CV and Google Scholar profile
37
H-Index (All Time)
8114
Citations (All Time)
Angela Ka-yee Leung is an internationally recognized psychologist whose pioneering research bridges cultural psychology, creativity, sustainability, and social innovation, with significant impact on understanding mindsets and societal challenges.

Combines innovative theoretical and empirical approaches to cultural and social psychology with applied impact in sustainability, climate action, and organizational innovation; recognized for bridging East-West perspectives, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and translating research into policy and public discourse; highly cited with significant influence on both academic and policy communities.

Focused research areas include Transforming complex and contradictory issues into opportunities for thriving individuals and societies; mindsets and their impact on psychological and physical wellness; psychological science of climate change and sustainable living; multicultural experience and creativity; cosmopolitanism and globalization; social innovation; paradox management; working motherhood; lay beliefs of busyness.
Areas of Expertise
Cultural psychologySocial psychologyCreativityParadoxClimate change

Professor Angela Leung joined SMU in 2007. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and B.Soc.Sc. from the University of Hong Kong. Her research examines how complex, contradictory, and challenging issues can be transformed into opportunities so that people and society can thrive. Her research topics include multiculturalism and creativity, cosmopolitanism and globalization, paradox management, working motherhood, and environmental psychology. Together, this program of research offers novel understanding of how our mindset makes sense of personal and societal challenges, and the downstream differential consequences of being impaired versus enriched by the accompanying conflicts and tensions. Her publications have appeared on top-tier journals including American Psychologist, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Journal of Environmental Psychology. She has edited two books on the psychological science of culture and creativity (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Oxford University Press, 2018). Professor Leung is currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology and Associate Editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. She was the Lee Kong Chian Fellow in 2018-19 and 2019-20 and has received numerous research awards. Her areas of teaching include psychology research methods, motivation, creativity, and cultural/social psychology.

Qualifications

  • PhD, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2007
  • MA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2005
  • BSocSc, University of Hong Kong, 2002

Research Interests

  • Multicultural competence
  • Creative and innovation
  • Psychology of globalization
  • Motivated cultural cognition
  • Embodied cognition

Research Advisor/Co-Research Advisor To

Course(s) Taught in SMU

  • Psychology of Motivation
  • Research Methods in Psychology
  • Psychology Study Mission
  • Capstone Seminar