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Posts archived in Psychological research (inferential statistics)


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Spot the mistake

May 14, 2013 by .

I came across this rather fun little study:428357-man-leaning-on-his-guitar-case

This experiment tested the assumption that music plays a role in sexual selection. Three hundred young women were solicited in the street for their phone number by a young male confederate who held either a guitar case or a sports bag in his hands or had no bag at all. Results showed that holding a guitar case was associated with greater compliance to the request, thus suggesting that musical practice is associated with sexual selection. (Guéguen et al., see here).

Interesting conclusion – but is it justified?

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Daily hassles

April 29, 2013 by .

A team of Californian researchers, led by Susan Charles, recently published a study linking daily hassles to depression (Charles et al., 2013). A group of just over 700 participants were studied for eight consecutive days. On each day they reported daily hassles and also how negative they were feeling. Ten years later the same participants were re-assessed. The researchers found that those participants who experienced negative emotions on days with high levels of daily hassles were more likely to be depressed. This suggests that people who are stressed by their daily hassles are more likely to suffer from mental health issues later in life.

 

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Obedience to authority

March 24, 2013 by .

compliance-movie-poster-slice1Some of you may be familiar with the MacDonald’s incident of 2005 where a hoax caller masqueraded as a policeman and delivered orders over the phone. Astonishingly he was obeyed despite the extreme nature of his instructions (read about the event here). I recently gave a talk in London including this event in my talk and one of the teachers directed my attention to a new film Compliance, which tells the story of the incident.

In my talk I distinguished between obedience in situations such as the MacDonald’s incident, which can be explained in terms of agentic shift and socialisation to obey orders from an authority figure, and obedience to the directions of the Nazi regime which can’t be explained in this way – Haslam and Reicher re-analysed Milgram’s original data (see here) and concluded that participants were identifying with the science of the experiments, which is why they obeyed, not because they were ‘just following orders’.

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Psychiatric disorders linked by a common gene?

March 6, 2013 by .

The largest ever genetic study of psychiatric illness, run by the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, has discovered that autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia may be linked with a common genetic defect.

Although these five psychiatric disorders are considered separate conditions, they have some symptoms in common. For example, mood and thinking problems can occur with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. Also children with ADHD often have symptoms of other disorders, such as autism.

According to an article by The Independent journalist Jeremy Laurance, ’Two genes which control the flow of calcium in the brain are implicated in several of the disorders and could provide a target for new treatments.’

Dr Jordan Smoller, one of the lead researchers said: ‘Our results provide new evidence that may inform a move away from descriptive syndromes in psychiatry and towards classification based on underlying causes’. The study was published in the journal The Lancet on February 28, 2013.

Here’s a link to another article on the same study appearing on the ‘My Health News Daily’ website,

Might this mean the next edition of DSM will be a more slender offering?!

 


 

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Save money on revision support

February 28, 2013 by .

9780198393399_AS_Revision_Pack_3rd_Edition webThere are some great savings to be had on revision materials this year. The Complete Companions revision packs for Psychology AQA A, available for both AS and A2 are out now. Each pack contains both the Mini Companion and the Exam Companion, with all the essential knowledge and exam practice you need to succeed in exams, at a special saving on the cost of buying the books individually.9780198393405_A2_Revision_Pack_3rd_Edition web

What’s in the packs?

The Mini Companion reduces each spread from the Complete Companion textbook to a single page of no-frills, but essential, information needed for the exam.

The Exam Companion is the ultimate exam preparation resource, including practice questions, model answers and examiner commentaries.

What’s the saving?

The AS pack is priced at £16.00, offering a saving of £6.49 on the RRP of the individual books, while the A2 pack costs just £21.00, a saving of £5.49.

You can get hold of yours on Amazon (AS or A2) or by emailing fiona.mccollum@oup.com. Hurry though – the packs are limited editions and when they’re gone, they’re gone!

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Stress and attachment

February 15, 2013 by .

You will have heard of the nature-nurture debate. In the last decade researchers have come to a deeper understanding of how the two interact. The field is called epigenetics and there is an interesting example of this in the link between stress and attachment.

rat-grroming-babyResearch has shown that rats who have been raised by mothers who groom and lick them are later better able to cope with stress than pups who were infrequently licked and groomed. What appears to happen is that the brains of well-licked baby rats have been changed. There are receptors in the brain that mop up the stress hormone cortisol, reducing the effect of stress on the brain. The gene that codes for these receptors is modified by the mothers’ behaviour so that ‘unlicked’ pups ultimately have fewer cortisol receptors in their brain.

The bottom line is that the attachment behaviours of the mother appears to alter the young rats’ brains so they cope less well with stressful experience. And this also affects the way the young rats subsequently treat their own babies. Nurture modifies nature. Poor attachment experiences have negative effects.

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Missing the gorilla

February 11, 2013 by .

Many of you will be familiar with the video where two teams are throwing basketballs to each other and, in the middle of the match a man in a gorilla suit walks through the middle – but many people fail to notice because of a phenomenon called inattentional blindness. We often don’t see things that are obvious because our attention is elsewhere. If you haven’t seen the video look here or, a different example hereUntitled

Drew and Wolfe recently conducted a study of inattentional blindness with radiologists. They were impressed  by the skill shown by such professionals in their ability to detect significant shapes when starring at fuzzy images on an X-ray. It gave them an idea. Drew and Wolfe placed images of a man in a gorilla suit on a series of slides that radiologists typically look at when they’re searching for cancer. They found that 83 percent of the radiologists missed it! See here.

The original researchers, Chabris and Simons were originally inspired to conduct their research by a real life incident of a mistaken eye-witness account, see here.

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A Day in the Life…

January 7, 2013 by .

ProductImage-7501342

Texts in our Complete Companion series are affectionately known as the ‘Cat and Dog’ books, but have you ever wondered who the cats and dogs are that adorn our covers? We thought we’d start with our AS Mini Companion kitten, BB, who lives with her owners Chris and Chloe in Bristol. We asked them to record a typical day in BB’s life to give you an insight into the secret world of a cover cat. Click the link below and enjoy!

http://youtu.be/xoxVDMtPZd0

 

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Want access to original Journal articles?

January 5, 2013 by .

logoIf you are a member of the BPS there is now free access to EBSCO  Psychology & Behavioural Sciences Collection Collection of over 500 full-text journal articles. See here. This includes student members.

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Children may make better witnesses than previously thought

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Swedish psychologist Gunilla Fredin has found that children include fewer details in their eyewitness accounts than adults, but that what they do recall is as accurate. Participants in the study (Fredin, 2011) were children aged 8-9 and 12-13 plus a group of adults (undergraduate students). All participants watched a video of a man looking for his lost dog.

A week later participants were interviewed individually (free recall). The children were additionally given a questionnaire about the video. Finally, a further week later, all participants were shown their answers and asked to assess how confident they were about the accuracy of their statements.

In the free recall condition adults provided more responses than either of the child groups. In the group with younger children there were more participants who only provided correct recall statements in free recall than in the other groups. This suggests that the children are capable of accurate reporting when they are allowed to choose what to report. prometheus-eyewitness-testimony

 

 

 

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