June 2023 - New paper! Led by Rista Plate, with Ham Huang, "When uncertainty in social contexts increases exploration and decreases obtained rewards" is now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and available here.
May 2023 - New paper! Led by Lori Flanagan-Cato, with Christina Steele and Rista Plate, "Effects of a service-learning course on mood and intergroup anxiety" is now published in the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education and available here.
May 2023 - New paper! Led by Ph.D. Candidate Ana Defendini, "Dissociating neural sensitivity to target identity and mental state content type during inferences about other minds" is now published in Social Neuroscience and available here.
January 2023 - New paper! Led by Alice Xia and Sarah Solomon, and in collaboration with Sharon Thompson-Schill, "Constructing complex social categories under uncertainty" is now published online ahead of print at Cognition and available here.
September 2022 - New paper! Led by Ph.D. Candidate Dilara Berkay, "A role for uncertainty in the neural distinction between social and nonsocial thought" is now published online ahead of print at Perspectives on Psychological Science and available here.
July 2022 - New paper! Led by postdoc Rista Plate and with Ham Huang, "Exploration is higher in social contexts at the cost of rewards" is now published in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society and available here.
July 2022 - The lab welcomes Jaime Castrellon, Ph.D.! Jaime joins the Jenkins Lab and the Kable Lab as an NIH K00 postdoctoral fellow after completing his Ph.D. at Duke University.
May 2022 - New paper! Led by postdoc Kenji Kobayashi, "Neural representations of others' traits predict social decisions" is now published in PNAS and available here.
May 2022 - Dilara Berkay presents at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Meeting on responses to uncertainty in brain regions associated with mentalizing.
May 2022 - Christina Steele earns the Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Psychological Science in recognition of her poster on how repeated intergroup contact promotes more positive perceptions of what others think of us.
April 2022 - Rista Plate presents at the Society for Affective Science Meeting on imagination-induced empathy and decisions on behalf of oneself and others.
February 2022 - Dilara Berkay presents at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference on domain-general responses to uncertainty in a key brain region of the mentalizing network.
January 2022 - New paper! Led by postdoc Rista Plate, "Anticipating greater impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social life is associated with reduced adherence to disease-mitigating guidelines" is now published and available here.
September 2021 - Ham Huang presents at the virtual Computational Cognition Workshop meeting on how aspects of the social context shape value representations during learning.
May 2021 - Christina Steele presents at the virtual meeting of Association for Psychological Science on how remote intergroup contact reduces outgroup bias.
April 2021 - Ana Defendini presents at the virtual meeting of Social and Affective Neuroscience Society her fMRI meta-analysis dissociating neural sensitivity to target identity and mental state content.
April 2021 - Kenji Kobayashi presents at the virtual meeting of Social and Affective Neuroscience Society on neural representations of others' traits during social decision-making.
March 2021 - Anna Jenkins receives the F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Research Grant. This award is given every two years by the American Psychological Foundation to recognize and support the efforts of one early career psychological scientist whose research advances understanding of the mind from both a behavioral and a neural perspective.
February 2021 - Ana Defendini presents at the virtual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on her meta-analytic findings dissociating neural sensitivity to target identity and mental state content type during mentalizing.
February 2021 - Kenji Kobayashi presents at the virtual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on how neural representations of others' traits during social decision-making in some, but not all, brain regions can be used to predict behavior.
February 2021 - Christina Steele presents at the virtual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on the impact of repeated intergroup contact in a naturalistic setting on intergroup bias.
February 2021 - Rista Plate presents at the virtual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on how people's expectations about the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to their willingness to curtail behaviors that spread disease.
July 2020 - Alice Xia presents at the virtual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society on how people construct social concepts under uncertainty.
February 2020 - Ekaterina Goncharova presents at the virtual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on the relationship between spontaneous imagination of the future and decisions on behalf of others.
January 2020 - The lab welcomes Rista Plate, Ph.D.! Rista joins the lab as a MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellow after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
December 2019 - Christina Steele is awarded a Marshall Scholarship. Christina has been named the 16th Marshall Scholar in Penn's history. Congratulations to Christina on this tremendous and well-deserved accomplishment! More info. here.
December 2019 - New book chapter: "Neural and behavioral insights into online trust and uncertainty", with Uma Karmarkar, will appear in the forthcoming book, Organizational Neuroethics; you can read the abstract here.
November 2019 - Christina Steele receives an Alumni Society Research Grant to support her ongoing work in the Jenkins Lab. Congrats, Christina!
October 2019 - New paper! "Empathy affects tradeoffs between life's quality and duration" is in press at PLoS ONE and available here.
September 2019 - Ekaterina Goncharova's poster is accepted for presentation at the 2020 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Join Ekaterina at the SPSP conference in New Orleans on February 28th, 2020, to hear about her work with Anna Jenkins investigating spontaneous imagination in decision-making on behalf of others.
September 2019 - The lab welcomes Vaida Rimeikyte, Ph.D. Vaida joins the lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow after completing her Ph.D. at Cornell University.
August 2019 - NSF grant awarded! We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting our research on the cognitive and neural mechanisms that produce decisions in social contexts.
July 2019 - Alice Xia's poster is accepted for presentation at the 2019 meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Join Alice in Montréal on November 15th to hear about her work with Sarah Solomon, Sharon Thompson-Schill, and Anna Jenkins examining how the mind constructs complex social concepts.
June 2019 - Anna Jenkins is named a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). This designation recognizes "substantial contribution to social psychology as an empirical science" and "significant publication in recognized journals or books."
June 2019 - New paper! "Rethinking cognitive load: A default-mode network perspective" is in press at Trends in Cognitive Sciences and available here.
April 2019 - Christina Steele receives a Hassenfield Foundation Social Impact Research Grant to conduct studies in the Jenkins Lab.
Penn's Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) awards the Hassenfield Foundation grant to projects with potential for real-world outcomes and significant social impact. Congratulations, Christina!
March 2019 - Christina Steele is awarded a Beinecke Scholarship.
The competitive Beinecke Scholarship provides funding for graduate education to a select group of college juniors. Congratulations, Christina!
September 2018 - New paper! "Predicting human behavior toward members of different social groups" is in press at PNAS and available here.
September 2018 - Ekaterina Goncharova's poster is accepted for presentation at the 2018 meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics.
Join Ekaterina in Philadelphia October 5-7 to hear about her research with Ming Hsu and Anna Jenkins examining patterns of decision-making in psychopathology.
June 2018 - Ekaterina Goncharova receives Highest Honors in Psychology at UC Berkeley.
Ekaterina earned Highest Honors in Psychology with her senior thesis examining patterns of social decision-making in psychopathology.
February 2018 - Ekaterina Goncharova's poster is accepted for presentation at the 2018 APS convention.
Join Ekaterina in San Francisco May 24-27 to hear about her senior thesis research examining patterns of social decision-making across three different psychopathologies at the meeting of the Association for Psychological Science.
January 2018 - Anna Jenkins is named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
The Rising Star designation "recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions".
The Jenkins Lab: launching in Summer 2018 at the University of Pennsylvania.
Anna Jenkins will join the Penn faculty as an Assistant Professor of Psychology in Summer 2018.
