Category: Education

Yoona Kang’s Korean name means: “How can I help?”

“Helping others is something I thought about a lot,” said Kang, a Rutgers-Camden assistant psychology professor and the creator of a new mobile app called Daily Compassion that she believes may lead to a path to help a lot of people, if only in a small way.

She and her graduate researchers are studying how to spread kindness digitally and in everyday life through the use of the app. She defines compassion as “having genuine concerns for the well-being of others and having desire to alleviate their suffering.”

The app measures, tests, and encourages the spread of kindness — quite the opposite of the nasty doxing and mean-spirited online messaging that occurs today.

People send messages anonymously on the app and can see, via a world map, messages being sent from one location to another.

“Our data does show that kindness indeed spreads,” said Kang, 41. “Whether/if you receive more messages yesterday or more positive wishes yesterday, then you are likely to send more the day after.”

That’s even though there is no pressure to reciprocate, she said, because of the anonymity of the messages.

The research is being conducted through the school’s Compassion and Well-Being Lab, which was started by Kang, who is also a professor of prevention science.

Her group recruited and paid 400 people across the United States to test the app in March and studied their usage. The app allows people to send messages that Kang created, including: “May you appreciate beauty.” “May you feel brave enough to begin again.” “May you experience kindness.”

Users reported they enjoyed participating. “This app made me feel GOOD,” one wrote. “Favorite part was being able to send them, hoping someone would benefit from it,” another wrote. “Wishing people well has been a very important part of healing,” wrote a third.

Even after using the app as little as four times on average, users reported higher feelings of well-being, she said. At 20 times or more, they reported decreased depression, she said.

Study participants also were asked to share their political party. People living in blue and red states were sending well wishes to each other, though they didn’t know it, she said.

Participants can send messages through the app, but they do not choose who they message because everyone is anonymous, Kang said. In some cases, the app randomly determines the user who will receive the message. In the meditation part of the app, users can send well wishes to a particular participant, as identified by an avatar, but they don’t actually know who that person is.

“The goal was to show that people from different backgrounds, regardless of where they are located, were willing to express compassion and kindness to one another,” she said.

Kang said her interest in kindness and compassion stems from her own experience. Her family came to America when she was 19, she said, and her parents opened a restaurant in California.

“Suddenly, I was here working as a waitress, working 50 hours a week while going to community college full time,” she said. “From midnight to 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., I would study.”

She had to learn basic things about living in America.

“It really shook my foundation about my worldview, and it really motivated me to help people like me who were going through similar challenges,” she said.

After community college, Kang got her bachelor’s degree in psychology at UCLA and her doctorate in cognitive psychology at Yale. Her dissertation was on whether compassion meditation decreased negative bias against people who experience homelessness.

Kang then spent a decade at the University of Pennsylvania, first as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a research director. She explored the neuroscience of compassion, something that not everyone was ready to accept.

“They thought it was a really soft concept,” she said. “I wanted to show this is science. This is quantifiable.”

She said the team’s data show how meditation, even as little as three minutes twice daily, has an overall positive impact on well-being and decreases depression and anxiety.

There really had not been studies that tried to quantify the spread of kindness. There is older work on the spread of loneliness and happiness, she said.

Now that the initial study is complete, the app is available via iPhone, but Kang said she has not advertised it because she is working on making it better, based on feedback from the user study. Still, about 20 people in countries including the United States and England have found it and are using it, she said.

While users can only send phrases she created, she wants to allow them to author their own at some point.

“We are working on that now,” she said.

She hopes the app eventually will encourage more people to consciously spread kindness. She would like for it to become a “quick micro-practice” daily, like teeth brushing.

“I do see a lot of potential where this can change a lot of people’s lives,” she said, “not in a dramatic way, but in little and consistent ways. My goal is really to make small changes in the largest possible population.”

Kateryna Sobolevska’s life is full: classes, homework, and activities at George Washington High School, managing an ambitious college search, serving as her mother’s English translator, sometimes picking her younger brother up from school.

But part of the 17-year-old’s mind is often 4,500 miles from Philadelphia — in her former home along the Stryi River in Western Ukraine, in Zhydachiv, where Sobolevska’s father and extended family still cope with the realities of a yearslong war.

She speaks to her father daily.

“He’s at risk every single day,” said Sobolevska, now a 12th grader. “They keep bombing the power plant, so he doesn’t have electricity all the time. He has to do laundry at a certain time. He has difficulties with work; it’s really overwhelming. There’s sirens every day.”

Still, Sobolevska is more than managing in her new home.

Less than four years after arriving in the United States, Sobolevska is at the top of her class at George Washington, with an Ivy League summer program under her belt, waiting to hear from a bevy of stellar colleges — and recently named to a select list of Philadelphia School District students.

When Sobolevska arrived in the U.S. at 14, American traditions were unfamiliar — something from a story or a book. She had never celebrated Thanksgiving.

This year, she’ll be sitting down to a turkey dinner with family, a little incredulous at the recognition that is beginning to come her way.

“But,” she said, “I am very thankful.”

‘Everything is so different’

In 2022, as war closed in, Sobolevska’s parents made a quick decision: Things were too dangerous in Ukraine. Sobolevska, her mother, Oleksandra, and her brother, Oleh, had to flee.

Her father, Rostyslav, could not join them — men between the ages of 18 and 60 were forbidden from leaving the country.

“All of us hoped that it would only be a couple of months,” Sobolevska said.

The three traveled first to Prague, then to New York, then on to Philadelphia. Every move felt unsettling, Sobolevska said.

Sobolevska had been a strong student in Zhydachiv — class president three times, a member of her student government, chosen to represent her school at language competitions.

But she had to start over at age 14. She began ninth grade at George Washington High in sheltered English classes, learning the language with other newcomers.

With more than 1,800 students, George Washington is imposing; it felt forbidding. It was tough to navigate, and her class schedule was changed three times.

“Everything is so different here,” Sobolevska said. “In ninth grade, it was really hard to get used to the language, to expectations, to all those processes. Ninth and 10th grade were really difficult for me.”

One of her teachers flagged Sobolevska to Billy Marchio, the coordinator of George Washington’s International Baccalaureate program, a rigorous academic course of study.

“She told me, ‘She’s really bright, she’s really improved her English. Give her a shot, I think she can do it,’” said Marchio, who agreed.

Making an impression

Entering IB in her 11th-grade year was a revelation for Sobolevska.

“I was excited,” she said. “IB is more close to what is expected from students in my country. It just gives me more stability — it’s very difficult courses, and a lot of expectations.”

Sobolevska met the expectations and then some. She was one of just 14 students nationwide — chosen from a pool of hundreds — who won a place in a summer journalism program at Princeton University.

Living on a college campus and learning from top professionals and peers from around the country provided more challenges that Sobolevska slayed. She published two stories, one about her frustration with comparisons between the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, a call for global solidarity. She felt at home in the Ivy League environment.

Senior year has been a blur — applying to a laundry list of colleges, including Harvard, a top choice, and, most recently, being honored as one of the district’s seniors of the month, singled out for her “courage, perseverance, and quiet strength” as well as for her academic skills.

Marchio has been wowed by Sobolevska — both as a student and as a leader, serving as an IB officer, tutoring peers in the National Honor Society.

“Through all of her anxieties and all of her stress, she produces spectacular work,” Marchio said. “She’s so critical and analytical. She makes an impression on everyone.”

Shouldering significant responsibility

Sobolevska is quiet, unassuming. When she talks about her college search, she mentions that she’s applying to schools in “Boston, Connecticut, New York,” not Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

She grows more animated when she talks about her family: her father, who works in sales management, her mother, who works at a grocery store, and even her brother — they argue, as siblings do, but are still very close.

“We’re really close with my mom, especially since she moved here,” said Sobolevska, who has significant responsibility on her shoulders. “I’m the main translator in the family. I help her with English; all the doctor’s appointments are on me.”

When she won the district’s Senior of the Month honor, her mother bragged to relatives and coworkers. Thousands of miles away, her father “was really excited. He was just so proud. But it was weird for him, difficult to understand because I’m very far away.”

Sobolevska, who now goes by Kate, longs to be reunited with her father, the rest of her family, and the friends she left behind, but living and learning in the U.S. have changed her, she said.

Here, “I think people here are not as stressed,” Sobolevska said. “They’re just more easygoing. It’s really warming to see how people can listen to music outside or talk loudly outside, or just say hi to everyone. In Ukraine, we don’t really have that. It’s nice to see how people are really friendly here.”

Her father “doesn’t want us to go back” home now, she said. “It’s not safe; it’s really stressful.”

Looking ahead to her future, “I would like to visit” Ukraine, Sobolevska said. “I’m not sure if I would want to live there. When I grow up, I would love to travel a lot — I don’t want to stay in place.”

Sobolevska’s rise is remarkable, but that’s who she is, Marchio said.

“She’s just trying to make her father proud, to make her father’s sacrifice worth it,” Marchio said. “She’s putting a lot on her plate to make everyone happy and proud of her, and I couldn’t respect that more.”