Phil Deming

Propagation Mapping: A Precision Framework for Reconstructing the Neural Circuitry of Brain Maps Human brain mapping has traditionally relied on univariate approaches to characterize regional activity, an assumption that is increasingly being challenged. While functional connectivity offers a pro...

🚨 Preprint Out!
Thrilled to share my first sole-author paper introducing a novel method to reconstruct neural circuits underpinning the spatial organization of human brain maps 🧠✨
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github.com/JulDugre/Pro...
#neuroskyence #compneurosky

📢 I'll be recruiting a PhD student in Developmental Psychology for 2026 at UNC Chapel Hill! Student will be co-mentored with Dr. Eva Telzer at the Winston Center. Interests in naturalistic fMRI/fNIRS, developmental affective neuro, and behavioral addictions would be great fits.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

Heads up that the NSF #GRFP guidelines suddenly changed and now only current first-year grad students are eligible...my second-year student who intentionally waited to maximize her chances is devastated, as countless others will be. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Assistant Professor of Psychology - Madison, Wisconsin, United States Current Employees: If you are currently employed at any of the Universities of Wisconsin, log in to Workday to apply through the internal application process.Job Category:FacultyEmployment Type:Regula...

The Dept. of Psychology at the U. Wisconsin–Madison has an opening for an Assistant Professor in the area of Computational Neuroscience and/or Cognitive Science, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI).

Domain of behavior or cognition is open. Details at jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

The UVA Clinical Psychology area is hiring! We're looking for someone whose research is at the intersection of youth mental health and digital technology. I love my colleagues and Charlottesville and would love to have you as a colleague!
Please RT apply.interfolio.com/172895

(PDF) Men Do Not Suppress Emotions More than Women in Everyday Life: Evidence from Large Scale Experience-Sampling Data PDF | Expressive suppression—hiding the outward expression of emotions—has been linked to negative mental health outcomes in Western samples. Despite... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

Men suppress emotions more than women?

New preprint by @elisekalo.bsky.social and colleagues reports 11 experience sampling studies which suggest that gender differences in the suppression of emotional expression may reflect internalized stereotypes rather than behavioral reality.

#PsycSci 🧪

Just posing these questions here because they are important active directions that scientists are taking to determine the pros and cons of trying to treat depression with psilocybin.

And only 1 of the 8 reviewed studies compared psilocybin to a standard antidepressant - psilocybin was no more effective than standard care. To treat depression or any illness, do we prescribe the drug that massively disrupts brain function?

All of the reviewed studies had a blinding problem - patients knew when they were on psilocybin. Does psilocybin work because of its biological effects or because patients believe it works?

Thank you! Looking at Table 2, I see lots of mixed findings, more so than the authors let on. Psilocybin's treatment effects depend on when and how depression is measured.

Just pointing this out in a friendly way because it's important not to skip the part where we get evidence that psilocybin actually treats depression.

Where is the evidence that psilocybin treats depression? My reading of the literature is that it often performs no better than typical antidepressants. For studies that do find treatment effects, the effects depend on how depression is measured.

Thank you for helping to disseminate our work!

@jbwormwood.bsky.social @katiehoemann.bsky.social @lisafeldmanbarrett.com @lilymarino.bsky.social @zoekross.bsky.social @srunyun.bsky.social @malloryjfeldman.bsky.social

Mixed emotions in the predictive brain Understanding complex or mixed emotions first requires an exploration of the human nervous system underlying emotions, and indeed all experience. We review current research in neuroscience, which desc...

Bittersweetness is often called a "mixed" emotion because one could replace it with different emotion labels like "joy and sadness."

Here's a paper on mixed emotions by my colleagues if you're interested:
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

You could say that all emotion labels like joy, anger, bittersweetness, etc are useful simplifications. They simplify highly complex experiences and allow us to compare experiences across moments.

Emotional experiences in daily life are highly variable - Philip Deming There’s a debate among psychologists about what emotions are. Yes, that’s right, scientists still do not agree on the nature of emotion, a pretty fundamental part of human experience. Some say that em...

You can read a more detailed plain-language breakdown of the study here:

philipdeming.com/emotional-ex...

Our job may be to better understand the variability of daily life emotional experiences and the brain’s meaning-making process.

Our approach – built from a sampling method our lab pioneered, with new modeling advances – is a powerful tool for capturing the complexity of emotional experience.

/end

Variation was the norm.

Emotions are blurry categories. An emotion label like ‘joy’ is a meaning that the brain makes in the moment based on a wide array of sensory information.

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What would these results have looked like if emotions were sharply-defined types?

The patterns themselves may have been more uniform and recurred across most people. Each person would have reliably assigned exactly one emotion label to each pattern.

Our data did not support this idea.

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Next, we mapped the reliable patterns of experience to the participant's own emotion labels.

The mapping was many-to-many: participants described events in multiple patterns using the same emotion label, and described events in the same pattern using different emotion labels.

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Patterns of daily life experiences are displayed for two example participants. Participant A has three patterns, participant B has four. Radar plots show the mean and spread of cardiovascular and affective features. Donut plots show the proportion of events for categorical features (posture, activity, social context). The reliable patterns varied across people.

For each person, we identified reliable patterns of similar events - using the heart data, valence, arousal, posture, activity, and social context recorded for each event.

The reliable patterns varied across people, both in nature and number.

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Ninety-seven young adults (age 18-36 years) completed the study, providing data for more than 10,000 daily life events (69-197 events per person).

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The survey asked them what emotions they were feeling (participants wrote in their own responses), whether they were alone or with other people (the social context), what they were doing, how pleasant they were feeling (valence), and how energized they were feeling (arousal).

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Participants wore heart monitors and motion sensors for 8 hours/day for 14 days as they went about their normal routine.

Whenever the person was physically still and experienced a change in heart rate, they received a survey on their phone.

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To test this view, we sampled participants' experiences in the real world (not in the lab).

Instead, each moment of joy is accompanied by a unique set of bodily feelings and is shaped by the current situation. And one experience of joy may share some similarities with moments of anger.

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Some scientists think emotions are sharply-defined types - each moment of joy is similar to the next, but different from moments of anger.

We found evidence for a different view: the lines between emotions are more blurry.

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tinyurl.com/2pmdwty2

UW-Madison research drives startups. Federal science cuts stall our mission. | Opinion Academic science is fertilizer of the economy. It creates soil where innovation thrive. Some who don’t know about how things grow think it’s manure.

www.jsonline.com/story/opinio...

Mapping the Psychopathic Brain: Divergent Neuroimaging Findings converge onto a Common Brain Network Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a constellation of interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial features. Its neural und…

Very interesting approach: while meta analytic analyses for brain correlates of psychopathy are not consistent, they overlap with default mode and subcortical networks and with lesion networks related to antisocial behaviour: tinyurl.com/54tkukj8 by some @ssspsychopathy.bsky.social members