Brief psychology news 08/2018

Some news from clinical psychology, methods, and open science. Again, this is a bit of an experiment … if it goes well, I’ll continue to write this up every other month or so.

1. A new preprint by Anne-Wil Kruijt and colleagues about attention bias modification is online, entitled “No evidence for attention bias towards threat in clinical anxiety: a meta-analysis of baseline bias in attention bias modification RCTs”. Related: a new paper by Richard McNally on the topic.
2. Great personal open science story by early career researcher Kaitlyn Werner who avoided DOOOOM because she shared her data.
3. Insightful video for students showing how publication bias works.
4. A list of 50+ postdoc positions (many in psychology) went live a few days ago on the website of Eva Lefkowitz.
5. Important preprint by Kathleen Reardon investigating the N-pact Factor in the clinical psychology literature — the statistical power of published empirical studies to detect typical effect.
6. comp-engine.org states they have 129 million data points from 24.9k time series datasets, freely available. I’d be curious if this would be a useful resource for psychologists working with time-series models.
7. New Editorial in Psychological Medicine by de Vries and colleagues, entitled “The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases on the apparent efficacy of treatments: the case of depression”, showing how negative results of clinical trials (antidepressants & psychotherapy) get “lost” in the literature.
8. maelstrom-research.org looks like a tremendously useful data repository for clinical psychology and epidemiology research.
9. Alberto Martín-Martín and colleagues used a database of 2,448,055 citations to compare the performance of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Summary: Google Scholar is a rough superset of Scopus & WoS, with substantial extra coverage beyond peer-reviewed articles (preprint).
10. Large new study in Lancet Psychiatry (N=1.200.000) on the relationship between physical exercise and mental health, by Adam Chekroud and colleagues. It was widely covered, and some critical voices also emerged. I was on vacation and haven’t read in detail, but it’s probably a good article to discuss with students.
11. New preprint by the tireless Jennifer Tackett and colleagues on open science and replicability in Clinical Psychology, entitled “Psychology’s Replication Crisis and Clinical Psychological Science”
12. New meta-analysis by Joshua Swift and colleagues entitled “The impact of accommodating client preference in psychotherapy: A meta-analysis” suggest that psychotherapy treatment outcomes are better when patient preferences are accommodated.
13. New Plos One paper by Tom Hardwicke & John Ioannidis entitled “Populating the Data Ark: An attempt to retrieve, preserve, and liberate data from the most highly-cited psychology and psychiatry articles” tried to obtain data from highly cited papers; the outcome was disheartening.
14. 2018 Transdiagnostic Approaches to Mental Health Challenge, 17-18 September 2018 Cambridge (UK). I’d go if I had the time, I think transdiagnostic work is crucial.
15. Our Jama Psychiatry paper is out, entitled “Emotional and Behavioral Symptom Network Structure in Elementary School Girls and Association With Anxiety Disorders and Depression in Adolescence and Early Adulthood”. I posted a guided tour through the paper on Twitter.
16. Finally, the black goat has a new episode that’s all the hype on social media! ;) Haven’t found the time to listen to it myself, but I heard it’s worth checking out.