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Science by the numbers: Researchers ask, ‘How true are our findings?’
WHYY News: Next month, the respected British Medical Journal will no longer publish the results of clinical trials unless drug companies agree to provide detailed study data. They hope to nudge other medical journals to follow suit. The journal Psychological Science is doing something similar, in a voluntary pilot program for now. The journal's editor Eric Eich, also a professor at the University of British Columbia, said other groups are systematically trying to reproduce past experiments to see if they can be replicated. "Most research in psychology, or pretty well any other field, it's all geared toward discovery," said Eich. "People get kudos for discovering new things.
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New Research on Emotion From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on emotion from Psychological Science. The Emotionally Intelligent Decision Maker: Emotion-Understanding Ability Reduces the Effect of Incidental Anxiety on Risk Taking Jeremy A. Yip and Stéphane Côté Can understanding the source of your emotions help you make better decisions? Participants were assessed for ability to understand emotions and were then told they would have to give a video-recorded speech (incidental anxiety condition) or prepare a grocery list (neutral condition). Each participant's level of risk taking was then measured.
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Cleverer still
The Economist: SCIENCE has few more controversial topics than human intelligence—in particular, whether variations in it are a result of nature or nurture, and especially whether such variations differ between the sexes. The mines in this field can blow up an entire career, as Larry Summers found out in 2005 when he spoke of the hypothesis that the mathematical aptitude needed for physics and engineering, as well as for maths itself, is innately rarer in women than in men. He resigned as president of Harvard University shortly afterwards.
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On Facebook, Bad With the Good
The New York Times: Like many women these days, Aran Hissam, 35, of Melbourne, Fla., posted the news that she was pregnant on Facebook. On the morning of an ultrasound last year, she debated on the site whether to learn the baby’s sex, musing “to peek or not to peek?” When she failed to post an update later that day, friends started to contact her. Ms. Hissam decided to return to Facebook to share the news that her unborn baby, a girl, had been found to have fetal hydrops and given no chance of survival. “I wanted to communicate the news to get people off my back,” Ms. Hissam said in a telephone interview recently.
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Americans increasingly stuff holiday stockings with gifts for themselves
The Washington Post: They say it’s better to give than to receive, but They haven’t been to the mall lately. Americans are doing more and more holiday shopping for themselves, data over the last decade show, even as planned gift-buying for family members has stayed steady (sorry friends and co-workers, your numbers are down). The reasons are complicated, including a recession that’s transformed what used to be a magical few days of strolling past Santa-themed window displays into a weeks-long, competitive fire sale.
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The Science of Finding the Perfect Christmas Gift
LiveScience: For all of recorded history, people have been giving presents for a myriad of reasons: to show affection, curry favor, or fulfill familial duty. And the custom goes beyond the human species. Even family cats are known to bequeath presents of dead mice or birds on their owners. There's also regifting — recycling a gift you've received previously — which new research in the journal Psychological Science suggests may not be as offensive as once thought, at least to the gift giver.
