Just published in Emotion! People who view stress as harmful show a drop in positive affect (PA) during daily social stress and no PA increase under workload. Ppl. with positive stress beliefs maintain their PA during social stress and show PA increase under workload. 🔗 doi.org/10.1037/emo0...

While everyone is on summer break I had a good paper-reading week :)

I’m recruiting two new PhD students to start in 2027, working with me on my program of research in quantitative psychopathology. I’ve put some information for interested students on my website: miriamkforbes.academic.ws Please share with anyone you know who might be interested!

The Cognition Group in the Psychology dept at Exeter are at risk of redundancy because "basic cognitive psychology research does not align with the current priorities of funding bodies" If you think this is overtly wrong and misguided, please sign this open letter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Open Letter in Support of the Cognition Group, University of Exeter

To Executive members of the University of Exeter, including Vice Chancellor Prof. Lisa Roberts, Senior Vice-President and Provost Prof. Dan Charman, Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean Prof. Sallie...

docs.google.com

Great discussion in the thread on meta analyses in general and different practices, across fields

Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 2w ago

Sobering: initial trials with huge effect, large follow-up trial showing no evidence for an effect. But practice is already locked in and criticism is defused by pointing to random effects meta-analyses which are necessarily dominated by the initial trials. polypharmacy.substack.com/p/we-should-...

More than words: Experience shapes #placebo pain relief through additional brain pathways 🧠 We're excited to share our latest publication in @natcomms.nature.com! 🤩 🔗 Read the paper: rdcu.be/fuxmn #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #PainResearch #BrainImaging #TeamScience #Reproducibility

I just came across this astonishing 20-year-old work. By transplanting embryonic mouse gum-forming tissue to the beak-forming region of chick embryos, the researchers showed that the chick epithelium could be induced to make teeth. But the best part is... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Waking‐up the sleeping beauty: recovery of the ancestral bird odontogenic program

Recent advances in molecular and developmental genetics have provided tools for understanding evolutionary changes in the nature of the epithelial–mesenchymal interactions regulating the patterned ou....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Did not make time to read other stuff this week, so this is about it :)

Lukas A. Basedow, PhD@labasedow.bsky.social · 4w ago

Got some time to kill on train journey so here are some thoughts on recently read papers:

Got some time to kill on train journey so here are some thoughts on recently read papers:

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 · 4w ago

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

A fantastic special issue on Mystical #Entropy features in our #vol39issue5! Follow this thread to know more. Let's start with an editorial by Michiel van Elk, with an overview of the contents doi.org/10.1080/0951... #openaccess 1/9

Understanding mystical experiences through the lens of entropy: introduction to the special issue on ‘mystical entropy’

Published in Philosophical Psychology (Vol. 39, No. 5, 2026)

doi.org

Is this related to whats in this paper? I have suspected this was important for a while but I don’t know enough about the details to be sure

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

To guide adaptive behavior and support predictions in real-life contexts, the brain may rely on opaque, over-parameterized models capable of directly fitting to the multidimensional world, while being blind—like evolution—to the underlying rules and causes.

cell.com

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning

Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e

academic.oup.com

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...

Good to see saliva is still relevant to associative learning...

Deon T. Benton@deontbenton.bsky.social · last mo.

🚨 Officially out at Child Development! A few years ago in Science, Ashley Thomas (ashleyjthomas.bsky.social) and colleagues argued that saliva could be a cue infants use to infer the strength of social relationships. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Exciting day. My set-theoretic reconceptualization of the DSM (w/ MDD, GAD, and PTSD as empirical examples) is out today in JPCS, along with four invited commentaries and my response. I'm biased, but I recommend all six papers. I was really jazzed by all four commentaries. 1/25

www.nature.com/articles/s41... one pays a price to change research fields & directions but it's fun. so that's that.

As suspected the heat did a number on me and I was mostly busy with ruminating on heat-related issues. Anyways, here are a few papers I still was able to read (and process):

1. Do antidepressants really need weeks to "kick in"? A paper correctly dispelled this myth. Unfortunately, they replaced it with other problematic claims, igoring principles of RCTs. My letter to the editor was rejected, so I posted it on PubPeer and summarize it below pubpeer.com/publications...

Another week full of interesting science :) June 15th-20th reading list.

Anesthesia is just like dreamless sleep, right? RIGHT? Cover story @anesthesiology.bsky.social this month - we developed an operating room protocol to promote dreaming during emergence from anesthesia... under the best conditions we found that **93%** of patients had experiences

This week's Experimentology chapter is "Estimation". The most important move in planning an analysis isn't picking your test or your model — it's clearly defining what you're trying to estimate. 🧵 experimentology.io/005-estimat...

Really cool work! This group is doing some of the coolest and most relevant addiction research I'm aware of!

Jonas Dora@jonasdora.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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...

Atlantic article discussing current/novel psychedelics, emphasizing parameters like expectancies, context, compound, dose, etc. There is SO MUCH scientific work to do to improve on preliminary work & explore altering variables that have not yet been tested! www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

The New Science of Psychedelic Drugs

University researchers are looking for ways to engineer better mind-altering therapeutic experiences

theatlantic.com

Even in Denmark, with its excellent provisions for children, parenthood marks a sharp divergence in academic careers (from employment to tenure to publications) for men and women -- for a variety of reasons reflecting both structure and agency. opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/f...

After a short hiatus I got back into the paper reading flow. Started with some placebo work and then drifted to more diverse papers. Enjoy.

IMHO this is a fantastic collection of chapters! However I'm a bit biased as I contributed a chapter on neuropsychological risks of psychedelic use

IGPP@igpp.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New Release: Psychedelic Harm Reduction (Springer, Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences). Featuring a chapter by @titoschmi.bsky.social and Cyril @costines.bsky.social on the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences shorturl.at/jQp4d

Ein direkter Angriff auf unsere Demokratie. Einschüchtern und Angst verbreiten. Rechtsextremisten sind bereit für exzessive Gewalt bis hin zu Mord. www.hessenschau.de/gesellschaft...

Professorin berichtet über Morddrohungen an Uni: "Marburg ist für mich zum Angstort geworden"

Schmierereien mit Mordaufrufen, Störungen in Seminaren und wachsender Druck: Die Marburger Historikerin Christina Brüning spricht erstmals öffentlich über Bedrohungen gegen sie, warum sie sich an ihre...

hessenschau.de

Pretty much exactly the advice I give the predocs in our lab! I also encourage colleagues to add some individuality and passion into their talks: let the audience know why the topic of your talk is interesting TO YOU. I love hearing talks from people who deeply care about the subject.

Mike Wiser@drmikewiser.bsky.social · 2mo ago

1. Know your timing. Most conference talk slots are 15 minutes. That is from the start of one speaker to the start of the next. That really means you should talk for 12-12.5 minutes, have 1.5-2 min for 1-2 questions, change over to the next speaker. Do not just try to wing it; practice with a clock.