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In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the last week:

1. How too much empathy can actually lead us to do the wrong thing - thought-provoking essay by Paul Bloom. (related research covered on the Digest).

2. Thanks to books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and, most recently, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are discovering the manifold biases that muddle human judgment. So how come there hasn't been a revolution in good sense and shrewd decision making? Samuel McNerney may have the answer.

3. The Digest nearly won an award this week (hold the applause), reaching finalist position for psychology/neuroscience in the inaugural Science Seeker blogging awards. Many congratulations to all the winners, especially to Aatish Bhatia winner of the psych/neuro category; to psychologist Pete Etchells who won "best post about peer-reviewed research"; and to Virginia Hughes, who won "post of the year" for her superb story about hypersomnolence.

4. The build up to the release of US psychiatry's updated diagnostic code (DSM-5) continued this week as the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology published a statement calling for a "paradigm shift" in psychiatric diagnosis "away from an outdated disease model" towards "an approach which pays far more attention to the complex range of life experiences of people experiencing mental distress."

5. The story broke at the Observer on Sunday with an unfortunate spin that implied psychology was at war with psychiatry. Professor Sir Simon Wesseley, a psychiatrist, showed there is in fact a great deal of consensus ("Mindless psychiatry is as unhelpful as brainless psychiatry, and the psychiatrist who ignores the social environment is, well, not a psychiatrist").

6. How to spot a murderer's brain (or not).

7. Ed Yong reported on an ambitious and controversial new study of super-brainy participants that's looking to pin down the genetic influences on intelligence.

8. Do nice guys really finish last?

9. If only there were somewhere you could get an expert, no-nonsense discussion of psychology research that's been splashed all over the media ... hang on, psychologist and writer Tom Stafford has started a new column for The Conversation that does just that - first off, can a poster of staring eyes really deter bike thieves?

10. The 2013 illusion of the year has been chosen - check out the winner and runners up.

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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Men's upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science...

Regular marijuana use is associated with favorable indices related to diabetic control, say investigators. They found that current marijuana users had significantly lower fasting insulin and were less likely to be insulin resistant, even after excluding patients with a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus. Their findings are reported in the current issue of The American Journal of Medicine...

Regular marijuana use is linked to advantageous indices related to diabetic control, according to a new study in The American Journal of Medicine. The research found that current marijuana users had considerably lower fasting insulin and had a lower probability of being insulin resistant, even after excluding patients with diabetes mellitus...

Researchers at the National Center for Veterans Studies, Salt Lake City, Utah, reported that the suicide risk among people in the military increases according to the number of lifetime traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) they have had. They published their findings in JAMA Psychiatry...

Consumers experiencing relationship problems are more likely to prefer aesthetic experiences that reflect their negative mood, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Emotional experiences of aesthetic products are important to our happiness and well-being...

Sporting events can bring a community together, such as when the Louisville Cardinals won the NCAA championship and University of Louisville campus was filled with camaraderie. They also can fuel bitter rivalries, such as the long-standing animosity between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs...

The song, "Get Happy," famously performed by Judy Garland, has encouraged people to improve their mood for decades. Recent research at the University of Missouri discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process. This research points to ways that people can actively improve their moods and corroborates earlier MU research...

A Brazilian investigative team, collaborating with a Simon Fraser University researcher, is citing an urgent need for targeted interventions among young crack users in cities throughout Brazil, identified as the world's biggest crack market, and further research to better address the problem...

For the penultimate round of the TV show The Apprentice, the competing entrepreneurs must face a series of interviews with a crack team of hardened executives. The implicit, believable message is that these veterans have seen all the interview tricks in the book and will spot any blaggers a mile off. However, a new study provides the reality TV show with a reality check. A team led by Marc-André Reinhard report that experienced job interviewers are in fact no better than novice interviewers at spotting when a candidate is lying.

The researchers filmed 14 volunteers telling the truth about a job they'd really had in the past and then spinning a yarn about time in a job they'd never really had. The volunteers were offered a small monetary reward to boost their motivation. These clips were then played online to 46 highly experienced interviewers (they'd conducted between 21 and 1000 real-life job interviews), 92 interviewers with some experience (they'd interviewed at least once), and 214 students who'd never before acted as a job interviewer. The participants' task was to identify the clips in which the interviewee was speaking truthfully about their work experience, and the clips in which the interviewee was fabricating.

Overall the participants achieved an accuracy rate of 52 per cent - barely above chance performance, which is consistent with a huge literature showing how poor most of us are at spotting deception. But the headline finding is that the more experienced interviewers were no better than the novice interviewers at spotting lying job candidates - the first time that this topic has been researched. Greater work seniority, having more work experience and having more subordinates at work were also unrelated to the ability to spot lying job candidates.

There was a glimmer of hope that interview lie-detection skills could be taught. Participants who reported more correct beliefs about non-verbal cues to lying (e.g. liars don't in fact fidget more) were slightly more successful at recognising which job candidates were lying (each correct belief about a non-verbal cue added 1.2 per cent more accuracy on average). Experienced and novice interviewers in the current study didn't differ in their knowledge about lying cues, which helps explain why the veterans were no better at the task. The more experienced interviewers were however more skeptical overall, tending to rate more of the clips as featuring lying.

"Our results provide the first evidence that employment interviewers may not be better at detecting deception in job interviews than lay persons," the researchers said, "although it is a judgmental context that they are very experienced with."

Although the main gist of the results is consistent with related research in other contexts - for example, studies have found police detectives are no better at spotting lies, despite their interrogation experience - this study has some serious limitations, which undermine the applicability of the findings to the real world. Above all, the study did not involve real interviews, which meant the participants were unable to interact with the interviewees in a dynamic manner.

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Reinhard, M., Scharmach, M., and Müller, P. (2013). It's not what you are, it's what you know: experience, beliefs, and the detection of deception in employment interviews Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43 (3), 467-479 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2013.01011.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Scientists from Royal Holloway University have found that when white Caucasians are under the illusion that they have a dark skin, their racial bias changes in a positive way...

A program co-led by St. Michael's Hospital could be the next widely used model to treat patients who are frequent users of the health care system and have severe addictions, often complicated by homelessness and mental health problems...

New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center finds that suicide, while strongly associated with psychiatric conditions, also correlates with environmental pollution. Lead researcher John G. Spangler, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of family medicine at Wake Forest Baptist, looked specifically at the relationship between air pollution and emissions from coal-fired electricity plants...

In a first-of-its-kind effort to illuminate the biochemical impact of trauma, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have discovered a connection between the quantity of cannabinoid receptors in the human brain, known as CB1 receptors, and post-traumatic stress disorder, the chronic, disabling condition that can plague trauma victims with flashbacks, nightmares and emotional instability...

All mammals sleep, as do birds and some insects. However, how this basic function is regulated by the brain remains unclear. According to a new study by researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, a brain region called the lateral habenula plays a central role in the regulation of REM sleep...

Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods and much more...

Although knowing an actor is gay significantly affected ratings of his masculinity, there was no significant effect on ratings of his acting performance, researchers say. A team of researchers tested the hypothesis claimed by recent news columns that an "out" actor cannot convincingly play a heterosexual because knowing someone is gay will bias perceptions of his or her performance...

Regular checkups at the doctor's generally concentrate on physical symptoms like pain or illness - now experts are recommending that annual visits to the doctor should also serve as a routine check on mental health and risky behaviors such as alcohol misuse. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force examined whether alcohol screening would be advantageous to a person's overall health...

Do fluent presenters make
learning feel too easy? Eloquent and engaging scientific communicators in the mould of physicist Brian Cox make learning seem fun and easy. So much so that a new study says they risk breeding overconfidence. When a presenter is seen to handle complicated information effortlessly, students sense wrongly that they too have acquired a firm grasp of the material.

Shana Carpenter and her colleagues showed 42 undergrad students a one-minute video of a science lecture about calico cats. Half of them saw a version in which the female lecturer was confident, eloquent, made eye-contact and gestured with her hands. The other students saw a version in which the same lecturer communicated the same facts, but did so in a fumbling style, frequently checking her notes, making little eye contact and few gestures.

After watching the video, the students rated how well they thought they'd do on a test of its content ten minutes later. The students who'd seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent speaker breeds confidence. In fact, both groups of students fared equally well in the test. In the case of the students in the fluent lecturer condition, this wasn't as good as they'd predicted. Their greater confidence was misplaced.

A second study was similar - 70 students watched either a fluent or fumbling lecturer, but this time the students had a chance afterwards to spend as long as they wanted reviewing the script. On average, both groups of students devoted the same amount of time (perhaps out of habit). But only among the students who'd watched the fumbling lecturer was there a link between time spent on the script and subsequent performance on the test. This suggests only they used the time with the script to fill in blanks in their knowledge.

"Learning from someone else - whether it is a teacher, a peer, a tutor, or a parent - may create a kind of 'social metacognition'," the researchers said, "in which judgments are made based on the fluency with which someone else seems to be processing information. The question students should ask themselves is not whether it seemed clear when someone else explained it. The question is, 'can I explain it clearly?'".

An obvious limitation of the study is the brevity of the science lecture and the fact it was on video. It remains to be seen whether this result would replicate in a more realistic situation after a longer lecture. Also, in real life, there may be costs to a fumbling lecture style that weren't picked up in this study, such as students mind wandering and skipping class.

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Carpenter, S., Wilford, M., Kornell, N., and Mullaney, K. (2013). Appearances can be deceiving: instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0442-z

--Further reading--
Co-author on this study, Nate Kornell, wrote a guest Digest post in 2008 with study tips for students. 
How fluency affects judgement, choice and processing style

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image: Paul Clarke Wikipedia Commons. 

A new "alternative model" included in the upcoming Fifth Edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM -5) lines up well with the current approach to diagnosis of personality disorder, according to a study in the May Journal of Psychiatric Practice...