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The Bad Science Reporting Effect
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The press coverage of the so-called “QWERTY effect” in early March left me somewhat worried that it is so easy to publish bad science, but absolutely appalled at the state of science reporting. The alleged effect is that average scores on reported positivity or happiness associations are slightly higher for words having more letters from the right-hand side of the keyboard. By late on March 8, Mark Liberman at Language Log had re-examined the relevant statistics, noting that the effect is extremely weak. It could explain about a 10th of one percent of the variance in positive vs. negative affective judgments about words, if it existed.
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3 Parenting Dilemmas SOLVED
Men's Health: It’s no small feat beating TV and video games in the battle for your kids’ attention, but here’s one way to win: Just point your finger. In a new study, University of Virginia researchers found that if an adult gestured with their index finger, children were more likely to believe that person was more knowledgeable than an adult who used a palm-down grasping gesture. “Children interpret pointing as a marker people use when they are trying to share or teach something,” says study author Carolyn Palmquist, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Virginia. Of course, attention problems might only be the tip of your parenting iceberg, so here’s how to handle a few more daily dilemmas.
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Refining the Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Doom
The New York Times: In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up? Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).
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Keep your cool with wrong hand
Yahoo! India: People who find it difficult to rein in their aggression and yell at others even for silly mistakes can benefit by simply using the wrong hand in daily life and thereby practice self control, suggests a study. According to Thomas Denson of the University of New South Wales, right handers should get into the habit of using a computer mouse, stirring a cup of coffee or opening a door with their left hand and left-handers should do the opposite, the Daily Mail reported. Training yourself to use the wrong hand seems to act as practice for other kinds of self control, such as being polite. Just two weeks of the exercises reduce the tendency to act on impulse, he says.
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Women react to Rush’s apology: Not accepted?
msnbc: The outcry over Rush Limbaugh calling birth control activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” seems to have worked. Several days after his attempt to slut-shame the Georgetown University law student, Limbaugh issued a rare apology on his website, saying "in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize." Janet Hyde, the Helen Thompson Woolley Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says such name-calling “is a method for exerting power and control over women.” Read the whole story: msnbc See Janet Hyde at the 24th APS Annual Convention
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Can’t Help Myself
The New York Times: Human consciousness, that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose, is our greatest evolutionary achievement. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and fortunately we also have the ability to operate on automatic pilot, performing complex behaviors without any conscious thought at all. One way this happens is with lots of practice. Tasks that seem impossibly complex at first, like learning how to play the guitar, speak a foreign language or operate a new DVD player, become second nature after we perform those actions many times (well, maybe not the DVD player).
