Hongbo Yu

Assistant Professor Hongbo Yu directs the Yu Emotion Science Lab at UC Santa Barbara, investigating neurocognitive mechanisms of social emotions like guilt and gratitude. His research integrates moral psychology with cultural neuroscience to understand how emotions shape moral evaluation and decision-making.

Methodologies include developing ecologically valid social interaction paradigms compatible with fMRI and eye-tracking, computational modeling of moral judgments, and large-scale text analysis of emotion concepts across cultures. Recent publications examine neural signatures of interpersonal guilt and face processing in autism spectrum disorder.

Professor Yu was recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science in 2021. His lab explores cultural variations in emotion expression and their implications for moral character assessments.