New Content from Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

Reexamining the Effect of Gustatory Disgust on Moral Judgment: A Multilab Direct Replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011)
Eric Ghelfi, Cody D. Christopherson, Heather L. Urry, et al.

This replication found little support for Eskine and colleagues’ (2011) original finding that conservative subjects, but not liberal subjects, who drank a bitter beverage before reading moral stories judged the characters’ actions more harshly than did subjects who drank a sweet beverage or water. Several laboratories attempted to replicate this finding by using the same procedure as Eskine et al. but found little to null effects of drinking the bitter beverage in comparison to drinking the sweet beverage and no overall differences between conservatives and liberals.

Improving Practices for Selecting a Subset of Important Predictors in Psychology: An Application to Predicting Pain
Sierra A. Bainter, Thomas G. McCaulley, Tor Wager, and Elizabeth R. Losin

Bainter and colleagues apply a Bayesian variable-selection procedure used in other disciplines—stochastic search variable selection (SSVS)—to choose the best set of predictors of perceived unpleasantness of physical pain from among a large set of sociocultural, psychological, and neurobiological possible predictors. SSVS allows narrowing down a large set of predictors to a smaller subset even when the predictors are correlated. The authors provide Web-based open-source software to implement SSVS and visualize the results.

Metascience on Peer Review: Testing the Effects of a Study’s Originality and Statistical Significance in a Field Experiment
Malte Elson, Markus Huff, and Sonja Utz

How effective is peer review, and how do study originality and statistical significance affect reviewers’ evaluations? Elson and colleagues manipulated the originality and statistical significance of the research reported in a fictitious abstract that had been submitted to a conference and sent to peer review. They found that there was a small bias in favor of significant results and no aversion to replication studies (i.e., less original studies). This research supports the feasibility and value of conducting metascientific experiments on the peer-review process to develop practical procedures to increase the utility of peer review.