Yuritza Y Escalante

The Affective Science Lab will be well-represented at this years @affectscience.bsky.social conference!

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

Wish I was there to support, you’re all going to do amazing!!

Delighted to be collaborating with @xiaosigu.bsky.social with support from @srndna.bsky.social 🎉

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Yuta Katsumi, Bradford C. Dickerson, et al:

Detecting short-interval longitudinal cortical atrophy in neurodegenerative dementias via cluster scanning: A proof of concept

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Join us at SAS 2026 for the Presidential Symposium! Consider the lessons affective scientists can learn from non-human and non-traditional systems like plants, animals, and AI! 🐒🌱🤖🐁 #SAS2026

New paper: The metabolic framework of reward

We reframe reward as a computation of metabolic optimization.

Dopamine and opioids, do not signal reward but act as physiological agents.

Learning and behavior serve the brain’s goal of optimizing energy use.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Dark blue hexagon, with a light blue frame. Features a brain facing the left, with the front half as a wire-frame mesh of light blue, and the back half with several polygon segments of different colours. Below is written "ggseg" in light blue.

The ggseg ecosystem finally has a proper home! 🧠

For those who don't know, ggseg is an R package ecosystem for visualizing brain atlas data. Think ggplot2, but for brains.

#rstats #neuroimaging #openscience

This hasn't stopped in Los Angeles, it's just no longer "news" - the only reason this kidnapping was reported is be because it happened directly in front of an NPR journalist who writes on immigration.

Hey everyone! I’m leading a student mentoring table at SPSP on Family Planning and Pregnancy during graduate school. I'm trying to collect some useful data: If you had kids in academia (any career stage)-- I would be grateful if you filled out this 10-question survey: forms.office.com/r/JeLL5cBk3w

🚨 I'm searching for a full-time research coordinator to join my group & work on precision brain 🧠 network and cognitive control projects at both 3T and 7T. Please rt 🙌

Applications due: Feb. 26
Start date: flexible, as early as June
More 👇
#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

We are looking for a Clinical Research Coordinator for a project combing work on aging, peripheral physiology, and fMRI. Perfect for any students looking to get involved in research before graduate school.
If you have great students looking for opportunities in Boston, please send them our way!

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

First map of human brain mitochondria is ‘groundbreaking’ achievement Hundreds of cubes of human brain tissue help scientists to chart the energy-making capabilities of various brain regions.

The brain’s energy landscape as a potential window into brain health
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

(study led by Martin Picard and Michel Thiebaut de Schotten)

Big congrats to everyone who’s applied to grad school! 🥳🎉

It’s a huge milestone, and we’re so proud of all the hard work you’ve put in. Take a moment to celebrate—you deserve it! 🌟

Tag a friend who’s on this journey so we can cheer them on too! 🙌🎓

REGISTER FOR SAS 2026 NOW! EARLY BIRD DEADLINE IS 1/31/26! SEE YOU IN PITTSBURGH👀

Come discuss new insights into emotion development at this year's Developmental Affective Science preconference at SAS!

YouTube video by Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon Prof. Lucina Uddin from UCLA discusses her views on brain networks as studied with functional MRI

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀, 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆?
@lucinauddin.bsky.social explains many of the challenges and controversies! Great discussion too.
Check out the latest Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon.
youtu.be/pP5swFPR0Ns

Happy to introduce our 25 2025 Alumni Scholarship Recipients!!

This year we have launched our 2025 Alumni Scholarship Fund to support 1st year grad students, graduates of our GSMI program, to cover educational expenses in their 1st year of graduate school.

💼 💔 Academia’s toxic love language is playing “hard to get”
🧪 💓 Science is the beautiful pursuit of building knowledge

I wrote an essay for Nature Human Behaviour on treating academia as “just a job” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What ideas would you add? 💡

#HigherEd #PhDLife #DiversityInSTEM

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...