We're engaged! @tyanna.bsky.social

🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share my latest preprint, with @jasilvers.bsky.social and @raziasahi.bsky.social! We applied hierarchical Bayesian modeling to an EMA dataset of emotion regulation to uncover how trait-like repertoires of emotion regulation relate to momentary emotion regulation and experiences of affect

Our multiverse analysis of associations between skin conductance and acute pain is published! >550 participants x 18 SCR pipelines = 1 winning approach to SCR analysis! (Ledalab + artifact detection). thread below. We hope others find this useful! Please RT :) journals.lww.com/pain/fulltex...

Preprint alert! 🧠 Using movie-watching fMRI and NLP, we show that prior social impressions shape how new social information is processed and updated over time, while moments of sudden insight ("aha"!) accompany transient shifts in brain activity that predict impression updates. (1/10)

Carrot, Peach, Crocus, Goji Berry, Tulip, Asparagus, and Primrose in the garden 🐣 Kiwi, Eki, Barb, and Squash staying far away 🐓🐓🐓🐓

1/ I’m excited to share our new @NatureHumBehav paper “Social Functioning in Autism: A Systematic Review & Meta-analysis” 🧵We synthesized 35 yrs of autism research to ask a fundamental Question: How is social functioning organized, developed, and altered in autism? Free link: rdcu.be/figGl

For a while, folks have asked me about older psyc job market numbers, and how they might reflect the 2008 financial crisis. I've finally been able to put together some numbers to reflect that (below) though the raw estimates come with some important interpretational caveats 🧵👇

Where did this year's #psychjobs market end up? Thanks to an unusually high number late postings, not as bad as it was looking earlier in the year. Still, this is the smallest number of jobs posted since 2012, representing a 26% decline from last year (~2/3rds the size of the covid drop in 2020).

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New paper from me at Perspectives on Psychological Science! "Reframing the Performance and Ethics of Empathic AI: Wisdom of the Crowd and Placebos" I use analogies to two classic psychological effects to recast recent findings about the performance of empathy by LLMs. doi.org/10.1177/1745...

Next is @gabefajardo.bsky.social presenting on high dimensional neural representations of facial expressions

#SANS2026 starts TODAY in San Diego! ☀️🧠 We can't wait to see everyone. If you are already here! Join us for the pre-conference workshops kick off this afternoon! socialaffectiveneuro.org/conference/

I’m thrilled to share that I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Thanks to all my mentors and lab mates for the incredible support :)

New paper: Jamil Zaki and I integrate theories of empathy + emotion regulation to describe how therapists have to regulate a "therapeutic emotional circuit" in each session. Lots of applications and avenues for new research. Just published in CPS! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper out in JPSP with @erichehman.bsky.social! We asked: What is the framework underlying our impressions of environments? Our large bottom-up study shows that people pay attention to 4 factors. We’re calling it the Environment Impressions Model: doi.org/10.1037/pspa...

How do we represent maps of social relationships in the mind & brain? To find out, we tracked 1st-year university students’ friendships, as well as students’ *beliefs* about who was friends with whom in their network. Yang breaks down what we found in the quoted thread 👇🏻 Broader context below:

How do we keep track of what different people are like and use that knowledge in the moment? 🧠🤓 Read our latest #BrainBites Based on work by @markthornton.bsky.social www.ohbm-com.com/brain-bites/...

New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com, with @ycleong.bsky.social, Marc Berman, and @joshcjackson.bsky.social! Two-sentence summary: Political pundits often talk as if partisans are divided in how they feel about political issues, as in “Democrats love abortion” or “Republicans hate immigrants.” 1/2

My father, Roy James Thornton, died on Wednesday. He was a scientist and educator, a gardener, a lifelong sportsman, an avid fiction reader, and an incomparable father, son, and husband. My mother and I are heartbroken. Read about his life here: markallenthornton.com/personal/roy...

Excited to share that our lab will be presenting multiple projects at SPSP 2026! If you’re interested in social perception, race talk, intergroup dynamics, or collective action — come check us out! #SPSP2026 #SocialPsychology #PersonalityPsychology #AcademicResearch #RaceTalk

Excited to share new work on how the brain makes social inferences from visual input! 🧠👯‍♂️ (With @lisik.bsky.social , @shariliu.bsky.social, @tianminshu.bsky.social , and Minjae Kim!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We're excited about the upcoming Computational Psychology preconference at @spspnews.bsky.social this Thursday. See our action-packed full day agenda below! Featuring 3 keynote talk themes with related early-career speakers, data blitz session, panel discussion. Don't miss it! #SPSP

Congratulations to the 2026 APS Spence Award Recipients! @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @williambrady.bsky.social, @esfinn.bsky.social, @andrewgrotzinger.bsky.social, @ycleong.bsky.social, @danieljamesyon.bsky.social, www.psychologicalscience.org/members/awar...

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...

New preprint from Lindsey Tepfer (@ltjaql.bsky.social) and me! We silenced portions of internal monologues in two films to manipulate participants' access to characters' thoughts. Using ISC and RSA, we found that this aligned later neural processing of the narrative & encoding of trait impressions.

Congratulations to the SANS Early-Career Award Winner Elisa Back (@elisabaek.bsky.social) and Mid-Career Award Winner Shuo Wang! Celebrate their achievement with us at #SANS2026 in San Diego!

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators! Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

Great piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication. For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.

Project Implicit is facing an existential threat. After almost 30 years, 60 million visitors, and hundreds of published papers, funding for our work has disappeared. We’ve never held a fundraising drive before, but we need your support to keep our site running. Please consider donating! 🙏

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning

New study out in Neuron: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne.... This work led by Zaid Zada uses fMRI hyperscanning of real dyads to show that speaking and listening rely on shared neural systems; and that conversation recruits unique brain processes that aren't observed in passive comprehension.

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Officially out! In this review, Aaron Chuey and I discuss how existing work on ToM mostly focused on a single individual’s mental states (e.g., what Sally thinks). Extending ToM, we argue for ToMS—an understanding of how multiple individuals communicate and influence each others’ minds. t.ly/u4rtb

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Delighted to share our new Perspective article @natrevneuro.nature.com, led by the great @edoardochidichimo.bsky.social : "Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination". With @loopyluppi.bsky.social, Pedro Mediano, @introspection.bsky.social, Victoria Leong and Richard Bethlehem.

And don't forget to first renew your membership/become a member! In addition to major discounts on conference registration, membership in SANS comes with other bonuses, including a 20% discount on open access fees at SCAN (new this year)! Details here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/membership/

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

Another ~monthly update on the state of the #psychjobs market: more jobs continue to trickle in, though at a decreasing pace. We've nearly hit parity with covid in absolute terms, although the prior year baseline was higher this year than that, so we still see a slightly larger relative decrease.

Together, we’re critical to the comprehension and production of meaning! 🧠 @markthornton.bsky.social

Last call for data-blitz and poster submission for the Computational Psychology preconference @spspnews.bsky.social! See thread below for details and hope to see you in Chicago!

Why do brain networks vary? Do these differences shape behavior? If every 🧠 is unique, how can we detect common features of brain organization? @rodbraga.bsky.social and I dig in, in @annualreviews.bsky.social (ahead of print): go.illinois.edu/Gratton2025-... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #MedSky 🧵👇

Preprint led by Salvador Vargas (on the job market!), with Chadly Stern, on stereotypes linking race & social class. We find a mean-level White–rich/Black–poor stereotype; the stereotype is strongest among third-group participants; and likely explained by social sampling: osf.io/preprints/ps...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab! We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!

📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣 The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning? Thread 🧵 ⬇️

New paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... @openmindjournal.bsky.social

AI jobs currently make up ~4% of posts on the psych job wiki. If you throw in "computational" and "data" (science), that goes up to 9% For comparison, the median size of the content areas (e.g., clinical, social, cognitive, etc.) is typically around 6-8%.

We're a month further into the job market - how are things looking? The good news is that the market does seem to have been delayed: ~150 new listings have appeared since my last post. The bad news is that the total is still substantially lower than what it was during the covid dip.

I’m excited to share my 1st first-authored paper, “Distinct portions of superior temporal sulcus combine auditory representations with different visual streams” (with @mtfang.bsky.social and @steanze.bsky.social ), now out in The Journal of Neuroscience! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...