Amit Goldenberg

We scrolls about 100 meters a day of social media content, much of it highly emotional. In a new paper led by Jonas Schöne (JPSP) we show that people tend to remember stronger emotional expressions, which leads them to estimate feeds as more emotional.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning.

Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Comparing the value of perceived human versus AI-generated empathy Nature Human Behaviour - AI mimics empathy well, but does its empathy feel different? The authors show human empathy has unique value: human-attributed responses are rated as more empathic than...

New paper in Nature Human Behavior (led by Matan Rubin), where we manipulated the perceived identity of a real-time empathic response to be or AI. We observed a drop in perceived empathy when label was AI, and this effect was mainly driven by emotion.
rdcu.be/et9ad

The combination of #artificialintelligence and #socialmedia poses a threat to democracy.

Our new paper explains how AI swarms can fabricate grassroots consensus, fragment shared reality, engage in mass harassment, interfer with elections, and erode institutional trust: osf.io/preprints/os...

Totally agree. So much information.

So to conclude, we can definitely predict something from the way people walk. Arousal (calm to excited)? Much more likely! Valence – I would need better proof. But this is a good start.

arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04190

The mean absolute error of the model after training was 1.11, which means the model was off by about one point on average. This is not bad, or even surprisingly good, especially given that valence results were restricted to a pretty narrow range, but can we predict valence? Not sure.

As for the results – it's unclear whether the music impacted emotions in the expected direction (not reported in the paper). One thing is clear: the valence scale – which ranged from very negative -1 to very positive 9 – had valence results mostly between 3 and 9, so no strong negative valence.

You can already imagine one major issue with the design, which is that different types of music may lead people to walk differently regardless of their emotional state. So are we predicting what music people heard? Or what they felt?

The paper asked 20 people to walk while listening to music that was previously validated to elicit different emotions. For example, to elicit high-arousal negative emotions (akin to anger or fear), participants heard music from Dracula or high-wire stunts and lighting was red/yellow shining.

Can you predict whether people are happy or sad by the way they walk?

If we could, that would be pretty fun.

Anyway, this paper claims you can predict both valence (positive negative) and arousal (calm and excited) from footsteps.

But, can you? See thread🧵

arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04190

Can learning from past peace processes help promote peace in ongoing conflict? Check out our new paper (with Michal Reifen-Tagar, Noa Omri, and Eran Halperin
@picr-lab.bsky.social
)
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
1/

wow! Thanks for sharing!!

These results are consistent with other companion studies that suggest the story of using AI as a companion is a story of access—people who don't have access to human friends are more likely to use AI as a substitute.

What was more interesting to me is the correlation between use time and loneliness. Higher use time was positively associated with loneliness. This is very likely driven by the fact that lonelier people are just more likely to spend more time with the chat.

Having worked on these topics for years, I also find it highly unlikely that spending 5.32 minutes on average per day talking to ChatGPT would lead to a reduction in loneliness. Loneliness is really hard to change.

Across all conditions (but with no control group that didn’t use ChatGPT), the authors report a reduction in loneliness over time. This, as the authors admit, basically means nothing because there was no control condition and this could just be the effect of time.

The RCT (where people were asked to use ChatGPT for 5 minutes a day, at least 4 days a week, for a total of 4 weeks) is disappointing. First, there was no control group, but rather a SUPER complicated (3x3) design of different types of use.

Does daily use of ChatGPT reduce loneliness?

I was very excited to see that OpenAI just published its first paper on GPT use and well-being with an experimental design. The outcome is quite disappointing .
🧵
www.media.mit.edu/publications...

Full-time Research Assistant / Lab Manager - HigherEdJobs Jobs in higher education. Faculty and administrative positions at colleges and universities. Updated daily. Free to job seekers.

🚨New job alert! My lab is hiring a lab manager. Perfect position for a graduating senior who is interested in full-time research before applying to graduate school. #Neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #VisionScience #MLSky Apply here: www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?...

Emotion regulation contagion drives reduction in negative intergroup emotions - Nature Communications Here the authors show that an emotion regulation intervention for reducing negative intergroup emotions in conflicts can decrease negative emotions not only in treated participants but also in nontrea...

Can emotion regulation interventions spread from treated to non-treated people in a group?
We examine this question in a paper published in @naturecomms.bsky.social, led by Michael Pinus and Yajun Cao.

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

Contagious Crying Revisited: A Cross‐Cultural Investigation Into Infant Emotion Contagion Using Infrared Thermal Imaging Contagious crying in infants has been considered an early marker of their sensitivity to others’ emotions, a form of emotional contagion, and an early basis for empathy. However, it remains unclear w...

The best examples of emotional contagion is infants starting to cry when they hear another person crying (knowing nothing about the context). But could it simply be an aversion to noise?
And is contagion stronger for neg emotions than for pos emotions?
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Very cool paper on using ML to predict habit formation.

My lab and I are looking to take an applied class on Graph Machine Learning, similar to this Stanford class: web.stanford.edu/class/cs224w/.

Any suggestions?

Disclosing sample bias fails to fully correct judgments of partisan extremity How do we infer the beliefs of an entire group (e.g., Democrats) after being exposed to the beliefs of only a handful of group members? What if we kno…

People's misrepresentation of collective political beliefs as more extreme than they actually are is an issue associated with various polarization-related outcomes (including acrophily). It seems that disclosing this bias doesn't fully solve the problem.

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

Come join our multi-country study on social preferences for political extremes!!

If you are a 4 year old that loves salad.

When asked to describe street food in the US and why it's so bad compared to other countries, I like to point out that I live in a place where Goldfish crackers are considered a legitimate salad topping.

oh wow. very interesting.

Now, here is a caveat: this paper came out in 1968, during a time of significant polarization in the U.S. due to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. It's possible that attraction to extremes is especially salient during such tumultuous times.