Lukas Gunschera
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lukasgunschera.com
Lukas Gunschera
@lukasgunschera.com
PhD Student at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge | Research on cognition, mental health, and digital media.

lukasgunschera.com
I'm looking for EMA software that can do relative scheduling: participants report a time in their first daily questionnaire (e.g. "woke up at 7am"), then follow-ups trigger x hours after that reported time. I would greatly appreciate any recommendations!
November 13, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
It’s astonishing how many researchers seem to believe that a cluster analysis is such a sensible analysis that it needn’t even be justified through a coherent research question. Just cluster analysis go brrrrr
October 27, 2025 at 3:42 PM
Exciting PhD opportunity with @matti.vuorre.com! ⬇️
I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social.

We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits.

tiu.nu/22989
October 23, 2025 at 7:15 PM
🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Some people are at greater risk of experiencing negative mental health outcomes of social media use than others, but why?

🧵

We examined whether individual differences in cognitive processes shape risk and resilience to mental health effects on social media: osf.io/preprints/ps...
October 17, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
🚨 New preprint: What does the research landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning look like 🌍?

We developed an LLM-powered bibliometric analysis to characterize article clusters, investigate their connections, and examine the distribution of topics across the landscape.

osf.io/6c2va_v1
OSF
osf.io
October 17, 2025 at 7:25 AM
The framing around 'stricter age restrictions' feels disproportionate considering the magnitude of the effects.

I ran some rough calculations: Cohen's d ≈ 0.059 and 0.114 for the group comparisons on the cognitive composite measure.
jama.com JAMA @jama.com · Oct 13
In US adolescents, increasing social media use from ages 9–13 was associated with lower scores on measures of reading, memory, vocabulary, and composite cognition.

ja.ma/42B8WCd
October 14, 2025 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
Everyone knows that temporal contiguity is important for associative learning. As the interval between a cue (e.g., a light) and an outcome (e.g., shock) gets longer, the conditioned response (e.g., freezing to the tone) is acquired less quickly.
October 10, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
they just slapped a surgeons general warning on RFK like he’s a pack of cigarettes
“Secretary Kennedy is entitled to his views. But he is not entitled to put people’s health at risk.”

Six former surgeons general condemn RFK Jr.
Opinion | Six surgeons general: RFK Jr. is a threat to the health of Americans
It was our duty in office to warn of dangers when we found them. We’re doing that again today.
www.washingtonpost.com
October 7, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
psych departments post a faculty job that has nothing to do with AI challenge
September 10, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
i looked at the methodology for this and it is
a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and
b. p-hacked
Nearly a third of Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says
1 in 3 Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says
www.independent.co.uk
October 3, 2025 at 2:15 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸

How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data.
www.science.org/content/arti...
AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds
Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings
www.science.org
October 1, 2025 at 4:17 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
😍 Our latest is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com. 🤩 We show with Bayesian modelling and experimental manipulation of uncertainty that developmental differences in social influence depend on differences in the internal uncertainty people have about their choice
doi.org/10.1038/s442...
Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence - Communications Psychology
Adolescents’ choices are influenced by others. A social risky choice experiment and Bayesian modelling reveal that age differences in internal uncertainty, being unsure how to choose, relate to differences in susceptibility to social influence.
doi.org
September 29, 2025 at 9:07 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
on.ft.com/46EDjIX Europe’s bill for extreme weather damage more than doubles this decade (2020-23 costs already more than double previous 10 years - good thing financial markets are so forward-looking. Oh)
Europe’s bill for extreme weather damage more than doubles this decade
Average economic losses associated with weather including intense floods have soared, according to European agency
on.ft.com
September 29, 2025 at 5:16 AM
Grateful to @rcpsych.bsky.social for the opportunity to present my research on “Rethinking social media addiction” and participate in the panel discussion.

Looking forward to translating the insights into the clinical-focused work in the pipeline.
September 26, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Reposting twice because it's such a great read!
September 25, 2025 at 10:47 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
What drives the bidirectional relationship between metabolic and mental ill-health?

Read our new metabolic psychiatry paper, “An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... led by @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social
An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health
Interactions between metabolic interoception and regulation may drive comorbidity between mental and metabolic ill-health.
www.science.org
September 25, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵
The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...
arxiv.org
September 18, 2025 at 7:56 AM
Excited to see this brilliant work from @bcdavidson.bsky.social preprinted! Check it out at osf.io/preprints/ps...
🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Prolonged Isolation is associated with an increased behavioural sensitivity to ‘Likes’ on social media.

🧵

Social media rewards are inherently social—but does posting change during social isolation, when in-person social rewards are limited?

It turns out, yes!
September 16, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
If true, this update is astonishing.
The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump.

This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.
September 1, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
Important reading as you prepare for your semester
August 31, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life?

Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social)
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...
August 25, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
If you are preparing your bachelor statistics course and would like to add optional material for students to better understand statistics on a conceptual level (see topics in the screenshot) my free textbook provides a state of the art overview. lakens.github.io/statistical_...
August 25, 2025 at 4:54 AM
Reposted by Lukas Gunschera
Do researchers’ financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials of internet-based interventions for depression affect the outcomes? This meta-analysis suggests that COIs may lead to inflated effect-size estimates. 🩺 #neuroskyence
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
August 19, 2025 at 7:18 AM