SMU Associate Professor of Psychology Christie Napa Scollon, an expert on the topic of subjective wellbeing, or happiness, is especially keen to understand why Asian cultures report lower levels of happiness than other places. In one such study, Associate Prof Scollon and her PhD student Sharon Koh measured the cognitive organisation of emotion knowledge using a reaction time paradigm (originally developed by Dr Michael Robinson at North Dakota State University). By asking participants a series of questions and measuring how quickly they responded, they made some inferences about how Singaporeans and Americans organise their emotions.