Elisa Baek

My lab at USC is recruiting!
1) research coordinator: perfect for a recent graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs: usccareers.usc.edu REQ20167829
2) PhD students: see FAQs on lab website dornsife.usc.edu/hklab/faq/

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

SoCoLab celebrates fall 🎃👻🍂
How did I get so lucky to end up with a group of such fabulous, kind, and funny human beings?

We're excited to announce that the #SANS2026 Presidential Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Steve Chang of Yale! (medicine.yale.edu/profile/stev...). He will deliver an address titled "Diverse Social Strategies and Neural Mechanisms underlying Mutual Cooperation"

Symposia Guidelines - Social Affective Neuroscience Society

Symposium submissions are now open for #SANS2026 in San Diego! The deadline for these submissions is November 17th at 23:59 Pacific. Check out the submission guidelines here: socialaffectiveneuro.org/symposia-gui...

📢 My lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is considering graduate student applications this fall

We welcome applicants interested in using computational modeling & fMRI to study social connection

🗓️ Deadline: December 1, 2025
🔗 Learn more: sinclaboratory.com/apply

#comppsychiatry #socialneuro

Having colleagues like @richardhuskey.bsky.social @soojongkim.bsky.social would be a dream!

Congratulations Kylie!

Excited to present our new work reading minds!

Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

Amazing opportunity for grad students looking for a postdoc! Excited to see all that @youngkihong.bsky.social’s new lab will venture into in the coming years 🎉

Excited to share this work led by @avamadesousa.bsky.social! This paper is so significant to me, not only because it reveals important insights into the disruptions in emotion representations that characterize loneliness, but also because it is a clear example of the power of team science 🌟

SoCoLab, Year 3! It has been a rough start to the new year, but first lab meeting of the semester with the best team reminds me of what this is all about. It feels like just yesterday that the lab was just me and @begumbabur.bsky.social 🥲 …now we fill the conference room!

what happens during "resting state"? @jinke.bsky.social asked this question by (literally) asking what participants what they were thinking during rest, finding that ongoing thoughts are reflected in FC patterns and predict behavior/traits!

excited to be part of this project!

My Baby Versus the World: Fathers' Neural Processing of Own‐Infant, Unfamiliar‐Infant, and Romantic Partner Stimuli First-time fathers processed own-infant stimuli in mentalizing, emotion regulation, and reward processing regions, and posterior midline responses tracked with bonding and parental stress. Whole-brai....

🧠Out now in @ohbmofficial.bsky.social ! 🧠

We scanned 32 first-time dads (~8 mos postpartum) while they watched videos of their baby, an unfamiliar baby, their romantic partner, and an unfamiliar woman…1/8

doi.org/10.1002/hbm....

Reconciling flexibility and efficiency: medial entorhinal cortex represents a compositional cognitive map Nature Communications - How the brain creates compositional cognitive maps that support both flexible and efficient planning remains poorly understood. Here, authors propose a...

New paper with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social in Nature Communications: an RL model that builds a successor map compositionally. The new model plans as well as the best models, and it links components of the map used for planning to neural codes in the medial entorhinal cortex.
rdcu.be/eAofi

I'm reviewing PhD applications this cycle to join my lab at
@uwpsych.bsky.social in Fall ‘26. Ideal for those interested in dev, decision-making, emotion regulation, fMRI, and quant/comp methods. We have cool stuff in the works and want more brilliant ppl in the fold!

psych.wisc.edu/joao-guassi-...

🥳Excited to share that our new paper is live at Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social! We show that Pavlovian learning can grow empathy for another person. 🧵👇

Home | Social Connection Lab The Social Connection Lab ("SoCoLab") at USC investigates what helps people feel socially connected to one another.

🚨We are recruiting a lab manager who will spend 80% of their effort in my lab and 20% of their effort in @leorhackel.bsky.social's lab. Please share widely!

Apply at usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange... with:
completed questionnaire (socolab.org/lab-manager-application), CV & Cover Letter!

Paper abstract and title.

🚨New paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social 🚨

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on?

We review the “psychology of virality,” or the psychological & structural factors that shape information spread online and offline: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lRke4sIRv...

Excited to share that I’ll be joining the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at @colorado.edu as an Assistant Professor this fall! My lab will study social cognition, focusing on the cognitive and neural bases of stereotyping and bias interventions.

♥️♥️

This paper exemplifies what I envision as my research pipeline: use neuroimaging to garner insight into psychological phenomena and then test the phenomena directly with experimental design to inform social psych theory 🧠💡

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations, Hongbo!!!!! So well-deserved 🥳🥳🥳

Many congratulations, Emma!

The new science of 'dad brain' You’ve heard of 'mom brain.' But how do men’s brains change when they become fathers?

Anyway, here's the link, if you can suppress your revulsion to my vocal intonation long enough to listen: www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025...

Opinion | The Moral Paralysis Facing Iranians Right Now

My new op-ed in the @nytimes.

I argue that Iranians are caught in a state of “moral paralysis,” a psychological trap set by the Islamic Republic itself. It pits two of our most sacred values against each other: liberation vs. self-determination. (1/2) www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o...

Does linguistic diversity when talking about emotions track wellbeing? In a new pre-print with @eriknook.bsky.social, we link emotion vocabularies to mental health in a large real-world psychotherapy dataset. Highlight: therapist emo vocab may help clients get better over time! shorturl.at/TKPN1

Member Spotlight: 2025 Spence Award Recipient Justin Minue Kim On the Science of Emotion This Spence recipient's interdisciplinary work examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of affective information processing and how they impact mental health.

Meet 2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence recipient @minuekim.bsky.social‬, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Sungkyunkwan University, whose interdisciplinary work examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of affective information processing and how they impact #mentalhealth.

Thanks, Sara! :) Can't wait to share the (many) future papers from our (many) collaborations soon!