Clinical psychology PhD student @universityofky | fMRI and Exposure Therapy | Exercise and Mental Health | #Rstats | Hiking, art, and plants.
Lexington, KY
Joined March 2022
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“You cannot model the dynamic trajectory of a flying bird by endlessly subdividing a photograph of a flock.”
My co-authors and I just published something in Clinical Psychology Review, and it's open access. It's called "One Size Fits None: A Call for an Idionomic Revolution."
We put together a story that has been sitting in plain sight. Applied psychology has made painfully slow progress, and part of the reason traces back to the ergodic error and to the racist, sexist, and antisemitic roots of traditional biostatistics. The majority of American Psychological Association presidents from 1892 to 1947 were card carrying eugenicists. The laws that later shaped the Holocaust were written here in the United States two decades earlier, with the active support of mainstream psychology. Most textbooks treat this as distant history. Almost none notice that the same assumptions still quietly define what we call good science.
This is an article of hope though. We lay out another way forward through the emerging science of idionomics, an approach that finally puts the individual client at the center. Do we know it will succeed? Honestly, no. But the path we have been on is scientifically and morally wrong, and if evidence based therapy is going to move ahead, it needs truly new ideas.
Read it here, for free: authors.elsevier.com/c/1nkyr…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Critics identified multiple fabricated or erroneous citations in the paper (non-existent works, wrong DOIs/journals). This matches common AI hallucination patterns.
x.com/cremieuxrecuei…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42710383/
So Claude writes my paper, and then reviewers use Claude to summarize and give feedback on the paper, and then I’ll get cited when someone else uses Claude to write their paper. Publish or perish am I right?
🚨Claude Code just gave me a complete research paper with a single prompt.
The paper has a strong argument and even beats AI-detection app, Pangram.
With a little editing, it can pass for 100% human, and can be easily submitted for peer review.
Here's the workflow I used:
ALT A research paper discusses Hans Christian Andersen’s tales in colonial India, while an AI detection tool analyzes its originality.
Troy Hubert retweeted
The effects described in this paper are a real policy/implementation challenge for dimensional models of psychopathology that show that there are no firm or clear boundaries between non-disordered and disordered mental and behavioral functioning.
How do we take the clear scientific results to improve conceptualization and diagnosis without sliding down the slippery slope of “everyone has a mental disorder?”
I think we shouldn’t shy away from what the data about mental illness show us, that most things fall along a spectrum, but we have to be mindful about how that information can be used for good and for bad for the public.
People with lower grade impairments can benefit from help and support AND we shouldn’t be pathologizing normal experiences. It may seem like threading a needle but I have to believe it’s possible. Good data, criteria, and methods of assessment and diagnosis will help a ton here.
Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.
What went wrong?
In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:
1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.
The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.
This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.
Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace…
Troy Hubert retweeted
Science is about to get absolutely nuked.
Unless we get extremely strict about providing and opening up code and data and documenting lab experiments rigorously, a torrent of credible-looking but fraudulent papers is upon us.
Can water intake prevent Alzheimer’s disease? No. This is fully AI-generated… but the data below could easily pass as real.
The new ChatGPT image model is truly impressive, but I think it poses a real risk for scientific integrity in future.
For example, I could just generate a dataset with a single prompt that appears to show something like water preventing Alzheimer’s disease. Ironically, we used to laugh at obvious “AI slop” (like those weird generated mice), but that’s changing pretty fast. If I were reviewing this fake figure today, I’m not sure I could reliably tell whether this figure is real or AI-generated?
The bigger issue is that the usual signals we rely on e.g., how realistic or plausible something looks are no longer enough.
I think we really need more comprehensive AI detection and, more importantly, stronger verification standards for scientific submissions going forward. We’ll probably also need better ways to digitize lab notebooks and ensure access to raw data, something closer to how code and version history are tracked...
Troy Hubert retweeted
Lock in folks, this year we’re going to increase our brain’s neuroplasticity by meditating, sleeping well, exercising, learning new things and doing things that are challenging.
Most research papers should be a brief report with an interpretable results sections including figures and explanations of findings in plain English.
I recorded my heart rating during my dissertation proposal. Enjoy this figure showing my stress in real time:
Troy Hubert retweeted
CBT is awesome.
- Cognitive Restructuring: Get rid of negative thoughts
- Behavioral Activation: Stay active, feel better
- Problem-Solving: Address challenges directly
- Exposure Techniques: Confront fears, reduce them
Unlike endless psychoanalysis or revisiting obscure childhood drama (jokes at psychodynamic), CBT often delivers quicker results.
While I prefer psychodynamic therapy, I value most therapy approaches. Psychiatry has bigger challenges than debating therapy types. Harsh comments on X about certain therapies sadden me. If you dislike one, it may stem from a poor, manualized version or a caricature.
Most viewed in the last 7 days from @JAMAPsych:
Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is generally effective for treating major depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, OCD, and eating disorders.
ja.ma/42sc6IO
My dog when I walk in the room and he’s chewing on my shoes:
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Troy Hubert retweeted
OCD & PTSD can look the same. I’ve created a handout offering considerations for differentiating these symptoms: spaces-cdn.owlstown.com/blob…
Thanks to our @IOCDF Trauma & PTSD in OCD SIG members for the recommendation! This & other free resources available at cmpinciotti.com
Troy Hubert retweeted
This is still one of my favorite #dataviz of all time.
It shows how sensitive results are in small samples.
It provides raincloud plots with N=20 (on the left) & N=500 (right).
There is no difference between the two conditions other than the N.
My entry for #TidyTuesday this week involves fixing a bad visualization I saw on Reddit. Data Viz rule #1: Make the scale of your figure match your data. You can see the difference between the original (left) and mine (right).
Link to code: rpubs.com/Troy_Hubert09/1249…
Troy Hubert retweeted
It's published.
We ran 80,000 simulations tonight.
Harris won in 40,012.
natesilver.net/p/nate-silver…
Can anyone in the clinical psychology field tell me if they know anyone that does 50/50 clinical work and research? I really enjoy clinical work, but I also enjoy coding/stats and participating on a research team. Is it a pipe dream to do 50/50 clinical work/research?
Posted my first #TidyTuesday yesterday with a typo in it... So lets try this again!
Using simulated data I created this figure to show hypothesized results for a treatment study between active control and experimental groups.
CODE: rpubs.com/Troy_Hubert09/1229…