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Ashley Watts

@ashleylwatts.bsky.social
2.1K followers 547 following 401 posts
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Reposted by Ashley Watts
Jeff Lockhart @jwlockhart.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
At least where I got my PhD, if I wasn't sure what I found, how it worked, if it was useful or significant, nobody pretended I accomplished anything.
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
🌟 Vanderbilt Psychology has an open rank position available in our clinical area! Job ad here: apply.interfolio.com/194049 (Note that this position is separate from our other psych department's asst prof search: apply.interfolio.com/194058) RTs appreciated!!
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Autumn Kujawa @akujawa.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
✨We’re hiring at Vanderbilt! ✨ Two open tenure track Assistant Professor positions in the Dept of Psychology & Human Development 🧠 For more info and to apply: apply.interfolio.com/194058 Please share!
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Jonas Dora @jonasdora.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I'm super excited to share a new preprint in which @kevinmking.bsky.social and I propose an update to the affect regulation theory of alcohol use: "A mathematical and computational formalization of the affect regulation hypothesis of alcohol use" doi.org/10.31234/osf...
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David Epstein @davidnotdave.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Clear it up, Cofnas signatories. Do you care about academic freedom, a fine ideal that includes empirical examinations of racism, misogyny, and gender nonbinaries? Or do you care only about an absence of consequences for racist tweets from your racist friends? Have the guts to say which.
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
When it comes to signing open letters about academic freedom, “We have to take a principled stand!” doesn’t work if there have been loads of other much more obvious and serious instances of violations of academic freedom to which you said absolutely nothing.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23/08/2026
here is the thing. if you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, i am not calling you a racist to *insult* you, i am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Check out a recent paper from my lab led by @josephfsexton.bsky.social: We show how and why conventional practices to “establish” unidimensionality of psychiatric constructs are highly fallible and prematurely foreclose upon multidimensional solutions. (Joseph’s thread is worth perusing!)
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Joseph Sexton @josephfsexton.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
📝 Excited to share an accepted first-authored paper at Clinical Psych Science! Why are so many mental disorders treated as unidimensional? We show support for 1-factor models is often just an artifact of conventional psychometric methods -- which weren't designed with psychopathology in mind.
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Whitney Ringwald @whitneyringwald.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Are temperament and personality the same thing? Check out our new preprint tackling this question. Led by the incomparable @kaileylawson.bsky.social, with @rebeccatheshiner.bsky.social, bsky-less Rick Robins This was such a fun one to work on with this team!
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Daniel P. Moriarity @dpmoriarity.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Your academic friends repost your work. My academic friends send me unsolicited recipe recommendations. We are not the same. @ashleylwatts.bsky.social
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
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Aaron Fisher @aaronjfisher.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
One of the advantages of the configural approach is that it only examines presence and concurrence. So, you're only ever looking at those that have something, rather than those that don't. And I'm finding that the HiTOP works really nicely under configural analysis. 1/
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Ryan Carpenter @rwcarpenterphd.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
New out in Addiction, we wrote an editorial about negative affect and drinking in daily life. It talks a lot about ice cream. @sammeisel.bsky.social @samuelacuff.bsky.social @andreawycoff.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
static.klipy.com
Kitten Enjoys Ice Cream
ALT: Kitten Enjoys Ice Cream
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FactPost @factpostnews.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Senator Raphael Warnock's proposal to ban private equity firms from buying up single-family homes is now federal law.
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Excited to share a paper recently accepted at Nature Mental Health! 😄 For decades, we've assumed that covariance among psychopathology informs comorbidity. What if we’ve been wrong?
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Julia Métraux @juliametraux.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Scoop: NIH is on a mission to enlist one million Americans to share their genetic data to help with health research through a precision medicine program called “All of Us.” What participants don’t know is that at one research site, Palantir stores the data. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
motherjones.com
Palantir has a hand in NIH's most ambitious health initiative
The defense tech firm's work with public health data has largely flown under the radar.
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Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, PhD @lluaces.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
1/ @sadcatlab.bsky.social research "in press" at Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. In 274 adults with 7 weekly measurements, we find that cognitive change in CBT predicts subsequent symptom change, controlling for time-invariant confounds + linear trends osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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Aaron Fisher @aaronjfisher.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Exciting day. My set-theoretic reconceptualization of the DSM (w/ MDD, GAD, and PTSD as empirical examples) is out today in JPCS, along with four invited commentaries and my response. I'm biased, but I recommend all six papers. I was really jazzed by all four commentaries. 1/25
Screenshot of a portion of the most recent TOC for the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. Shows a target article for a recent set-theoretic reconceptualization of the DSM, four invited commentaries, and a response.
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Michael Nabert @sustainablesong.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Research confirms that the more skilled professionals like doctors and software engineers rely on AI, the more their skills degrade. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good
Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.
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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
#AcademicSky I'd add: write your talk, and do your slides, yourself. No AI. These are valuable skills to learn, and will enable you to hone your own voice. (I'm not just old-man grumbling. In a world where everyone is using AI, you can add value by being the person who can think for themself)
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Andrea Howard @drandreahoward.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
I just returned from two back-to-back conferences. Students, I noticed that a lot of your slide decks had an oddly similar layout structure and I was able to confirm in conversations that these were AI-generated/assisted. Some thought about this for your own professional development: 🧵
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Trung Le Nguyen @trungles.com · 31/05/2026
I am begging these guys—this Princeton prof in particular, but also a lot of other guys in positions of influence—to stop making their midlife crises everybody else’s problem
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Association for Psychological Science @psychscience.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Relying on #memory alone may leave important gaps and new assessment strategies are needed to gain a clearer picture of what’s really happening. #AlcoholUseDisorder #ClinicalScience @kevinmking.bsky.social
psychologicalscience.org
For Young Adults, Recollection of Alcohol Addiction May Differ From Reality
When young adults are asked to recall their drinking habits, their recollections may not always match what actually happened in their day-to-day lives, a new study suggests.
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.
ms.now
Opinion | Beware conservatives promoting “intellectual freedom”
Victor Ray: This conservative lie about schools like mine is furthering authoritarianism
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Joseph Sexton @josephfsexton.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Very stoked to share that I'm joining Temple University's Clinical Psych PhD program this fall! I'll be doing critically minded and methods-heavy work on measurement, depression, and suicide in adolescents with @olinotom.bsky.social. Feeling super grateful! If you're in Philly, say hi :)
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Jenny Grant Weinandy @jgrantweinandy.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
By calling distress about social media an addiction, we are also unintentionally invoking negative biases about addiction ("lazy", "their own fault") that allows companies to be less responsible. So unless we are certain the case is addiction, it may be better to be cautious about saying addiction.
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
the Gen Zs in my lab find me impossibly relatable, I just know it
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Shai Carmi @shaicarmi.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
Very interesting perspective article by @caina89.bsky.social et al on genetic studies in psychiatry. The authors argue that studies increasingly rely on "shallow" phenotyping (self-reported), leading to biases in estimation of genetic relationships between disorders. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The predicament of heritable confounders - Nature Genetics
This Perspective argues that diagnoses derived from self-reports, electronic health records and self-administered questionnaires introduce heritable bias that confounds the interpretation of data from...
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
The New York Times reports that a group of “scientific” racists misused National Institute of Health data (that families were assured would be protected) to write bogus papers on supposed to biological racial differences. Gift link.
nytimes.com
Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
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Gordon Hodson @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
#AcademicSky But also: Wow. The speed with which scholars have turned epistemic authority over to black-box algorithms, created by Big Tech who stole content from scholars.... is truly staggering. People, this should be a time of resistance, not capitulation.
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Kevin M. King @kevinmking.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
I kept reading EMA studies claiming to test etiological theories of AUD, but I realized they never actually measured how people experience AUD in their daily lives. So we set out to see what we could learn with existing data. 1/19 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Seven Symptoms Over Nearly 4,000 Days: Item-Level Variability in the Psychometric Properties of Daily Alcohol Use Disorder Symptoms in Young Adult Drinkers - Kevin M. King, Dahyeon Kang, Megan E. Schu...
People experience symptoms of alcohol use disorders (AUD) in their daily lives, including more impairment-based symptoms (e.g., hazardous use, interpersonal pro...
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
Writing is thinking Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.
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Autumn Kujawa @akujawa.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
We still have an opening for a clinical psych postdoc to join our team. Interested applicants are welcome to email me directly for more information, and I’m happy to set up a time to chat. Please share!
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Liam McHugh-Russell @xntl.info · 07/01/2026
While there is so much that is disturbing about this case study in the destruction of academic freedom, one high point is the refusal of the targeted professor to submit
Dear Dr. Sweet,
I hereby submit my S 2026 syllabus for PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues, for mandatory censorship review.
The syllabus has not changed much since I last taught the course. I have made some minor adjustments to the module on Race and Gender Ideology and to the lecture on Sexual Morality. These topics are commonly covered in this type of course nationwide, and the material is discussed in depth in the assigned textbook (Fiala and MacKinnon, 10th edition). I also ask my students to read a few passages from Plato (Aristophanes' myth of the split humans and Diotima's Ladder of Love).
Please note that my course does not "advocate" any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.
If you interpret System Rule 08.01 §2.1(b) as prohibiting these topics, I would like to remind you that the U.S. Constitution protects my course content. Texas A&M is a public institution bound by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has noted that academic freedom is "a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom" (Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 [1967]).
Another relevant precedent is Sweezy v. New Hampshire. Here is Chief Justice Earl Warren for the majority in 1957:
"The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and stu
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 16/12/2025
Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?
nature.com
More than half of researchers now use AI for peer review — often against guidance
A survey of 1,600 academics found that more than 50% have used artificial-intelligence tools while peer reviewing manuscripts.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 26/11/2025
Who gives a shit!!!!!!!!!!!!! Who cares!!! Eat whatever pie!!!
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
circling p-values right below .05 to infer something about the invalidity of inferences (or even research misconduct) is conceptually no different from calling p-values right above the threshold marginally significant. makes no sense to deride one of these practices while upholding the other.
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
Folks who are going to APS next summer: @olinotom.bsky.social and I are thinking of proposing a symposium on rethinking/reconceptualizing comorbidity (still finalizing a specific topic) and are looking for a couple of other folks to present. Anyone potentially interested? Feel free to DM!
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Re-upping since we're just over a week away from the deadline to apply to the TT asst prof position in our clinical area at Vanderbilt! Please consider applying if you're on the job market! RTs appreciated.
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James Downie @jamescdownie.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
A moment of silence, please, for the "young men are all MAGA now" narrative. (Source: www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...)
Spanberger v. Earle-Sears exit poll

Men 18-29: Spanberger 56%; Earle-Sears 42%
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Joe Hanson @drjoehanson.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
academic.oup.com
Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning
Abstract. The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when
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Aaron Fisher @aaronjfisher.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
If the proponents of the "P" factor weren't all famous grey hairs, would we be talking about it all?
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Will Jennings📉🗳️ @drjennings.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
I'm going to start a thread with examples of how the NYT uses euphemism to painfully avoid saying that Trump is committing blatantly unconstitutional and lawless acts. Let's start with this one... "stretched the limits of his spending powers"
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Jonathan Magnolia Gilligan @jmgilligan.org · 10/10/2025
Student governments of Vanderbilt, MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, UVA, and Arizona issued a joint statement condemning the Compact and stating that "Academic Freedom is not negotiable." www.instagram.com/p/DPm507ljBJ...
On October 1st, 2025, the White House sent the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to our seven universities, outlining expectations universities must meet to continue receiving federal benefits.

Although the compact's full implications remain unclear, the document outlines
unprecedented expectations universities must meet to receive federal benefits. This could systemically alter the mission of higher education and erode the independence that has long defined our universities. We must not allow these attempts to control what can be taught, studied, or spoken on our campuses.

Our universities represent the full spectrum of American higher education, from liberal arts colleges to leading research institutions. As students, this directly impacts us, and thus, our voices must be heard. We know firsthand that institutional autonomy is instrumental to the perpetuation of innovation and progress. As the Compact itself acknowledges, “American higher education is the envy of the world and represents a key strategic benefit for our Nation," yet the document undermines the very principles that make this statement true. Our administrations have been presented with a false choice between their commitments to knowledge and education and our access to the resources that sustain them. To preserve our status as world leaders in education, we must remain true to the foundation of academic freedom that has propelled us forward.

As student representatives, we stand in united opposition to the outlined conditions. We call on our community of students, faculty, alumni, and leadership to reaffirm our commitment to reject political interference and federal overreach. Academic freedom is not negotiable.
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Proud of my Vanderbilt colleagues for making it clear that our university should reject the proposed "Compact". As I state below - this deal is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms. (And yay to MIT for their clear rejection today!) www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...
msnbc.com
Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain.
Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.
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Nashville Post @nashvillepost.com · 10/10/2025
The Vanderbilt University Faculty Senate has adopted a resolution recommending the school reject a recent offer from the Trump administration. www.nashvillepost.com/politics/vand…
nashvillepost.com
Vanderbilt faculty senate opposes White House compact
University members approve resolution recommending university reject Trump deal
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
"American civil society has more than enough financial and organizational muscle to stop this authoritarian offensive. But it requires collective resolve. And it requires leadership, which has been in painfully short supply." www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
thecrimson.com
Harvard Must Take a Stand Against Trump’s Compact | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
Harvard, rather than quietly pursuing its own appeasement strategy, should lead the way to preserve academic freedom and democracy.
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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
⚡️ NYT Editorial Board: “Blame Trump when your energy bills go up… Rather than trying to put oil companies out of business, Mr. Trump is going after clean energy, and Americans will face higher bills as a result.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/o...
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
A strong statement from the Dartmouth President regarding the "Compact" president.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/10... 1/2
president.dartmouth.edu
Response to the ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education’ | Office of the President
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