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Resveratrol researcher faked data, report says; what drives academic fraud?
Los Angeles Times: A University of Connecticut researcher who worked on the health benefits of a chemical in red wine fabricated data in 145 separate research projects, a three-year investigation has found. University officials have notified 11 scientific journal studies co-authored by Dipak Das, whose work focused on whether resveratrol -- an antioxidant found in grape skin -- can prevent coronary heart disease or kill cancer cells, according to the Boston Herald.
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Depression Defies the Rush to Find an Evolutionary Upside
The New York Times: In certain quarters of academia, it’s all the rage these days to view human behavior through the lens of evolutionary biology. What survival advantages, researchers ask, may lie hidden in our actions, even in our pathologies? Depression has come in for particular scrutiny. Some evolutionary psychologists think this painful and often disabling disease conceals something positive. Most of us who treat patients vehemently disagree. Consider a patient I saw not long ago, a 30-year-old woman whose husband had had an affair and left her. Within several weeks, she became despondent and socially isolated.
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In schools, self-esteem boosting is losing favor to rigor, finer-tuned praise
The Washington Post: For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates — but few, if any, academic gains. Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments. Consider teacher Shar Hellie’s new approach in Montgomery County. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Infants May Use Lip Reading to Learn Language
ABC News: Infants learn language not only through sound, but also through lip reading, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers say the new findings defy the conventional view that babies learn to speak through sound alone and the research may even assist in diagnosing autism spectrum disorders in the future. Scientists from Florida Atlantic University studied 89 infants ranging in age from 4 months to 12 months old. They also studied 21 adults.
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Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 2)
Scientific American: In this post, I continue my interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty, a social psychologist at the University of Surrey and one of the authors of ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?”, which was published in The British Journal of Psychology in December. My detailed discussion of that paper is here. The last post presented part 1 of our interview, in which Dr. Hegarty answered questions about the methodology of this particular research, as well as about some of the broader methodological differences between research in psychology and in sciences that are focused on objects of study other than humans.
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Opposites Don’t Attract (And That’s Bad News)
Wired: Opposites attract. Although we love to repeat this optimistic cliche about human natures, decades of psychological research have demonstrated that the trusim isn’t true. Rather, people seek out people who are just like them. This is known as the similarity-attraction effect, or SAE. Although there is slight variation in the strength of the effect, the SAE has been shown to exist in nearly every culture, from Western Europe to the remote tribes of the Brazilian rainforest. It doesn’t matter where we live or how we grew up or which language we speak – we still want to spend time with people who feel similar. It’s simply more comfortable.
