Nicole Rust

@nicolecrust

Mood & Memory researcher with a computational bent. . Science advocate. Prof (UPenn Psych) - Author: Elusive Cures.

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Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 5d

Maybe one good way to think about it is that a bomb has gone off and some have been hit harder than others. A rational response is to move to the nearest "safe zone". For some, that might be a small shift to align with funding priorities. For others, a bigger move will be required.

bomb site image with radioactive fallout damage

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 9d

After all, mood remains among the most fascinating and important of all mental functions, even if the field studying it is chaotic. We'll get there ...

woman throwing up her hands in a field of sunflowers

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 9d

On Emotions, moods and affective states: oecs.mit.edu/pub/bhn7j5s7...

The phenomena that comprise emotions, moods, and affective states are united by their valence—their pleasantness or unpleasantness—such as the pleasure of seeing a baby laugh or the aversion to smelling feces. Beyond this broadly accepted defining characteristic, the researchers who study them have a multitude of ideas about how to best define their constructs, what shapes them, and the most promising path toward understanding them scientifically. For instance, many researchers agree that emotions should be distinguished from moods, but not all agree on the criteria that differentiate them. Similarly, some restrict the terms emotion and mood to instances in which subjective experience is evident (and thus to humans capable of subjective report), whereas others apply them more broadly (to nonhuman animals and human infants). Still others propose abandoning categories like emotion, arguing that they are not groups around which theories can be shaped. The rationales behind these conceptual disputes underscore the multifaceted complexity of these important but little-understood phenomena, as does their contrast with functions with more widely settled terminology such as memory. The concepts and terms used to describe affective phenomena carry important legal and ethical implications.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 9d

Decades ago when I studied early vision, I felt like the logic of progress in the field was a bit too formulaic (show an exceedingly well-established model is incomplete and extend it). Today I'm envying those for whom scientific progress has a logic that their community generally agrees on.

two horses each eating on the other side of the fence

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 16d

Well said, Joe LeDoux. 10 years ago me would probably regard this as bonkers. Until you sit down to puzzle through questions about emotion/mood (and mental suffering), it’s easy to take one of two sides but the answers most likely lie in the middle. /1 www.jneurosci.org/content/46/2...

I believe that a new approach is needed, one that fuses the science of emotion with the science of consciousness. Such a science of emotional consciousness does not presently exist for two reasons. One is that researchers who study emotion in the brain have had relatively little interest in and knowledge about the science of consciousness. And the other is that consciousness researchers are far more interested in the conscious perception of visual stimuli than in emotional consciousness. Both fields are diminished by mutual ignorance of the other, and much could be gained if emotion researchers accepted that emotions are fundamentally conscious experiences, and if consciousness researchers accepted that emotions are our most important conscious experiences

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 19d

I first met Emily on a bus, at a thing. This photo does an incredible job of capturing her spirit, I think. Pictures are worth a thousand words and all that .. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· 26d

Now up at @oecs-bot.bsky.social ! Looking to wrap your head around concepts & terms (and debates) in emotion & mood research (“affective science”)? Here’s a go to. oecs.mit.edu/pub/bhn7j5s7...

Emotions, Moods, and Affective States
by Nicole C. Rust
Published on
Jul 16, 2026
Emotions, Moods, and Affective States

Contents
·

The phenomena that comprise emotions, moods, and affective states are united by their valence—their pleasantness or unpleasantness—such as the pleasure of seeing a baby laugh or the aversion to smelling feces. Beyond this broadly accepted defining characteristic, the researchers who study them have a multitude of ideas about how to best define their constructs, what shapes them, and the most promising path toward understanding them scientifically. For instance, many researchers agree that emotions should be distinguished from moods, but not all agree on the criteria that differentiate them. Similarly, some restrict the terms emotion and mood to instances in which subjective

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jul 3

The TL;DR is captured in Fig 7 of the preprint.

Figure 7: Schematic of the two-stage algorithmic transformation creating the ITC and HC representations. In each of the plots, the blue cloud represents a cartoonized distribution of firing vigor to novel images and the red cloud to repeated images. Left: Early in the visual system, such as in the retina, memorability and familiarity are not reflected in firing vigor. In Stage 1 of the algorithmic transformation, the ventral visual pathway (e.g. retina, LGN, V1, V2, V4, and IT) creates an ITC representation (middle), where both memorability (MB) and repetition suppression (RS, black arrows) influence the firing vigor. Namely, more memorable images elicit stronger responses, resulting in greater repetition suppression. However, this results in an ITC representation in which both memorability and familiarity intermingle. In Stage 2 of the algorithmic transformation, familiarity is selectively extracted, amounting to a rotation of the distributions shown in ITC (cyan arrow) to create the HC representation. In HC, familiarity is reflected largely independent of memorability.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jul 3

By that, I mean: here's the ask/answer to a recent question to a question posed to me

Q – Memory has long been a central focus of your neuroscience research. What fascinates you most about memory today? Has that changed over the years?
A – I spent much of the last decade trying to understand how our brains perform the remarkable feat: we can remember thousands of images with great visual detail after seeing each only once and only for a few seconds. It's been thrilling to traverse from befuddlement about how this could possibly happen to strong intuitions about how it works based on the discoveries we've made over the years. That type of approach to memory — which is how most mental functions are studied — focuses on how the brain solves well-defined tasks like answering the question "Have you seen this picture before?". I'm newly fascinated with a different aspect of memory that isn't captured by that type of approach: the subjective experience of remembering. Our laptops can perform memory tasks, but they don't feel or experience anything when they draw from their memory stores; in contrast, we do. What's happening in the brain to support subjective experience?

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jul 2

Great Q. The umbrella category "affect" can be traced back to the 1700s when Kant and others categorized the mind into tripartite functions: cognition (knowing), affection (feeling), and conation. In 1900s CogSci, affect was largely shoved aside. doi.org/10.1002/1520...

For two hundred years many psychologists took for granted that the study of mind could be divided into three parts: cognition, affection, and conation. They disagreed on whether these should be considered faculties of the mind or merely a classification of aspects of mental activity, but the threefold division was repeatedly revived. In the last twenty-five years, if we judge from the titles of books and journal articles, scientific psychology-whether its focus is on perception, learning and memory, development, or personality and social psychology-has become engaged withone of these aspects, now called cognitive psychology. An examination of the tripartite classification in historical perspective may show the extent to which affection and conation are now suffering neglect by contrast with cognition as their coequal. This historical review may give a better understanding of what is happening in the present.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jul 2

Yes!! That's how I always like to conceptualize it: it's a big feedback loop. eg for mood: Experiences are integrated to create mood which modulates cognitive functions like decision making, in turn determining what we experience.

Slide: experiences are integrated to create mood which modulates cognitive funciton, like decision making, in turn determining what we experience.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 28

The piece ends with this.

If your daughter is genuinely interested in any area, she should of course follow her dream. But it is important for you (and her) to take a reality check.

Getting a permanent job in science in academia often takes at least 13-18 years and her chance of a full professorship is much the same as her counterpart in the “softer” areas – and much worse than her male counterpart in Stemm.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 24

On a professionally labelled corpus of 925 papers assigned to quality tiers by trained domain experts, QED Score separated the lowest-quality papers from the rest with an AUC of 0.867 (where 0.50 is chance and 1.0 is perfect)

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 19

Fascinating! Thank you for it. Relevant! (Also of note that Boltzmann himself suffered from a mental condition directly related to the phenomenon of interest here, mood).

The debates were fierce and sometimes personal. At the 1895 Lübeck conference, Boltzmann engaged in heated exchanges with Ostwald and other anti-atomists. The scientific community was divided, with many prominent figures skeptical of atomic theory despite its growing explanatory power.

These attacks took a psychological toll on Boltzmann, who suffered from depression and felt increasingly isolated. He saw statistical mechanics as his greatest achievement yet struggled to convince peers of its validity. The opposition wasn’t merely scientific disagreement but touched fundamental questions about science’s nature and purpose.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 18

A can of worms! I would (respectfully) say that rigorous models that relate to psychiatric drugs to behavior are few (b/c that link is really hard). On an optimistic note, one wonderful exception is Ritalin, ala @marlenecohen.bsky.social et al. www.nicolecrust.com/s/Ritalin-as...

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 18

Great Q! The issue is that we have yet to replace the homunculus concept (which we all agree is broken). How does real world decision making really work? How is it all coordinated? Here's my favorite image of the concept from Susan Blackmore's book. www.susanblackmore.uk/consciousnes...

little person in a brain pulling levers.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 17

www.aspenpublicradio.org/2026-06-16/i...

They've succeeded with larval zebra fish, which have about 80,000 neurons, she says. So it should be possible to scale up for adult Danionella fish, which have about 650,000.

Human brains, by comparison, have about 86 billion neurons.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 14

CBT in Beck’s words (1979)

This new approach to emotional disorders changes man's perspective on himself and his problems. Rather than viewing himself as the helpless creature of his own biochemical reactions, or of blind impulses, or of automatic reflexes, he can regard himself as prone to learning errone-ous, self-defeating notions and capable of unlearning or correcting them as well. By pinpointing the fallacies in his thinking and correcting them, he can create a more self-fulfilling life for himself.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 14

Fascinating. When developing one of today’s most widely deployed behaviorally therapies for anxiety & mood disorders, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Aaron Beck credited the Stoics. www.penguin.com.au/books/cognit...

This approach goes back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics,

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 8

Melancholia I (Albrect Dürer, 1514). Isn't she fabulous?! "His Melancholia is neither a miser nor a mental case, but a thinking being in perplexity. She does not hold on to an object which does not exist, but a problem which cannot be solved." Struggling with a project this week? She's your muse.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 7

For those in the know, how's this? In addition to getting the facts right, does it capture the spirit of the psychodynamic approach?

$The theory behind psychodynamic therapy holds that our conscious thoughts reflect only a tiny fraction of what drives our behavior; most of it is driven by our unconscious mind. Our mind, in turn, is comprised of the tripartite id, which instinctively seeks pleasure and immediate gratification; the superego, our moral center that internalizes societal standards; and the ego, which mediates between what the id wants and what the superego permits. When the id and superego are in conflict, our ego resorts to unconscious defense mechanisms like denial, projection, or repression to safeguard us. However, if the ego is overwhelmed by the tension between the id and superego, it can result in psychological issues and maladaptive behaviors. The therapeutic solution involves making the repressed conflict between the id and superego conscious for resolution. This often requires revealing the moral standards, rules, and expectations that the superego internalized in childhood, which have become ingrained beliefs about right and wrong, causing anxiety, guilt, and shame.$

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 7

I enjoy the challenge of taking complex concepts and explaining them in ways that do them justice but nearly everyone can understand. One that trips me up: psychodynamic theory. It's hard to capture Ego, ID, Superego. Have you ever seen it done succinctly and well? archive.org/details/long...

circle with ego, superego and id parsed by conscious and unconscious

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 6

Still befuddled by this: the debunking of the "chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression" in the 1970s and the later uptake by popular culture that persists. In the absence understanding of how antidepressants work, here's advice on how to communicate. www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-healt...

How do antidepressants work?

As with many other kinds of medications and treatments, we don't know for certain how antidepressants work. We do know that they affect the activity of certain chemicals in our brains. These are called neurotransmitters, and pass signals from one brain cell to another. The neurotransmitters most affected by antidepressants are serotonin and noradrenaline.

However, research suggests that antidepressants work on the brain in multiple ways that go beyond simple chemical reactions. This research suggests that they:

influence how the body responds to stress
improve our negative thinking
stop or even reverse damage to brain cells.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 5

Here's more (same ref).

Thus, although lacking direct experimental confirmation, the catecholamine hypothesis currently seems to be the strongest and most useful pathophysiological hypothesis of affective disorders. It must be stressed, however, that this hypothesis is undoubtedly, at best, a reductionistic oversimplification of a very complex biological state and that the simultaneous effects of the indoleamines, other biogenic amines, hormones and ionic changes will ultimately have to be included in any comprehensive formulation of the biochemistry of the affective disorders. In our present state of knowledge, however, the catecholamine hypothesis is of considerable heuristic value, providing the investigator and the clinician with a frame of reference integrating much of our experience with those psychopharmacological agents which produce alterations in human affective states.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 5

It's fascinating to compare the intellectual humility and nuance of the "catecholamine hypothesis of depression" when it was first introduced (1965) with the lack thereof later. In this review that launched it, Schildkraut says a lot of good stuff. ia600108.us.archive.org/view_archive...

It has not been the aim of this paper to consider the important roles of personality, environmental, or genetic factors in the affective disorders. Many clinicians, including the author, have observed, however, the significant effects which social and interpersonal factors have on the clinical response to antidepressant drugs. An effect of genetic factors on the response to antidepressant medication has also been reported recently!2 While our systematic knowledge in these areas is currently limited, their importance must be stressed and the need for further study emphasized. Recent physiological and pharmacological studies have supported the long-standing observation, based on clinical phenomenology, that depression does not represent a single homogeneous entity.7’40’

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 4

Congratulations on 3rd! I bet you learned a ton, as one always does when jumping in the deep end like this. And as you explain, 3rd place is a huge win in context. I'm thrilled to see this. Many of us are eager to have you help lead the way.

In the weeks and months ahead, my team and I will move this project forward. I seek to turn the successes of my campaign in New Jersey’s 12th District into a national movement to save both science and democracy. This will be a great undertaking.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 3

Scientific terms can evolve. Case in point: "depression". "Melancholia" and translations goes back to Ancient Greece and has many meanings (like 'black bile imbalance'). In the early 1900s, Adolf Meyer suggested a new term, "depression" to clean things up. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 2

Tremendous congratulations to newly minted Dr. @catrinahacker.bsky.social!!

Catrina on front of a slide saying basic translational neuroscience.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 1

It's fine. Like all analogies, it falls short. I worry that some of my friends have been overselling it ... (I did too until I sat down to think it through). press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

When I consider the state of brain research today, I suspect that some
subfields, including anxiety and depression, are waiting for their Coperni-
can moment. As we will discuss, one influential idea about the brain is that
it is a type of information- processing machine that computes. The metaphor
of the brain as a computer is a crucial step toward understanding how the
brain gives rise to the mind and to be hav ior, and it has been tremendously
successful at helping us understand some things about the brain— like
how vision and memory work— and helping us to build artificial intel-
ligence. Ultimately, however, the computer metaphor falls short because
it’s not a great way to think about what anxiety or depression might be like.
When we focus on the computation of something, we presume that com-
putation is a process with an end goal, of moving from one state to an-
other. Analogously, we can presume that the brain “computes anxiousness,”
but we are left wondering: To what end? What prob lem is the brain trying
to solve when it performs this computation? Is the “computation” of anxi-
ety really the right way to think about it? It certainly feels more Ptolemaic
than Copernican, and I suspect that I’m not the only one left wondering
whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement.
Put another way, the gap between the brain- as- a- computer metaphor
and the lived experience of patients with anxiety and depression is vast
and intimidating. I worry that the computer metaphor helps us begin to
build the bridge we need, but alone, it cannot completely traverse that gap.
This is true not only for anxiety but also for many other functions of the
brain and mind that tend to go awry. Thinking about insomnia, epilepsy,
anorexia, autism, or schizophrenia as a deficit in “computation” strikes me
as the wrong way to think about the prob lem from the outset.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust· Jun 1

The piece is worth a read. McHugh is full of zingers.