Oops, I was wrong. The article is in Perspectives on Psychological Science, along with a response from Lieberman and others. It's a fascinating debate, and I think that the dead salmon study makes the correlations in fMRI studies look even fishier.
________________________________________ From: Bourgeois, Dr. Martin Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 7:58 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: RE: [tips] Dead salmon detects human emotion This is awesome, and it reminds me of a debate at the upcoming Society for Experimental Social Psychology: Puzzlingly High Correlations in Cognitive/Affective Neuroscience Matthew Lieberman, University of California at Los Angeles vs. Piotr Winkielman, University of California, San Diego, with David Kenny as moderator The debate is organized around a paper that just came out in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Piotr Winkielman is one of the authors), which argues that the methods of a great many fMRI studies lead to spurious correlations (the original title of the paper was Voodoo Correlations in Cognitive/Affective Neuroscience) because researchers selectively define the brain regions of interest after looking at the data. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 6:08 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] Dead salmon detects human emotion Remarkable new experiment, a fMRI study by Bennett et al reported at the 15th annual meeting of the Organization for Brain Mapping in June this year in San Francisco. Meeting announcement at http://www.meetingassistant3.com/OHBM2009/index.php >From the Methods section of the abstract: Subject: One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMR study. The salmon was...not alive at the time of scanning. Task: The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing. http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg for the abstract of the poster presentation (the poster itself, actually) And if that doesn't make itself clear, try this: http://tinyurl.com/mww9tj Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: [email protected] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
