Dr. Buchtel received her PhD in cultural psychology (social/personality area; quantitative minor) from the University of British Columbia in 2009, and her B.A. from Yale University in 1999. In between, she spent four years in Changsha and Beijing, teaching English at the high school and university levels and learning Mandarin Chinese.

My research seeks to explore and deepen our understanding of Chinese cultural influences on psychology, including moral concepts, values, motivation and reasoning styles, and their implications for Western theories. I use interdisciplinary approaches, multiple/mixed methods with cross-cultural data (e.g. psychophysiological data, qualitative data, quantitative surveys and experiments) and adopt open-science practices.

See updated publications and projects at: https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/persons/emma-ellen-kathrina-buchtel

In my teaching, I aim to cultivate positive attitudes towards diversity, curiosity and excitement about new ideas, and to teach skills that help my students learn and benefit from different perspectives. Please take a look at our pedagogical projects on teaching discussion skills in the Hong Kong context (https://eduhk-pt.wixsite.com/ptindiscussion) and teaching Global Perspectives through a focus on affective pedagogy and affective cultural competence (https://cultivateglobalpers.wixsite.com/home), an animated video to help visualize how "within culture differences are (almost) always bigger than between-culture differences," (De-essentializing Bar Graphs: Diversity within Differences"), and my TEDx talk, “Culture, Morality and Connecting Across Differences” (https://youtu.be/LToLDHWKGBE).