Yuritza Y Escalante

December 9th at 12PM: Lucina Uddin will be discussing brain networks during the Philosophy and Neuroscience Salon hosted by @pessoabrain.bsky.social

Sign up here: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Understanding the debate around terms in emotion research requires appreciating why emotions are more challenging to study than other brain functions. To investigate memory, for example, researchers often design a memory test for which there are ground-truth correct and incorrect answers to the questions posed. In contrast, emotion is a subjective experience for which there is no ground truth—no one but you really knows how happy, anxious, scared or disgusted you are. This subjectivity makes emotions much more difficult to measure than other brain functions, especially in animals, because we cannot ask them how they feel. The most extensively used measure of emotions is applied by simply asking people questions about their feelings, such as: “On a scale from 1 to 5, how upset are you?”. However, measures of subjective experience are limited to humans who can communicate and cannot be applied to nonhuman animals or young children. A second type of emotion measure probes biological reactions triggered by emotions, including facial expressions or galvanic skin responses; often, however, these responses do not map cleanly onto subjective reports. Other versions of physiological measures seek to quantify how emotions are reflected in dynamic patterns of brain activity (or their proxies, such as fMRI results). A final way to measure emotion is to induce an emotion and measure how it changes a person’s behavior on a well-defined task, such as a paradigm for risky decision-making. These different ways of measuring emotions set the stage for debates about what these measures should be called, centered around the evidence they provide.

This piece was seemingly about the words we use to describe emotions but behind it is a discussion about what makes them harder to study than other brain functions. From a philosophy of science perspective, it's a fascinating (measurement) problem!

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain - Nature A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic processing.

Nature research paper: Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain

go.nature.com/4839zaL

Social Science Research Coordinator in School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, California, United States The Department of Psychology’s Psychophysiology Lab is seeking a full-time Social Science Research Coordinator (RC) position. The RC will be an...

The Stanford Psychophysiology Lab (PI: James Gross) is hiring a new lab manager! If you have a superstar student interested in emotion, please share this ad with them! Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Job ad: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

#psychjobs

Affective science has lost an extraordinary member of our community: Dr. Paul Ekman, who passed peacefully at home at the age of 91 on Monday. Dr. Ekman's pioneering cross-cultural research on the interpretation of facial expressions in emotional terms...(1)

Landed at #SfN and we have lots of fun new results to share. See below for Yassalab poster presentations. If you want to talk #Alzheimers or #mentalhealth come chat with us.

#SfN25 #neurosky #neuroskyence #academicchatter

Taking just another small step towards trying to reduce the stigma attached to borderline personality disorder & psychiatric illnesses - at ISSPD2025.

Warning. ⚠️ If you are writing an NSF GRFP, new this year, you need official transcripts to apply. Beware. They will not review applications without official transcripts. ‼️

Unfolding event structure distorts subjective time Our experience of time is often distorted in striking ways. Although prior work has shown that boundaries between events can shape temporal perception…

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

We’re hiring in Quantitative Psychology at UNC Chapel Hill!

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the program and please share widely!

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

The Biological Cost of Chronic Stress: Allostatic Load and Newer Conceptualizations 7 November 2025 9am -12 pm PDT

🗣 Join the Stress Measurement Network for a webinar digging into "𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬: 𝐀𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐋𝐨𝐚𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬"

Date: November 7, 2025
Time: 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM PDT
Sign up here: www.stressmeasurement.org/event-detail...
#psychscisky #healthpsych #affectsci

🧠 We are accepting graduate students for fall 2026! 🧠

If you are interested in vision or attention and how they relate to function and behavior, and want to explore these with a plethora of tools, we'd love for you to apply!

Check out our website (www.davidosher.com/index.html) and get in touch!

Excited to share our work making an "allostasis-first" case that brain function is most productively framed in terms of its core regulatory function. We also introduce some new ideas in the context of metabolism and cognitive function in Alzheimer's.
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Moments Lab

Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!

www.momentslab.org

Want to do a PhD with me and the Emotions in Context Lab? We’re looking for new grad students to join us next fall! Check out the lab website to learn what we’re working on now and in the near future: www.emotionsincontextlab.com/join/

World’s first personalized CRISPR therapy given to baby with genetic disease Treatment seems to have been effective, but it is not clear whether such bespoke therapies can be widely applied.

To be clear, these kinds of breakthroughs are going to come to a screeching halt with the current NIH funding cuts. This new treatment is only possible because of decades of basic research. What might be possible 20 years from now if we don't destroy basic research?

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Theory of Constructed Emotion: More Than a Feeling
doi.org/10.1177/1745...
#neuroscience

We’re hiring postdocs to join my lab at UNC. If you’re interested in adolescence, brain, and social development, DM me. Our work incorporates fMRI, social media, and longitudinal methods. We study risks and opportunities in adolescence. If you’re at #SRCD2025 and want to meet, please reach out!

Knowing the world together is the foundation of science. It's why we celebrate universities as places where diverse perspectives can meet and make new knowledge together. It's what we must fight fiercely to defend now.

On day 3, we asked SAS attendees to share their favorite (or most frequently used) emoji & HOW they use it. It's fun to think about the variation in emoji use and how it can lead to unique and inventive ways to communicate! 🦫 Thank you to everyone for such a great #SAS2025!

No worries, great video!

Keely Muscatell on stage sharing a slide including multiple papers

Loved getting this crash course reading list for how bodily contexts can influence psychological processes from Dr. Keely Muscatell at #SBSM2025Seattle! Papers are linked in thread below. #psychscisky #affectivescience #healthpsych #devpsych

CASL is showing up for Society for Affective Science this week!