A refreshingly sober view on important issues in mental health science that I think about a lot... I'm not as pessimistic/nihilistic as I come across sometimes, but I do worry deeply that we are often not meeting the challenges where they are.

Aaron Fisher@aaronjfisher.bsky.social · yesterday

Putting the two together: The mushy imprecision of our methods leaves room for almost any theory to be substantiated and for any 'mechanism' to find some kind of operational instantiation, but not really. Not at all, in fact, from where I stand. It's all so impossibly noisy and imprecise.

Ed Yong used to do amazing science journalism at The Atlantic... Now we get this: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

What if Freud Was Right?

A neuroscientist dares to argue that old-fashioned psychoanalysis holds the key to curing mental illness.

theatlantic.com

"Dopamine, bruh..."

Sanjay Srivastava@sanjaysrivastava.com · 6d ago

What is an extremely nerdy/obscure/specific thing you hate with a white-hot wrath?

Three psychologists use QRPs on dubious projects, grossly underpay participants, make coercive and sexist remarks, have their grants revoked, lose their lab space, and wrestle with the possibility of having to work in the private sector... And that's all in just the first 15 minutes of Ghostbusters.

Now in press at Cortex! "False discovery rate correction promotes confounded neuroimaging designs" Paper 🔓: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Mark Thornton@markthornton.bsky.social · 11mo ago

After 5 years, I finally carved out time to turn this blog post on FDR (markallenthornton.com/blog/fdr-pro...) into a manuscript. The preprint features a much broader range of simulations showing how FDR promotes confounds, and how this effect compounds with publication bias: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am a neurodivergent neuroscientist. My bipolar brain brings struggle but it also helps me think off-the-map ideas. To help others who are similarly different, I co-founded the Neurodiversity Innovation Center for Excellence in Neuroscience (niceinneuro.org) with Leah Blankenship and Lila Kaye.

Jon haidt, steven pinker, and cialdini are three psych folks who appear to be attending peter thiels secret meeting

maia arson crimew 🏴@crimew.gay · 2mo ago

SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.

Person identity drives neural similarity more than action and valence during dynamic emotion perception https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.01.728854v1

Big congratulations to undergrad RA superstar Debbie Okeke for successfully defending her honors thesis "Investigating Neural Patterns In Dynamic Facial Processing Using Representational Similarity Analysis." Debbie started as a freshman in my lab and we are so proud of all that she has accomplished

I agree, but It's sad to me that people think we we do is "looking for __ in the brain." And the problem goes both ways. If you are interested in understanding brain, basing it on conceptually vague, poorly measured, or otherwise flawed ideas from psychology isn't helping make progress either.

Brent W. Roberts@bwroberts.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This...the fetishizing of unreplicable neuroscience in order to legitimize our work is self-defeating. We don't need to know that depression is in the brain (as opposed to what???) to know it is problematic. How much money have we wasted proving something like depression is "real"?

Popularity of brain regions and networks in every available SANS (@sansmeeting.bsky.social ) program over the years. Now, animated! Looking forward to seeing everyone next week in La Jolla for #SANS2026.

New Perspective out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We consider why neuroimaging analyses struggles to predict adolescent mental health, discuss approaches for improving prediction, and provide open-source implementations and tutorials: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Revamping neuroimaging analysis to reveal biomarkers of adolescent mental health - Nature Mental Health

Neuroscience research struggles to link neurobiological phenotypes with real-world mental health experiences, especially in youth. Here the authors challenge assumptions in functional neuroimaging stu...

nature.com

Popularity of brain regions and networks in every available SANS (@sansmeeting.bsky.social ) program over the years. Now, animated! Looking forward to seeing everyone next week in La Jolla for #SANS2026.

My new obsession is ggsegSchaefer for plotting stat maps of our preferred brain parcellation atlas. So easy to customize, manipulate, and make pretty (...even if my general aesthetic tastes remain questionable).

Fortunate to be a part of this! Moriah had an incredible dissertation and I was lucky to be on her dissertation committee.

Rob Chavez@robchavez.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Excited to share our latest paper on computational mechanisms of self-enhancement with links to mental health. We used hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion modeling to decompose choices on a social comparison task and relate them internalizing symptoms. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/GPFSV...

Also, after 19 years into my career, this is my very first empirical publication that is purely behavioral and has zero neuroscience... I'm officially a real psychologist!

Rob Chavez@robchavez.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Excited to share our latest paper on computational mechanisms of self-enhancement with links to mental health. We used hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion modeling to decompose choices on a social comparison task and relate them internalizing symptoms. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/GPFSV...

Excited to share our latest paper on computational mechanisms of self-enhancement with links to mental health. We used hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion modeling to decompose choices on a social comparison task and relate them internalizing symptoms. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/GPFSV...

Computational Mechanisms of Self-Enhancement During Social Comparison and Their Relationship to Internalizing Symptoms - Moriah S. Stendel, John A. Clithero, Robert S. Chavez, 2026

Internalizing disorders, such as anxiety and depression, commonly feature cognitive biases in self-evaluation, particularly in the context of social comparison....

journals.sagepub.com

Yup..

At a different point in my life, this would have been shocking and disappointing. The only shocking part now is how numb I feel to this kind of news, and the disappointment is with myself for feeling that way. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/u...

Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years

nytimes.com

I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...

The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience invites submissions to a collection on “The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition”. Making decisions i

academic.oup.com

SPSP is crazy. So many presentations on climate change and environment, yet folks aren’t allowed to take the leftover lunches without tickets because all leftover lunches “must” be thrown away 🤔 Anyways is you see me, say hi! #SPSP2026

A nice, level-headed post about the motivations and outcomes of using technology (including LLMs) in research that you care about.

moin syed@syeducation.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research

On reasonable resistance to using GenAI in research

getsyeducated.substack.com

Interaction effects have all kinds of problems that people have been overlooking for years. Maybe we should finally try to publish this damn preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Klaus Pforr@klauspforr.eurosky.social · 6mo ago

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects doi.org/10.1177/2515...

Today, the RAs in my lab told me I have "girl dad energy." I've got some practice...

My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below

We're getting excited... just putting the finishing touches to **PsychoPy Studio** This is a complete rewrite of the PsychoPy Builder/Coder app, now packaged in Electron. Faster load, modernised UI, web-ready, independent of the Python interpreter 🎉 🚀 blog.psychopy.org/general%20bl...

PsychoPy Studio: the app we love, reimagined

It’s now over 20 years since PsychoPy’s humble beginnings as an open-source Python library to help users present high-precision stimuli and collect responses from participants. Since 2009 PsychoPy…

blog.psychopy.org

1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme... haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...

Five classes I took in college: - Styles of Scientific Argument - Analysis of Variance - Probability & Statistics for Engineers - Intelligence & Creativity - Advanced Data Analysis II That statistics minor is really pulling its weight... but man, most of my classes sounded so generic.

Sanjay Srivastava@sanjaysrivastava.com · 6mo ago

Nevermind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college Personality Psychology Macroeconomics Shakespeare Sociology of Sex Roles Screenwriting Five important and very different ways of thinking about what it means to be human

Updating my CV now and realizing that in my 19 years in science, I have only ever given one conference symposium talk in my entire career (not counting a grad student blitz and a preconference). ..... and ,of all places, it was at SESP 🤨 🤷