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A Question of Trust: Fixing the Replication Crisis
The Guardian: Human beings are born to communicate with each other. Communication involves both trust and vigilance. We constantly monitor how reliable the information is and how trustworthy the person is who has provided the information. So what about information we get from scientists? Psychology has recently provided material that could figure in a crime scene investigation story. This is not a story about scientific fraud, but about the failure to replicate experiments. This is serious because replication is the gold standard by which we know if we can trust a result. Read the whole story: The Guardian
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Buffering the Impact of Maternal Depression, Anxiety, and Stress on Neonatal Outcomes
Sophia E. Green, Emory University, presented her research on "Buffering the Impact of Maternal Depression, Anxiety, and Stress on Neonatal Outcomes" at the 2014 APS Annual Convention in San Francisco. Green received a 2014 APSSC RISE Research Award for this work.
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Trust the Face or the Body?
Our study investigates the role of in-group out-group distinction in the relationship between face versus body cues and emotion recognition. The basic emotion model by APS William James Fellow Paul Ekman suggested that people recognize emotions based on faces. A recent study led by Hillel Aviezer of The Hebrew University of Jeruselem, however, suggested that people also identify emotional expressions based on contextual body cues. Our study goes one step further and investigates whether there is any variation in judging emotions from faces and bodies for in-group or out-group members.
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Here’s a New Way to Waste Time: Pre-crastinate
New York Magazine: Introducing a newly discovered way to waste time: “Pre-crastinating,” the inverse of procrastinating. If procrastination is putting things off, pre-crastination is “the tendency to complete, or at least begin, tasks as soon as possible,” even if doing so will cost us more time and effort in the long run, according to an upcoming paper in Psychological Science (the researchers sent Science of Us an early copy). Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Overexposed? Camera Phones Could Be Washing Out Our Memories
NPR: Los Angeles blogger Rebecca Woolf uses her blog, Girl's Gone Child, as a window into her family's life. Naturally, it includes oodles of pictures of her four children. She says she's probably taken tens of thousands of photos since her oldest child was born. And she remembers the moment when it suddenly clicked — if you will — that she was too absorbed in digital documentation. "I remember going to the park at one point, and looking around ... and seeing that everyone was on their phones ... not taking photographs, but just — they had a device in their hands," she recalls. Read the whole story: NPR
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Speed-Reading Reborn for Smartphones, Smartwatches
Scientific American: Speed-reading is either a productivity enhancer or a gimmick that lets people gobble up content without really understanding or retaining what they’ve read. This debate—dating back to the late 1950s—resurfaced recently when Samsung integrated the new Spritz speed-reading app into the high-profile Galaxy S5 smartphone and Gear 2 smartwatchlaunched last month.