Excited to share our new paper asking a simple question: Why do mental and metabolic health so often go hand in hand? We (@camillanord.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social) tested whether shared neurocognitive signatures play a role in this relationship www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Does social media use show established neurocognitive signatures of addiction? Concerns about social media addiction are widespread, yet whether platforms' design features actually engage the same neurocognitive pathways as established addictions has remained untested. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🚨New Preprint Announcement🚨 Social Media Reward Sensitivity and Depressive Symptoms Over Time 🧵 Social media platforms are designed to maximise engagement by amplifying social rewards such as “likes”, and there is widespread concern that these digital designs contribute to mental health declines.

Journal editors - the status quo on preregistration is not working! You need to check submissions vs. preregistrations before sending articles out for review. *56%* of experiments I reviewed in last year have severe problems with non-disclosure, undocumented deviations, & more - see Claude summary ↓

1/ "Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. The updated version of this preprint is now online! THREAD🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397

🚨 🎉 Our CONSENSUS VIEW, “An international consensus on core reproducibility items in research,” is now out in @plosbiology.org 🎉 🚨 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

@lukasgunschera.com joined The Naked Scientists to unpack whether social media is truly “addictive” as a US jury finds Meta & YouTube partly responsible for harm. Key point: problematic use is real, but evidence gaps remain. 🎧 www.linkedin.com/posts/digita...

UKgov publishes new screen time guidance for under 5s 👨‍🍼 <2s: Avoid screens except shared activities 👶 2-5s: Try for less than 1hr a day 📱 Choose safe, slow-paced content 🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Lead by example 🛌 Have screen-free areas/times Glad to have contributed. Parent guidance and research report linked below.

There are other reasons for the UK government not to award or continue Palantir contracts but this statement of intent by its CEO must surely be decisive?

"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing. They're bragging"

So many inspiring talks (here by @saramehrhof.bsky.social, Sameer Alladin, @studenova.bsky.social) and discussions on the first day of the #MindBrainBody Symposium 2026! #MBB2026

🎉 Congratulations to @georgiaturner.bsky.social for passing her PhD with flying colours today! A meticulous and truly interdisciplinary piece of work. Thank you also to @lorenzspreen.eurosky.social and Paul Fletcher for acting as examiners 🙌

🚨New pre-print🚨 osf.io/preprints/ps... What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?

Delighted to share that our paper "Associations between early-life mental health and abnormal sleep duration in midlife: findings from a prospective cohort study in Great Britain" is now published in @springernature.com European Journal of Epidemiology! rdcu.be/e5rAK 👇

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

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.

Introducing CORTRE: a reporting guideline for reproducibility efforts 👉 cortre.github.io We are excited to officially announce CORTRE: COmplete Reporting for Transparent Reproducibility Efforts 🎯 🧵👇

Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry? New from me, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com. Thread tomorrow. arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

In my paper Sample Size Justification I discuss 6 approaches to justifying sample sizes. The focus of the paper is to teach people the tools they need to be honest when they explain where their sample size comes from. I know, so radical ;) online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix. I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.

🚨 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

Is Santa Real? Many users feel they're getting presents from him. Scientists say it's time to consider whether they're onto something.

It’s really hard to defend industry academic collaborations with meta as earnest, if they’re internally burying evidence of harm. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

I'm looking for EMA software that can do relative scheduling: participants report a time in their first daily questionnaire (e.g. "woke up at 7am"), then follow-ups trigger x hours after that reported time. I would greatly appreciate any recommendations!

It’s astonishing how many researchers seem to believe that a cluster analysis is such a sensible analysis that it needn’t even be justified through a coherent research question. Just cluster analysis go brrrrr

Exciting PhD opportunity with @matti.vuorre.com! ⬇️

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Some people are at greater risk of experiencing negative mental health outcomes of social media use than others, but why? 🧵 We examined whether individual differences in cognitive processes shape risk and resilience to mental health effects on social media: osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New preprint: What does the research landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning look like 🌍? We developed an LLM-powered bibliometric analysis to characterize article clusters, investigate their connections, and examine the distribution of topics across the landscape. osf.io/6c2va_v1

The framing around 'stricter age restrictions' feels disproportionate considering the magnitude of the effects. I ran some rough calculations: Cohen's d ≈ 0.059 and 0.114 for the group comparisons on the cognitive composite measure.

Betteridge’s law of headlines is strong with this one. arxiv.org/abs/2510.02408

Everyone knows that temporal contiguity is important for associative learning. As the interval between a cue (e.g., a light) and an outcome (e.g., shock) gets longer, the conditioned response (e.g., freezing to the tone) is acquired less quickly.

they just slapped a surgeons general warning on RFK like he’s a pack of cigarettes

psych departments post a faculty job that has nothing to do with AI challenge

i looked at the methodology for this and it is a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and b. p-hacked

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸 How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data. www.science.org/content/arti...

😍 Our latest is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com. 🤩 We show with Bayesian modelling and experimental manipulation of uncertainty that developmental differences in social influence depend on differences in the internal uncertainty people have about their choice doi.org/10.1038/s442...

on.ft.com/46EDjIX Europe’s bill for extreme weather damage more than doubles this decade (2020-23 costs already more than double previous 10 years - good thing financial markets are so forward-looking. Oh)

Grateful to @rcpsych.bsky.social for the opportunity to present my research on “Rethinking social media addiction” and participate in the panel discussion. Looking forward to translating the insights into the clinical-focused work in the pipeline.

Reposting twice because it's such a great read!

What drives the bidirectional relationship between metabolic and mental ill-health? Read our new metabolic psychiatry paper, “An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... led by @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

Excited to see this brilliant work from @bcdavidson.bsky.social preprinted! Check it out at osf.io/preprints/ps...

If true, this update is astonishing. The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump. This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.

Important reading as you prepare for your semester

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

If you are preparing your bachelor statistics course and would like to add optional material for students to better understand statistics on a conceptual level (see topics in the screenshot) my free textbook provides a state of the art overview. lakens.github.io/statistical_...

Do researchers’ financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials of internet-based interventions for depression affect the outcomes? This meta-analysis suggests that COIs may lead to inflated effect-size estimates. 🩺 #neuroskyence www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....