Emma Barratt

Online Studies Psychological Science requires that authors who use samples from online data collection include a statement in the Method section explicitly addressing their approach to preventing and detecting automated or AI-generated responses. Rationale As large language models and other generative AI tools become more accessible, the risk of data contamination by non-human respondents has increased dramatically in research. Psychological science (and the social sciences generally) is particularly susceptible to this issue given its growing reliance on online data collection. Preventing automated responses during data collection and detecting them afterward often involve methodological trade-offs. For instance, technical barriers that aim to prevent LLM use (e.g., blocking copy-pasting functionalities) may eliminate behavioral indicators needed for detection (e.g., pasting rather than typing). This policy aims to enhance transparency and reproducibility of reported results by requiring authors to articulate their approach across both prevention and detection dimensions, enabling readers and reviewers to assess the likelihood of reported data being influenced by automated responses. Scope This policy applies to any submission with at least one study that includes data collected online without direct human supervision (e.g., via crowdsourcing platforms, student participants who complete the study online, online recruitment ads, or remote survey distribution tools). Required Reporting Authors must include in the Methods section either: A statement confirming that procedures were in place to prevent and/or detect and exclude automated or AI-generated responses, including a description of those procedures (e.g., explicit participant instructions against LLM use, disabled copy–paste functionality, CAPTCHA use, IP filtering, consistency checks, attention checks, adversarial prompting) as well as the types of automated responses that these procedures are suitable …

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Per protocol analysis strikes again!

Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.

“A practical framework for something I intuitively recognised, but hadn’t been able to name” | BPS In a recent issue of The Psychologist, we asked readers to tell us about a paper that changed their life. Ayad Marhoon (University of Leeds) answered the call:

In a recent issue of The Psychologist, we asked readers to tell us about a paper that changed their life. Ayad Marhoon (University of Leeds) answered the call: www.bps.org.uk/research-dig...

(If you'd like to make a similar contribution, see the end of the article!)

a bald man wearing glasses and a black shirt is sitting in front of a wall . Alt: Danny Devito saying "nope" and shaking his head

All of academia is like: Surely there is a better way to be doing this thing but I don't want to be the one to do it

"The lesson of this, and many other studies, is that good intentions are not enough to deliver consistency and validity."

AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

'to treat peer review as a throughput problem is to misunderstand what is at stake. Review is not simply a production stage in the research pipeline; it is one of the few remaining spaces where the scientific community talks to itself.' 1/3

Does anyone use the Spanish version of the RBANS ("Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status")? If you are able to send us an original form, we would be happy to compensate you for it.

Editorial by @astridchevance.bsky.social on censorship in academia.

Worth your time.

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky 🧪

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We just posted some helpful tips on searching for preprints on psyarxiv: blog.psyarxiv.com/2026/01/27/h...

Truncation and fuzzy matching should be especially helpful for lit reviews.

Keep posting your preprints to psyarxiv ❤️

M is for… Mundane | BPS The Psychologist A to Z continues.

Friday is National Nothing Day… I'm still rather keen to pull together a collection of pieces from Psychologists who consider 'nothing' in their research or practice. Absence, gaps, silence, the banal, mundane, etc etc.
This was a toe in the water years ago…
www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

195: Living meta-analysis everythinghertz.com/195

We discuss how living meta‑analyses can cut research waste and keep evidence current. We also chat about how using synthetic research participants is a terrible idea and what researchers *really* mean when they call a study "recent".

Resources for Evidence-Based Reporting on Transgender Communities - The Open Notebook Many of the issues that affect transgender people—such as gender-affirming medical care, educational policy, sports participation, military service, gender-motivated hate crime, and workplace discrimi...

Reporting on the transgender community? Here are resources from TON and @transjournalists.org for reporting accurately and responsibly. 🧪

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscope slide. 🫧🐻🧪

I love how this newly discovered immune signaling in plants looks kind of like fireworks. It's a celebration of botany! That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪🌱

a,b Average sleep time during 36 h under LD in C. andromeda (a) and N. vectensis (b). White, black, and red horizontal bars represent light, dark, and SD periods, respectively (C. andromeda: ZT17-23, N. vectensis: ZT20-ZT4). c, d Sleep time accumulation of the previous 12 h (sliding average) in C. andromeda (c) and N. vectensis (d) during 36 h under LD. Black arrowheads indicate sampling time for the DNA damage assay presented in (i–l). e Confocal z-projection of a C. andromeda rhopalium and adjacent peri-rhopalial tissue. White squares mark representative single nucleus in the mesoglea. Red asterisk indicates rhopalium. Scale bar 150 μm. f Confocal z-projection showing the mOrange-positive endodermal nervous system in tg(-2.4NvElav1b:mOrangeCAAX) N. vectensis. White squares mark representative single neurons. Scale bar 100 μm. g Representative images of cells in the peri-rhopalial tissue of C. andromeda sampled at ZT11, ZT23, and the following day (Day2 ZT11). Nucleus stained by DAPI (gray), and γH2AX foci (magenta) are stained using immunohistochemistry. Scale bar 4 μm. h Representative images of γH2AX staining (magenta) in mOrange-positive neurons (green) of tg(-2.4NvElav1b:mOrangeCAAX) N. vectensis sampled at ZT17, ZT8, and the following night (Night2 ZT17). Nucleus stained by DAPI (gray). Scale bar 2 μm. i, k Normalized number of γH2AX foci per nucleus of control and sleep-deprived C. andromeda under LD. i Control: Day1 (n = 24, 1.00 ± 0.64), Night (n = 22, 0.55 ± 0.55), Day2 (n = 26, 1.31 ± 0.63). k Sleep-deprived: Day1 (n = 27, 1.00 ± 1.09), Night (n = 31, 2.11 ± 1.13), Day2 (n = 28, 1.42 ± 1.12). Values are mean ± s.d. (n=rhopalia from 8-10 animals per time point).

Jellyfish sleep, which is already bizarre given they have no brains. DNA damage accumulates in their neurons when jellyfish are awake, and it gets repaired when they sleep. This might be something fundamental, evolutionarily, to the role of sleep. 🧪🌊

Link: nature.com/articles/s41...

Medical breakthroughs in 2025 ... and a happy new year.

New post!

There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost.

Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

New Paper in @computationalcommunication.org

The Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset 2020-2022

with the most wonderful co-autohors @buehling.bsky.social & @maxzehring.bsky.social

>> 2020-2022
>> 715 channels & 229 public groups
>> 5,641,026 messages
>> Manually curated
>> Open for researchers

YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel Interview with Sky News about Flu cases in England December 2025

Was on Sky News this morning discussing Flu and whether this was a record bad year or not.

Also discussed what we could do and the importance of vaccines, ventilation and wearing a mask if you're ill.

youtu.be/_PZiU3R7jac

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.

The Psychological Impact of Digital Isolation: How AI-Driven Social Interactions Shape Human Behavior and Mental Well-Being Felix Eling 3697-3705 Apr 30, 2025 Education The Psychological Impact of Digital Isolation: How AI-Driven Social Interactions Shape Human Behavior and Mental Well-Being Felix Eling Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Pharmacy, Gulu College of Health Sciences, Gulu City, Northern Uganda DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.90400265 Received: 13 March 2025; Revised: 22 March 2025; Accepted: 25 March 2025; Published: 30 April 2025 ABSTRACT The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in social interactions has transformed how humans experience companionship, communication, and mental well-being. This review examines the psychological impact of AI-driven social interactions, focusing on virtual assistants, AI chatbots, and digital companions. It explores the benefits, risks, and ethical concerns associated with AI companionship. A systematic review methodology was employed, detailing inclusion criteria, databases searched, and analysis techniques. Findings suggest that while AI can offer emotional relief and support, over-reliance may disrupt real-world social bonding. Ethical concerns such as data privacy, emotional manipulation, and regulatory gaps are highlighted. The study underscores the need for balanced AI integration in human socialization. The study also addresses gaps in previous literature by examining AI’s influence on different demographic groups and cultural contexts.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist.

I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

No way!! Oh that's so rad... Loving this for past you, Apocalyptica are awesome.

Look, LLM use in academia isn't just students. You need to be speaking clearly with your collaborators about your writing standards from the beginning. Make people say out loud that they don't write their own articles anymore.

Mind-altering ‘brain weapons’ no longer only science fiction, say researchers UK academics say latest chemicals are ‘wake-up call’ and urge global action to stop weaponisation of neuroscience

Sorry but I'm pretty sure that mind-altering 'brain weapons' are STILL only science fiction www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Would love to see if this has changed over the years!