Hamilton Undergraduate Research Scholarship Awarded to Matt Hutnyan and Savannah Ostner!

This post is about half a year late—but better late than never! Congratulations to the SCN Lab's Matt Hutnyan and Savannah Ostner who were awarded Hamilton Undergraduate Research Scholarships for the 2020-2021 academic year! These awards are being used to examine data from our study, Thinking About People, which focuses on several different types of social cognitive processes.

SCN Lab and the MuSci lab at the University of Oregon receive award from the Grammy Museum Grant Program!

In collaboration with Dr. Zach Wallmark (PI; U. Oregon), Dr. Linh Nghiem (Co-PI; Australian National University), and Dr. Jing Cao (Co-PI; SMU), Dr. Tabak (Co-PI) and the SCN Lab were awarded funding from the Grammy Museum Grant Program to conduct: An fMRI investigation of empathic accuracy for people and music. The study will begin recruitment this Summer at the University of Oregon Center for Translational Neuroscience.

New Paper In Press from the SCN Lab!

Together with former SMU undergraduate Stejara Dinulescu, SCN Lab graduate students Talha Alvi and Cici Sunahara, as well as collaborators from SMU and UCLA, we recently published a paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science in which we conducted one of the largest studies ever examining the association between standardized assessments of self-referential processing and social cognitive ability (i.e., theory of mind and empathic accuracy). We found that self-referential processing was associated with both measures of social cognition, which provides additional behavioral support that filtering and understanding information through the self can assist in our ability to understand others.

Here is the in press reference:

Dinulescu, S., Alvi, T., Rosenfield, D., Sunahara, C. S., Lee, J., & Tabak, B. A. (in press). Self-referential processing predicts social cognitive ability. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620902281

New Paper In Press from Talha Alvi and the SCN Lab!

Talha Alvi and collaborators from SMU, Boston University, and UCLA recently published a paper in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in which they demonstrate negative associations between social anxiety symptoms and social cognitive ability. This paper included a sample of nearly 1500 people and may represent the largest examination of social anxiety and social cognition to date.

Here is the in press reference:

Alvi, T., Kouros, C. D., Lee, J., Fulford, D., & Tabak, B. A. (2020). Social anxiety is negatively associated with theory of mind and empathic accuracy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 129(1), 108–113. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000493