1/ Another @sadcatlab.bsky.social paper 👀 Cognitive change methods and cognitive change in CBTs: are they important? What do we know? What is anything? Here we draw a link between the literature on cognitive reappraisal and cognitive restructuring in CBTs. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

We just got approved to hire a teaching professor in Quantitative Methods! This is the *very* rare tenure track teaching position at Berkeley. I'll be chairing the search committee. Official job ad coming later this summer!

👀 Read my in-depth series of articles about how OMB has taken control of NIH Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) despite having ZERO statutory authority to do so. (This is illegal!)

having one of those days

1/ New paper 👀 TL; DR the COMET single session intervention (SSI) was superior in reducing depression, anxiety, and to a lesser extent improving well-being than a waiting control in college students. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Brought in some of the lavender lemon curd brumble cake I made as an anniversary present and their review was "elevated fruit loop". I feel like I should be offended but, honestly, pretty accurate description.

With @remyfurrer.bsky.social, a new piece in Nature Human Behavior. The standard description of a polygenic score as a "genetic predisposition" essentializes a statistical construct. It's not language policing: PGS are a new kind of entity; now is the time to think carefully about what they are.

I just can't help myself sometimes. I need to apologize to my students that were subjected to this silliness today... #statsmeme #Bayes

1: Data-Driven and Computational Approaches for Improving the Characterisation and Treatment of Mental Disorders 👥 With @shirleybwang.bsky.social, @dpmoriarity.bsky.social, @maddyfrumkin.bsky.social, & @marilynpicciri1.bsky.social 📍 Friday 29th of May, 5:30-6:50pm, Room 124, P1 Level

Some evidence of decreasing depression rates among adolescents from the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. 60% of teens with depression reported receiving mental health treatment (31% taking meds) www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/d...

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

Excellent blog & fact check of Jay Bhattacharya on status of grants awards & ability to spend FY2026 funding from @27unihted.bsky.social. A great thing to read as Jay goes before the Senate next week. substack.com/@27unihted/n...

Diagnostic criteria for autism and OCD are built largely around male presentations, contributing to underdiagnosis in females, gender-diverse individuals, and marginalized populations.

Internal notes reveal that in March, the mental-health institute (NIMH) projected it'd only be able to issue ~5% of its typical new awards because of the shortage, potentially leaving $500 million unspent.

NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the country, leaving labs reeling in the meantime. “I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”

Well, would ya look at that! NSF is going to send >10% of its current budget to industry (read: tech start ups) instead of universities…it’s as if the admin is trying to dismantle our basic science mechanism and use it as a start up fund for private companies 💁🏻‍♀️ www.nsf.gov/tip/updates/...

Brain Connectivity & Dual Diagnosis 🧠 New research from MUSC ARC clinical colleagues! @jimprisciandaro.bsky.social A deep dive into the brain’s wiring in individuals with Bipolar Disorder (BD) and Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) #neuroscience #bipolar #alcoholusedisorder #research #brain

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

The censorship at TTU is so bad that my someone above me, outside my discipline is intersting himself into my students training without my consent, insisting he is required to do so because of the 'policy'. @standupforscience.net

I loudly fanboyed in our apartment when I got invited to collaborate on this paper- and the experienced lived up to the hype! I've never been part of a project that expanded my thinking as much as this- grateful to @miriforbes.bsky.social for looping me in+ excited to see people's thoughts!

Which leads to the main finding: Empirically derived phenotypes nested within each disorder outperformed the DSM-defined constructs. Constructs derived from patterns of symptom covariation grouped individuals with more similar symptoms, and may get us closer to underlying mechanisms.

We looked at other approaches to quantifying heterogeneity too, finding they were not interchangeable. Construct-focused heterogeneity should be the priority for work on mechanisms (biomarkers, treatment response), and person-focused is more relevant for communication and treatment planning.

Turns out empirically derived phenotypes (data-driven symptom sets) nested within traditional mental disorders can help reduce diagnostic heterogeneity! We learned so much cool and interesting stuff in this study. I could talk (/post) about it all day, but here’s a few highlights (🧵)

When patients ask, “What disorder do I really ‘have’?” the honest answer is usually more interesting and messier than a single diagnostic label. I wrote for the @nytimes.com on what I wish people understood about diagnoses and the nature of mental health problems. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

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.

New paper showing insufficient evidence for neuroimaging features to define reproducible, biologically valid, & clinically meaningful schizophrenia subtypes. The subtypes identified to date likely reflect continuous variation within the disorder rather than discrete, biologically distinct entities.

Beautiful piece by Awais. Money quote below. My one concern is that many psychiatrists do not in fact mean what Awais means when they say "you have ADHD". They mean it in exactly the same way one says "you have liver cancer". And it's very harmful for mental health science and practice.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

I also created a version of the 'guess the correlation' game. Students always enjoyed it, but the original website (with fun retro design) started to require a google account login. So I created my own version. Play it here: lakens.github.io/statistical_...

BRB, pre-registering a study on concordance between tendency to: (1) Rationalize that an LLM must have true intelligence because it demonstrates empathy and kindness and (2) Believe that wait staff are flirting because they smiled

4) The short and incisive paper by Anderson 1972: More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

3) Then there is of course the ontology of complex systems by Wimsatt. It's a lot but well worth a week of your time. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Wimsatt: Perhaps, just perhaps, the best explanation of a phenomenon at a given level is to be found at the same level. Kendler: Noone would seek to explain hypertension at the level of quarks. A few of my favourite papers on this topic of absurd biological reductionism: 🧵

This...the fetishizing of unreplicable neuroscience in order to legitimize our work is self-defeating. We don't need to know that depression is in the brain (as opposed to what???) to know it is problematic. How much money have we wasted proving something like depression is "real"?

The ASSIST Lab @ UW–Madison is hiring a full-time Research Specialist! This position is a great fit for someone interested in clinical psychology research, suicide prevention, intensive longitudinal methods/EMA, and digital approaches to understand mental health. jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/researc...

Investigative journalism is inherently about hope. Subscribe to our new podcast, “Paper Trail” — and you might change the way you see the world, too. 🎧 Listen to the trailer: https://propub.li/48Mu9w1

There’s fairly good evidence that antidepressants are overprescribed in the US and less effective than advertised, and obviously these fascists are doing this because of eugenics; but forcing millions of people to quit SSRIs cold-turkey would (imho) trigger an almost unfathomable wave of suicides

Looks like I'll get my first chance to be a reviewer on an NIH study section. Got a training coming up soon, but any tips or tricks from the more seasoned reviewers out there?

Canvas may be down but us Blackboard Ultra users still can't figure out where anything is so at this point it's a tie.

Very excited to share new findings from an NIMH-funded R21 on the neurodevelopment of worry! Manuscript led by super 🌟 Postdoctoral Scholar in the lab @ceciwestbrook.bsky.social , check it out! 👇👇👇 @psychiatry.pitt.edu

Thinking about swapping my headshot for an AI-aged version I can grow into vs. trying to figure out the ratio of grey hairs that necessitates an update.

Are we still posting our raw datasets now that they're being farmed for genAI-written papers? I'm starting to feel differently now sharing data before I'm totally done with my own research questions...

2026 Kentucky Derby results: 1. 🐎 2. 🐎 3. 🐎 4. 🐎 5. 🐎 6. 🐎 7. 🐎 8. 🐎 9. 🐎 10. 🐎 11. 🐎 12. 🐎 13. 🐎 14. 🐎 15. 🐎 16. 🐎 17. 🐎 18. 🐎

Are your pharmacy calls being answered by AI voice chatbots? Doctor's offices? Insurance companies? I recorded a call with the CVS LLM chatbot while trying to fill an Rx. It could not process "I have a new prescription." CVS Pharmacy is an LLM Voice-Chatbot Now ⤵️ www.patreon.com/posts/157128...

What does accelerated biological aging actually mean for children? Can we measure it with algorithms only trained in adults? And do different biomarkers of aging measure the same thing? Find out at my #SOBP2026 talk tomorrow afternoon 🧬🧠

Lot's of folks cheering this paper's implications, as if it shows all's well in how we do science and can return to business as usual. IT DOES NOT SAY THAT! But by the paper's own logic, if we can't establish a crisis (using binary replication rates), we also can't say there isn't a crisis. 1/3