It was also great to catch up with former DSEC Lab members Emma Ilyaz, Olivia Merulla, and Astra Yang! 🤩 Thanks for an amazing time, #SAS2026!

I also had the privilege of chairing a symposium on neurobehavioural sensitivity to social cues. Special thanks to Carly Lenniger, Morgan Lindenmuth, and Katie Billetdeaux for their excellent contributions to this session!

MSc student Emily Schreiner presented a poster on the dynamics of teenagers’ facial movements when posing emotions, highlighting age-related differences in the production of emotional expressions. 🎭

MSc student Emma Canning gave a flash talk on teens’ ability to identify emotion in faces and voices of different emotional intensities. This research helps identify the type of emotional cues that may be particularly hard for youth to pick up on when trying to understand others’ emotions. 🔎

PhD student Riley Bonar gave a pre-conference flash talk on the link between attentional biases and amygdala response to friends in adolescence, and presented a poster on how closeness to friends and parents predicts teens’ eye gaze patterns to social information. 🧠

It’s been a week already, but the @dseclab.bsky.social is still buzzing from all the exciting science we got to learn about at the @affectscience.bsky.social conference! 🤩

The DSEC Lab is in Pittsburgh for #SAS2026! 🎉

We’re excited to present some of the latest findings from the lab and to learn from the incredible work being shared by others at the conference! Our team will be presenting on Friday and Saturday, so stay tuned for some conference highlights!

Thank you so much for being a part of it! Your flash talk was excellent!

Major shout-out to my co-host, @eriknook.bsky.social, without whom this would not have been possible. 🩵 Thank you to the SAS co-chairs, @katiehoemann.bsky.social & @desmondong.bsky.social, and the pre-con co-chairs, Sophie Wohltjen and Kuan-Hua Chen, for their support in making our vision happen!

Special thanks to our wonderful keynote speakers, @drkoraly.bsky.social, Vanessa LoBue, & @jamielarsh.bsky.social, for kicking the day off with inspiring framing talks. I loved the excellent flash talks & group discussions about the pressing issues in the field. Let's do it all again soon! 🤩

Wow - what a pre-conference! It was a thrill to co-host the first ever Developmental Affective Science pre-conference to the @affectscience.bsky.social conference this week. I was blown away by the group's energy, enthusiasm, and ideas! 🪴

I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Johanna Jarcho as our first Seminar Series speaker of the term in the Centre for Neuroscience at Queen's. 🙏 Don't miss her talk, "Rethinking the role of memory in the development of social anxiety", tomorrow (Jan 21)!! neuroscience.queensu.ca/calendar/dr-...

As the Fall '25 semester ends, I wanted to shout out this wonderful team of students who work diligently to advance our understanding of adolescent development. I am fortunate to work alongside such an inspiring group of trainees. Looking forward to more science & fun next year! 🧠

@affectscience.bsky.social notices are out! 🎉 If you’re going to #SAS2026, consider attending its very first Developmental Affective Science pre-conference too! @eriknook.bsky.social and I hope to see you there. 🤞🏻 Spread the word!

Pre-Conferences – The Society for Affective Science

Submissions for pre-conference flash talks just opened (society-for-affective-science.org/2026-sas-ann...), and will close on January 9th, 2026. Please encourage your colleagues and trainees to apply, and share with anyone you think might be interested in attending! We hope to see you there! 🙏

We're pleased to be hosting three speakers for framing talks (Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Vanessa LoBue, @jamielarsh.bsky.social), a flash talk session with presentations from trainees & ECRs, and discussions of key issues in the field (with the goal of fostering collaborations & projects/papers).

Excited to share this: @eriknook.bsky.social and I are hosting a pre-conference on Developmental Affective Science before this year's @affectscience.bsky.social (March 12, 2026). If you're thinking of attending #SAS2026, consider joining us for the pre-con too! ✨

The Department of Psychology at Queen's University (Canada) is hiring! The position is for an established researcher (Associate/Full Professors) in social affective neuroscience.

The full ad can be found here: www.queensu.ca/psychology/n...

Please share widely! 🍁🧠

Congratulations to Riley Bonar for his successful Master’s thesis defence yesterday! Thank you to the evaluation committee for the engaging discussion and insightful questions. Riley, you have so much to be proud of—can’t wait for the next steps of your academic journey!

Happy trails to the dseclab.bsky.social 2025 summer staff! Victoria Cassel (queensuresearch.bsky.social USSRF), Polly Clayton (Matariki Network of Universities), Maria Fernanda Trigo Adami (MITACS), Olivia Merulla (staff), and Kyla Campbell (coordinator) moved our lab's work forward in major ways.

Major thanks to the @DSEC Lab Summer 2025 team for their hard-work & dedication! L to R, top: Tessa Patton, Navid Shabani Barzegar, Maria Fernanda Trigo Adami, Daniel Nault, Olivia Merulla, Catherine Shevelevich, Riley Bonar. Bottom: Victoria Cassel, Kyla Campbell, me, Rushmeet Singh, Polly Clayton.

DSEC Lab: Welcome We will be sending out a new newsletter 3 times a year with new studies, recent findings and activities!

The @dseclab.bsky.social sends out triannual newsletters sharing information about our ongoing studies, recent findings, & fun activities for youth. Download them at our website or subscribe to learn more about youth's social and emotional communication!
www.michelemorningstar.com/our-lab-news...

Thank you to Liz daSilva, Ryan Lundell-Creagh, and @danielnault.bsky.social for such a fantastic collaboration!

We highlight important systematic sources of individual variability in how people pose emotional expressions (age, gender/sex, etc.) & argue that emotion perception research must account for expresser-related variability to better characterize how we communicate emotional intent.

You might have heard me harp on about "encoder effects" in the last few years... and now, our review paper on the topic is finally out in Affective Science! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Thank you to SSHRC-CRSH for funding basic science designed to understand fundamental social processes in the critical developmental stage of adolescence!

Knowing more about how teenagers navigate their social worlds—and how this relates to social success—can inform our educational and therapeutic practices to help adolescents thrive in their social relationships.

How do teenagers attend to social signals from others? How do they interpret their parents' and friends' emotions and adjust their behaviours accordingly in different social situations?

$11.5M to boost Queen’s research advancing understanding of people, societies, and the world | Queen's Gazette The Insight and Partnerships programs support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities and the formation of collaborations that bring about its real-world impact.

I'm very fortunate to be the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant this year. Our project will investigate how adolescents' processing of social information varies by social context, and how this relates to psychosocial outcomes during the teenage years.

www.queensu.ca/gazette/stor...

Hostile Attribution Biases and Evaluation of Vocally Enacted Responses to Peer Provocation in Early Adolescents Hostile Attribution Bias (HAB) is the tendency to perceive ambiguous social information as threatening. The social information processing (SIP) model provides a theoretical framework for determining ...

Tone of voice isn't often considered in interventions aimed to reduce HAB, but our findings point to the importance of considering how youth evaluate nonverbal cues when deciding how to respond to peer provocation.

Read the full article here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....