Holly Sullivan-Toole
hollysully.bsky.social
Holly Sullivan-Toole
@hollysully.bsky.social
Dev Affective Neuro, Reward, Reinforcement Learning, Anhedonia, Dopaminergic Circuitry, Brain Iron
she/her
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
Just accepted at Nature Mental Health:

Crises and Opportunities for Psychological Science under Fascism

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/nz42x_v3

1/9
November 7, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
In the olden dayes we would know by now the relative force impact of a fully laden subway sandwich fired at point blank range by an inebriated individual who hasn’t thrown anything in 15 years. Academic tweetersky is a pale shadow. 🙁
November 5, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
US citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents children would be coming to get bus, lawyers say
U.S. citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents about children gathering at bus stop, lawyers say
Lawyers for Carlos Jimenez said he was in fear after an agent threatened him with chemical spray, then pointed a gun at him.
www.latimes.com
November 2, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
October 12, 2025 at 9:43 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America
October 4, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
Thank you so much to all of my co-authors on this paper; I certainly would not have received this award without all of the brilliant support I have gotten!
September 13, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Awesome work on dense sampling of reward response from @mattmattoni.bsky.social!!! with a great thread detailing findings!!
🚨🚨New precision imaging study and open dataset 🚨🚨 Featuring almost 200 functional runs acquired in 3-4d intervals and behavioral manipulations focused on intraindividual study of the reward response - The Night Owls Scan Club (NOSC) With @dvsmith.bsky.social and @olinotom.bsky.social!
September 29, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
In which a top US Border Patrol official, incredibly, tells my tall and Anglo colleague @chipmitchell1.bsky.social that he's not the type they're looking for as they go about downtown Chicago arresting people based on "how they look"

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...
Feds in military gear flood downtown Chicago; top border official says arrests based on 'how they look'
The immigration agents were spotted making arrests in downtown Chicago and River North neighborhood early Sunday.
chicago.suntimes.com
September 28, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
somehow I missed this!

Dopamine represents a domain-general teaching signal:

www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Striatal dopamine signals errors in prediction across different informational domains
Dopamine reflects prediction errors not only about reward but also about valueless stimuli, challenging many current theories.
www.science.org
September 16, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Corn bread in a waffle iron is next level!!!
September 26, 2025 at 12:00 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
August 28, 2025 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
Do late adolescents and emerging adults who live in a communities with higher violent crime rates exhibit altered reward-related neural activation? This question was recently investigated in a sample of 101 adolescents.

Read more in BSAM, free for the week!
#healthpsych #psychscicky
Residence in Communities With Higher Violent Crimes... : Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine
dequately understood. Furthermore, most of the adversity literature examines individual-level exposure (eg, crime victimization), whereas efforts to consider neighborhood-level factors (eg, neighborho...
journals.lww.com
August 20, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
✨ New paper ✨ in JAMA Pediatrics! We discuss how understanding the timing ⏰ of stressful events relative to neurodevelopment can help us better identify risk factors (looking backward) and predict future psychopathology (looking forward) at the individual level
#neuroskyence #devpsych #PsychSciSky
August 19, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
Underrepresented minority faculty in the USA face a double standard in promotion and tenure decisions
August 16, 2025 at 12:54 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf

TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .
Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model
Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...
rdcu.be
August 13, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
I will be interviewing for a clinical psychology PhD student in the Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry Lab this interview cycle.

Please see our website for more info about what we do + share with applicants you think might be a good fit.

share.google/uJRyS3NY9Kdo...
Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry Lab – University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology
share.google
August 7, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Matthew Mattoni, Thomas M. Olino, et al:

Functional connectivity heterogeneity and consequences for clinical and cognitive prediction: Stage 2 registered report

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
August 13, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
We wrote a piece for @naturemedicine.bsky.social 🧠

Menstrual cycle irregularities can be both cause and consequence of wide-ranging health issues.
Embracing this complexity could reveal novel brain–body interactions and advance neuroscience.

Check out our commentary www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Why menstrual cycle irregularities belong in brain research - Nature Medicine
The menstrual cycle requires tight orchestration between the brain and body, and irregularities can be both the cause and the consequence of wide-ranging health issues. Embracing this complexity, inst...
www.nature.com
August 13, 2025 at 9:27 AM
Read this whole thread 👇
I've been thinking a lot about the preprint in terms of my own career. I grew up academically in computational labs. My papers were abstract early on and they only got more abstract as I progressed. The model was: find a new exciting mathematical tool. Apply it to brain imaging data. Write it up. 1/
I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
August 13, 2025 at 3:11 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
What an amazing demonstration of why Precision Functional Mapping matters 🧠It’s been an honor to support the team in this huge endeavor!
I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
August 10, 2025 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
When nothing worked, this did. Precision functional mapping is here for treatment-resistant depression. This is what hope looks like. 💡
I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
August 11, 2025 at 12:19 AM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
August 10, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by Holly Sullivan-Toole
Personalized Adaptive Cortical Electro-stimulation (PACE) in Treatment-Resistant Depression

Punchline: PERSONALIZED network neuroscience works.

*Easily* the most important paper I’ve been part of.

Read the manuscript for details. Watch the movies for *amazing* testimonial.

1/2
August 10, 2025 at 5:25 PM