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With PSA Testing, The Power Of Anecdote Often Trumps Statistics
NPR: Millions of men and their doctors are trying to understand a federal task force's recommendation against routine use of a prostate cancer test called the PSA. The guidance, which came out last week, raises basic questions about how to interpret medical evidence. And what role expert panels should play in how doctors practice. About 70 percent of men over 50 have gotten a PSA blood test. Some are convinced it was a lifesaver. Tom Fouts of Florida is one of them. He and his doctor had been watching his PSA (prostate-specific antigen) creep up for almost two years. Fouts was losing sleep over it, wondering if it meant a silent killer was incubating in his prostate gland.
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Are Wider Faced Men More Self-Sacrificing?
Picture a stereotypical tough guy and you might imagine a man with a broad face, a square jaw, and a stoical demeanor. Existing research even supports this association, linking wider, more masculine faces with several less-than-cuddly characteristics, including perceived lack of warmth, dishonesty, and lack of cooperation. But a new study suggests that men with these wide, masculine faces aren’t always the aggressive tough guys they appear to be. “Men with wider faces have typically been portrayed as ‘bad to the bone,’” says psychologist Michael Stirrat. But he and David Perrett wondered whether the relationship between facial width and personality was really so simple.
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Political Polarization ‘Dangerous,’ Psychologist Says
LiveScience: CHICAGO - For the first time in American political history, Democrats and Republicans have sorted themselves into a perfect left-right split, a prominent political psychologist said this week, calling the result a "dangerous era" in U.S. politics. Traditionally, political parties have been coalitions of broad groups of people, based more on industry, region and interest group than basic morals, University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt said here during a lecture at the annual meeting of the Association of Psychological Science. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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The Science of ‘Gaydar’
The New York Times: “GAYDAR” colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation. But does gaydar really exist? If so, how does it work? Our research, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, shows that gaydar is indeed real and that its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features as well as the spatial relationships among facial features. We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight.
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NSF Gives Clinical Students a Shot At Winning Graduate Fellowships
Science Magazine: In 2010, after years of tolerating an ambiguous policy on whether clinical or counseling psychology fits into the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF's) mission to fund basic science, agency officials announced that they would reject any application—without even reviewing it—from students in clinical or counseling psychology graduate programs. The psychological science community protested the decision, and within a year, NSF had restored eligibility for scores of graduate psychology students. The reversal has had a significant impact: A doctoral student in psychology has won a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship.
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SBE Advisory Committee Holds Meeting
COSSA Washington Update: Mumpower New SES Division Director Myron Gutmann, the current AD for SBE, updated the Committee on the directorate's activities. He announced the appointment of Jeryl Mumpower, currently at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, as the new director of the Social and Economic Sciences (SES) division. Mumpower, a former program officer for Decision, Risk, and Management Science, will replace Rachel Croson, who will return to the University of Texas at Dallas in September after two years at NSF. Mumpower previously taught and served in administrative positions at Albany University, State University of New York. He has a Ph.D.
