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Payton Jones Profile picture
Payton Jones
@paytonjjones
Staff Machine Learning Engineer @ MyFitnessPal. PhD in Experimental Psychopathology from @Harvard. Tweets about mental health policy & PTSD.
2 subscribers
Nov 19, 2022 • 13 tweets • 8 min read
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.
Aug 28, 2022 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
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…
Jan 29, 2022 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Sep 30, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
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…
Sep 29, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
What's your favorite weird story in the history of psychology? Mine has to be the history of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)...
Sep 16, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Jun 8, 2020 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
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.
Apr 23, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
The field of clinical psychology naturally provides a perfect little petri dish for pseudoscience. Why?

1) Common factors do the heavy lifting in psychotherapy, meaning almost any type of therapy will work at least decently well 2) Client expectancy matters a lot. So if you can convince clients you know what you're doing, you'll boost your effect! This rewards scientists & therapists who are overconfident and overstate their knowledge of how their psychotherapy model works
Feb 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Interested in meaning-making approaches to trauma, trigger warnings, and explorations of behavior that challenge the typical scientific view of PTSD?

Give a follow to my excellent lab-mate @BenjaminBellet2 ! sciencedirect.com/science/articl… (More of his scientific work in this thread)

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21…
Feb 18, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
networktools 1.2.2 is now available on CRAN! The most relevant update is the addition of the function PROCRUSTESnet. Image Similar to the averageLayout function in qgraph, this function is useful for comparing two groups (e.g., a network for males and a network for females) side by side. It plots each network using MDS and brings them into a similar space using a Procrustes rotation and dilation.
Feb 11, 2020 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Happy to announce that our paper on trigger warnings for trauma survivors has been accepted at Clinical Psychological Science! We find no evidence that trigger warnings are helpful for trauma survivors, and some evidence of potential harms. osf.io/qajzy/ The primary question we tested was whether trigger warnings help trauma survivors prepare to face disturbing content, as has been suggested by many trigger warnings advocates (e.g., nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opi…
Jan 12, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
An argument I often hear against standardized testing, IQ, etc:

"Most people who advocate in favor of the importance of standardized testing and IQ are those who score highly on these metrics, and thus stand to benefit"

Let's break this down (1/4) First, imagine an alien world in which standardized tests are completely invalid and don't mean anything at all. Who will support these tests anyways?

Likely those who score highly and stand to benefit.

So far so good. (2/4)
Jan 6, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Our paper on self-triggering behavior among individuals with PTSD was just accepted at Clinical Psychological Science! The post-print is available open-access through @OSFramework osf.io/fmcp9/

A thread (1/14) First, some background on PTSD:

When confronted with reminders of their trauma, individuals with PTSD can experience extremely unpleasant re-experiencing symptoms (e.g., intense fight-or-flight physiological responses, intrusive memories). (2/14)
Nov 26, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
So excited to finally receive the printed version of our paper on the projected upper limit of psychotherapy (@ Clinical Psychological Science). Seeing the hard copy of a paper always makes it feel more real! Image Also, hallelujah for @PsychScience allowing a color figure for free. It looks so much better this way... Image
Nov 7, 2019 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
A bold theory of how psychotherapy works:

There are exactly 3 active ingredients in psychotherapy--
1. Exposure (& avoidance prevention)
2. Expectancy
3. Alliance Alliance only partly counts, because it is only ~15% controlled by therapist factors, and ~85% due to the early results of either (1), (2), or noise
Oct 18, 2019 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Our paper "Central symptoms predict posttreatment oucomes and clinical impairment in anorexia nervosa" was just published in Clinical Psychological Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… The full text is available here: researchgate.net/publication/33…

This thread is relevant if you are interested in eating disorders OR if you are interested in network analysis, especially regarding centrality.
Sep 21, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
THREAD: A new and important addition to the empirical literature on trigger warnings from @brave_billiken ! (1/10) The main finding: the only significant predictor of trigger warning advocacy was "insititutional betrayal" -- the belief that one's educational institution has not proven trustworthy in valuing one's safety and emotional well-being (2/10)
Aug 7, 2019 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Our new paper "An Upper Limit to Youth Psychotherapy Benefit? A Meta-Analytic Copula Approach to Psychotherapy Outcomes" was just released in Clinical Psychological Science. In my opinion, this is the most important research I have ever done. (1/11) doi.org/10.1177/216770… The project started in Dr. John Weisz's "psychotherapy research" graduate course. He showed his research that youth psychotherapy hasn't really improved over the past decades. You should take a moment to read it -- it's sobering, to say the least ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30571478 (2/11)
Jul 10, 2019 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Our new preregistered paper on trigger warnings in trauma survivors was just released as a preprint! We find that no matter how you slice it, trigger warnings just don't help. osf.io/axn6z (1/8) How do they affect trauma survivors' anxiety? No effect. People who reported a PTSD diagnosis? Still no effect. People who met the clinical threshold for PTSD? Anxiety actually *increased* a bit. (2/8)
Apr 18, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The myth that psychological findings in MTurk or WEIRD samples are "unrepresentative" of humans needs to go away. This line of reasoning assumes a priori that there is a strong moderation of psychological effects by demographic characteristics (1/4) As it turns out, such moderation is extremely rare. See for instance the results from Many Labs 2 and the dozens of studies evaluating MTurk vs Lab samples (2/4)
Apr 5, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
(1/1) Another excellent #triggerwarning study out in JEP-Applied by @Toribridgland and colleagues. Five more experiments, 1600 more participants, preregistration, and basically the same pattern of results (!) -- trigger warnings don't seem to help psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-11… (2/2) This study makes a crtical distinction that we missed in our study -- the period of *anticipation* before the stimulus vs. the interpretation after the stimulus is seen. Trigger warnings consistently generate negative anticipations, but don't influence interpretation Image