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New questions about the integrity of psychological research
Minneapolis Post: The integrity of psychological research (like medical research) has come increasingly under fire. Earlier this year, a scandal erupted about the work of a prominent and extensively published psychologist, Diederik Stapel, most recently of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He was found to have committed widespread academic fraud, which called into question his well-publicized findings on a variety of psychological topics, including racial stereotyping and advertising and identity.
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Even Unconsciously, Sound Helps Us See
"Imagine you are playing ping-pong with a friend. Your friend makes a serve. Information about where and when the ball hit the table is provided by both vision and hearing. Scientists have believed that each of the senses produces an estimate relevant for the task (in this example, about the location or time of the ball's impact) and then these votes get combined subconsciously according to rules that take into account which sense is more reliable. And this is how the senses interact in how we perceive the world.
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The Psychology of Health Screening
The Huffington Post: Imagine it's time for your annual physical. You visit your family doctor, and along with all the usual probes and tests and queries, your doctor tells you about a disease you've never heard of before. Called thioamine acetlyase, or TAA, deficiency, it affects the body's normal ability to process nutrients, and can lead to severe medical complications -- exhaustion, physical deterioration, even early death. Although studies indicate that 1 in 5 adults suffers from TAA deficiency, most are unaware that they even have the disease. But there is a test that screens for TAA deficiency, your physician tells you.
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The Psychology of Nakedness
Wired: The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me. The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and perfect strangers. Most of the time, this approach works well enough. If I notice someone squinting their eyes and clenching their jaw, I automatically conclude that he must be angry; if she flexes the zygomatic major – that’s what happens during a smile – then I assume she’s happy.
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What happens to math nerds when they get older
Financial Post: New scientific studies continue to escalate the hard work vs. raw talent debate. One study from Vanderbilt University shifts things in favor of raw talent. Professors David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow discovered that SAT scores at age 12 are a good indicator of your college major and job in the future. These charts compare 12 year olds at the bottom end of the top quartile for math with a group at the top end of the top quartile for math; in other words, the lesser math nerds versus the super math nerds. Compared to lesser math nerds, super math nerds were twice as likely to get a doctorate.
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The Certainty of Memory Has Its Day in Court
The New York Times: Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict.
