The replication crisis hits psychiatry: No candidate genes for depression

A new study on candidate genes for depression was just published in the American Journal of Psychiatry by Border et al, entitled “No Support for Historical Candidate Gene or Candidate Gene-by-Interaction Hypotheses for Major Depression Across Multiple Large Samples”. Below, I will discuss the background and context of the study, followed by study design and… Read more »

Brief psychology news 02/2019

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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… Read more »

First preregistered network replication study with power analysis & open data

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 »

Brief psychology news 01/2019

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January 2019 news from Clinical Psychology, Quantitative Psychology, Meta Psychology, and Open Science. For prior news, see the rubric Psychology News on this blog. The subheaders below are only rough approximations, since many items fit multiple categories; I only list each item once though. If you have suggestions how to better order this, please let… Read more »

The Myth of the Miracle Cure: Is Ketamine an Efficacious Antidepressant?

This blog post is the result of a collaboration between Dr Lucy Robinson (Twitter, email) & me. Life with depression can be miserable, painful and sad. The suffering it causes is indubitable and it is imperative we do a better job at helping people feel better, with effective, practical, and long-lasting treatments. The promise of… Read more »

Brief psychology news 11/2018

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November news from Clinical Psychology, Quantitative Psychology, and Open Science. New free R ebook “Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century” by Russell Poldrack Kevin Kotzé shared all materials for his master/PhD course on time-series analyses online New free ebook “Ecological Momentary Assessment in Mental Health Research” by Jeroen Ruwaard, Lisa Kooistra, & Melissa Thong Manylabs… Read more »

James Coyne sued me for cyberbullying

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In this blog, I first describe the formal complaint of Dr James Coyne against me, launched a week after my blog post about tone on social media in August 2017. Coyne claimed that I am “aligned with racism” and show “hostility towards patient populations”, concluding that “something needs to be done quickly”. Second, I discuss… Read more »

Brief psychology news 10/2018

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September and October news from clinical psychology, methods, and open science. With a heavy focus on open science this time around — a lot happened in the summer. Guardian piece by Chris Chambers & Pete Etchells: “Open science is now the only way forward for psychology”. Interesting Twitter discussion on paying peer-reviewers, with a 2014… Read more »

Failure of the week

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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 »

10,377 ways for major depression, but 341,737 ways for melancholia

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 »

SIPS18 collected resources, and reflections of a SIPS virgin

The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) hosted their third annual conference in Grand Rapids MI a few days ago. This blog provides a summary and some collected resources for those who couldn’t join, and a few reflections (praise & challenges) of a SIPS virgin. SIPS: an introduction I will not repeat all… Read more »

Measurement Schmeasurement

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TL;DR This post summarizes our recent APS symposium entitled “Measurement Schmeasurement” (feat. Jessica Flake, Mijke Rhemtulla, Andre Wang, and Scott Lilienfeld); provides a brief history of how it came to be, and the important role social media plays in modern psychology; and serves as a shameless plug for an invited measurement workshop Jessica and I… Read more »