After reading this module, you will be able to:Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of archivall research and case studiesDescribe longitudinal, cross-sectional, and sequential research designs

Recent research in psychology has highlighted a number of replication problems in the discipline, with publication bias – the preference for publishing original and positive results, and a resistance to publishing negative results and replications- identified as one reason for replication failure. However, little empirical research exists to demonstrate that journals explicitly refuse to publish replications. We reviewed the instructions to authors and the published aims of 1151 psychology journals and examined whether they indicated that replications were permitted and accepted. We also examined whether journal practices differed across branches of the discipline, and whether editorial practices differed between low and high impact journals. Thirty three journals (3%) stated in their aims or instructions to authors that they accepted replications. There was no difference between high and low impact journals. The implications of these findings for psychology are discussed.

In this study, we examined participants' choice behavior in a sequential risk-taking task. We were especially interested in the extent to which participants focus on the immediate next choice or consider the entire choice sequence. To do so, we inspected whether decisions were either based on conditional probabilities (e.g., being successful on the immediate next trial) or on conjunctive probabilities (of being successful several times in a row). The results of five experiments with a simplified nine-card Columbia Card Task and a CPT-model analysis show that participants' choice behavior can be described best by a mixture of the two probability types. Specifically, for their first choice, the participants relied on conditional probabilities, whereas subsequent choices were based on conjunctive probabilities. This strategy occurred across different start conditions in which more or less cards were already presented face up. Consequently, the proportion of risky choices was substantially higher when participants started from a state with some cards facing up, compared with when they arrived at that state starting from the very beginning. The results, alternative accounts, and implications are discussed.

This seminar looks at current theories on happiness and positive psychology as well as practical implications of those theories for our own lives. It explores the concept of happiness, different cultural definitions of happiness, and the connection between happiness, optimism, and meaning. Also explored are practical strategies for creating more opportunities for happiness in our lives and for learning how to deal more effectively with sources of unhappiness.
This seminar is part of the Experimental Study Group at MIT.

What does 'attention' mean to you? This unit will help you to examine how we 'pay attention'. How do we manage to single out sounds and images that require attention and how easy is it to distract someone and why?

More attractive people elicit more positive first impressions. This effect is called the attractiveness halo, and it is shown when judging those with more attractive faces, bodies, or voices. Moreover, it yields significant social outcomes, including advantages to attractive people in domains as far-reaching as romance, friendships, family relations, education, work, and criminal justice. Physical qualities that increase attractiveness include youthfulness, symmetry, averageness, masculinity in men, and femininity in women. Positive expressions and behaviors also raise evaluations of a person’s attractiveness. Cultural, cognitive, evolutionary, and overgeneralization explanations have been offered to explain why we find certain people attractive. Whereas the evolutionary explanation predicts that the impressions associated with the halo effect will be accurate, the other explanations do not. Although the research evidence does show some accuracy, it is too weak to satisfactorily account for the positive responses shown to more attractive people.

Short Description:
Despite psychology being one of the most popular undergraduate programs, students often report not knowing how training in psychology relates to careers. With chapters written by experts across Australia, this book explores just some of the many ways that students can apply their training in psychological science across a variety of careers and sectors.

Long Description:
Despite psychology being one of the most popular undergraduate programs, students often report not knowing how training in psychology relates to careers. With chapters written by experts across Australia, this book explores just some of the many ways that students can apply their training in psychological science across a variety of careers and sectors.

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Word Count: 158047

ISBN: 978-0-6453261-1-6

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People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suffer from a profound social disability. Social neuroscience is the study of the parts of the brain that support social interactions or the “social brain.” This module provides an overview of ASD and focuses on understanding how social brain dysfunction leads to ASD. Our increasing understanding of the social brain and its dysfunction in ASD will allow us to better identify the genes that cause ASD and will help us to create and pick out treatments to better match individuals. Because social brain systems emerge in infancy, social neuroscience can help us to figure out how to diagnose ASD even before the symptoms of ASD are clearly present. This is a hopeful time because social brain systems remain malleable well into adulthood and thus open to creative new interventions that are informed by state-of-the-art science.

This course illuminates current theories about autism together with challenges faced by people on the autism spectrum. Theories in communicating, interacting socially, managing cognitive and affective overload, and achieving independent lifestyles are covered. In parallel, the course presents state-of-the-art technologies being developed for helping improve both theoretical understanding and practical outcomes. Participants are expected to meet and interact with people on the autism spectrum. Weekly reading, discussion, and a term project are required.

Short Description:
This particular work is one part of the author’s undergraduate senior capstone project and is one of 11 in the series titled “Controlling the Narrative for Peace of Mind.” Seniors enrolled in Professor Erica Kleinknecht’s capstone seminar in the Spring of 2021 all used a core set of literature as a starting point and then they personalized the content to an area of their choosing. The work here reflects an integration and application of literatures in cognitive, applied cognitive, psycholinguistic fields of study, plus additional topic-specific content.

Word Count: 6835

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Short Description:
During the shooting of The Jungle Prescription we filmed hours of fascinating encounters with some the world´s most knowledgeable ayahuasca minds. Only a small fraction of the rich material we amassed on the subject made to the final film.Now for the first time, the full transcripts of some of these encounters have been made available to the public exclusively through this book.

Long Description:

This book stems from the collected transcripts of what is now a fifteen-year inquiry into the implications of ayahuasca in the realms of Western culture and modern medicine.

ABOUT THE FILM

Amid the giant ferns and hummingbirds of the Peruvian jungle stands Takiwasi, a treatment center where ancient Amazonian medicines are being used to detox Western drug addicts. The man who runs it is Dr. Jacques Mabit, a French M.D. who has spent decades working hand-in-hand with curanderos, Amazonian traditional doctors. At the center of his practice is a brew called ayahuasca, Quechua for ‘vine of the souls’.

Far away, in the worst drug ghetto in North America, the most recognized specialist in addiction is at the end of his rope. Dr. Gabor Maté has spent a frustrating decade dealing with substance abuse and a failed medical system, one that treats addiction as a choice rather than a result. He hears of ayahuasca, which, they say, can do in one night what may take years of traditional therapy. Dr. Maté is intrigued by this plant remedy and its potential.

We follow Maté as he visits Jacques Mabit in the Amazon, as well as the leading scientists testing what ayahuasca actually does in the brain. Inspired, he returns home to create an underground treatment program. Working with a band of talented facilitators, using the techniques of ayahuasca shamanism, Mate’s immersive psychotherapy program finds new dimensions.

The film is a conversation about medicine and healing, at the unlikely frontier where people are working to bridge the gap between the secrets of the deep Amazonian forest and the fractured modern world.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

During the process of realizing this project, we recorded hours of fascinating conversations, featuring some of the most knowledgeable minds in the world of ayahuasca, discussing the plant and its possibility. Only a small fraction of the rich material we amassed made to the film.

Now for the first time, we present a carefully selected offering of these encounters – made available exclusively through this book.

Word Count: 62635

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Background: The reproducibility policy at the journal Biostatistics rewards articles with badges for data and code sharing. This study investigates the effect of badges at increasing reproducible research. Methods: The setting of this observational study is the Biostatistics and Statistics in Medicine (control journal) online research archives. The data consisted of 240 randomly sampled articles from 2006 to 2013 (30 articles per year) per journal. Data analyses included: plotting probability of data and code sharing by article submission date, and Bayesian logistic regression modelling. Results: The probability of data sharing was higher at Biostatistics than the control journal but the probability of code sharing was comparable for both journals. The probability of data sharing increased by 3.9 times (95% credible interval: 1.5 to 8.44 times, p-value probability that sharing increased: 0.998) after badges were introduced at Biostatistics. On an absolute scale, this difference was only a 7.6% increase in data sharing (95% CI: 2 to 15%, p-value: 0.998). Badges did not have an impact on code sharing at the journal (mean increase: 1 time, 95% credible interval: 0.03 to 3.58 times, p-value probability that sharing increased: 0.378). 64% of articles at Biostatistics that provide data/code had broken links, and at Statistics in Medicine, 40%; assuming these links worked only slightly changed the effect of badges on data (mean increase: 6.7%, 95% CI: 0.0% to 17.0%, p-value: 0.974) and on code (mean increase: -2%, 95% CI: -10.0 to 7.0%, p-value: 0.286). Conclusions: The effect of badges at Biostatistics was a 7.6% increase in the data sharing rate, 5 times less than the effect of badges at Psychological Science. Though badges at Biostatistics did not impact code sharing, and had a moderate effect on data sharing, badges are an interesting step that journals are taking to incentivise and promote reproducible research.

Beginning January 2014, Psychological Science gave authors the opportunity to signal open data and materials if they qualified for badges that accompanied published articles. Before badges, less than 3% of Psychological Science articles reported open data. After badges, 23% reported open data, with an accelerating trend; 39% reported open data in the first half of 2015, an increase of more than an order of magnitude from baseline. There was no change over time in the low rates of data sharing among comparison journals. Moreover, reporting openness does not guarantee openness. When badges were earned, reportedly available data were more likely to be actually available, correct, usable, and complete than when badges were not earned. Open materials also increased to a weaker degree, and there was more variability among comparison journals. Badges are simple, effective signals to promote open practices and improve preservation of data and materials by using independent repositories.

Short Description:
This open access textbook was developed as an upper division undergraduate textbook for theories of personality. Its intended audience are students from Portland State University enrolled in Psychology 432 Personality course. The chapters are shorter than some personality textbooks and in this particular course Psy 432 the textbook is combined with other readings including scientific articles on personality.

Word Count: 104891

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We revisit the results of the recent Reproducibility Project: Psychology by the Open Science Collaboration. We compute Bayes factors—a quantity that can be used to express comparative evidence for an hypothesis but also for the null hypothesis—for a large subset (N = 72) of the original papers and their corresponding replication attempts. In our computation, we take into account the likely scenario that publication bias had distorted the originally published results. Overall, 75% of studies gave qualitatively similar results in terms of the amount of evidence provided. However, the evidence was often weak (i.e., Bayes factor < 10). The majority of the studies (64%) did not provide strong evidence for either the null or the alternative hypothesis in either the original or the replication, and no replication attempts provided strong evidence in favor of the null. In all cases where the original paper provided strong evidence but the replication did not (15%), the sample size in the replication was smaller than the original. Where the replication provided strong evidence but the original did not (10%), the replication sample size was larger. We conclude that the apparent failure of the Reproducibility Project to replicate many target effects can be adequately explained by overestimation of effect sizes (or overestimation of evidence against the null hypothesis) due to small sample sizes and publication bias in the psychological literature. We further conclude that traditional sample sizes are insufficient and that a more widespread adoption of Bayesian methods is desirable.

Bayesian hypothesis testing presents an attractive alternative to p value hypothesis testing. Part I of this series outlined several advantages of Bayesian hypothesis testing, including the ability to quantify evidence and the ability to monitor and update this evidence as data come in, without the need to know the intention with which the data were collected. Despite these and other practical advantages, Bayesian hypothesis tests are still reported relatively rarely. An important impediment to the widespread adoption of Bayesian tests is arguably the lack of user-friendly software for the run-of-the-mill statistical problems that confront psychologists for the analysis of almost every experiment: the t-test, ANOVA, correlation, regression, and contingency tables. In Part II of this series we introduce JASP (http://www.jasp-stats.org), an open-source, cross-platform, user-friendly graphical software package that allows users to carry out Bayesian hypothesis tests for standard statistical problems. JASP is based in part on the Bayesian analyses implemented in Morey and Rouder’s BayesFactor package for R. Armed with JASP, the practical advantages of Bayesian hypothesis testing are only a mouse click away.

An unintimidating guide to basic hypothesis testing logic for beginners

Word Count: 45834

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This text is being designed for lower division college courses in behavioral neuroscience. It is published now to allow students to access material before it's completion at the end of fall 2020.

Short Description:
The Bell Jar (1963) is the only novel American writer and poet Sylvia Plath wrote in her lifetime. Published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book parallels Plath's experiences with—presumably—clinical depression or bipolar II disorder as the protagonist descends into mental illness.

Long Description:
The Bell Jar (1963) is the only novel American writer and poet Sylvia Plath wrote in. her lifetime. Published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book parallels Plath’s experiences with—presumably—clinical depression or bipolar II disorder as the protagonist descends into mental illness.

Word Count: 70404

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically as part of a bulk import process by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided. As a result, there may be errors in formatting.)