Uku Vainik

There are a bunch or brief but well structured research fellowships opening up at the MRC-IEU: www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

The last case of polio was detected in Finland in 1985 🤔

The genomics of Johari Window's façade 👇

I couldn't find a tool to plot different #neuroimaging data in one consistent style, so I made one! Meet yabplot (yet another brain plot) - a #Python package for (sub)cortex & tracts.🧠
- Simple API
- Built-in atlases
- Custom atlas support
🔗 github.com/teanijarv/ya... (drop a ⭐️!)

Eisenhower

Would there be interest in a "scientific programming with agents" writeup? I'd build the same R package with different LLM agents, and see how far each gets. I'd evaluate and what a good prompting strategy is, and how we could train our future students who'll never code themselves.

New newspaper headline for your Intro to Causal Inference lecture just dropped

In short, the US and Israel have started this war with vague and unachievable objectives, with no int law base, and little or no support from Gulf states or other US allies. If Iran succeeds in hitting US/Israeli targets or disrupts oil exports, Trump will find using mil force is not risk free. End

Bluesky needs polls

repost if you agree, like if you disagree

Assistant Professor Tenure Track for Social Psychology with a Focus on Environmental Psychology - Universität Bern Universität Bern is looking for Assistant Professor Tenure Track for Social Psychology with a Focus on Environmental Psychology

Our institute is hiring
1. an assistant professor (with TT) for Social Psychology (focus: environmental psychology)
ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/jo...

2. an assistant lecturer (with TT) for Experimental Personality Psychology
ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/jo...

Assistant Professor School/Applied Child Psychology Program Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...

School psychology scholars: we have a job opening. We are Canadian and very nice humans. You can contact me for more info. mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...

🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?

We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

198 effect sizes in ego depletion resesrch showed an effect size of d=0.62. Preregistered large replications (including some by original authors) yielded an effect size of 0. No one has been able to offer any other explanation for this huge research waste than massive p-hacking.

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

The Big 5 test is about twice as accurate as the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator for predicting life outcomes, placing the usefulness of the MBTI test halfway between science and astrology.

Any psychologist will tell you, the Meyers-Briggs is mostly bullshit.
powerofusnewsletter.com/p/why-are-we...

Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music Author summary Many people experience chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing art. Yet not everyone feels these reactions in the same way. These differences provide a window into ho...

A particular moment in my favourite Radiohead song always gives me goosebumps every time I play it. Turns out susceptibility to such “chills” (induced by music, poetry, art) varies between people & that genetic differences play a part. Check out our new paper, led by @giacomobignardi.bsky.social. 👇🧪

Your personality among different jobs Personality profile fit test: see how your Big Five personality traits match over 250 jobs. Based on a scientific study of nearly 70,000 people.

Great summary! Recent personality research has moved beyond Big Five to personality nuances. Nuances are even better at predicting outcomes, eg most suitable jobs - everyone can test themselves for free at whichjob.me

Great to be involved in this publication: "Phenome-wide study on alcohol consumption provides genetic evidence for a causal association with multiple diseases and biomarkers" led by Nigussie Kassaw - doi.org/10.1016/j.nu....

The predicament of heritable confounders - Nature Genetics This Perspective argues that diagnoses derived from self-reports, electronic health records and self-administered questionnaires introduce heritable bias that confounds the interpretation of data from...

Very interesting perspective article by @caina89.bsky.social et al on genetic studies in psychiatry.

The authors argue that studies increasingly rely on "shallow" phenotyping (self-reported), leading to biases in estimation of genetic relationships between disorders.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In case you missed these, here's a compilation (for a few giggles to end the week).

1. Instagram post by NYUmed comms (oops).

bsky.app/profile/andr...

Researcher in Post-Pandemic Youth Mental Health  (294258) | University of Oslo Job title: Researcher in Post-Pandemic Youth Mental Health  (294258), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2026

I'm hiring #PROMENTA @uio.no: Researcher (PhD) in post-pandemic youth mental health (#NordForsk consortium SISU/PRISM).
#MoBa #genetics + registry data -> gene-environment interactions. Please share!
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... @ki.se @haskolinn.bsky.social @thlorg.bsky.social

Another Claude project: a static site that pulls in GWAS SNP data from ensemble, multiple public biobanks, open targets, gtex, eqtl catalog, and OMIM.

sashagusev.github.io/gwas_lookup/

Looking forward to this year's Behavior Genetics Association (BGA) conference, in my hometown of Amsterdam!

Deadline for abstracts is next week, February 16th: bga.org/content.aspx...

Me and @aysuo.bsky.social talk to @sjoerdalten.bsky.social about economics and genetics. And we get some book recommendations. Neat!

Mendelian Randomization is powerful but often debated. We benchmarked it against the "ground truth" of human metabolic pathways to see how often it gets it right. 🧬

Result: MR is robust! It matches known metabolism in 43% of cases and identifies valid drug targets.

www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

Genetics identifies obesity as a shared risk factor for co-occurring multiple long-term conditions - Communications Medicine Mounier et al., analyse whether obesity, measured by body mass index (BMI) affects the shared genetic risk between 71 long-term health conditions including diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Healt...

Latest output from the GEMINI (genetics of multiple long-term conditions) team 🧬

We used genetics to subtract the effect of obesity, revealing multiple conditions that 1) share obesity as a common cause or 2) share other causes 🌟 strong implications for intervention 🥼

Paper doi.org/10.1038/s438...

Top download from APA Journals in 2025 examines occupational differences in #personality traits, drawing on Big Five domains and personality nuances. Full article + interactive tool to explore the results ➡️ https://bit.ly/3NMyk3h @katlinanni.bsky.social @ukuvainik.bsky.social @renemottus.bsky.social

New paperAlert! We show that generative AI can quantitatively assess personality from brief, open-ended text—with surprising accuracy. 🧠✨

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Postprint (pending mod approval): osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/10

The skinny on intermittent fasting
"the better the study , the less it finds"
gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/w...

I reviewed an earlier version of this paper. I think it's interesting, because you can tell by reading it that evolutionary psychology still lacks a loyal opposition and a healthy error culture.
It's a defensive paper, targeted at people who believe evolution stops at the neck, YouTubers, _others_