by Craig Marker | Jan 30, 2008 | Uncategorized
Here is an excerpt from the BPS blog:Over two hundred Asian and Caucasian students were invited to take part in what they were told was a test of their personality and typing skills. During the typing part of the task, they were warned in advance that pressing the...
by Craig Marker | Jan 29, 2008 | Uncategorized
Mindhacks has an interesting article on how the low serotonin theory of depression has continued. Here is an excerpt:Bad Science has a fantastic article on antidepressants and the widely-promoted but scientifically unsupported ‘low serotonin theory’ of...
by Craig Marker | Jan 29, 2008 | Uncategorized
Authors of a December, 2007 article in Perspectives in Psychological Science discuss how extreme happiness may be related to less than optimal outcomes in measures of success. Their research points to moderately high happiness as being most highly correlated with...
by Craig Marker | Jan 24, 2008 | Uncategorized
Here is an excerpt from Slate.com, which describes a new research study investigating whether other golfers do worse when Tiger Woods plays:Tiger is thus formidable even if he doesn’t always take first, which gets us to the study’s question: How does his...
by Craig Marker | Jan 18, 2008 | Uncategorized
From Mindhacks:Inkling has an interesting article on the effect of stress on the menstrual cycle that investigates the received wisdom that stress can prevent periods. It turns out the scientific studies have found no conclusive answer as they’ve returned mixed...
by Craig Marker | Jan 17, 2008 | Uncategorized
A recent article by Janek Musek suggests that the Big Five factors of personality, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness correlate and can be combined to create the ‘Big One’ factor of personality. Here is an excerpt...
by Craig Marker | Jan 17, 2008 | Research
The file drawer problem (described here) is a publication bias in which results that are significant are published more that results that are not statistically significant. Thus, non-significant findings end up in the file drawer. A research team led by Erick Turner...
by Craig Marker | Jan 14, 2008 | Uncategorized
Here is an excerpted statement from Joseph LeDoux on Edge:Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment...
by Craig Marker | Jan 14, 2008 | Uncategorized
Here is a great excerpt from an interview with Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. The full article can be found here.In Oren Rudavsky’s recent film, The Treatment, a wealthy Manhattan widow is baffled that a schoolteacher...
by Craig Marker | Jan 14, 2008 | Uncategorized
Here is an excerpt of a discussion of a study which discusses why more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect them to. Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study [pdf], shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of...
