Link feast
In case you missed them, 10 of the best psychology links from the past week.
22 March 2013
1. The Psychologist magazine has released a digital preview of its forthcoming April issue which is devoted to the psychology of humour, including free access to: my feature article How many psychologists does it take to explain a joke? ; Marc Abrahams (of the Ignobel Awards) on psychology research that will make you laugh, then think; Richard Wiseman’s interview with stand-up comic Rich Herring about the psychology of comedy; Sophie Scott on the psychology of laughter; plus much more – check it out!
2. How babies work – new blog by Nicholas Day for Slate.
3. Why it’s difficult to admit that a long book you read was rubbish. Classic research digested in entertaining style by Tom Stafford for BBC Future.
4. The world’s longest-running experiments remind us that science is a marathon, not a sprint (Nature feature includes discussion of Lewis Terman’s longitudinal study of gifted children – now 9 decades long!).
5. A campaign against the latest version of psychiatry’s diagnostic code (DSM5) was launched this week by Louis Hoffman, Ph.D., President of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, and Peter Kinderman, Ph.D., who is Professor of Clinical Psychology at University of Liverpool, UK.
6. Why is the Myers-Briggs test so ubiquitous despite zero scientific credibility?
7. The Psychology of Effective Workout Music
8. Dorothy Bishop posted a riposte on her blog this week, after the authors of a recent paper (on the benefits of action video games for dyslexia) complained about her earlier criticisms of their work. Interesting arguments here about small sample sizes, newsworthy findings, and whether blogs are the right place for academic debate. Good points made on both sides, I thought.
9. Split-Brain Patients Reveal Brain’s Flexibility – cool comic infographic by neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin and artist Jorge Cham for Scientific American (more on the left- and right-brain).