Are you a parent of a 12-15 year old young person who experiences chronic musculoskeletal pain? Please share our study details (see below) with your child as we are eager to hear from more 12-15 year olds on how they manage their pain. For more information, see inspiremsk.stir.ac.uk

Thoughtful piece: “Rather than focusing on a crisis of boys or girls, many specialists say the priority should be supporting young people overall, sometimes in a gender-neutral way” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Been ages since I've seen a case study... Realisations that hit you at 3pm, I guess.

Catherine Carr explains her discovery that geckos retain a vibration-sensing pathway previously thought to be lost when animals moved onto land. By @helenak.bsky.social #neuroskyence" www.thetransmitter.org/neuros-ark/n...

A reminder that we used to do the odd April Fool, but we had to stop because the media would pick up on them as serious stories... wonder what that says about Psychology… www.bps.org.uk/search?term=...

I’m so excited to say that the WHO WANTS NORMAL? paperback is now available to pre-order. This edition has a brand new forward and all the interviews with 50+ of Britain’s best known disabled women, from Ruth Madeley to Rosie Jones. Pre-order from a range of stores here: linktr.ee/WhoWantsNorm...

New work could pave the way for objective assessment of cognitive fatigue across multiple conditions: www.bps.org.uk/research-dig...

I noticed the UK government's estimate of CO2 from future AI data centres was implausibly low. I asked for the methodology underpinning the analysis, but got nowhere. When I wrote an article about it they just... deleted the analysis. Now, @adamvaughan.bsky.social has covered this for the Times.

Your annual reminder that in this day and age, posting hoax paleontology (and other science) "discoveries" on April Fool's Day **will be misinterpreted by MANY people** unless the discovery is incredibly absurd.

The beautiful preservstion of trilobite compound eyes will never cease to amaze me. On this little 400ish million year old Phacops you can see all the little lenses - each one a rigid calcite mineral crystal! Together they had excellent 360° vision, perfect for finding lunch on the seafloor.

Friday bump for my survey - still recruiting and only a few weeks left now #hearingloss #hearingdifference #music #musiclistening #everydaymusic #mentalhealth #wellbeing #qualityoflife #researchstudy #survey #musicscience #psychology #phdlife #phdsky #academicsky #psychscisky

Fascinating new study about men’s friendships. There’s a lot of evidence here that the “male loneliness crisis” is actually a white, wealthy man problem. Other men are building friendships with similar depth to women’s friendships.

This is a core peril of connectome-body models: behavioral fidelity ≠ biological fidelity. Virtual animals are powerful, but ONLY if brain-body interfaces are grounded in biology. A model that walks like a fly might just be a worm in disguise. 👀

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I hope no one needs an MRI this year. The world's largest producer of liquified helium is in Qatar and is shut off. We just got a notice that our supply for the year will be at least cut in half. No one could have predicted this (unless they thought about it).

Bad news for all those Tech Bros. "It was once believed that clones were identical to the original, but it has become clear through this study that mutations occur at a rate three times higher than in offspring born through natural mating." shorturl.at/DMQuY

⚠️New review straight out of the oven! "Spatial navigation in preclinical Alzheimer's disease: A review" arxiv.org/abs/2603.23082 We focus on spatial navigation as a sensitive cognitive marker in preclinical AD, compiling evidence from cognitively unimpaired individuals with positive AD biomarkers.

LLMs are imputation machines. They pull patterns from text data; Useful for things like coding, especially coding that has been done before. Academics work in knowledge generation, which goes far beyond imputation. If you think LLMs can replace grad students, you are telling on yourself.

Why is the #cerebellum (known for coordinating motor functions) also engaged in #cognition? @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social & @actlab.bsky.social investigate the problems that have made it so difficult to answer this question and outline strategies to make progress. 🧪 #NeuroSky

How exactly does artificial intelligence drive individuals toward violent extremism? ​I am excited to share our recent publication in Personality and Social Psychology Review, "Intelligent Systems, Vulnerable Minds: A Framework for Radicalization to Violence in the Age of AI."

This confirms all my prejudices, and I will not be critically evaluating its claims or evidence at this time.

Such a great article. These are behaviors that people may or may not know are problematic (although some people definitely do). And we all need to be aware of them when reviewing for publication and in other venues. And... (1/3) #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

🔊 New preprint 🧠 for the first time we show congenital #aphantasia has physical brain anatomy alterations. Surprisingly, they have structurally intact #visual pathways. Structural alterations instead found in the fronto-temporal and cingulate systems. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵

New study shows that many animals like the same sounds as we do - suggesting a shared aesthetic sense (further evidence that animals' perceptual worlds are an important part of their welfare experience) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A reply to my reply about bots in online studies - and a very cool demonstration! I summarized my thoughts in the comments to this post.

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

📢 New preprint from the lab🧠 ▶️doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.12.710517 What does fMRI connectivity actually reflect at the neural level? The natural intuition is: more neural activity = more connectivity! Using cortical perturbations we show this is not necessarily the case: sometimes less is more! 👇🧵

Science Communicators: join me in helping @sarahmackattack.bsky.social et al with this data collection effort! I'm generally survey-averse but I filled out this one. Why? To prioritize the holes that most need to be filled, we need to understand where they are.

All of my infant jokes are in development.

Meanwhile my public health colleagues

🚨 New Blog Post 🚨 I wrote my very first blog post 😊 This post is for quantitative researchers working with negatively worded Likert-scale items and haven't heard that these items can cause problems. I outline key issues, describe alternatives, and recommend lit. yannicmeier.de/2026/03/03/w...

A new study, titled “Evidence of White Matter Neuroinflammation in ME/CFS: A Diffusion-Based Neuroinflammation Imaging Study”, was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping. Dr Charles Shepherd comments on the blog: https://meassociation.org.uk/ykrj #MECFS

This story is a good example of why it is so difficult to communicate genuine science to the public. Despite every scientist not on the company payroll decrying it as a bogus and unscientific project, the story presents it as some sort of both-sides issue. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Texting daily with a random human peer is more effective at reducing loneliness than texting with a highly supportive chatbot. Next time you feel lonely reach out to a human, any human. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Curious about how psychological theories are built, tested, and refined in practice? This summer, the Theory Methods Society is launching the very first edition of the summer school Theory Building in Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (July 6–10, 2026). theorymethodssociety.org

Audio long read 🔊 Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? go.nature.com/3ONrV8q

The new DSM is on the horizon www.psychiatry.org/news-room/ne... …do any Psychologists actually care? How does DSM impact your daily working life?

The BPS Environmental Psychology Section @bpsenvpsych.bsky.social has a Journal Club! Our first meeting is 24 March 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm, lead by @suewilbraham.bsky.social FREE registration. Details: www.bps.org.uk/event/enviro...

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Per protocol analysis strikes again! Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.

In a recent issue of The Psychologist, we asked readers to tell us about a paper that changed their life. Ayad Marhoon (University of Leeds) answered the call: www.bps.org.uk/research-dig... (If you'd like to make a similar contribution, see the end of the article!)

All of academia is like: Surely there is a better way to be doing this thing but I don't want to be the one to do it

"The lesson of this, and many other studies, is that good intentions are not enough to deliver consistency and validity."

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

Does anyone use the Spanish version of the RBANS ("Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status")? If you are able to send us an original form, we would be happy to compensate you for it.

Editorial by @astridchevance.bsky.social on censorship in academia. Worth your time. #AcademicSky #PsychSciSky 🧪 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We just posted some helpful tips on searching for preprints on psyarxiv: blog.psyarxiv.com/2026/01/27/h... Truncation and fuzzy matching should be especially helpful for lit reviews. Keep posting your preprints to psyarxiv ❤️

Friday is National Nothing Day… I'm still rather keen to pull together a collection of pieces from Psychologists who consider 'nothing' in their research or practice. Absence, gaps, silence, the banal, mundane, etc etc. This was a toe in the water years ago… www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

195: Living meta-analysis everythinghertz.com/195 We discuss how living meta‑analyses can cut research waste and keep evidence current. We also chat about how using synthetic research participants is a terrible idea and what researchers *really* mean when they call a study "recent".