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This is a crappy psychology study where none of the researchers is a psychologist. PNAS is a big name in medical science (?), but an unimportant journal in psyc

This is a crappy psychology study where none of the researchers is a psychologist. PNAS is a big name in medical science (?), but an unimportant journal in psychology. There's no serious psychology journal going to publish this kind of stuff. Why? The first problem is measurement. What is the reliability of using positive/negative words to determine positive/negative emotional state? 70%? 80%? The effect size of this study is 0.001, which would be way way way smaller than the measurement error. LOL. What a laughable "study".

omginternets 7y ago
Completely agree with you that the study is trash, however ... >but an unimportant journal in psychology. This is untrue. It's comically untrue. I was doing my PhD in cogsci when this came out and everybody was surprised that PNAS would publish such a bad study, given that we were more used to seeing things like this: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf and this https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf. PNAS has an _excellent_ reputation in psychology, especially in the psychophysics and EEG/MEG crowd.
- conistonwater 7y ago
  PNAS does this sort of thing often enough, it doesn't really deserve its positive reputation (if any): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  Adam Kramer has a PhD in psychology, for what it's worth.
  - datashow 7y ago
    Thanks. Good to know.
- datashow 7y ago
  cognitive science is a unique field, it is somewhat related to psychology, but definitely not a subfield of psychology.
idm 7y ago
In the psychological sciences, it seems like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. When a phenomenon with a large effect size is demonstrated with tens or hundreds of participants, everybody crows about how the sample size should have been larger. On the other hand, when a small effect size requires millions of observations to detect, now the criticism is that the effect is too small to matter. At any rate, this effect is small - but it is reliable. The only crappy part about this study is the ethical boundaries it crossed. In most other ways, this study was kindof amazing...
- datashow 7y ago
  There was a tiny difference detected with millions of observations. But it has no scientific meaning.
- thatcat 7y ago
  In statistics, there is an optimal sample size for avoiding type 1 and 2 errors. https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/n2.html https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/n2.html

omginternets 7y ago

Completely agree with you that the study is trash, however ... >but an unimportant journal in psychology. This is untrue. It's comically untrue. I was doing my PhD in cogsci when this came out and everybody was surprised that PNAS would publish such a bad study, given that we were more used to seeing things like this: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf and this https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf. PNAS has an _excellent_ reputation in psychology, especially in the psychophysics and EEG/MEG crowd.

conistonwater 7y ago
PNAS does this sort of thing often enough, it doesn't really deserve its positive reputation (if any): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas
disgruntledphd2 7y ago
Adam Kramer has a PhD in psychology, for what it's worth.
- datashow 7y ago
  Thanks. Good to know.
datashow 7y ago
cognitive science is a unique field, it is somewhat related to psychology, but definitely not a subfield of psychology.

idm 7y ago

In the psychological sciences, it seems like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. When a phenomenon with a large effect size is demonstrated with tens or hundreds of participants, everybody crows about how the sample size should have been larger. On the other hand, when a small effect size requires millions of observations to detect, now the criticism is that the effect is too small to matter. At any rate, this effect is small - but it is reliable. The only crappy part about this study is the ethical boundaries it crossed. In most other ways, this study was kindof amazing...

datashow 7y ago
There was a tiny difference detected with millions of observations. But it has no scientific meaning.
thatcat 7y ago
In statistics, there is an optimal sample size for avoiding type 1 and 2 errors. https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/n2.html https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/n2.html