Stanford Psychology Podcast 161 - Yuan Chang (YC) Leong: Emotional arousal & dynamic brain connectivity
Oct 30, 2025
In this engaging conversation, Dr. Yuan Chang (YC) Leong, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and director of the Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Lab, dives into the fascinating world of emotional arousal and brain connectivity. He reveals how dynamic movie-watching can illuminate emotional responses, discussing the intricacies of arousal, misattribution, and the importance of context. YC also shares his excitement about using AI as a model to enhance our understanding of cognition and human behavior.
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Subjectivity Shapes Interpretation
- People interpret identical situations differently because of goals, beliefs, and emotions they bring to them.
- YC frames his lab around emotions in social contexts using computational methods to study this variability.
Movies Reveal Contextual Emotion Dynamics
- Dynamic, contextual stimuli like movies reveal how affect evolves over time and depends on narrative meaning.
- YC argues movies better capture slow, contextual emotional fluctuations than brief, decontextualized stimuli.
Arousal Lives In Network Dynamics
- Emotional arousal can be encoded in time-varying interactions across large-scale brain networks, not just single regions.
- YC links this to neuromodulatory effects (e.g., norepinephrine) synchronizing brain networks during arousal.