This is the visa that the US gives to new faculty members.

Is the idea that getting into a romantic relationship increases well-being a myth? A new MacLab paper says no. And I had so much to say about this work, I started a Substack: The Unromantic. Links for the paper and the Substack in replies.

The Substack: unromanticprof.substack.com

I think I might just hurl my laptop into the sea

A tale as old as time. Different methods of measuring the supposedly same construct simply...do not. I'll add that I think "subjective" and "objective" measures both tell us something meaningful, just about different things. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Most folks will find their courage by finding their people.

I've watched a lot of people find their courage. They usually believed in something, but they also believed in each other. As co-strugglers, they depended on each other. They comforted and encouraged each other. They helped each other. That investment made them stronger, bolder, and more capable.

In my experience, courage is usually the product of love and/or solidarity. When we are deeply invested in each other, we are more likely to take risks that we wouldn't take out of mere principle, or for the sake of people we feel disconnected from. Our alienation mass produces cowardice.

For potential grad students: if you're interested in this kind of work on assessing and improving close relationships measures, our group just got a grant to do five more years of it. Join our team!

Helena's qualitative work for this was so amazing. Participants summed up sentiment override and their use of global evaluations for us really nicely.

I’ve watched Sam give two talks about this topic (once as a first year grad student which was extremely formative for my research trajectory). Very excited to see this in print!

Did Pseudo measure anything? Well, yes. "Qualitative probing suggested that participants tended to imbue the Pseudo items with relational meaning.” The provocative questions is where else is this happening? What other psych measures only capture general vibes, not the specific constructs we assume?

The meaningless scale measuring 'pseudo' correlated well with established relationship quality variables. In other contexts, authors interpret similar correlation matrices as evidence of a Nuanced Construct, without considering it could be spurious.

Despite having gibberish items, 'Pseudo' was measured reliably (alpha = .95), had good single factor structure (CFI = .98, RMSEA = .07, SRMR = .02), was prospectively predictive of relationship satisfaction. Hard to argue it's not a 'good' scale.

This is schmeasurement's Dead Salmon fMRI study: A cautionary tale of how standard research practices can produce misleading results. I love it. Immediately putting it on my reading lists.

It's out!!🌶️🔥

From this paper: (Holy Cow! Reminds me also of how Bullshit Receptivity items can glom together!)

🚨 YA’LL!! HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS PAPER TO COME OUT FOR AGES. IT IS SO SATURN. I MEAN, IT IS SO GOOD. SAME THING. (JUST READ IT)

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/...

The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

This strike is no longer just about fair wages. It's about whether we actually have the right to strike in this country. Why would employers negotiate with unions in good faith, when they can just wait for the government to force everyone back to work instead? Solidarity with Air Canada's workers.

🧠🧠🧠 PsyArXiv needs you! Please sign up to join our moderator team. First cohort is getting trained on next Monday, with more trainings to come. Easy way to give back to this crucial community resource. Students, postdocs, faculty, all welcome - come one and all!

Western University is offering new scholarships of up to 40k CAD for four years to doctoral students who are studying at, have an offer from, or have had an offer rescinded from one of the top 100 American universities. Come and study with me or one of my colleagues!

More than five million Americans in over 2,100 towns and cities joined us today to say we don't do kings in this country. Thank you for making it clear that we won't be ruled by fear.

A question for #psychology researchers - sth my students ask me often: what if I can't find previous literature that supports my hypotheses? Perhaps they haven't looked widely enough, but let's assume there is really no previous evidence or theory to inform the hypotheses. What is ur take? RT pls.

LLMs are not intelligent. They are powerful search engines that inhale content and spit it back out in the requested format. They don't know what they're saying - they can't tell fact from fiction or news from satire. And they don't cite their sources, so now you can't tell the difference either.

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found here👇 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

Overheard at a train station: Friend 1, pulling out her phone: "Okay, let's see what's going on in the world, eh?" Friend 2, looking disgusted: "No thanks"

Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

HAPPY PRIDE 🏳️‍🌈 Under Trump, research using terms like “Trans,” “LGBTQ,” & “Gender identity” is being defunded. These terms reflect real people who deserve science that includes them. Stand with us to protect LGBTQ+ science from political erasure. grant-watch.us/nih-data.html @rcmedphys.bsky.social

Logging onto Bluesky these days is like trying to read a dystopian novel so depressing that you can only stomach a few pages at a time.

The Free Speech Administration throwing down arguably the biggest sledgehammer against free thought and association in my lifetime.

Systems theorists: everything is a system! Advertisers: heeeyyyy what an idea

4/n The AI industry will do almost anything rather than contemplate a marketplace where they don’t set the price for training data at the low value they want it to have. Not because you can’t train AI at that price point, but because you can’t make zillions at that price point.

Dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, and serotonin are the four humors of social media.

Private, for-profit surgical and diagnostic facilities get $280m in the Ontario budget These investor-owned facilities cost the public purse 2-3x more than hospitals for the same procedure www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

"You're asking me to get from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there?" To continue the metaphor: because you're paying thousands of dollars a semester for an immersive hiking experience.

You're a node in a network with a handful of connections to other nodes. The way to make the world a better place is not by trying to bend the whole network to your will. Try to be a good node, and encourage your direct connections to be good nodes too.

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org

For my multilevel modeling students, I created a tutorial sharing all the main functions I use for data cleaning in R. It took me maaaany years to figure out my cleaning workflow, so I wanted to share it with y'all in case I can save anyone else time :-) sites.google.com/view/gabriel...

De-identify your data before you share it. De-identify your data before you share it. De-identify your data before you share it. De-identify your data before you share it. De-identif

For Mother’s Day I am asking for me and other wealthy Canadians to be taxed at a higher level. Read about it at the link below, and find out more by following @patmillscanada.bsky.social 🇨🇦 www.cbc.ca/news/busines...

Pro tip: If you're a US-based scientist and your research area is not on this list, add "quantum" in front of whatever you're doing.

This is all because we didn't come down hard enough on Clippy

I assume each prospective pope had to submit a preaching statement, leadership statement, cover letter, CV, recommendation letters from three different bishops...

Western University is seeking applications for Canada Excellence Research Chairs. Please reach out if you are interested in Theme 2: Neuroscience. Western has extraordinary strengths in cognitive, molecular and systems neuroscience across species (rodents, NHPs, humans) uwo.ca/research/cer...

Imagine if projector salespeople told you projectors were great in the classroom not because they let everybody see an image better but rather because now every course could be about projectors, because projectors are the future and the time to opt out of talking about projectors all day has passed.

If you have an interest in non-human primate systems neuroscience and/or imaging esp. if it relates to development or learning, call me! These are major chair positions that come with at least $4M or $8M over 8 years, depending on career stage.

The thing that makes the US exceptional for science is the absolutely astronomical amount of money its government has historically been willing to invest in science. We cannot magically create that kind of infrastructure elsewhere.