What if you read the dramatic claim that playing a certain video game could reduce your risk of dementia by 25%? I hope you'd be skeptical. You might think that it was a ploy to increase the video game's sales. Whenever you read a claim like this, you should ask to see the evidence. In …
Continue reading This brain game can reduce risk of dementia in seniors. How do we know?
Imagine walking across your college campus at night, a low-visibility situation. As you walk along, what areas of the image stand out most to you? Imagine tapping on the spots of the image where you'd be focusing your eyes during your walk. Imagine you're walking along this path. Tap on areas of the photo that …
Continue reading Where do you look as you walk across campus?
GLP-1 drugs have become widely prescribed and used; their original use was to help people, originally those with Type II diabetes, lose weight. People who take them often notice they experience less "food noise," or internal chatter. As the use of these drugs has become widespread, users have also noticed that they are less interested …
The Association for Psychological Science recently announced the winners of the "Share your Science" competition, in which researchers create short social media posts about their work. One of the winners was Dr. Ren Salig (University of Michigan) who created a short Instagram video about their work on bilingualism. Let's watch it, and come back here …
I just discovered a new series of videos called SciFusion Shorts, which posts well-produced, video interviews with psychology researchers around the world. They're a great place to hear about cutting-edge research and practice research methods concepts such as conceptual definitions, operational definitions, ethics, and graphing correlational results. The researchers use video clips to study resilience. …
Here's another instagram post from Kyle Inspires. This one is about how fast people walk. He's on Youtube and Facebook, too, but here are links to the story on Instagram and TikTok: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSp0Hy1jlwb/?igsh=cGNlaGNhYjR1MThqTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kyleinspires/video/7587465849527667982 What variables does walking speed supposedly correlate with? How strongly does it correlate? Photo: GagliardiPhotography/Shutterstock a) Watch Kyle Inspires' short video …
I've started to get videos from poster Kyle Inspires on my Instagram feed; he's also posted them on TikTok, Youtube and Facebook. Let's work through an example of one of his claims. One of the claims is that members of professional orchestras are much more likely to have been August babies. Can you locate the …
Continue reading Checking out claims about August babies on TikTok/IG
A colleague is doing research on mixed emotions across cultures, so this headline caught my eye: "Religious people experience more mixed emotions than non-believers" The website PsyPost summarized (possibly with the help of AI) the empirical research. The original empirical journal article is available here, and might be paywalled. The study found that people who …
Last fall, some social scientists published a study using data from one of my favorite national surveys--the American Time Use Survey. (I'm a nosy psychologist who is fascinated by how people spend their days.). They concluded that doing almost any daily activity is more enjoyable when we do it with friends. Here's how the research …
Continue reading Doing almost anything is better with friends
Here's a research synopsis from the Science Daily website with the headline, "Running on little sleep? You're twice as likely to get hurt." The way this heading is phrased, it makes it sound like a causal claim. Phrases such as "twice as likely" don't make it causal, but the "if...then..." nature of the headline does …
Continue reading “Running on little sleep? You’re twice as likely to get hurt”