Category Archives: Psych Your Mind

A Single Factor Model for Success in Graduate School – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on September 14, 2013 by | Comments Off on A Single Factor Model for Success in Graduate School – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Graduate School: The Playground of the Mind
If you've come to the internet more than once, then you know that blogs often discuss the difficulties of coming out of graduate school with a tenure track faculty appointment in psychology or other fields (here and here). For those of you out there considering a research career at a major university--keep in mind that it's not for everyone. PYM has also tried its hand at one or two lists of traits needed to succeed in graduate school. These lists have been inspired by others. Together, success lists make it seem like graduate success is a product of a number of personality factors and situational variables that people have very little control over.

But, what if I told you that success in graduate school is much simpler than considering all these complex person X situation interactions? What if whether you sink or swim is really just about one key ingredient? Today I present a single factor model for success in graduate school!

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External Validity and Believability in Experiments – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on August 21, 2013 by | Comments Off on External Validity and Believability in Experiments – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Imagine for a moment that you are an experiment participant in a dystopian future university thirty years from now. At birth, you were taken from your natural parents and assigned to two robotic parental unit alternatives. The first unit is cold and metal, it has a big frowny face, and all it's good for is dispensing the occasional hot meal through it's midriff. The second unit provides no food, but this unit is fashioned with a luxurious coat of fine fur that feels warm to the touch.

Months pass as you are raised by these two robotic parental units. As you descend further and further into madness, every move you make is video recorded by a pair of enterprising future psychologists who are seeking an answer to one question: Will you spend more time with the cold, metal, food-dispensing robot or the furry one? Surprisingly, though the metal robot fulfills your metabolic needs, the researchers are fascinated to find that you spend most of your time with the furry mother surrogate.

What do results from an experiment such as this (famously conducted by Harry Harlow on monkey's in the 1950's) tells us about the nature of social relationships, love, and survival? Do they tell us anything about the human/monkey experience? Or are the conditions of the experiment so artificial in nature, that they obscure our ability to draw insights about basic psychology? I consider these questions in today's post.

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Psych-Your-Mind: Now (Facebook) Official! – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by | Comments Off on Psych-Your-Mind: Now (Facebook) Official! – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
wikipedia.org
Hello everyone! As many of you know, our blog has been plugging along for two years now. We've discussed all manner of psychology-related issues--from ESP to gaslighting, and everything in between. Most of you have arrived here because you know one of the bloggers at PYM, you love psychological SCIENCE, or you're my mom (Hi Mom!). Some may have even found their way here through our various social media posts on twitter (mwkraus, psychyourmind) or even on google+ (which is looking more like a wasteland of social media).

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The Psychology of the "Psychology Isn’t a Science" Argument – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by | Comments Off on The Psychology of the "Psychology Isn’t a Science" Argument – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Tom knows a pseudoscience when he sees one! (wikipedia.org)
Every so often the internet is set ablaze with opinion pieces on a familiar question: Are "soft" sciences, like psychology, actually science? Most of the time the argument against psychology as a science comes from people from the so-called harder sciences (you know, people who don't know ish about psychology). Of course, every once in a while we throw ourselves under the bus by declaring that for our softer sciences to be taken seriously, we must be more like the real sciences. You're still reading this so most likely you are interested in my opinion on this topic. With a quick nod to others who have covered this topic here, here, here, and here, let's review some of the arguments for and against psychology as a science in what follows.
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The Trouble with Destiny: Relationships Take Work – Amie Gordon (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on July 3, 2013 by | Comments Off on The Trouble with Destiny: Relationships Take Work – Amie Gordon (Psych Your Mind)
Do you believe in Soul Mates?
If I could give one piece of advice as a relationships researcher, it would be this: Relationships take work. Sure we’d all like to believe in destiny, thinking there is someone out there who is meant for us. Then when we find our soul mate, we will slip into an easy and comfortable companionship that provides us with decades of endless laughter and joy, and not a single fight or tense moment. But that is the stuff of dreams, people. Of course there will be times of joy greater than you imagined and laughter that brings you to tears, and those moments should far outweigh the fights and tension. But to believe that you are destined to be with one person and when you find the right relationship for you, it will be one that doesn’t take work, well that belief may be detrimental for your relationship.

In a great test of what happens when people believe they are "meant to be", close relationships researcher C. Raymond Knee looked at the extent to which people held Destiny Beliefs or Growth Beliefs, and the consequences of these beliefs for their relationships.


Destiny Beliefs. People who hold high destiny beliefs report that potential relationship partners are either compatible or they are not, that successful relationships are built on finding a compatible partner, and that relationships that begin poorly will inevitably fail.

Growth Beliefs. People who hold high growth beliefs report that the ideal relationship develops over time, that challenges to a relationship can make it even stronger, and that successful relationships are mostly the result of hard work and learning to resolve incompatibilities.
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What Grinds My Gears? Media Coverage of Emotion Research – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on July 1, 2013 by | Comments Off on What Grinds My Gears? Media Coverage of Emotion Research – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
What's in a facial expression of emotion? (source)
Last week Boston Magazine published an article (here) claiming a "new theory" of emotion. The article then challenged the idea that emotions are signaled and perceived universally through unique facial expressions (like we've discussed here). The article purports to be a take-down of famous emotion researcher Paul Ekman*--whose work has been popularized on such television shows as Lie to Me. Here is why I hated this article:

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Quality v. Quantity in Publication – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on June 20, 2013 by | Comments Off on Quality v. Quantity in Publication – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Einstein says Quality not Quantity (source)
I was on twitter the other day (mwkraus, why aren't you following me?) and my twitter feed displayed a great quote from Albert Einstein with some important career advice for aspiring scientists: He said something like "a career in which one is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality." This quote got me wondering about the career trajectories of aspiring social psychologists, and the tension between wanting to publish as much as possible, and wanting to publish only the very best research. I consider this tension in today's blog.


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This is NOT advice for first year faculty – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on June 11, 2013 by | Comments Off on This is NOT advice for first year faculty – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Hello again, PYM readers. It is now June and I just finished my first full academic year as a faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Chambana). Having just passed through the rabbit hole, I have returned mostly unscathed to blog a bit about my experience. As this is just my first year, I don't have any advice that will help others who are transitioning to professor-hood, rather, this post reflects some of the things that I think people (like me) deal with during their transition to a new faculty job. Onward!

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Four (Wrong) Ways To Interpret Links Between Genes and Education – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on June 9, 2013 by | Comments Off on Four (Wrong) Ways To Interpret Links Between Genes and Education – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Last week Science published a neat little paper examining links between specific human DNA sequences and educational attainment. The paper, which is a bit shorter than the list of authors who worked on the project, examined a total sample of more than 120,000 participants who had their entire genome sequenced for a number of small clusters of repeating nucleotides (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs). They then examined all the SNPs and their associations with the level of educational attainment of each of the participants in the sample. After controlling for bias, in that a genome wide study performs thousands of significance tests, three SNPs emerged as significant predictors of educational attainment.

I find this study very interesting because there are a number of provocative ways to interpret the results of this study, and most of those would be incorrect! In what follows, I highlight four (wrong) ways to interpret the results of this study.

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PYM Enters the Terrible Twos! – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)

Posted on March 14, 2013 by | Comments Off on PYM Enters the Terrible Twos! – Michael Kraus (Psych Your Mind)
Two years ago today, this blog was born. Thanks to you, PYM readers, this once tiny blog venture has been an overwhelming success--both in terms of outreach, and I think, in terms of fun (at least for the bloggers)! Let's check out some of the PYM blog stats after the jump.

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