Looking forward to this year's Behavior Genetics Association (BGA) conference, in my hometown of Amsterdam! Deadline for abstracts is next week, February 16th: bga.org/content.aspx...

Today I am wearing #blue4ReNU for ReNU Syndrome awareness day 💙 4th February (or 4/2), was chosen by families to reflect the 4-2 in RNU4-2 🧬 ReNU syndrome is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder impacting ~100,000 individuals globally 🧠 🌎 lnkd.in/dvruKxZH #ReNUSyndrome @renusyndrome.bsky.social

Great piece in the NYtimes with quotes from @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social and @sashagusevposts.bsky.social. The misuse of NIH datasets with sensitive personal information for racist aims should be concerning for anybody interested in scientific integrity. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

🚨 anyone with methodological skills, an intrest in psychiatric genetics and having impact no psychiatric care should consider this PhD position in Amsterdam with Wouter Peyrot! Its work related to THE first example I give when asked when and how genetics might actually influence care. 🚨

Any Dutch who might have thought to contest implementation of the anti-fireworks law next year are going to have a hard time making their case, after the Vondelkerk burnt down tonight www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/...

Pleased to advertise that the auditory labs from UNLV will have presentations from post-bacc, grad student, post-doc, and faculty researchers @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social and the APCAM auditory conference in Denver in a few weeks. Please see the image for details on our presentations.

Better schools can compensate for dispositions

We have an open postdoc position in Social Science Genomics in Berlin! Includes gene-environment interplay within German population cohorts & experimental online survey studies to probe public perceptions of potential DNA biomarker applications 🔗 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/2196134/2025...

Rate and noise in human amygdala drive increased exploration in aversive learning www.nature.com/articles/s41... - another example where noise is exploited as a tunable resource to enable exploration

OPEN PHD POSITION - Come join our group! The IMPRS at @mpi-nl.bsky.social is offering an PhD position on modelling structured meaning in the brain, supervised by me and Helen De Hoop at the Centre for Language Studies in the @dondersinst.bsky.social - www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe... #NeuroJobs #cogsci

More top notch rigorous scientific building blocks breaking down… www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

🚨 I’ll be joining Psychological Science as an Associate Editor starting next month. People at, or near, my intersection of psych genetics, clinical psych, psychological Epidemiology should consider the journal for your best work! (read the EiCs editorial on the journal policies/goals below)

Come join us for a 4-year PhD on effects of rare gene disruptions involved in speech disorder, investigated in human neuronal models (via gene-editing, tissue culture, brain organoids, high-res microscopy, transcriptomics, epigenomics). More info: www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe... #AcademicJobs #PhDJobs 🧬🧪

The Estonian Biobank is an awesome resource (and @klehto.bsky.social is similarly awesome) — a fantastic opportunity to do some great science!

🐥 Early-bird announcement The abstract deadline for BGA 2026 will be February 15, 2026. BGA will take place June 23-26, in beautiful Amsterdam. Time to start thinking about the cool findings you want to share with your international colleagues at our annual meeting!

So happy to see this out! 🎉 We surveyed people from 68 countries about how they encounter and engage with information about science! See the thread below for a summary of the main findings 👇 Congratulations to the whole team, especially @nielsmede.bsky.social and @colognaviktoria.bsky.social 👏

It's out! 🥁 In this five-episode series, we dive deep into the mysteries of the human brain. 🧠 So how special is the human brain? How did it evolve? And can we ever really understand it? Grateful to all the amazing guests, incl. @matthewcobb.bsky.social, for their ideas. Enjoy! 👏

The recording is now available so that you can confirm that I indeed have a German accent and color-match my outfits with my Zoom background. youtu.be/YL0co26ng-g?...

🔥🔥🧠PhD positions are open in my lab, studying brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders based on neuroimaging MRI scans. Due: Dec 1, 2025. If you are interested, please DM me.

updated preprint from @loganjames.bsky.social @themusiclab.org: humans share acoustic preferences with a variety of other species I love this finding—in call/song/noise/etc pairs where we know (from prior work) that animals have a preference, humans reliably identify the more-attractive sound

We couldn't not rate this classic early DAG by our beloved collective granddagy, Sewall Wright. 14/10. Ten for the DAG, plus one for each cute guinea-pig node. From Wright (1920) "The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in Determining the Piebald Pattern of Guinea-Pigs"

Great review on The Genetics of Human Handedness: Microtubules and Beyond www.cell.com/trends/genet... - handedness is such an interesting phenotype!

I’m looking for a postdoc to join my lab and work on Multi-Brain Stimulation (MBS). Learn more about the project and how to apply below 👇 This position is funded by the @erc.europa.eu Reposts are very welcome 🙏 #Postdoc #Neuroscience #BrainStimulation #EEG #SocialNeuroscience

For anyone who has not read Stigler's wonderful paper on the Epic Story of Maximum Likelihood, I cannot recommend it enough. You will laugh, you might cry, and you will certainly walk away learning something new. #statssky #statistics www.mit.edu/~18.655/pape...

New paper alert! Rare DNA changes in the SETBP1 gene are linked to speech problems & diverse syndromes affecting brain development. Work led by ace postdoc @maggiemkwong.bsky.social uncovered impact of different gene variants, coupling clinical/speech evaluation to molecular & cellular readouts.🧬🗣️🔬🧪

Our conference on Dialectical Biology, the Marxist tradition represented by the work of Richard Lewontin, is this weekend! Join us Friday to Sunday, online or in Toronto, register here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale... Help spread the word if you can!

“Do the results support the conclusion? Is the analysis sound? If yes and yes, keep your review brief and constructive.”

I finally have some new work to share - some thoughts on how we perceive style with a sprinkle of aesthetics, Fechner, and most importantly: labradors 🐕 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

QUESTION 🚨: I wrote code that uses methods of moments too generate realistic synthetic data for a UKB trait from the showcase page. I might be able too add corelation between traits (have to find a source) to allow multivariate synth data, is this usefull enough to wrap in an R package??

📢 Call for Abstracts! The 2nd Annual Conference on #AestheticDevelopment takes place on Nov 20, 2025, at the MPIEA. We invite submissions on how children engage with and develop through the arts. 🗓 Deadline: Oct 12, 2025 🔗 indico.ae.mpg.de/event/29/abstracts/ #Aesthetics #Conference

Out today! www.cell.com/current-biol...

🧩Learning to talk & read isn’t just about effort or teaching—it’s shaped by biology, experience & context 🧠Our new review links genetics, neuroscience, psychology & education to show why some children find language or reading easier. 📖 doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🖼️genes→brain→cognition→behaviour 🧵👇

Two birds of a gene - catch Matt Keller's webinar at @uio.no on October 15th. Please share www.sv.uio.no/promenta/eng... @ispg.bsky.social @behaviorgenetic.bsky.social @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social @essgn.bsky.social @ibg.colorado.edu

Now I know what you’re thinking: Did they make a video abstract for this important study? Reader,

Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350.... A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n 🗣️🧬🧪

Mathematical psychology uses simulation as well, to understand models that are too complex to understand completely without it. It can help uncover surprising behaviour or predictions. Crucially, the sims are helping understand models, not people. The *psychological* knowledge is gained elsewhere.

New publication from our lab: Brain Dynamics during Architectural Experience: Prefrontal and Hippocampal Regions Track Aesthetics and Spatial Complexity 1st author is Lara Gregorian, with collaborators @pfvelasco.bsky.social Zita Patai and Fiona Zisch Stimuli: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

New preprint with @rogierk.bsky.social @paulbuerkner.com - we introduce "relative measurement uncertainty" - a reliability estimation method that's applicable across a broad class of Bayesian measurement models (e.g., generative-, computational- and item response theory-models osf.io/h54k8

We’re looking for a postdoc to join our Max Planck group in Germany some time in 2026. If you have computational and/or neuroimaging expertise, and are interested in questions intersecting perception and cognition, please reach out! I’ll also be happy to chat at the #Bernsteinconference this week.

Our paper "A fragmented field" has just been accepted at AMPPS. We find it's not just you, psychology is really getting more confusing (construct and measure fragmentation is rising). We updated the preprint with the (substantial) revision, please check it out. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Intervening on a central node in a network likely does little given that its connected neighbors will "flip it back" immediately. Happy to see this position supported now. "Change is most likely [..] if it spreads first among relatively poorly connected nodes." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The most universally agreed upon property that sets emotion/affect apart from everything else is valence: approach/avoid; pleasant/unpleasant. Here they target its computation in flies, where you can really figure out the biology. We know so little about how valence is computed by brains. Exciting!

Our new paper is out, in which we developed an approach to transform Polygenic Scores (PGSs) into disorder probabilities (i.e., the absolute lifetime disorder risk). Below a thread 👇 open access link: rdcu.be/eIjvC

🚨 New preprint out! We reconstructed parental haplotypes in >440k individuals (UK & Estonian biobanks) to estimate assortative mating directly in the parental generation. This reveals intensified assortment in recent generations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations to one of #GENEAmsterdam's founding members, Wouter Peyrot, for receiving an ERC starting grant! www.amsterdamumc.org/en/research/...

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al. Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics? Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants. 1/3 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

It was a pleasure introducing PsyNet and its many applications at the Laboratory for Experimental Social Psychology today! Thanks @felixhermans.bsky.social for the invitation and all PsyNet developers, incl. @pmcharrison.bsky.social and @norijacoby.bsky.social for creating such an amazing platform!