Author: Dominique Makowski
Date: 2026-03-22

# psycho for R

#### Dominique Makowski

#### 2026-03-22

Abstract

Psycho is an R package that aims at providing tools for psychologists, neuropsychologists and neuroscientists, to transform statistical outputs into something readable that can be, almost directly, copied and pasted into a report. It also implements various functions useful in psychological science, such as correlation matrices, assessment plot creation or normalization. The package revolves around the psychobject. Main functions from the package return this type, and the `analyze()` function transforms other R objects into psychobjects. Four functions can then be applied on a psychobject: `summary()`, `print()`, `plot()` and `values()`. Contrary to many other packages which goal is to produce statistical analyzes, `psycho` aims at filling the gap between statistical R outputs and statistical report writing, with a focus on APA formatting guidelines, to enhance the standardization of results reporting. Complex outputs, such as those of Bayesian and frequentist mixed models, are automatically transformed into readable text, tables, and plots that illustrate the effects. Thus, the results can easily be incorporated into shareable reports and publications, promoting data exploration, saving time and preventing errors for better, reproducible, science.

# Overview

The package mainly revolves around the `psychobject`. Main functions from the package return this type, and the `analyze()` function transforms other R objects into psychobjects. 4 functions can be then applied on a psychobject: `summary()`, `print()`, `plot()` and `values()`.

# Installation

### Install R and R Studio

- Go here: https://cran.r-project.org/
- Download the last version for your OS
- Install it
- Go here: https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/
- Download the right version for your OS
- Install it
- Start R studio

### Install the psycho package

If you’ve never used `psycho`, enter one of the following in the console and press enter:

    # This for the stable version:
    install.packages("psycho")

    # Or this for the dev version:
    install.packages("devtools")
    library(devtools)
    devtools::install_github("neuropsychology/psycho.R")

In case of error: Sometimes the installation fails, and you might find in the red output the following lines:

    there is no package called ‘**thenameofapackage**’
    ERROR: lazy loading failed for package ‘psycho’

Try installing the missing packages (`install.packages("thenameofapackage")`) and then, install psycho again (sometimes this can be done several times).

Anyway, once you have `psycho`, just put this at the beginning of every script:

    library(psycho)

# Guides

- Bayesian Analysis in Psychology

# Examples

- Formatted Correlation with Effect Size
- Extracting a Reference Grid of your Data for Machine Learning Models Visualization
- Copy/paste t-tests Directly to Manuscripts
- Easy APA Formatted Bayesian Correlation
- Fancy Plot (with Posterior Samples) for Bayesian Regressions
- How Many Factors to Retain in Factor Analysis
- Beautiful and Powerful Correlation Tables
- Format and Interpret Linear Mixed Models
- How to do Repeated Measures ANOVAs
- Standardize (Z-score) a dataframe
- Compute Signal Detection Theory Indices
- Installing R, R Studio and psycho

# Credits

This package helped you? Don’t forget to cite the various packages you used :)

You can cite `psycho` as follows:

- Makowski, (2018). The psycho Package: An Efficient and Publishing-Oriented Workflow for Psychological Science. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(22), 470. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00470

# Contribution

Improve this vignette by modifying this file!