Postdoctoral Fellow - Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab

The Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab (CASCog Lab), directed by Professor Desmond Ong in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, works at the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence on how people and machines understand emotions. The postdoctoral fellow will work primarily on an NSF-funded project on how well AI models understand human emotions, including how machines reason about emotions in context, over time and across interventions such as emotion regulation, and may contribute to related projects on the advantages and drawbacks of artificial empathy, implications for mental health and for adolescent development, technical mitigation of harmful AI behaviours such as sycophancy, and mental-health and safety benchmarks.

The fellow takes part in every stage of research, from literature review and human and machine experiments (including simulations) to data analysis, computational modelling and publication, proposes and leads their own projects, supervises undergraduate research assistants and contributes to grant writing. Salary $70,000.

PhD in psychology, cognitive science, computer science or a related field received no more than three years before the start date; experience designing and running psychological experiments; statistical analysis and visualisation; programming in R and/or Python. Preferred: using LLMs for psychological research and open-science practices. Application: cover letter (up to 3 pages), CV, up to two representative publications and contact details for three referees.