It's Festivus, so I'm going to air some grievances. 1. If you're going to write a year end story about how scientists responded to authoritarianism and *NOT* include @standupforscience.bsky.social in the write up or cite that the photo you used as your header is from one of our rallies...that's bs.

Currently on the lookout for postdoc opportunities in psychological measurement or misophonia research. I focus on improving assessment through psychometrics + machine learning, with special interest in fairness. Excited about interdisciplinary teams! #Postdoc #Psychometrics #Misophonia

A Christmas miracle? I was just offered a job in academia 😭🎄

Cool new paper alert! “Friendship: The Most Overlooked Public Health Asset” - Jamie Krems and Victor Kaufman journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

My husband is not working right now, and it is going as you might expect (he has coerced me into watching the extended editions of all 3 Lord of the Rings movies) 🍿🧝‍♂️🪾💍

I submitted a personal essay about how my mother’s eating disorder shaped my own relationship with my body and restricted my relationship with her, and it was accepted to an anthology! I’ve only ever really written scientific papers, but this was an interesting way to express myself.

Technically, this one came out last year, but I read it this year. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

A strange thing about getting married is learning the lore about your in-laws. For example, today I learned that my husband’s uncle was in the Home Alone movie.

On the bright side, future teachers of evidence in public policy will not be short of examples of what happens when dogmatic contrarian certainty is combined with junk pseudoscience and confirmation bias.

Time for our annual viewing of the academia-themed Just in Time for Christmas, in which she gets cold called by the “Dean of Yale,” who wants to publish her dissertation because it will be a bestseller and offers a flyout for a job she didn’t apply for, and mystical William Shatner shakes things up.

Also new: “Perpetration of IBSA in the digital age: prevalence, motivations, and community attitudes in 10 countries.” Lots of upsetting information here, but “The most common motivation for perpetration for both genders was because they thought the behavior was funny” broke my heart.

New in JAMA Psychiatry: "Interpretation Issues With the Patient Health Questionnaire Instructions” The PHQ-9 is one of the most common measures of depression symptoms; yet… “The PHQ is widely misinterpreted, raising concerns about its validity for research and clinical decision-making.”

The therapeutic benefits of consuming a fistful of chocolate chips should receive heightened research attention from the scientific community.

Accepting another peer review request in December

You should be able to respond to reviewer comments with memes to liven up the peer review process.

That’s enough news for today.

This really did set the tone for an absolutely miserable year, socially, professionally, and personally.

“Women who had an abortion, and those who did not become pregnant, earned significantly more over a 30-year period than those who became mothers by an estimated $398,000 ($495,000 in 2025 dollars) and $448,000 ($556,000 in 2025 dollars), respectively.” psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Not my usual content, but last week marked ten years since my mother died from ALS. ALS is always a death sentence. There is no known treatment. I’m running the Big Sur Marathon with the ALS Therapy Development Institute this April to raise funds for research. If you can, please consider donating.

Oh my god, this is so devastating. These students are SO CLOSE to going home. I am thinking of this community and everyone affected by this horrible tragedy.

Today in “We Didn’t Need a Study to Know That, But I Guess I’m Glad There’s Data to Show It”: "LGBTQIA+ students in conservative states exhibited significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07448481.2025.2537140

Oh I have a comment: “Loss of promising talent supported by these [DEI] programmes will substantially weaken our research capacity, limit innovation and substantially reduce discoveries important for driving scientific advancements.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41131402/

I sent someone a peer review request, and they accepted it within 15 minutes… I could cry. For the last paper I tried to send out, I had to request 14 reviewers to get 2 people to agree, and it took almost 2 months.

EATING DISORDERS RESEARCHERS AND CLINICIANS: APA is proposing changes to the eating disorder severity indicators. Now is the time to have YOUR VOICE heard about the continued use of BMI in assessing AN severity and more. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/proposed-changes

I once had a student write an original song for a final project. He performed it live, playing guitar and serenading the class about the technical details of 5 empirical articles on the psychology of prejudice 😅 I will never forget! Totally blew me away.

I know my eating disorder recovery is strong because every time I see a new photo of a stick thin celebrity, the only thought I have is, “NOT FOR YOU” over and over.

Just checked Canvas to see that my Psychology of Human Sexual Behavior course at SDSU has… 360 students enrolled for next semester. If anyone needs me, I will be hiding under my desk.

Secretary of State stealing my old tweets, I see

I was in an interview this morning, and my cat leapt through the air behind me, screaming. Incredible timing. The interviewer asked if it was a baby 😅

The safest place on the internet is the r/bald subreddit. I have no idea why this came up on my Reddit, but I now follow religiously, as men support one another through the decision to go bald. It is SO positive and wholesome. Amazing to see men supporting each other about body-related concerns.

🧵1/4 New paper alert! psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... Can you celebrate diversity while undermining it? Our new paper in American Psychologist discusses how people/organizations can appear committed to diversity while their conceptualizations of diversity actively undercut it.

Sometimes, I reminisce about academic Twitter the same way I reminisce about theater camp. We were all together in this wonderful and complicated and often messy space for a short time, where we built community and created something wonderful. Then the summer ended, and the magic was gone.

Just reviewed an 88-page manuscript, and I think that I am done with reviewing for this year.

My therapist asked me how I spend my downtime, and I told her about the concept of “turning your downtime into uptime.” She said, “That scares me.”

I have taken every campus interview I’ve ever been on as an opportunity to build out my professional wardrobe, and I feel like I’m finally finding my professional vibe.

One of my best friends is an assistant professor at Texas Tech, and she shared this with our group chat today. Suffice it to say… the GC was abuzz this afternoon.

Received some wonderful/terrible news today.

If you run across a gen A.I. slop 🤖💩 diagram in an academic journal, I’d love to know about it! Please fill out this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Slop in journals is illuminating about journals’ quality control. And journals would like you to forget their mistakes. #AcademicChatter

The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.

OU has put the professor here on administrative leave:

Really interesting thread. I’ve experienced some of this in my classes, too. About 15-20% of my students are really struggling. I’ve seen some universities implement a first year seminar to help students with some of the more fundamental skills of university work. I think this is a great idea.

Quick read this weekend: “Sex is a Spectrum” by Augustín Fuentes. Fuentes expertly draws from biological research on non-human animals and human anthropology to reveal the inadequacy of the sex binary for understanding human and non-human biological sex. The book is pretty dense, but a great read.

Hello. If you need to smile today, I would recommend the r/IllegallySmolCats subreddit, which I had the distinct pleasure of discovering this morning.

Kudos to Rebecca for leading this charge! Lynn's data is an embarrassment to the scientific enterprise. The skull measurers on Twitter are having a predictable response with the repeated claim that "other data replicate" Lynn's results. Easy to see that's not true for the 2002, 2012, or "new" set

My hot take is that in the era of easily-generated AI nonsense papers journals that want to ensure high quality will need to start hiring full-time professional editors and reviewers instead of relying on volunteer labor from overworked academics.

To put this in context, I was offered a teaching track job in 2023 that had a salary of $55,000.

When my brother was a freshman at Penn State, he paid me to outline a chapter of his Psychology 1000 textbook. I loved it so much that I outlined the whole book.

PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS! EVERYONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR PUBLISHED BOOKS! gonna be reposting your books because hoo you made a book! www.versobooks.com/products/303...

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in our house, but I will be eating leftover Burma Superstar for every meal tomorrow, and for that, I am thankful.

My wife is going to be teaching Intro to Counseling/Intro to Psychotherapy next semester. Does anyone have slides they'd be willing to share with her?