Evan Giangrande

Prepping for @dgps.bsky.social Methods, few recent papers pushing ctsem and dynamic models in interesting directions

#1 Developmental changes in twin cognitive correlation (ACE) across age, test instrument, zygosity, with @evangiangrande.bsky.social @ent3c.bsky.social et al

osf.io/preprints/ps...

conspiracy theory-type rabbit-holes, where a lot of the online sources are fringe and hotly debated, it's easier to believe what All-Powerful-And-Knowing Chatbot says. Safeguards related to AI literacy could help.

I also really dislike his stigmatizing use of the word "crazy"

Agreed, it's odd he implies that psychosis is either genetic or environmental. Most of this boils down to a diathesis-stress model, with AI-provided info as the stressor and, as @dingdingpeng.the100.ci mentions, dynamics. Big issue with AI is the apparent trustworthiness of the source. Cf...

Philosophy <--> Science

The causality facade isn't limited to AI/ML, of course. But the more complex and black-boxy the model, the easier that facade is to ignore/downplay.

difficult to validate and built on untestable assumptions about the causal structure, confounds etc. Adding more covariates doesn't necessarily help. See "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" section on CausalML here arxiv.org/pdf/2206.15475

This has become my latest pet peeve. "Causal" is sexy and creates the impression that you're uncovering mechanism(s), but "causal estimates" are often just associational and/or reliant on strong assumptions that are rarely met.

E.g., CausalML applied to observational data. Cool, but...

Big thanks to @margotvdweijer.bsky.social for spearheading this effort! And to our coauthors @appelbap.bsky.social, Emily Bassett, and @lucasjmatthews.bsky.social

Check out our preprint on ethical and legal considerations regarding Mendelian Imputation of missing parental genotypes! The method raises tricky questions about informed consent and potential harm. We highlight gaps in current practice and provide recommendations for researchers and IRBs.

I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.

Combatting harmful misappropriations of behavioral genetics requires response at multiple levels, including organizational. To that end, the BGA Public Science Committee has released a Statement on the Misuse of Genetics

S/O to my advisors, @jorsmo.bsky.social and Ben Neale; our wonderful collaborators in Finland and @fimm-uh.bsky.social, especially Aarno Palotie and Olli Pietilänen; and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research @broadinstitute.org

Global functioning is used widely to inform treatment and prognosis. In our sample, GF scores were associated with important severity- and course-related variables including hospitalization burden and cognitive performance.

We addressed those gaps using the SUPER-Finland study, which includes linked register data for every single psychiatric hospitalization in Finland since 1969. Global functioning has been assessed routinely at inpatient admission and discharge nationwide since 1994. A peek at the raw GF scores:

Polygenic risk scores for predicting outcomes and treatment response in psychiatry: hope or hype? Over the last years, the decreased costs and enhanced accessibility to large genome-wide association studies datasets have laid the foundations for the development of polygenic risk scores (PRSs). ...

Some background: recently, interest has increased in using PGS to predict not only lifetime SZ risk, but also clinically relevant disease outcomes. Studies have been limited by small Ns and superficial phenotypes. Here's a nice review of that literature: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

These results suggest that integrating genomics with clinically relevant, longitudinal phenotypes may help parse heterogeneity in schizophrenia severity, prognosis, and course.

Caveat: as is typical in Psych Gen, effect sizes were small and PGS are not sufficiently predictive for clinical use.

Leveraging ~120k GF measures from a complete hospitalization register, we found that higher SZ PGS predicted worse GF at admission & discharge, and less functional improvement during hospitalization. Higher EA PGS predicted better discharge GF and greater improvement, but worse admit GF

Polygenic Scores for Schizophrenia and Educational Attainment Predict Global Functioning Across Psychiatric Hospitalization Among People with Schizophrenia Question Is variation in global functioning among people with schizophrenia associated with genetic differences? Findings In this genetic association study of 5991 adults with schizophrenia and 59,79...

🚨🧬 New preprint! We tested whether PGS predicted global functioning across psychiatric hospitalization among 5991 people with schizophrenia. medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Tomorrow!! Check out a great panel on the communication of polygenic score research

Deadline tomorrow!! Already shaping up to be a great issue.

Behavior Genetics

🚨 2 weeks left to submit your abstract for our special issue 🚨

"Behavioral Genetics as a Public Science: Impacts and Implications" 🌏🧬

We welcome both empirical and theoretical articles that explore the broader significance of genetic research on human behavior

👇👇
link.springer.com/journal/1051...

Chapter 7 of Groth-Marnat, Gary (2016). Handbook of Psychological Assessment, Sixth Edition: Wiley.

Geared towards clinicians but provides a thorough history of MMPI development, updates, and psychometrics. PDF is available online!

This is the first I've heard of "palliative psychiatry," a concept that strikes me as equal parts inaccurate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful.

Worth a read for Paul's insightful comments.

Call for Abstracts: CPSP Special Issue on Nonclinical Providers Call for Abstracts Special Issue of Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice: The Role of Non-Clinical Providers in Expanding Equitable Access to Effective Youth Mental Health Care Important date...

‼️Call for Submissions‼️

Special Issue in @apajournals.bsky.social @scpdiv12.bsky.social CPSP: "The Role of Non-Clinical Providers in Expanding Equitable Access to Effective Youth Mental Health Care"

Email @randimschuster.bsky.social and I with any questions!
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Specificity, length, and luck: How genes are prioritized by rare and common variant association studies Standard genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and rare variant burden tests are essential tools for identifying trait-relevant genes. Although these methods are conceptually similar, we show by anal...

What do GWAS and rare variant burden tests discover, and why?

Do these studies find the most IMPORTANT genes? If not, how DO they rank genes?

Here we present a surprising result: these studies actually test for SPECIFICITY! A 🧵on what this means... (🧪🧬)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Love a cheeky badge ribbon @broadinstitute.org

#ScienceWriting

Publisher reviews national IQ research by British ‘race scientist’ Richard Lynn Elsevier investigates journals by scientist who created discredited rankings of countries’ intelligence

Elsevier is (finally): "reviewing its decision to publish research papers by the late Richard Lynn, an influential figure in the discredited field of “race science” who argued western civilisation was threatened by genetically inferior ethnic groups" www.theguardian.com/science/2024...

Please share!

S/O to @behaviorgenetic.bsky.social for their support

And to the other members of the BGA Public Science Committee including @margotvdweijer.bsky.social @robbeewedow.bsky.social @cognitivecamz.bsky.social

Call for Submissions: Behavior Genetics Special Issue on Public Science Call for Submissions: Behavioral Genetics as a Public Science: Impacts and Implications Journal: Behavior Genetics Aim and Scope: Genetically informed studies of human behavior captivate a broad a...

🚨Call for submissions!🚨

We're organizing a special issue on "Behavioral Genetics as a Public Science"🧬🌍

Relevant topics include:
-Public outreach and education
-(Mis)use and (mis)interpretations of BG research
-Ethical, legal, and social issues

tinyurl.com/bgpublicscie...