-
The Power of Red
Allure Magazine: Red is not a color you wear when you're feeling shy. You swipe on red lipstick or put on a red dress when you want to be noticed. It's sexy but assertive, not demure. After all, it's also the color of stop signs, of anger, of extreme heat. But where does red get its power? A few new studies aimed to answer that question. The first, published in the upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, asks whether our ideas about the color red are cultural or if they have deeper, biological roots. The authors think it might be a product of evolution, not just convention.
-
New report suggests coffee should be sold with a warning
BBC News: A new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that coffee should come with a health warning. Professor Simon Crowe led the team that looked into the effects of coffee for La Trobe University in Victoria. He tells Radio 5 live Up All Night's Rhod Sharp that if you have got a high-stress lifestyle and a heavy caffeine habit you could be getting more than you bargained for; you could start hearing voices. Listen: BBC News
-
Baltimore scientists search for cause, treatment for hoarding
Los Angeles Times: The table in Jack Samuels' Fells Point office is piled two feet high with books, papers, scientific journals and grant applications. Samuels' wife likes to tease him that he has a hoarding problem, just like the people he studies. In reality, those stacks of paper might hold a remedy. Samuels, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine, is the go-to guy nationwide for researchers seeking to understand the biological basis of hoarding — an intense, irrational drive to collect items in vast quantities, coupled with an inability to discard even objects that are worthless or broken. Read more: Los Angeles Times
-
This Is Your Brain. And this Is Your Brain on Gossip.
Boston Magazine: Late last month, smack in the middle of the DiMasi trial and right around the time we learned of Arnold's infidelity, a Science study out of Northeastern University popped into the world and promptly landed itself in headlines across the blogosphere. The title, "The Visual Impact of Gossip,” pretty much explains its popularity off the bat.
-
psychological-scientists
-
Teaching Scientific Methodology
Although we construct and justify scientific knowledge on the basis of experimental evidence, the way we do this is much more interesting, and much more problematic, than science textbooks suggest. The suggestion of these textbooks that to adopt a scientific method is to adopt a simple routine fails to do justice to the sophisticated skills which scientists use when they experiment and when they reason from evidence. -Gower, 1997, p. 11 In 1960, F. J. McGuigan published a groundbreaking methodology text that set the mold for practically all subsequent methodology texts in psychology.
