Nigel Jaffe
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nigeljaffe.bsky.social
Nigel Jaffe
@nigeljaffe.bsky.social
160 followers 410 following 11 posts
Clinical psych PhD student at Penn State. Psychotherapy, personality, emotion. NSF GRFP fellow. Formerly McLean Hospital TEDY Lab
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Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
affectscience.bsky.social
Our partnership with the @inclivio.com continues as we get closer to #SAS2026.
Inclivio provides EMA researchers with tools that make data collection easier and more participant friendly.
Like (1 pt) and repost (3 pts) to enter a drawing for free access to Inclivio!
inclivio.com
Inclivio
inclivio.com
January 30, 2026 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
shirleybwang.bsky.social
We're hiring! The Computational Clinical Science Lab @ Yale is seeking a full-time lab manager/research coordinator to start in early summer 2026.

For more information about the position and to apply: forms.gle/LtQwVgPUfaGk...

Please share widely & consider applying!
forms.gle
January 13, 2026 at 4:45 PM
nigeljaffe.bsky.social
Fantastic post-bacc opportunity! ⬇️
christianwebb.bsky.social Christian Webb, PhD @christianwebb.bsky.social · Jan 9
Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️
webbslab.com/job-postings
January 10, 2026 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
christianwebb.bsky.social
Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️
webbslab.com/job-postings
January 9, 2026 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
francesghart.bsky.social
(1/9)
New year, new preprint alert!! 🤩🚨

We provide new evidence linking intolerance of uncertainty and death anxiety in religious/spiritual individuals.

Link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

See 🧵 for a brief summary 👇

#deathanxiety #intoleranceofuncertainty
January 1, 2026 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
christianwebb.bsky.social
Honored to have our work recognized by
@bbrfoundation.bsky.social, alongside many colleagues doing important work in the field.
December 30, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
mjcrockett.bsky.social
New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/
Abstract When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences ground "thick empathy", a form of empathy that has been largely overlooked in the psychology and neuroscience literature. Consider how a mother, empathizing with her daughter about to give birth, can draw on her own experience of childbirth, and her relationship with her daughter, to deeply grasp what her daughter is going through in a way that others who lack those experiences cannot. I argue that thick empathy deserves more empirical attention because it is associated with well-being and helps us build networks of effective mutual social support. My analysis highlights novel risks and dilemmas posed by "empathy machines" that promise to enhance or even replace human empathy and are becoming increasingly popular as a potential solution to widespread loneliness. Even when empathy machines provide value to individuals, their widespread adoption risks imposing collective emotional and epistemic costs that ultimately make it harder for us to empathize well. Keywords: empathy, understanding, experience, thick description, ethnography, phenomenal knowledge, interpersonal knowledge, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chatbots
December 11, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
jzpsych.bsky.social
Sometimes, doing research feels truly fulfilling. Working on this paper was one of those moments. doi.org/10.1037/ccp0...
December 7, 2025 at 12:40 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
sharinahamm.bsky.social
New preprint alert! (1/5)🌟

I’m thrilled to share the preprint of my first first-authored PhD paper! We test whether shared reinforcement functions help explain why adolescents who engage in one self-destructive behavior often engage in others.

Summary⬇
osf.io/preprints/ps...
December 1, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
hadarfisher.bsky.social
💫 Excited to share new preprint a systematic review & meta-analysis of 123 studies (40k+ ppl) on how well language-based models detect depression from text.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...
Language-Based Detection of Depression with Machine Learning: Systematic Review and Meta- Analysis
Early detection of depression is critical for timely intervention. Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) approaches have increasingly been used to automatically detect depression...
www.researchsquare.com
November 23, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
xiaosigu.bsky.social
📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 -
www.cpconf.org

@robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop

More info to come soon!
November 21, 2025 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
dcameron.bsky.social
Although most of my photos right now are of State College autumn, here's Happy Valley from the sky this August. It was awe-inspiring to get this view.

So, come join us here! I'll be recruiting a graduate student to the Empathy & Moral Psychology (EMP) Lab during this cycle, to start in fall 2026.
October 21, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
mareike.bsky.social
delighted to see this published 🙌 using EMA, we (with @roryoc.bsky.social) investigated suicidal ideation in daily life. we found that it arises from an interaction of within-person increases in loneliness and an individual’s level of personality functioning psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
November 3, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
shirleybwang.bsky.social
Thrilled to share a new paper in @jamapsychiatry.com on path asymmetry in complex dynamic systems of psychopathology! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

With amazing collaborators @tfblanken.bsky.social, Han van der Maas, & Denny Borsboom 🥳
Path Asymmetry in Complex Dynamic Systems of Psychopathology
This article illustrates the assumption of path symmetry in current theories of psychopathology and calls for the development of dynamical systems of mental illness that incorporate asymmetry.
jamanetwork.com
October 29, 2025 at 8:42 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
lluaces.bsky.social
1: In 2023, I wrote this paper arguing that research on active ingredients of CBT, and by extension on their mechanisms, is not close to improving therapy outcomes.

I just read a paper on inhibitory learning improving outcomes of exposure. Egg on my face?

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Identifying active ingredients in cognitive-behavioral therapies: What if we didn't?
Identifying active ingredients of psychological interventions is a major goal of psychotherapy researchers that is often justified by the promise that…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 27, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
tkaiser.science
New paper led by Nele Assmann, in which we used causal forests to test the heterogeneity of treatment effects of Schema Therapy vs. DBT for severe Borderline Personality Disorder.
Differential effectiveness of dialectical behavioral therapy and schema therapy in patients with borderline personality disorder: a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be treated successfully with specific psychological treatments, but there is no clear evidence of superiorit…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 24, 2025 at 7:42 AM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
aidangcw.bsky.social
Interesting new special issue in Psychological Assessment.

Edited by Kristin Naragon-Gainey and @kstanton.bsky.social

Here's their overview paper: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

And here's our contribution, which will win us no friends:
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
October 24, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
christianwebb.bsky.social
Thanks to @bbrfoundation.bsky.social for highlighting our lab's study (led by @hadarfisher.bsky.social & @nigeljaffe.bsky.social) using📱smartphone sensors + LLM-derived text ratings to track behavioral activation and symptom change in teens with anhedonia.
bbrfoundation.org/content/smar...
Smartphone Sensors + ChatGPT Successfully Tracked & Predicted Symptoms in Adolescents with Anhedonia | Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
The ubiquity of smartphones and the rapid advance and widespread public adoption of “AI” tools like ChatGPT (especially among the young) have raised hopes among some researchers that such technologies...
bbrfoundation.org
October 24, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
bsiepe.bsky.social
We built the openESM database:
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python

Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
October 22, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
dsquintana.bsky.social
Here are two "I can't believe these are free" online stats texts books that cover both underlying principles and practical applications in R that I regularly refer to.

Learning Statistics with R
learningstatisticswithr.com

Doing Meta-Analysis with R bookdown.org/MathiasHarre...
A screenshot with the following Learning statistics with R: A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners. (Version 0.6.1) Danielle Navarro (bookdown translation: Emily Kothe) 2019-01-11 Overview Learning Statistics with R covers the contents of an introductory statistics class, as typically taught to undergraduate psychology students, focusing on the use of the R statistical software. The book discusses how to get started in R as well as giving an introduction to data manipulation and writing scripts. From a statistical perspective, the book discusses descriptive statistics and graphing first, followed by chapters on probability theory, sampling and estimation, and null hypothesis testing. After introducing the theory, the book covers the analysis of contingency tables, t-tests, ANOVAs and regression. Bayesian statistics are covered at the end of the book. A screenshot with the following Welcome! Welcome to the online version of “Doing Meta-Analysis with R: A Hands-On Guide”. This book serves as an accessible introduction into how meta-analyses can be conducted in R. Essential steps for meta-analysis are covered, including pooling of outcome measures, forest plots, heterogeneity diagnostics, subgroup analyses, meta-regression, methods to control for publication bias, risk of bias assessments and plotting tools. Advanced, but highly relevant topics such as network meta-analysis, multi-/three-level meta-analyses, Bayesian meta-analysis approaches, and SEM meta-analysis are also covered. The programming and statistical background covered in the book are kept at a non-expert level. A print version of this book has been published with Chapman & Hall/CRC Press (Taylor & Francis)
October 17, 2025 at 8:43 AM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
hadarfisher.bsky.social
Now out in NPP – Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience! 📱🧠

Can LLMs and smartphone sensing help us track therapy progress in real time?
dpn-journal.bsky.social NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience (DPN) @dpn-journal.bsky.social · Oct 14
🆕 study by @hadarfisher.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social @christianwebb.bsky.social tested whether smartphone mobility sensing & LLM ratings of text can track behavioral activation in teens to boost engagement in rewarding activities

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Client Challenge
www.nature.com
October 17, 2025 at 9:07 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
dpn-journal.bsky.social
🆕 study by @hadarfisher.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social @christianwebb.bsky.social tested whether smartphone mobility sensing & LLM ratings of text can track behavioral activation in teens to boost engagement in rewarding activities

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Client Challenge
www.nature.com
October 14, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
ent3c.bsky.social
In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.
Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are
Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.
www.theatlantic.com
October 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
centerhealthyminds.bsky.social
Congrats to CHM Core Faculty member Simon Goldberg and Founder/Director Dr. Richard J. Davidson on receiving a $2.8M grant from National Institutes of Mental Health to support their research on digital interventions for mental health interventions!

@sgoldbergphd.bsky.social @d3center.bsky.social
October 1, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Nigel Jaffe
francesghart.bsky.social
Had a great time presenting my poster exploring people's thoughts & feelings about death w/ #BERTopic this evening at the Society for Research in Psychopathology Annual Meeting! Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat– it was wonderful learning more about others' work and nerding out! 💀🪦
#SRP2025
September 26, 2025 at 5:56 AM