A recent study shows that about one in five patients released from intensive care will develop symptoms of PTSD during the first year after ICU, such as flashbacks, trouble sleeping or nightmares. While surviving serious illness is great, being left with new psychological symptoms is quite unfortunate.

As these symptoms are often discussed with general practitioners (GPs) rather than mental health professionals, the new PICTURE study by Gensinchen et al. (2025, co-authored by Ulf-Dietrich Reips) investigates the effectiveness of a short-term variant of narrative exposure therapy conducted by GPs. The results of this randomized control trial paint the picture of a very promising new intervention! Read the article yourself here: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-082092 or get an overview in one of the media posts about this study by the LMU Munich or BMJ Group.

The Journal of Perceptual Imaging publishes papers on topics such as cognitive effects, perception, and imaging. From time to time it also publishes special issues. In a special issue on Remote Research in the Perceptional and Cognitive Sciences an article on the influence of facial cues in avatars was published by iscience team member Yury Shevchenko and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, along with their former Master student Jakob Heisenstein, whose Master thesis was the basis for the piece. More recently, in February 2025, Maria Rosa Miccoli and Ulf-Dietrich Reips published an article on exact versus conceptual replication in the same journal!🍾💭

You can find the articles below – we highly reccommend you check them out!

Shevchenko, Y., Heisenstein, J., & Reips, U.-D. (2024). How do avatars make a positive impression: The effect of facial cues on avatar evaluation. Journal of Perceptual Imaging, 7, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2352/j.percept.imaging.2024.7.000406

Miccoli, M. R., & Reips, U.-D. (2025). Exact versus conceptual replication: Internet-based research investigating the replicability of cognitive effects. Journal of Perceptual Imaging, 7. https://doi.org/10.2352/j.percept.imaging.2025.7.000408

The PANDOTA Ph.D. grant from University of Constance is targetted towards first-year Ph.D. candidates from natural science disciplines. The aim is to help students to get started in their academic carreers and get settled in the scientific community. It is quite competitive as it is only awarded to up to 12 candidates each year.

We are happy to announce that this year’s psychology grant was awarded to iscience team member Anni – congratulations! 🥳The great challenge now will be to figure out how to spend the money and make the most of it. 🤔✨

After going through a preregistration and review process with the new and convincing peer community in (PCI), two new articles are in press in JEP:LMC and Royal Society Open Science!🥳

Congratulations to doctoral students Lilly Roth and Annika Tave Overlander as well as former Bachelor and Master student John Caffier in getting these articles from our eSNARC project published along with their mentors, supervisors, and collaborators!🎆

The two articles are:

Roth, L., Caffier, J., Reips, U.-D., Cipora, K., Braun, A., & Nuerk, H.-C. (in press). True colors SNARCing: Semantic number processing is highly automatic. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
More information can be found here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aeyn8.

Roth, L., Caffier, J., Reips, U.-D., Nuerk, H.-C., Overlander, A. T., & Cipora, K. (2025). One and only SNARC? Spatial-Numerical Associations are not fully flexible and depend on both relative and absolute number magnitude. Royal Society Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241585.
More information can be found here: https://osf.io/ajqpk.