Zachary Cohen

@depressionlab.bsky.social

assistant prof. Personalized Treatment Lab @uarizona clinical psychology, intervention science. Precision Mental Health/Digital Therapy. Dad+Husband. He/him.

@lluaces.bsky.social with another banger! Thoughtful research design plus amazing writing equals another paper that will go on my lab’s required reading list.

Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, PhD@lluaces.bsky.social · last mo.

1/ @sadcatlab.bsky.social research "in press" at Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. In 274 adults with 7 weekly measurements, we find that cognitive change in CBT predicts subsequent symptom change, controlling for time-invariant confounds + linear trends osf.io/preprints/ps...

Those of us who were trained at CTSA by Edna Foa will be very familiar with this. I love Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)! I've licked the bottom of my shoe many times when working with OCD (and still do it 2x per year when I teach my undergrad and graduate courses on CBT). And much more...

Aaron Fisher@aaronjfisher.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Just grabbed the doorknob and licked the palm of my hand for the benefit of a therapy client. That's what you call dedication!

What to do when #AI meets #OpenScience? @stokel.bsky.social spoke to me & other colleagues about this pressing issue for this @nature.com article. @drandreahoward.bsky.social @katiecorker.bsky.social @miriforbes.bsky.social @debruine.bsky.social

Chris Stokel-Walker@stokel.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My latest for @nature.com looks at the challenge researchers are facing thanks to bots scraping their data uploaded alongside their research - and what they think ought to be done about it www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We just got approved to hire a teaching professor in Quantitative Methods! This is the *very* rare tenure track teaching position at Berkeley. I'll be chairing the search committee. Official job ad coming later this summer!

NHS data should be driving innovation & improvement – it’s an amazing resource We just published the sequel to our 2021 "Road to Hell" paper on using NHS data for research... things are worse! Buckle up for a long 🧵about *how COMPLETELY mad* system is for accessing NHS data for research 1/20

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Selecting an effect size for power analysis is hard. Many researchers fall back on Cohen's thresholds, but they have no empirical basis and vary wildly by field. Our new paper offers a better option: field-specific effect size distributions built from meta-analytic data doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Abstract
Effect sizes are useful for understanding the magnitude of study results and for planning new studies via power analysis.
However, despite their wide usage, effect sizes are often misinterpreted. This is mostly due to an over-reliance on general
effect size benchmarks that were not intended for broad application across diverse research fields. Inaccurate effect size
interpretations can lead to incorrect conclusions about the magnitude of study results and incorrect sample size estimates,
thereby increasing the likelihood of false-positive results. This article introduces the ESDist R package, which is designed
to calculate empirically derived effect-size benchmarks or a range of reliably detectable empirical effect sizes for a specific
research question or field of interest by computing effect size distributions (ESDs). This package can be used on data that
can be easily extracted from pre-existing meta-analyses to help researchers more accurately plan new studies or to better
understand how an individual study might relate to other studies in their field. ESDist includes a set of features that make it
easy to use in a priori power analysis. Moreover, the package includes a feature for estimating effect size benchmarks that
account for publication bias and are weighted by effect sizes' variances, which addresses existing limitations of using ESDs
for study planning or interpretation.

Cuts to scientific research will have effects for years to come. @standupforscience.bsky.social has been an important voice connecting scientists & all of us. @cdelawalla.bsky.social leads that group, & her latest post is a call to action to restore funding 👇🏿👇🏼👇🏾👇🏻👇🏽 substack.com/home/post/p-...

Scientists, it's time to pay your taxes.

This arrangement—where a small number of dedicated scientist activists fight for the whole of the ecosystem—isn’t sustainable.

substack.com

For instance: @claireecusack.bsky.social just submitted a paper today in which we show that discrete emotion states predict discrete avoidance behavior in SAD with *very* high accuracy. We know this, right? But now we can locate the phenomenon in *specific moments of time* à la JITAI concepts.

Aaron Fisher@aaronjfisher.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I will say until I'm blue in the face: clustering as a magical ontological tool is dumb and bad. Clustering as a discretization tool that sacrifices dimensional granularity for temporal specificity is fantastic.

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations. psych.princeton.edu/diversity/mi...

Microsabbaticals at Princeton Psychology

Microsabbaticals at Princeton Psychology provide a several-week-long visit to our department for early-career faculty. The program focuses on early-career scholars who would benefit from interactions ...

psych.princeton.edu

⚠️ Despite all the hype, chatbots still make terrible doctors. Out today is the largest user study of language models for medical self-diagnosis. We found that chatbots provide inaccurate and inconsistent answers, and that people are better off using online searches or their own judgment.

Banner image with screenshot of scientific article from nature Medicine, as well as two panels from the study method and results

Thrilled to announce the Oxford Psychological Networks Summer School (OxPNS)! This is the first-ever psychological network analysis workshop in the UK, to be held in magical Oxford from June 22-26, 2026. To apply and for more information, please visit: oxfordpns.com A brief thread 🧵

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