-
What Can Effect Sizes Do for You? A Quick Tutorial for a Deeper Understanding of Psychological Research
I listen to a lot of podcasts in which various psychological articles are often discussed (e.g., stuff you should know, radiolab, etc.). As a psychologist, I am often frustrated when a podcast mentions a study’s finding (e.g., having a sister is associated with better self-esteem than having a brother) but then says something like this:…
-
Moniker mumbo jumbo
Social psychology research is known for its counterintuitive, surprising, sometimes even “cute” findings. One of the latest findings in this series is that your initials can affect how successful you are; for instance, students whose names start with C or D get worse grades than students whose names start with A or B. Authors Lief…
-
Childhood Sexual Assault: Impacts are broad, but not for all victims?
Psychologists often rely on grouping participants together based on shared characteristics (e.g., are girls better than boy in reading ability). The goal is to broadly understand the relationships between potential causes and effects, and, ideally learn from them. In the first example above, perhaps reading interventions targeting boys may be an effect if the study…
-
Mind-reading, lie-detection and telekinesis with fMRI and EEG – Science fact and fiction
In the last few years, fMRI and EEG have made it into the popular press as tools for reading minds (here, here, here, here and here for a sample), lie-detection (here, here and here), and telekinesis – controlling/ moving objects with our thoughts – (here, here, here, and here). I think there was even a…
-
Correlation, causation, or association – What does it all mean???
From allaboutaddiction.com: A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. While in that instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word associated, the comment made me think that maybe I should explain the differences here. I’m a scientist…