Matt Southward

Anyone interested in what we’re up to in mattlab - follow us on Instagram!

We’re (@)mattlabatosu and we try to post useful mental health info, study findings, and glimpses into our actual lives 👇

www.instagram.com/mattlabosu

In this behemoth effort led by @anhhtran.bsky.social, we reanalysed 11 experience-sampling datasets, and found limited evidence that context (intensity, controllability, and social features) meaningfully shaped everyday emotion regulation strategy use.

🥹

Despite our schools’ heated rivalry, we’ll still read and discuss great papers from ❌ichigan profs like @craiganthonyrs.bsky.social in our grad psychopathology class at OSU!

And shoutouts to @shannonsauerzavala.bsky.social and the TIPS Lab crew for being patient with this paper-in-a-year-and-a-half! 🥳

It was just accepted at Psych Assessment today so the published version should be available soon.

So if you want to capture between-person differences, use any instructions but if you might want to capture within-person differences, matching the instructions to your timeframe is probably the way to go.

Feedback, comments, and questions very much welcome!

We think focusing people on a consistent timeframe improves their within-person reliabilities but keeping other aspects of the measures consistent ensures we're still assessing the same personality construct. 👯

Within-person relations with anxiety, depression, quality of life, & functioning:

✅ Generally stronger for weekly instructions (as expected)

osf.io/gznav/files/...

Within-person means & standard deviations:

Weekly instructions condition:
⬇️ Somewhat lower means (as expected)
⬆️ Higher standard deviations (as expected)

Are they measuring the same underlying personality construct?

✅ Generally, yes!

Although model fit significantly improved for some measures when we let the 2 instruction conditions differ, these improvements were fairly modest & mostly with the NEO (general personality).

Test-retest reliability:

✅ Generally .70+ in both conditions, although typically higher in the general instructions condition

Within-person internal consistencies:

✅ Adequate-to-good in the weekly instructions condition

❌ Poor-to-questionable in the general instructions condition

Between-person internal consistencies:

✅ Excellent and generally the same regardless of randomization condition

We randomly assigned 257 University of Kentucky undergrads to complete 6 weekly personality assessment batteries that either:
(a) asked about their personality in general or
(b) over the prior week

If we're assessing personality when we think it might change (like in treatment), asking people repeatedly how they are in general might get weird 😵‍💫

If I've only had a week of therapy, my personality can't have changed much *in general* but might be shifting a lot.

Most personality measures ask people how they are *in general* or don't specify a timeframe for people to consider, which makes sense when we want to capture how people are in general but do so at one timepoint.

For example, the BFI-2: www.colby.edu/wp-content/u...

We know personality changes over our lifespan (h/t @dingdingpeng.the100.ci & @ajwright.bsky.social), but what about the granular changes contributing to it?

Or when we want to test for personality changes in treatment? psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/201...

Can we just use the same measures for each?

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...

Update! We'll be accepting applications until 11:59pm ET on Sunday, Nov 30! 📆

What’s Columbus like, you ask? Here are some scenes!

Golden foliage on campus 🍁
Making friends with a praying mantis 😺
LCD Soundsystem 🎧
Columbus Pride (feat. several clinical grad students)! 🌈

Re-upping this thread for anyone thinking about applying for grad school who wants to know what life in Columbus is like!

(I’m also more than happy to answer questions, snap pics, or provide food recs as needed to give you a better sense of Columbus & OSU 🌰)

Please check it out, share the post with anyone you think might be a good fit, and absolutely reach out via DM or email with any particular questions!

I'll leave it open as long as folks need, though the first deadline we have listed is Oct 2.

a man says we do this we do this together in front of a window ALT: a man says we do this we do this together in front of a window

Plus, you'd get to collaborate with awesome people at OSU like Jen Cheavens & Dan Strunk as well as people around the country, like @shannonsauerzavala.bsky.social
at UK, Kateri McRae at Denver, & Christian Waugh at Wake Forest.

We have a great team with a graduate student, post-bac, and undergrad RA's: u.osu.edu/mattlab/

Columbus is an incredibly livable place (see my past tweets for evidence) and OSU has so many resources to run all kinds of projects.

This is an ideal spot for someone interested in an academic career in emotion reg/treatment/personality research.

You'd also be seeing patients as part of two studies:
1. matching skills to anxiety pts
2. our NIH R33 award on BPD Compass: reporter.nih.gov/project-deta...

Post Doctoral Scholar Screen reader users may encounter difficulty with this site. For assistance with applying, please contact hr-accessibleapplication@osu.edu. If you have questions while submitting an application, pleas...

Postdoc with us in Columbus! 🌰

I'm pumped to recruit a 1-2 year postdoc working on:
- mechanisms of change in treatment
- treatment personalization
- emotion reg

With a breakdown of:
50% research
30% treatment
20% mentorship/collaboration/conferences

osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

Fountain with a rainbow band surrounded by shrubs and trees

Things are rough in the world right now so it’s a little relief to enjoy the rainbows in the Mirror Lake fountain on campus 🌈⛲️

Come to think of it it’s insane psychotherapy works at all. Somebody told you something or told you to DO something and it helps with a problem you’ve had for a long time 🧐

Schiller Park in Columbus, Ohio at dusk with a dog, tennis court, line of clouds, and a nearly full moon

Just enjoying an 8:30pm stroll through the warm summer breeze in Schiller Park #ColumbusThings

New preprint! A Crowdsourced Megastudy of 12 Digital Single-Session Interventions for Depression in American Adults

What's the best way to help someone overcome depression with just 10 minutes of their time online? We ran a trial (n=7,505) testing 12 diverse interventions.

osf.io/preprints/ps...