Getting involved in research as an undergrad

SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) published a brief primer on getting involved in research as an undergraduate. It’s worth checking out:

Link to the article at SPSP.org.

Intelligence and feedback from the environment

Here is a link to an interesting piece by Tom Stafford on the ever-excellent Mind Hacks blog about intelligence. In General Psychology and Introduction to Psychological Testing, we are/have been studying intelligence. Tom’s take on this is that the essence of intelligence – in humans, the ability to adaptively respond to our environment is gathering and interpreting feedback from the environment about our actions and the actions of others. Interesting stuff, especially the mechanical animals artist Tim Lewis constructs that seem to have some intelligence. It also bears on the measurement of intelligence and what that means.

Mechanical Turk and Clinical Populations

Last night in Intro to Psychogical Testing, we discussed the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system for recruiting participants for reliability studies. The new APS journal Clinical Psychological Science just published an article on the quality and characteristics of Mechanical Turk workers in relation to clinincal variables. Specifically, there was a much higher prevalence of social anxiety, unemployment, and potential substance use disorder. This is good for people studying these areas, but for those studying factors that might intercorrelate with those, it may be a suspect source of participants. Overall though, the reliability between the first wave and second wave of data collection was high, which means that Mturk might be a good place to run reliability and validity studies.

Here’s a link to the article at Clinical Psychological Science.