February 25, 2025
Congratulations to Daphne Muhammad '25, recipient of the inaugural Gordon Allport Fellowship from the Consortium for Interacting Minds! This prestigious award recognizes her outstanding senior honors thesis research, conducted under the mentorship of Professor Kiara Sanchez, Assistant Professor and E.E. Just 1907 Early Career Fellow in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences.
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February 19, 2025
Professor Thalia Wheatley is highlighted in a Psychology Today article for her 2018 study showing how people who “click” often experience similar neural responses.
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February 17, 2025
Assistant Professor Mark Thornton, Dartmouth College, is being recognized by SANS, the Social & Affective Neuroscience Society, with an Early-Career Award. His award will be presented at the Annual Meeting in Chicago, April 23-26, 2025. Congratulations to Mark!
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February 12, 2025
"Seven early career scientists are recipients of the 2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. These researchers are leading cutting-edge psychological research on a wide array of topics, such as the neurocognitive mechanisms of information processing, children’s persistence behaviors, and the connections between psychopathology and addiction...Thornton’s research explores how people predict each other’s behavior. His work draws on theories and methods from a wide array of fields, including social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and computer science. For example, previous work has integrated findings from social psychology with findings from neuroscience to design new ways to predict the dynamics of fluctuating mental states. Thornton has a passion for rigorous quantitative and computational methods. In addition to his research, he has organized workshops on computational methods and written public-facing articles on statistics and data visualization. "
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Emotions are ubiquitous to the human experience, shaping all our social interactions. For example, encountering a person asking for money on the street can evoke immediate sadness as well as anticipated guilt if one chooses to ignore them. How do these dynamic emotional experiences shape our behaviors? We develop a unified framework to understand emotion by integrating a dimensional model of core affect with social choice paradigms. Contrary to traditional emotion theories that emphasize anger as the primary driver of punitive decisions, we demonstrate that a broader spectrum of negative emotions explains decisions to punish, free-ride, and defect. Emotional expectations represent an additional facet of social exchange, influencing how we interact with others. We introduce a novel computational framework that incorporates emotion expectations, revealing that these emotion prediction errors (PEs) outperform traditional reward PEs in predicting social choice and are distinctly encoded in the brain. The rapidly expanding, yet poorly understood, domain of human-AI interaction led us to explore how interactions with AI influence emotions. We show that emotion PEs serve as a fine-tuned barometer for well-being, explaining why individuals experience greater happiness after conversations with generative AI compared to journaling about emotional topics. By leveraging computational modeling, machine learning, neural imaging, and human-AI interactions, this work provides a unified perspective on how both immediate and expected emotions, across diverse contexts, shape our everyday decision-making and well-being. Joseph Heffner, Postdoctoral researcher in the Rutledge Lab at Yale, will be here in person to lecture from 12:00 – 1:00 pm in Room 213, Moore Hall, Dartmouth College on May 22nd.
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Talking to friends—or seeking racism-specific support—is one of the most common ways Black Americans cope with experiencing racism. Research investigating whether such support is beneficial to Black Americans’ well-being, however, has yielded mixed findings. In this talk, I will discuss findings from a few projects that investigated (1) from whom Black Americans seek racism-specific support, (2) whether support’s benefit is contingent upon the support provider’s race (same- vs. cross-race), and (3) which support strategies—and from whom—are most helpful (or harmful) to Black Americans’ psychological and relational well-being. Dr. Marshburn will present his virtual lecture on March 6th from Noon - 1pm.
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Alexandra Paxton, Associate Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut, will lecture from Noon – 1 pm, Room 213, Moore Hall, Dartmouth College. Dualism—the idea of separate "mind" and "body"—has influenced theories of psychology for hundreds of years, and even as its explicit influence has waned, its implicit influence remains. It can be particularly sticky in our understanding of social interaction, bringing along a sense that people are separated from one another and their environments. In this talk, I present work on social interaction from a dynamical and ecological perspective, arguing for a view of people as inextricably linked to one another in and through their shared environment.
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Lecture by David Levari, PhD. the Lawrence A. Rand and Tina Smith Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences and Entrepreneurship, Brown University, Noon to 1 pm , a virtual presentation
LinkThe CIM talk series highlights innovative, new research that elucidates some aspect of how minds interact. Invited speakers join us from all over the world—in person or virtually—to share their latest methods and findings. Our aim is to sample widely across methods and fields (e.g., hyperscanning, social network analysis, cross-cultural studies, and natural language processing of conversation) to achieve a broad view of the research frontier.
SLAB (short for Social Lab) is a biweekly meeting interleaved with the CIM talk series. SLAB is a place where CIM-affiliated grad students, post-docs, and lab managers informally present in-progress work with the goal of receiving timely and constructive feedback from the larger CIM community. We find that helping each other think through ideas and analyses in the earliest stages of the scientific process not only strengthens individual projects but seeds inter-lab collaboration and creates a deep and distributed network of shared knowledge.
