Friday, October 7, 2011

Feast

Our round-up of the latest juicy titbits in the world of psychology:

All week long BBC Radio 3 has been running a series of programmes "The Darkest Hour" on insomnia.

The latest issue of the American Psychological Association's monthly mag, Monitor, is free online and includes a cover feature on "How the web is changing us".

"You love your iPhone, literally," claimed a risible neuro-nonsense op-ed column in the New York Times. Leading psychologists and neuroscientists aired their irritation in a joint letter to the paper. Neurocritic dissects the column's claims.

The mighty Steve Pinker has a new book out "“The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Scientific American Mind interviewed him about the book. Positive review from Slate magazine. Negative review in Prospect magazine.

The latest issue of our own Psychologist magazine is out now, and includes an open-access comment special on the recent English riots.

Science writing whiz, Ed Yong, has an excellent feature on neuroaesthetics in this month's Times Eureka science magazine (via free PDF or Times website).

Nature has a news feature on the increase in retractions of science papers.

NPR has an article and podcast about the way psychology helped locate the ship HMS Syndney, lost off Australia during World War II. [Read our own report on this research].

The latest episode of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind is available on iPlayer and includes a chat with the researcher behind the "how to break a habit" research that we covered recently.

The latest Neuropod podcast is online and includes a feature on how the brain is adapted for reading.

Psychologist Aric Sigman wrote a tendentious article about the health risks of daycare for babies and young children. Developmental psych expert Prof Dorothy Bishop took him to task for scare-mongering and misrepresenting the literature. So too did the Guardian's Ben Goldacre. Read Sigman's response and the response from the editors of The Biologist, where the much-criticised article was published.

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 80-year-old Tomas Transtroemer, is a psychologist. Congratulations Tomas!

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

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