Another topic recommended by a student involves the genetic basis of fear. Most rodents are terribly afraid of open spaces, and for logical reasons. If a rodent is on the floor (I’ve inadvertently dropped a few in my lab days), it will run directly for the wall. This is likely Read more…
Another alert student passed along an article with a very romantic theme–holding hands. For today’s college students, hand-holding in public is signals a very significant relationship, and in some respects is considered more intimate than kissing at a party. James Coan of the University of Virginia will be publishing Read more…
Gordon Gallup and his colleagues developed an interesting way to test whether or not an individual had a sense of “self.” If you place a dot of red dye on the forehead of a human infant of about 18 months of age, the infant will touch his or her own Read more…
In spite of the best efforts of statistics faculty everywhere, people constantly want to infer causality from correlations. Even though we can point to ridiculous examples, such as the strong positive correlation between ice cream sales and the murder rate (both increase in warm weather), some people just don’t get Read more…
An alert student forwarded me a rather bizarre report from MSNBC about a discussion among British psychiatrists about the use of the label “schizophrenia.” According to these psychiatrists, schizophrenia “has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.” Labeling is always an issue in psychopathology. We have to have some agreement that Read more…