Sam David Parsons

Radboud University Medical Centre (Radboudumc) · Department of Cognitive Neuroscience

Resilience is considered to be the process by which individuals demonstrate more positive outcomes than would be expected, given the nature of the adversity experienced. We propose that acognitive approach has the potential to guide studies investigating the relationships between adversity, stress, and resilience. Weoutline a preliminary cognitive...

Resilience is a dynamic process theorized to protect against, or counteract the adverse effects of risk exposure. A wealth of prior research has examined the role of selective processing of negative emotional information as a vulnerability factor in the development of emotion dysfunction. However, less consideration has been given to the possible r...

The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for evidence on the roles that different stakeholders play in reproducibility and research integrity. Of central priority are proposals for improving research integrity and quality, as well as guidance and support for researchers. In response to this, we argue that there is one imp...

The Oxford Achieving Resilience during COVID-19 (ARC) study collected data from adolescents (aged 13–18), and parents of adolescents, from March 2020 to August 2021. Following a baseline survey (1274 completed baseline), participants were invited to 11 follow-up weekly surveys then 9 monthly follow-up surveys, and to an optional cognitive task. Eac...

Open scholarship has transformed research, and introduced a host of new terms in the lexicon of researchers. The ‘Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Teaching’ (FORRT) community presents a crowdsourced glossary of open scholarship terms to facilitate education and effective communication between experts and newcomers.

Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on embedding open and reproducible approaches into research. One essential step in accomplishing this larger goal is to embed such practices into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. However, this often requires substantial time and resources to implement. Also, while many pedagogical resourc...

The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for evidence on the roles that different stakeholders play in reproducibility and research integrity. Of central priority are proposals for improving research integrity and quality, as well as guidance and support for researchers. In response to this, we argue that there is one imp...

Background: Recent years have witnessed an increasing prevalence of binge eating tendencies in adolescence-warranting a clearer understanding of their underlying predisposing and precipitating factors. The current study investigated whether the interaction between high levels of anxiety and stress predicted increased levels of binge eating tendenc...

Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on embedding open and reproducible approaches into research. One essential step in accomplishing this larger goal is to embed such practices into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. However, this often requires substantial time and resources to implement. Also, while many pedagogical resourc...

The combined cognitive bias hypothesis proposes that emotional information-processing biases may conjointly influence mental health. Yet, little is known about the interrelationships amongst cognitive biases, particularly in adolescence. We used data from the CogBIAS longitudinal study (Booth et al., 2017), including 450 adolescents who completed m...

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the swift response of mental health research funders and institutions, service providers, and academics enabled progress toward understanding the mental health consequences. Nevertheless, there remains an urgent need to understand the true extent of the short- and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on m...

The development of negative cognitive biases, together with symptoms of anxiety and depression, has yet to be investigated longitudinally. Using a three-wave design, the present study examined developmental trajectories of anxiety and depressive symptoms and the co-occurrence of cognitive biases, in a large normative sample of adolescents (N = 504)...

Extensive research has examined attention bias to threat in the context of anxiety in adults, but little is understood about this association in young children, and there is a dearth of longitudinal research examining whether attention bias to threat predicts anxiety over time in childhood. In the current study, a sample of 180 children participate...

Resilience is a dynamic process depicted by better than expected levels of functioning in response to significant adversity. This can be assessed statistically, by taking the residuals from a model of psychological functioning regressed onto negative life events. We report the first study to investigate multiple cognitive factors in relation to thi...

Analytic flexibility is known to influence the results of statistical tests, e.g. effect sizes and p-values. Yet, the degree to which flexibility in data-processing decisions influences the reliability of our measures is unknown. In this paper I attempt to address this question using a series of reliability multiverse analyses. The methods section...

Attentional bias to threat cues is most adaptive when the dangers they signal can readily be controlled by timely action. This study examined whether heightened trait anxiety is associated with impaired alignment between attentional bias to threat and variation in the controllability of danger, and whether this is moderated by executive functioning...

The strength of research conclusions must follow from the strength of evidence. In this commentary I raise several issues with a recent paper "Brain structure changes induced by attention bias modification training" (Abend et al., 2019). I follow the paper's five highlights to discuss; the absence of discussion of negative ABM results, the low powe...

The objective of this study is to determine whether attention toward fear messages is affected by variation in the controllability of the associated danger. There is no consensus regarding the effectiveness of fear appeals in driving adaptive behaviour, and it may be the case that threat messages fail to capture attention if the associated danger i...

Background: Adolescence is a time of considerable social, cognitive, and physiological development. It reflects a period of heightened risk for the onset of mental health problems, as well as heightened opportunity for flourishing and resilience. The CogBIAS Longitudinal Study (CogBIAS-L-S) aims to investigate psychological development during adol...

Psychological science relies on behavioral measures to assess cognitive processing; however, the field has not yet developed a tradition of routinely examining the reliability of these behavioral measures. Reliable measures are essential to draw robust inferences from statistical analyses, and subpar reliability has severe implications for measures...

The Combined Cognitive Bias Hypothesis proposes that emotional information processing biases associate with each other and may interact to conjointly influence mental health. Yet, little is known about the interrelationships amongst cognitive biases, particularly in adolescence. We used data from the CogBIAS longitudinal study (Booth et al. 2017),...

The open science movement is rapidly changing the scientific landscape. Because exact definitions are often lacking and reforms are constantly evolving, accessible guides to open science are needed. This paper provides an introduction to open science and related reforms in the form of an annotated reading list of seven peer-reviewed articles, follo...

Considerable effort and funding have been spent on developing Attention Bias Modification (ABM) as a treatment for anxiety disorders, theorized to exert therapeutic effects through reduction of a tendency to orient attention toward threat. However, meta-analytical evidence that clinical anxiety is characterized by threat-related attention bias is t...

Few scientific developments are as divisive as the increasingly popular Open Science movement. Because exact definitions are lacking and reforms are constantly evolving, accessible guides to Open Science are needed. This paper provides an introduction to Open Science and related reforms in the form of an annotated reading list of 8 peer-reviewed ar...

Background: Considerable effort and funding are spent on developing Attention Bias Modification (ABM) as a treatment for anxiety disorders. ABM is theorized to exert therapeutic effects through reduction of an increased attentional bias towards threat. Yet, the available meta-analytical evidence for the common assertion that clinical anxiety is cha...

Psychological science relies on behavioural measures to assess cognitive processing; however, the field has not yet developed a tradition of routinely examining the reliability of these behavioural measures. Reliable measures are essential to draw robust inferences from statistical analyses, while subpar reliability has severe implications for the...

Psychological science relies on behavioural measures to assess cognitive processing; however, the field has not yet developed a tradition of routinely examining the reliability of these behavioural measures. Reliable measures are essential to draw robust inferences from statistical analyses, while subpar reliability has severe implications for the...

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to P ≤ 0.005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to P ≤ 0.005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

Background: Optimal psychological development is dependent upon a complex interplay between individual and situational factors. Investigating the development of these factors in adolescence will help to improve understanding of emotional vulnerability and resilience. The CogBIAS longitudinal study (CogBIAS-L-S) aims to combine cognitive and geneti...

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to p ≤ .005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

Abstract: Resilience is considered to be the process by which individuals demonstrate more positive outcomes than would be expected, given the nature of the adversity experienced. We propose that a cognitive approach has the potential to guide studies investigating the relationships between adversity, stress, and resilience. We outline a preliminar...

In this presentation I outline our recently accepted paper ”A cognitive model of psychological resilience”. The model aims to draw together the largely disparate research areas of cognitive-experimental or information-processing approaches to emotion dysfunction and resilience resarch.

In this presentation I outline cognitive-experimental and information processing approaches to emotion dysfunction before outlining how these methods can be applied to resilience research. I finish by outlining our recently proposed cognitive model of resilience and the role of applied flexibility in mapping appropriate cognitive processing strateg...