iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Incredibly grateful to Danny Pine, John Torous, Adam Grabell, Marta Korom, Katharina Kircanski, and @davidmoorman.bsky.social, who have been instrumental mentors in my journey. And a huge thank you to my wonderful colleagues, friends and loved ones for their endless support!

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Excited to share I’ll be pursuing my PhD in Clinical Psychology with Greg Strauss at the University of Georgia, where I’ll be studying emotion regulation and negative symptoms in schizophrenia and high-risk youth using 🧠and📲. Very honored to have also been awarded UGA’s Presidential Fellowship!

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Reposted by Alex Dhima

Mark Shuquan Chen @markschen.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

We're hiring! The Emotion and Psychopathology in Context Lab at Harvard invites applications for a full-time RA/lab manager to start in 2026 summer. Ideal for students preparing for graduate study (e.g., clinical psych). Please consider sharing & applying! jobs.smartrecruiters.com/HarvardUnive...

jobs.smartrecruiters.com

Research Assistant I

Company Description: By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds...

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

A huge thanks to Manasa Kalanadhabhatta and Adam Grabell their mentorship and support on this project! View full preprint 👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

doi.org

OSF

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

… this approach may hold promise for personalized, neuroscience-informed treatment routing and response monitoring in early childhood.

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

We show that naturalistic, brain-based measures via fNIRS, analyzed using simple and interpretable machine learning models, can detect psychotherapy-like states in young children, although modestly. While larger replications with external datasets are required …

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

📊Feature analysis revealed that lower mean activity and variability in the left ventrolateral PFC while engaging in calm-emotion😌 reflection increased the likelihood of being classified into the therapy-like condition.

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

… whereas post-hoc exploratory models (using the four most frequently selected features across 1,000 folds from the a-priori models) yielded improved and consistently significant performance (mean AUC=0.72 - 0.76, p=0.005) 🎯

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

📊Across 200 iterations of 5-fold cross-validation, logistic regression models accurately classified whether a child was engaged in the therapy-like task (mean AUC=0.60-0.76). Performance in a-priori models was modest against a permutation null (AUC=0.60-0.63, p=0.044-0.13)…

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

🧠fNIRS was used to record activity of the bilateral dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) throughout the entire duration of the task.

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

78 preschool children were randomly assigned to: - a dyadic coloring task prompting awareness and reflection of 😡angry and😌calm emotions, designed to mimic a therapy-like interaction, or - identically structured interpersonal control condition with no emotion-related prompts🚫

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Alex Dhima @alexdhima.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

New preprint‼️ Thrilled to end 2025 with new work extending my undergrad honors thesis showing that interpretable machine learning can classify young children’s engagement in dyadic, psychotherapy-like tasks from live fNIRS data of the vlPFC and dlPFC 🧠 🧵👇 OSF👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

doi.org

OSF

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