Link feast

Our pick of the best psychology and neuroscience links from the past week or so:The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Colour of This DressThe internet is abuzz with talk of the dress that some people see as white and gold, others as blue and black. Adam Rogers at WIRED provides an explanation.Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle to Define Emotions"While it's possible for researchers to study facial...

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What do clients think of psychotherapy that doesn't work?

Psychotherapy works for most people, but there's a sizeable group for whom it's ineffective, or worse still, harmful. A new study claims to be the first to systematically investigate what the experience of therapy is like for clients who show no improvement after therapy, or who actually deteriorate.Andrzej Werbart and his colleagues conducted in-depth interviews with 20 non-improved clients (out...

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How to draw Marilyn Monroe, Pop art Speed drawing by Chee

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Some student-professor pairings lead to "unusually effective teaching" (and it's possible to predict which ones)

Video trailers can be used to predict whichlecturers are the best teachers, and whichstudents they are especially suited to.In the near future, students could be presented with a series of video trailers of different professors at their university. Based on their ratings of these videos, the students will be paired with the professors who provide the best fit. The outcome will be superior learning,...

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The six forms of resistance shown by participants in Milgram's notorious "obedience studies"

When discussing Milgram's notorious experiments, in which participants were instructed to give increasingly dangerous electric shocks to another person, most commentators take a black or white approach.Participants are categorised as obedient or defiant, and the headline result is taken as the surprising number of people – the majority – who obeyed by going all the way and administering the highest,...

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Recruiters think they can tell your personality from your resume. They can't

Recruiters are poor at inferring an applicant’s personality from their resume, but that doesn’t stop them from jumping to conclusions on the back of their flawed assumptions. That’s according to a new study that involved over a hundred professional recruiters evaluating pairs of resumes.The US-based recruiters estimated applicant personality from the limited information in short two-page resumes....

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The “Backfire Effect”: Correcting false beliefs about vaccines can be surprisingly counterproductive

Nearly half of the US population wrongly believes the flu vaccine can give you flu,but correcting this error has the opposite of the desired effectBy guest blogger Simon OxenhamAccording to a new study, 43 per cent of the US population wrongly believes that the flu vaccine can give you flu. In actual fact this is not the case – any adverse reaction, besides a temperature and aching muscles for a short...

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