About Us
Yu Emotion Science Lab (YES Lab) aims to explain the underlying forces that create these mental hills and valleys, and how they shape the landscape of our moral lives. More concretely, we study neurocognitive mechanisms of social emotions (such as guilt and gratitude), their moral significance, and how they are shaped by culture. Complementing these experimental approaches, we also use text analysis and large language models (LLMs) to investigate commonalities and variabilities of emotion and moral concepts throughout history and across cultures. In another line of research, we are interested in how conceptual knowledge modulates our perception of objects, such as human faces (e.g., social trait inference), visual arts and music, and brand logos. We combine LLMs, computer vision models, human behavioral experiments, and multi-modal neuroscience measures to understand how conceptual and physical features of objects are represented and integrated in the brain.
Join the YES Lab
For undergraduate students, if you want to learn more about the people and research in the YES Lab, you can drop by our lab meetings. You can find the time, location, and schedule here (you need to login with your UCSB google account). If you are interested in joining the YES Lab as a research assistant, please fill out this Form.
YES Lab will NOT accept PhD applications in 2025 - 2026.
