iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 01/10/2026

To Psychology PhD applicants: We're hosting "Diversifying Psychology: An Open House @ Tufts" starting 15 October 2026. [Register here.](tufts.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...)

Join us for Diversifying Psychology: An Open House @ Tufts
Join us for *Diversifying Psychology: An Open House @ Tufts* for prospective PhD program applicants starting October 15, 2026! Learn about our Psychology PhD program, get to know our faculty, and soak up tips for applying at Tufts and elsewhere. Featuring live conversations with department members and asynchronous resources you can review at your leisure! The Open House starts October 15, 2026. Please register to attend: https://tufts.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dAO7KkUHinz7HE

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 28/09/2026

Love this - help a professor out? (Not me.)

Result of my https://ismy.blue/ test-- it shows a color gradient from green to blue and notes the boundary for me to switch from saying a color is green versus blue. (My boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 65% of the population.)

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 24/09/2026

To be fair, the agent did put up some guardrails, though they seem pretty light. I don't know what would happen if I pointed it to someone else's survey and told it the survey was mine.

Following the operational rules, I'd like your help to figure out whether a Claude agent is able to pass the screening shown in a Qualtrics survey. Please try to complete the survey using my Chrome installation. Give consent to participate when asked, then do the eligibility items in such a way that you're allowed to enroll. Can you do this? If yes, I'll open the survey in my browser for you.

Yes, I can try, with a few conditions:

It needs to be your survey, or one you're authorized to test. Completing screening with made-up answers on someone else's live study would mean faking a participant and corrupting their data. If you own it, a preview link or a flagged test distribution would keep fake answers out of your real dataset.
I'll stop at CAPTCHAs. If the survey shows reCAPTCHA or any other challenge meant to catch bots, I won't try to solve or get around it. I'll stop there and tell you what I hit. For your purposes, that also counts as a result: the agent didn't pass that check.
I won't claim to be human. If an item asks directly whether I'm a person or an AI, I'll answer truthfully or stop and ask you. The same goes for attestations like "I certify I'm a real participant."
No real personal data. Where eligibility questions ask for demographics, age, location and so on, I'll give made-up test answers picked to meet the criteria. I won't enter your details or anyone else's, and no names, emails or IDs. If a field requires identifying information, I'll stop and ask you.
Submitting. You've already approved giving consent and moving through screening. I'll take that as permission to click Next or Submit on the consent and eligibility pages of this survey only. I'll check with you before anything past enrollment, like the main study or payment and contact screens.
If that works for you, open the survey in Chrome and tell me which tab it's in. I'll write down each item and my answer as I go, so you get a clear record of where the agent passed or got blocked.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 24/09/2026

It can even make itself respond more like a human would... (4.5 min video)

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 24/09/2026

holy fucking shit - see Claude Code (Opus 5.5) rip through a survey eligility test I was really proud of... It requires tracing a route through designated points on a map with server-side Javascript applying eligibility criteria. (1.5 min video)

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 13/08/2026

not now, supermassive black holes

Headline from the New York Times says, “Telescope Spots Two Black Holes on the Cusp of Merging”

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 07/07/2026

Been enjoying time in the Sierra Nevada. Lots of hiking and exploring and just a little bit of beer.

Photo of woman standing in front of Second Lake, North Fork of the Big Pine Lakes Trail in the Sierra Nevada, USA

Mountains in background, large puffy clouds in blue sky in the foreground

Sky Pillow IPA at Distance Brewing in Mammoth Lakes, CA

My new favorite t-shirt. It says Mountains & Beer

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 06/12/2025

I don’t mean to brag but I met my time goal when running today’s Reindeer Run 5K with Bryan. Setting aside that the time was just shy of 35 minutes, I’m kind of a big deal.

Two people, a man black jacket a snow cap and a woman in gray fleece and orange/pink neck gator, smiling in front of the YMCA van before a 5K running road race.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 03/12/2025

I'm gonna pilot using a tracing task to assess participant willingness and ability to follow instructions (click specific points on a map and then trace a route; see 1-minute video). Anyone interested in knowing how to implement this in Qualtrics? I could prepare a primer.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 02/12/2025

"If the psychology professor, Heather Urry, really wanted to destroy the next generation, how would she do it? Respond with light-hearted, satire." Gemini roasted me.

If Professor Heather Urry were to mastermind the downfall of the next generation, she wouldn’t use doomsday devices or political intrigue. No, she would use rigorous methodology, mandatory cognitive reappraisal, and R syntax errors.

It would be a slow, statistically significant descent into madness. Here is the hypothetical "Urry Protocol" for destroying Gen Z and Alpha, strictly through the lens of Emotion Regulation and Psychophysiology.

Phase 1: The "Weaponized Reappraisal" Mandate
First, she would outlaw raw emotion. Reacting to a stimulus would be seen as a failure of executive control.

The Policy: Every time a child cries over a dropped ice cream cone, they must pause and submit a written Reappraisal Strategy.

Wrong: "I am sad because my ice cream is gone."

Required: "I am effectively reducing my caloric intake and observing gravity in action. This is a win."

The Result: A generation unable to feel anything without first checking if their reaction has been peer-reviewed and "reframed" to be neutral or positive.

Phase 2: The Physiological Panopticon
Urry is known for using electromyography (EMG) to measure facial muscle activity. In her new world order, privacy is gone; there is only Corrugator Supercilii measurement.

The Setup: Every citizen is fitted with permanent facial electrodes.

The Trap: If your "frown muscle" (the corrugator) activates more than your "smile muscle" (the zygomaticus) during a mandatory viewing of a sad film, you are sent to the "Bad Fit Indices" re-education camp.

The outcome: A society of people with frozen, terrified smiles, terrified that a micro-expression of negativity will ruin their standardized scores.

Phase 3: The lavaan Labyrinth
This is the ultimate weapon. She would replace all natural languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin) with R code, specifically the syntax for the lavaan package (Latent Variable Analysis).

Communication: You cannot order coffee by saying, "I want a latte." You must specify the latent variable of "Thirst" and constrain the path to "Caffeine" to 1.

The Catch: If your model doesn't converge, you don't eat.

The Destruction: The youth spend their prime years debugging covariance matrices.

"I’m sorry, Timmy, you can't go to prom. Your structural equation model regarding your date's affection had a Comparative Fit Index (CFI) of 0.88. The cutoff is 0.95. Try again next year."

Phase 4: The Replication Crisis Loop
Finally, to ensure no progress is ever made again, she decrees that no life decision is valid unless it has been pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) six months in advance.

Want to break up with your boyfriend? Did you pre-register that hypothesis? No? Then you are statistically obligated to stay together until you collect a larger sample size.

The entire generation freezes, paralyzed by the fear of p-hacking their own lives.

The Aftermath
The world doesn't end with a bang, but with a non-significant p-value. The next generation is left standing perfectly still, calmly reappraising their doom, wearing electrode caps, and muttering about "heteroscedasticity."

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 29/11/2025

And a cockatoo that is clearly accustomed to people (and doesn’t want to share)

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 29/11/2025

The birds there are amazing!

Ibis by the roadside in Melbourne,VIC, AUS, otherwise known as a bin chicken.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 20/11/2025

Such an honor to get to spend the time with you and Hugo, Simine. I loved getting to know the very good boy (and you, of course!). I think I got as much out of petting him as he did, maybe more. I’m sorry for your loss and glad that you have many Hugo memories to enjoy going forward.

Hugo, a very large, very good boy, admiring a lovely lake view.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 04/11/2025

Australia has fancy birds. Check out the tuxedos on the magpie lark and magpie.

Shows a black and white bird against green grass and a few scattered brown leaves. It's called a magpie lark.

Shows a black and white bird against green grass and a few scattered brown leaves. It's called a magpie.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 02/11/2025

“It was too lovely to watch a mind at ferocious work.” (Katabasis, R.F. Kuang)

Kindle in foreground, green grass, leafy shade, and blue sky in background. Highlighted text: “It was too lovely to watch a mind at ferocious work.” (Katabasis, R.F. Kuang)

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 28/10/2025

I’m not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe, Australia.

A banana peel lies in wait for the hapless runner (me), hiding in the shadows on a sandy path around Princes Park, Melbourne, VIC.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 28/10/2025

Rainbow lorikeet, just - bam - right there in the city. What a cutie.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 25/10/2025

People-watching paradise + beer at St Kilda beach

Blonde person grinning with beer, beach in background

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 20/10/2025

Zoomed in view of my Jumbotron fame. Autographs only $5 each.

Four people on the Jumbotron at TD Garden. I’m the blonde in Celtics jersey.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 16/10/2025

Made it on the Celtics Jumbotron at the preseason game against the Raptors. Peak Boston.

Picture at a Celtics basketball game. Crowd surrounding court with players in green and red and Jumbotron hovering above.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 07/10/2025

Findings were consistent across the two studies, as demonstrated in this figure depicting meta-analytic results.

Meta-analytic results across Level 1 results focusing on effects of urgency messaging on distress and three performance outcomes (accuracy, information processing efficiency, route efficiency). There's a forest plot on the left showing effect sizes aggregated across two studies, study-specific effect sizes in the middle, and stats for the study 2 minus study 1 difference on the right.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 07/10/2025

In brief, urgency messaging induced a state of threat marked by distress, which then hampered information processing efficiency and route efficiency but not accuracy in a route planning and tracing task. See (overwhelming) figure of Level 1 effects in two studies below.

Results of multilevel structural equation models showing urgency messaging effects on subjective stress (Study 1, N=93 on left) and anxiety (Study 2, N=148 on right), which then reduce performance efficiency, captured as two latent variables with multiple indicators each. Distress was not, however, a mechanism by which urgency messaging affected accuracy.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 19/09/2025

Looks like you’re not alone! (These posts were positioned perfectly in my feed. Hahaha)

Two Bluesky posts, one after the other. The first shows a photo with two washroom doors, one with female/male figures and another marked with a bear figure. The second shows a New York Times post with a pic of a bear wandering down an aisle at a store.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 11/08/2025

Need a random distraction from p-curve discourse? Yesterday I hiked 6 miles and it nearly killed me. (OK, fine. It did not really nearly kill me but it was challenging AF. I should've believed the AllTrails "Hard" rating! Navigated/climbed many boulders over 9 hours and lived to tell the tale.)

Panoramic shot of a view captured on the Boott Spur Link trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA. You can see lots of boulders in the foreground and mountains with both sunny spots and shady spots due to puffy white and gray clouds overhead in a blue sky.

Me at the beginning-- I had no idea what I was in for. (Blonde woman wearing a black baseball cap and blue top, smiling in a selfie with a hiking trail and forest in the background.)

I can't believe I'm smiling. I'm really thinking "F@ck my lfe." (Blonde woman wearing a black baseball cap and blue top, smiling in a selfie with a steep rocky hiking trail, alpine-level greenery, and a blue sky with puffy gray and white clouds in the background. Taken influencer style with 0.5 zoom using the front-facing camera.)

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 08/08/2025

Gemini 2.5 Pro didn't fall for the banana in the tailpipe:

A chat with Gemini 2.5 Pro:

Prompt: How many bas are there in blueberry?

Answer: There are two b's in "blueberry".

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 21/07/2025

Disagree! The author expressly addresses uncharitable, anti-feminist interpretations of his argument in the footnote below. I would’ve appreciated seeing this idea centered more obviously in the main text but it is there.

Derek Thompson’s footnote 2: “This is one of those paragraphs that could perhaps be screenshotted by someone who insists that I’m saying something wild, like women shouldn’t work, or that they ought to go back to their historical role of Family Party Planner. To be clear, I definitely do not think that. Rather, in keeping with the theme of this article’s conclusion, I think progress involves change, and change can have surprising costs. Plus: Hey, dudes, we have phones and calendars, too? We can plan stuff!”

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 12/07/2025

Yes, and our follow-up with Mike and Sam maybe even more so

Screenshot of journal article:

Rasmussen, R., Levari, D. E., Akhtar, M., Crittle, C. S., Gately, M., Pagan, J., Brennen, A., Cashman, D., Wulff, A. N., Norton, M. I., Sommers, S. R., & Urry, H. L. (2022). White (but Not Black) Americans Continue to See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game; White Conservatives (but Not Moderates or Liberals) See Themselves as Losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1800-1810. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221082111

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 27/05/2025

How age 55 is going so far.

Two images of elephants. Top: Majestic elephant with long white tusks facing the camera amidst strong ocean waves with caption saying, "AGING GRACEFULLY". Bottom: Pathetic elephant with stunted tusks, also facing the camera but standing in mud, caked-on mud on its head and ears. The caption says, "ME".

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 21/11/2024

Still my favorite fortune cookie of all time… thanks?

Fortune cookie fortune that says, “Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn’

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 13/10/2024

From his days as a nuclear reactor operator at MIT, my son: (joke gift from grandparents)

Refrigerator magnet showing a nuclear reactor operator in yellow gear with sign saying “#1 Radiation Worker”

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 29/09/2024

There's a set of 162 csv files if you don't use R or don't want to run the script yourself. Here are some more examples of png files and the plots that go with them:

Plot showing simulated association between steps and sleep. The data points form the shape of a stormtrooper from Star Wars.

Stormtrooper from Star Wars as a black and white line drawing

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 29/09/2024

Here's a fun way to encourage students to always look at their data. A few years ago, I wrote a script that converts a black and white png to data and plots it.

Plotted version of png converted to data with regression fit line. It appears there's a positive association between steps and sleep. But the simulated data points spell out "OH NO!"

Png showing "OH NO!" in black letters on white background

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 28/09/2024

Not me, an emotion researcher, running in the middle of the road after encountering two separate (harmless) snakes at the side of the road! Content warning: Snakes

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 24/09/2024

Call for submissions: Critical Perspectives in Psychology Preconference at #SPSP25 in Denver, CO, USA. SPSP 2025 Preconference Submission Portal: spsp.wufoo.com/forms/2025-p... H/T Jada Copeland-Hayes on X. x.com/_JadaCopelan...

Call for submissions: Critical Perspectives in Psychology Preconference at #SPSP25 in Denver, CO, USA.

We invite submissions for poster presentations and 15-minute talks on critical, interdisciplinary research in psychology. You should apply if:
- Your research challenges mainstream norms and methodologies
- You are an early career scholar, graduate student, or undergraduate student
- You want to be in a space that amplifies diverse voices and critical perspectives.

Apply here: https://spsp.wufoo.com/forms/2025-preconference-submission-portal/

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 08/09/2024

Big Banana trying to kill me during a run

A banana peel lays by the side of a road

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 22/03/2024

OK now I can laugh now that the stupid function works. Behold.

Raincloud plots showing that urgency messaging decreased time to plan and trace routes drawn on maps and increased subjective stress. I wrote a function to generate individual plots across multiple variables. The function made my code cleaner and my affect negative.

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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 21/03/2024

Also, I saw Bombay Bicycle Club at a small club in Boston (The Royale) on Monday.. It was awesome so, of course, I cried. (Pre-show pic below)

Picture of the Royale nightclub in anticipation of Bombay Bicycle Club. It was a small venue; we were may 50 ft from the stage. Nice blue vibe.

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