This will sound weird but love yourself enough to write your own term papers.

Dr. Cowan talks with a grad student at a table.

Dr. Cowan and grad student Anna Benedict discuss a dataset.

A quote attributed to Dr. Cowan: “The more we can do to help the public understand the experiences of people living with a diagnosis like schizophrenia, the more we can fight against the stigma. We can observe things in the lab about the disease, but what does that actually mean in the lives of the people affected? It’s a powerful way to fight the idea that a person can be reduced down to a label.”

Do people living with schizophrenia in Michigan feel that they are in control of their actions & the outcomes of those actions? Dr. Cowan is using lab-based measures & life story interviews to capture real world relevance in people’s lives.

Full story here: psychology.msu.edu/news-events/...

Wisdom

Longitudinal Trajectories of Premorbid Social and Academic Adjustment in Youth at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: Implications for Conversion AbstractBackground and Hypothesis. Social and academic adjustment deteriorate in the years preceding a psychotic disorder diagnosis. Analyses of premorbid

Raffi is doing such amazing work helping to shed light on the premorbid period. It was a rewarding experience having the opportunity to work with him and the NAPLS group on this one. @hrcowan.bsky.social academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

Testing addiction theories at home

People with alcohol use disorder, but with no desire to stop drinking, report changes in subjective experience during drinking that refute the hedonic allostasis theory of addiction.

psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/...

Victoria / David Beckham meme: "There's an entire literature that disagrees" Be honest "A few experts disagree" Be honest "I wasn't cited" Thank you

Preparing my first-day-of-class slides on AI policies, and I asked ChatGPT to generate infographics of key course concepts. My favorite is this Lovecraftian nightmare summarizing "biological models of psychopathology" (aka, the Bream Chemistry of Psychopallogy)

Loved reading this "great" "article"!

starter pack of academic imposters and it's just you

New commentary in American Psychologist with the legendary @jadler.bsky.social on posttraumatic growth: why all parts of it can use some revision (like those suggested by others in this issue!), and why it's a fool's errand to predict PTG before it happens.

doi.org/10.1037/amp0... (open access!!)

The Onion should buy Elsevier next

I have a joke about internship applications, but I can't afford to send it.

(But seriously this is absurd and removes any relief from actually finally finishing these apps. How did people also manage in-person interviews???)

A headshot of Dr. Cowan.

A quote attributed to Dr. Cowan: “Our field often has a blind spot for individuals' interpretations of their own experiences, environments, and life events. By using a more person-centered approach, we not only improve our predictive and explanatory models of mental illness, but we also treat our participants with respect as people who are more than their scores on measures of symptoms or functional impairment.”

A warm welcome to Dr. Raffles Cowan (@hrcowan.bsky.social), our new assistant professor in the Clinical Science research area! Dr. Cowan’s research lies at the intersection of clinical science & personality psych.

Get to know Dr. Cowan more here: psychology.msu.edu/news-events/...

Also, East Lansing is a great place to live! (if you like nice views out your lab window and an affordable cost of living and that sort of thing) More info about the program and applications here (3/3) psychology.msu.edu/programs/cli...

Grad students are welcome to focus more on the quantitative side (e.g., factors, clusters, MLM, NLP), the qualitative side (e.g., narrative identity, thematic analysis), or a mix of both. Interested? Join us for a virtual info session Sept 30 (2/3) psychology.msu.edu/graduatestud...

I’m recruiting a grad student this fall!! Join me at the
@msupsychology.bsky.social Risk, Resilience, & Recovery Lab, where we add personality, development, life narratives, self, identity, and personal meaning into crunchy structural & longitudinal models of serious mental illness. (1/3)