New work led by the brilliant @yizhang96.bsky.social: In lab experiments and naturalistic groups, people generalize perceptions of acceptance and rejection across social network ties.

New paper out in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology! 🎉 How do we figure out who will accept or reject us in a new group? We show that people generalize relational value across friendship ties—forming a network gradient of approach & avoidance. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lq3x51f8w...

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Prolonged Isolation is associated with an increased behavioural sensitivity to ‘Likes’ on social media. 🧵 Social media rewards are inherently social—but does posting change during social isolation, when in-person social rewards are limited? It turns out, yes!

We are hiring a full time project assistant! Please forward to any bright, curious team players you know who might be interested in applying: usc.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/ExternalUSCC...

Excited to share our new preprint! 🚨 Does human learning have an automatic aspect? Is it possible that we learn things that are counterproductive and only lead to reduced gains?

Hi friends - new paper! about the cognitive mechanisms underlying social categorization and polarization. "Increased complexity of social category markers leads to diverse rule-based categorizations and reduced intergroup bias" more below... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Our latest paper, led by @yizhang96.bsky.social, finds Pavlovian learning shapes empathy: People can link another person's abstract mental states—like feeling good or bad—with reward. This shapes empathy in new situations where those feelings are perceived.

🥳Excited to share that our new paper is live at Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social! We show that Pavlovian learning can grow empathy for another person. 🧵👇

We are recruiting a joint lab manager at USC! (80% of time with @elisabaek.bsky.social, 20% of time in my lab). Our labs study social connection and social learning/decision-making using social neuro, social cognition, and computational modeling approaches. Please share!

🚨New paper now out in Emotion!! As a post-bacc, Dr. Jamil Zaki & @leorhackel.bsky.social supported me in developing my own research project. 7+ years later, I received notice of publication acceptance the day before my dissertation defense🥲 Check out abstract and DM for PDF access!

Excited to share our new review on how neuroimaging and computational models can help uncover how people see what they want to see, now out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! It was a blast writing this with Haena Kim and @iancballard.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Paper in @pnas.org in which @d-melnikoff.bsky.social and I provide evidence for model-based effects on automatic evaluation. This was a super fun “adversarial” collaboration with 0 adversariality. It may have been nice to be right, but getting it right is nearly as nice: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The value of ecologically irrelevant animal cognition research Opinion by Scarlett Howard tinyurl.com/37aedmfx

I wrote about our new research on how the brain learns from social rejection — and why that matters for connection 👉 theconversation.com/your-brain-l...

I’m thrilled to share my new paper on impression formation & updating in @natrevpsychol.nature.com! In it, I argue that impression formation is fundamentally a learning process. And as such, theories of impression formation should be based on mechanisms of learning and memory. Some key take-aways:

A learning and memory account of impression formation and updating Perspective by David M. Amodio (@davidamodio.bsky.social) Web: go.nature.com/3YTubx3 PDF: rdcu.be/ejREM #psychology #psychscisky

Thrilled to share that my first, first-author paper is out now! Using an episode of 'Survivor', we find that distinct features of conversation – semantic similarity, emotional tone, and confidence – strongly inform observers about underlying social relationships. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

👀New preprint! In 3 prereg experiments we study how engagement-based algorithms amplify ingroup, moral and emotional (IME) content in ways that disrupt social norm learning (and test one solution!) w/ @joshcjackson.bsky.social and my amazing lab managers @merielcd.bsky.social & Silvan Baier 🧵👇

If you’re a grad student or postdoc & would be interested in giving a virtual talk in our lab this semester, please email me! We work on social learning and choice, and work broadly relevant to reward/motivation, social cognition/connection, and/or prosociality would be of interest to our group.

🚨Thrilled to share our new study, led By Dr. Inon Raz, in Cerebral Cortex🚨: "The Future, Before, and After". The ability to imagine things we haven’t done before is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. How do we do it?

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

Excited to share that our work on using AI to analyze police body camera footage was featured in Scientific American! We're using multi-perspective, multi-modal, models to better understand police interactions and identify areas for improvement. www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-a...

A secondary but neat finding in our new work: We find neural evidence for rewards biasing social perception. We’ve previously found that rewards lead people to see others in a more positive light. We’ve argued this reflects a kind of affect-as-information… www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Social rejection sucks, but they also provide a learning signal. Here we show that the two aspects of social rejection can be dissociated using computational modeling and neuroimaging. Delighted to have been able to be part of this work, definitely one of the most fun collaborations I've had!

New paper! Led by Elena Kozakevitch-Arbel, with Simone Shamay-Tsoory, we used multi-dimensional reinforcement learning approach to examine whether people are sensitive to different dimensions of social scenarios during empathic interactions www.nature.com/articles/s44... 🧵

Excited to share our new work exploring how people learn from acceptance and rejection: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We find that the brain's 'social rejection' network tracks changes in how others value us—separate from reward learning about positive outcomes. See Begum’s thread below for more!

Excited to share this preprint of work led by @shangao.bsky.social, where we build a predictive model that maps prefrontal fNIRS activity to whole-brain fMRI during movie-watching!

Very excited to share this preprint with @thatadammorris.bsky.social and (newly minted ISCON Early Career Award winner) David Melnikoff in which we reexamine the question of whether people are aware of their implicit attitudes. TLDR: most likely not. psyarxiv.com/gak52/ For details, see 🧵 below.

Young minds can be savvy educators. 🧒📚 New work from the USC Minds in Development Lab reveals that 7-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, adjust their teaching based on who's learning, giving simpler info to infants and more complex info to adults. doi.org/10.1111/cdev...

Excited to share new work in TiCS on Simplifying Social Learning: authors.elsevier.com/a/1iZ4S4sIRv... We highlight how social expertise lets us simplify complex reinforcement learning, offering a prototype for how people can turn hard learning problems into easier ones.

Hi #PsychSky! Follow here for research and news from the USC Department of Psychology.