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A Tutorial on Evaluating Hypotheses Using Bayesian Methods
What do black bears have in common with Bayesian statistics? Both make an appearance in a 2013 paper written by Rens Van de Schoot, Marjolein Verhoeven, and Herbert Hoijtink in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. In this paper, the authors use a hiking trip to illustrate Bayesian thinking and its advantages over traditional, sometimes called frequentist, statistics. During a hiking trip in Alaska, one of the Dutch authors observed a bit of black fur behind some bushes. Was it a bear?
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Parents’ Math Anxiety Can Undermine Children’s Math Achievement
If the thought of a math test makes you break out in a cold sweat, Mom or Dad may be partly to blame, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers led by University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to be math-anxious themselves—but only when these parents provided frequent help on the child’s math homework. Lead study author Erin A. Maloney is a postdoctoral scholar in psychology at UChicago. Gerardo Ramirez and Elizabeth A.
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Cold Offices Linked to Lower Productivity
Companies may want to turn up the thermostat. Blasting the air conditioning doesn’t just run up energy bills, it may also be running up costs in lost worker productivity. In a small field study from 2004, Cornell University psychological scientist Alan Hedge determined that workers are more efficient when they’re warm. Hedge and colleagues carefully tracked the productivity of nine women working at an insurance office in Orlando, Florida. Their workstations were equipped with air samplers that recorded the temperature every 15 minutes. Productivity was tracked by software that measured their typing speed and errors for 20 consecutive days.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Capacity for Visual Features in Mental Rotation Yangqing Xu and Steven L. Franconeri Despite researchers' interest in mental rotation -- the ability of people to rotate the visual representation of objects in their mind -- there is still much we don't know about it. To learn more about this ability, the researchers performed a series of studies, some including eye tracking, in which participants were asked to mentally rotate simple objects with four differently colored parts. Participants were able to keep track of only one of the color-location feature links during the rotation task.
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Psychosis and Violence Aren’t Strongly Linked
Violent individuals are often assumed to suffer from a long history of mental illness that compels them to act destructively, but the link between psychosis and aggressive acts may be weak.
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Hidden Cameras Make Safer Drivers
Love them or hate them, a new study finds that speed cameras really do help stop drivers from speeding—particularly when the camera is hidden. Drivers may not appreciate getting a ticket, but speeding is one of the biggest contributors to traffic fatalities. Statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cite speeding as a factor in 29 percent of motor vehicle crash deaths in the United States. Evidence suggests that speeding cameras can substantially reduce traffic collisions, including ones in which drivers are seriously injured or killed. However, research also suggests that speeding cameras can actually increase rear-end collisions in certain circumstances.
