Lukas Gunschera

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online:
www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han...

Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

Thanks for this great article on an important topic. I want to add that there is more nuance to the debate of behavioural addictions, and research *does* support the claim that dopamine drives addiction in other pleasurable behaviors (i.e. gambling). For example: www.nature.com/articles/npp...

#CPConf2025 is a wrap - thanks to everyone who made this event so special! @unituebingen.bsky.social @tueneurocampus.bsky.social

Amazing, huge congratulations!!🙌🏼

I'm hiring 2+ 2.5-year postdocs over the next few months.

Job 1: looking for someone with deep expertise in computational modelling (reinforcement learning, agent based modelling) on real-world/complex data (closing: 18 August, starting: October-December), www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/52059/

So exciting!🙌🏼

Brilliant work by @saramehrhof.bsky.social on shared neurocognitive signatures of psychiatric and metabolic disorder at #cpconf2025

1/3 New post up! 📝 I took the workhorse 🔧 of binary modeling—logistic regression—and gave it a Bayesian tune-up using a Kaggle SMS-spam dataset.

We have a ✨NEW PREPRINT✨! Using data from the @clscohorts.bsky.social Millennium Cohort Study and linked healthcare records, we tested the association between social media use and psychiatric diagnoses in secondary care in young people in England. This is still a work in progress - feedback welcome!

Excellent thread on dopamine culture. We have some work in the pipleline that is highly relevant to this!

Camilla presenting on all of the exciting implications of her interoception work!

Finally, the amazing Professor Camilla Nord presents on interoception - including some cool lived experience work on body sensations, and work on disgust and gastric rhythms, alongside work on energy conservation. #BAP2025

Here’s a screenshot of the “addictive use” trajectories from the JAMA paper cited below. My educated guess from the details of the measure is that none of these lines comes close to bona fide “addictive” use

🧵

Treemap showing measurement fragmentation across subfields in psychology. Hill-Shannon Diversity 𝐷=1626.05

How often measures in the APA PsycTESTS database are (re)used according to the APA PsycInfo database: rarely, the majority are never reused.

Our fragmentation index (Hill-Shannon diversity) over time across subdisciplines shows fragmentation rising.

Our paper "A fragmented field" has just been accepted at AMPPS. We find it's not just you, psychology is really getting more confusing (construct and measure fragmentation is rising).
We updated the preprint with the (substantial) revision, please check it out.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

That’s incredible!! Huge congratulations 🙌🏼

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Two papers out today on RL in the dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain of mice (one from McGill's new PI @paulmasset.bsky.social). Both papers demonstrate heterogeneity in discount factors!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

If you want to intervene to improve people's health, more often than not, you are (or should be) asking a causal question - 'what happens to Y when we change X?'

Prediction methods are not suited to answering that kind of question.

In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor An internal investigation had found that Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino’s research on why people lie and cheat was based on falsified data.

Harvard university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School www.wgbh.org/news/educati...

In all fairness, the journalist went on to reference two correlational, cross-sectional studies.

Handyverbot in der Schule? Nehmt zumindest den Kleinsten das Handy weg – auch zu Hause! Niedersachsen diskutiert ein Handyverbot in der Schule. Handys gehören heute zum Alltag dazu, keine Frage. Aber bitte nicht für Kleinkinder.

German newspaper article claims the damaging effects of social media on brain, motor, and language development are "unambiguously proven". When I asked for sources: "I have closed all tabs already". Nothing says rigorous reporting like closed browser tabs.

www.noz.de/deutschland-...

Learned something new today: Zotero has a feature where it informs you if an article in your reference library has been retracted. Very cool!

Not sure where to start with this one. Internet gaming addiction… is a risk factor for internet gaming disorder

New post: I was curious about the consensus statement on social media effect and wondered how the sausage gets made.
rubenarslan.github.io/posts/2025-0...

Highly important and timely article about mental health lessons in schools. Sometimes action without evidence is worse than inaction.

I have used this for teaching stats and it's such a great resource!

I’d *love* to work in a field of research where expert consensus meant that there’s strong & compelling evidence to believe something. Unfortunately often such evidence does not exist, and experts can agree for all sorts of reasons.>

Science Magazine gets it wrong. 🧵

Social media interventions to improve well-being - Nature Human Behaviour In this Perspective, the authors review current interventions on social media use among adolescents and propose a new theoretical model based on self-determination theory to guide the effective design...

New Perspective out in @nathumbehav.nature.com today with co-author @orbenamy.bsky.social!

We propose a new framework for designing 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 that support well-being, grounded in self-determination theory 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Social media use in adolescents with and without mental health conditions - Nature Human Behaviour Using a nationally representative UK sample of adolescents with clinical-level mental health symptoms, this Registered Report examined differences in social media use. The results suggest that adolesc...

After 3 years in the making, our Registered Report is out in @nathumbehav.nature.com!

We analyse nationally representative UK data from 3,340 adolescents (aged 11–19) to examine how social media use differs between those with and without mental health conditions. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks to @adigitaltanay.bsky.social for having @georgiaturner.bsky.social and me on to discuss our research at the intersection of social media and cognitive science! 🎧