Computational Social Neuroscience Lab

We love listening to podcasts and several of us like being involved in them too. Here are some ones from members of the CSN Lab.

Rob was a recently guest on The Nature and Nurture Podcast, hosted by Adam Omary, a developmental social neuroscientist and PhD student at Harvard University. This wide ranging conversation covered broad topics from personality neuroscience to evolutionary theory to AI to consciousness.
On YouTube
On Spotify

Former CSN Lab Manager and current licensed Oregon psilocybin facilitator, Jack Kapustka, was a guest on the Psiloquium Podcast, discussing the science of psychedelics. It’s one of the most level-headed interview about this topic you can find anywhere.
On Spotify

And, of course, CSN Lab graduate student Taylor Guthrie has not only been a guest on a podcast but is a host of his own called The Social Brain. There, he and his co-host cover a broad range of topics in psychology and neuroscience in a very approachable style that is geared towards broader audiences. You can find all of the episodes of his podcast on his YouTube channel and on Spotify.
On YouTube
On Spotify

Amazing news from our superstar CSN Lab undergrad, Debbie Okeke! She was accepted into not one but two competitive summer research program at OHSU and will be working this summer at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) with Dr. Kathy Grant who studies primate models of addiction.

We are so excited for Debbie and all of her success; OHSU will be lucky to have her.

Congrats, Debbie!

Our beloved undergraduate RA, Clara Morrison, presented at their first conference their first conference! Clara has been working on fixing slice timing acquisition issues from one of our latest studies and got to talk about all of their efforts at the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) at Stanford this past weekend.

Psychology is often accused of having physics envy. Here in CSN Lab, we don’t worry about such silly things and just invite the physicists on board with us. 🙂

We’re all so stoked for you, Clara!

CSN Lab said goodbye to our beloved lab manager Jack Kapustka and celebrated the end of the 2022/2023 academic year in June. So much was accomplished this year by current and former lab members, from completing the first year of college, to graduate school acceptances, to advancement to PhD candidacy. Lots to be proud of, and cheers to all.

After a long COVID-induced drought, CSN Lab had our first presence at in-person conferences in several years! So reinvigorating to learn what is going on in the field and be able to share our work with everyone.

Moriah Stendel presented her poster “Distributed and Specific Brain Systems Underlying Interpersonal Perception and Self-Evaluation” at the Society of Affective Science meeting in Long Beach, CA.

Taylor Guthrie presented his poster “Dyadic Neural Representations of Personal Narratives” a the Social & Affective Neuroscience meeting in Santa Barbara, CA.

CSN Lab’s graduate student Taylor Guthrie has been selected by UO Department of Psychology a recipient of this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award! Taylor has always had a passion for teaching and he absolutely shines as an educator. Need proof? You can find a sample of his lectures on Cognitive Neuroscience and other high quality learning material on his popular YouTube channel.

Congrats to Taylor!

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) was kind enough to ask me a few casual questions about my career for their monthly Member Spotlight feature.

Check it out here:  https://spsp.org/member-spotlight/rob-chavez

There is so much interesting work going on in the lab these days! Here are our lab members’ posters for the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society 2021 meeting.

 

Self-Esteem Modulates Self/Other Neural Pattern Correspondence
During Interpersonal Perception
Moriah Stendel
(poster award winner)

 

Valence Modulates Self/Other Recapitulation Effect
During Interpersonal Perception
Faith Collins

 

Disentangling Neural Activation to Self and Others
Using Structural Connectivity
Youri Benadjaoud

 

 

Peer Perceptions of Neuroticism and their Influence on
Friendship and the Brain
Ryan Conaghan

I joined UC Berkeley graduate students Smriti Mehta and Paul Connor on their podcast More of a Comment than a Question to discuss the intersection of neuroscience and social psychology and about the variety of views one can have about the goals of that marriage.

You can find the interview wherever you get your podcasts or here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1207223/6712774

There are plenty of places to track trends in state-by-state COVID-19 data, but I find many of them to be a bit messy or bloated for just getting a quick snapshot of what’s going on with the information I care about. So, I wrote a no-frills web app that automatically pulls up-to-date data from covidtracking.com API and makes plots of the things I want to see. You can find this app here:

https://robchavez.shinyapps.io/shiny/

If you are interested in tinkering with the code or using it as a template for your own R Shiny app, you can find the code for it here:
https://github.com/robchavez/misc_scripts/blob/master/app.R