Today’s song is “That Woman Called Mary” by Lightnin’ Hopkins. Performed for a docu in 1968 when he was 56. The canonical blues structure but loose and conversational. Listen to the sheer slowness, the unrushedness of the performance and yet how mesmerizing and magnetic. youtu.be/HbJiriEol44?...

Samuel Lightnin' Hopkins - The Blues

YouTube video by Javier Eder

youtu.be

New Blog post: Which Data Repository Should you Use? In light of OSF closing down, I compare Zenodo, Dataverse, ResearchBox, PsychArchive, and local repositories on six important dimensions. If you want to know which to pick: It depends! daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/08/whic...

Which Data Repository Should You Use?

The Center for Open Science has announced that from November 16, 2026, no new projects can be created on the Open Science Framework. After F...

daniellakens.blogspot.com

Some photos of our recent film shoot in Indonesia for our video for Episode 21, on the Empire of Majapahit. Really excited to share the results with you all when it's done! All reenactment footage we use is 100% real, with human actors and costumes, and always will be!

🏝️🌋 Episode 21 is now live! 🌋🏝️ This time we look at the Majapahit Empire on the island of Java. With traditional music, shadow puppet performances, and readings in Old Javanese, find out how the empire of the islands fell. YouTube: youtu.be/01CZBhZM430?... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3xZ9...

Amazing. Ancient Egyptian versus Modern Egyptian Arabic. Video is in Egyptian Arabic but you'll get the gist of it. Some words haven't changed in 5,000 years. Via www.instagram.com/reel/DYKjGpA...

Excited to share a paper recently accepted at Nature Mental Health! 😄 For decades, we've assumed that covariance among psychopathology informs comorbidity. What if we’ve been wrong?

PsyArXivBot@psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Covariation among higher-order psychopathology dimensions is driven by nomorbidity, not comorbidity: https://osf.io/3t2cm

Excited to share our new blog about how family and friends affect marital stability. Our unexpected but not too surprising takeaway: A good marriage can buffer an unsupportive family, but a supportive family can’t fully protect a struggling marriage @spspnews.bsky.social @josoperrel.bsky.social

Two weeks to go! Submissions close July 15 for our virtual love conference taking place October 13, 2026. theloveconsortium.org/so/0cPxw0E2g...

We made an open repository of close relationships measures. Our goal is to catalogue all of the published self-report measures in relationship science. You can help us expand the database by suggesting measures you tend to use in your research, or by uploading your own measures! relascale.com

RelaScale - Psychological Measures and Constructs

RelaScale is a searchable database of psychological measures and constructs for relationship researchers.

relascale.com

The Empathy & Moral Psychology Lab will be at APS in Barcelona! Unfortunately, I can't be there in person. Check out @amormino.bsky.social's symposium & talk, @jokretz.bsky.social's first talk, two talks by @jdweng.bsky.social (including one on my behalf), @farvk.bsky.social's poster. A great team!

1/ We've been measuring intellectual humility wrong. Most scales ask "are you intellectually humble?" but the people least humble are the most miscalibrated about it. They overclaim. The #humilityparadox. Out today in Behavior Research Methods. Here's what we did instead. 🧵

A meta-analysis is not a ‘easy’ publication. Search strategy development, screening, more screening, data extraction, requesting additional data, risk of bias assessments, the actual synthesis, write up—it all takes time. Many people heavily underestimate the resources required to complete one

Dan Quintana@dsquintana.bsky.social · 4mo ago

So we emailed the authors of all 358 unpublished registrations. 80 wrote responded. The reasons they gave were almost entirely logistical: no time (47%), people leaving the project (11%), no funding (7%). Only one person cited non-significant results as a reason for not publishing.

The preprint is now available: osf.io/preprints/ps... Thanks to the PsyArXiv moderators for their speedy review! Freely available to any who want to read about the many ways in which the oft-cited literature on desistance spectacularly fails to support the claim of widespread desistance

Dr. Catherine Wall@catherinesjwall.com · 5mo ago

New publication alert! After four years of analysis, synthesis, and careful writing, I am pleased to announce a brand-new article, “Desistance”: A Multimethod Review of the Literature on Gender Identity Variability in Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth (1) 🧵 psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

I consider Dr. Foa’s exposure therapy work among the most profound achievements in clinical psychology. Her work has saved so, so many lives. She led a big life. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/h...

Edna Foa, Who Pioneered Exposure Therapy to Treat PTSD, Dies at 88

nytimes.com

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

New paper, out this week in PLOS One, suggests that most close relationship self-report measures are primarily capturing relationship quality 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Predicting relationship quality with itself? A single general factor captures most of the variance across 34 common relationship measures

In relationship science, researchers have generated a wide array of constructs and corresponding self-report measures to characterize, explain, and predict relationship quality – the foremost studied ...

journals.plos.org

I'm excited to announce one of the two big Consortium on Moral Decision-Making conferences for spring 2026. In June, we're collaborating with Penn State Center for Social Data Analytics to host "AI and Social Research: Empathic AI, Metascience, and Methodology" here on campus and hybrid on Zoom.

Psychology has a whole cottage industry in which people come up with some construct that is essentially "attitudes/beliefs/expectations/feelings about X", and then the central claim is that this construct is a super important determinant of future X outcomes.>

Ridiculously useful information for anyone designing EMA studies or evaluating EMA studies as a reviewer/consumer of research.

Egon Dejonckheere@dejonckheeregon.bsky.social · 6mo ago

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/...

My new career column in Nature is out. After reviewing hundreds of PhD applications for my lab and admissions at the UIUC, I kept seeing the same mistakes. I share 8 common application and interview mistakes and what applicants can do differently. doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Eight common errors I see in PhD applications and interviews, and how to avoid them

Convince a supervisor that you’re a great fit for their laboratory by preparing questions, honing your personal statement and showcasing strong team-player instincts.

doi.org

I saw we were fighting about what AI will do to (social) science. I have some thoughts (originally written for a book on scientific inquiry) and decided to turn them into my first substack article. Co-written with Nat Rabb! tomstello.substack.com/p/standing-o...

Standing on the Shoulders of Termites

Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love AI (scientists)

tomstello.substack.com

Can this thing also answer Prolific surveys? I am beginning to really worry that the MTurkification of Psych Science might be nearing an end

I'm hiring a postdoc at @cmu.edu (w/ far.ai & @dgrand.bsky.social + @gordpennycook.bsky.social)! How do LLMs shape human beliefs — and what do we do about it? AI safety meets behavioral science. Open to technical and social science backgrounds.

The Consortium on Moral Decision-Making is pleased to announce its 2026 proposal cycle for interdisciplinary seed grants for morality and ethics research. Check out our call below, and visit our website (from the press release) to learn about eligibility and how to apply. @ssripennstate.bsky.social

I got 99 problems in online survey research but social desirability ain‘t (a huge) one Important paper ⬇️⬇️

Danbischof@danbischof.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚨📄 New paper (conditional accepted at @thejop.bsky.social): We test whether social desirability bias actually distorts answers in online surveys. Short version: It mostly doesn’t. w. @timallinger.bsky.social @kristianvsf.bsky.social @morganlcj.bsky.social URL: osf.io/preprints/os...

Excellent article! The tone is very measured but the implications are definitely worth field-wide attention!

Wendy Higgins@wchiggins.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Thrilled to share our new paper introducing “validity potential” versus “realised validity” as a key distinction for psychological measurement, with @davidmkaplanx.bsky.social, Alexander Gillett, @suttonprofessor.bsky.social, and @robert-m-ross.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Super proud advisor moment: kudos to @jdweng.bsky.social for his first first-author publication! With @minzlicht.bsky.social, we inverted the empathy selection task to look at preferences to receive empathy. We can speculate on what people want from AI, but a motivational account suggests we ask 1/n

Josh Wenger@jdweng.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New publication with @dcameron.bsky.social and @minzlicht.bsky.social in @commspsychol.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... AI empathy is good, but would people actually choose to turn to AI for emotional support over a human empathizer?

To potential students, 10/10 would recommend working with Greg Depow!

Greg Depow@gregdepow.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Excited to share: This summer I'm starting as an Assistant Professor at @lakeheaduniversity.bsky.social! 🥳 I'll be continuing my research on empathy, teaching, and mentoring students. Prospective students interested in empathy are welcome to reach out. Grateful to my family, colleagues, and mentors!