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
Dad with me as a baby
Me, Mom, and Dad in Kokomo
Me and Dad grilling
The three of us in Costa Rica
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: Dorsa Amir, William Brady, Emily Finn, Daniel Yon, Yuan Chang Leong, Andrew Grotzinger.
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...
Check out the preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Data and code here: osf.io/8bqgw/ and here: openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...
This work also demonstrates how emerging computational tools - like the deep neural network we used to manipulate these stimuli in a way that none of participants realized - can help us overcome traditional tradeoffs in psychological and neuroscientific research.
This reserach further underscores the important of understanding others' minds in shaping our broader understanding of the world and the people within it.
These findings clarify the roles of these regions in social cognition, indicating among other things that the STS is not merely involved in mental state inference from multimodal cues, but also in the later use of that information in support of downstream cognitive processes.
We find that this both of these process are supported by portions of lateral temporal cortex, extending from the posterior to anterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), as well as an anterior portion of lateral prefrontal cortex.
Importantly, this design allows us to dissociate the normal process of inferring others' mental states (e.g., from a combination of noisy cues) from the process of *using* knowledge of others mental states to predict events or change our minds about others.
By randomly manipulation access to characters' thoughts via inner monologue narration in naturalistic stimuli, we take an important step towards overcoming this tradeoff, and understanding how mental state knowledge shapes narrative processing and trait impression updating.
Prior studies on these topics have faced a tradeoff between internal and external validity, either using artificial paradigms with clean manipulations to justify stronger causal inference, or using naturalistic paradigms to better generalization to real world contexts.
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.