14. Tessa Rusch: COVID-Dynamic, an extremely variable year, and theory of mind

Apr 2, 2021

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Tessa Rusch is a postdoc working on computational modelling of social interactions at Caltech in the labs of Ralph Adolphs and John O'Doherty. She is also part of COVID-Dynamic project, a large-scale longitudinal study on the psychological effects of the COVID pandemic.

In this conversation, we talk about Tessa's experiences of being part of such a large project, about her move to the US just before the pandemic, and about her review on computational models and bevioural tasks of Theory of Mind.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New conversations every other Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:04: Before Tessa's PhD
0:04:07: Tessa's first year in the US, during the pandemic
0:16:51: Tessa's original plan for her postdoc with Ralph Adolphs and John O'Doherty
0:24:22: How COVID-Dynamic got started
0:32:42: The practicalities of running a large collaborative study
0:43:37: Social changes during an extremely variable time
0:55:03: Working with complex data sets
1:14:02: Doing COVID research while working on other projects
1:20:48: Discussing Tessa's review article about Theory of Mind from Neuropsychologia
1:47:27: Tessa's final words of wisdom

Podcast links

Website: https://bjks.buzzsprout.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BjksPodcast

Tessa's links

Website: https://www.hss.caltech.edu/people/tessa-rusch
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=OzT7c-oAAAAJ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tessa_rusch

Ben's links

Website: www.bjks.blog/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=-nWNfvcAAAAJ

References
Kuper-Smith, B. J., Doppelhofer, L. M., Oganian, Y., Rosenblau, G., & Korn, C. (2020). Optimistic beliefs about the personal impact of COVID-19. PsyArXiv.
Post, T., Van den Assem, M. J., Baltussen, G., & Thaler, R. H. (2008). Deal or no deal? decision making under risk in a large-payoff game show. American Economic Review.
Rusch, T., Han, Y., Liang, D., Hopkins, A., Lawrence, C., Maoz, U., ... & Stanley, D. (2021). COVID-Dynamic: A large-scale multifaceted longitudinal study of socioemotional and behavioral change across the pandemic. PsyArXiv.
Rusch, T., Steixner-Kumar, S., Doshi, P., Spezio, M., & Gläscher, J. (2020). Theory of mind and decision science: towards a typology of tasks and computational models. Neuropsychologia.
van Baar, J. M., Chang, L. J., & Sanfey, A. G. (2019). The computational and neural substrates of moral strategies in social decision-making. Nature communications.
Van den Assem, M. J., Van Dolder, D., & Thaler, R. H. (2012). Split or steal? Cooperative behavior when the stakes are large. Management Science.