Psychology and More

Consciousness is a very difficult concept to define, let alone study scientifically. It is often overlooked in introductory psychology classes, I think because discussing it quickly becomes a tangled briar of contradictions and confusion. It’s a shame because it is one of the most important concepts in human experience.

See this recent article in the New York TImes about consciousness and some scientific studies on it. One vexing thing about these studies is the questions of why, when the neocortical regions are inactivated, can participants understand the language used as commands to perform some function? If Wernicke’s area is inactivated by anesthetics, how is the language comprehended? The article does not provide any explanation of this.

THis week in class we’ll be talking about the Big Five trait model of personality, and one trait is “neuroticism.” An article in today’s NY Times talks about neurosis and the decline of the use of the word neurotic. Check it out here.

Over all, scores on those kinds of questionnaires have not changed much in adults in the United States since the 1950s. But recent studies have found that, among college students, neuroticism levels have increased by as much as 20 percent over the same period.

The first report is in on the Diederik Stapel academic fraud issue. of 20 papers examined, 18 were found fraudulent. this is not the end of the investigation. Two more committees are reporting their results later. I have not used any of his publications in my academic work, but those who have may need to do a bit of rewriting.

A very sad situation is that three dissertations were found to contain fraud as perpetrated by Stapel. I presume those students will have their degrees revoked, but maybe there will be a way for them to keep their degrees.

Details on this page.

We discussed amnesia in class last week. There is a good article today in Neurophilosophy, a blog hosted by the Guardian newspaper, about the portrayal of amnesia in films. It discusses the excellent film Memento, which I also mentioned in class.

Check the article out here.

Just in time for the exam in General Psychology:

A recent post on the excellent PsyBlog about changing your answer on a multiple-choice exam.

The New York Times has a short piece on the Deiderik Stapel academic fraud incident I wrote about earlier. There are now “several dozen” papers involved. The investigating committee, for reasons unfathomable to me, has not released a list of  the papers. To me “several” implies more than 4, and less than 12. So there are somewhere around 50-100 papers possibly involved. That is huge, and for now I think we will simply have to avoid citing any of his work.

Link to the NY Times article.

This week in class, we discussed Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments and saw the original film, Obedience, that he produced. Sunday night at 9pm EST on Discovery, there will be a show on people’s capacity for evil, which will have a Milgram experiment replication. The Advances in the History of Psychology blog mentioned it and gives details here.

Just in time for our third exam, the Wall Street Journal summarizes some research on studying for best test performance. here are some of the tips:

• testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory
• Review the toughest material right before going to bed the night before the test
• A common study habit—the all-nighter—is a bad idea
• High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best for breakfast the day of the test
• Information reviewed amid distractions is less likely to be recalled later

Regarding anxiety about the exam:

• One calming tactic that has been shown to improve scores is to teach yourself in advance to think differently about the test—using visualization techniques
• reducing “novelty and stress on the day of the exam” can prevent choking under pressure
• If you are still feeling anxious, set aside 10 minutes beforehand to write down your worries

See the full article here.

In class Thursday, we discussed memory and social judgment, which led to a discussion of eyewitness testimony in court trials. The blog LiveScience covers some issues around reliability of memory, particularly in the context of eyewitness testimony. Have a look at it here.

Last night’s execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis reportedly sent those convinced of Davis’ innocence into hysterics. One of their concerns — that eyewitness testimony in the case had been recanted — also concerns cognitive scientists.

“This is not the first time a person is pretty much convicted based on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence,” said Jason Chan, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, adding that the number of eyewitnesses who later recanted their testimony was “relatively unusual.”

PsyBlog covers a good exchange between two research teams about whether familiarity with others induces us to like them more or to dislike them. The literature generally supports the liking side of the debate, and when teaching it, that’s what professors generally emphasize. But this exchange points out how science works: we challenge the status quo and sometimes find surprising results (and suffer the slings and arrows of the establishment). If the results can be replicated and extended, then we learn a whole lot more about behavior.