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Pessimism Is the One Thing Americans Can Agree On
Are Americans cockeyed optimists or incorrigible pessimists? Do they think that American society has improved or gotten worse in various ways—and how accurate are their views? You might imagine that the answer would be nuanced, that it would depend on factors like people’s politics or news-consuming habits. But the answer isn’t nuanced at all, according to a new study. In research published earlier this year in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Gregory Mitchell at the University of Virginia and Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania looked at these questions empirically.
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Black Women’s Childhood Symptoms of Disordered Eating Predict Symptoms in Adulthood
New research finds that childhood symptoms of disordered eating are predictive of symptoms in adulthood regardless of race, debunking the myth that eating disorders don’t affect Black women.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on assessing and mitigating bias in AI applications for mental health, investigating coping vs. thriving, exploring mnemicity attribution as a cognitive gadget, and much more.
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The Reason Food off Someone Else’s Plate Always Seems to Taste Better, According to Science
“Can I try that?” “Are you going to eat that?” Part of the appeal in eating out is in not having to spend the time or effort preparing food or cleaning up after yourself. But there’s another, more subtle benefit: Food that comes off your dining partner’s plate invariably seems to taste exceptionally good. In some cases, even better than whatever you ordered. And there’s a good reason for that. For a 2014 paper published in the journal Psychological Science [PDF], researchers at Yale enlisted 23 undergraduate students and gave them a rather pleasant scientific objective.
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Play Piano for Brain Health — Because It’s Not Too Late To Learn and It Slows Cognitive Decline
Learning new skills as an adult can be difficult. We’ve established our habits and routines. Old dogs, new tricks, et cetera. As a child, your day was planned out, and you didn’t have as many responsibilities; you were free to spend time rollerskating, jumping rope, or learning a musical instrument. The latter is one thing many adults wish they’d done in their younger years. Not only is playing an instrument fun and impressive, but it’s also intellectually stimulating. There's good news, though: Even if you've never beat a drum, strummed a guitar, or tickled the ivories, it’s not too late. to start.
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‘Spell-Checker for Statistics’ Reduces Errors in the Psychology Literature
A free-to-use tool designed to detect statistical errors is significantly reducing the number of mistakes creeping into papers, suggests a study published this January1. First described in a 2015 publication2, statcheck is an online tool that can identify errors in the P values — a controversial but popular statistical measure — reported in scientific papers. The tool, developed by Michèle Nuijten, a methodologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been applied to tens of thousands of psychology studies during peer review and by authors themselves, and according to a 2017 study, it is right more than 95% of the time3.
