Thrilled to announce I'm joining the Winston National Center and @UNCPsych as a Research Assistant Professor this summer! My research program will focus on how we can use neuroimaging methods to understand the complex feelings brought on by media and tech

RT @darbysaxbe: Vance is likely unaware that in 2016, NIH added rigor & reproducibility criteria to grant review. Rather than reward effort….

Even if the genetically modified grey wolves resembling dire wolves were true instances of de-extinction (they are not), why are they calling it the first de-extinction? #pyreneanibexerasure.

Loved being a part of this amazing article on how affective neuroscientists are grappling with conceptualizing mixed emotions!.

Excited for #SAS2025! Come say hi, or lead me to some good food trucks

RT @John_Attridge: Normalise accepting my article without revision.

Tremendous thanks to @darbysaxbe @Jonas_Kaplan and @damasiousc for all their support and encouragement throughout my years at USC, and Marc Potenza for initially sparking my interests in the links between brain development and media-use/ gaming.

RT @TIME: "Just as we now glance at nutrition labels without a second thought, we could one day check content labels before diving into a n….

RT @chris_a_kelly: Excited to share our new article w/@affectivebrain in @NatureHumBehav. Key finding: consuming more negative content on….

And why is it always high school math or English, yet I also somehow already have a PhD, but it’s gonna be taken away because I forgot I was supposed to do one last semester of high school work?.

RT @YWaizman: 🚨New paper! "Behavioral & Neural Evidence for Difficulty Recognizing Masked Emotional Faces." Thanks to my incredible co-auth….

Yesterday I got to go on KCBS to talk about the importance of studying mixed emotions, and their relevance to technology and socioemotional development! (And yes, I was both excited and nervous at the beginning).

RT @ConversationUS: Mixed emotions – neuroscience is exploring how your brain lets you experience two opposite feelings at once https://t.c….

RT @usnews: New in U.S. News Opinion by Anthony Gianni Vaccaro: Our study revealed something new about how complex feelings are formed in t….

Considering mixed emotions in psychology and neuroscience will vastly improve the applicability of our research to people's lives! Excited to have this piece out with @USNewsOpinion and @ConversationUS .

Do we lose a bit of experimental control in applying these changes? Of course. But if we truly aim to describe affect, and create a science that is applicable to the messiness of the real-world, we have to! Affect is messy, and at times, weird. Our studies need to reflect that.

I argue that we can alter our measures to err on the side of less fixed-choice options, and design studies that emphasize intrasubject variability, to assure that we are collecting as detailed reports as possible, and creating datasets where we can study emotional complexity.

In turn, we also tend to not even study these types of feelings. Yet these states that do not as easily fit into constructionist or discrete emotion theories are exactly what we should be studying to move theory forward, as they force these theories to evolve to fit new data!.

The measurement standards we tend to use are not designed to capture mixed feelings, uncertainty about feelings, blends, emotional shifts,"feeling nothing", and other of states that people report in daily life but that do not fit neatly into valence-arousal or categorical models.

My first solo-authored journal article! I argue that to move affective science forward, this requires more than solely moving data collection to the real-world: we need to measure 'messier' aspects of affect that our measures and theory normally leave out.