as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments. Current favorites: 1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective! 1/

Hot take: one of the main benefits of running data analyses in 🐬 Docker 🐬 isn't reproducibility, but saving yourself (or your lab) hundreds or thousands of pounds in computer costs*. Here's how... #datascience #docker #rstudio #python *for a very niche set of people

video making very strong (& problematic) claims about the supposed damaging effects of screen time on children's education & cognition is trending on youtube (from the US senate committee)... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_...

video making very strong (& problematic) claims about the supposed damaging effects of screen time on children's education & cognition is trending on youtube (from the US senate committee)... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_...

On Tues, February 17th I'll be giving a talk and short workshop on (narratively) generative modeling for Princeton's psychology department, psychology.princeton.edu/news-events/.... The talk (and maybe the workshop) will be live-streamed for those interested in attending remotely.

I've used Lavaan almost every (work)day for 15 years, but this open source labour of love has never received proper institutional support. I'm delighted to be a small part of an 1.5M OpenScienceNL award, led by Jorgensen, to completely revamp and futureproof Lavaan www.openscience.nl/en/news/45-p...

Wow if you have a UK student loan this is definitely worth checking, Xmas is on @martinlewis.moneysavingexpert.com again this year 🎄🎄https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loan-overpayment-refund

In 2021 we reported that live learning outperformed recorded learning. In a new preregistered analysis, my first senior-author paper led by Stan de Visser (pre-print), we find that this benefit does not increase with interactivity. The potential to interact may be enough to boost learning. A thread:

Happy to share my new paper published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: A critical look at statistical power in computational modeling studies, particularly those based on model selection. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

New paper by brilliant final yer PhD student Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer and colleagues, including 3 undergraduate students (Evans, Ratcliffe, Janaarthanan) 🤩 The Relationship between Perceived Friendship Quality and Self-Judgements in Adolescent Girls from London journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer on how to make the world a better place for young people, the cumulative impact of adversity & how to mitigate it in the Gates Cambridge podcast, So, now what? - @cambridgeuni.bsky.social

This is really neat. I have borrowed the reliability() function to my `easyRasch` package, and use plausible values instead of fully Bayesian estimation to produce similar estimates/CIs, see code example below. RMU point estimates are similar to EAP reliability. pgmj.github.io/easyRasch/re...

I've added a new example to our paper's repo, demonstrating how our reliability method replicates Cronbach's alpha for a simple model, but also how our method can account for: (i) binary data, (ii) varying numbers of items per pps, & (iii) improvement over trials www.bignardi.co.uk/8_bayes_reli...

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

📣New study 📣 We examined the prevalence of food insecurity and its association with mental health and wellbeing, using the 2023 @oxwell.bsky.social survey of 38,430 children and young people aged 8–19 in England with @sjblakemore.bsky.social @minafazeloxford.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/jcv2...

New paper! Excellent work by @bignardi.bsky.social and @minafazeloxford.bsky.social, who leads the Oxwell study The prevalence of food insecurity and its relationship with wellbeing in a large, cross-sectional study of children and young people in England Out soon. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Delighted to be hiring a new Clinical Psychology Lecturer to come and join our vibrant environment at the SGDP Centre @kingsioppn.bsky.social @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social please share! my.corehr.com/pls/coreport...

@drandreahoward.bsky.social, hold my beer.. Latent class growth models are worse than useless, and we've known this for more than 20 years. (See Bauer 2007)

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 Larysa Zasiekina, @sjblakemore.bsky.social‬, Iryna Hlova, @bignardi.bsky.social‬ and I investigated the prevalence of PTSD in adolescents who have experienced war. Our systematic review and meta-analysis is linked below, but read on for highlights… 🧵 doi.org/10.1080/2000...

Amazing funded phd opportunity with great supervisors👇👇👇👇👇

Revealed: 🥣 Diluted juice, no fruit or hot food: how schools are cutting their breakfast club offering due to squeezed funding in government pilot 🥣 Concerns about SEND provision at “inclusive” breakfast clubs

Does anyone know of an available dataset including (1) passively collected data on what Apps are being used in the foreground of one's phone and when, & (2) mental health questionnaire measures (from 1 or many time points)? Thank you 🙏

Our approach to understanding how adversities impact adolescent development often neglects the specificity and complexity of adolescence. In our new review, we propose the adolescent adverse experiences framework to capture adverse experiences at multiple levels: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Data published today from the English Housing Survey shows overcrowding for social tenants having almost doubled in the last 20 years - now nearly one in 10 are overcrowded.

Dress code: robes and skullcap optional "...this is an official speaker invitation, to be a Distinguished Speaker at the upcoming “6th Global Conclave on Neurology and Neurological Disorders" (NEURO Conclave 2025)"

New paper! Adolescents more susceptible to anti-social influence on an experimental task reported lower compliance with future COVID social distancing rules. Prosociality also predicted future compliance, but less clear associations for other factors. OA Link: doi.org/10.1016/j.he...

APA-style Bayesians! Are we doing 95% CrI or 95%CI for credible intervals? #bayesianstatistics #psychology

We are hiring! We're looking for a great project manager to help with a large-scale Wellcome funded study. If you know of anyone that this might appeal to, please share. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/49880/

We’re seeking nominations for up to five outstanding dissertations in cognitive science for the Glushko Dissertation Prize! Each prize will be accompanied by a ✨$10,000 award✨ Self-nominations are welcome! Learn more and nominate at cognitivesciencesociety.org/glushko-diss... 🗓️ Deadline: Jan. 18

American Psychological Association giving big South Park energy this morning

🚨 My team is hiring an undergraduate intern (UK universities only) - a great opportunity, if I can say so myself! Please share widely. Want more info? See here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Looking for a reference - does anyone know of any large, recent studies describing age trends in depression & anxiety in childhood and adolescence ideally separated by gender? Longitudinal or cross-sectional. #devpsy #devpsyc #devpsychsky #devpsycsky #clinpsy

New year, new keyboard (switches & keycaps).

New paper by @bignardi.bsky.social et al Mental health and socio-cognitive predictors of adherence to COVID-19 social distancing rules in adolescents in England www.cell.com/heliyon/full...

*Networks of care for the modern adolescent* 🫶🌻 In our new paper, we combine a #network approach + applied research lens to explore where #youngpeople are accessing #mentalhealth support & how helpful they find it. w/ Simon R White & @minafazeloxford.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Signed! Could not imagine a better place to do a PhD than the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

Do you know any early career researchers in the UK who have contributed something special to improve research practices? The call for the 2025 Dorothy Bishop award is open now! Nominations close on 26 January 2025. www.ukrn.org/2024/12/12/t...

I wrote an article about my dad's death, and how it affected my views on assisted dying, published in the Times Free version here

**We are recruiting** Seeking a postdoc to work on a Wellcome-funded cohort study focusing on social-cognitive processing in typically developing children and adolescents (aged 8-18 years) and children and adolescents with 22q11.1 deletion syndrome. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/49291/

Psychonomes interested in reliability estimation and bayesian measurement models come by poster 179 this evening (bring coffee). #psynom2024 #psychonomics

Our latest paper, published today in Royal Society Open Science, found that being alone heightens 'threat alert' in teenagers—even when they're connected on social media. 🧠📲 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

My dept (UCL Experimental Psychology) has 12 funded PhD studentships for next academic year (Sept 2025 start)! These are only for UK citizens or with right to remain. I would be happy to support applications from students who would like to join my lab. See: www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/researc...

Funded PhD with Dr Stephanie Burnett Heyes Midlands Mental Health and Neurosciences PhD Programme for Healthcare Professionals "IDENTITY: A virtual reality mental healthcare pre-assessment tool for children and young people" Open to NHS healthcare professionals midlandsmhndtp.ac.uk/project/2025...

Does anyone have recommended materials (textbooks, webbooks, youtube vids, blogs, etc.) for learning mixed modelling aimed towards psychology undergraduates?

Equivalence between representational similarity analysis, centered kernel alignment, and canonical correlations analysis #stats #compneuro #neuroscience www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1 week left to apply for this 4-year fully funded PhD studentship: gw4biomed.ac.uk/the-impact-o...

Another excellent evaluation of the Sure Start programme, this time on its effects on youth offending. Once again it shows that investment in early years, preventative services improves life chances, reduces the costs of social failure and delivers major benefits.

Round of applause for whoever did this.