newsletter: june 2026
meet this month's guest editor, Randy Lee!
hi, it’s Ivy! we hope you’re enjoying the summer so far. i’m so pleased to introduce our guest editor for this month, who is an awesome scholar and dear friend — Randy Lee!
Randy Lee 😊🧋
Moments after successfully defending my dissertation!
about me
I study how people connect with and make sense of one another. I’m particularly interested in the social regulation of emotion, how people interpret and respond to ambiguous social situations, and the conditions that promote or prevent social connection, belonging, and prosocial action.
I am currently a postdoc in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where I work with Paula Niedenthal. I recently completed my Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Cognitive Science. At Cornell, I was advised by Vivian Zayas (chair), Tom Gilovich, and Cindy Hazan.
I started my college journey at Mt. San Antonio College, my local community college in Walnut, California. Thanks to the support of mentors who profoundly changed my life and academic trajectory, I transferred to UC Berkeley, where I earned a B.A. in psychology with high distinction and completed an honors thesis. After graduating, I remained in Berkeley and worked as a lab manager for joint Ayduk and Mendoza-Denton Lab.
Outside of research, I enjoy attending concerts, exploring new restaurants, and seeking out the spiciest food I can find.
Looking ahead, I hope to become a professor at a research university, where I can continue conducting research, mentoring students, and creating the kinds of supportive academic communities that have had such a profound impact on my own journey.
📺 watching 👀
Jury Duty Presents Company Retreat. The original Jury Duty is fantastic. This time, the series follows a temp worker at a family-owned hot sauce company as the founder prepares to step down.
The Continental on Peacock. I love the John Wick universe, and although this is not a great show by any stretch, the expanded lore and a few excellent action sequences makes the series worth it.
📚 reading 🤓
How Music Works by David Byrne. I’ve been a big fan of Byrne’s music and of Talking Heads. Byrne has been long interested in psychology and neuroscience, and this has shown up in his American Utopia show on Broadway and his recent Who is the Sky? album and tour. The book is Byrne’s attempt to explain how music gets made and why it sounds the way it does. It’s also a behind-the-scenes look at the business of music (recording, touring). Byrne starts the book with what he describes as a “slow-dawning insight” about creativity “that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.” As a social psychologist, I was tickled by how this insight echoes one of the field’s central ideas: the power of the situation. Highly recommended!
👂listening 🎧
The Boys of Dungeon Lane by Paul McCartney
Nine Inch Noize by Nine Inch Noize
Come and See by Gurriers
Live in San Francisco by Thee Oh Sees
A Ass Pocket of Whiskey by R.L. Burnside
some papers I would like to share:
Support for “cancellation” is overestimated
Jakob Kasper, Randy Lee, Jabin Binnendyk, Gordon Pennycook, and Ovul Sezer
PsyArXiv (Under Review)
Glad to help out: Grateful people are more likely to engage in costly prosocial action
Randy Lee, Kirstan Brodie, Jerry Richardson, and Tom Gilovich
Emotion (In Press)
An integrative framework for capturing emotion and emotion regulation in daily life
Randy Lee, Minghui Ni, Wicia Fang, Inbal Ravreby, Yuichi Shoda, and Vivian Zayas
Affective Science (2025)
Randy Lee, Gizem Surenkok, and Vivian Zayas
BMC Public Health (2024)
some papers that I am trying to read this month:
The structure of social situations: Insights from the large-scale automated coding of text
Shilaan Bhatia, Andrew Yang, and Taya R. Cohen
Psychological Science (2026)
Jordan R. Axt, Peter Connor, Suzanne Hoogeveen, Cory J. Clark, Michelangelo Vianello, Joanna N. Lahey, Adam Hahn, Justin To, Richard E. Petty, Thomas H. Costello, Gregory Mitchell, Philip E. Tetlock, and Eric Luis Uhlmann
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2026)
Attention bias for facial expressions of emotion: A meta-analytic review
Joshua Maxwell, Robert Torrence, & Eric Ruthruff
Psychological Bulletin (2025)
Randy’s website to keep up with his updates:
https://www.randyl.ee/
THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP
🚀 RESOURCES AND JOB MARKET OPPORTUNITIES 🚀
The Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab at UT Austin is seeking postdoc to begin fall 2026 to study how AI models understand human emotion
The Behavior, Culture, and Inequality Lab at the University of Michigan is hiring a postdoc — apply by June 15!
social psychology student Helen Devine created this awesome resource for psych students seeking post-bacc positions, including a slack
check out this field guide to advocacy for social and behavioral scientists developed by phd student Yalda Daryani