It's kicking off in psychology (bad science)

this paper does quite an amusing debunking of a highly cited paper. (rips it to shreds)



The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio.



I did post it earlier but it seems to have gained more traction since then

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Originally Posted by jimbob Nice smackdown of a rather dubious paper in psychology http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ne.../#.UecAXm1nCWQ Quote: The ‘critical positivity ratio’ is a popular idea. Fredrickson and Losada’s 2005 paper on it has been cited a massive 964 times on Google Scholar, just for starters. And yet – that paper is complete rubbish. As are Losada’s previous papers on the issue. I criticize a lot of papers mysef, but this one really takes the biscuit. It’s an open and shut case. As Brown et al write, the idea of a single ‘critical ratio’ that determines success or failure everywhere and for everyone is absurd in itself: Some gems from the finally published rebuttal paper, Nick Brown was quite pleased with the amount of sarcasm that made it through the edits: Quote: They appear to assert that the predictive use of differential equations abstracted from a domain of the natural sciences to describe human interactions can be justified on the basis of the linguistic similarity between elements of the technical vocabulary of that scientific domain and the adjectives used metaphorically by a particular observer to describe those human interactions. If true, this would have remarkable implications for the social sciences. One could describe a team’s interactions as “sparky” and confidently predict that their emotions would be subject to the same laws that govern the dielectric breakdown of air under the influence of an electric field. Alternatively, the interactions of a team of researchers whose journal articles are characterized by “smoke and mirrors” could be modeled using the physics of airborne particulate combustion residues, combined in some way with classical optics.

I suspect this will make more waves within psychology.



Here is another blog about it

ETA:

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In the meanwhile, positivity lady moved on to new field of research – genomics. Her paper linking positivity with gene expression came out in PNAS a week back. Check the last sentence (emphasis ours), if not anything else. A functional genomic perspective on human well-being Quote: To identify molecular mechanisms underlying the prospective health advantages associated with psychological well-being, we analyzed leukocyte basal gene expression profiles in 80 healthy adults who were assessed for hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, as well as potentially confounded negative psychological and behavioral factors. Hedonic and eudaimonic well-being showed similar affective correlates but highly divergent transcriptome profiles. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells from people with high levels of hedonic well-being showed up-regulated expression of a stress-related conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA) involving increased expression of proinflammatory genes and decreased expression of genes involved in antibody synthesis and type I IFN response. In contrast, high levels of eudaimonic well-being were associated with CTRA down-regulation. Promoter-based bioinformatics implicated distinct patterns of transcription factor activity in structuring the observed differences in gene expression associated with eudaimonic well-being (reduced NF-κB and AP-1 signaling and increased IRF and STAT signaling). Transcript origin analysis identified monocytes, plasmacytoid dendritic cells, and B lymphocytes as primary cellular mediators of these dynamics. The finding that hedonic and eudaimonic well-being engage distinct gene regulatory programs despite their similar effects on total well-being and depressive symptoms implies that the human genome may be more sensitive to qualitative variations in well-being than are our conscious affective experiences.

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=263496&goto=newpost