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How We Decide
What decisions we make and how we arrive at them - those questions served as the backdrop for yesterday's "Choices" theme program at the APS 23rd Annual Convention. But the program's four presenters answered these questions in surprisingly different ways. Dan Ariely of Duke University described the situations that lead people to make dishonest decisions. Given the chance, most people will cheat just enough to benefit from the opportunity but not enough to feel like a bad person.
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The Elusive Independent Variable
In discussions of psychological research, the independent variable is not often referred to as “elusive.” Why, then, would it be elusive in psycho-social intervention research? In her SSCP address at the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Varda Shoham, of the University of Arizona and NIMH, answered just that. Treatment fidelity, influenced by the therapist, contributes significantly to treatment effectiveness. Without this fidelity, outcome measures inevitably reflect variations in treatment implementation rather than the intended treatment. So, what leads to treatment variation? In some instances, training and dissemination of therapies are not optimal.
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Miracle Fruit and Flavor: An Experiment Performed at APS 2010
The results are in! At Convention last year APS Past-President Linda Bartoshuk led a miracle fruit experiment with the audience during the Presidential Symposium in Boston, MA. Audience members tasted 'miracle fruit,' a freeze-dried West African berry, that changed the way they tasted fruit they ate afterwards. Bartoshuk shared the results with attendees in a poster presentation at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Synsepalum dulcificum berries (miracle fruit) affect the tongue such that sweet taste is added to acids.
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The Many Faces of Network Analysis
Psychometrist Denny Borsboom from the University of Amsterdam kicked off the program talking about networks he and his team generated using categories from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In addition to creating networks that show how symptoms from different mental disorders are connected, Borsboom has also developed symptom networks for individuals. "You can now think of people as having different network structures," says Borsboom.
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Do Parenting Styles Mirror Teaching Styles?
Douglas A. Bernstein of the University of South Florida and has over 40 years of classroom experience. He thought he had seen it all, but he continues to be surprised till this day by some of his students’ antics and excuses in the classroom. In his ‘Taxonomy of Teacher Complaints’ or TTC as he calls it, Bernstein states that a lack of motivation and respect, irresponsible learning behavior, dependency, academic dishonesty and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement in students are a teacher’s worst nightmare.
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Men’s Learning About Women’s Sexual Interest
My name is Teresa A. Treat from the University of Iowa and I presented my research at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. This study examines learning processes in young men regarding women's sexual-interest cues under probabilistic feedback conditions. The conditions established were more characteristic of "real-world" social-learning environments than deterministic feedback. 661 undergraduate males completed a category-learning task with photographs of women in an equivalent age range. Probabilistic feedback decreased sexual-interest utilization; individual differences in learning correlated with sexual-aggression risk.
