How can we best use signals from the gut to treat motivational symptoms in depression? 📣 We are hiring new PhD students 🧠 Full ad (in German; at least B2 is required): karriereamukb.de/jobs/doktora...

very happy about this one 😊

Neuropsychopharmacology@npp-journal.bsky.social · last wk.

#TWiNPP In a large epigenetic study of psychotherapy response in OCD, baseline, stable, & longitudinal DNA methylation signals were associated with clinical improvement; many of them were genetically influenced. Findings highlight trait-like markers and dynamic change / @kirahoeffler.bsky.social

I’m very happy to share our new preprint on how acute stress responses in the lab relate to stress experienced in everyday life: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Stronger brain responses to acute stress reflect greater everyday stress variability

Laboratory stress tasks are widely used to assess individual differences in acute stress reactivity, yet it remains unclear how these responses correspond to stress experienced in everyday life. Here,...

biorxiv.org

New paper alert! In this paper we were interested to formally test some of the assumptions made by computational psychiatrists - assumptions about parameter recoverability, reliability and validity. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core

The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms - Volume 56

cambridge.org

Why do people stop pursuing goals they care about❓ Motivational deficits are among the most disabling symptoms, yet current treatments often have only modest effects. In @lillyt.bsky.social new paper, she asks if we're missing an important piece of the puzzle 🧠 #neuroscience #cogpsyc #psychscisky

Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits - Translational Psychiatry

Translational Psychiatry - Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits

nature.com

Excited to see this paper on learning about how to learn out in eLIFE, spearheaded by Jonas Simoens and the team from Ghent incl @sebraem.bsky.social @pieterverbeke.bsky.social and Tom Verguts)

Ghent Center for Cognitive Neuroscience@ghentccn.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Limitations of pupil diameter as a proxy for modes of locus coeruleus activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738598v1

Does the brain's response to non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation depend on the current state of the body? Our new paper suggests yes. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation modulates Pavlovian bias in a state-dependent manner

The vagus nerve transmits vital signals between organ systems of the body and the brain. Despite growing interest in non-invasive transcutaneous vagus…

sciencedirect.com

I was so pleased and proud to watch my 2nd year PhD students, Lisa Woodley + @holmyers.bsky.social present their work at our PGR conference yesterday. Oh, and @lucysta02475610.bsky.social submitted a grant, and @kellydonegan.bsky.social chaired the mental health session. What a day!

1/ New paper alert! Stress often builds over time, but many scientific studies treat it as just an on/off thing. In this paper, we introduce the Leiden Stroop-like Stress Task (LSST): a new paradigm for inducing graded, mild-to-moderate stress in the lab. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Leiden Stroop-like Stress Task: A tool to reveal physiological dynamics using graded stress induction

Stress evokes a complex repertoire of psychological and physiological responses. This paper introduces the Leiden Stroop-like Stress Task (LSST), a pa…

sciencedirect.com

So glad to finally share work years in the making! What started with fMRI effect size benchmarks ended up showing that conventional study planning detects ~half of expected brain effects, suggesting more distributed processes than the lit shows (+ new methods for mass univ effect/power estimation)

claude and have figured out how to (a) critique papers, while auto-deploying methods checklists; (b) integrate our critiques (cos we each miss stuff the other catches); and (c) provide career-stage-calibrated feedback and suggestions for improvement. perfect for stress-testing lab manuscripts.

New #OpenAccess paper in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 📄 Childhood maltreatment (CM) increases the risk for lifelong mental illness - but which biological pathways are involved here? One prominent target put forward is inflammation. But what drives proinflammatory states? A paper🧵

some big news! hBayesDM has now been fully ported to cmdstan/cmdstanr/cmdstanpy check out the PR below, or the changelog for an overview: PR: github.com/CCS-Lab/hBay... Changelog: ccs-lab.github.io/hBayesDM/new... stay tuned for some additional features coming soon, including covariate support 🤓

feature: hBayesDM version 2.0 by Nathaniel-Haines · Pull Request #182 · CCS-Lab/hBayesDM

hBayesDM 2.0 — modernize stack & toolchain Top-to-bottom refactor of both the R and Python packages onto current Stan tooling, plus the supporting work to keep behavior, docs, and CI in sync. H...

github.com

If you have not seen our new paper yet, check out the final publication 🍪 👇

Cell Reports Medicine@cp-cellrepmed.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Online now: Blunted anticipation, but not consummation, of food rewards in depression

This is us 🎈. The study was led by @corcerebrum.bsky.social and the @neuromadlab.bsky.social team.

Universität Bonn@unibonn.bsky.social · 5mo ago

#ScienceSnack People with depression do not perceive food as less rewarding when they actually consume it—differences emerge during anticipation. New study by The University Hospitals Bonn & Tübingen and the University of Bonn: www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/088-... © UKB/Aljoscha Haupt

How can 🍪 help us understand anhedonia? What started as a small project is now (> 2 years after the preprint, with revision deadlines landing exactly during my move from Tübingen to Bonn and even during a monastery-based PhD retreat) finally out in Cell Rep Med 🔽🧵 www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Blunted anticipation, but not consummation, of food rewards in depression

Schulz et al. show that anhedonia in depression, as measured by a scale often equated with loss of pleasure, reflects reduced anticipation of food rewards rather than impaired enjoyment itself. Linkin...

cell.com

Hiring! Please share! Two postdoctoral researchers at EPFL, Lausanne, to join an SNSF-funded project on stress, motivation, immersive VR, physiology, multimodal sensing and translational biomarkers. Details & applications: www.fens.org/careers/job-... www.fens.org/careers/job-...

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations

Phylopic, NIH Bioart, Bioicons, Scidraw, Open Science Art, Health Icons, Servier Medical Art, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Noun Project, Segment Anything, Excalidraw, draw.io, Biographics

doi.org

🚨 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...

So exciting to see @lucysta02475610.bsky.social present the results of her mammoth, multi-year project to develop a questionnaire measuring the Negative Appraisal of Gastric Sensations (NAGS): it differentiates between people with eating disorders and gastric disorders! @yorkpsychology.bsky.social

📣 Join us for the next GSRNet Flagship Webinar with Brenda Penninx, chaired by @dequervain.bsky.social Don't miss this opportunity to explore current perspectives on measuring stress in daily life! 📅 June 10, 2026 🕒 3pm CEST / 9am EDT / 6.30pm IST 🔗 gsr-net.org/workshops-we... #GSRNet #stress

📄NEW PAPER📄 Dopamine underpins both effort💪 and reward learning⭐. Here, we show it also supports their interaction! w A Huynh, D Obawede, J Coxon @coxon.bsky.social, M Bellgrove, and T Chong @trevorchong.bsky.social #dopamine #learning #effort @plosbiology.org journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/5

Excited to share our new Nature Methods paper on DeepCor, a contrastive autoencoder for denoising fMRI. DeepCor separates neural signal from noise at the voxel level, works for single participants, and outperforms CompCor by up to 215% on real data. 1/7 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

DeepCor: denoising fMRI data with contrastive autoencoders - Nature Methods

DeepCor is a deep-learning-based denoising approach for task-based and resting-state fMRI data that can be used even for single participants.

doi.org

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

New paper lead by my fab grad student Quynh Nguyen (who is on the postdoc job market btw) 🧵https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-026-10226-5?utm_source=rct_congratemailt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oa_20260408&utm_content=10.1007%2Fs11031-026-10226-5

Can your brain's white matter proxies of inflammation re-identify you like a fingerprint? Turns out: yes, and we used this to psychometrically evaluate diffusion basis spectrum imaging and to detect depression-related changes in the cingulate bundle. #neuroskyence 🩺 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super proud of @sjoerdmeijer.bsky.social who demonstrated that amygdala-TUS slows initial threat acquisition and enhances subsequent extinction. Great collaboration with @lennartverhagen.bsky.social and @deVoogdld.bsky.social ea. Thanks to @ERC.europa.eu. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The human amygdala in threat learning and extinction

Ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human amygdala provides causal evidence for its role in forming persistent threat memories.

science.org

A teaser for our upcoming preprint on the short-term test-retest reliability of diffusion basis spectrum imaging. Voxel-level reliability of hindered fraction (a proxy measure of edema) in white matter is good, particularly close to cortical gray matter. W/ @lhkal.bsky.social @akuehnel.bsky.social

I am enjoying a few uninterrupted hours of plotting today. Finally got my hands on our diffusion basis spectrum imaging data, and it looks good, particularly in white matter voxels. I hope we will have a preprint coming out in a few weeks, led by @lhkal.bsky.social & @akuehnel.bsky.social