Hello all. I made a video about CDS. It took me more than two years to create and involved processing 228 scientific papers and writing over 200 pages of notes.
The video is an introduction to CDS: the definition and symptoms, how it compares to ADHD, the impairments associated with CDS, the history of CDS research, and so on.
Note: No AI, no midroll ads or promotions. For those of you with audio-processing issues, I made sure the subtitles were accurate.
It's here:
https://youtu.be/YtImdOdLUkQ?si=UsVDBCoE7XgF7kW5
The citations and references for everything in the video are here in this PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-g3Z16HMv9hOD1BfDCvKc16LlfMxScfq/view?usp=sharing
In order for this post not to get automatically deleted, here are the first three references from the reference list (the rest are in the PDF linked directly above):
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental
disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Association.
https://doi/book/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2012). The brain’s default network and its adaptive role in internal
mentation. The Neuroscientist, 18(3), 251–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073858411403316
Banich, M. T. (2009). Executive function: The search for an integrated account. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 18(2), 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
8721.2009.01615.x
It's still getting deleted. Here is the first paragraph:
Cognitive disengagement syndrome—formerly known as sluggish cognitive tempo—is
characterized by daydreaming, underactivity, and mental confusion (Becker et al., 2023). As I
write this in 2026, cognitive disengagement syndrome—CDS for short—is not well known. It’s
not even in the standard guides psychiatrists and clinical psychologists use for diagnosis.
Becker, S. P., Willcutt, E. G., Leopold, D. R., Fredrick, J. W., Smith, Z. R., Jacobson, L. A.,
Burns, G. L., Mayes, S. D., Waschbusch, D. A., Froehlich, T. E., McBurnett, K., Servera, M., &
Barkley, R. A. (2023). Report of a work group on sluggish cognitive tempo: Key research
directions and a consensus change in terminology to cognitive disengagement syndrome.
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 62(6), 629–645.
Hi everyone — I'm the lead author of a study that was covered by PsyPost today, and I thought this community might find it interesting.
We surveyed 567 adults in romantic relationships about why they deceive their partners — measuring seven different motives, from avoiding conflict and sparing a partner's feelings to malicious intent. We also measured attachment insecurity, dark personality traits, relationship satisfaction, and each person's overall tendency to deceive.
Instead of asking only why do people lie, we asked a slightly different question: are there distinct types of deceivers based on their motivational patterns.
Using latent profile analysis, we found three groups:
Transparent Partners (38.1%) — reported uniformly low endorsement of every motive for deception and the lowest tendency to deceive. They also reported the highest relationship satisfaction and were the most securely attached group.
Strategic Soothers (47.6% — the largest group) — deceive mainly for self-protective and relationship-maintenance reasons: avoiding conflict, sparing a partner's feelings, covering mistakes, and protecting privacy. They scored low on malicious motives. Their satisfaction fell in between the other two groups — significantly lower than Transparent Partners, but significantly higher than Antagonistic Strategists.
Antagonistic Strategists (14.3% — the smallest group, but the most concerning) — endorsed every motive for deception at elevated levels, including malicious intent, attention seeking, and sexual avoidance. They reported the highest tendency to deceive, the lowest relationship satisfaction, and elevated dark personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism).
The main takeaway is not "lying is fine." It's that the meaning of deception can't be inferred from frequency alone — the motives behind it matter. And here's the part I find most interesting: insecurity alone didn't determine who became an exploitative deceiver. Strategic Soothers and Antagonistic Strategists reported nearly identical levels of attachment insecurity — what separated them was dark personality traits. Insecure people low in those traits tended to deceive to keep the peace; the same insecurity paired with narcissism, psychopathy, or sadism showed up as deception aimed at control and self-interest.
The full study was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and PsyPost wrote a summary here:
Happy to answer questions — and I'm curious what this community thinks...
When empathy dies, so do we
I'm a psych researcher. My new framework argues that "exposure to adversity builds resilience" is wrong as usually stated — and that the reason is a confound nobody has cleanly separated.
Two developmental literatures have run in parallel for decades without meeting. One documents the costs of overprotection; the other, the harms of adversity. Neither offers a positive theory of the middle — what beneficial engagement with difficulty actually looks like.
My claim: the field keeps measuring exposure and treating it as the causal variable, when the actual causal structure is an interaction. Whether difficulty helps or harms a child depends on a separate dimension — the caregiver's stable capacity to co-regulate and scaffold meaning — that is not reducible to the exposure itself. Define those two dimensions independently and the paradox dissolves: a high-capacity parent can still produce a fragile child by deploying that capacity toward shielding rather than accompaniment.
The paper formalizes this as moderated mediation and lays out three mechanisms. I'll link it in a comment. I'm most interested in attacks on the orthogonality claim — that's the load-bearing wall.