Benedek Kurdi

🚨Historical Psych Pre-Conference🚨

We have a great lineup of speakers for the #SPSP2026 edition!

Submit your poster or data blitz abstract by Oct. 23 (link below!). Open to folks from any career stage

Any research on psychological change or historical context of social psych is welcome!

We're recruiting PhD students to join us at Nebraska! Spreading word:

Whether you (or your student's) current home is in Psych or PoliSci, if you're interested in political psych, you could be a great fit.

I run a joint lab (www.pierceekstrom.com/ekstromlab) with Ingrid Haas (paclab.unl.edu). 1/3

Developing Intuitions That Close Friends Know the Content of Each Other’s Minds Abstract. To maintain and develop close relationships, people need to accurately represent the minds of their social partners. Although studies have characterized many aspects of children’s intuitive ...

New paper in Open Mind, with @emmayu23.bsky.social, Megan Richardson, and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social! We find that by 6 years of age, children think that close friends know the content of each other’s minds.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

@openmindjournal.bsky.social

These numbers are so crazy, and I don't think the situation will improve anytime soon... 😢

@elijfinkel.bsky.social
& I are recruiting a postdoc in the #LitowitzCenter for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University. We seek research excellence regarding navigating conflict.

Application deadline: Nov. 17.

Salary: ~$80k.

facultyrecruiting.northwestern.edu/apply/MjQzNw==

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

@psychscience.bsky.social Submission site for Barcelona 2026 opens Oct. 30th!!! Join us in Spain for the first APS to be held outside the U.S. Many new ways to interact and to share psychological research being done around the world. www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

🥳🥳🥳

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Excited to share that I’ll be the incoming Editor of AMPPS. My first priority is building a diverse team of Associate Editors and Editorial Board members. If you’re interested, DM me or add your name via this super simple survey.
cornell.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
Please share!

ISCON now seeking nominations for the 2024 Best Social Cognition Paper Award!

This award recognizes an outstanding article (theoretical or empirical) in the field of social cognition. Papers eligible if published in 2024.

More info here: www.socialcognition.net/best-paper-a...

ISCON now seeking nominations for the 2025 Early Career Award! Recognizing a junior scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of social cognition.

Nominees must have received their PhDs no earlier than 2019.

More info here: www.socialcognition.net/early-career...

The most universally agreed upon property that sets emotion/affect apart from everything else is valence: approach/avoid; pleasant/unpleasant. Here they target its computation in flies, where you can really figure out the biology. We know so little about how valence is computed by brains. Exciting!

New article from the lab, suggesting to me a way in which children's autobiographical memory may differ from their event memory more generally--
Autobiographical memory in children: relation to neural white matter www.tandfonline.com/eprint/B7FZ8...

A memory can be represented at different levels of granularity, from highly specific to generalized.

Different representational formats of a memory can be used at different times or in different contexts, and draw on different neural representations.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🙋‍♂️

Six years in the making, a postdoc project with @freemanjb.bsky.social is finally now out in print. Many thanks to Jon and @hennavartiainen.bsky.social and everyone who made this important work possible.

Shorthand version of the paper: telling people that "Themaglin is associated with an increased probability of Pneuben” makes people think that Themaglin causes Pneuben.

(or maybe it is just associated with an increased probability of that inference?)

So excited to share that my first first-author paper is out in
@commspsychol.nature.com
🎉

In a mini-meta analysis of seven studies, we looked at whether loneliness is related to altered expectations of one’s own and others' emotion transitions.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
(1/4)

I completely understand when someone is busy and has to turn down a review request. But please suggest others if possible. I am now handling a paper with seven review requests declined (so far), and not a single person has left suggestions for alternatives.

Members of the Social Cognition Lab (L to R): Neranjana Iyer, Vicky Wang, Benedek Kurdi, Joyan Cyrus, Shaoming Wang, and Siyu He

@psychillinois.bsky.social Social Cognition Lab, fall 2025

Research Coordinator, Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab in Graduate School of Education, Stanford, California, United States The Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) seeks a full-time Research Coordinator (acting lab manager) to help launch and coordinate the Minds,.....

I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share:
phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

No Evidence of Experimenter Demand Effects in Three Online Psychology Experiments: https://osf.io/g6xhf

Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Image of labubu doll labeled labubu next to image of spiky labubu doll labeled lakiki

::slowly stands while clapping::

🚨Introducing the SANS Fellows Program 🚨

We’re excited to honor members whose scholarship, mentorship, & service have shaped social & affective neuroscience!

Nominate someone—or yourself—to be a SANS Fellow!

Details: socialaffectiveneuro.org/sans-fellows...

About PsyArXiv – PsyArXiv Blog What is PsyArXiv? PsyArXiv (psychology archive) is an open preprint archive designed to facilitate rapid dissemination of psychological research. PsyArXiv is a creation of the Society for the…

PsyArXiv's amazing team of 100+ moderators has now approved all preprints that meet the requirements outlined in the updated PsyArXiv policies (is.gd/paxpolicy). Thank you to everyone who volunteered, this was a true community effort! #PsychSciSky

Mark Chen | Department of Psychology

My website is official 🙌 Excited to share that I am interested in reviewing applications for Harvard’s Clinical Science PhD program this fall as I look for the first student to join my lab! I appreciate it if you can share with your network :)
psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mark-...

If you have submitted a preprint to PsyArXiv in the last year or so and it *isn't* currently accessible, there's a good chance it's due to the document listing authors whom you haven't entered in the metadata.

Job alert: I'm hiring a postdoc for my lab at CU Boulder starting Fall 2026!

We study person perception, stereotyping & prejudice, and intervention science using behavioral & neuroimaging methods.

Link: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

Review starts Nov 1 and continues until filled.