TL;DR: this post explains the basics of academic publishing; highlights several severe problems; discusses the recent activities of the American Psychology Association (APA) targeting psychological researchers; suggests some ways forward; and ends with an unexpected plot twist: an APA journal invited me to join their editorial board while I was writing this APA-critical blog post…. Read more »
Three brief personal updates. After living in 6 countries in the last 12 years; after affairs and short relationships with Ludwig Maximilian’s University Munich, Free University Berlin, University of Michigan, Arizona State University, University of Leuven, and University of Amsterdam; and after 3 years as a very happy postdoc … I thought I should start… Read more »
Summary: Mental disorders are commonly defined as “brain disorders” in the literature. I show in this blog that this notion remains speculative, and share a 10-week syllabus / reading list about theon the topic about the nature of mental disorders. Update, 2024: the main arguments around reductionism in this blog post are part of my… Read more »
Below you find a summary of my 2017 academic year, inspired by a recent blog post by Alexander Etz who concluded: I don’t see these kinds of period recap posts from my blogging colleagues very often. I’m not sure why. Maybe posts like this could feel like bragging about all the good stuff that’s happened… Read more »
I created a collaborator network last year in R, but based that on an excel input file that I created manually, and edited the names using Inkscape. Funny doing it once, but too much effort to repeat that every year. I have a larger number of collaborators now, so I looked into finding an automated… Read more »
To boost your academic career, early career researchers should consider picking up at least one associate editor position for a scientific journal. After all, spending countless hours on administrative duties will get you a long way in science. Below I provide a 15-minute 3-step tutorial on how you can easily do that, based on my… Read more »
A few days ago, Richard Morey started a discussion on Twitter arguing that small samples are not inherently problematic. In the interesting discussion that ensued, I kept thinking about clinical psychology and clinical trials, where I believe that small samples are problematic. To explain my position, let’s look at situations where small samples are fine,… Read more »
I received this email a few days ago from academia.edu. And honestly, this screenshot might just say all there is to say about this topic, in which case I’d like to see academia.eu admit that they’re making up numbers and sending them to researchers as clickbait. Otherwise, I’d love to see an explanation — it… Read more »
Working between disciplines is exciting, and I wouldn’t want to have it any other way. Psychology has become much more interdisciplinary in recent years, and there was a discussion today on social media whether psychologists should ‘know math’. This reminds me of the statement Plato had famously engraved at the door of his Academy in… Read more »
TL;DR: The tone-police police on social media must take responsibility for silencing early career folks in psychological science debates on social media. I also talk about rude dudes, a dinner with Dawkins, and Coyne calling my work “insufferable pomposity”. Introduction: the tone-police police and social media We founded a roleplaying website in 2001 that quickly… Read more »
A few months ago, we published a new paper (PDF). For the 3 figures in the manuscript, we created some adjacency matrices that we wanted to be fully reproducible, so we decided to upload our code. Because I had anticipated problems with .R files, I uploaded the syntax as a .txt file instead. A month… Read more »
One of the fundamental shortcomings of the empirical psychological literature on mental disorders, personality aspects, intelligence, or emotions is that there is a lack of depth regarding the discussion what these psychological constructs are. Researchers often use statistical models such as factor models and find 3 depression factors or 5 personality factors, but it remains… Read more »
I had the honor to chair 2 symposia at the International Convention of Psychological Science in Vienna the last days, and gave 3 talks. You can find all presentations below.
Our paper “Estimating psychological networks and their accuracy: a tutorial paper” was published in Behavioral Research Methods as open access paper! You can find the full paper here, and the supplementary materials here. In this paper, we raise the possible danger of an upcoming replicability crisis consistent with the rest of psychology, given that we… Read more »
I wrote this commentary together with Adam Chekroud. You can find a PDF version of this commentary here. Introduction The largest and longest investigation of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) to date, the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D), was conducted in four stages. Each stage comprised a different medication, and patients moved to the next… Read more »