Just got the unofficial news that a former lab member got tenure and alum wins are one of the best parts of my job.

📱One scroll can change your day. What guides your scrolling? I’m keynoting at the CityU Hong Kong International Conference on AI-Empowered Communication and Global Innovation. I’ll share our lab’s NeuroAI for sequential media selection. If you’re there, say hi! www.cityu.edu.hk/com/Page.asp...

::slowly stands while clapping::

Very excited to welcome our newest lab member, Jocelyn (Yachen) Xie! Jocelyn is broadly interested in cognition and media narratives, especially in how moral judgment and decision-making affect people’s preferences and evaluations of media content and characters cogcommscience.com/members/

My latest piece, on apprenticeship, artificial intelligence, and intrinsic motivation. Handcrafted from the heart. Please, share and enjoy. open.substack.com/pub/robchave...

I made a calendar reminder a while back for next week titled "Deadline to submit". I do not remember what this is for.

Brilliant work addressing a critical issue

The next step is to examine the overlap of existing psychopathology and gaming disorder in the brain 🧠

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

We’re hiring @ucdavis.bsky.social Comm! TT Asst Prof in Mediated Interpersonal Communication. Our dept blends behavioral, biological & computational strengths at one of the most interdisciplinary campuses anywhere. Apps due Oct 15. Glad to chat recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07289

Looking for a reminder that good things happen? Meet OLAUG (Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage), women in their 60s to 80s who dive Cape Cod ponds to pull up trash. Along the way they find community, purpose, and even flow www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/20...

Tour de force review on “Economics of Attention” by Loewenstein just published in J Econ Lit @aeajournals.bsky.social #behavioraleconomics

2 years ago today

I’m honored to share that I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure @ucsb. To mark this, our lab, the Yu Emotion Science (YES) lab releases its official logo (credit: @avamadesousa.bsky.social )

So excited to share that my first first-author paper is out in @commspsychol.nature.com 🎉 In a mini-meta analysis of seven studies, we looked at whether loneliness is related to altered expectations of one’s own and others' emotion transitions. www.nature.com/articles/s44... (1/4)

Excited to share this work led by @avamadesousa.bsky.social! This paper is so significant to me, not only because it reveals important insights into the disruptions in emotion representations that characterize loneliness, but also because it is a clear example of the power of team science 🌟

Big news, Spartans! 💚🤍 The Moral Minds Lab has officially opened its doors @michiganstateu.bsky.social! We can’t wait to kick off our very first semester of research on how we become moral beings. Here’s to new beginnings! @msupsychology.bsky.social

“You are here to learn to ride a bicycle, not to invent a bicycle.” "Now, I’m about to establish my own research group. I feel ready to design and invent my own bicycle. I’ll remind my trainees that their job, first and foremost, is to learn how to ride." www.science.org/content/arti...

How I wish I wrote abstracts vs how I write abstracts…

What happens when digital media, algorithms, and misinformation collide? A new Journal of Media Psychology special issue, co-edited by me, @hjhether.bsky.social, and @soojongkim.bsky.social, features seven articles on information integrity in today’s media ecosystem econtent.hogrefe.com/toc/zmp/37/5

My co-authors, Jana Diesner, @tedunderwood.me, @zoeleblanc.bsky.social, @gworthey.bsky.social and @profdownie.bsky.social, and I are excited to share our paper in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social "Who decides what is read on Goodreads?" on book review sponsorship, open access at doi.org/10.1177/2053....

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

From the world's first email to saving millions of premature newborns to CRISPR gene editing, history-making innovation is happening across the UC system every day. www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/7-world...

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social Highlights ⬇

Really just had something like this feeling this afternoon. It’s the high that keeps you coming back for more

I’m a proud student of Bellevue, North Seattle and Golden West community colleges. I have been so lucky to be able to take CC classes with running start in high school and supplement my university coursework at CCs. They provide essential education and we should be expanding not limiting funding.

Without the flexible scheduling of community college I wouldn’t have been able to complete the first step of my academic career. Great @nytimes.com article about how recent ed challenges affect CC and hurt communities and people who depend on them.

Shen et al. show that pre-existing neural similarity in strangers predicts future friendship and changes in social distance over time in an emerging social network of MBA students. @carolynparkinson.bsky.social, @lisashen-yixuan.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A community college trained my dad as a heavy equipment mechanic. A community college helped me, a working-class kid with no clue, transfer to a university. Community colleges launched friends into trades and college degrees; pathways to opportunity are now at risk www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/m...

NSF and NIH suspend grants to UCLA | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Read the article here: ja.ma/4o9EM1N

“Why is my teen addicted to video games?” Our new study in JAMA Network Open shows that psychopathology is a key driver--not an outcome of gaming disorder! Depression, anxiety, ADHD, and social challenges may underlie gaming disorder. Treat the root, not just the game. 🎮🧠 #commsky #psychsci #gaming

Through experiments and simulations, this study shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shaping the processes involved in cultural evolution. @davidschultner.bsky.social @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social @lucasmolleman.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled that our paper on the mechanisms underlying social learning strategies is out! First big paper from my @erc.europa.eu & @kawresearch.bsky.social funded group. More to come! I'm currently looking to recruit two post docs, get in touch if you find this line of research interesting.

Hear, hear! “We advocate for… a more constructive mindset in which different dimensions of progress in neuroscience are explicitly acknowledged and their value is recognized - to temper their respective limitations and build on each other’s strengths.”

THIS WEEK the @cogscisociety.bsky.social Minds in the Making workshop brings you Vanessa Bermudez and @togelius.bsky.social in conversation about LEARNING 🧠💪 x DESIGN 🛠️! And what makes GAMES awesome for learning. Wednesday July 16th, 12pm-1pm PT. Register here: stanford.zoom.us/meeting/regi....

Major updates to our ConversationAlign R package - submitted to CRAN and JOSS today. If you're interested in computing alignment and main effects for >40 psycholinguistic dimensions in naturalistic conversation, this is the package for you reilly-conceptscognitionlab.github.io/Conversation...

Our review on Metastability has been published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience - you can view it here rdcu.be/d3bh9. Fantastic collaboration involving experts from the UK, the US, Spain, Australia and Portugal.

Check out Emily's op-ed for @nytimes.com on how small shifts in how we think can help us make choices that are better aligned with our values! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/o...

This looks excellent! @sansmeeting.bsky.social

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In a new piece, Dr. Robin Nabi and I discuss the space between fear-based bans and full digital freedom: The Digital Middle. (See link below)⬇️ There is a middle ground but it is up to each parent to evaluate where there child is at and what is best for them #commsky #psychsky

🧠📖 New paper out! How does the brain make sense of a story? Combining behavioral data, #fMRI, and #LLMs, our study explores how distinct hippocampal-cortical systems support the #encoding and #sequencing of #narrative events during ongoing comprehension. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Benchmarking methods for mapping functional connectivity in the brain | doi.org/10.1038/s415... What is the best measure of functional connectivity (FC)? led by @zhenqi.bsky.social in @natmethods.nature.com ⤵️

From Joe Francemone and me: Moral information about one character doesn’t just shape how we see them—it reshapes how we see others around them. In social networks, moral judgments spread through contrast or assimilation depending on how the network is structured. academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...

Wrapping up #ica25 with @rzhprfshr.bsky.social presenting our work with @joebayer.bsky.social reviewing the research under the broad umbrella of “social connection”. And perfect timing because the paper was published TODAY at @natrevpsychol.nature.com 🥳 rdcu.be/erayE

Amazing works were presented at our Top Paper sessions (Part 2)Congrats to these presenters!!🎉

Very happy to see that @overbye.bsky.social’s fantastic work on detecting bias in human-in-the-loop algorithms was awarded a top paper in @icacsab.bsky.social this year. Incredibly interesting, rigorous, and timely research! #ica25

Swing by @b-wheeler.bsky.social poster session at 1:30 to snag one of our exclusive MNL 3D printed brain keychain. 🧠 She is also on the job market this year 👀👀 #ica25

Excited to present at #ICA25 Today! 🗓 1:30pm | Poster #70 | Centennial Foyer (Regency) “Is Academic Online Bullying a Widespread Phenomenon? A Study of Scholarly Discourse on Twitter/X” If you're attending, stop by to discuss our findings...and pick up a fun brain keychain while you're there! 🧠