A month ago, I wrote about things that bum me out in academia, and some antidotes against cynicism creep. It was actually one of my best-received blog posts, and I appreciate all the positive feedback, comments, and shares. In the last half year, we’ve had an absolutely terrible experience with a scientific journal, so let… Read more »
A new paper published today in Lancet Psychiatry, led by Christopher Veal, reports findings from a systemic review of 450 clinical trials for unipolar and bipolar depression. Our results can be seen as trying to answer one of the oldest questions in the field of depression measurement: which of the over 200 measures is the… Read more »
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post on a new paper, but the recently published paper of Jill de Ron et al. investigates limitations of network models discussed for a good decade now, and I’m very happy it’s online (URL, PDF). As many of you know, network models in our field often… Read more »
About a year ago, the Association for Psychological Science awarded me with the Janet Taylor Spence Award for transformative early career contributions to psychological science. Given that I often move on too quickly into the next big thing rather than taking stock a little when good things happen, I wanted to write a short blog… Read more »
Young Academy Leiden challenged its members—including yours truly—to make a video about an upcoming research project, with two constraints. First, we only have one minute to communicate our idea. Second, as toolkit, we can only use LEGOs from the ‘creative suitcase’ we all received, a small box of LEGOs. Here’s my short video, about my… Read more »
What is a good theory, and what is a bad one? In this blog, I’ll introduce theories, models, phenomena, data, and how they relate to each other. I’ll explain what Paul Meehl, the hypothetico-deductive framework, and the open science reform have in common, and why proposed solutions to problems in our field have largely ignored… Read more »
Led by the first author Kaat Hebbrecht, we published an open access paper a few days ago on “Understanding personalized dynamics to inform precision medicine: a dynamic time warp analysis of 255 depressed inpatients” in BMC Medicine. You can find the full text here. I briefly summarize the paper in this blog post, given that… Read more »
I’m extremely happy, proud, humbled, and somewhat nervous announce that my application for an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant was successful (on my first try!), following the announcement by the ERC today. The ERC Starting Grant is part of EU’s Research and Innovation programme, called Horizon 2020. The scheme was quite competitive this year,… Read more »
Our team led by the brilliant Astrid Chevance just published a new paper, entitled “Identifying outcomes for depression that matter to patients, informal caregivers and healthcare professionals: qualitative content analysis of a large international online survey”. The paper is online in Lancet Psychiatry. Rationale When it comes to measuring outcomes in clinical studies of depression,… Read more »
The goal of this blog post is to summarize our recent study on COVID-19 and student mental health, and do a bit of science translation of our core findings. You can find the paper accepted in Clinical Psychological Science here, and all data, code, measures, codebooks, and all other relevant material here. Click on the… Read more »
One of the problems I’ve been facing in academia is that I don’t take pause and celebrate when things go well — after a published paper, I usually just move on too quickly. Rotate, travel, run to the next project. This is my main motivation for keeping this “summary of my academic year” blog series… Read more »
I haven’t written blog posts about individual new papers in over a year, but this one is a milestone I’m really proud of: Our new network paper on social media and well-being was published today. Specifically, we looked at the relations between Facebook use, rumination, depressive, anxiety-, and stress-related symptoms, social comparison, contingent self-esteem, and… Read more »
Following up on last year’s summary of 2017, I wanted to write up the highlights of my academic 2018: publications, collaborations, achievements and failures, open science, blogging, and some thoughts about the upcoming year. In summary, due to my new job, and many new obligations that came with it, 2018 was a much busier year,… Read more »
In our Clinical Psychology group in Leiden, we have the tradition to share new papers, accepted grant proposal, and other achievements in emails called “Paper of the Week”, “Grant of the Week”, and so forth. I just started here, so I don’t know where the tradition comes from, but it’s great to receive regular updates,… Read more »
We wrote up the core arguments and calculations of this blog post as an article for Lancet Psychiatry. Major depression: a highly heterogeneous disorder Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a complex and heterogeneous disorder. The DSM-5 that is commonly used to diagnose patients with MDD requires the presence of at least one of the two… Read more »