We often think that the emotions people express reflect how they feel, but people’s feelings do not necessarily fall neatly into different emotion categories. My research aims to reconceptualize the act of expressing our emotions as dynamic decisions we make based on both the internal signals we receive from our own bodies, the expressive options available to us, and information in the external environment that we believe is relevant to what elicited these feelings.

• Teoh, Y. Y. & Hutcherson, C. A. (Preprint). Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression. PsyArXiv.

• Teoh, Y. Y., Cunningham, W. A., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2023). Framing subjective emotion reports as dynamic affective decisions. Affective Science, 4(3), 522-528.

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People often assume that the decisions people make under constraints like time reveal their true nature: whether they are good or bad, moral or immoral, altruistic or selfish. My research instead suggests that what these constraints like time do is force people to make faster but less informed decisions. People then cope with this by prioritizing what information to look for first, which often reflect the contexts they find themselves in. So, rather than clearly reveal people’s dispositions, the kinds of decisions people make under constraints reflect the tension between their own preferences and the external incentives in their environment.

• Teoh, Y. Y., Cho, H., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2025). Information Prioritization Underpins the Flexible Expression of Social Preferences Under Time Constraints. Social Psychological and Personality Science

• Teoh, Y. Y., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2022). The Games We Play: Prosocial Choices Under Time Pressure Reflect Context-Sensitive Information Priorities. Psychological Science, 33(9), 1541–1556.

• Teoh, Y. Y., Yao, Z., Cunningham, W. A., & Hutcherson, C. A. (2020). Attentional priorities drive effects of time pressure on altruistic choice. Nature communications, 11(1), 1-13.

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