Jenny Fielder

Conceptagion A concept contagion can be more difficult to wipe out than one for which the vector of spread is more tangible

Heathrow’s terminal 4 was evacuated yesterday as fire crews were called in to investigate “possible hazardous materials”.

Emergency services declared that no “adverse substance” had been found.

So what really happened at Heathrow?

My latest substack:

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!

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Another exciting new job opening at @uclpals.bsky.social with Niko Steinbeis and Essi Viding - www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... #neurojob #computationalpsychiatry

Experienced, bothered by, or both: People differ in how they understand the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) items: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jcsq8_v1

New report on understanding the drivers of declining youth mental health

To effectively respond to worsening mental health, we need to understand not just what is happening, but *why*

We used an evidence-based approach to unpack common explanations

1/🧵

youthfuturesfoundation.org/publication/...

Less than a week left to apply for this PhD studentship in my lab at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social !

Deadline Sun 6th July

Funded PhD opportunity with @sjblakemore.bsky.social and I, at Cambridge. We are looking for someone interested in developmental science, to start in the coming academic year. Please share it with anyone you think might be interested (see details attached 😁).
drive.google.com/file/d/1RIvg...

It's been a little while since I've written a Mental Elf blog, and I found this fascinating qual paper on young people's views of CAMHS on TikTok. Give it a read below 👇

This suggests that feelings of heightened control buffer against stress, and points to control beliefs as a potential target for intervention to reduce the detrimental impact of stressors in everyday life. Stay tuned for more of my PhD work on how these beliefs may be modified! 👀 8/8

Two graphs showing the change in subjective stress between the two respective timepoints: a) Stress Induction – from before to after the stressor, and b) Stress Relief – from after the stressor to after the stressor debrief. There is higher stress induction and less stress relief for the Neutral Control Condition (videos) compared to the Highly Controllable Condition (Wheel Stopping task)

We found that those who performed the highly controllable Wheel Stopping task had less of an increase in stress in response to the stressor, and a greater decrease in stress after being debriefed that they didn’t have to complete the stressor task after all. 7/n

In Study 2, we tested whether inducing heightened control from the Wheel Stopping task compared to watching videos (neutral control) buffered against the negative impact of a later stressor, which was of either high or low intensity (preparing a speech or studying a baking recipe). 6/n

Scatterplot showing the negative association between subjective control and subjective stress during the Wheel Stopping task for both studies. The regression line shows the relationship between subjective control and subjective stress, after accounting for perceived task difficulty and random effects of participant and timepoint.

Feeling more in control was tightly coupled with feeling less stressed during the task, even after accounting for perceived task difficulty. Higher mean subjective control and lower subjective stress were also associated with lower initial state and trait anxiety and depressive symptom severity. 5/n

Figure with 3 panels: a) Histogram of parameter estimates across all participants showing that there is variation across participants. b) Histogram and box plot of individuals' correlation coefficients between their model predicted and actual control ratings for both studies (the median r for Study 1 = 0.54 and Study 2 = 0.69). c) A plot of control ratings over the time course of the experiment, with control ratings predicted from the model in red, and the actual ratings in blue, shown for 3 randomly selected participants per study. This shows that the model predicted values tightly couple the actual responses.

We developed a Wheel Stopping task to measure and manipulate subjective feelings of control by changing the wheel’s speed, segment size, and deceleration. A linear model showed that trial-by-trial variation in task parameters captured fluctuations in subjective control at the individual level. 4/n

Decades of learned helplessness research has shown that stress is most potent when uncontrollable, but clear evidence on the impact of *heightened* control over stress in humans is lacking. 3/n

Stress is a major cause of mental illness across the lifespan. Importantly though, subjective dimensions of stress, such as perceived control, shape the response and later impact that stress can have. 2/n

Really excited that my first PhD paper is now out in @elife.bsky.social: Sense of control buffers against stress.

This has been a great team effort with Jinyu Shi, Dan McGlade, @docqhuys.bsky.social and Niko Steinbeis, comprising two studies and a total of N=768!

Summary thread below 🧵⬇️

Experimental researchers: Does anyone have experience of collecting data on Testable, and how does it compare to Prolific? (Cost, ease of getting participants, quality of data?)

including @isaacwinterburn.bsky.social here

Thanks!

www.testable.org

6) British Psychological Society Undergraduate Research Assistantship Scheme - 6 or 8 weeks for penultimate year undergrads. Must find a host (society member) at the same institution and write a project proposal. Deadline 9th March

5) University of Cambridge MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit Summer Internship scheme - 6 weeks for undergrads of any year. Deadline typically mid-end April

4) British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) Summer Internship scheme - 6-8 weeks for undergrads (or masters students if no PhD funding secured). Must find a host (society member) and write a project proposal. Deadline 21st March. @bapsych.bsky.social

Undergraduate Research Bursary The next application deadline will be midnight (UK Time) on 1 March 2025. This scheme will finance a number of bursaries to support undergraduates studying psychology or a related discipline in the…

3) Experimental Psychology Society Research Bursaries - 10 weeks for penultimate year undergrads or just graduated (see new graduate bursary on EPS website for the latter). Must find a host (society member) and write a project proposal. Deadline 1st March. @exppsychsoc.bsky.social

Brandon Davidson on LinkedIn: Science and Policy Internship Advertisement ☀️ We are hiring an undergraduate intern! ☀️ The Digital Mental Health programme (led by Amy Orben) at the University of Cambridge is recruiting our Science…

2) University of Cambridge Science & Policy Internship Scheme - 12 weeks for a current undergrad. Project about screen usage with @orbenamy.bsky.social and UK Government Department for Science. Deadline 14th February

1) University of Cambridge Life Sciences Internship - 8 weeks for penultimate year undergrads. Includes research theme “Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour”. Deadline 16th January

I've collated a list of *paid* UK summer research internships for undergrads in psychology/neuroscience, ordered by application deadline. Please share with students and add any other opportunities I've missed below!

#psychology #psychiatry #neuroscience #academia #research #internships #undergrad

Estimating adolescent mental health in the general population: current challenges and opportunities Louise Black, Margarita Panayiotou, Neil Humphrey Adolescence is a period of change and increased mental health difficulties, which are important for lifetime outcomes. Adolescent mental health is therefore an active research area, with large samples often drawing on self-report general measures (ie, not disorder-specific or focused on a narrow outcome). We argue that these measures have a key role in our understanding of issues such as prevalence, antecedents, prevention, and intervention, however, measurement has been given little attention and high-quality measures do not tend to be available or used. We offer insights into historical and psychometric challenges that have contributed to current problems and highlight the implications of relying on poor measures, which at their worst can be biased and unethical. We make recommendations for research and practice on selecting measures and improving the evidence base and make a call to action to reject low-quality measurement in this field.

For anyone working in adolescent mental health: I *really* recommend reading this important paper about the most commonly used questionnaires (inc SDQ)

In short: most of them have poor psychometric properties, so do we even know what they are measuring?

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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