On the Newsstand

Your Brain Thinks Money Is a Drug
NPR, August 7, 2009
If you’ve ever thought of money as a drug, you may be more right than you know. New research shows that counting money — just handling the bills — can make things less painful. “It is surprising,” says Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management who [conducted] the research. “It still surprises me.”
Coverage of “The Symbolic Power of Money: Reminders of Money Alter Social Distress and Physical Pain” in Psychological Science (Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Roy F. Baumeister, Volume 20(6), 700-706).

Read the full NPR article here.

Read the original Psychological Science article here.

The Real Problem with the Rorschach Test: It Doesn’t Work
Newsweek, July 30, 2009
The most recent survey data indicates that 4 in 10 clinical psychologists still use the Rorschach “always or frequently” with patients. Why would that be? This isn’t the first time the Rorschach has come under attack. The test was roundly criticized back in the ’50s for lacking standardization and norms. Those problems were presumably corrected in the ’70s, with the introduction of an elaborate system of instructions for therapists, and many newly trained therapists incorporated the revised test into their practices. Even so, it is this revised version of the Rorschach that still fails on both reliability and validity, according to the PSPI report.
Coverage of “The Scientific Status of Projective Techniques” in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Scott O. Lilienfeld, James M. Wood, and Howard N. Garb, Volume 1(2) 27-66).

Read the full Newsweek article here

Read the original Psychological Science in the Public Interest article here.

Three Paths to Better Teaching, and When to Stray From Them
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 10, 2009
This year [David B.] Daniel and Debra A. Poole, a professor of psychology at Central Michigan University, published an essay in Perspectives on Psychological Science in which they urged college-pedagogy researchers to spend less time in the lab and more time observing actual classrooms in all their complexity. It is crucial, Mr. Daniel and Ms. Poole argue, for researchers to understand how various elements of instructors’ and students’ behaviors interact with one another. Their paper uses analogies from nutrition: Just as vitamin D supplements make some people build up too much calcium, certain instructional practices that might seem like a good idea in the abstract can actually harm some students some of the time.
Coverage of “Learning for Life: An Ecological Approach to Pedagogical Research” in Perspectives on Psychological Science (David B. Daniel, Debra A. Poole Volume 4(1), 91-96).

Read the full The Chronicle of Higher Education article here.

Read the original Perspectives on Psychological Science article here.