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lewin

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Everything posted by lewin

  1. Look for professors in your department who have active research programs, e.g., look for their websites or recent publications. If their website has instructions for potential research assistants follow those instructions. If not, read some recent papers of whichever professors look like they're doing interesting work and send them an email offering to volunteer if they need people with reference to what you found interesting from what you read. Or, if your department does independent study courses you could approach them from that angle, i.e., to work with them for credit. Last, look for funded opportunities from your university, e.g, there is a summer NSERC research award that can fund undergraduate students for the summer.
  2. Interpersonal relationships is a gigantic research area. You could check out the website for International Association for Relationships Research--they have a directory of some members--and look for pubs in their (several) journals. Some bigger names to look for: Eli Finkel, Paul Eastwick, Harry Reis, Joanne Wood, Shelly Gable, Sandra Murray, Brooke Feeney, Nickola Overall, Omri Gillath, Emily Impett, Ben Karney, James McNulty, Geoff McDonald, Mario Mikulincer, David Sbarra, Jeff Simpson, John Lydon, Ed Lemay, Margaret Clark..... those are mostly off the top of my head as someone outside that area.
  3. Outside of psychoanalytic circles, I'm curious whether there is actually an answer to this question beyond what Freud called the "day residue" and memory consolidation. Some social psychologists have studied the motivated interpretation of dreams, i.e., to what extent dream interpretations are affected by preexisting beliefs, and the effects of dreams on judgments. Morewedge & Norton 2009
  4. I'm not a clinical psychologist and not diagnosing anything but I think you're making the correct attribution because the worrying and rumination being exhibited here is far beyond typical responding. It's not about your sanity, but it does seem that you're disproportionately worried about what seems to be a trivial incident. I'd echo the earlier advice about bringing it up with your professional, if you have one, because it will also help you cope with similar situations in the future. For example, a recent movement in psych is automated tools that check the stats of published papers for errors. If you're constantly worried that a little stats mistake will cause a paper to be retracted or sink your career that'll be paralyzing.
  5. According to a colleague of mine (and in my experience as a dilettante studying pseudoscience in mental health treatment), MA-level therapists who lack the research experience that a PhD brings tend to be more taken in by faddish treatments, e.g., rebirthing therapy, recovered memories, EMDR. Clinical psychologists also tend to take on more complex case presentations (e.g., schizophrenia, anxiety, major depression) but that level of training isn't needed for every person seeking therapy, e.g., a nurse practitioner can treat many 'family doctor' conditions that don't require a medical doctor. I'm blanking on the source but I recall reading that efficacy studies show that newly trained PhDs are more effective practitioners than MAs initially--because they get more training hours--but the difference disappears after something like five years (when equating the type of case being treated).
  6. You must mean that some French or bilingual programs don't require the GRE, right? Because there are GRE dates in Ottawa. .
  7. I get why people email, and it's not going to hurt anyone's chances unless one says something stupid, but I've also heard this sentiment (e.g., "It's bypassing the official process, which is there for a reason.") Coincidentally, I saw the website of a princeton faculty member who has this on her webpage: "I often receive emails from prospective Ph.D. applicants with requests to talk about my work and what it would be like to do research with me. As of 9-8-13, I decided to refrain from having these personal conversations in advance of reading all applications, because I do not wish to favor students who received advice about how to connect with prospective advisors or who have connections to me through my current colleagues. Before we make final admissions decisions in our department, we fly out our top candidates to visit the campus and to have one-on-one discussions with their desired mentors, graduate students, and researchers in the department. I view this as the time when the candidates and prospective mentors can have these types of conversations, to figure out whether Princeton (and my research group) would be a good fit." I wonder if this is getting more common... maybe POIs are getting sick of being flooded with emails, hah.
  8. One of the downsides is that candidates are stigmatized or seen as less capable when seen (rightly or wrongly) as an affirmative action hire. Heilman at NYU has a comprehensive program of research on this, much from the 1990's.
  9. [deleted, I answered my own question]
  10. The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.
  11. A mentor of mine said he disliked any contact beyond the "are you taking students?" type because he saw it as students trying to curry favor and bypass the application process. My judgment is that this is a minority opinion, but also that students should keep it in mind when considering whether to flood their POI's inboxes.
  12. Sit tight. Independence and the ability to not obsess about something that you can't do anything about (e.g., paper under review) are valued traits in a graduate student.
  13. Meehl also critiqued medical science quite a bit and those didn't take either Or if they had, much of medical diagnosis would take place by computer (Dawes, Faust, & Meehl, 1989)
  14. I think I agree, but the line between superficial merit "wow factor" and more substantive merit "this work has scientific value that your peers acknowledge" can be really fuzzy. Is "wow" just whether the work seems to get attention outside of the discipline? Or attracts media attention? Sometimes it's only clear in retrospect. You're right that the incentives tilt towards superficial "wow" rather than substantive "wow".... I don't know whether it's still there, but a few years ago wow factor was relatively explicitly written into the reviewer guidelines at Psych Science ("would you go down the hallway to tell one of your colleagues in a different discipline about this?"). I applied for grants recently and "knowledge mobilization" (aka, putting your work out there to the [social] media, etc.) is a merit evaluation category just like student training. The problems are systematic and institutional... and given how pervasive they are, I find myself being really sympathetic towards individuals like Amy Cuddy who happened to play the publicity game really well--like everybody told us to do--and is now being ripped for it. I definitely don't think that quality and wow factor need to be in opposition to each other, in principle.
  15. Just to clarify, I didn't have Gelman in mind particularly when I wrote my other comment about tarnished reputations but in retrospect I see why it looked that way. Mea culpa. I'm not in statistics and don't know much firsthand about Gelman's rep one way or another. About my Trump metaphor... "minority" and "large number of people" aren't mutually exclusive terms; Trump has a large number of supporters but they're still a minority of Americans. Regardless, my point wasn't about the raw numbers of people involved but rather the sense of resentment and disenfranchisement that's occurring. Of course there are a lot of dissimilarities with Trumpers, but in common what I see is a some number of people--perhaps many numerically, but not the majority proportionally--that are nursing sense of umbrage and resentment that there are other popular people in the "establishment" that have status (measured in pubs, TED talks, or ivy league tenure) that is unearned, and those people deserve to be taken down a peg or two, and that the reformers have been unfairly shut out. Gelman probably gets increased support because he's a big name, and he's finally "calling out" the other popular kids. Stepping back to the OP's point.... for new grad students my advice would be to keep your head down and avoid any kind of controversial advisors, i.e., too strongly in any camp. Establish a track record of good research and worry about the internecine feuds later.
  16. People might ask: What are these "new requirements" and who are the people setting them? Science is a collaborative enterprise and things happen by consensus. "Call them out" is an interesting choice of words because I think that's what people chafe at because it sounds like admonishing and shaming; rather, there should be discussion, debate, and persuasion. To highlight the point that it's possible to be a methods-focused person without being an asshole about it. The best examples I can think of are Preacher and Hayes. They realized that people weren't doing mediation analyses properly but instead of just kicking at past work, they created tools to facilitate proper mediation analyses. Their SPSS macro is enormously popular and has driven the field forward, allowing novel study designs that weren't possible in the past because we didn't have readily accessible means of analyzing the data. They have a good reputation because they're smart, creative, respective, productive, and collegial. The criticism I often hear leveled at (some) replicators and (some) methods people is that they want to rip apart what other people are producing without producing anything useful of their own. Build up, not tear down. When people like Alison Ledgerwood say: "We're trying to improve methods in our lab, here's what we've been doing if you want to try it too..." this is helpful and people respect it. When others, who I won't name, say that they'll only trust findings that were pre-registered because they assume those findings were p-hacked or whatever, that's not helpful. It signals distrust of and disrespect for your colleagues.
  17. There's also: Choose an advisor who doesn't have a reputation for being an asshole. These political debates tarnish reputations on both sides, and my read on the field's sentiment is that it's a lot worse to be someone who rips on others via social media. A lot of what's going on in social psychology lately reminds me of what's going on with Trump supporters: A minority that feels disenfranchised and embittered, and produces a lot of vitriol and aggression to try and provoke reform from the establishment. Make Science Great Again.
  18. Coincidentally, I came across this review recently, which looks on point and easy to digest.. might give you some advice for dealing with the relatives... https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/780/docs/12_pspi_lewandowsky_et_al_misinformation.pdf
  19. Cognitive dissonance is more about rationalizing our behaviour when it misaligns with an attitude. e.g., Conservatives used to care about senate reform. Harper gets elected and does nothing about it, so people start to minimize the importance of senate reform (i.e., weaken their attitude in order to justify the lack of action). You're asking a big question. At the most basic, Social Identity Theory talks about ingroup bias where we derive positive feelings from promoting our own social groups and derogating others. Broadly, you're also talking about "motivated social cognition" where we shape our thoughts in service of other goals (e.g., to be right, to feel good, to promote our group at the expense of others). So people see a meme disparaging Trudeau and conservatives are inclined to believe it (because it supports their prior beliefs) and liberals are inclined to be skeptical (because it contradicts their prior beliefs). The most specific term you're looking for is probably "biased assimilation" or "confirmation bias".
  20. Presumably the OP is American but for any Canadian readers, stipends that are classified as scholarships are not taxed. The portion that is classified as TA wages is taxed. You also get tuition credits that will (likely) be more than enough to get any taxes returned.
  21. Yes. There are only so many hours in the day. In my grad program, internally funded students TA'd 10 hours/week for 2 of 3 terms/year as part of their funding package. Externally funded students (e.g., had a gov't fellowship) TA'd 5 hours/week for 1 of 3 terms/year. After a few years the divergent research productivity was very apparent. Twenty hours a week might be common but I can't imagine that I could have been as productive working that much.
  22. Nosek has a 2010 PSPB that ranks social psych grad programs by research impact.
  23. I don't think this is a question that can be answered in the abstract -- an opinion very much depends on the specific PIs and schools involved, and knowledge of why you didn't make it this year and whether another year would help. I think you should seek out someone at your school who knows your area and ask their advice.
  24. Minor thing but don't speak ill of your other programs even with vague terms like "fit". First, they might know people there and word gets around. Second, what if you end up there? Don't stress about having done it, but avoid in the future.
  25. To answer your question, no, this is not the right place to ask for homework help.
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