February 2019 news from Clinical Psychology, Quantitative Psychology, Meta Psychology, and Open Science. For prior news, see the rubric Psychology News on this blog.
Clinical
- If you are interested in re-analyzing clinical trial data, check out clinicalstudydatarequest.com.
- Preprint by Raphael Schuster et al.: Effects of intense assessment on statistical power in randomized controlled trials: Informed simulation study on depression.
- Clinical within-subjects dataset shared by Aaron Fisher in form of a new preprint: Open Trial of a Personalized Modular Treatment for Mood and Anxiety.
- Paper by Ravi Parikh et al. on whether artificial intelligence in clinical sciences ought to be regulated: Regulation of predictive analytics in medicine.
- New paper by Joel Thomas & Paul Sharp, discussing new ideas to integrating biopsychosocial complexity in clinical research: Mechanistic science—A new approach to comprehensive psychopathology research that relates psychological and biological phenomena.
- Lien Faelens et al. published the first network replication paper that includes both a pre-registration and a formal power analysis; the topic of the paper is the relation of Facebook use and depression. We shared both datasets, and are looking forward to other researchers re-analyzing the data: Negative influences of Facebook use through the lens of network analysis. (I summarized the paper a few days back in a brief blog).
- Preprint by Yuri Milaneschi et al. shows that the relationship between depression and vitamin-D / omega-3 fatty acids identified in prior observational studies is likely due to confounding: A role for vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids in major depression? An exploration using genomics.
- Registered report by Andrew Przybylski & Netta Weinstein on 1000 British teenagers aged between 14 and 15 and their carers finds no evidence that playing violent video games leads to aggressive behaviour: Violent video game engagement is not associated with adolescents’ aggressive behaviour: evidence from a registered report.
- Paper showing that trauma types (loss of child/partner vs other loss) predicts qualitative differences in symptom profiles, which relates with prior work showing that specific life events lead to different symptom profiles in depression: Symptomatology following loss and trauma—Latent class and network analyses of prolonged grief disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and depression in a treatment‐seeking trauma‐exposed sample.
Methods
- Preprint by Robert Wilson & Anne Collins: Ten simple rules for the computational modeling of behavioral data.
- Editorial by Douglas Samuel, incoming editor in chief at Assessment, who puts the journal on a new path towards more rigorous and open science. The journal adopts the registered reports format, and will focus on improving the quality of non-questionnaire measures over the next years. I put together a brief summary of the editorial.
- Paper by Marcus Crede & Peter Harms discussing questionable research practices in the context of fitting CFA models: Questionable research practices when using confirmatory factor analysis.
Meta
- Mark Alfano with a list of Questionable Publication Practices; including points that have been discussed quite heatedly online such as “publication in economically predatory but academically respectable journals”.
- Preprint by Tal Yarkoni et al.: Enhancing and accelerating social science via automation: Challenges and opportunities.
- Preprint by Uli Schimmack: The validation crisis in psychology.
- Paper by Michael Muthukrishna & Joseph Henrich, arguing that the replication crisis is a theory crisis: A problem in theory.
- An interesting observation that results in WEIRD samples might generalize better to non-WEIRD samples than previously expected, at least for a subset of findings
- Got a grant deadline coming up? Here’s a tutorial on how to manipulate Google Scholar ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ …
Open science
- SIPS is one of the first conferences I know of that offers both a Diversity Travel Fund and also $300 for free childcare (until funds run out). If you want to support SIPS and these initiatives, you can donate here. If you want to learn more about SIPS, I wrote a brief intro blog post about the conference last year.
- Utrecht University published a brief Open Science Program; would be great to see more Universities do so.
- Stage 1 registered report of a large adversarial collaboration on the facial feedback hypothesis, involving 18 labs: The Many Smiles Collaboration: A Multi-Lab Foundational Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis.
Favorite paper of the month
