My CVAbout Me
Hi, I’m Jincheng (Clyde) Wu, a second-year master’s student in Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Dr. Xinyin Chen.
My research interests broadly center on children’s and adolescents’ socio-emotional development. I am interested in how individual characteristics, such as temperament, social cognition, and resilience, interact with family, school, and cultural contexts to shape young people’s social experiences and adjustment. Through this work, I hope to better understand how relationships and environments can support development across childhood and adolescence.
My work combines vignette-based tasks, peer nominations, questionnaires, and qualitative interviews. I also develop LLM-assisted programs to facilitate the coding and analysis of naturalistic language data. Through my research and experiences in youth mentoring and socioemotional learning, I hope to inform school- and family-based support for children and adolescents.
I received my B.S. in Applied Psychology from Zhejiang University of Technology, where I worked with Dr. Yulong Tang and Dr. Shuyi Zhai. In Spring 2024, I was a visiting student at the University of California, Berkeley. My previous research experience also includes work with the Family and Culture Lab at UC Berkeley and the Life-span Development Laboratory at Stanford University.
PhD applications: I am actively seeking potential PhD advisors and programs that align with my research interests for Fall 2027 entry, particularly in School Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Human Development and Family Studies. I would be grateful for the opportunity to learn from and work with faculty whose research focuses on temperament, peer relationships, and school adjustment.
I welcome conversations about shared research interests and opportunities to collaborate. You can reach me at clydewu [at] upenn.edu.
Research Interests
- Shyness, Temperament, and Socioemotional Development
- Peer Preferences, Friendships, and Social Networks
- School Adjustment, Risk, and Resilience
- Family and Cultural Contexts of Development
Selected Research
Shyness and Peer Relationships in School
How do children evaluate shy peers, and when do their preferences change? My research examines peer preferences across developmental stages and situations with different social demands. Related projects investigate how children’s own shyness, friendship characteristics, and perceptions of peer networks relate to school adjustment. This work includes several conference presentations and manuscripts under review or in preparation.
Culture, Parenting, and Socio-emotional Development
How do cultural contexts and historical changes shape beliefs about children and their development? How do these beliefs, in turn, inform parenting and socialization practices and relate to children’s adjustment? As a research assistant in Dr. Xinyin Chen’s lab, I have contributed to projects examining children’s temperament, social behavior, peer relationships and leadership, school performance, and parenting within cultural contexts. These projects also address culturally relevant concepts and practices, including care-based power-assertive parenting and cultural values (self- and group-orientation). My contributions draw on multiple methods, including behavioral observations during free-play sessions, peer nominations, and questionnaires.
Adolescent Stress and Support
How do adolescents experience stress, and what support do they find helpful? I contribute to mixed-methods research on Chinese American adolescents’ academic stress and support from peers, families, and schools. In a related area of applied work, I contribute to qualitative research and activity design for a school-based mentoring project using the Possibility Mentoring Framework.
Social Cognition and LLM-Assisted Corpus Analysis
My research experience also includes studies of children’s social cognition, including exploratory behavior and selective trust in gossip. I develop LLM-assisted programs to support the coding and analysis of naturalistic language data. In a project on young children’s gossip, I evaluated a coding framework combining LLM screening with human review. A manuscript from this work is under review.
News and Updates
- Fall 2026: I am serving as a teaching assistant for the ISHD Proseminar (EDUC 8560) at Penn GSE.
- May 2026: I presented our research on Chinese American adolescents’ academic stress and peer relationships at the Supporting Dual Language Learners and Children of Immigrant Families Annual Research Conference in Berkeley.
- April 2026: I presented our research on children’s gossip and LLM-assisted analysis at the Cognitive Development Society Meeting in Montréal.
- February 2026: Our poster on preferences for shy peers from preschool to adolescence was accepted for the 28th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD) in Incheon.
- February 2026: I presented our research on Chinese American adolescents’ academic stress and peer relationships at the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) Convention in Chicago.
- November 2025: I presented our research on Chinese children’s preferences for shy and unshy peers at the 25th Occasional Temperament Conference.