About Us
Yu Emotion Science Lab (YES Lab) studies how emotions and moral judgments arise from neurocognitive processes, and how they shape social life across cultures and history. Our work centers on three research directions. First, we investigate the psychological and neural basis of emotion—especially social emotions—asking how the brain processes emotion-eliciting situations, gives rise to conscious feelings, and translates them into behavior and motivation. Second, we study moral cognition and decision-making, including how people mentally represent morality, the neurocognitive mechanisms that support harm-based moral choices, and questions of moral standing such as who has the right to blame. Third, we examine impression formation of people and artworks, focusing on how faces, identities, and visual art are represented in the brain, and how visual and conceptual information jointly shape impressions (e.g., warmth, competence, or aesthetic liking). Methodologically, we integrate behavioral experiments (interactive games and vignettes), computational modeling of latent psychological processes, and multimodal neuroscience (fMRI, EEG, and intracranial recordings). We also leverage AI models (computer vision and large language models) and naturalistic materials—from historical texts and videos to real-world photographs and artworks—to map both shared principles and cross-cultural, cross-historical variation in emotion, morality, and perception.
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.
