Psychology
purepedantry | July 7, 2008I often rant about bad coverage of the psychology of sex differences, so it is always satisfying to see an article that really has their facts straight.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, have an excellent article reviewing Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain and Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. They take both authors to task for selective use of the literature, using evidence that is dated, and for ignoring the complexity of the subject.
The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in most areas,…
edyong | July 5, 2008
"Out, damn spot! Out I say!" In Macbeth's fifth act, Lady Macbeth's role in the treacherous murder of Duncan takes its toll, and she begins obsessively washing her hands to alleviate her guilty conscience. Now, some four centuries after Shakespeare penned his play, scientists have found that physical and moral cleanliness are just as inextricably linked as he suggested.
The link between bodily cleanliness and moral purity is evident throughout the world's cultures. Cleansing ceremonies are common in religions. Christians and Sikhs literally wash away their sins through baptism, while…
omnibrain | July 3, 2008 Hitachi recently announced that they would be producing a 5 TB drive in the near future (2010?). This is totally unexciting to me but what Hitchachi's Yoshiro Shiroishi said was. According to Techradar:
As for what can be stored on such disks, Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi explains, "By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain."
In other words, a next-generation hard drive will be able to recall that trip to the seaside in 1976, but never where it left the car keys last night.
Ignoring the faulty memory comment for a moment - Where in the…
edyong | June 30, 2008If you picture a woman twisting a doorknob, all the elements of this brief event show up in your mind - the woman, the twisting action of her hand and the doorknob. But as I describe this scene and as you read it, the players are mentioned in a very strict order. The subject (the woman) comes first followed by the verb (twisting), and the object (the doorknob) holds up the rear.
These word orders are one of the most fundamental aspects of any language and one of the earliest that young children pick up on. The Subject-Verb-Object order of English (SVO) is typical of many languages including…
purepedantry | June 30, 2008A lot of people have read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In the book, he gives an example of a group of people forced to estimate the weight of a cow. (This was actually an experiment that geneticist Franics Galton attempted.) When you do this, you find that the accuracy of the average response from the group is much greater than the accuracy of each individual estimate.
This is the so-called wisdom of crowds. The assumption with experiments like this is that each individual will make the best guess they can and this guess will be stable over time -- minus any new information…
omnibrain | June 25, 2008This is seriously the worst press release I've ever read. It doesn't say how the research was done, it doesn't have the results from the research, it is poorly written (run on sentences?!), and it is pointless. Why was this even released? Does EurekAlerts even have any criteria for releasing press releases? I do know they have criteria for who counts as a journalist - and it certainly isn't bloggers (we can't get embargoed articles from them - but we can from PLOS)
Anyway... here's the release.
purepedantry | June 23, 2008PsyBlog is soliciting your favorite psychobabble. Head over there to give your favorite instance of the complete misinterpretation of psychology in pop culture.
My favorite is number one on their list of examples: "Their brains lit up in the scanner." Brain activity is not phosphorescent. There is euphemism, and there is a point where the euphemism entirely confuses the issue.
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks
neurophilosophy | June 18, 2008The idea that memory is reconstructive and not reproductive - which dates back at least to the 1930s, when Frederic Bartlett published his classic book Remembering - has profound implications for the criminal justice system, as it raises questions about the reliability of eyewitness testimonies.
The BBC now reports that cognitive psychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds has called for "a major rethink of memory and the law" in a report written for the British Psychological Society and the Law Society.
The article also quotes prominent memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus of the…
neurophilosophy | June 17, 2008
Photo: Edmund E. Kasaitis.
Tomorrow night's full moon will be very low in the sky, and will give a strong illusion of being far bigger than it actually is.
Exactly why we experience this phenomenon is unclear; NASA provides several explanations, including this one:
A similar illusion was discovered in 1913 by Mario Ponzo, who drew two identical bars across a pair of converging lines [like railroad tracks]...The upper yellow bar looks wider because it spans a greater apparent distance between the rails. This is the "Ponzo Illusion."
Some researchers believe that the Moon Illusion is…
purepedantry | June 17, 2008Lots of people get mad behind the wheel, but who are the people likely to try and kill you at the intersection? A CSU psychologist found that road rage correlates with large numbers of bumper stickers:
Szlemko and his colleagues quizzed hundreds of volunteers about their cars and driving habits. Participants were asked to describe the value and condition of their cars, as well as whether they had personalized them in any way.
The researchers recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos and even plastic dashboard toys. They also asked questions…
clock | June 12, 2008The article is here, but it is too long for me and my attention span to read through. I got a snippet, though:
But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of…
purepedantry | June 12, 2008I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
-- MacBeth Act III, Scene 4, Lines 162-166
I have a book to put on the reading list. Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo has a new book on the psychology of evil and how previously "good" people can do bad things. The book is called The Lucifer Effect.
If you remember, Zimbardo was the author of the famous Stanford Prison experiment. The Stanford Prison experiment cast students as prison guards…
neurophilosophy | June 12, 2008Paraskavedekatriaphobia is an irrational fear of Friday 13th; it is a form of triskaidekaphobia (a fear of the number 13 in general).
neurophilosophy | June 12, 2008
The bi-monthly American magazine Psychology Today has launched a network of blogs covering a wide variety of topics, including addiction, cognitive science, sports psychology and psychotherapy.
The network contains more than 80 blogs, many of which are written by researchers who are prominent in their respective fields. I haven't had a look at all of them, but here are a few that caught my eye:
Brainstorm, by the editors of the magazine;
In Practice, by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac; and
Quirky Little Things, by Jesse Bering, director of the Institute of…
razib | June 8, 2008Will Wilkinson and Jon Haidt just did a bloggingheads.tv. I've blogged Haidt's ideas before (Chris is skeptical). During this bloggingheads.tv interview Haidt lays out the difference between college age liberals and other societies with a scenario where a beloved dog dies and the family decides to consume the creature. Most non-college age non-liberals think that that's immoral, while many of the liberals express a more guarded utilitarian evaluation where its morality is ambiguous. That's fine, but later on Haidt mentions that a lot of New Age liberals are always going on about "toxins…
omnibrain | June 7, 2008 According to the Mayo Clinic website,
Three out of four people with Alzheimer's will wander at some point during the course of the disease. Wanderers who get lost outdoors may become injured or even die of exposure. This risk increases dramatically if the weather is very cold or very hot.
There's a number of ways that you can protect your beloved family member from trying to walk to Disney World or their house in the old country.
Some of the ways the Mayo Clinic suggests for preventing wandering are:
Alarms and locks
A variety of devices can alert you that your loved one is on the move.…
grrlscientist | June 4, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, psychology, trauma, emotions, 9-11, psychological health
To talk or not to talk, apparently that is the question, especially after a collective catastrophe, such as 9-11 or the Virginia Tech University shootings. A paper that will be published in the June issue of Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology reveals that -- contrary to current opinion -- verbally expressing one's emotions is not necessary to cope successfully with a community tragedy, and in fact, doing so might actually be harmful.
Expressing one's emotions in the aftermath of a community…
omnibrain | May 30, 2008 I never quite understood the whole NCAA pool thing, or fantasy leagues for that matter. In a non-professional gambling environment the chances of you winning are pretty much chance. You've all heard about the girl picking her teams based on what colors she likes and winning. In any case... there is an interesting study from Naomi Mandel and Stephen M. Nowlis or Arizona State University demonstrating that Office pools make people pretty unhappy. Well except the winner - but there's only one of them (except in my department where there is one for the worst bracket - which I can't even win…
terrasig | May 26, 2008Let me say from the outset that I am too close to this issue, in many ways, to be fully objective. However, this issue is likely to be of interest to those in the academic community and especially anyone who followed the now-discredited 2006 Duke lacrosse case.
On 15 May Duke graduating senior and guest columnist, Kristin Butler, wrote an editorial in The Duke Chronicle entitled, "Summa cum loony." Her editorial addressed the fellow graduation across town of Solomon Burnette, convicted in 1997 of robbing two Duke students, and Crystal Gail Mangum, the exotic dancer hired by Duke lacrosse…
neurophilosophy | May 25, 2008This clever 2-minute film was produced by the Korean electronics firm Samsung, as part of their promotion for a new product called the SOUL mobile phone.
Related:
Interior design optical illusions
The left brain/right brain myth