Penn State bloom 🌸

Are different desires (e.g., food, sleep, alcohol, cannabis) experienced and regulated the same way? We tested this question in a new preprint with Yang Liu, @minzlicht.bsky.social, @wilhelmhofmann.bsky.social, and @kevinmking.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Super excited to share that after graduating from Smith College this May, I’ll be joining @shirleybwang.bsky.social‘s Computational Clinical Science Lab at Yale University as a lab manager! Huge thank you to everyone who supported me throughout the process, so excited for everything ahead 🥳

Why do participants stop responding in #ESM / #EMA studies? 📱🔔 Average compliance is about 7️⃣9️⃣%, but that hides massive variation. Our new m-Path blog reviews predictors of response compliance: study design, incentives, participant traits, and time effects. 🔗 blog.m-path.io/blog/blog-1/...

This Deep Dive covers work by @hadarfisher.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social @christianwebb.bsky.social exploring whether smartphone passive sensors & LLMs can track activation in adolescents w/ anhedonia receiving behavioral activation therapy youtu.be/K1Lo50QBcQM?...

Now out in npj Digital Medicine 🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our systematic review and meta-analysis examines how well language-based models detect depression from text. We reviewed 123 studies (40,000 + observations) using NLP and machine learning.

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

I am elated to share that I will be joining Yale's Clinical Psychology PhD program this fall, under @shirleybwang.bsky.social's mentorship! I am so grateful for the opportunity to continue working with the wonderful team at the CCS Lab, and to everyone in my corner who helped make this happen! 😊

New paper from our team: Can ML identify which adolescents benefit most from school-based mindfulness? In 8,376 students (MYRIAD trial), models detected statistically significant but clinically negligible differential effects (d ≈ .07–.08). Precision prevention is hard...

Our partnership with the @inclivio.com continues as we get closer to #SAS2026. Inclivio provides EMA researchers with tools that make data collection easier and more participant friendly. Like (1 pt) and repost (3 pts) to enter a drawing for free access to Inclivio! inclivio.com

We're hiring! The Computational Clinical Science Lab @ Yale is seeking a full-time lab manager/research coordinator to start in early summer 2026. For more information about the position and to apply: forms.gle/LtQwVgPUfaGk... Please share widely & consider applying!

Fantastic post-bacc opportunity! ⬇️

Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️ webbslab.com/job-postings

(1/9) New year, new preprint alert!! 🤩🚨 We provide new evidence linking intolerance of uncertainty and death anxiety in religious/spiritual individuals. Link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... See 🧵 for a brief summary 👇 #deathanxiety #intoleranceofuncertainty

Honored to have our work recognized by @bbrfoundation.bsky.social, alongside many colleagues doing important work in the field.

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Sometimes, doing research feels truly fulfilling. Working on this paper was one of those moments. doi.org/10.1037/ccp0...

New preprint alert! (1/5)🌟 I’m thrilled to share the preprint of my first first-authored PhD paper! We test whether shared reinforcement functions help explain why adolescents who engage in one self-destructive behavior often engage in others. Summary⬇ osf.io/preprints/ps...

💫 Excited to share new preprint a systematic review & meta-analysis of 123 studies (40k+ ppl) on how well language-based models detect depression from text. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 - www.cpconf.org @robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop More info to come soon!

Although most of my photos right now are of State College autumn, here's Happy Valley from the sky this August. It was awe-inspiring to get this view. So, come join us here! I'll be recruiting a graduate student to the Empathy & Moral Psychology (EMP) Lab during this cycle, to start in fall 2026.

delighted to see this published 🙌 using EMA, we (with @roryoc.bsky.social) investigated suicidal ideation in daily life. we found that it arises from an interaction of within-person increases in loneliness and an individual’s level of personality functioning psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Thrilled to share a new paper in @jamapsychiatry.com on path asymmetry in complex dynamic systems of psychopathology! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... With amazing collaborators @tfblanken.bsky.social, Han van der Maas, & Denny Borsboom 🥳

1: In 2023, I wrote this paper arguing that research on active ingredients of CBT, and by extension on their mechanisms, is not close to improving therapy outcomes. I just read a paper on inhibitory learning improving outcomes of exposure. Egg on my face? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper led by Nele Assmann, in which we used causal forests to test the heterogeneity of treatment effects of Schema Therapy vs. DBT for severe Borderline Personality Disorder.

Interesting new special issue in Psychological Assessment. Edited by Kristin Naragon-Gainey and @kstanton.bsky.social Here's their overview paper: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... And here's our contribution, which will win us no friends: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Thanks to @bbrfoundation.bsky.social for highlighting our lab's study (led by @hadarfisher.bsky.social & @nigeljaffe.bsky.social) using📱smartphone sensors + LLM-derived text ratings to track behavioral activation and symptom change in teens with anhedonia. bbrfoundation.org/content/smar...

We built the openESM database: ▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place ▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software ▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python Find out more: 🌐 openesmdata.org 📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Here are two "I can't believe these are free" online stats texts books that cover both underlying principles and practical applications in R that I regularly refer to. Learning Statistics with R learningstatisticswithr.com Doing Meta-Analysis with R bookdown.org/MathiasHarre...

Now out in NPP – Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience! 📱🧠 Can LLMs and smartphone sensing help us track therapy progress in real time?

🆕 study by @hadarfisher.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social @christianwebb.bsky.social tested whether smartphone mobility sensing & LLM ratings of text can track behavioral activation in teens to boost engagement in rewarding activities www.nature.com/articles/s44...

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Congrats to CHM Core Faculty member Simon Goldberg and Founder/Director Dr. Richard J. Davidson on receiving a $2.8M grant from National Institutes of Mental Health to support their research on digital interventions for mental health interventions! @sgoldbergphd.bsky.social @d3center.bsky.social

Had a great time presenting my poster exploring people's thoughts & feelings about death w/ #BERTopic this evening at the Society for Research in Psychopathology Annual Meeting! Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat– it was wonderful learning more about others' work and nerding out! 💀🪦 #SRP2025

Why We're Like This Ep. 1: Shannon Sauer-Zavala on how to be less neurotic open.substack.com/pub/olgakhaz...

The lab has been doing some cool work around basic affect regulation processes and their links to substance use. This paper was just accepted at JSAD. OSF has the pre-print, pre-reg, codebooks, and analysis files here: osf.io/ha58c/ Paper is here: www.jsad.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Two new preprints on multilevel HMMs! Time series data is now pervasive in psychology and new methods are needed to model the dynamics in such data. Hidden Markov Models (HHMs) are powerful models for dynamics in which a system is switching between a number of discrete states.

Postdoc with us in Columbus! 🌰 I'm pumped to recruit a 1-2 year postdoc working on: - mechanisms of change in treatment - treatment personalization - emotion reg With a breakdown of: 50% research 30% treatment 20% mentorship/collaboration/conferences osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

Year 2 of Temple's Demystifying Graduate Applications Event!

📱EMA is increasingly used in intervention studies to acquire a more fine-grained and ecologically valid assessment of change. But EMA is relatively burdensome. What's the added value? We tried to address this question in our new paper now out @jmirpub.bsky.social www.jmir.org/2025/1/e69297 1/n

Now on CRAN, the apa7 package extends @davidgohel.bsky.social's flextable to get the finicky details of APA style right with minimal fuss, even in tables, even in .docx. #rstats wjschne.github.io/apa7/

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Machine learning can identify which adolescents are more likely to benefit from SBMT vs. TAU. This may point to a path toward precision prevention in schools. Next step: prospective trials testing whether algorithm-guided intervention assignment improves outcomes. 4/n

🚨 New research alert We applied machine learning to the large MYRIAD trial (84 schools and 8,376 UK teens) to ask: 👉 Which adolescents benefit most from mindfulness delivered in schools? Bottom line: One-size-fits-all doesn’t work. Paper link: tinyurl.com/vvpvfunh 1/n

Deep diving the newest from @jamesmcmurtry.bsky.social The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy. It is really, really good. A true wordsmith. Builds great characters. Tells bold truths. Writes about getting old. I'll put him up against Prine, Clark, Van Zant, Earle.... Give a listen. Catch him live.

Potential grad applicants: I'm hoping to take 1-2 new students this cycle! There's no need to email me in advance unless you have specific questions that aren't answered on the lab or psych department's website - everyone's applications will be considered equally. u.osu.edu/mattlab/2025...

(1/6) New pre-print alert! 🤩🚨 We provide new evidence for contra-hedonic functions of NSSI & ED behaviors in adolescents. See 🧵 for a brief summary 👇 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excellent new paper spearheaded by lab member @hadarfisher.bsky.social finding that emotion rigidity (assessed via EMA) in youth predicts future depressive symptoms over a 2 year follow-up.

🚨New paper on emotion rigidity as a risk factor for future depression out in BRAT! Thank you to @christianwebb.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social and the awesome teddylab team @nigeljaffe.bsky.social, KristinaPidvirny, and Anna Tierney 🙌 Free 50d access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lRqe1KMdl...

🧠📱Excited to share our invited commentary in @jamanetworkopen.com on the promise and pitfalls of using smartphones (and wearables) to track psychopathology w/ @hadarfisher.bsky.social and linked to excellent paper by @whitneyringwald.bsky.social, @aidangcw.bsky.social & team. tinyurl.com/5n8z4r6e