Neuroscientist, psychologist, and author of "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain" (Amazon "Best Books") and "How Emotions are Made"
2 subscribers
May 15, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Kindness is good for your brain & body — and the brains & bodies of those around you. I'll share a list of the best novels I've read in which kindness plays a major role. They're complex, sometimes funny, and engaging stories that kept me thinking and left me optimistic. 1/7 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson.
An unlikely friendship between a retired British major and a Pakistani shopkeeper blossoms into something more. My husband, who generally doesn't read love stories, also adored this book. 2/7 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
May 5, 2023 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
@Mark_Solms First, some context. In the last seconds of our video chat (01:35:09) Mark remarked, "Huge problems with that meta-analysis, huge problems, but look, we're out of time." To justify his concern, he has linked to a blog post.
Here's the meta-analysis: doi.org/10.1017/S01405… 1/19
@Mark_Solms Mark, I'm genuinely puzzled if your best evidence of "huge problems in the meta-analysis" is this blog post. It's not a peer-reviewed paper. The author freely admits she's not an expert in meta-analysis or even statistics. Her main arguments are informal thought experiments. 2/19
Feb 11, 2023 • 11 tweets • 7 min read
@Nancy_Kanwisher We were really pleased to see our paper ignite such vigorous discussion. Here’s a follow up thread to make a few points of clarification, since our core claims were sometimes lost in translation.
@Nancy_Kanwisher 1) It’s worth posting some of the original assumptions in the paper. The language might seem unintuitive (e.g., “neural ensemble”, “mental event”) but was chosen carefully to avoid straw man arguments. The fact that there was polarized response suggests we were successful.
Aug 30, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Our lab's new paper in @NatureComms examines how famous actors portray emotion with their faces. The findings have important implications for so-called "Emotion AI" systems. I'll summarize our novel method and findings. @AffectiveSciLab 1/13 news.northeastern.edu/2021/08/20/you…
Summary: Famous actors who portray emotion convincingly don't conform to stereotypes (e.g. scowling for anger, pouting for sadness). Rather, variety is the norm. Also, viewers didn't reliably identify the portrayed emotion from the actor's face alone, without context. 2/13
