Many Explanations for Why Patients Overreport Their Symptoms

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Many Explanations for Why Patients Overreport Their Symptoms

Some mental health patients report more symptoms than they actually experience and this is often attributed to malingering, when people intentionally inflate their symptoms for some benefit. The assumption that such patients are malingering tends to overshadow alternative explanations, even though research indicates that there are actually multiple pathways that could lead to overreporting. Researcher Harald Merckelbach of Maastricht University and colleagues review the available data and detail some of these alternative explanations in Current Directions in Psychological Science. More

No one likes the SAT. It’s still the fairest thing about admissions.

The 33 hedge fund managers, Hollywood actresses, CEOs and other well-connected parents indicted this month didn’t just allegedly commit fraud or pay bribes to get their kids into elite schools. Authorities say they also hired ringers or “tutors” to increase their children’s scores on the SAT and ACT standardized tests More

Myth: It’s Better to Stick to Your First Impulse Than Go Back and Change Multiple Choice Test Answers

A misconception that is ideally addressed early in the introductory course. More

Why American Students Haven’t Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the More

The Truth About the SAT and ACT

This Saturday, hundreds of thousands of U.S. high-school students will sit down to take the SAT, anxious about their performance and how it will affect their college prospects. And in a few weeks, their older peers, who took the test last year, will start hearing back from the colleges they More

Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research

In 2015, Nick Brown was skimming Twitter when something caught his eye. A tweet mentioned an article by Nicolas Guéguen, a French psychologist with a penchant for publishing titillating findings about human behavior, for example that women with large breasts get more invitations to dance at nightclubs, or blond waitresses More

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