Stay tuned to hear more about our work on children's emotion beliefs -- These undergrads were on fiiiiire! ✨

Logic of Emotion Lab@logicemotionlab.bsky.social · 3d ago

Congratulations to John and Daisy for wrapping up their fabulous summer research on how children’s emotion beliefs influence mental health, and how music relates to emotions. We are grateful to OURSIP and ReMatch+ for supporting their time in the lab and can’t wait to see where they go next!

1st book review! “Lombrozo unpacks the psychology of explanations in rich detail and sharply analyzes how explaining can help and hinder…The result is a fresh, engrossing take on an important aspect of human behavior.” 😀 www.publishersweekly.com/9780063395008

Why We Ask Why: The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand by Tania Lombrozo

People explain what they experience, feel, and encounter in order to understand the present and anticipate the future, according...

publishersweekly.com

💥 New paper: Children Need Structural Explanations for Social Inequalities, and Educators Who Can Provide Them I enjoyed the opportunity to yap about two of my favorite things: Structural explanation and liberal arts education! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Children Need Structural Explanations for Social Inequalities, and Educators Who Can Provide Them - Rebecca Peretz-Lange, 2026

Children are highly aware of social inequalities by the preschool years, and they spontaneously generate explanations to make sense of them. In particular, chil...

journals.sagepub.com

Yale is hiring in developmental psychology (open rank )! We're especially interested in complementing and broadening our area, including via somewhat less traditionally central such as cross-cultural and comparative approaches. Feel free to reach out with questions!

Time for #CogSci2026 @cogscisociety.bsky.social! Excited to chat about the latest work from my wonderful collaborators - we’ve been thinking about library learning, social learning, and their interaction with resource rationality. Drop a message, or just stop me if you see me!

Come say hello at #CogSci2026! Excited to be part of this incredible symposium!

First, @adanyajohnson.bsky.social & @cehaeffner.bsky.social organized the first-ever trainee pre-conference at CPC! So proud of them for this amazing day full of leaning and community building (and so fun to be on the Growing Up in Science panel w @robbrutledge.bsky.social @philcorlett.bsky.social)

Are you a trainee interested in shaping the future of SANS? Consider joining our Trainee Committee! We're looking for 3-6 new members to help plan and run trainee-focused programming. More information and application here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Today is the LAST day to submit a public comment on the proposed OMB rule. We've put together a guide to help: www.psychologicalscience.org/act-now

🚨 Now out in @jamapsychiatry.com 🚨 Are people with depression less responsive to rewards on social media, just like in the lab? Actually…quite the opposite! 🧵 📄 Read the paper here: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

The Reinforcement Effect of Social Media Likes in Depression

This study investigates individual differences in the effect of social media likes on posting behavior and their association with and specificity to depressive psychopathology.

jamanetwork.com

Really fascinating results by @danmirea.bsky.social now out in JAMA Psychiatry!

Dan Mirea@danmirea.bsky.social · 4w ago

🚨 Now out in @jamapsychiatry.com 🚨 Are people with depression less responsive to rewards on social media, just like in the lab? Actually…quite the opposite! 🧵 📄 Read the paper here: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I am so grateful I had the opportunity to chair my first symposium at @infantstudies.bsky.social last week and present my first talk "Hatchlings – Community-Library Partnerships to Reduce Childhood Literacy Inequities: A Qualitative Investigation" #ICIS2026

I am looking for an #SPSP2027 symposium to place some interesting new work on any of the following: interminority solidarity, cross-group friendship, protests, or social injustice more broadly. Please let me know if you are still looking for presenters!

One year down at Lehigh! 🎉 This year we built the lab, did some cool science, and sent out our very first newsletter (tinyurl.com/5n978emu). I'm also excited to share that I'll be recruiting a PhD student this cycle! If you know any trainees who might be a great fit, please send them my way!

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

Huge congratulations to Dr. Dan Mirea (@danmirea.bsky.social) on his dissertation and defense!!! We are so proud of you and can’t wait for all the big things you continue to do! 🥳 Read more about Dr. Mirea's amazing work in this thread:

I'm thrilled to be the chair of @infantstudies.bsky.social symposium 8.4: Community-Engaged Research Focused on Infant and Perinatal Populations next week with rockstar lineup @rachelromeo.bsky.social, Rose Perry, and @dtandon.bsky.social. Join us Thursday, 7/9 at 4:45pm to learn more! #ICIS2026

This work was inspired by @tomerullman.bsky.social's “illusion illusion” paradigm (arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613) where VLMs mistake illusion-like images for genuine optical illusions. In both cases, models respond to what a problem looks like rather than what it actually requires.🔮

The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None

Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something "really is" and how some...

arxiv.org

Shoutout to my former undergrad Jane Singman (now @pearlhanli.bsky.social's lab manager), who helped me launch this project when I first started my own lab in 2021. She will soon be applying to PhD programs! 👀

🐅 🧡 x 🔱 💙

Natalia Vélez@natvelali.bsky.social · last mo.

It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!

In light of the Supreme Court's tragic decision on TPS, here is something I wrote last year. www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/...

How the Temporary Protected Status program saved my life

Immigration policy is not an abstract discussion happening far away from us, writes Bosnian native Ismar Volić, who came to the U.S. as a teenager. It is the difference between hope and despair, betwe...

wbur.org

Ever wondered why we sometimes 'catch' another person's anxiety even after a brief interaction? We developed a paradigm to induce contagious anxiety and find that empathy and mental imagery mediate anxiety contagion. See thread & preprint for details! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Essentialism folks: My 3yo bit into a blueberry, saw the green flesh inside, and proclaimed “there’s avocado inside!” (She had earlier asked me what blueberries were made of). Isn’t she supposed to intuitively expect natural kinds‘ insides to determine their external properties? Help

Cognitive Bat Signal #2 -- If you wanted to evoke rapid phasic physiological arousal in an experimental context (without hurting the participant), how would you do it? Loud sudden sounds and sudden jump scare videos are all we've come up with. We want to examine changes in discourse in hyerarousal

Please share! We are recruiting expert panellists for a Delphi study on extrinsic emotion regulation terminology. Fully online, starting July 2026, and all contributors formally acknowledged in the published output. Sign up: bit.ly/4nmm3Ar #EmotionResearch

So excited that I’ll be joining @jesssalerno.bsky.social and Nick Schweitzer as a postdoc at Cornell starting this fall! Stay tuned for work on how people assign causal and moral responsibility in legal contexts!

There are many widely available health & wellness apps that will remind you to periodically get up from your desk and walk around but I can personally recommend my own low-tech method which is to continuously drink ungodly amounts of tea.

We just got approved to hire a teaching professor in Quantitative Methods! This is the *very* rare tenure track teaching position at Berkeley. I'll be chairing the search committee. Official job ad coming later this summer!

Looking for a tech position? There’s the “just get involved in something good” approach. If you go that route, it’s a win!! Then there’s the “get involved in the NEXT BIG THING” approach, which is a WIN. The decision is a win vs WIN. There are no bad options. (That said …). 😊

Robb Rutledge@robbrutledge.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🎉New positions!🎉 Postdoc and Research technician openings in our lab @yale for computational psychiatry research. Technician position a great stepping stone to grad school. More info: rutledgelab.org/positions Work w/big data from our smartphone apps and large clinical samples happinessquest.app

👋 Are you an SPSP member working at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution? Join us for a virtual meet-up to build a sense of belonging and support within the SPSP PUI community! 📅May 22 (12-1 PM US ET) RSVP here: https://ow.ly/8SpL50YZHWE