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Report Demonstrates Need for Improved Reproducibility in Psychological Science
Over the last several years, psychological scientists have become especially concerned about the reproducibility of studies in the field. Do peer-reviewed publications hold up under scientific scrutiny? Or are some papers that get published just lucky flukes? Until recently, researchers have relied only on intuition to estimate reproducibility. A new report published in Science, however, attempts to provide the first empirical estimate of the reproducibility of psychological science. According to this report, less than half of the psychology studies from a sample of 100 replicated.
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Developing Electrophysiology Training Resources
This event was supported by the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, which invites applications for nonrenewable grants of up to $5,000 to launch new, educational projects in psychological science. Proposals are due October 1 and March 1. Cindy M. Bukach of the University of Richmond noticed a problem: The field of cognitive neuroscience relies on costly and complicated neuroimaging methodologies, creating a barrier to entry for undergraduates. An exception is the electroencephalography/event-related potential (EEG/ERP) technique, which offers inexpensive and accessible methodologies for investigating cortical dynamics during human cognition.
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First Latin American Congress for the Advancement of Psychological Science
This event was supported by the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, which invites applications for nonrenewable grants of up to $5,000 to launch new, educational projects in psychological science. Proposals are due October 1 and March 1. At a first-of-its-kind meeting, scientists based in Latin America and beyond shared research and training as well as media and public policy strategies.
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What’s “Fair” Depends on Where You Come From
The mentality that “you get what you earn” is widely accepted as what is “fair” in most Western societies. But is this concept of distributive justice universally considered fair, or is it a culture-bound phenomenon? Marie Schӓfer and colleagues wanted find out. Their research, recently published in Psychological Science, examined how children in three different societies made merit distributions. The researchers chose to look at German children as a representation of modern Western culture, children from the Samburu African tribe to represent gerontocratic society (rule by elders), and children from the ≠All Hai||om African tribe to represent an egalitarian society.
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A Tutorial on Evaluating Hypotheses Using Bayesian Methods
What do black bears have in common with Bayesian statistics? Both make an appearance in a 2013 paper written by Rens Van de Schoot, Marjolein Verhoeven, and Herbert Hoijtink in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. In this paper, the authors use a hiking trip to illustrate Bayesian thinking and its advantages over traditional, sometimes called frequentist, statistics. During a hiking trip in Alaska, one of the Dutch authors observed a bit of black fur behind some bushes. Was it a bear?
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Psychosis and Violence Aren’t Strongly Linked
Violent individuals are often assumed to suffer from a long history of mental illness that compels them to act destructively, but the link between psychosis and aggressive acts may be weak.
