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Testing Creativity
Widow. Bite. Monkey. What word goes with these three words? This is the kind of question that is asked on the Remote Associates Test, which psychologists use to study creativity. In a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists took a closer look at the test to see why people go wrong. (The answer to that question is coming soon, so think about it now.) People who have an easier time coming up with answers in the Remote Associates Test, or RAT, are generally more creative.
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A Gender-Biased Metric Guides Funding Decisions in Psychology Research
How do psychologists gauge scientific impact? One way is the so-called “journal impact factor,” or JIF, a ranking of a journal derived from the number of citations by other authors to all of the articles it has published in a given year. But JIF isn’t just a statistical abstraction. “JIFs are increasingly used to assess and predict the merits of academic work,” which leads to decisions about hiring, promotion, and the allocation of scarce resources to researchers, says University of Surrey psychologist Peter Hegarty. Needless to say, such a consequential measure must be as fair as possible.
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Can you really be addicted to the internet?
The Guardian: Several reports today suggest that a study of the brains of people who excessively use the internet show abnormalities similar to those found in people with substance addictions could be proof that the internet has similar addictive qualities to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. The Independent's report here is the most extensive. It says: Internet addiction has for the first time been linked with changes in the brain similar to those seen in people addicted to alcohol, cocaine and cannabis.
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Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 1)
Scientific American: Back in December, there was a study that appeared in The British Journal of Psychology that got a fair amount of buzz. The paper looked at the influence that magazines aimed at young men (“lads’ mags”) might have on how the young people who read them perceive their social reality.
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Do we bounce back quickest when life hurts us the most?
Business Insider: Do we bounce back quickest when life hurts us the most? Yes. Often we bounce back from painful events more quickly than we would guess: Intense hedonic states trigger psychological processes that are designed to attenuate them, and thus intense states may abate more quickly than mild states. Because people are unaware of these psychological processes, they may mistakenly expect intense states to last longer than mild ones. In Study 1, participants predicted that the more they initially disliked a transgressor, the longer their dislike would last.
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The male paradox
Calgary Herald: Disturbing male-oriented crime stories were all over the news in 2011. So-called honour killings in Ontario. An Edmonton filmmaker convicted of a lethal luring that mimicked his film script. The allegations of torture and sexual assault against Calgary’s Dustin Paxton. And, of course, that testosterone- and alcohol-fuelled riot in Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to Boston. A fascinating article published in 2011 may give us some powerful insights into these tragedies. According to two University of South Florida psychologists, our manhood is actually a very fragile and precarious commodity. When it’s threatened, we’ll go to extreme lengths to defend it.
