The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 8 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 58 posts. There were 9 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 868kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 131 views. The most popular post that day was Unconscious perceptual processes.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, digg.com, itp.nyu.edu, search.conduit.com, and google.co.in.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for behavioural science, heterotypic continuity, behavioral science, behaviour science, and behavioural sciences.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Unconscious perceptual processes February 2009
3 comments

Heterotypic Continuity & Comorbidity October 2008

How do biases affect decision making in mental health? October 2009

Can People who lack Self-Regulation Skills still have Satisfying and Well-functioning Relationships? June 2008

Ego Depletion & Executive Functioning October 2007
1 comment

Evolutionary reasons such as a lack of genetic relatedness and kin selection have previously been used to explain the higher rates of child abuse and homicide observed in stepfamilies (Daly & Wilson, 1988). The research team from Stockholm University and Mid Sweden University investigated whether an evolutionary explanation sufficiently explained this higher prevalence.

The research team analyzed Statistics Sweden records of parental child homicides in Sweden for the period 1965–2009. They included data from two biparental family types in their study: families with two genetic parents and stepfamilies. The group also analyzed the proportion of stepfamilies and families with two genetic parents in the general population for 1987, the midpoint of the study, to determine whether children in stepfamilies were statistically more likely to be murdered.

Dr. Temrin’s team used contingency tables to compare the observed frequencies of parents from the two family types committing child homicide with the frequencies of parents in the two family types in the general population. They found that on average there are 3.2 perpetrators per million parents for stepfamilies, and 1.9 per million parents for families with two genetic parents.

The team also investigated perpetrators in stepfamilies specifically, by finding the ratio of biological parent and stepparent child homicide perpetrators in stepfamilies and comparing it to an expected 1:1 ratio using a Chi-square test.

There were 152 perpetrators of parental child homicide in the two family groups used over the 45 year study period: 125 perpetrators were in families with two genetic parents and 27 were in stepfamilies. Of the 27 stepfamily murderers, 13 killed their genetic children, 13 murdered their stepchildren, and 1 perpetrator killed both. This means that the risk of a stepparent or a genetic parent in a stepfamily murdering a child is not significantly different from a 1:1 ratio (Chi-square = 0, p > 0.99).

“Our study suggests that the risk of being killed is not associated primarily with the non-genetic relation stepparent and stepchild but rather by living in a stepfamily,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Hans Temrin from Stockholm University.

Data on the criminal record of all Swedish parents in both genetic parent families and stepfamiles was also taken from the The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention dataset for the midpoint of the study, 1987.

Dr. Temrin’s team found that rates of crime across Sweden were higher for adults in stepfamilies than in biparental families, with general crime 1.5 times higher (28.2% vs. 17.8%), and violent crime twice is high (4.4% vs. 1.9%). These findings agree with previous studies that found that there is a higher incidence of unemployment, psychiatric problems and anti-social behaviors for parents in stepfamilies than parents in families with both genetic parents (Belsky, 1993; Turner, Finkelhor & Ormrod, 2007).

“The Cinderella effect – the observation that adults are more likely to kill their stepchildren than their biological children – has long been a staple of evolutionary psychology-informed homicide research, and this study suggests that this explanation is likely too simple,” said Dr Damon Muller from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.

Dr. Temrin explains that “most parental child homicides are not caused by conflicts with the child but rather by problems that parents have.”

“Giving help to people with psychiatric problems and to families with problems in my opinion is the only way to decrease child maltreatment and the risk of children being killed.”

The research team hopes to replicate their study in other countries to investigate whether their observations hold.

References

Belsky J, 1993. Etiology of child maltreatment: A developmental-ecological analysis. Psychological Bulletin 114: 413-434.

Daly M, Wilson M, 1988. Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Fergusson DM, Fleming J, O’Neill DP, 1972. Child abuse in New Zealand. Wellington, New Zealand: A. R. Shearer, Government Printer.

Turner HA, Finkelhor D, Ormrod R, 2007. Family structure variations in patterns and
predictors of child victimization. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 77: 282-295.

Dan Ariely is a behavioural economist. He studies irrationality and tries to understand why humans act as they do act. In this video he focuses on the role of morality. In some clever studies he looks at why we think that it’s OK to cheat and steal (sometimes).

The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Gerd Gigerenzer is one of the stars in the realm of decision-making. He has written many articles about decision-making that has been cited many times. In this video he gives a lecture at the University of California about the intelligence of the unconscious.

Be aware: This is an enormously inspiring video, that might change the way you look at decision-making – not only in a scientific way, but also in daily life. this might shake your foundation of what you believe is true, so don’t watch this if you’d like to hang on to “usual logic thinking”.

fMRI Video Interview #1

• Introduction
• What is fMRI?
• fMRI Research
• fMRI Method
• fMRI Signal
• The Salmon
• Corrections & Thresholds
• The Black Box
• The Press

fMRI Video Interview #2

• fMRI & Behaviour
• Understanding Behaviour
• Getting Started
• Use of fMRI
• Future of fMRI
• Brain Pacemakers

Well let’s take a look at them:

So there are about 10 million hits for that keyword and this page is ranking #3, just behind Wikipedia (no chance to beat them) and the FBI (probably better not to provoke them). This is actually pretty incredible. Thank you Google!

We will do our best to deliver high quality content.

PS: If you wonder: This picture was taken using a proxy – so no faking with the results, but they might look different on your computer, because Google does track you *creepy…I know*.

Those are the stats of the Behavioural Science Blog for the last few week, with the normal dip around Christmas holidays.

In this chart, showing the blog from the beginning to now, you can see that it has been around 800 views monthly for a while now. Well I guess that this is going to change, considered that there are some really good articles coming up.

I also find it interesting to look at the search terms, that people entered into Google (or other search engines) to arrive at this site. Every combination of “behavioural science” is doing pretty well, but also “heterotypic continuity” – a very specific search term. Actually the most search terms only appeared once, but it would have been a too-long list to publish them here.

2009-10-18 to 2010-01-16

Pamela Smith is writing on an article about power. She is a powerful woman and it’s also her topic of expertise. Thanks Pam – I am really looking forward to reading your article!

Sanne Nauts just called me about an article we have written together (ready to be published – yeah!). But that’s not what you are gonna get to read (however thinking about it…that might also be interesting) – she really knows all about the backlash effect and what women on a job interview should and should not do.

Fred Hasselman is my personal hero of Nonlinear time series analysis & Dynamical modeling. Don’t worry – he says he has come up with an ingenious way to communicate these topics to people with an IQ lower than 150 (world première!).

Hubert de Mey did give the best lecture I have ever had the opportunity to listen to (about why Skinner got it right and Chomsky got it wrong – such a pitty that battle was lost a few decades ago). He is going to write about why it is really really important to have a theory when doing research (and why mapping brain regions to “something” – does not make sense).

I have also been talking to Daniel Fitzgerald about a possible contribution to this blog. I can tell you more about it in a couple of weeks, but it will most probably be a series of short video interviews on fMRI research and technology.

I am really excited that this blog is growing and attracting such high quality writers. However if you are reading this and you are a student (=like me) I would like to tell you this: Don’t be scared – we’re all a big family. Your contribution is just as valuable – so keep it coming!

Your pretty excited

Martin Metzmacher

Writing this blog (together with Christina now for some times) has been one of the most interesting and also rewarding steps I have taken in my academical carrier.

Behavioural Science is often characterized by ground breaking, but very low-level research. Oftentimes it is only a very select group that actually read the article and  often projects get abandoned, because the end goal “scientific article” is so far away.

I also wonder sometimes why we, as scientists, still use this very complicated system of scientific journals. Okay let’s be honest. Peer reviewed journals are very important when it comes to select high quality research – that’s for sure. But what is with all those really good, but not perferct research? And what is about those great ideas that you have, but never act upon?

As we enter the digital age this will all change – communication will be open, instead of closed. Ideas will spread fast, instead of slow and (from my perspective the best improvement) “ordinary” people will have access to scientific data and ideas.

However the language suited for writing for a select group of knowledgable people is different from the style when writing for “normal” people. It’s all about “What does that tell us?”, “WOW” and “Oh yes…I can use this piece of information for doing X!”.

This is what the Behavioural Science Blog is all about – and I think Dan said it best (so I put it in the ad):

Join us in our quest for high-quality and comprehensive articles written for those who want to follow the latest research, but find traditional sources inaccessible.

Change won’t come on its own.

Join it now and get your message out there!

If you want to become a part of this blog just send me an email and tell me a little bit about who you are and what you would like to write about. Videos, pictures, articles – it’s all welcome. The only thing I ask from you is that it comes in a format that makes it comprehensive to a large group of people, not only scientists in the field of behavioural science.

This has been a great journey for me and I enjoyed every bit of it. I hope you will enjoy it, too!

Martin Metzmacher