Dax is a registered counsellor with experience working in education and social service sectors. Dax is also a research psychologist aiming to identify the mechanisms for social compassion. In his doctoral research, Dax investigates the personality profile of individuals who embrace diversity by examining the personality-attitudinal link between facets of openness and attitudes of prejudice and tolerance. As a quantitative researcher, Dax is trained in R programming, SPSS, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, multiple regression, and logistic regression. Outside of his work, Dax will be learning coding, knitting beanies, reading manuals on parenting, and annoying his four-year old son.

While trying to decipher the relationships between religiosity, mindfulness, self-efficacy, and their effects on subjective well-being amongst Buddhists in China a few years back, Barry encountered an issue – no doctrinally developed Buddhist religiosity scale was available. Hence, he is now developing a Buddhist religiosity scale that can truly reflect the active ingredients of being a religious Buddhist from a perspective rooted in Buddhist doctrinal teachings. His Ph.D. research will provide the Buddhist community with a scale developed through a culturally bound emic lens yet allow theoretical comparisons with frameworks commonly used to measure religiosity in monotheistic religions.

Xiangbin served as a psychologist in the criminal justice setting before entering the private sector. He is currently working as a clinical psychologist while pursuing his PhD with JCU Singapore. Inspired by his personal and professional experiences, his PhD research is on integrating religion and spirituality with psychotherapy in Singapore. He hopes that his research will shed light on local practitioners’ and clients’ attitudes and preferences in this important aspect of clinical practice.  

Yong Jie is a PhD candidate at James Cook University, Singapore. For his doctoral research he is investigating the psychological conceptualisations of curiosity and their applicability in Southeast Asia. He is also interested in the associations between curiosity and video gaming, including potential addiction. Yong Jie also a sessional lecturer and tutor at JCU, and particularly enjoys teaching research methodologies and statistics.