Her research centers on the biopsychosocial integrative framework to investigate the mechanisms underlying mental health across diverse populations. As first author or corresponding author, I have published 10 academic papers in journals such as PNAS, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and Molecular Autism. My research spans psychology, neuroscience, and social sciences, integrating psychometric assessments, naturalistic behavioral experiments, neuroimaging techniques (MRI, EEG), physiological stress indicators, and multidimensional data analysis approaches, combining both theory-driven hypothesis testing and data-driven exploratory analyses. My work focuses on mental health issues—particularly depression and anxiety—that arise from structural factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage and neurodiversity. In the area of socioeconomic status (SES), I have systematically revealed the theoretical and empirical foundations for differences in depression manifestations across individuals with varying SES (e.g., income, education, and living environment; Hao & Farah, 2023, PNAS), and explored the neural and physiological mechanisms of emotion regulation and social interaction in the relationship between SES and depression. In autism research, I have found that depressive symptoms in individuals with autism may stem more from heightened self-awareness and reduced social satisfaction rather than from overt social deficits, and that these symptoms are associated with specific structural brain region characteristics (Hao et al., 2025, Molecular Autism). Future research will further examine the modulatory roles of social neural circuits and structural factors such as gender and SES in depression and anxiety. I have presented my research in oral or poster sessions at numerous international conferences, including the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Meeting, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) Annual Meeting, and the Society for Affective Science (SAS) Annual Meeting. I serve on the editorial board of Communications Psychology and as a junior editorial board member for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine.