Claudia Massaccesi

Home - ESCAN 2026 ESCAN 2026 is the 9th ESCAN Conference, the biennial meeting of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

The ESCAN 2026 website is now live! → escan2026.eu

Join us in Rome, 3–6 June 2026, for the next European meeting in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

Find the registration info, venue details, and updates all in one place.

More news soon.
#ESCAN2026 #Neuroscience #Rome2026

Positive affective contagion in bumble bees Affective contagion, a core component of empathy, has been widely characterized in social vertebrates but its existence in any invertebrate is unknown. Using a cognitive bias paradigm we demonstrate p...

Bee positive: A demonstrator’s positive attitude toward the potential for a reward is picked up by an observer in 🐝 #neuroskyence
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks ACNP! Excited to (virtually) attend my first ACNP meeting 🤩

🚨 PhD/Postdoc alert 👇

If you are interested in doing a PhD/Postdoc in computational psychiatry (starting Sept 2026), do get in touch by October 4th at ondrej.zika@pm.me :)

Any inquiries are welcome. To apply, please attach your CV, half page motivation and half page research statements.

New paper out in NYAS!
nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
We show that protecting others' from pain promotes effortful prosocial behavior 💪🧑‍🤝‍🧑🤝
w/ @clauslamm.bsky.social @silanilab.bsky.social @lei-zhang.bsky.social
(thread below)

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516) | University of Oslo Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (286516), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Please RT
2 new positions in the lab as postdoc & PhD!

Interested in stress, pain, or reward? This project has it all!

We are a friendly but ambitious group. Oslo is a capital city on the fjord & bordered by forest, great urban & outdoors opportunities: 💃 ⛷️ 🚣 🎭 🎶

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

✨ Exciting news for our upcoming S4SN Lisbon meeting! ✨

Join us from September 23-26 for a dynamic program filled with inspiring talks, poster presentations, and networking opportunities. Get ready to connect, learn, and share ideas in the beautiful city of Lisbon!

The program is out 😍

Major news!
Exhaustive metaanalysis (N=2706) finding that endogenous opioids play a MINOR role in human pain regulation:
Consistent with 0.3 on 11-point VAS

By @isabellmeier.bsky.social @martintrostheim.bsky.social @marieeikemo.bsky.social @loseth.bsky.social et al

Thread 👇
osf.io/preprints/os...

I am still 100% in

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

The efficacy of elevating anandamide via inhibition of fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) combined with internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorde... Neuropsychopharmacology - The efficacy of elevating anandamide via inhibition of fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) combined with internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy in the treatment of...

Its a long weekend here in Canada, which seems appropriate to mourn our recent @npp-journal.bsky.social paper, in which we find that FAAH inhibition does NOT improve symptoms in PTSD🙁

A heroic effort w/ @cannabrain.bsky.social @connorhaggarty.bsky.social @ryanntansey.bsky.social & many more 🧵⬇️

Only 1 week left to apply for our open PhD position! 🧠

‼️ Deadline: May 18th

still a couple of days left to apply!

Laborleiter*in (m/w/d) Psychophysiologie und Verha... In der Fakultät für Psychologie und Sportwissenschaft ist zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt die Stelle der*des Laborleiter*in (TV-L E12 bzw. E13) im B...

⚠️Permanent position (E13) as lab manager (psychophysiology, experimental behavioral neuroscience) at University of Bielefeld. Earliest starting date is in July but later is absolutely possible. Please share widely uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/427...

Amazing opportunity to join the fantastic @scanunit.bsky.social and do cool research on prosocial behavior 🤝🧠
Apply or share widely!

3-year postdoc position (100% fte, TVL-E13) in human fMRI and psychopharmacology at the Institute of Experimental Psychology, Comparative Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. Applications are invited for a 3-year postdoc position in the Comparative Psychology research group

Affective and Social Predictors of Food Consumption During the COVID-19 Lockdown COVID-19 lockdowns were linked to a surge in unhealthy food–related behaviors, potentially as an attempt to cope with disrupted social homeostasis. Here, we tested bidirectional associations between m...

Out in Biological Psychiatry
"Affective and Social Predictors of Food Consumption During the COVID-19 Lockdown"
www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

Autistic traits relate to reduced reward sensitivity in learning from point-light displays (PLDs) | Royal Society Open Science A number of studies have linked autistic traits to difficulties in learning from social (versus non-social) stimuli. However, these stimuli are often difficult to match on low-level visual properties,...

🎉New paper out in Royal Society Open Science!🎉

Our lab member Raimund Buehler has just published his second ever, first-author paper!

📄 Read it here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
#AutismResearch #Neuroscience

🌍 We are launching a new #ManyLabs!!! Join the Heat & Cognition project! We're studying how extreme heat affects human thinking, social behavior & well-being — globally.
Contribute & co-author:
🔗 Info: heatandmind.wordpress.com
📋 Sign up: www.soscisurvey.de/HeatandCogni...
#EnvironmentalPsychology

Day-to-day fluctuations in motivation drive effort-based decision-making | PNAS Internal states like motivation fluctuate substantially over time. However, studies of the neurocomputational mechanims of motivated behavior have ...

A little bby from my PhD is published!

we did a complex study to answer a simple Q:
do day-to-day feelings impact choices?

A: Yes. When feeling motivated (independent of other stable or unstable feelings) choices changed because rewards seemed greater.

open access link:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

As the world grows scarier, let's talk about social connection!

We review its role in addiction & how it's influenced by opioids, now out in Biological Psychiatry (special issue on social homeostasis)

It's @loseth.bsky.social's brainchild & covers A LOT🧠

doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

#neuroscience

Overall, our results challenge the notion that individuals exhibit prosocial apathy when effort is required to help others and suggest that the type of incentive (avoiding harm vs. increasing wealth) is a key factor in shaping effortful prosocial behavior.

Last, using computational modelling, we show little credible evidence that discounting of pain reduction by effort differs between self and other

Participants also exerted a similar amount effort to reduce their and the other's pain, indicating that this prosocial motivation to protect others’ form harm extends beyond decision-making to action invigoration

We showed that when pain reduction is the outcome of the prosocial act individuals are similarly willing to mobilize effort to help themselves and a stranger

Prior research suggested that when effort is required to help, individuals become prosocially apathetic. Here we adapted a well-validated prosocial effort task (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28819649/) and we examined if this is the case also for non-monetary rewards, i.e. reducing other’s pain

New preprint from my postdoc work @scanunit.bsky.social
osf.io/preprints/ps...
“Avoiding pain to others motivates effortful prosocial behavior reducing prosocial apathy”
w/ @clauslamm.bsky.social @lei-zhang.bsky.social @silanilab.bsky.social

Participants also exerted a similar amount effort to reduce their and the other's pain, indicating that this prosocial motivation to protect others’ form harm extends beyond decision-making to action invigoration.

We showed that when pain reduction is the outcome of the prosocial act individuals are similarly willing to mobilize effort to help themselves and a stranger.

Prior research suggested that when effort is required to help, individuals become prosocially apathetic. We adapted a well-validated prosocial effort task (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28819649/) and examined if this is the case also for non-monetary rewards, that is reducing other’s pain.