July 2019 news from Clinical Psychology, Quantitative Psychology, Meta Psychology, and Open Science. For prior news, see the rubric Psychology News on this blog.
Clinical
- Psychology Today has a number of new blogs by researchers; they recruited fairly heavily at APS. For instance, check out the new blog “The Game Changers” by Jennifer Tackett.
- Allsopp et al. on “Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification”
- Baldwin et al. on “Agreement Between Prospective and Retrospective Measures of Childhood Maltreatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis”
- White & Holder on “Meta-analyses of positive psychology interventions: The effects are much smaller than previously reported”
- Marquand et al. on “Conceptualizing mental disorders as deviations from normative functioning”; really nice methods review and tutorial for normative models
- Paulus & Thompson on “The Challenges and Opportunities of Small Effects The New Normal in Academic Psychiatry”
- Fredrik Hieronymus et al. on “Influence of baseline severity on the effects of SSRIs in depression: an item-based, patient-level post-hoc analysis”; paper shows that antidepressants differentially impact on individual depression symptoms, especially in non-severe depression, and that treatment also seems to worsen specific symptoms such as weight changes and libido
- Hengartner & Plöderl on “Newer-Generation Antidepressants and Suicide Risk in Randomized Controlled Trials: A Re-Analysis of the FDA Database”; moneyquote: “The suicide rate was higher in the antidepressant than in the placebo group (OR = 2.83, 95% CI = 1.13–9.67, p = 0.02)”
- Interesting Hertz podcast episode on GWAS and the demise of candidate gene approaches, feat. Kevin Mitchell
Methods
- Dima on “Scale validation in applied health research: tutorial for a 6-step R-based psychometrics protocol”
- Katie Gates et al. on “Latent Variable GIMME Using Model Implied Instrumental Variables (MIIVs)”; this allows modeling time-series data using GIMME whilst including latent variables
- New blog post by Peter Kuppens on the ‘mobileQ’, a free, open source software to collecting experience sampling data
- Great website “Complexity Explained“
- A recent paper showed that an AI trained on older scientific papers made disoveries years before they happened; VICE had a nice summary of the paper
- Cassidy et al. on “Failing Grade: 89% of Introduction-to-Psychology Textbooks That Define or Explain Statistical Significance Do So Incorrectly”
- Patrick Curran & Dan Bauer made available 170 pages of R lavaan tutorials.
- Fantastic Twitter thread about parallel analyses, and recent work on the topic
- After getting this request many times in the last months, I put together an ultra-brief explanation of conditioning on colliders on Twitter
Meta
- Hochstein on “How metaphysical commitments shape the study of psychological mechanisms”
- Amy Orben & Daniel Lakens on “Crud (Re)defined” — a preprint about Meehl’s famous crud factor; the authors “track the history of the crud factor and examines how its use in the scientific literature has developed to this day”
- Sassenberg & Ditrich on “Research in Social Psychology Changed Between 2011 and 2016: Larger Sample Sizes, More Self-Report Measures, and More Online Studies”
- Moving from authorship to contributorship — blog post by Alex Holcombe (related paper)
Open science
- SIPS 2019 happened last week — the Society for the Improvement of Psychology Science. I had the privilege to give 2 workshops there, with Don Robinaugh on “Improving Psychological Science by Formalizing Psychological Theories: The Value of Computational Modeling”, and with Jessica Flake on “Questionable Measurement Practices and how to Avoid Them”. You can find all materials here. A lot more happened: dozens of workshops, hackathons, unconferences, and other nameless things. You can find all materials on the SIPS 2019 landing page on the OSF — definitely worth browsing for a few hours.
- Olivia Kirtley et al. on “Making the black box transparent: A pre-registration template for studies using Experience Sampling Methods (ESM)”
- Olivie Kirtley et al. started an open repository of ESM items: “Our aim is to support the further development, transparency and reproducibility of ESM research by creating an open repository of existing ESM items”
- If people claim pre-registrations hinders exploratory work, please send them to Laura Scherer for clarification :)
- Omer et al. with a letter on predatory publishing in Psychiatry. In sum, 126 predatory journals (PJ) were launched between 2007 & 2018; there were 6925 articles with 19673 total citations; 18079 of the citations come from legitimate journals; papers have 26363 coauthors from 133 countries; common affiliations for authors in PJs were USA and Iran
- Tal Yarkoni hates open science
- Chivers blog entitled “Does psychology have a conflict-of-interest problem?”
Book of the month
R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621. Features a list of causes for depression, including “loss of liberty”, “education”, “poverty”, “death of friends”, “sorrow (as cause & symptom)”, “immoderate eating/bad diet”, and “temperament & parents, it being a hereditary disease”. Also features some causes that haven’t survived the test of time too well, such as “hot brain”, “witchcraft”, and “overmuch garlic”. I’m torn about “vehement desires” ;).
PS: Lancet Psychiatry published an incredibly nice profile about me :)
PS2: Cannot find the full of the paper I’m linking to? I describe a way around the problem here; keyword ‘sci-hub’.