The Emotion & Self Lab descended on Charlotte, NC, US of A, last weekend for the 3rd Biannual Meeting of the Association for Research in Personality. Our contingent included Jess, Joey, Aaron, and former lab member (and newly minted Assistant…
What is an emotion? We’ve all read about how this question has puzzled psychologists for over a century, notably since the publication of William James’ famous article of the same name. The same question apparently intrigued theologians, philosophers, and physicians…
The Decade of Navel Gazing (2010–???) took another step toward cementing its legacy this week with the publication of Nosek and Bar-Anan’s proposal for Scientific Utopia. The authors present a six-step program which would help psychology increase the efficiency, speed, and…
We have all heard by now that replication is the panacea for the ills plaguing social psychology. Whether we fear single-study papers containing tenuous effects reached through undisclosed analytical flexibility, post-hoc justifications of results that were entirely unanticipated, or downright…
Psychologists are increasingly turning to online data collection methods when conducting research, and such methods sometimes degrade data quality. We all have heard anecdotal accounts of malingering participants on M-Turk and online HSP studies and, as a result, many of…
Personality development, like many aspects of phenotypic development seen across species, can be viewed within the framework of flexible ontogeny (Hagen & Hammerstein, 2005). An individual’s behavioral patterns across time represent that individual’s context-dependent adaptive strategy for coping with the…
At the risk of inundating loyal readers with navel-gazing fodder, I recommend Gregory Mitchell’s (2012, Perspectives on Psych Science) new article examining effect sizes within and outside of the lab. Mitchell surveyed 82 meta-analyses that directly compared effect sizes for…
Emotion researchers often examine the divergent effects of two or more emotions on behavior. Such research designs involve inducing emotion states in groups of participants and comparing the average response on a behavioral measure across groups. For example, one might…
Following on the heels of a year that included Bem’s ESP paper and the False Positive Psychology upheaval and culminated in our area-wide discussion of research practice in social and personality psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science just released a new…
Psychologists have long thought of neuroticism as a fundamentally maladaptive personality trait. Neurotics experience a preponderance of negative emotions, get sick frequently, and tend to lack satisfying interpersonal relationships. In short, neuroticism seems devoid of any redeeming value. An evolutionary…