Researchers have gone beyond identity status and been putting more and more emphases on the dynamic process of identity development and its contextual embeddedness. Study of individual's adaptation to the multicultural background is a good point of penetration. Because of the differences in regional conditions and cultural traditions, the minority youths who go to university in the mainstream culture would have special experiences and challenges in the development of their self-identities. Semi-structured interview and narrative were used in this research to discover the characteristics of the self-identity constructing processes of Mongolian undergraduates in a Shanghai university context. Their identity constructing process could be divided into three stages: difference-detecting, self-doubting and self-orienting. The main efforts of identity constructing in each stage could all be described as self-exploring and support-seeking. Special contents of internal explorations and sources of support were distinguished at different stages. As relative results, three main types of self-orientation were revealed: goal-oriented, self-isolated and unreserved assimilated. The characteristics of them are quite similar to those of three identity processing styles proposed by Berzonsky, which indicates there are some common elements lying in all self-development processes of adolescences and young adults. Ethnicity and culture could be background and resource or what Côté called identity capital that impacts the special course of self-identity constructing under similar principles. Different attitudes towards and relationships with their own ethnicity and new surroundings separated the three types of students from each other and interacted with the developmental characteristics and tendencies of their ethnicity identifications and self identities. It was found that minority youths' self-identity constructing was based on their needs of self-value and interacted with their ecological niche constructing. Take ethnicity attachment and ethnicity responsibility as a typical example: the setting up of bi-direction relationship between individuals and their ethnicity (or other identity-related factors) was very important for minority youths to expand and integrate themselves. We also presented in detail our methodological exploring process so as to illuminate the limitation of traditional methods and the necessity and importance of methodological reform. Methodologically, both emic and etic positions were taken, interview and narrative approaches were adopted and individual angle of analysis was kept in the research. They were all proved to be effective to provide insight into the dynamic process of self identity constructing.

Cultural psychology of education strives to understand the locality of the developing individual. This article tries to interpret the mission and vision of the cultural psychology of education in the background of modern society, with individualizing and techno-mechanistic social trends as its prominent feature. The concept of “contextualized individual” is proposed as a potential framework to conceptualize the relational and contextual dependence of the developing subject. The article also re-interprets Li and Xu’s 2018 paper “Developmental Psychology Research Based on Educational Practice in China” to explore how to use the framework of the “contextualized individual” to theoretically channel and generalize educational researches and interventional studies in a local educational setting.

Adolescence is a developmental period when individuals actively evaluate and construct their life goals. During the past several decades, China has transformed dramatically toward a highly competitive, market-oriented society. Despite a growing interest in exploring the implications of cultural values for youth adjustment in contemporary China, little is known about what life goals are prevalent among Chinese adolescents. This mixed-methods study aimed to identify the key themes of life goals and to examine gender, grade, and urban-rural differences in the identified themes among Chinese adolescents, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 163 middle- and high-school students in urban and rural China. Thirteen key life goal themes were identified; among them, the most mentioned themes were Family Well-being, Academic Excellence, and Personal Happiness. Quantitative results showed grade and urban-rural differences in the adolescents’ endorsement of the themes of life goals. Specifically, more middle schoolers and rural students endorsed life goals that emphasize social belonging and group well-being, whereas more high schoolers and urban students endorsed life goals that underscore individual independence and uniqueness. These results indicated the implications of social change for adolescents’ life goals in contemporary China.

A sequel to the previous article "Roots of Excellence: The Releasing Effect of Individual Potentials through Educational Cultural Intervention in a Chinese School" (in press), the present study is on the unexpected reversal phenomena in the process of cultural intervention. The goal of the intervention is to construct the dynamics of Jiti (well-organized collective in Chinese) through creative activities to promote students' development. In the intervention, the releasing effect (Wu et al. 2016) emerged as well, but the teacher's concern about worsening discipline and academic performance evoked and reinforced his habitual notions and practices of education, turning the joint activities into a way of strengthening discipline. The energy that had been discharging at the beginning of the intervention was inhibited, so that many more problematic behaviors took shape. The whole class formed an inhibitory atmosphere, within which pupils formed self-defensive regulation strategies. By comparing with the productive collective in which intervention was effective and analyzing this unexpected reversal process, we can not only see pupils' self-construction status in the inhibitory culture but illuminate the formation of the teacher's resistance to educational and cultural transformation as well. Resistance is originated from teachers not being able to interpret pupils' inner developmental needs but instead anxious about the ongoing problems.

High-achieving students face greater expectations in competitive societies such as China, which can impede their performance. Based on previous observations regarding what we call the “inhibition phenomenon of high-achieving students,” wherein otherwise successful students show unexpectedly poor performances in collective activities of relatively unfamiliar forms, the present research analyzes the self-identity of such students and explores the underlying mechanisms that result in this inhibition phenomenon. An idiographic approach is employed to examine typical cases and their semiotic mediation in the self-identity regulative process. Two high-achieving students who exhibit the characteristics of the inhibition phenomenon are compared with another high-achieving student who appears not to be inhibited, using a multilevel and comprehensive analysis that integrates a number of aspects, such as the students’ emotional experience of the activities in relation to which the inhibition phenomenon occurs, their meaning-making regarding the activities, and their reflections on their daily school lives. The findings show that, for the inhibited students, a cued identity as being a “good student” is activated through the activities with the connotations of “being successful compared to the others” and “pursuing recognition” leading to a worsened performance; alternatively, the student not susceptible to inhibition displays an identity of being a “learner,” who focuses on the content of the activity and concrete suggestions from important others. These specific semiotic mediation processes indicate that, when self-identity is narrow and result oriented, it is easy for excessive future-oriented self-demands to be imposed, thereby bringing pressure to the individual at that moment. By contrast, a flexible and process-oriented identity facilitates an individual’s involvement in unfamiliar activities, enabling a richer, more open self-construction process.