Check out the latest climate communication research at Penn during our event next week!

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Climate Change & Mental Health

📅 Submission deadline: 3 August 2026

👉 Learn more and submit your manuscript here:
lnkd.in/eeXmuCF7

Please share with colleagues and networks working at the intersection of climate science, psychology, and public health.

How do people reach agreement on public health issues?

Using fMRI hyperscanning + NLP, we found that when conversation partners aimed to compromise rather than persuade, they explored a wider range of mental states and topics — and ended up agreeing more.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

SCORE | Center for Open Science SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Grant Witness is hiring! We're seeking a full-time data scientist to join our team building data resources to support journalism, litigation, and activism protecting science, public health, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/apply.html #rstats

📢 New preprint from the lab🧠
▶️doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.12.710517

What does fMRI connectivity actually reflect at the neural level?
The natural intuition is: more neural activity = more connectivity! Using cortical perturbations we show this is not necessarily the case: sometimes less is more!

👇🧵

Home | Communication Science Futures Communication Science Futures is a conference aimed at addressing pressing issues and opportunities in the interdisciplinary, social...

Hey y'all! Very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting Communication Science Futures again in East Lansing later this year. The conference in 2024 was a blast, and we're looking forward to running it back!

Keynote speaker: James Pennebaker
Submission deadline: June 5th.

→ commscifutures.com

I Wrote Research Funding Announcements for NIH for 22 Years. This Year They’ve Published 14 How NIH went from 756 funding announcements to 14 in two years — and what it means for every disease that depends on federal research

‼️ We are on track for a staggering 98% reduction in posted NIH funding opportunities this year relative to historical norms. Political review and red tape are blocking approval of funding announcements across the board. See Elizabeth Ginexi’s analysis:

elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/i-wrote-re...

#psychjobs

“Scientists can start to demonstrate authenticity by remaining resolute in our values: truth, accountability, freedom of ideas, open debate, transparency, and public good. We stand by these principles, even when they are not universally popular.”

National Science Foundation: $9 billion total in FY2026

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model.

This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine.

🧵/

🧵New paper out in @commspsychol.nature.com We tested whether language-based assessments (LBAs) can predict not just subjective well-being (life satisfaction) but also psychological well-being (autonomy). Across 3 studies, we found that LBAs work well for some constructs—but not all! 1/

This thread shows a deliberate defunding of U.S. science, engineering, social science, innovation, and education excellence. It’s a U.S. national security, competitiveness, and economic disaster.

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop

And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹)

RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

There is No Scientific Justification to Revoke the Endangerment Finding The U.S. EPA's decision to repeal the Endangerment Finding will limit the government's ability to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

As I say here, there is no scientific justification to revoke the engagement finding. In fact, over the last 15+ yrs, the evidence of how climate change affects our health has only grown. Higher risk of allergies, dementia, fertility, heart disease, and death: that’s what’s on the line. @nature.org

My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below

New from SAS! We’re launching a Teaching Resource Repository and inviting members to share syllabi, slides, readings, and assignments. Help build a shared teaching hub for affective science—submit by Feb 15 (ongoing after!) #sas2026

Faculty Lecturer - Department of Psychology Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...

McGill is hiring a faculty lecturer in social psychology, in a (non-adjunct) permanent teaching position.

Please consider being my colleague, Montreal is really great: mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill...

Public luxury! You love to see it.

How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are

A Minnesota woman observing ICE agents in her car was cornered on one-way streets. An agent approached, called her by name—citing facial recognition. Days later, her Global Entry and TSA privileges were revoked, with no explanation.

‼️‼️‼️‼️ This is huge ‼️‼️‼️‼️

I want you to stop and think about what kind of country we're living in when a major metropolitan paper is publishing this story. Is that the kind of country you want to live in? I sure hope not.

“Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year…That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers … but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024”

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published:
doi.org/10.1162/QSS....

@tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

'Beyond the politics of demand: Prefigurative politics and the future of collective action research'

New pre-print from @swedishprotests.bsky.social @metesefauysal.bsky.social and others with important argument about how social psych approaches collective action

osf.io/preprints/ps...