What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

When people attempt to capitalize by sharing the good news with others, what dimensions of empathy in the responder predict perceived responses to capitalization attempts from the capitalizer perspective? I address this question in a new paper now In Press at Emotion osf.io/preprints/ps...

💡Policy Update: The Trump Administration has dismissed all 24 members of the National Science Board which oversees NSF. SPSP stands with @cossa.bsky.social in calling on Congress to exercise its oversight authority to investigate this action. Learn more: ow.ly/JaF250YQMeB

This finding (10% of participants thought CAF was probably training a raccoon army) reminds me of the anecdote from David Wilk who wrote questions for the game show The Power of 10. When they polled Americans if they ever had been decapitated, 4% responded that they had. www.npr.org/transcripts/...

HAPPENING NOW: The AFT and @aaup.org are in Texas launching our new Nnational Higher Education platform ahead of the 2026 midterms. Read more in the release here, and follow along in the thread below. @afthighered.bsky.social

Today, the AAUP & @aft.org launched our national policy platform to win back an American higher education system that protects the freedom to teach & learn & strengthens our democracy. Read it in full here: www.aaup.org/blueprint-st... 🧵

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Thanks to @gregdepow.bsky.social & Leif Anderson for organizing a great session yesterday on receiving empathy! Along with @anatperry.bsky.social, they are excellent colleagues to chat with and then consider true meanings of the constructs "empathy" and "brunch" @affectscience.bsky.social #SAS2026

Come check out the fun Friday morning AI empathy symposium led by @gregdepow.bsky.social & Leif Anderson @affectscience.bsky.social #SAS2026. I'll be talking about empathy choice for AI empathy work with @jdweng.bsky.social @minzlicht.bsky.social, and why recipient experiences matter for this debate

Looking forward to @affectscience.bsky.social #SAS2026 in Pittsburgh this week, where I will speak on AI empathy in a session by @gregdepow.bsky.social & Leif Anderson, along with @anatperry.bsky.social. Ontology of empathy, and pierogies, a balanced meal. I may arrange an AI #empathy popup coffee ☕

1/ New paper in Communications Psychology: Against Frictionless AI. Led by my student Emily Zohar and @paulbloomatyale.bsky.social. The argument: AI's greatest selling point is also its problem. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations. psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

Preprint of "Wise Empathy Improves Well-being on Instagram" is now available: osf.io/preprints/ps... Effects of social media on well-being vary, and depend greatly on online experiences. Here, we present a wise empathy intervention to change digital experiences and improve well-being. #empathy 1/4

As we head toward #SAS2026 we are excited to partner with @inclivio.com to support EMA research in affective science. If you’re attending the conference, like (1 entry) and repost (3 entries) this post to enter a drawing for 1 of 3 licenses to run your study on Inclivio for *free*. inclivio.com

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

We are excited to announce our partnership with @inclivio.com's software for #SAS2026. We’re counting down to the conference with a series of posts. Enter a drawing for 3 EMA study licenses by liking (1 point) and reposting (3 points)! #SAS #AffectiveScience #EMA #EmotionDynamics

Excited to share: This summer I'm starting as an Assistant Professor at @lakeheaduniversity.bsky.social! 🥳 I'll be continuing my research on empathy, teaching, and mentoring students. Prospective students interested in empathy are welcome to reach out. Grateful to my family, colleagues, and mentors!

Excited to see this out in print in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It's the first publication with @amormino.bsky.social in the EMP Lab, along with Joel Segel from Health Policy and Administration. At a pivotal moment for empathy, we consider its role for policymaking 1/n

I wrote a piece with Nick Hobson in Harvard Business Review (@hbr.org) on how leaders can use empathy wisely to help their employees feel supported while benefitting their own well-being. Check it out and share let me know what you think. hbr.org/2026/01/five... #empathy #leadership

Pleased to share for those using #rstats for analyzing #dyadic data, that we released a major update of dySEM on CRAN (now ver. 1.4.1) *just* before the winter break. New functionality for scripting/outputting dyadic SEMs, along with (much) more test coverage! 🧵 cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Some good resources on mediation and design-based alternatives in this thread.

Excited to announce a new open-access EMP Lab paper on empathic AI: an interdisciplinary collaboration between psychology, philosophy, & engineering on motivated empathy expression and reception with social robots. @ssripennstate.bsky.social @psuliberalarts.bsky.social @rockethics.bsky.social 1/n

I quite enjoyed answering questions about what got me interested in empathy, what surprised and interested me in a recent paper on state and trait empathy, and how I think about some of the interpersonal implications of my research. Thank you to @theloveconsortium.bsky.social for the opportunity!

Recently presented at @theloveconsortium.bsky.social's Virtual Symposium on Empathy as an Interpersonal Process with Dr. Kotiuga and Dr. Monroy. I presented on how empathy predicts perceptions of partner responsiveness across positive and negative emotional contexts: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyRA...

📣 Digital Research Community! The new UK Adolescent Health Study will follow 100k young people (8–18yrs) for 10+ years. Please share what digital technology measures you think it should include. Please complete this survey (by 24th November 2025 @ 9AM): cambridge.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Excited to have you @gregdepow.bsky.social! We hope you'll join us next week. www.theloveconsortium.org/tlc-events

On Nov. 18th I'll be presenting at a virtual symposium run by @theloveconsortium.bsky.social. I'll present recent work w/ @chrisoveis.bsky.social on how different dimensions of empathy relate to perceived responsiveness for the target of empathy across positive and negative emotional conversations.

We built the openESM database: ▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place ▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software ▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python Find out more: 🌐 openesmdata.org 📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Wake up, boo. Craig Enders just dropped a bunch of new, free material and software on how to manage missing data. www.appliedmissingdata.com/ies-toolkit #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

🚨 TT job alert! 🚨 The University of Florida is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology; open to ALL AREAS within social psych. Review begins 10/10. Job ad here: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53... I'm co-chair of the search committee and happy to answer questions! 🧵

New jobs for computational social scientists at UNC and USC: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307... amd uscjobs.sc.edu/postings/194...

UNC is hiring in Quantitative Psychology! Assistant Professor (tenure-track). Please share widely! Find details here: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Intervening on a central node in a network likely does little given that its connected neighbors will "flip it back" immediately. Happy to see this position supported now. "Change is most likely [..] if it spreads first among relatively poorly connected nodes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Good explanation of odds ratios. As Noah notes, ORs can often be tough to interpret. One way to improve interpretability is to present results in terms of Quantities of Interest such as probabilities (logistic) and counts (poisson/negative binomial) as argued here: psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Thinking about odds ratios... An odds is a ratio of events to non-events. For example, if the event is survival, the odds of survival is the number of survivors per death. If the event is getting a disease, the odds is the number of diseased individuals per healthy individual.

Halvorson et al. (2021) should probably be required reading for folks working with binary and count data (@kevinmking.bsky.social ) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Final week to apply for the 2026 SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you're an early-career scholar and passionate about collaborative, transdisciplinary research beyond traditional departments, this is the postdoc fellowship for you. Deadline: Oct 1, 2025 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

🚨 Spread the word! We're (w/ @whitneyringwald.bsky.social & @aleksakaurin.bsky.social) organizing a special issue at PD:TRT focused on innovations for measuring context in ambulatory assessment studies of personality pathology. We'd love for you (yes, you) to submit a proposal (deadline Nov. 14th):

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨We're hiring!🚨 The Dept of Psychology at Rutgers is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology. Review of applications begin on Oct 18. Details here: jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/259... I'm chairing the search committee and am happy to field questions about the position. 🧵

The Dept. of Psychology at the U. Wisconsin–Madison has an opening for an Assistant Professor in the area of Computational Neuroscience and/or Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI). Domain of behavior or cognition is open. Details at jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

For our scientists. By @ellecordova.bsky.social

I'm happy to announce that Vanderbilt Psychology's clinical area is hiring a TT asst prof this year! Please share with your networks and consider applying if you're on the market! Happy to (try to) answer questions about the search if you have them. Link here: apply.interfolio.com/173316

Come be my colleague! The Department of Psychology at Princeton and @princetonneuro.bsky.social‬ are jointly searching for an Assistant Prof in Cog Neuro. puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

We're hiring TWO social psychologists (one health, one any area of social) at U of Utah! Pls share widely, and reach out if you have any questions! utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/186...

New Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below

Come and work with me in beautiful Ames! isu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/IowaSt...

Exciting news! I'll be working with the Center for Digital Thriving @digitalthriving.bsky.social as a fellow to develop an intervention aimed at improving the well-being of youth on social media. The intervention will train youth to engage skilfully with emotions on their feed using wise empathy.

We are HIRING! The Department of Psychology at NDSU is seeking a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology (broadly defined) to begin August, 2026. Full details here: tinyurl.com/3sjknmxn Questions can be directed to me. Please share widely!