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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Aug 6

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-...

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Jul 1

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

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...

rdcu.be

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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · Jun 3

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...

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

Totally agree. So much information.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

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

arxiv.org

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

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?

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Apr 1

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

arxiv.org

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 28

wow! Thanks for sharing!!

Deborah Shulman @debshulman.bsky.social · Mar 28

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/

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 24

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 24

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 24

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 24

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 24

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Mar 24

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...

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Michelle Greene @mgreenephd.bsky.social · Mar 21

🚨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?...

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.

www.higheredjobs.com

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Feb 6

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...

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...

www.nature.com

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Jan 20

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/...

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...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Jan 10

Very cool paper on using ML to predict habit formation.

Joe Simons @joesimons.bsky.social · Jan 8

I'm a couple of years late to the party on this one, but a very interesting article on using digital behaviour data to investigate habit formation.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#SocialPsych #Psych #PsychSky #ComputationalSocialScience #CSS

Menlo Security

safe.menlosecurity.com

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Jan 9

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?

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Joe Simons @joesimons.bsky.social · Jan 8

I'm a couple of years late to the party on this one, but a very interesting article on using digital behaviour data to investigate habit formation.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#SocialPsych #Psych #PsychSky #ComputationalSocialScience #CSS

Menlo Security

safe.menlosecurity.com

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Jan 5

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...

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…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Dec 18

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

federicozimmerman.bsky.social @federicozimmerman.bsky.social · Dec 18

🚨 Call for Collaborators 🚨 Join our multi-country study on social preferences for political extremes funded by @templetonfdn.bsky.social 🌍 We’re examining why people prefer extreme ingroups across multiple countries 🧠 Contribute to our project on political polarization! Details below👇

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federicozimmerman.bsky.social @federicozimmerman.bsky.social · Dec 18

🚨 Call for Collaborators 🚨 Join our multi-country study on social preferences for political extremes funded by @templetonfdn.bsky.social 🌍 We’re examining why people prefer extreme ingroups across multiple countries 🧠 Contribute to our project on political polarization! Details below👇

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Dec 12

If you are a 4 year old that loves salad.

Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Dec 12

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.

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Amit Goldenberg @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social · Dec 5

oh wow. very interesting.

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