Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
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In this reply, I concentrate on two broad issues raised by the four commentaries in this issue: the hierarchical model of domains and individual differences in creativity. In the first case, I cite additional research to address the contrast between "hard" and "soft" domains and the application of this contrast to children, adolescents, and noneminent adults. In the second case, I introduce two recent studies to confirm the model's predictions regarding personal creative achievement. I hope that the original article, the commentaries, and this reply will inspire future inquiries into creativity in all its disciplinary varieties.
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Can intuition be taught? The way in which faces are recognized, the structure of natural classes, and the architecture of intuition may all be instances of the same process. The conjecture that intuition is a species of recognition memory implies that human intuitive decision making can be enormously enhanced by virtual simulation.
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Perspect Psychol Sci · Jul 2009
Editor's Introduction: Special Issue on the Next Big Questions in Psychology.
In this issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, we learn what 18 leading psychologists believe are the next big research questions in their respective fields. I invited about 20 of our most outstanding scholars to tell us what they believe are the most important questions to be asked in the upcoming decade. ⋯ The range of articles, from psychoneuroimmunology to human-android interactions, clearly indicates the enormous scope of psychology. My hope is that both freshly minted and senior scientists alike might gain from these insights into the research they should pursue in the years ahead.
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Perspect Psychol Sci · May 2009
Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studiesofemotion, personality, and social cognition have drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between brain activation and personality measures. We show that these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained. ⋯ In addition, we argue that, in some cases, other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations. We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide accurate estimates of the correlations in question and urge authors to perform such reanalyses. The underlying problems described here appear to be common in fMRI research of many kinds-not just in studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition.