Rob Chavez

We don’t just lock on to our first impression of someone and call it a day. Instead, we regularly revise our appraisals as we learn more about them. But *how* do our brains make this process possible? Check out this fresh pre-print to see how we went about answering this question!

Yep..

Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Excited to share a recent review with @prof-nick-allen.bsky.social and @jenndsn.bsky.social: Multidimensional social cognitive profiles: Implications for adolescent internalizing psychopathology out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! Free access until Aug 28: authors.elsevier.com/a/…

My friend is a co-lead on this project (my wife is a collaborator). Let me tell you what it was about and why Battacharya’s decision simply amplifies the consequences of structural racism that the project was attempting to understand. A 🧵 1/12

A refreshingly sober view on important issues in mental health science that I think about a lot... I'm not as pessimistic/nihilistic as I come across sometimes, but I do worry deeply that we are often not meeting the challenges where they are.

Ed Yong used to do amazing science journalism at The Atlantic... Now we get this: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Dopamine, bruh..."

Three psychologists use QRPs on dubious projects, grossly underpay participants, make coercive and sexist remarks, have their grants revoked, lose their lab space, and wrestle with the possibility of having to work in the private sector... And that's all in just the first 15 minutes of Ghostbusters.

Now in press at Cortex! "False discovery rate correction promotes confounded neuroimaging designs" Paper 🔓: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am a neurodivergent neuroscientist. My bipolar brain brings struggle but it also helps me think off-the-map ideas. To help others who are similarly different, I co-founded the Neurodiversity Innovation Center for Excellence in Neuroscience (niceinneuro.org) with Leah Blankenship and Lila Kaye.

Jon haidt, steven pinker, and cialdini are three psych folks who appear to be attending peter thiels secret meeting

Person identity drives neural similarity more than action and valence during dynamic emotion perception https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.01.728854v1

I agree, but It's sad to me that people think we we do is "looking for __ in the brain." And the problem goes both ways. If you are interested in understanding brain, basing it on conceptually vague, poorly measured, or otherwise flawed ideas from psychology isn't helping make progress either.

Popularity of brain regions and networks in every available SANS (@sansmeeting.bsky.social ) program over the years. Now, animated! Looking forward to seeing everyone next week in La Jolla for #SANS2026.

New Perspective out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We consider why neuroimaging analyses struggles to predict adolescent mental health, discuss approaches for improving prediction, and provide open-source implementations and tutorials: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Popularity of brain regions and networks in every available SANS (@sansmeeting.bsky.social ) program over the years. Now, animated! Looking forward to seeing everyone next week in La Jolla for #SANS2026.

My new obsession is ggsegSchaefer for plotting stat maps of our preferred brain parcellation atlas. So easy to customize, manipulate, and make pretty (...even if my general aesthetic tastes remain questionable).

Fortunate to be a part of this! Moriah had an incredible dissertation and I was lucky to be on her dissertation committee.

Also, after 19 years into my career, this is my very first empirical publication that is purely behavioral and has zero neuroscience... I'm officially a real psychologist!

Yup..

At a different point in my life, this would have been shocking and disappointing. The only shocking part now is how numb I feel to this kind of news, and the disappointment is with myself for feeling that way. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/u...

I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...

SPSP is crazy. So many presentations on climate change and environment, yet folks aren’t allowed to take the leftover lunches without tickets because all leftover lunches “must” be thrown away 🤔 Anyways is you see me, say hi! #SPSP2026

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

Interaction effects have all kinds of problems that people have been overlooking for years. Maybe we should finally try to publish this damn preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today, the RAs in my lab told me I have "girl dad energy." I've got some practice...

My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below

We're getting excited... just putting the finishing touches to **PsychoPy Studio** This is a complete rewrite of the PsychoPy Builder/Coder app, now packaged in Electron. Faster load, modernised UI, web-ready, independent of the Python interpreter 🎉 🚀 blog.psychopy.org/general%20bl...

1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme... haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...

Five classes I took in college: - Styles of Scientific Argument - Analysis of Variance - Probability & Statistics for Engineers - Intelligence & Creativity - Advanced Data Analysis II That statistics minor is really pulling its weight... but man, most of my classes sounded so generic.

Updating my CV now and realizing that in my 19 years in science, I have only ever given one conference symposium talk in my entire career (not counting a grad student blitz and a preconference). ..... and ,of all places, it was at SESP 🤨 🤷

Oliver Sacks has always been one of my favorite writers, & I've tried to emulate him for a long time. However, anyone who has spent any real effort trying to translate their real-world experience into a compelling narrative knows how unstructured, anticlimactic, and uninteresting reality really is.

"ai is inevitable" is a high accuracy indicator of "I am a sucker"

Code red.... Does anyone know a not-by-hand hack to grade 493 scantrons without a scantron machine? ⚰️

But for real, I think my wife has legit won this game... ⚰️

ManuscriptCentral Wrapped! In 2025, you submitted 5 papers AND all got rejected 🎉 You spent 💯 minutes in total trying to submit your papers! You reviewed for 10 journals that would never publish your papers ❤️