Whitney Ringwald

A JAMA article titled "The Complexity of Research on Moderate Alcohol Consumption and Health: The Consensus Report From NASEM" by Ned Calonge et al., published online September 30, 2025.

💬 Perspective: The evaluation of moderate alcohol consumption on health is complex due to known harms of heavy drinking, potential benefits of low consumption, varying evidence quality, and biases.

ja.ma/3KIU12Q

Interested in a career in digital mental health, but not set on a clinical psych degree? Check out Dartmouth's PhD programs in Quantitative Biomedical Sciences and Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

geiselmed.dartmouth.edu/qbs/
geiselmed.dartmouth.edu/tdi/academic...

Omg I love them all!

When we measure personality multiple times in a study, does it matter if we ask people about their personality *in general* or *since the last time point*?

Turns out: yes!

We found differences in internal consistency, Ms, & SDs but not in the underlying constructs 🧵

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

YouTube video by HiTOP Using HiTOP in Research

We’ve just published another video on HiTOP that tries to flesh out a bit more how the framework can be helpful in research: youtu.be/q0jOi_Nl1yo

We hope it’s useful, and are keen to hear any feedback

Thanks again so much to @tashtc.bsky.social for all of her hard work creating this video series ✨

Wrote for @psyche.co about disinhibition – the trait that brings chaos and frustration, but can also (sometimes) spark charm and boldness. Check it out!

Fascinating. This study identified environmental features associated with obesity rates from satellite images. Here are street views of some of the most important features, per their models.

Geotagging is so rad.

Polygenic and developmental profiles of autism differ by age at diagnosis - Nature A study of several longitudinal birth cohorts and cross-sectional cohorts finds only moderate overlap in genetic variants between autism that is diagnosed earlier and that diagnosed later, so they may represent aetiologically different conditions.

This was a fantastic collaboration with lots of people including @hilarycmartin.bsky.social @jakobgrove.bsky.social, Experts by Experience, and several others who I can't seem to find on this app.

Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hi bluesky friends! I plan to submit a symposium with @craiganthonyrs.bsky.social for APS 2026 on contextual psychopathology research from ECRs (students welcome!) Content area and methods are wide open. If you are interested or know someone who may be, message me and we'll chat further. 1/2

Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts? - Behavior Research Methods A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.

Had missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Life satisfaction mostly declines with age. Previous findings (esp. the famous U-shaped age-SWB trajectory) were artifacts of misspecified models. doi.org/10.1093/esr/...

9/ So my take-away: everyday solitude desire fits an allostatic view - it helps regulate demand in times of distress. This desire is contextual, so this work doesn't deny that if withdrawal becomes chronic, homeostatic needs for connection may resurface.

Read preprint 👉: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity - Nature By analysing the smartphone data of 2,112,288 participants, in particular observing and comparing the activity of the same individual in two different environments, we find that increases in the walkability of environments result in increases in daily physical activity, providing evidence of the importance of the built environment on physical health.

There's a really nice new study using phone data from Americans who relocated from one city to another to look at the effect of walkable environments on physical activity. E.g., people move TO New York and walk more, they move FROM New York and walk less www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An adapted version of the current HiTOP model, including 'psychosis' and 'emotional dysfunction' superspectra and omitting the homogeneous symptom component/maladaptive traits lists

Look no further for an *excellent* overview of HiTOP! This chapter for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Dimensional Models in Psychopathology does a fantastic job of pulling everything together.

Tam Pham is an absolute superstar and I feel very lucky to work with her ✨

osf.io/preprints/ps...

I am barely on this app, because of *gestures wildly* life, the universe, and everything, but I should announce that I plan to review apps for clinical psychology PhD admissions this cycle! Please read my website for more info! www.sarahevictor.com/contact

At #SRP2025?

I'm presenting some findings on antagonism from meta-analyses, large scale text mining, and large language modeling tomorrow at 2:30!

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...

In addition to posting plants and puppies, I also mentor students interested in personality pathology. My lab is recruiting a graduate student in clinical or personality psychology for Fall 2026. So please send folks my way. Feel free to share! Thanks.

A turducken of collaboration enthusiasm 🥰

Huge shout-out to my inspiring and brilliant co-authors @aleksakaurin.bsky.social, Kailey Lawson, and Rick Robins.

Preprint available here: osf.io/28sav_v1

4. With these joint temperament/personality traits, we were then able to establish mean-level change and rank-order stability in traits across an age span that's not been investigated yet.

Bottom line: traits are really stable and change in the direction of maturity.

3. My favorite finding.

Using joint latent growth models that assume analogous temperament/Big 5 traits are indicators of the same factor...

....we found evidence that they are not distinct constructs but are actually just different expressions of the same underlying dimensions.

2. Looking at bivariate associations across all available waves, we see analogous temperament starts predicting adult personality around age 12-14, in line with the idea the transitional time of adolescence is when we start laying the foundation for who we grow up to be.

1. Childhood/adolescent temperament predicts conceptually similar Big 5 traits at age 26.

But also, Effortful Control predicts all Big 5, suggesting self-regulation helps us adapt to the roles of responsibilities of adulthood.

We studied a sample of 647 youth who rated their temperament traits from ages 10-16 and Big 5 personality traits from 14-26.

With this unique dataset including overlapping temperament/personality assessments, spanning key developmental periods, we were able to find some very interesting things:

✨✨ New paper out in JPSP! ✨✨

Despite rich theory on links between temperament and personality, they're rarely studied together. This has left major unaddressed questions.

We tackled these questions by looking at how temperament and personality develop together from ages 10-26.

Brief thread...

New review! We synthesized literature on empathic AI: AI-generated emotional support is rated higher than human responses, but people's knowledge of the source shapes their perceptions. W/ @desmond-ong.bsky.social @amit-goldenberg.bsky.social @anatperry.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to see y’all!

There is so much to unpack, but I’ll be brief here! Teens with higher levels of maladaptive traits often acted less warmly and more dominantly in their everyday interactions.
Their ability to “read” others’ minds (mentalizing) was less stable, shifting a lot from one moment to the next.