Penn State bloom 🌸

Are different desires (e.g., food, sleep, alcohol, cannabis) experienced and regulated the same way? We tested this question in a new preprint with Yang Liu, @minzlicht.bsky.social, @wilhelmhofmann.bsky.social, and @kevinmking.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Super excited to share that after graduating from Smith College this May, I’ll be joining @shirleybwang.bsky.social‘s Computational Clinical Science Lab at Yale University as a lab manager! Huge thank you to everyone who supported me throughout the process, so excited for everything ahead 🥳

Predictors of response compliance in ESM / EMA research

Why do participants stop responding in #ESM / #EMA studies? 📱🔔

Average compliance is about 7️⃣9️⃣%, but that hides massive variation.

Our new m-Path blog reviews predictors of response compliance: study design, incentives, participant traits, and time effects.

🔗 blog.m-path.io/blog/blog-1/...

Can we track therapeutic change outside the clinic? YouTube video by NPP - Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience (DPN)

This Deep Dive covers work by @hadarfisher.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social @christianwebb.bsky.social exploring whether smartphone passive sensors & LLMs can track activation in adolescents w/ anhedonia receiving behavioral activation therapy
youtu.be/K1Lo50QBcQM?...

Now out in npj Digital Medicine 🎉

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our systematic review and meta-analysis examines how well language-based models detect depression from text.

We reviewed 123 studies (40,000 + observations) using NLP and machine learning.

Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research On reasonable resistance to using GenAI in research

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

Yay!!!!!! 🤩

I am elated to share that I will be joining Yale's Clinical Psychology PhD program this fall, under @shirleybwang.bsky.social's mentorship! I am so grateful for the opportunity to continue working with the wonderful team at the CCS Lab, and to everyone in my corner who helped make this happen! 😊

New paper from our team: Can ML identify which adolescents benefit most from school-based mindfulness?

In 8,376 students (MYRIAD trial), models detected statistically significant but clinically negligible differential effects (d ≈ .07–.08).

Precision prevention is hard...

Our partnership with the @inclivio.com continues as we get closer to #SAS2026.
Inclivio provides EMA researchers with tools that make data collection easier and more participant friendly.
Like (1 pt) and repost (3 pts) to enter a drawing for free access to Inclivio!
inclivio.com

We're hiring! The Computational Clinical Science Lab @ Yale is seeking a full-time lab manager/research coordinator to start in early summer 2026.

For more information about the position and to apply: forms.gle/LtQwVgPUfaGk...

Please share widely & consider applying!

Fantastic post-bacc opportunity! ⬇️

Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️
webbslab.com/job-postings

(1/9)
New year, new preprint alert!! 🤩🚨

We provide new evidence linking intolerance of uncertainty and death anxiety in religious/spiritual individuals.

Link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

See 🧵 for a brief summary 👇

#deathanxiety #intoleranceofuncertainty

Honored to have our work recognized by
@bbrfoundation.bsky.social, alongside many colleagues doing important work in the field.

Abstract When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences ground "thick empathy", a form of empathy that has been largely overlooked in the psychology and neuroscience literature. Consider how a mother, empathizing with her daughter about to give birth, can draw on her own experience of childbirth, and her relationship with her daughter, to deeply grasp what her daughter is going through in a way that others who lack those experiences cannot. I argue that thick empathy deserves more empirical attention because it is associated with well-being and helps us build networks of effective mutual social support. My analysis highlights novel risks and dilemmas posed by "empathy machines" that promise to enhance or even replace human empathy and are becoming increasingly popular as a potential solution to widespread loneliness. Even when empathy machines provide value to individuals, their widespread adoption risks imposing collective emotional and epistemic costs that ultimately make it harder for us to empathize well. Keywords: empathy, understanding, experience, thick description, ethnography, phenomenal knowledge, interpersonal knowledge, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chatbots

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Sometimes, doing research feels truly fulfilling. Working on this paper was one of those moments. doi.org/10.1037/ccp0...

Yes. Those two feel way underrated

Very cool, Shari! Congrats!

New preprint alert! (1/5)🌟

I’m thrilled to share the preprint of my first first-authored PhD paper! We test whether shared reinforcement functions help explain why adolescents who engage in one self-destructive behavior often engage in others.

Summary⬇
osf.io/preprints/ps...

💫 Excited to share new preprint a systematic review & meta-analysis of 123 studies (40k+ ppl) on how well language-based models detect depression from text.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 -
www.cpconf.org

@robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop

More info to come soon!

Although most of my photos right now are of State College autumn, here's Happy Valley from the sky this August. It was awe-inspiring to get this view.

So, come join us here! I'll be recruiting a graduate student to the Empathy & Moral Psychology (EMP) Lab during this cycle, to start in fall 2026.

delighted to see this published 🙌 using EMA, we (with @roryoc.bsky.social) investigated suicidal ideation in daily life. we found that it arises from an interaction of within-person increases in loneliness and an individual’s level of personality functioning psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Path Asymmetry in Complex Dynamic Systems of Psychopathology This article illustrates the assumption of path symmetry in current theories of psychopathology and calls for the development of dynamical systems of mental illness that incorporate asymmetry.

Thrilled to share a new paper in @jamapsychiatry.com on path asymmetry in complex dynamic systems of psychopathology! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

With amazing collaborators @tfblanken.bsky.social, Han van der Maas, & Denny Borsboom 🥳

Identifying active ingredients in cognitive-behavioral therapies: What if we didn't? Identifying active ingredients of psychological interventions is a major goal of psychotherapy researchers that is often justified by the promise that…

1: In 2023, I wrote this paper arguing that research on active ingredients of CBT, and by extension on their mechanisms, is not close to improving therapy outcomes.

I just read a paper on inhibitory learning improving outcomes of exposure. Egg on my face?

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

Differential effectiveness of dialectical behavioral therapy and schema therapy in patients with borderline personality disorder: a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial Borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be treated successfully with specific psychological treatments, but there is no clear evidence of superiorit…

New paper led by Nele Assmann, in which we used causal forests to test the heterogeneity of treatment effects of Schema Therapy vs. DBT for severe Borderline Personality Disorder.

Interesting new special issue in Psychological Assessment.

Edited by Kristin Naragon-Gainey and @kstanton.bsky.social

Here's their overview paper: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

And here's our contribution, which will win us no friends:
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Smartphone Sensors + ChatGPT Successfully Tracked & Predicted Symptoms in Adolescents with Anhedonia | Brain & Behavior Research Foundation The ubiquity of smartphones and the rapid advance and widespread public adoption of “AI” tools like ChatGPT (especially among the young) have raised hopes among some researchers that such technologies...

Thanks to @bbrfoundation.bsky.social for highlighting our lab's study (led by @hadarfisher.bsky.social & @nigeljaffe.bsky.social) using📱smartphone sensors + LLM-derived text ratings to track behavioral activation and symptom change in teens with anhedonia.
bbrfoundation.org/content/smar...