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Scientists are furious after a famous psychologist accused her peers of ‘methodological terrorism’
Business Insider: The science of psychology is in crisis. One by one, many of its flashiest and most famous results have collapsed in the last decade as a new generation of researchers have re-examined famous findings. Forcing a smile can't really make you happy. The smell of chocolate cookies doesn't make you a better test taker. A robot named "statcheck" is trawling through published papers for statistical errors, and posting public comments when it finds them. It's a scary time to be a member of the psychological academic establishment. As the social psychologist Michael Inzlicht wrote on his blog back in February, "Our problems are not small and they will not be remedied by small fixes.
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Hillary Clinton’s ‘Angry’ Face
The New York Times: When Hillary Clinton participated in a televised forum on national security and military issues this month, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, tweeted that she was “angry and defensive the entire time — no smile and uncomfortable.” Mrs. Clinton, evidently undaunted by Mr. Priebus’s opinion on when she should and shouldn’t smile, tweeted back, “Actually, that’s just what taking the office of president seriously looks like.” The implication of Mr. Priebus’s comment was a familiar one: A woman making stern-looking facial movements must be angry or upset.
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’Power Posing’ Co-author: ‘I Do Not Believe That ‘Power Pose’ Effects Are Real’
New York Magazine: It would be hard to come up with a recent psychological idea that has stormed the mainstream more quickly and effectively than “power posing” — the idea that if you adopt assertive, “powerful” poses it can have various positive psychological and physiological effects that may help you during negotiations, public speaking, and other high-pressure situations. The idea comes from a 2010 paper published in Psychological Science co-authored by Dana Carney and Andy Yap, then of Columbia University, and Amy Cuddy of Harvard.
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Teens’ Memory for Faces Shifts Toward Peers During Puberty
Adolescents begin to view faces differently as they prepare for the transition to adulthood, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "We know that faces convey a lot of different social information, and the ability to perceive and interpret this information changes through development,” explained psychological scientist Suzy Scherf of Penn State, senior author on the study.
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Asking for directions
The Boston Globe: If stereotypes are to be believed, women are poor navigators, while men won’t ask for directions. But maybe that’s not the right perspective. Students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, were given “two timed pencil-and-paper tests of perspective-taking ability: the object-perspective/spatial-orientation test and the standardized road-map test of direction sense.” Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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You’re Joking: Detecting Sarcasm in Emails Isn’t Easy
“Well, that meeting was a really fantastic use of my time.” You may want to think twice before hitting send on that email with a sarcastic joke – regardless of whether your boss or your work buddies are on the receiving end. New research investigating how we determine the emotional content of text is showing that people have a very hard time catching on to sarcasm in emails and texts. This means that written communications aren’t the best medium for making a well-meaning joke; people often interpret a friendly riff as being overtly negative, or they don’t catch the sarcastic tone at all and assume a caustic jibe is actually praise.
