I gave a research talk at Sungkyunkwan University’s Human Affective Neuroscience Lab (PI: Dr. Justin Minue Kim). I presented my first PhD project, Differentiable Intersample Modeling (DIM), discussing how it complements the Anna Karenina (AnnaK) framework widely used in social and affective neuroscience. Specifically, using the lab's dataset (Kim & Kim, 2022 PNAS), we explored how the representational geometry of affective traits can align with that of emotional processing neural circuit morphologies.
I’m excited to share that my first PhD project, Differentiable Intersample Modeling (DIM), has been selected for a Trainee Blitz Talk at SANS2026, and I’ve also received a Travel Award! DIM is a new toolkit that expands RSA (representational similarity analysis), enabling a flexible learning of intersample geometry so that the resultant representation can be maximally aligned to the target representation.
I’d love to connect and chat at SANS2026! Feel free to reach out. See you in San Diego!
In the previous quarter, I worked as a TA for PSYC137: Social Cognition (taught by Dr. Piotr Winkielman), where I also had the chance to give a guest lecture to about 200 undergrad students. In the lecture, I introduced the ongoing debates in psychology around mixed emotions and shared some critical perspectives on why mixed emotions haven’t been widely studied as a distinct affective experience in experimental psychology so far.
I have explored some tools that can better analyze individual differences and their underlying factors. About four years ago, I began studying the principles and applications of causal machine learning, exploring its potential to address these questions. As part of this effort, I contributed as the second author to this new paper, Individual differences in effects of stressful life events on childhood ADHD: genetic, neural, and familial contributions.
Through this work, we were able not only to predict ‘individualized' exposure effects of early-life stress on children’s ADHD symptoms but also to identify key moderators such as parental psychiatric history, the child’s genetic vulnerability, and white matter connectivity within cognitive control networks. These findings allowed us to discuss the possibility of early identification and prevention among vulnerable groups. I believe that psychological/psychiatric works could move from an average treatment–effect paradigm toward a more individual-centered framework.
I’m excited to announce that I start my PhD in UCSD Psychology! Since UCSD Psych has long been my dream program because of its research-intensive and interdisciplinary environment, I’m deeply thrilled to have the opportunity to pursue my PhD at this institution.
I will pursue my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Eshin Jolly, whose research focuses on identifying neural representations of social relationships and affective experiences. He explores how these representations function in naturalistic settings through the development and application of innovative tools, which is highly aligned to my theoretical and methodological interests. I hope to make powerful synergy through productive collaboration!
My co-first-authored paper, Revisiting Your Memory: Reconstruction of Affect-Contextualized Memory via EEG-guided Audiovisual Generation, has been officially published as a proceeding in ACM Multimedia Workshop on Cognition-oriented Multimodal Affective and Empathetic Computing (CogMAEC). This work originated from my AI × Art Hackathon 2024 project. In this work, my colleagues and I combined EEG-based affect decoding and multi-modal generative AI to reconstruct music videos that depict individuals’ affect-charged autobiographical memory. Through a two-stage user study, we found that the generated videos effectively captured and represented the affective dynamics felt during memory recall. This work was also highlighted in a blog post from Neuroelectrics, whose EEG recording device was utilized in this project.
I presented a poster of one of my post-master’s projects, Trait depression predicts negatively biased encoding and retrieval of ambivalent movie, at CCN2025 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This project elucidates how trait depression is associated with negatively biased encoding and recall of emotionally mixed movie scenes at neurophysiological and verbal levels. Engaging in discussions with researchers from around the world was a wonderful opportunity to refine the conceptual model of this study. My wife, Janice Min, also successfully presented her international collaboration project.
In addition, we took the chance to this travel to Portugal for our honeymoon, where we savored delicious nata, enjoyed Porto wine, and soaked up the refreshing sea breeze everyday!
My MS thesis, Awe is characterized as an ambivalent affect in the human behavior and cortex, is finally published at Communications Psychology. Although awe has been described in philosophy as a distinct ambivalent experience, modern affective science has struggled to examine whether this ambivalence can be distinguished from simply pleasing or displeasing states (or their fluctuations). Combining VR, EEG, continuous affect rating, and deep representational learning/alignment, we show that subjective awe intensity across diverse scenarios is better predicted by behaviors and distinct neurogeometry associated with ambivalent feelings than by those linked solely to positive or negative affect. I hope my work serves as a case that the complex structure of emotions we experience in daily life can be explored within a scientific framework.
This project was made possible through an interdisciplinary approach. I am grateful to professional filmmaker Seung Yeop Oh for collaborating on the design of VR stimuli, to AI expert Danny Dongyeop Han for planning the analytical framework together, and to my advisor Dr. Jiook Cha, whose expertise bridges psychology, neuroscience, and AI.
I presented my master’s thesis, Awe is characterized as an ambivalent experience in the human behavior and cortex, at the Korean Human Brain Mapping (KHBM) 2024 conference and was honored to receive the Best Oral Presenter Award! This experience reaffirmed the recognition of complex emotions like awe as a significant topic in affective neuroscience. I was especially pleased to discuss and refine the rationale behind my focus on using naturalistic paradigms, real-time affect rating, and deep representational learning for systematic study.
Above all, my wife, Janice Min, also received the Best Poster Award for her master’s on-going research. Sharing such a moment of pride with her made it all the more special :)
My first paper, The twofold role of subjective fluency in displeasing but preferable visual artworks: self-report and eye-tracking analysis, in collaboration with aesthetics researchers from my undergraduate days, is finally published at Empirical Studies of the Arts!
We tackled the “paradox of horror,” a philosophical question since 17C, through a lens of cognitive science. Most people hate unpleasant art, but some love it. Why? We tested how art knowledge shapes this difference. Cogsci has claimed that fluency amplifies the valence effect on preference, while art appreciation models argue that art knowledge (expected to shape fluency) reduces its impact. We were motivated to revolve these conflicting findings.
Publishing my first paper has been a rewarding experience, especially in engaging with philosophers to explore how empirical methods can tackle philosophical questions. Special thanks to Dr. Mijung Kang from SNU Aesthetics for her invaluable support in this collaboration!