Yang Teoh

call for experimental economics conference 15-19 June 2026 for PhD students in economics

NEW Summer School in Theory-based Experimental Economics + follow-on conference @Caltech 15-19 June 2026
Please spread the word.

The Big 5 test is about twice as accurate as the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator for predicting life outcomes, placing the usefulness of the MBTI test halfway between science and astrology.

Any psychologist will tell you, the Meyers-Briggs is mostly bullshit.
powerofusnewsletter.com/p/why-are-we...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at University of Birmingham Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share!
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting - Nature Communications When people dislike their options for candidates, they tend to refrain from voting rather than voting for the candidate they like best. Here, the authors show that this tendency to opt out of lose-los...

Excited to share my first PhD paper with @ashenhav.bsky.social
@shenhavlab.bsky.social
“Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting.”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth.

Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word!

More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...

Postdoc position!

Myself and @jordanaxt.bsky.social are seeking applications for a shared post-doctoral researcher at McGill, beginning Fall 2026.

Topic area broadly centered on intergroup dynamics, prejudice, discrimination

Full description here: hehmanlab.org/ad
1/2

New paper on planned missingness. Recently been liking the approach of planned missingness in a survey -> FIML to estimate constructs.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Emotion and Choice: The Integral Role of Emotion in Constructing Value In the centuries-long history of decision-making research, emotion’s role in choice has only been investigated relatively recently. Early theories of decision-making, which conceived of emotions...

Check out @orielf.bsky.social & I's chapter "Emotion and Choice: The Integral Role of Emotion in Constructing Value" in the new volume, Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions, edited by @dvsmith.bsky.social @thepsychologist.bsky.social & @dfareri.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Interested in doing a postdoc on misinfo/belief change with me and @gordpennycook.bsky.social? We are looking for candidates to apply for a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowship, based at York University. Contact me for more details! #PsychJobs

Writing is thinking

Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

"Even after accounting for the upfront costs and delayed benefits, enrolling marginal applicants to public universities generates substantial net returns for society, the marginal students themselves, and the government budget."

Public Universities FTW!

We are hiring a new Ph. D. student on neuroimaging and/or computational modeling on motivation and emotion. Tübingen is a great place to pursue work on these topics!!

uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

Environmental representations in mouse hippocampal CA1 reflect the predictive structure of navigation Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨
AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp
🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK
🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks)
🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy
🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

Yale Psychology is accepting applications for the Susan Nolen-Hoeksema postdoctoral fellowship! Open to a broad range of areas in psychology, and applicants should identify 1 or more potential faculty mentors.

Apply by Feb 1, 2026: apply.interfolio.com/178435

New post with grad student @ugurozkusen.bsky.social out in @spspnews.bsky.social's Character & Context on a new JEP:G paper using intergroup contact on social media to reduce prejudice.

Read the Character & Context post: tinyurl.com/28hyccs7
Read the full paper in JEP:G: tinyurl.com/mpkhsjay

1/n

Interoception vs. Exteroception: Cardiac interoception competes with tactile perception, yet also facilitates self-relevance encoding | PNAS Internal bodily signals, notably the heartbeat, influence our perception of the external world—but the nature of this influence remains unclear. Di...

My very first paper is finally out in @pnas.org, with Catherine Tallon-Baudry and Patrick Haggard! Interoception, exteroception, the self and more, it's got it all.

Also it should go open access at some point
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Jobs | Psychological & Brain Sciences Tenured/Tenure-track position in Cognitive Psychology Open Date Dec 01, 2025 Salary Range or Pay Grade The expected academic base salary range for this position is $110,000- $144,500 (Assistant Profes...

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins is inviting applications for 3 open-rank tenured/tenure-track positions in (1) Behavioral Neuroscience, (2) Cognitive Neuroscience, and (3) Cognitive Psychology.

pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression - Communications Psychology People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative sign...

Happy to finally see this paper (w/ @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social) out now @commspsychol.nature.com
We built a computational framework to show people flexibly balance communicative benefits against social costs when deciding whether and how to express their emotions. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression - Communications Psychology People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative sign...

Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative signal against the potential social costs they incur.
@yyangteoh.bsky.social
@cendripetalfrce.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories.

In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

Altogether, we show how framing emotion expressions as a value-based communicative decision can be incredibly helpful in understanding the myriad of expressive behaviors people deploy in their social interactions with others.

People also were keenly attuned to the social context and flexibly regulated their emotion expressions accordingly. When their reputation was at stake, people selectively suppressed/exaggerated happiness to communicate stronger normative preferences for equity than they seemed to privately hold.

We show that people in general tended to suppress anger in anticipation of social costs, as much work before us have theorized. But people also demonstrated remarkable flexibility in their expressive behaviors. They did not suppress all negative emotions and sometimes exaggerated/faked sadness.

We propose that it comes down to a weighting of the communicative benefits of expressing a particular emotion against the potential social costs it incurs, and develop both a new paradigm and computational model to capture this evaluative process.

Emotion expressions are critical signals for communicating how we feel, but lots of research (and our own anecdotal experiences) tell us that people don't always express how they genuinely feel. How do people choose when and what to express?

Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression - Communications Psychology People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative sign...

Happy to finally see this paper (w/ @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social) out now @commspsychol.nature.com
We built a computational framework to show people flexibly balance communicative benefits against social costs when deciding whether and how to express their emotions. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)

A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning Nature Human Behaviour - In this study, Collins proposes an alternative dual-process (working memory and habit) model of reinforcement learning in humans.

My paper is out!
Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets.
rdcu.be/eQjLN