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...

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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 This is the first bottom-up review of the lived experience of persons who attempt suicide. The study has been co-designed, co-conducted and co-written by experts by experience and academics, focusing...

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 news: you can apply to do non-COVID research, from today! | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science We are delighted to announce that - from today - you can submit applications to the OpenSAFELY service for non-COVID-19 studies.

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.

RegCheck RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.

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

Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...

“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/...

The effects of Omega-3 supplementation on stress, anxiety, depression, sleep quality, and everyday memory in individuals with psychological distress: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled tri... Psychological stress, anxiety, depression, memory impairment, and poor sleep quality are prevalent issues that affect individuals' quality of life and…

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...

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

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...

dySEM package logo of two gender/sex-ambiguous figures holding onto a collection of rainbow-coloured balloons in a fashion resembling an SEM path diagram

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...

Beware of OpenAI's 'Grantwashing' on AI Harms | TechPolicy.Press J. Nathan Matias and Avriel Epps say OpenAI's announced research funding is the perfect corporate action to make sure we don't find answers for years.

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 Generative AI Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? A Relationship Science Perspective - Molly G. Smith, Thomas N. Bradbury, Benjamin R. Karney, 2025 The development of generative artificial intelligence capable of sustaining complex conversations has created a burgeoning market for companion chatbots promisi...

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

screenshot of my post

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...

The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy, by Michael Geoffrey Asia. Imagine confiding your most private fantasies to what you believe is an unfeeling algorithm that cannot judge or remember. Now imagine that on the other side of that conversation is a man sitting in a...

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/

Advertising is Coming to AI. It’s Going to Be a Disaster. | TechPolicy.Press Daniel Barcay sounds the alarm on AI chatbots hiding advertising in conversations—and why this threatens autonomy and demands new rules.

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.

Perils of Partialing: Can Scholars Predict Residualized Variables' Nomological Nets? Objective Partialing is a statistical procedure in which the variance shared among two or more constructs is removed, allowing researchers to examine the unique properties of the residualized, parti...

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 OpenAI says a suicidal teenager should have read their fine print

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

Has the time come to stop using control groups in trials of psychosocial interventions? Click on the article title to read more.

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/...