Amit Goldenberg
amit-goldenberg.bsky.social
Amit Goldenberg
@amit-goldenberg.bsky.social
I study emotions, collectives, technology and their interaction. Harvard Business School | Harvard Psych (affiliated) | D3
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
August 6, 2025 at 12:33 PM
🔖 NEW PAPER ALERT 🔖 Out in PNAS – we used equation discovery algorithms to improve models of human reinforcement learning.

Led by the wonderful Kyle Lafollette with an amazing team Yanni Yuval @roeyschurr.bsky.social and @d-melnikoff.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
August 1, 2025 at 7:20 AM
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
July 1, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
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...
June 3, 2025 at 5:03 PM
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
April 1, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
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/
March 28, 2025 at 4:33 PM
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...
March 24, 2025 at 1:29 AM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
🚨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
March 21, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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
February 6, 2025 at 3:10 PM
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
January 20, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Very cool paper on using ML to predict habit formation.
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
January 10, 2025 at 2:13 PM
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?
January 9, 2025 at 4:00 AM
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
January 5, 2025 at 12:34 PM
Come join our multi-country study on social preferences for political extremes!!
🚨 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👇
December 18, 2024 at 11:27 PM
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.
December 12, 2024 at 7:50 PM
When we present our work on attraction to extremity, people often ask whether this is a new phenomenon. We found this great paper from 1968 showing that people assign more sincerity, competence, trustworthiness, and likability to extremes on their own side.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
December 5, 2024 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
New paper! Led by Elena Kozakevitch-Arbel, with Simone Shamay-Tsoory, we used multi-dimensional reinforcement learning approach to examine whether people are sensitive to different dimensions of social scenarios during empathic interactions www.nature.com/articles/s44... 🧵
Adaptive empathic response selection is sensitive to multiple dimensions of social interaction - Communications Psychology
When providing emotional support and deciding on an empathic reaction, responders were sensitive to changes in the person requiring empathy, the emotional state of that person, and the cause of their ...
www.nature.com
November 26, 2024 at 9:59 PM
First paper from our lab on LLMs and emotional support (led by @joannazli): Skill but not effort drive GPT overperformance over humans in cognitive reframing of negative scenarios.

Short thread of the results 1/7
 
osf.io/preprints/ps...

#Psychology #AcademicSky #SocialPsyc
OSF
osf.io
April 21, 2024 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
“Should I be a caring man or a dominant man?”

Postdoc at the University of Geneva with Vincenzo Iacoviello and Clara Kulich

#SocialPsyc #Psychology #PhDSky #PsychJobs
Post-doc position in Social Psychology, University of Geneva
Deadline: 30 April, 2024 • At the University of Geneva, we have an open position for a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. The successful candidate is expected to conduct their research within the social ...
www.easp.eu
April 12, 2024 at 7:06 AM
🚨new paper🚨Stereotypically, women are seen as more emotional than men. How is this translated into judgments of emotionality? In a paper by Megan Gorges we show that stereotypes turn into judgements when people aggregate multiple emotional expressions. #psychsciski #socialpsyc
osf.io/preprints/os...
February 15, 2024 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
New work in press at PSPB! With Aashna Poddar, Adina Williams, and Andrei Cimpian

We found intersectional male-centric and White-centric biases based on a list of 4,000+ first names in large-scale (English) text using word embeddings

Results overview ⬇️

osf.io/preprints/os...
January 29, 2024 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
Our paper explains how social identity shapes information processing and contributes to the belief and spread of #misinformation

We argue that understanding the interplay between social identity and accuracy is crucial in addressing misinformation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
January 30, 2024 at 7:14 PM
Reposted by Amit Goldenberg
We are looking for a new colleague - please share 👇

Full #professorship in general #psychology at TU Dresden

It's a great psych department with fantastic resources and colleagues. Get in touch w/ questions
@dgps.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social @s4sn.bsky.social
tu-dresden.de/vacancy/11075
January 24, 2024 at 12:58 PM
New paper with Lameese Eldesouky and Kate Ellis on loneliness. Using EMA, we show that when people feel more lonely, they are less likely to share their emotions, compared to when they feel less lonely (within individual), revealing a vicious cycle. #PsychSciSky
authors.elsevier.com/c/1iUtFheKdy...
January 26, 2024 at 3:05 PM
Super excited to present the first empirical paper in a new line of work that focuses on the spread of psychological interventions. This one is about the spread of emotion regulation interventions to reduce negative emotions in intergroup conflicts. > osf.io/km6r4
January 25, 2024 at 2:48 PM