Very excited to share that my first paper, with Peter Mende-Siedlecki and @leorhackel.bsky.social, is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com! ☺️

Can getting more rewards make you feel more skilled, even if your performance doesn't change?

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Excited to be featured on #TheAcademicMinute during @dornsife.usc.edu Scholars Week!

I discuss our research on how our brains learns from social rejection. Check it out if you’ve got a minute👇

bit.ly/BBaburAM

New paper out in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology! 🎉

How do we figure out who will accept or reject us in a new group?

We show that people generalize relational value across friendship ties—forming a network gradient of approach & avoidance.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lq3x51f8w...

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)

🥳Excited to share that our new paper is live at Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social! We show that Pavlovian learning can grow empathy for another person. 🧵👇

Rejection can be emotionally painful, but it can also teach us something. A social psychology researcher shows how rejection can serve as a learning signal – shaping how people navigate relationships and decide whom to attempt to connect with in the future.

I wrote about our new research on how the brain learns from social rejection — and why that matters for connection

👉 theconversation.com/your-brain-l...

That’s a wrap on #SANS2025! Had a great time presenting my work on how our brains learn from rejection & how loneliness relates to patterns in our daily language

A secondary but neat finding in our new work: We find neural evidence for rewards biasing social perception.

We’ve previously found that rewards lead people to see others in a more positive light. We’ve argued this reflects a kind of affect-as-information…

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

🫂 Updating our beliefs about what our interaction partners are feeling towards us and choosing partners who accept us can help us interact with partners who are likely to reciprocate care and avoid ones that are unlikely to, guiding adaptive social choice

💡These findings offer an alternative account to interpreting activity in the social rejection network, beyond social rejection being painful or surprising. We show that experiences of rejection can also serve as learning opportunities, shaping future social decisions

🔍 Next, we asked whether the social rejection network (dACC, vACC, AI) encoded an internal model of relational value. We found that partners who elicited more similar voxel patterns were rated more similarly by the participants ("how much do you think this person likes you?")

🧠 We also found that these processes are distinctly represented in the brain
-Updating beliefs about how others value us, through good or bad ranks, tracked activity in the “social rejection network”(dACC, vACC, AI)
-Learning from rewarding outcomes tracked activity in VS

🧩 Using a Bayesian cognitive model, we found that people tracked relational value and rewarding outcomes when choosing partners

🤝 Participants tried to match with others for a trust game and got feedback on:
1. Relational value (partner's ranking of them)
2. Reward value (successful match or not)

This allowed us to separate learning how others feel toward us from tracking positive social outcomes

🤔 Social rejection hurts, but it can also be informative. We modeled how people choose partners after experiences of social rejection and acceptance & uncovered two distinct learning mechanisms shaping social affiliation using computational neuroimaging

🥳 Exciting news! My first paper is out now in @pnas.org

This work was a great collaboration between @ycleong.bsky.social , Chelsey Pan, & @leorhackel.bsky.social

We examined how the brain learns from experiences of social acceptance and rejection🧵👇

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