Shu-Sha Angie Guan

Dr. Guan earned her BA in Psychology at UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UCLA. Her work focuses on how social contexts (e.g., culture, social relationships, digital technology) affect mental and physical well-being, especially among ethnic minority and immigrant adolescents and young adults.

For example, she has examined: (1) how children from immigrant backgrounds provide support to their parents and communities through language brokering (i.e., translation and interpretation work) and how this work affects parent-child relationships and prosocial development (e.g., respect, empathy, transcultural perspective-taking; Guan & Shen, 2014; Guan et al., 2014); (2) how adolescents from diverse cultural backgrounds, in turn, receive support from parents, siblings, and peers and what this may mean for their psychological (e.g., depressive symptoms) and physiological health (e.g., as measured by salivary cortisol, inflammatory markers like c-reactive protien [CRP]; Guan & Fuligni, 2015; Guan et al., 2016); and (3) how support online and offline affect the ways young adults respond to stress psychologically (e.g., anxiety, worry) and physiologically (e.g., as measured by heart rate [HR], diastolic & systolic blood pressure [DBP, SBP], salivary cortisol; Guan et al., 2017).

Her experiences as a child language broker and first-generation college student have deeply informed her work.