Media Neuroscience Lab

🎮 New on Channel 3 (ABC KEYT) this Wednesday at 6pm PST:
A new UCSB study finds that video game addiction in teens often stems from underlying mental health issues — not the games themselves. #gamingdisorder #mentalheath #videogames

📢 CCR needs a new Editor in Chief! 📢
@vanatteveldt.com is rotating out so we are inviting (self)nominations to lead our journal through its next phase. Deadline 15 January, see link for details: journal.computationalcommunication.org/announcement...

Thank you to everyone in the Communication & Social Cognition division who joined us for Alison Oliver's talk, “A Pupillometric Evaluation of Moral Judgments.” We really appreciated the great discussion! #nca2025 #commsky

🚨 #COMMSky Spotlight Alert! 🚨

@nibasaleem.bsky.social is featured in the November 2025 edition of the #ICA (@icahdq.bsky.social) Newsletter! 🌟

Check out the member spotlight at the 🔗 below. We’re proud to see our PI's research focus and mentorship aspirations highlighted on the global stage! 🌎

A presentation title slide with the heading “Character Profiles: Broadening Theoretical Conceptualizations of Character Schemas” in large red text. Below, in black text, it reads “Matthew Grizzard, Scarlet and Gray Associate Professor.” Two columns list collaborators: Lucy Brown, Rebecca Frazer (with a small University of Florida UF logo), Charles K. Monge (with a small Texas Tech University double-T logo), and Sebastian Lubert on the left; Violet Musser, Samantha Flanagan, and C. Joseph Francemone on the right. At the bottom left is The Ohio State University logo with the university name.

Excited to present our project “Character Profiles: Broadening Theoretical Conceptualizations of Character Schemas” at #NCA2025!

This work examines character and person perception processes of distinct character types (e.g., pirates, cowboys, mad scientists).

Thurs Nov 20 - 2:30PM - Maple 05

I am super excited to see the #CommSky community at NCA 2025!

Stay updated with an NCA feed here: bsky.app/profile/did:...

You can be featured by simply including these hashtags in your posts: #NCA25 #NCA2025

Video game addiction in teens likely stems from preexisting mental health issues A new study out of UCSB's Media Neuroscience Lab indicates that gaming disorder (AKA video game addiction) likely develops from a player's preexisting mental health conditions.

🎮 New study: Teen gaming addiction may stem more from pre-existing mental health issues (like anxiety & depression) than from video games themselves.

It is not just about the joystick, but it’s about what’s going on in the mind. 🧠
Read more: news.ucsb.edu/2025/022004/... #commsky #psychsci #gaming

Psychopathology and Gaming Disorder in Adolescents This cohort study uses data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to examine directional longitudinal associations between psychopathology and gaming disorder among adolescents.

Read the article here: ja.ma/4o9EM1N

“Why is my teen addicted to video games?”
Our new study in JAMA Network Open shows that psychopathology is a key driver--not an outcome of gaming disorder!
Depression, anxiety, ADHD, and social challenges may underlie gaming disorder.
Treat the root, not just the game. 🎮🧠
#commsky #psychsci #gaming

This study looked at behavioral data from the ABCD study dataset. A closer look at specific reward dynamics in video game content and at the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms will follow! Big kudos to Kylie Falcione (@kyliewoodman.bsky.social) for her heroic efforts in this project!

In this cohort study of 4289 adolescents, we found that higher baseline levels of psychopathology were significantly associated with an increased risk of developing gaming disorder later, but gaming disorder was not associated with worsening psychopathology.

Psychopathology and Gaming Disorder in Adolescents This cohort study uses data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to examine directional longitudinal associations between psychopathology and gaming disorder among adolescents.

Very excited to share our latest article on Psychopathology and Gaming Disorder in Adolescents published in JAMA Network Open (ja.ma/4o9EM1N).

Did you meet the media neuroscience lab at #ica25 ?
@b-wheeler.bsky.social
@musamalik.bsky.social
@kyliewoodman.bsky.social

Drop a like or comment who you met and we will give you a follow!

P.S. All three of these brilliant researchers are going on the job market this year!

🎉 Congratulations to former lab member Dr. Sungbin Youk on winning a Top Paper award at @icacsab.bsky.social!

His research used multifaceted analytic approaches to explore how brain activity can help us understand and predict donation behaviors in response to Singapore PSA videos #ica25

Doing or planning digital platform research? We want to hear from you. Take our 5–8 min survey to help shape tools, infrastructure & training for researchers.
🔗 tiny.cc/aio-survey #AIO2025survey

🎉 Congratulations to @fhopp.bsky.social on winning @icacsab.bsky.social’s Rising Star Award!

Dr. Hopp, PI of the Moral Computing Lab at ZPID and former MNL member, continues to shape the field through rigorous and high-quality science. We’re so proud!

ICYMI: 🏆 Congratulations to the winners of Saturday's #ICA25 posters! 🏆 Yoo Joo Lee (Washington State U) won the Top Poster award, and Brittany Wheeler (U of California, Santa Barbara) received the Top Student Poster award!

We hope you had the opportunity to swing by and see @b-wheeler.bsky.social 's TOP STUDENT POSTER!
If you didn't get to see it check out the poster below ⬇️⬇️

Congratulations @len-s.bsky.social ! 🎉

Swing by @b-wheeler.bsky.social poster session at 1:30 to snag one of our exclusive MNL 3D printed brain keychain. 🧠
She is also on the job market this year 👀👀
#ica25

Excited to present at #ICA25 Today!

🗓 1:30pm | Poster #70 | Centennial Foyer (Regency)

“Is Academic Online Bullying a Widespread Phenomenon? A Study of Scholarly Discourse on Twitter/X”

If you're attending, stop by to discuss our findings...and pick up a fun brain keychain while you're there! 🧠

One final presentation to go at #ICA25! @b-wheeler.bsky.social will be sharing our emerging research on online hate and bullying!

We’re always amazed at the impact you can make in just 3 minutes. Thank you to CSAB for hosting an incredible showcase of groundbreaking work. All the presenters inspired us. A special shoutout to @musamalik.bsky.social for his standout paper on global morality! #ica25

Huge thanks to everyone who joined @musamalik.bsky.social’s presentation this morning! 🌟 Grateful for such an engaged audience! #ica25

Truly, is there anything @musamalik.bsky.social can’t do?
If you haven’t had the chance to hear Musa share his research, you’re in for a treat. Catch him tomorrow at #ica25 , first at 9am in the Aspen Ballroom, then again at 12pm in the Mt. Blue Sky room.
(He is also on the job market this year 👀)

Jacob leading a GitHub breakout session

Kylie leading an fMRI analysis breakout session

We’re thrilled to see MNL represented at @hackingcommsci.bsky.social!
Huge thanks to @jacobtfisher.online and @kyliewoodman.bsky.social for organizing another fantastic hackathon and sharing valuable comm sci insights such as using GitHub and running fMRI analyses.
#hackica25 #ica25

We can't wait to kick off #ica25 in Denver!

What are your most recommended talks? #commsky

We will try to attend as many as we can!

These papers and tools are a concerted effort of an amazing group of people I (Rene) had the pleasure to work with. A special thank you to all co-authors and extra kudos to @musamalik.bsky.social who spearheaded our eMACD work, very well done! Now, onwards to some new ideas in this area, stay tuned!

The extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD): Development and applications of a crowd-sourced approach to extracting moral intuitions from text - Behavior Research Methods Moral intuitions are a central motivator in human behavior. Recent work highlights the importance of moral intuitions for understanding a wide range of issues ranging from online radicalization to vaccine hesitancy. Extracting and analyzing moral content in messages, narratives, and other forms of public discourse is a critical step toward understanding how the psychological influence of moral judgments unfolds at a global scale. Extant approaches for extracting moral content are limited in their ability to capture the intuitive nature of moral sensibilities, constraining their usefulness for understanding and predicting human moral behavior. Here we introduce the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD), a dictionary-based tool for extracting moral content from textual corpora. The eMFD, unlike previous methods, is constructed from text annotations generated by a large sample of human coders. We demonstrate that the eMFD outperforms existing approaches in a variety of domains. We anticipate that the eMFD will contribute to advance the study of moral intuitions and their influence on social, psychological, and communicative processes.

Our earlier companion paper with MFT as focus, the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD) can be found here: psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.3758/.... The score tools (eMFDscore and eMACscore) you can use for your own mining morality projects are available on Github (links are available in the papers).

Most previous moral mining research has been informed by Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). Here, we develop and evaluate an alternative moral mining tool based on the theory of Morality as Cooperation (MAC), using crowd-sourced annotations and MoNA! mona.mnl.ucsb.edu.