About

Jeanne L. Tsai is the Dunlevie Family Professor and a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. She is also the Director of the Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab and Co-Founding Director of the Asian American Research Center at Stanford. She earned her B.A. in psychology at Stanford University, followed by her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her academic background includes a clinical internship and post-doctoral work at UCSF in minority mental health. She was an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota from 1997 to 2000 before joining Stanford's psychology faculty in 2000. Her research broadly focuses on the cultural shaping of emotion and its implications for health, decision-making, and person perception. Her work has been funded by prominent institutions such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. She has served as an Associate Editor of the journal Emotion and is a fellow of several professional societies, including the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. At Stanford, she has received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching twice and the Asian American Activities Center Faculty Award.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Developmental psychology
• Psychotherapist
• Cognitive psychology
• Communication

Selected publications

• Leader choices reflect cultural differences in ideal affect more during organizational growth than decline.

  Emotion · 2026-03-09

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What emotions do people prefer in their leaders, and do these emotional preferences vary depending on how their organizations are performing?In three studies conducted between 2018 and 2023 with European American, East Asian American, and Hong Kong Chinese participants, we predicted that people would choose leaders whose emotional expressions matched their culture's ideal affect (the affective states they value) more during growth, when conditions are favorable and people default to cultural ideals, than during decline, when conditions are unfavorable, and people are more open to other options.In Study 1 (N = 304), participants imagined that their own organizations were undergoing growth or decline and rated the emotions they would ideally like their leaders to have.In Studies 2 (N = 449) and 3 (N = 558), participants read hypothetical scenarios of student organizations undergoing growth and decline, and chose a leader among excited, calm, and neutral candidates.Across the studies, during growth, European Americans and East Asian Americans chose excited candidates more and calm candidates less than did Hong Kong Chinese, consistent with cultural differences in the valuation of high arousal positive affect.During decline, however, these cultural differences disappeared.Moreover, in Study 3, participants' ideal high arousal positive affect predicted their positive judgments of the excited candidate when conditions were favorable but not when they were unfavorable, suggesting one mechanism underlying these cultural differences in leader choice.Together, these studies suggest that people prefer leaders who express culturally ideal emotions more during organizational growth than decline.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Meta-Analytic Review of Cultural Variation in Affect Valuation

  2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Manuscript in Press at Psychological Bulletin. ©American Psychological Association, 2025.This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritativedocument published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at:10.1037/bul0000499.

  Publisher

• How U.S. ‘cultural defaults’ challenge American public health and what public health officers can do about it

  SSM - Population Health · 2025-03-29

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  As practitioners and scientists reflect on what can be learned from COVID, we argue that cultural defaults-commonsense, rational, and taken-for-granted ways of thinking, feeling, and acting -played an important role in how countries responded to the pandemic, and help explain why the United States suffered 4-6 times more deaths per 100,000 people compared to the East Asian countries of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Drawing on a recent review and theoretical integration, we describe six pairs of contrasting cultural defaults that were common in how the U.S. and some East Asian nations responded to the pandemic: (1) optimism-uniqueness vs. realism-similarity, (2) single vs. multiple causes, (3) expression of high vs. low arousal emotions, (4) influence-control vs. wait-adjust, (5) personal choice-self-regulation vs. social choice-social regulation, and (6) promotion vs. prevention. These historically-derived defaults are often outside of individual awareness, but are reflected in and reinforced by institutional practices and policies, the media, and everyday interactions. They are infused with cultural values, understood as the "right way" to be or behave, and are adaptive in their respective contexts. Importantly, both constellations of cultural defaults are viable depending on the problem to be solved. We then provide six specific ways in which public health officers might productively consider these and other cultural defaults when preparing for the next crisis and planning how to effectively motivate people to protect their own and others' health. Our hope is to facilitate efforts to include a focus on culture within the scope of the social determinants of health and to encourage more partnerships between behavioral scientists and public health practitioners. Recognizing the cultural defaults of the various "publics" they seek to protect is critical as U.S. public health officers aim to promote health for all, a significant and complex challenge in the increasingly individualistic U.S.

  PublisherDOI

• Neural Evidence for Cultural Variation in Emotion

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-09-16

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization

  Science · 2025-11-27 · 11 citations

  article

  Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants' feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.

  PublisherDOI

• A meta-analytic review of cultural variation in affect valuation.

  Psychological Bulletin · 2025-12-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What affective states do people ideally want to feel and why? In Affect Valuation Theory, Tsai et al. (2006) proposed and observed that (a) how people would ideally like to feel (their "ideal affect") differs from how they actually feel (their "actual affect"), and (b) cultural factors shape people's ideal affect even more than their actual affect. In this individual participant data meta-analysis, we reexamined these two premises in a combined data file of over 31,000 participants from 124 data sets collected by different research teams across the world. Consistent with Tsai et al., we observed that (a) actual affect and ideal affect are empirically distinct constructs, and (b) cultural differences in ideal affect are larger in magnitude than cultural differences in actual affect. These findings held across research teams, participant populations, and publication status. Importantly, most cultural differences in ideal affect endured over time, including European Americans' greater valuation of high arousal positive states compared to East Asian Americans and East Asians. New patterns also emerged: European Americans valued low arousal positive states more over time; differences in ideal affect emerged among specific East Asian cultural groups; and socioeconomic status, gender, and age were also associated with differences in ideal affect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Cultural Defaults in the Time of COVID: Lessons for the Future

  Psychological Science in the Public Interest · 2024-10-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  Five years after the beginning of the COVID pandemic, one thing is clear: The East Asian countries of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea outperformed the United States in responding to and controlling the outbreak of the deadly virus. Although multiple factors likely contributed to this disparity, we propose that the culturally linked psychological defaults ("cultural defaults") that pervade these contexts also played a role. Cultural defaults are commonsense, rational, taken-for-granted ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. In the United States, these cultural defaults include optimism and uniqueness, single cause, high arousal, influence and control, personal choice and self-regulation, and promotion. In Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, these defaults include realism and similarity, multiple causes, low arousal, waiting and adjusting, social choice and social regulation, and prevention. In this article, we (a) synthesize decades of empirical research supporting these unmarked defaults; (b) illustrate how they were evident in the announcements and speeches of high-level government and organizational decision makers as they addressed the existential questions posed by the pandemic, including "Will it happen to me/us?" "What is happening?" "What should I/we do?" and "How should I/we live now?"; and (c) show the similarities between these cultural defaults and different national responses to the pandemic. The goal is to integrate some of the voluminous literature in psychology on cultural variation between the United States and East Asia particularly relevant to the pandemic and to emphasize the crucial and practical significance of meaning-making in behavior during this crisis. We provide guidelines for how decision makers might take cultural defaults into account as they design policies to address current and future novel and complex threats, including pandemics, emerging technologies, and climate change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-11-22 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Today, social media platforms hold sole power to study the effects of feed ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants' feeds in real-time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1,256 participants on X during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by two points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reducing discrepancies between actual and ideal affect across adulthood: the roles of activity flow conduciveness, pleasantness, and familiarity

  Cognition & Emotion · 2024-07-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 3,815). Greater activity familiarity was associated with smaller discrepancies in actual-ideal LAP, while greater activity pleasantness was associated with smaller discrepancies in actual-ideal HAP. These findings provide insights on the activities that help people achieve their ideal affect more easily.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reranking Social Media Feeds: A Practical Guide for Field Experiments

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-06-27

  preprintOpen access

  Social media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and behavior, yet performing experiments on these platforms and, in particular, on feed algorithms is becoming increasingly challenging. This guide offers practical recommendations for researchers developing and deploying field experiments focused on real-time reranking of social media feeds. The article is organized around two contributions. First, we provide an overview of an experimental method using web browser extensions that intercepts and reranks content in real time, enabling naturalistic reranking field experiments. We then describe feed interventions and measurements that this paradigm enables on participants' actual feeds, without requiring the involvement of social media platforms. Second, we offer concrete technical recommendations for intercepting and reranking social media feeds with minimal user-facing delay, and provide an open-source implementation. This document aims to summarize lessons learned in running field experiments on social media, provide concrete implementation details, and foster the ecosystem of independent social media research. Finally, we release the source code that serves as a blueprint for implementing future feed-ranking experiments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brian Knutson

  Stanford University

  21 shared

• Yu‐Wen Ying

  17 shared

• Helene H. Fung

  Chinese University of Hong Kong

  16 shared

• Robert W. Levenson

  University of California, Berkeley

  15 shared

• Yulia Chentsova-Dutton

  Georgetown University

  13 shared

• James J. Gross

  10 shared

• Yukiko Uchida

  10 shared

• Tamara Sims

  9 shared

Labs

• Culture and Emotion LabPI

Education

• B.A., Psychology

  Stanford University

• Ph.D., Clinical Psychology

  UC Berkeley

Awards & honors

• Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (twice)
• Asian American Activities Center Faculty Award
• Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science
• Fellow of the American Psychological Association
• Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology