Thank u!!

Popular Online Content as a Treatment-as-Usual Control in Digital Mental Health Intervention Trials: Secondary Analysis of Two Online Randomized Controlled Trials With Repeated Measures Background: Treatment-as-usual (TAU) conditions are intended to reflect the support typically received in routine treatment settings. For digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) delivered online, ...

In trials of internet-delivered mental health interventions, treatment as usual (TAU) controls rarely reflect real online help-seeking. In a new paper (mental.jmir.org/2026/1/e83707), we show popular online content (YouTube videos, infographics, etc.) can feasibly make TAU controls more realistic.

Only ONE consistently predicted intervention effectiveness:

The interventions’ specificity to the outcomes measured.

No other features we tested here (attentional ease, presence of images, videos, or questions, length, conceptual construction, etc.) predicted interventions' effect sizes.

2/2

From Risk Avoidance to User Empowerment in AI Mental Health Crisis Support People experiencing mental health crises frequently turn to open-ended generative AI (GenAI) chatbots for support. However, rather than providing immediate assistance, some GenAI chatbots are designed...

What should an AI chatbot do when someone shows signs of a mental health crisis?

In a new pre-print with @arkaghosh024.bsky.social and more, we draw from community helper / gatekeeper models to propose AI crisis support design principles aimed at empowering users.

arxiv.org/abs/2603.05647

There were actually a few participants who said they found the trout activity relaxing and had thought about it over the four-week study period. So it may have been a stronger control than we had hoped!

A crowdsourced megastudy of 12 digital single-session interventions for depression in US adults Nature Human Behaviour - An online experiment compared 12 brief online interventions for depression. Most improved mental health immediately, but these gains decreased over time, with only two...

Our crowdsourced megastudy comparing a diverse set of 12 single-session interventions for depression is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com!

Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/e6pzz (no paywall)

We also published a brief non-academic piece about the study today: theconversation.com/free-10-minu...

I'm looking for a postdoc to work on our NIH-funded R01 which is a longitudinal cohort of adolescents (13-20) doing EMA and passive text sensing! Please apply, especially if you have experience in the analysis OR collection of these data.

PLEASE SHARE!!

indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/32132

Behavioral Science What do we do? We conduct large-scale behavioral science studies to improve the daily decisions, behavior, and experience of vulnerable individuals (e.g., the well-being of citizens and families / ed...

Do you want to work with me?:) Please spread the word! We are looking for talented Post-doc candidates for a 10-month Junior Fellowship at the Behavioral Science Center, hosted by the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS). 1/6

www.the-bs-lab.com

📣 Digital Research Community!

The new UK Adolescent Health Study will follow 100k young people (8–18yrs) for 10+ years. Please share what digital technology measures you think it should include.

Please complete this survey (by 24th November 2025 @ 9AM): cambridge.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

New release of PowerLMM.js! Browser-based power analysis for longitudinal models with dropout.

Now includes:
- Power analysis summary report
- Reproducible & shareable configs (URL/JSON)
- Calculations validated against R
- Hypothesis region visualization

powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com

Attention #Postdoc researchers and #PhDAward candidates: CBITs is seeking applicants for our NIMH T32 postdoctoral fellowship to begin July 2026 with training in both mental health and human computer interaction
Apps will be reviewed December 2025!
Learn more: cbits.northwestern.edu/education-an...

🚨 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...

Interested in a career in digital mental health, but not set on a clinical psych degree? Check out Dartmouth's PhD programs in Quantitative Biomedical Sciences and Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

geiselmed.dartmouth.edu/qbs/
geiselmed.dartmouth.edu/tdi/academic...

Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts? - Behavior Research Methods A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.

Had missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

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 🧵

Researchers: Stop Thinking You Know How Things Have Changed, Go Measure It!

Your intuitions are biased.
The past isn't how you think it is.
Measurement Invariance is a mindset & a must.

Our new paper on intuitive vs real change in society/people.

osf.io/4v6mf_v1/dow...

#psych #phdsky #sociology

The Mental Illness Self-Labeling Model: A Conceptual Model for Studying the Effects of Mental-Illness Self-Labeling on Clinical Outcomes - Isaac L. Ahuvia, Bruce G. Link, 2025 Self-labeling with a mental illness, for example, deciding that one “has depression,” has the potential to affect clinical outcomes through multiple cognitive a...

Forthcoming in CPS (@psychscience.bsky.social): Are mental illness identities helpful? Harmful? Can thinking you have a mental illness become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”... and how would this happen?

doi.org/10.1177/2167...

🧵⬇️

This was the largest trial of SSIs, and the first ever megastudy of mental health interventions. Thanks to leadership from @protzko.bsky.social, @lluaces.bsky.social, @matnoc.bsky.social, @stephenschueller.bsky.social, and @jschleiderphd.bsky.social, and all 50 teams who submitted SSIs!

The most successful SSIs’ content and styles varied a lot, but broadly, they provided focused, engaging, and actionable guidance on a skill that was important to users.

We think future work should aim to leverage SSIs’ short-term gains toward more sustained behavior change or service engagement.

We randomized 7,505 American adults experiencing depression to one of the 12 SSIs or a control.

Nearly all SSIs boosted agency and hope for improvement immediately (Cohen's ds ≤ 0.37). However, only two significantly reduced depression four weeks later (ds = 0.14 and 0.15).

Digital single-session interventions (SSIs) have been shown to improve depression, with small effects and in limited settings. We wanted explore ways to make them better.

To learn which kinds of SSIs work and which don’t, we crowdsourced 66 diverse SSIs from global teams and chose 12 for testing.

New preprint! A Crowdsourced Megastudy of 12 Digital Single-Session Interventions for Depression in American Adults

What's the best way to help someone overcome depression with just 10 minutes of their time online? We ran a trial (n=7,505) testing 12 diverse interventions.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thanks to my terrific co-authors, @arkaghosh024.bsky.social, @carterfunkhouser.bsky.social, @stephenschueller.bsky.social, and @jschleiderphd.bsky.social

And shout out to @psychscience.bsky.social for being leaders on open science.

Non-paywalled version of the paper here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Longer Single-Session Interventions May Not Be Better: Evidence From Two Randomized Controlled Trials With Online Workers Facing Mental-Health Struggles - Benjamin Kaveladze, Arka Ghosh, Carter J. Fun... Online, self-guided single-session interventions (SSIs), which provide a complete mental-health intervention in one brief experience, promise to increase global...

New paper out today!

We present two RCTs challenging the idea that longer digital single-session interventions for mental health must be more efficacious.

This matters because briefer interventions (e.g., 8 mins vs. 23 mins) are likely to reach more people.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Expression of Interest in Serving as a PsyArXiv Moderator As you might have heard, PsyArXiv is having some issues with an increase in low-quality submissions, ranging from AI generated manuscripts to inflate citation metrics, incoherent or nonsensical docume...

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

What happens when kids get their first smartphone?

They spend less time watching TV/movies, but no less time sleeping or engaging in enrichment activities like reading or going to museums or playing musical instruments or…

From @leoroe.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#psych

Lincoln park Zoo, Ohio St beach or Oak st Beach, the Field Museum, and the giant faces that spit out water next to the bean!

Open Letter in Support of Science — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

An open letter highlighting the co-optation of open science language in the latest Executive Order to justify policies that are, in fact, antithetical to open science principles.

Read and consider signing with your support.

www.standupforscience.net/open-letter-...

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Inform and Do No Harm: A Novel Approach to Reduce Negative Effects of Mental Health Awareness

My student Dasha Sandra tackled growing concerns about false self-diagnosis following awareness efforts and found a promising solution. Thread /1

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Are you a person of color interested in using a mindfulness app to improve your mental well-being?

You can earn up to $140 for participating in this study.

Help us make these apps better for people like you!

Eligibility: redcap.link/gjmdtwjc

Please participate and share 🤓