The Big One Factor of Personality

A recent article by Janek Musek suggests that the Big Five factors of personality, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness correlate and can be combined to create the ‘Big One’ factor of personality. Here is an excerpt...

File Drawer Problem in Drug Studies

The file drawer problem (described here) is a publication bias in which results that are significant are published more that results that are not statistically significant. Thus, non-significant findings end up in the file drawer. A research team led by Erick Turner...

Joseph LeDoux on Fallability of Memory

Here is an excerpted statement from Joseph LeDoux on Edge:Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment...

Shyness and Social Phobia

Here is a great excerpt from an interview with Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. The full article can be found here.In Oren Rudavsky’s recent film, The Treatment, a wealthy Manhattan widow is baffled that a schoolteacher...

Correlation between the Cost and Taste of Wine

Here is an excerpt of a discussion of a study which discusses why more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect them to. Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study [pdf], shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of...