Devinder Khera

Study promotion for a great PhD student!

If you and/or your romantic partner are experiencing depressive symptoms, consider participating in this online study. Your participation can help researchers better understand romantic partner support. Open to couples of any gender or sexual orientation 🌈

"Bonded by Evolution" book next to Mango the toy poodle.

We're all very excited around here to read @pauleastwick.bsky.social's new book!

Polyamory is about honesty, not an excuse to sleep around An anthropologist’s detailed research shows polyamorists focus on intimacy and honesty, not sleeping around

Where popular portrayals of polyamory most often miss the mark is in the idea that the practice is primarily about having sex with multiple partners. Polyamory is mostly about intimacy, not sex, and it has ethics at its core. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/polyamory-isnt-all-about-sex/

You never need to watch the video but you do need to know it was an execution

why I have trust issues

At least it wasn't 21-0 in the first half. Took till the 2nd half this time.

Large Language models pose an existential threat to online survey research www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An AI can now evade a comprehensive suite of data quality checks, achieving a 99.8% pass rate on 6,000 trials of standard attention checks.

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

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...

Typical Steelers football. Boswell deserved to be bailed out.

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Is social interaction a tradeoff of autonomy for belonging compared to being alone? New paper by phenom @elainehoan.bsky.social says yes if you're interacting with strangers, no if you're interacting with friends/family. With a romantic partner you gain in both. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Common method bias can lead to spurious correlations in relationship studies Nature Reviews Psychology - Common method bias can lead to spurious correlations in relationship studies

Nice coverage of our Pseudo project in Nature Reviews. @johnsakaluk.bsky.social @davekhera.bsky.social @helenaqin.bsky.social @sarahcestanton.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Silly Jimmy Kimmel. He should have just called for all homeless people to be killed and he’d still have a job.

Is the idea that getting into a romantic relationship increases well-being a myth? A new MacLab paper says no. And I had so much to say about this work, I started a Substack: The Unromantic. Links for the paper and the Substack in replies.

ggplot2 4.0.0 A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

I'd feel more confident with the wet bandits.

For potential grad students: if you're interested in this kind of work on assessing and improving close relationships measures, our group just got a grant to do five more years of it. Join our team!

Our preprint for #dyadic SEM tutorial with {dySEM} is back up/available!

Thanks to @psyarxivbot.bsky.social team quickly retooling their approach (and the thankless work of the mods) to help sift the real from the slop!

Excellent paper alert!!!

I’ve watched Sam give two talks about this topic (once as a first year grad student which was extremely formative for my research trajectory). Very excited to see this in print!

Despite the unclear meaning of the items, many participants tried to rate them by drawing on information about their own romantic relationships. A total of 88.89% of participants referenced their own relationships in response to at least one item, and many of these responses (41.46%) drew on global, usually positive feelings about the relationship. For example, when asked to justify a rating to the snowdrop item, a participant wrote, “I love the person I am in a relationship with. 7 was the highest number I could choose to indicate how much I love them.” In response to the umbra item, another wrote, “I wasn’t sure what umbra meant. But I appreciate everything that comes with my relationship, so I clicked ‘agree.’”

Helena's qualitative work for this was so amazing. Participants summed up sentiment override and their use of global evaluations for us really nicely.

This is schmeasurement's Dead Salmon fMRI study:

A cautionary tale of how standard research practices can produce misleading results.

I love it. Immediately putting it on my reading lists.

It's out!!🌶️🔥

Shoutout to my talented coauthors @johnsakaluk.bsky.social, James Kim, @davekhera.bsky.social, Helena Qin and @sarahcestanton.bsky.social.

When considering the moving to UWO, the opportunity to have Sam as a colleague in SPDP, and work with her, was a huge draw. And I'll never forget how agitated her award-winning address--where she first laid these ideas out--left the audience. Incredibly proud to see this work out and play a role.

From this paper:

(Holy Cow! Reminds me also of how Bullshit Receptivity items can glom together!)

🚨 YA’LL!! HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS PAPER TO COME OUT FOR AGES. IT IS SO SATURN.

I MEAN, IT IS SO GOOD.

SAME THING.

(JUST READ IT)

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025 Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...

In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

a cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane is dancing on a dance floor ALT: a cartoon unicorn with a rainbow mane is dancing on a dance floor

I'll be recruiting a grad student to join the UNICORN lab for Fall 2026! If you know any magical students interested in gender/sex, LGBTQ+ issues, intergroup relations, stereotyping & prejudice, social cognition, feminism, issues of bodily autonomy, or anything else I do, please send them my way!

The Love Consortium Statistics Decision Tree launched today! Think of it like a choose-your-own adventure guide to help you identify the best analyses for your specific dataset and research question.

theloveconsortium.org/so/9fPWyVE6Z...

#DataScience #Statistics