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Payton Jones Profile picture
@paytonjjones
Sep 29, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
What's your favorite weird story in the history of psychology?
Mine has to be the history of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)...
It all started one day when Francine Shapiro, an PhD-dropout in English literature, was walking through the park. As her eyes went back and forth looking at the beautiful scenery, she noticed her thoughts calm down and become more pleasant.

So what's her conclusion?
You may think it was "Oh, it's nice and calming to walk through a beautiful park."

Nope. She thought:

"Oh, it appears that moving one's eyes back and forth is a neurological intervention that connects the brain's hemispheres and will cure PTSD"
So she started treating patients (!!) by having them move their eyes back and forth while thinking about their traumatic memories. And as it turns out -- they loved it!

EMDR spread like a wildfire, and soon there was a veritable cult of true believing supporters.
Naturally, some psychologists and neuroscientists eventually took notice of the...questionable...empirical basis of the therapy. EMDR became the poster boy of quack psychotherapy.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11098395/
But the best twist is the next one.

Over time, the evidence from randomized trials gradually piled up.

EMDR...works!

journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
As an astute reader might have guessed, the main reason for this is incidental -- in EMDR, patients *recount their trauma memories in detail* while doing the eye movements.

This amounts to the same thing as imaginal exposure, an effective therapy for PTSD with a known mechanism
But while the "connect the brain's hemispheres" thing was obviously, uh, wrong, the craziest twist is that the eye movements don't seem to be inert either!
Iris Englehard and her experimental lab have recently shown that providing a mild visual distraction (taxing visual working memory) can boost the efficacy of imaginal exposure.

EMDR is vindicated (kinda)!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.512…
If there is a moral to this story, I don't know what it is.

Cults are good? Listen to the clearly-insane English student?

Or maybe..science is actually self-correcting sometimes? Follow the data, even when it seems odd?

I'm not sure, but it's one for the history books!
Addendum: the evidence for eye movements adding something extra (beyond exposure) is weaker than I thought. A nice meta-analysis here!

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More from @paytonjjones

Payton Jones Profile picture
Nov 19, 2022
Does adding a content warning change how people feel about artwork?

That's the question we asked in a brand new study just released this week. It's the first study to test content warnings for art.

w/ @Toribridgland @BenjaminBellet2 (preprint: psyarxiv.com/6h5k8/)
Consider "Phryne before the Areopagus" (1861) by Jean-Léon Gérôme. It's a beautiful oil on canvas in the clean and bright academic style.

It also depicts a sexual assault.
If people are forewarned about this, does this change how they interpret and feel about the art?
Read 13 tweets
Payton Jones Profile picture
Aug 28, 2022
We just released a meta-analysis on the efficacy of trigger warnings, content warnings, and content notes (preprint).

Here's a short 🧵 explaining the results with graphs and figures. Image
There are a lot of fundamental disagreements about what it even means for a trigger warning to "work" properly.

One common argument is that trigger warnings help prep individuals to brace themselves to face their triggers.

e.g. nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opi…
On this aspect, trigger warnings clearly fail.

Studies consistently show a near-zero effect, with trigger warnings making no meaningful difference on "response affect" to potentially triggering material.

Notice that even the most extreme point doesn't reach a medium effect ImageImage
Read 17 tweets
Payton Jones Profile picture
Jan 29, 2022
As the world becomes safer around us, are we shifting our standards to be tuned in to smaller and smaller provocations?

That's the question we tested in a new paper just published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-20… (open link @ end)
In a world of ambiguous signals and noise, we constantly shift our standards to preserve optimal detection.

Psychologists and rationalists have studied these effects for years under the umbrellas of range-frequency theory, signal detection, Bayesian reasoning, etc.
But what about cases where there is no clear "true" distribution we can lean on? Ambiguous, human-made concepts such as "rudeness", "morality", "threat", "trauma", or "the color blue"?
Read 15 tweets
Payton Jones Profile picture
Sep 30, 2020
A truly tragic loss for science and a great personal loss for many.

If you are unfamiliar with Scott's absolutely stellar research, I will link some of it in the thread below (open access where possible).
On psychological treatments that can cause harm:

users.pfw.edu/young/350-Abno…
On common confusing and misleading phrases that are overused in psychology and psychiatry:

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
Read 10 tweets
Payton Jones Profile picture
Sep 16, 2020
Exposure therapy should always be voluntary because humans have dignity and should have choices over how they live their lives. Forcing involuntary exposure irreparably damages the therapeutic relationship.

But that doesn't mean that involuntary exposure doesn't *work*
In fact, all the evidence suggests that it *does* work (in terms of reducing fear regarding the target stimulus).

All of our foundational research on fear learning comes from rats, and we never exactly gave them a choice about whether they wanted to be in the experiments.
Imagine you are an evil villain who locked a spider phobic in some kind of nightmare prison and forced them to have many close encounters with tarantulas.

Eventually, it's almost certain this person would lose their fear of tarantulas.
Read 7 tweets
Payton Jones Profile picture
Jun 8, 2020
Do you care about protecting survivors of trauma?

You may want to reconsider your use of trigger warnings. Our new paper, just appearing in Clinical Psychological Science, suggests they may do more harm than good.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21…
The link above is for the published, peer-reviewed version of the paper.

As a note, I previously threaded about the preprint () and postprint () versions of this paper, before the published version was available.
To start, let's review what being "triggered" means. Far from the slang that generally refers to an overly sensitive person who becomes angry when their values are challenged, being "triggered" has a quite different meaning for those with PTSD.
Read 23 tweets

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