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In case you missed them – 10 of the best psychology links from the past week.

01 March 2013

By Christian Jarrett

1. The great illusion of the self – mind-boggling goodness from New Scientist (free registration required to read the full articles).

2. Professor Uta Frith DBE, autism expert and a”grand dame of British science”, was on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday – you can listen again on iPlayer or download the podcast.

3. In the wake of recent scandals in social psychology, Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone have written a lengthy defence of the discipline in the latest issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement. To help prevent future fraud, they note at the end that a consensus has been reached: “that psychology journals will now require the raw data for all published studies to be publicly accessible online”. If true, this is a promising development, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it. (In related news, a new psychology journal BMC Psychology has launched, promising to avoid bias towards flashy, counter-intuitive results).

4. The latest (March) issue of The Psychologist magazine is online and includes open-access articles on involuntary autobiographical memory and the globalisation of mental illness. There’s a free digital preview over at Issuu.

5. I reported last week on Obama’s mission to map the human brain. Some more reactions are in … Chris Frith said on Twitter that this from Steve Fleming is the best reaction he’s read. Vaughan Bell also provided his take over at Mind Hacks: “while the big sell is nonsense, the project is likely to genuinely revolutionise neuroscience in a way that could push the field light years ahead.”

6. How what you think of your boss – especially whether you trust them – influences their ability to lift your performance. New research digested by Alex Fradera at our sister blog.

7. I shared a link two weeks ago about a new report from the RSA based on psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary, which explores human politics and philosophy in the context of the contrasting functional styles of the left and right brain hemispheres. Kenan Malik has provided an excellent critique of the new RSA report (and the book it’s based on). McGilchrist took the criticism very badly – check out the full exchange on Malik’s blog. (There’s also a useful overview of the debate from Jonathan Rowson over at the RSA’s Social Brain blog).

8. A new study has looked at Twitter habits associated with having more followers – Neurobonkers has the low down.

9. The Pacific Standard published an article by Ethan Watters about the researchers who are exposing psychology’s bias towards WEIRD people.

10. “Happiness = marriage + money ($50-75K) + no kids, says Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert“. That’s according to a report by Chuck Leddy for the Harvard Gazette.