Is the ‘default mode network’ responsible for the mental health crisis in youth?
(Note: I now also wrote up this blog post as a commentary that I submitted to the editor of the journal.) The very short answer is: no, youth mental health… Read more »
Does the d (disease) factor really exist?
Mental health problems are comorbid, which means that they are positively intercorrelated and don’t tend to occur in isolation. Of all people diagnosed with major depression, for example, about half… Read more »
Using GPT-3 to search for scientific “references”
I have been playing around with GPT-3 and its chatbot in previous weeks, and found it fascinating. GPT-3——the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3——is a deep learning language model developed by OPEN… Read more »
“Clear evidence” for serotonin hypothesis of depression?
There has been a 60 year long discussion on the role of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the pathophysiology of depression. A recent systematic investigation by Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues concluded… Read more »
Measurement error in network models
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… Read more »
Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative… Read more »
Award for transformative early career contributions
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… Read more »
Treating depression with psychedelics: red flags and FAQ
There was a lot of hype in the last days around a new study on treating major depressive disorder via psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms. In the paper… Read more »
Creating basic psychometric summaries in R
We just finished collecting the first cohort of the WARN-D study, our ambitious effort to create a personalized early warning system for depression. In the 90 minute self report survey,… Read more »
Studying mental disorders as systems, not syndromes
Update: the paper is now published in Current Directions in Psychological Science; you can find my summary of the paper on Twitter. I’ve written a very brief piece on embracing… Read more »
Schmeasurement: DSM-5 symptom measure edition
For our new WARN-D research project on building a personalized early warning system for depression, I recently looked into openly available, transdiagnostic, self-report mental health screeners. The most common recommendation… Read more »
1 minute science communication video .. only using legos
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,… Read more »
On Theory
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… Read more »
Modeling idiographic and nomothetic dynamics of 255 depressed inpatients
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… Read more »
ERC Starting Grant on predicting depression onset
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… Read more »