Observer > 2009 > October
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222009Volume 22, Issue8October 2009

Presidential Column

Linda Bartoshuk
Linda Bartoshuk
University of Florida
APS President 2009 - 2010
All columns

In this Issue:
Artificial Sweeteners: Outwitting the Wisdom of the Body?

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The Observer is the online magazine of the Association for Psychological Science and covers matters affecting the research, academic, and applied disciplines of psychology. The magazine reports on issues of interest to psychologist scientists worldwide and disseminates information about the activities, policies, and scientific values of APS.

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  • Thumbnail Image for Disaster Response and Recovery

    Disaster Response and Recovery

    Disasters like Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut draw massive media coverage, trauma interventions, and financial donations to victims. But psychological research shows the efforts don’t always yield the intended benefits.

Up Front

  • Artificial Sweeteners: Outwitting the Wisdom of the Body?

    Obesity, with its correlations to heart disease, diabetes and a multitude of other health problems, is one of our largest public health concerns. It also has a very large behavioral basis. As psychologists, how can we contribute to getting people to eat healthier and exercise more? Behavioral researchers are working on many aspects of this problem, but as a researcher in taste, I gravitate towards understanding why people make the food choices they do. For decades, one choice available to dieters has been to substitute artificial sweeteners for sugar in their diet. But, do artificial sweeteners promote weight loss or weight gain? Although substituting sweeteners for sugar should lead to weight loss, the reality appears to be different.

Practice

  • But I Really Tried!

    “But I really tried!” is a refrain teachers often hear from students who do not get the grades they feel they deserve. Growing up, our students heard that hard work leads to positive outcomes and that they can be anything they want to be. As such, our students often see effort as the goal rather than a means to an end. As teachers, this poses a problem. First, students, more so than teachers, tend to think that effort should factor into grades (Adams, 2005; Zinn, et al., 2009). Also, students tend to have different views than teachers when it comes to defining “outstanding” effort. For example, a student might argue that she studied “for over 2 hours for the exam,” to which her teacher might reply, “Only 2 hours?” Similarly, students might view “cramming” before a test as effortful, whereas their teachers might view the same practice as less-than-optimal effort.

First Person

  • Navigating the Potential Pitfalls of Online Visibility

    “What am I going to do with these gold lamé booty shorts?” When this  booty-related status message popped up under a student’s name in my Gmail* chat window, I felt unintentionally voyeuristic. Gmail is a program that likes to automate processes. Anyone you email frequently (e.g., your advisor, that student who asks a lot of questions, a client who uses email to schedule sessions) will automatically be added to your address book and can miraculously appear in your chat window. This is what occurred with the student who experienced the “booty short” quandary; I never invited her onto my chat list, but there she appeared. The amount of information you can learn about someone via “status messages” in a chat program, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other social networking sites is voluminous and begs the question of what to do when you learn something you might not want to know.

More From This Issue

  • Observations

    PSPI Article Wins Miller Award The Psychological Science in the Public Interest report “The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics” (Vol. 8, No. 1) has been awarded the 2009 George A. Miller Award for Outstanding Recent Article in General Psychology by The Society for General Psychology. Congratulations to authors Diane Halpern, Camilla P. Benbow, David C. Geary, Ruben C. Gur, Janet Shibley Hyde, and Morton Ann Gernsbacher! The Link Between Weight and Importance Weighty. Heavy. What do these words have to do with seriousness and importance? Why do we weigh our options, and why does your opinion carry more weight than mine?

  • Yale Convocation Celebrates 80 Years of Psi Chi

    Attendees at the convocation celebrating 80 years since the Ninth International Congress of Psychology and the founding of Psi Chi in 1929. On September 4, 2009, over 50 faculty and students converged on the stately Presidents Room of Yale University for a convocation to mark “80 years of excellence” since the Ninth International Congress of Psychology and the founding of Psi Chi in 1929.

  • The Cattell Fund: ‘An Amazing Gift to the Field of Psychology’

    The James McKeen Cattell Fund has supported “the science and the application of psychology” since its establishment in 1942. APS shares these goals and for the last several years has partnered with the Fund in support of the Supplemental Sabbatical Awards, a program that provides financial support for academic psychologists to extend their sabbatical leave time in order to further develop their research. This program has had “an enormously positive impact on the careers of psychological scientists over the years,” according to UC Berkeley’s Robert Levenson, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Fund and Past APS President.

  • On the Newsstand

    Why Do Some People Ignore Evacuation Orders? Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2009 The recent wildfires and ensuing evacuation orders raise the touchy question of why some people refuse to leave their homes and risk their lives. Do they have a death wish? Long for a little excitement? Were they unable to leave? A study of Katrina survivors, published this summer in the journal Psychological Science, found that none of those typical assumptions fit. Instead, the people who defied evacuation orders — many of whom had limited financial resources — did not feel powerless or passive but instead saw themselves as connected to their neighbors and dependent on each other.

  • ‘An Unconscionable Embarrassment’

    A century ago, American medicine was an unregulated and unscientific craft, with little research to support its practice. In 1910, The Flexner Report, published by early 20th century educator Abraham Flexner, under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, exposed the sorry state of medical practice, leading to major reform of both the training and practice in medicine. Among other things, the report revealed that half of the nation’s medical schools were sub-par, and many were closed down as a result.

  • Federal Perspectives on Research and Human Subjects Protection

    Menikoff Jerry Menikoff is Director of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). OHRP leads the department’s efforts to ensure the protection of the rights, welfare, and well-being of subjects involving in research conducted or supported by HHS. Menikoff previously served at the National Institutes of Health as the director of the Office of Human Subjects Research and as a bioethicist.

  • Universal Social Cognition

    Susan Fiske delivers her William James Fellow Award Address. “Psychologists have an insatiable tendency to look for commonalities in the human condition” said Princeton University’s Susan T. Fiske in her 2009 APS William James Fellow Award Address. As Fiske, who is a Past President of APS, noted, many of psychology’s endeavors are devoted to finding the common threads that run through all of us, not only to bolster our sense of a shared humanity, but to advance psychology’s role as a comprehensive science able to make predictions about human behavior.