Publications

For the most up-to-date list of my publications, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.

Research training and experiences

I completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Linguistics and Literature from the National University of Social Sciences and Humanities of Vietnam. I then studied Liberal Arts and Sciences (interdepartmental major, focusing on psychology and linguistics) at University College Utrecht (BA, honors) in the Netherlands. My bachelor thesis on the perception of trustworthiness was conducted at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research. Afterwards, I obtained a Research Master in Social Psychology (MSc, cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam). From 2013 until 2014, I worked in an interdisciplinary project on the evolution of sematic systems across 50 Indo-European languages at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics under the supervision of prof. Michael Dunn and prof. Asifa Majid.

In July 2014, I started my PhD research under the supervision of prof. Lydia Krabbendam and prof. Catrin Finkenauer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My PhD dissertation was an investigation on the mechanisms through which a person can understand other people’s thoughts and feelings and the influence of culture (specifically on cultural differences in the concept of the self) on these processes. Eventually, I was studying how we can take the perspective of another person more efficiently and how we can empathize better with other people. For my PhD research projects, I used a wide range of methodologies, including surveys, semantic priming experiments, cross-country comparisons as well as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). At the end of my PhD, I also worked with prof. Shihui Han as part of a research visit to the Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Peking University, China.

After defending my PhD dissertation in 2019, I became a postdoctoral researcher in a project funded by the Jacobs Foundation and studied the reciprocal relationship between academic self-concept, motivational behaviors, and academic achievement.

Since 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Ammodo SENSA team investigating the reciprocity between the development of prosocial behaviors and that of socio-emotional cognitive abilities in children. I also joined the GUTS consortium (gutsproject.com) to study the relationships between self-concept, self-concept clarity and socio-cognitive emotional development in adolescents.

Since August 2022, I took up the position of an assistant professor at the Department of Clinical, Neuro- & Developmental Psychology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My research interests continue to revolve around self-concepts (how we make sense of ourselves) and social cognition (how we make sense of, emphathize with, and act prosocially towards other people) while taking into account the cultural contexts we are in.

(This was me in summer 2014 when I just completed my work at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and was about to come back to Amsterdam to start my PhD research.)