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Ciarán O’Driscoll

@cycology.bsky.social
545 followers 857 following 5 posts

Clinical Psychologist & Associate Professor (UCL) t.co/CIIfAAKIXB

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Reposted by Ciarán O’Driscoll
Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 25/09/2026
"Systematic reviews are only as credible as the studies they include" INSPECT-SR was published yesterday, giving concrete guidance on how to exclude untrustworthy studies. Cochrane's statement: www.cochrane.org/about-us/new... Article: www.cochrane.org/about-us/new... Guidance: inspect-sr.com
cochrane.org
New tool helps researchers spot problematic trials before they distort evidence | Cochrane
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Omid V. Ebrahimi @omidvebrahimi.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
📜 Out now: ‘Towards a genetics of mental disorders as complex dynamical systems’ After 2 years of work with @michelnivard.bsky.social & @ludvigdb.bsky.social We outline a roadmap to align behavioural genetics with novel dynamic theories of mental disorders A thread 🧵 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
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Brennan Kahan @brennankahan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
***JOB ALERT*** We are seeking to appoint 3 Statistical Methodologists to work on methods related to the statistical analysis of clinical trials, or innovative design methodology. The posts will be based within the UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
ucl.ac.uk
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 14/09/2026
Did you know that there’s only a single letter separating an “idionomic clinical workflow” from an “idiotnomic clinical workflow”? I haven’t managed to write my screed about cluster analysis yet, here’s another blog post in the meantime: www.the100.ci/2024/10/28/i...
the100.ci
Idiographic Approaches in Psychology: Hold your horses
There have been persistent calls spurring psychologists to do more “idiographic” research, starting even before Peter Molenaar’s “Manifesto on Psychology as Idiographic Science”, which is already 20 y...
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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I love the concrete examples of how to avoid anthropomorphism in this article: artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation image recognition → image labeling speech recognition → automatic transcription shows bias → reflects bias hallucination → undesirable output goal → success condition
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Joar Øveraas Halvorsen @joarhalvorsen.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Another example of null results from a superiority trial interpreted as equivalence. The Unified Protocol for Adolescents didn’t outperform progressive relaxation, so the authors conclude that both conditions were effective and should be broadly disseminated. 🙃 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
A multicenter randomized controlled effectiveness trial of transdiagnostic treatment for adolescents with subthreshold anxiety and depressive symptoms | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core
A multicenter randomized controlled effectiveness trial of transdiagnostic treatment for adolescents with subthreshold anxiety and depressive symptoms - Volume 56
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Reposted by Ciarán O’Driscoll
Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
This paper shows how measures and constructs in psychology get introduced but rarely reused. Would love to see a similar analysis done on methods of analyzing neural data. A Fragmented Field: Construct and Measure Proliferation in Psychology" Anvari et al., 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Treemap plots for (top) personality and social psychology and (bottom) clinical and health psychology. Each tile shows one measure, labeled with its acronym if it fits on the tile. Larger tiles indicate that the measure has been used a higher number of times; the many smaller tiles show fragmentation.
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Dawson Haddox @dawsonhaddox.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
🚨 New preprint! Across six studies (N=2,467), we evaluated three modular adaptations to the PHQ depression measures: separating double-barreled items, adding irritability and low-libido items, and supporting past-week assessment. 🧵1/7 osf.io/preprints/ps...
Screenshot of the abstract for “Modular Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) Adaptations for Symptom-Level and Past-Week Depression Assessment in Clinical and Nonclinical Adults.”
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Hugo Fleming @hugofleming.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
New paper alert! 📣📣 In this work, we investigated the origins of somatic symptoms – a common and debilitating feature of anxiety and depression. 'Anxiety is associated with the persistence of conditioned somatic sensations over time'
osf.io
OSF
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Vaughan Bell @vaughanbell.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
New from us: Personality change after traumatic brain injury: a systematic review and meta-analysis link.springer.com/article/10.1... Developed and completed in collaboration a diverse team including members from @headwaylondon.bsky.social
link.springer.com
Personality change after traumatic brain injury: a systematic review and meta-analysis - Journal of Neurology
Background Personality change is a debilitating consequence of traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet its prevalence, characteristics, and treatment remain poorly understood. Methods We completed a pre-reg...
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Jason da Silva Castanheira @jasondasilvac.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Out now in eLife, our new and improved paper on Attention and planning. Here, we explore how attention acts like an inductive bias that selects relevant information on which to plan. 📍🗺️👀 (1/5) elifesciences.org/articles/108... @smfleming.bsky.social
elifesciences.org
How attention simplifies mental representations for planning
Spatial attention controls the information people become aware of and, in turn, incorporate into simplified perceptual representations for use in multi-step planning.
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Ashley Watts @ashleylwatts.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
What’s driving the overlap between psychopathology dimensions? Not comorbidity – nomorbidity. Most of our samples contain people with little psychopathology, and shared absence of psychopathology dimensions can look like shared presence if you assume a linear association in the population.
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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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Don Lynam @drlynam.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Happy to be part of this paper. 1. Depression and personality functioning are pretty fungible. 2. It is hard to statistically work one's way around latent correlations of .75 to .87. 3. The perils of partialling remain grossly underappreciated (see www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...)
annualreviews.org
The Questionable Practice of Partialing to Refine Scores on and Inferences About Measures of Psychological Constructs
Partialing is a statistical approach researchers use with the goal of removing extraneous variance from a variable before examining its association with other variables. Controlling for confounds thro...
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Reposted by Ciarán O’Driscoll
Earthling @ziyatong.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
🎯
@nluewmist / I’m finally reading Dune. This quote which in the first few pages hit hard; “once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only let other men with machines to enslave them.”
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Jonas Dora @jonasdora.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
I'm really excited to share a new preprint! Lab studies have consistently shown that stress and negative emotions make people drink alcohol, but studies of daily life (EMA) keep failing to find it. What does that mean for the shared theoretical prediction both designs test? osf.io/preprints/ps...
Figure summarizing new EMA data from our lab
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Schera Wyss 💀 SLUG HUMAN @scherawyss.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
This might be one of the most insane scandals in game history When Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines
Screenshot of the article
 (I'm sorry I don't have time to type this whole thing as alt text my poor thumbs owww)Screenshot of the article
 (I'm sorry I don't have time to type this whole thing as alt text my poor thumbs owww)Screenshot of the article
 (I'm sorry I don't have time to type this whole thing as alt text my poor thumbs owww)Screenshot of the article
 (I'm sorry I don't have time to type this whole thing as alt text my poor thumbs owww)
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Ciarán O’Driscoll @cycology.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Human-AI relationships and their therapeutic implications www.emerald.com/mhdt/article...
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Omid V. Ebrahimi @omidvebrahimi.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
🌟 Out in Clinical Psychology Review after years in the making: Pleased to share the 1st meta-analytic network analysis (MAGNA) investigating core maintaining features of anxiety symptoms pooling 156 networks (N = 303,151). w/Belli, Tichelaar, @sachaepskamp.bsky.social & @cycology.bsky.social 🧵:
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Irish Learning Technology Association @iltasky.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
AI in education = commercialisation of a collective responsibility outsourcing a social, civic, and democratic process of cultivating the coming generation to commercial and capitalist enterprise whose priority is profit
AI in education = commercialisation of a collective responsibility

outsourcing a social, civic, and democratic process of cultivating the coming generation to commercial and capitalist enterprise whose priority is profit
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Reposted by Ciarán O’Driscoll
Björn Siepe @bsiepe.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Using (multilevel) VAR models? Ever checked how well they actually fit your data? @jmbh.bsky.social & I created VARcheck, an R package for visual model checking for VAR models. Blogpost with workflow: bsiepe.github.io/blog/2026-05... 📝Paper: doi.org/10.31234/osf... 💻Docs: bsiepe.github.io/VARcheck/
The image shows two plots. On the left-hand side, you can see a plot showing empirical & predicted time series in the plot, and a distribution of empirical values on the right-hand side. The R² of the model is 0.28, and the RMSE is 1.28. 
On the right side, we see a plot of residuals over time as well as their marginal distribution, again on the ride side of the plot. We also see that the autoregressive coefficient of the residuals is 0.16.
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 19/05/2026
🤷🏾‍♀️
Sick and wrong: Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts
60% of evaluated AI Scribe systems mixed up prescribed drugs in patient notes, auditors say

Brandon Vigliarolo
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Richard D. Morey @richarddmorey.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
read this and tell me again that long term memory is organized semantically
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Sacha Epskamp @sachaepskamp.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
I spent the past semester building interactive teaching apps with AI-assisted coding. I used my personal website to share them with my students, but that makes them hard to find for other educators. So I built Galvoro — galvoro.app
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Hannah Waight @hwaight.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.
nature.com
State media control influences large language models - Nature
Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger ...
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 12/05/2026
Heartbreaking, really really disturbing and gross: AI toys aren't remotely a good idea www.wired.com/story/the-ne...
“Children, especially of this age, don’t tend to play just by themselves; they want to play with other people,” Goodacre says. “They bring their parents into the play. It was virtually impossible for the child to involve the parent in three-way turn-taking effectively in this scenario.” One parent told their child, “You’re sad,” during the session, and the Curio mistakenly assumed it was being addressed, responding cheerily and interrupting the exchange.
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Biological Psychiatry @biologicalpsych.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
A review of 18 studies found no consistently reproducible subtypes of schizophrenia, suggesting that differences in brain structure across patients may reflect a spectrum rather than discrete biological categories.
bpsgos.org
Neuroimaging-Based Subgroups in Schizophrenia: A Critical Appraisal of Clustering Studies
Efforts to define biologically grounded subtypes of schizophrenia have increasingly leveraged neuroimaging data and clustering algorithms. Such approaches aim to capture patient-level heterogeneity…
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Ciarán O’Driscoll @cycology.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Investigating differences in common mental health symptom expression and co-occurrence across ethnicities rdcu.be/fgmQl - using moderated network analysis to show the influence of ethnicity on both symptom levels and symptom co-occurrence
rdcu.be
Investigating differences in common mental health symptom expression and co-occurrence across ethnicities
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Ciarán O’Driscoll @cycology.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Exploring the dynamic system changes underlying the resolution of social anxiety in individuals receiving cognitive behavioural therapy www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Exploring the dynamic system changes underlying the resolution of social anxiety in individuals receiving cognitive behavioural therapy
Cognitive models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) provide theoretical frameworks that explain maintaining factors and guide treatment protocols. While…
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Reposted by Ciarán O’Driscoll
Simon Hammann @simonhammann.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.
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Sacha Epskamp @sachaepskamp.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
After 150 years of boring wooden Galton boards, I finally fixed it! Now with lasers, bazookas, bombs, pinball bumpers, and extremely serious sci-fi hamsters. 🎯 EXTREME GALTON 👇 sachaepskamp.com/extreme_galton
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Madalina Vlasceanu, PhD @madalina.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
What makes behavioral interventions work beyond the psychological theory they implement? Their format, level of engagement, delivery modality? In a new paper analyzing 274 interventions from 15 megastudies (4.1M+ participants), we tested 19 features: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2
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Cherise Rosen @ccrosenphd.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
World Psychiatry ~ The lived experience of persons who attempt suicide: a bottom-up review co-designed, co-produced and co-written by experts by experience and academics. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The lived experience of persons who attempt suicide: a bottom‐up review co‐designed, co‐produced and co‐written by experts by experience and academics
This is the first bottom-up review of the lived experience of persons who attempt suicide. The study has been co-designed, co-conducted and co-written by experts by experience and academics, focusing...
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Hyowon (Hyo) Gweon @hyogweon.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Officially out TODAY in Child Development! It's good to try challenging tasks and explore on your own, but not when it might be too hard and help isn't available. Children get that. w/ Kat Shannon, Aneesa Conine-Nakano, Willem Frankenhuis, @mcxfrank.bsky.social academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...
academic.oup.com
Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners
Abstract. The effectiveness of social learning depends on whether learners receive help when they need it. In four preregistered studies, U.S. 4–6-year-old
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Whitney Ringwald @whitneyringwald.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
I am so pro-behavioral sequences. Especially excited that the network metrics outperformed total screen time in predicting mental health.
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Ben Goldacre @bengoldacre.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c Now it's over to users! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...
bennett.ox.ac.uk
OpenSAFELY news: you can apply to do non-COVID research, from today! | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science
We are delighted to announce that - from today - you can submit applications to the OpenSAFELY service for non-COVID-19 studies.
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Omid V. Ebrahimi @omidvebrahimi.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
📝 New preprint on the threat of cyborg propaganda to democracy. We discuss how the key divide in online influence is no longer bots vs humans. We are entering an era of 'cyborg propaganda': Verified human identities disseminate centrally generated, AI-crafted narratives 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
I've been inspired to become a founder of a new startup that develops brain-to-brain interface technology. It's called Talk. We're going to reinvent communication for the digital age. The best part is that we're able to zero-shot transfer the full computational stack already used by your brain!
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Anna Ciaunica PhD @annaciaunica.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
Sneak peak from our paper led by amazing Erik Bekker ! 👇🏼 arxiv.org/abs/2601.21016
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Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.
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Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Comparing registrations to published papers is essential to research integrity - and almost no one does it routinely because it's slow, messy, and time-demanding. RegCheck was built to help make this process easier. Today, we launch RegCheck V2. 🧵 regcheck.app
regcheck.app
RegCheck
RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.
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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
“Our findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque.” @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com et al. arxiv.org/abs/2601.115...
arxiv.org
Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research
To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...
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Omid V. Ebrahimi @omidvebrahimi.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
🌟📝 Just out in World Psychiatry: Our new piece demonstrates the added value of dynamic symptom networks for predicting treatment outcomes beyond baseline severity & common covariates, with an added explained variance of 9-22% at post-treatment & follow-up. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
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Martin Plöderl @ploederl.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Hurray, Omega-3 ends all mental suffering! Reduction of stress, anxiety, and depression with SMD > 3! Quite a lubricated review process, too: Received 8 Sep 2025; Revised 17 Nov; and accepted on Christmas (24 Dec). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
The effects of Omega-3 supplementation on stress, anxiety, depression, sleep quality, and everyday memory in individuals with psychological distress: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled tri...
Psychological stress, anxiety, depression, memory impairment, and poor sleep quality are prevalent issues that affect individuals' quality of life and…
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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
eiko-fried.com
WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried
If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...
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John Sakaluk @johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Pleased to share for those using #rstats for analyzing #dyadic data, that we released a major update of dySEM on CRAN (now ver. 1.4.1) *just* before the winter break. New functionality for scripting/outputting dyadic SEMs, along with (much) more test coverage! 🧵 cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
dySEM package logo of two gender/sex-ambiguous figures holding onto a collection of rainbow-coloured balloons in a fashion resembling an SEM path diagram
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J. Nathan Matias @natematias.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Should scientists apply to OpenAI's fund for research on AI & mental health? Should policymakers consider it a credible safety effort? Avriel Epps & I see it as "grantwashing," and it's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots. We explain: www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...
techpolicy.press
Beware of OpenAI's 'Grantwashing' on AI Harms | TechPolicy.Press
J. Nathan Matias and Avriel Epps say OpenAI's announced research funding is the perfect corporate action to make sure we don't find answers for years.
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Can Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? Chatbots can be responsive in ways humans see as supportive, yet cannot provide the benefits of a real human. My concern is that as more people go to chatbots for social contact, they will not be available to real humans. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Can Generative AI Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? A Relationship Science Perspective - Molly G. Smith, Thomas N. Bradbury, Benjamin R. Karney, 2025
The development of generative artificial intelligence capable of sustaining complex conversations has created a burgeoning market for companion chatbots promisi...
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Anthony D. Ong @anthonyong.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Call for papers: Emotion special issue on Affect Dynamics Across Multiple Timescales (moments→days→years) and links to mental and physical health. Letters of intent due Jan 15, 2026. Details/submission: www.apa.org/pubs/journal... Please share with colleagues/trainees. @affectscience.bsky.social
apa.org
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