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Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.
This was an awesome week for psychology and neuroscience blogging! I had a hard time picking just three or four, so here are six:
Korsakoff's Syndrome is a fascinating neuropsychiatric disorder marked by fantastic stories, told by patients, about things that have happened to them. Neuroskeptic discusses an interesting new paper on the evolving understanding of this rare disorder.
In a Halloween-inspired post, Brad Walters of "Cortical Hemming and Hawing" retells the legend of Bloody Mary and offers some thoughtful hypotheses as to what might actually account for the appearance of a strange figure in the mirror.
In another seasonally-appropriate post, Matt Soniak tells the tale of a very interesting (and hairy!) case study: The werewolf is dead, long live the werewolf, or: The co-existence of lycanthropy and Cotard's syndrome.
At the Games with Words blog, Josh Hartshorne dives back into the frightfest that is Universal Grammar. Universal Grammar is dead. Long live Universal Grammar. (Okay, maybe this one isn't Halloween themed, but there are those who think that Universal Grammar is as much a myth as are werewolves, if not more)
Social Learning Theory is not without its critics, but no matter what you think of the theory, Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll study is a classic. John Wayland of the History of Psychology blog explains it.
Another classic of psychology is the Asch conformity study. Asch found that "some people were willing to agree with a majority view that was clearly wrong," in a task requiring individuals to compare the lengths of lines. But there were some methodological issues with the original Asch study. At BPS Research Digest, Christian Jarrett explains a new line of research replicating the Asch studies with more methodological rigor.