✨New PhD Position!✨ Come and work with us on understanding cognition with a mix of cognitive modelling and ultrasound neuromodulation! More info on the lab & position: mic-lab.de/positions/ph... Official job ad: tinyurl.com/miclab-phd 🙏Please RT - deadline is Oct 14 ‼️

Addiction has become the default framework for interpreting problematic social media use. It shapes how it is measured, discussed, regulated, and what support young people are offered. But does it match the experiences of young people who report feeling addicted to social media? 🧵(1/7)

Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵

Instead of asking whether telling people (including minors) that their behaviour is harmful puts them off, we should ask about the harms this message itself could cause.

Designing Social Media Health Warnings for Teenagers and Young Adults

This randomized clinical trial examines whether teenagers and young adults perceive that social media warnings discourage them from wanting to use social media and increase their awareness of the harm...

jamanetwork.com

Honoured to receive a Poster Prize at #BAP2026 for my project investigating the Effects of Transcranial Ultrasound Stimulation (TUS) on Interoceptive Attention. I'm grateful to everyone who worked on this project, @camillanord.bsky.social and Veronica Forslund, who were at the conference, and...

Does problematic social media use involve the same dopamine-related reward mechanisms as addiction? That’s the question motivating the research I presented at the @bapsych.bsky.social Summer Meeting, involving a dopaminergic manipulation to probe the involved mechanisms. #BAP2026

Excited to be chairing/presenting at our post-doc symposium discussing the advancements (and challenges 🤫) of computational psychiatry with a ⭐️ line-up of @saramehrhof.bsky.social @yanivabir.bsky.social & Alicia Rybicki. If at #BAP2026, come join us today at 2pm ‼️

British Association for Psychopharmacology@bapsych.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Three high quality Post-Doc symposia will be running in parallel on Monday afternoon, 20th July, with subjects including computational psychiatry, long-term effects of stopping antipsychotics and antidepressants, and challenges of psychosis prediction modelling #BAP2026

🎉 Now published in Nature Communications! 🧠 We develop a novel computational reinforcement learning & habit model of Twitter data, and show that younger people & women are more behaviourally sensitive to 'Likes'. Read the paper: bit.ly/4f1vsKS

Georgia Turner@georgiaturner.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨New preprint 🚨 **A computational model of reward learning and habits on social media** 🧵 We develop a computational reward learning model of real-world social media data, which infers the separate goal-directed and habitual cognitive processes driving posting...

Excited to share our new paper asking a simple question: Why do mental and metabolic health so often go hand in hand? We (@camillanord.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social) tested whether shared neurocognitive signatures play a role in this relationship www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computational phenotyping of effort-based decision-making in type-2 diabetes on and off semaglutide - Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology - Computational phenotyping of effort-based decision-making in type-2 diabetes on and off semaglutide

nature.com

🚨 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...

🚨New Preprint Announcement🚨 Social Media Reward Sensitivity and Depressive Symptoms Over Time 🧵 Social media platforms are designed to maximise engagement by amplifying social rewards such as “likes”, and there is widespread concern that these digital designs contribute to mental health declines.

Journal editors - the status quo on preregistration is not working! You need to check submissions vs. preregistrations before sending articles out for review. *56%* of experiments I reviewed in last year have severe problems with non-disclosure, undocumented deviations, & more - see Claude summary ↓

1/ "Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. The updated version of this preprint is now online! THREAD🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples": synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents. However, producing these samples requires many analyti...

arxiv.org

Jamie Cummins@jamiecummins.bsky.social · last yr.

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

🚨 🎉 Our CONSENSUS VIEW, “An international consensus on core reproducibility items in research,” is now out in @plosbiology.org 🎉 🚨 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

An international consensus on core reproducibility items in research

Evidence-based solutions are needed to help improve reproducibility in research. This Consensus View presents a consensus-based list of core reproducibility items for research that has been developed ...

journals.plos.org

@lukasgunschera.com joined The Naked Scientists to unpack whether social media is truly “addictive” as a US jury finds Meta & YouTube partly responsible for harm. Key point: problematic use is real, but evidence gaps remain. 🎧 www.linkedin.com/posts/digita...

UKgov publishes new screen time guidance for under 5s 👨‍🍼 <2s: Avoid screens except shared activities 👶 2-5s: Try for less than 1hr a day 📱 Choose safe, slow-paced content 🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Lead by example 🛌 Have screen-free areas/times Glad to have contributed. Parent guidance and research report linked below.

There are other reasons for the UK government not to award or continue Palantir contracts but this statement of intent by its CEO must surely be decisive?

Elizabeth Freedman@elizabethf100.bsky.social · 7mo ago

A company being awarded UK Government contracts👇🏻

"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing. They're bragging"

Malte Elson@malte.the100.ci · 7mo ago

Any sufficiently advanced file-drawer is indistinguishable from p-hacking

So many inspiring talks (here by @saramehrhof.bsky.social, Sameer Alladin, @studenova.bsky.social) and discussions on the first day of the #MindBrainBody Symposium 2026! #MBB2026

🎉 Congratulations to @georgiaturner.bsky.social for passing her PhD with flying colours today! A meticulous and truly interdisciplinary piece of work. Thank you also to @lorenzspreen.eurosky.social and Paul Fletcher for acting as examiners 🙌

🚨New pre-print🚨 osf.io/preprints/ps... What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?

Delighted to share that our paper "Associations between early-life mental health and abnormal sleep duration in midlife: findings from a prospective cohort study in Great Britain" is now published in @springernature.com European Journal of Epidemiology! rdcu.be/e5rAK 👇

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at University of Birmingham

Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

jobs.ac.uk

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Pavel@spavel.bsky.social · 8mo ago

The latest from Anthropic: using Anthropic's products makes you worse at your job

Introducing CORTRE: a reporting guideline for reproducibility efforts 👉 cortre.github.io We are excited to officially announce CORTRE: COmplete Reporting for Transparent Reproducibility Efforts 🎯 🧵👇

Ever wonder what proportion of high profile social media research is tied to the tech industry? New from me, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com. Thread tomorrow. arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research

To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...

arxiv.org

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

Mike Inouye@mikeinouye.bsky.social · 10mo ago

"Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Across the highest adult performance, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

In my paper Sample Size Justification I discuss 6 approaches to justifying sample sizes. The focus of the paper is to teach people the tools they need to be honest when they explain where their sample size comes from. I know, so radical ;) online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix. I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.

Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization

Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used thi...

science.org

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 11mo ago

This article provides more data showing how easy it is to manipulate humans on social media. These researchers rerouted the algorithm on Twitter to push some users toward “antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity”. It only took 1 week to elicit changes that used to take 3 years.