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Walk Through a Door and Throw Memories out the Window
National Geographic: Forgot to turn off the stove? Can’t figure out why you have that piece of string tied to your finger? Don’t blame yourself; blame the door you just walked through. According to Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky, the simple act of walking through a doorway makes people forgetful. Radvansky conducted numerous experiments in which subjects’ memories were tested after crossing a room or exiting through a doorway. In all cases, the research subjects forgot more after walking through a doorway than they did walking the same distance across an open room. Read the whole story: National Geographic
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More About Academics and Dodgy Statistics
The Wall Street Journal: Can statisticians “prove almost anything”? Canada’s National Post takes on one of the academic issues of the moment. The focus is a new article in Psychological Science, alluded to on Ideas Market last week, called “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” In it, three psychologists make their case by presenting a study in which people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m 64″ literally grew younger, relative to a control group.
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Babies may benefit from moms’ lasting melancholy
ScienceNews: A double dose of mom’s depression may do a baby good. Infants generally thrive physically and mentally if their mothers’ emotional condition, whether healthy or depressed, remains stable before and after birth, say psychologist Curt Sandman of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues. Kids whose mothers stayed depressed from the fourth month of pregnancy on displayed first-year mental and physical development comparable to that of youngsters whose mothers stayed emotionally healthy for the same stretch, Sandman’s team will report in Psychological Science.
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Seven healthy sins
Edmonton Journal: Everything in moderation. I think of those three words as my mother's superhero buzz-phrase. Not quite as catchy as Bart Simpson's "Don't have a cow, man," or Captain Marvel's "Shazam!" but possibly more instructive. After decades of scare stories on TV and in magazines and newspapers about the dangers of red meat, alcohol, marijuana and sexually transmitted diseases, it's a wonder anyone even gets out of bed in the morning. It's dangerous out there. Liquor, red meat and anger can seriously harm you. And let us not forget the moral, legal and medical complications that travel hand in glove with marijuana and sex.
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Q & A With Psychological Scientist Kendall Eskine
Bitter food, bitter guests... make sure you choose your Thanksgiving menu wisely! Researchers have found that the taste of the food and drinks that you serve your guests may impact their moral judgments of you. Read about their research here. Kendall J. Eskine is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Loyola University New Orleans. He has a special interest in how abstract ideas are entwined with our physical and sensory experiences. Last week we asked our Twitter and Facebook followers to submit questions to Eskine on his research...his answers are below! 1. You cited 'affect as info'.
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Statisticians can prove almost anything, a new study finds
National Post: Catchy headlines about the latest counter-intuitive discovery in human psychology have a special place in journalism, offering a quirky distraction from the horrors of war and crime, the tedium of politics and the drudgery of economics. But even as readers smirk over the latest gee whizzery about human nature, it is generally assumed that behind the headlines, in the peer-reviewed pages of academia, most scientists are engaged in sober analysis of rigorously gathered data, and that this leads them reliably to the truth.
