Link feast

1. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner has left the building. Famed for his research into thought suppression, Wegner also made great strides in other areas. Dan Gilbert describes him in this obituary as modern psychology’s “most original thinker”. Get the t-shirt. Here’s a Boston Globe obit and here’s a Digest report on Dan Wegner’s 2011 paper that suggested the internet is becoming an external hard-drive for the mind.

2. How to help every child fulfil their potential. Psychologist Carol Dweck spoke at the RSA on Monday and her talk is now on YouTube. (more in the Digest archive)

3. BBC Two’s Horizon programme focused on the science of personality this week. You can catch the documentary on iPlayer and here’s an accompanying article on the BBC news website.

4. A new open-access paper published this week makes the case that control conditions in psychology are often not robust enough, in that they don’t control for participants’ expectations for improvement. Ed Yong blogged about the paper over at National Geographic.

5.  Regular readers of the Digest blog will have noticed an increasing number of studies recruiting participants via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Over at the Cultural Cognition project Dan Kahan provides some background on what exactly Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is and why he thinks it has validity problems.

6. Did you know the late John Paul II was a neuro pope?

7. Oliver Sacks on the joy of reaching 80.

8. “Man, you are going to get wasted. The words drinkers choose to describe their behavior may say a lot about the risks they face.”

9. The horrible psychology of solitary confinement.

10. Mindfull is a new mental health support, information and advice website for 11 to 17-year-olds.