What’s driving the overlap between psychopathology dimensions? Not comorbidity – nomorbidity. Most of our samples contain people with little psychopathology, and shared absence of psychopathology dimensions can look like shared presence if you assume a linear association in the population.

Exciting day. My set-theoretic reconceptualization of the DSM (w/ MDD, GAD, and PTSD as empirical examples) is out today in JPCS, along with four invited commentaries and my response. I'm biased, but I recommend all six papers. I was really jazzed by all four commentaries. 1/25

Happy to be part of this paper. 1. Depression and personality functioning are pretty fungible. 2. It is hard to statistically work one's way around latent correlations of .75 to .87. 3. The perils of partialling remain grossly underappreciated (see www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...)

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I'm really excited to share a new preprint! Lab studies have consistently shown that stress and negative emotions make people drink alcohol, but studies of daily life (EMA) keep failing to find it. What does that mean for the shared theoretical prediction both designs test? osf.io/preprints/ps...

This might be one of the most insane scandals in game history When Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines

Human-AI relationships and their therapeutic implications www.emerald.com/mhdt/article...

🌟 Out in Clinical Psychology Review after years in the making: Pleased to share the 1st meta-analytic network analysis (MAGNA) investigating core maintaining features of anxiety symptoms pooling 156 networks (N = 303,151). w/Belli, Tichelaar, @sachaepskamp.bsky.social & @cycology.bsky.social 🧵:

AI in education = commercialisation of a collective responsibility outsourcing a social, civic, and democratic process of cultivating the coming generation to commercial and capitalist enterprise whose priority is profit

Using (multilevel) VAR models? Ever checked how well they actually fit your data? @jmbh.bsky.social & I created VARcheck, an R package for visual model checking for VAR models. Blogpost with workflow: bsiepe.github.io/blog/2026-05... 📝Paper: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 💻Docs: bsiepe.github.io/VARcheck/

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

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read this and tell me again that long term memory is organized semantically

I spent the past semester building interactive teaching apps with AI-assisted coding. I used my personal website to share them with my students, but that makes them hard to find for other educators. So I built Galvoro — galvoro.app

I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.

Heartbreaking, really really disturbing and gross: AI toys aren't remotely a good idea www.wired.com/story/the-ne...

A review of 18 studies found no consistently reproducible subtypes of schizophrenia, suggesting that differences in brain structure across patients may reflect a spectrum rather than discrete biological categories.

Investigating differences in common mental health symptom expression and co-occurrence across ethnicities rdcu.be/fgmQl - using moderated network analysis to show the influence of ethnicity on both symptom levels and symptom co-occurrence

Exploring the dynamic system changes underlying the resolution of social anxiety in individuals receiving cognitive behavioural therapy www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

After 150 years of boring wooden Galton boards, I finally fixed it! Now with lasers, bazookas, bombs, pinball bumpers, and extremely serious sci-fi hamsters. 🎯 EXTREME GALTON 👇 sachaepskamp.com/extreme_galton

What makes behavioral interventions work beyond the psychological theory they implement? Their format, level of engagement, delivery modality? In a new paper analyzing 274 interventions from 15 megastudies (4.1M+ participants), we tested 19 features: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2

World Psychiatry ~ The lived experience of persons who attempt suicide: a bottom-up review co-designed, co-produced and co-written by experts by experience and academics. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Officially out TODAY in Child Development! It's good to try challenging tasks and explore on your own, but not when it might be too hard and help isn't available. Children get that. w/ Kat Shannon, Aneesa Conine-Nakano, Willem Frankenhuis, @mcxfrank.bsky.social academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

I am so pro-behavioral sequences. Especially excited that the network metrics outperformed total screen time in predicting mental health.

OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c Now it's over to users! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...

📝 New preprint on the threat of cyborg propaganda to democracy. We discuss how the key divide in online influence is no longer bots vs humans. We are entering an era of 'cyborg propaganda': Verified human identities disseminate centrally generated, AI-crafted narratives 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

I've been inspired to become a founder of a new startup that develops brain-to-brain interface technology. It's called Talk. We're going to reinvent communication for the digital age. The best part is that we're able to zero-shot transfer the full computational stack already used by your brain!

Sneak peak from our paper led by amazing Erik Bekker ! 👇🏼 arxiv.org/abs/2601.21016

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Comparing registrations to published papers is essential to research integrity - and almost no one does it routinely because it's slow, messy, and time-demanding. RegCheck was built to help make this process easier. Today, we launch RegCheck V2. 🧵 regcheck.app

“Our findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque.” @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com et al. arxiv.org/abs/2601.115...

🌟📝 Just out in World Psychiatry: Our new piece demonstrates the added value of dynamic symptom networks for predicting treatment outcomes beyond baseline severity & common covariates, with an added explained variance of 9-22% at post-treatment & follow-up. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Hurray, Omega-3 ends all mental suffering! Reduction of stress, anxiety, and depression with SMD > 3! Quite a lubricated review process, too: Received 8 Sep 2025; Revised 17 Nov; and accepted on Christmas (24 Dec). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Pleased to share for those using #rstats for analyzing #dyadic data, that we released a major update of dySEM on CRAN (now ver. 1.4.1) *just* before the winter break. New functionality for scripting/outputting dyadic SEMs, along with (much) more test coverage! 🧵 cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Should scientists apply to OpenAI's fund for research on AI & mental health? Should policymakers consider it a credible safety effort? Avriel Epps & I see it as "grantwashing," and it's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots. We explain: www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

Can Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? Chatbots can be responsive in ways humans see as supportive, yet cannot provide the benefits of a real human. My concern is that as more people go to chatbots for social contact, they will not be available to real humans. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Call for papers: Emotion special issue on Affect Dynamics Across Multiple Timescales (moments→days→years) and links to mental and physical health. Letters of intent due Jan 15, 2026. Details/submission: www.apa.org/pubs/journal... Please share with colleagues/trainees. @affectscience.bsky.social

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion. That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

On news that Google has told advertisers that it plans to bring ads to Gemini in 2026, resurfacing this on worst case scenarios and what to do about it from Daniel Barcay, Executive Director of the Center for Humane Technology.

Excited to share a Registered Report in J. of Personality looking at the “perils of partialing” – led by the Bluesky-less Leigha Rose with @drlynam.bsky.social and me. (1) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Had a quick go at fitting a GAM and showing the 95% interval for each 'peak':

OpenAI says a suicidal teenager should have read their fine print

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

This is the most alarming story I’ve read today. Giving up the fight before it’s started

🚨 SynthNet is out 🚨 Researchers propose new constructs and measures faster than anyone can track. We (@anniria.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci) built a search engine to check what already exists and help identify redundancies; indexing 74,000 scales from ~31,500 instruments in APA PsycTests. 🧵1/3

All control conditions in randomized trials of psychological treatment have serious problems. Maybe we should stop using them at some point? Read my new open access paper in World Psychiatry doi.org/DOI:10.1002/...

“Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.”