dynEGA paper published in Psychiatry Research Case Reports
Our dynEGA case-study paper was published in Psychiatry Research Case Reports. The earlier version remains available through OSF Preprints.
Updates
2026
Paper on interdependent self-construal and adolescent well-being published
Our paper, “Between ‘we’ and ‘well-being’: Do basic psychological needs mediate the relationship between interdependent self-construal and adolescent subjective well-being?”, was published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. The preprint is available on OSF.
Examination committee for the Italian National PhD Programme in AI
I served on the examination committee for the Italian National PhD Programme in Artificial Intelligence, AI for Society track, at CNR Pisa.
Invited seminar at ISTI-CNR in Pisa
I gave an invited seminar at ISTI-CNR in Pisa: “From Simulated Online Communities to Hybrid Publics with YSocial: Operational Validation and Experimental Evidence.” See the official event page and the slides.
YSocial network study presented at Sunbelt 2026
Our work “From Agents to Humans: Network Structure and Homophily in LLM-Simulated and Mixed Online Communities” was presented by Sara Major at Sunbelt 2026.
YSocial validation paper published in EPJ Data Science
We published Towards Operational Validation of LLM-Agent Social Simulations in EPJ Data Science. The study runs 30 independent 30-day YSocial simulations of Voat's v/technology using stateless Dolphin Mistral 24B agents, then compares them with 30 matched Voat windows across activity patterns, network structure, toxicity, topic coverage, and stylistic convergence. The simulations match community-scale activity and topic coverage, while systematic gaps in reply volume, core-periphery concentration, repeated interactions, and toxicity allocation point to memory and content-layer calibration as the next engineering targets. Code and artifacts are on GitHub.
Paper on analytical robustness published in Nature
Large collaborative paper on analytical robustness in the social and behavioural sciences published in Nature. The project examined how independent analysts' choices can shape results and conclusions when reanalyzing the same studies.
Paper on identity orientations published in Identity
Paper with Jonathan M. Cheek, Milica Lazić, and Veljko Jovanović on personal, relational, public, and collective aspects of identity published in Identity. The article reviews the development of identity orientation scales and discusses psychometric work on the AIQ-IV.
Preprint on dynEGA of affect and self-harm urge in NSSI
Preprint with Michaela Bruckbauer-Schwed, Leopold Roth, Martin Plöderl, Marc Keglevic, and Anton-Rupert Laireiter on Dynamic Exploratory Graph Analysis of affect and self-harm urge in non-suicidal self-injury. Posted on OSF Preprints.
Paper on AI-based student feedback analysis in College Teaching
Paper with Mariana Teles on using AI text analysis to classify and summarize open-ended student feedback in large classes. We describe a practical guide for instructors who want to apply sentiment analysis and topic modeling to course evaluations without writing code. Published in College Teaching.
Paper on adolescent depression and anxiety across 30 countries
Large cross-national paper on depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents across 30 countries published in Journal of Affective Disorders. The study tested measurement invariance and links with subjective well-being in adolescent samples across five continents.
transforEmotion paper published in Computational Communication Research
We published our transforEmotion paper in Computational Communication Research. The R package solves modal fragmentation by unifying text, image, and video emotion recognition in a single tool. It supports zero-shot classification with custom emotion labels and runs locally without API dependencies.
Talk at IAAP Webinar on AI & Emotion in Digital Life
Presented "transforEmotion: Multimodal Emotion Analysis in R" at the IAAP Webinar: AI & Emotion in Digital Life. I walked through text, image, and video emotion workflows in the package.
Talk at Vanderbilt University QMDA Colloquium
Presented "transforEmotion in Practice: Multimodal Emotion Analysis in R" at the Vanderbilt University QMDA Colloquium. I demonstrated transforEmotion workflows on real data, covering text sentiment, video frame-by-frame emotion extraction, and dynamic network visualization of emotion time series.
2025
Preprint on Reddit deplatforming and toxicity
Preprint on Reddit deplatforming and toxicity dynamics on arXiv. We analyzed 6 communities (funny, gaming, gifs, pics, videos, technology) from the MADOC dataset across 4 Reddit ban waves (2015-2020). We found two migration regimes: a hostile takeover phase and a toxic equilibrium where fewer than 5% of newcomers reached central positions, yet toxicity doubled. Code on GitHub.
Preprint on operational validation of LLM agent simulations
Preprint on validating LLM agent social simulations on arXiv. We used YSocial with Dolphin 3.0 (uncensored Llama 3.1 8B) to simulate Voat's v/technology over 30 days and compared network structure, toxicity distributions, topic modeling (BERTopic), and semantic similarity against real data. Code and 14+ analytical scripts on GitHub.
Paper on cross-national invariance of externalizing problems screener
We tested measurement invariance of the Youth Externalizing Problems Screener (YEPS) across 32 countries using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Published in Development and Psychopathology.
Adolescent emotional experiences across 32 countries
A large cross-national study examining gender and country-level differences in adolescent emotional experiences across 32 countries. We used multi-group measurement invariance testing to compare positive and negative affect. Published in Applied Research in Quality of Life.
Democracy in Europe: liberal, populist, and social-democratic dimensions
We used European Social Survey Round 10 data from 31 nations and identified three dimensions of democratic attitudes: liberal, populist, and social-democratic. Partial measurement invariance held across countries. Workers showed stronger support for populist and social-democratic ideals than service professionals. Published in Sociologija.
Short Dark Triad across 14 cultures
We introduced a network-based approach to test measurement invariance of the Short Dark Triad, moving beyond traditional CFA methods. We compared 14 cultures. Published in Personality and Individual Differences.
AIQ-IV longitudinal invariance
We used two-wave longitudinal data to test whether AIQ-IV identity dimensions predict changes in well-being and internalizing/externalizing problems over time. Published in Journal of Child and Family Studies.
Adolescent self-construal across 30 countries
We tested configural, metric, and scalar invariance of the Aspects of Identity Questionnaire across 30 countries. This is the largest cross-cultural identity structure study to date. Published in Journal of Research on Adolescence.
Identity orientations and adolescent well-being
We tested whether collective ("we") identity orientations predict adolescent well-being beyond what basic psychological needs explain. We used structural equation modeling to separate the unique contribution of collective identity. Published in Identity.
Facial emotions of political leaders
We analyzed 220 YouTube videos of leaders from 15 countries using deep learning (frame-by-frame detection of 6 emotions + neutral). We found significant differences in negative emotion expression between populist and non-populist leaders. Code on GitHub. Published in Journal of Computational Social Science.
Dark Triad traits and emotional functioning
Network analysis mapping associations between Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and domains of emotional functioning. We used EBICglasso network estimation. Data and code on OSF. Published in International Journal of Psychology.
MADOC dataset and tools released
We released the Multi-Platform Aggregated Dataset of Online Communities (MADOC) on Zenodo, with Python (pymadoc) and R (rMADOC) packages. MADOC covers Reddit, Voat, Bluesky, and Koo platforms with communities including CringeAnarchy, fatpeoplehate, funny, gaming, and gifs in Parquet format.
Book published: Statistički metodi
Published "Statistički metodi: Praktični pristup u R-u" (Statistical Methods: A Practical Approach in R). The textbook covers core statistical methods with R code examples and practical exercises. In Serbian.
2024
transforEmotion v1.5 released
Released transforEmotion v1.5 on GitHub and CRAN. This version added Python environment provisioning via uv, improved video frame extraction, and streamlined reticulate setup for calling transformer models from R.
Dynamic exploratory graph analysis of emotions published
We applied Dynamic Exploratory Graph Analysis to 220 political leader videos and found a two-dimensional network separating positive from negative emotions. Populist leaders showed less connected anger expressions. We used transforEmotion for zero-shot video classification. Code on GitHub. Published in advances.in/psychology.
Updated preprint on facial emotions of political leaders
Updated preprint on facial emotional expressions of political leaders on arXiv. This version adds a model comparison study evaluating CLIP variants against CNN-based models for political emotion annotation. Annotation data and code on GitHub.
Talk at Sunbelt 2024
Presented on core-periphery structure and trust dynamics in online communities at Sunbelt 2024. I compared Reddit and Voat time series data. Slides and code on GitHub.
Paper on identity questionnaire validation
We examined structural validity and gender invariance of the AIQ-IV among Serbian adolescents, and tested relationships with mental health and basic psychological needs. Published in Journal of Personality Assessment.
Python workshop at CoPA Training School
Taught a Python workshop at the CoPA Training School. The course covered pandas, data wrangling, visualization, and basic NLP for social science data analysis. Materials online.