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NIH Simplifies IRB Procedures for Multisite Studies
Multisite research collaborations can lead to significant discoveries, but they are also a challenge for many reasons, including logistical ones. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have introduced a new policy to streamline one aspect of these valuable projects: Now, multisite, NIH-funded studies conducting the same experiment are required to use only a single institutional review board (IRB) to oversee the research. This new policy begins May 25, 2017, and affects NIH-funded multisite studies which intend to use the same experimental protocol.
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How Language ‘Framing’ Influences Decision-Making
The way information is presented, or “framed,” when people are confronted with a situation can influence decision-making.
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How Jerome Bruner Transformed Psychological Science
Legendary APS William James Fellow Jerome Bruner passed away at the age of 100 on June 5, 2016. His groundbreaking contributions to cognitive, educational, and perceptual psychology have had transformative effects on the field as a whole, as well as effects on fields such as anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. Often considered a founder of the cognitive revolution, many of Bruner’s ideas seem almost intuitive now, but at the time, they challenged the basic principles of scholarship and education.
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How Collectivism Protects Against Contagious Fear
An outbreak of Ebola in the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that began in 2014 made headlines around the world, as the number of individuals affected continued to climb. Ebola is a viral disease that can be transmitted to humans through animal and insect bites, but can also be spread from person to person through bodily fluids. The severity of the outbreak in West Africa, combined with the knowledge that the virus could spread through human contact, led many people in parts of the world that were actually at low risk of an outbreak to express xenophobic attitudes.
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Neuroticism Predicts Anxiety and Depression Disorders
The personality dimension of neuroticism -- characterized by an individual’s tendency to experience negative emotions, especially in response to stress -- has been shown to predict several forms of psychopathology, including substance abuse, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders. But does it predict one type of disorder more strongly than the others?
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Science Develops New Data- and Materials-Sharing Requirements
In June 2015, a committee sponsored by the Center for Open Science developed a set of guidelines offering “a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices” named the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines. Now, scientific publishers are putting these guidelines into action: The journal Science has announced that it has used these guidelines to revise its standards for articles that it publishes. The TOP guidelines invite journal editors to consider transparency and openness as they pertain to eight different parts of the research process.
