Holly Sullivan-Toole

@hollysully.bsky.social

Dev Affective Neuro, Reward, Reinforcement Learning, Anhedonia, Dopaminergic Circuitry, Brain Iron she/her

𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚🚨 Prisciliano Trejo, aged 29 becomes the 50th person to die in #ICE custody. He was denied medical care until it was too late. His family was denied the ability to see him when he was finally sent to the hospital. This thread is one you must spend time on. We cannot ignore the atrocities!

Had the pleasure of joining ACAMH @acamh.bsky.social to discuss my research on how reinforcement learning changes across adolescence — and how it is altered by risk factors for psychopathology

ACAMH - Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health@acamh.bsky.social · 2w ago

What is #Anhedonia? What drives changes in reward responsiveness during adolescence? In this #MindtheKids podcast, we explore how adolescents learn from rewards and what this means for #depression risk and #mentalhealth outcomes with Holly Sullivan-Toole. https://bit.ly/4hcqSLk

Our new study ⬇️inspired by the question: does psilocybin influence meta-learning and cortical processing of unexpected uncertainty? Why is this important? Meta-learning may be critical for therapeutic effects of psychedelics and how the trip creates a window that facilitates clinical intervention

People with depression and anxiety symptoms are surprisingly better at overriding gut-instinct motivational biases, while those with compulsions and intrusive thoughts showed the opposite pattern, suggesting distinct motivational disruptions across psychiatric dimensions.

Adaptive suppression of motivational biases increases with mood/anxiety traits

Changes in motivational biases appear central to many psychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Motivational biases, theorized to embody default response strategies…

biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org

I'm really excited to share a new preprint! Lab studies have consistently shown that stress and negative emotions make people drink alcohol, but studies of daily life (EMA) keep failing to find it. What does that mean for the shared theoretical prediction both designs test? osf.io/preprints/ps...

Figure summarizing new EMA data from our lab

Recent preprint with Oriel FeldmanHall and Matt Nassar, showing clear neural evidence that adolescent (13-15 yrs) social media and smartphones use are associated with blunted reward signaling in the ventral striatum, the brain's reward processing hub, and worse mental health. osf.io/preprints/ps...

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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.

Very excited to announce our new preprint, led by @hollysully.bsky.social, that presents, benchmarks, and validates a method to estimate brain iron content from routine fMRI scans! It comes complete with a BIDS app! Check out the preprint and thread below! doi.org/10.64898/202...

biorxiv.org

Holly Sullivan-Toole@hollysully.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🚨Preprint Alert🚨 Our new preprint 'A Scalable fMRI Estimate of Basal Ganglia Brain Tissue Iron for Use in Developmental and Translational Neuroscience' is live!! lnkd.in/gpG9naba

Our new paper asks whether autism is linked to the way people learn from rewards. We’ve previously shown that people not only learn to value the features that predict reward, but also assign credit to features of their actions that they know are irrelevant (in this case, the card's location).

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USPS announced that it would no longer postmark mail automatically on the date it is received. Voting rights advocates fear that this may end up disenfranchising voters who rely on postmark dates, and they’re urging people to get ahead of election deadlines.

In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration - Bolts

A change in how mail is postmarked could lead some voters to miss key deadlines, including voter registration. Advocates worry the people most affected will be those already facing voting barriers.

boltsmag.org

New preprint from the lab! Led by @martingell.bsky.social . There is something for everyone: brain-behavior prediction, latent variable modeling, test-retest reliability. 🧠📈📊 "Disentangling Brain-Psychopathology Associations: A Systematic Evaluation of Transdiagnostic Latent Factor Models"

Martin Gell@martingell.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Transdiagnostic latent factor models of psychopathology are widely assumed to improve brain-behaviour associations. So we decided to test this directly and found that they don't. A short 🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/10