Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Psychology

Index · Statistics · Log

Psychology articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	Other	???	Total
FA		3	4	11				18
FL			1	1				2
GA	5	14	27	70			10	126
B	28	179	299	295			88	889
C	28	322	1,073	1,873	1		421	3,718
Start	5	172	861	3,231		1	2,247	6,517
Stub		5	122	1,365			1,871	3,363
List	7	10	47	98	1		10	173
Category					2,895			2,895
Disambig				3	26			29
File					35			35
Portal					100			100
Project					23			23
Template		1			225			226
NA		8	43	145	679			875
Other				1	169			170
Assessed	73	714	2,477	7,093	4,154	1	4,647	19,159
Unassessed			1	13	1		415	430
Total	73	714	2,478	7,106	4,155	1	5,062	19,589
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 70,551			Ω = 4.82

Are you interested in bringing up the main article of this project, Psychology, to good article status?

Hi, everyone,

I see that the main article of this project, Psychology, was nominated once for featured article status in 2007, but didn't gain that status, and is currently listed as a B class article. I wonder who would be interested in focused, top-to-bottom improvement of the article's sources and overall organization and balance so that the article could be listed as a good article? I've nominated this article for consideration in this month's Core contest to improve vital articles, and I would be delighted to work collaboratively with other project participants to ensure that the Psychology article represents the reliable sources accurately and reflects well on this WikiProject. Are you interested in joining in? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 14:56, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Another editor is making very good suggestions for improvements in the Psychology main article, and a third editor is watching the page closely. I invite anyone else interested in the project to take a look at the discussion at the article talk page. I have gathered about half of the references for the article to begin a top-to-bottom reference check of everything that is cited there now. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 13:44, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

I just had the great pleasure of being one of several co-editors who brought the article English language up to good article status, and I think the current status of Psychology is already better than English language had ever been before this month, so I'm inviting all of you who are interested to join in (or look on) as other editors and I push to improve Psychology (which, after all, is the main article for this WikiProject) up to good article status. I've had a good time digging into library resources, both online and in actual physical libraries, to gather reliable secondary sources for improving the article. Feel free to join the fun or to make your constructive suggestions as the article revision continues. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 18:18, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia Primary School invitation

Hi everybody. On behalf of the teams behind the Wikipedia Primary School research project, I would like to announce that the articles Domestic violence — Gender stereotypes , of interest to this wikiproject, were selected a while ago to be reviewed by external experts. We'd now like to ask interested editors to join our efforts and improve the articles before March 15, 2015 (any timezone) as they see fit; a revision will be then sent to the designated experts for review (for details, please see each articles' talk page). Any notes and remarks written by the external experts will be made available on the articles' talk pages under a CC-BY-SA license as soon as possible, so that you can read them, discuss them and then decide if and how to use them. Please sign up here to let us know you're collaborating. Thanks a lot for your support! Elitre (WPS) (talk) 17:34, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

RFC on psychometrics in List of topics characterized as pseudoscience

A Request for Comments is in progress at Talk: List of topics characterized as pseudoscience concerning whether psychometrics should be: (1) included in that list; (2) included in that list, but with a notation that it is so categorized by a minority of scholars; (3) excluded from the list. Your participation in the RFC is welcome. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:02, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Involuntary celibacy

Valoem (talk · contribs) is requesting to move this back to mainspace, so opinions are sought over at User talk:Valoem/Involuntary celibacy. I'd argue that this has medical/psychological implications, though others' views may vary.. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:06, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Is "getting lost" a suitable topic for an article?

Hi, there is currently a draft Draft:Getting lost that has been declined on the grounds that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a dictionary (implying that the topic is too trivial to have an article). However, I disagree with the reviewer's assessment of that. Therefore I'm seeking for extra opinions on whether it is suitable or not. Thanks! Darylgolden^(talk) Ping when replying 06:33, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

• I absolutely agree that this is a suitable topic for an encyclopedia, and capable of substantial expansion with information about the increased incidence of "getting lost" with advancing age and the onset of dementia, and the frequent occurrence of getting lost in dreams. bd2412 T 04:35, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
• Maybe this would be suitable for a section in Orientation (mental). 67.188.230.128 (talk) 19:16, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Guessing.

I am working on a draft for the surprisingly article-less topic of guessing (Guessing redirects to Güssing, a small town in Austria, Guess is a disambiguation page). My research suggests that there is a great deal of unspoken psychological activity that goes into making a guess, so I thought it would make sense to ask for input here. Cheers! bd2412 T 04:32, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Spoon theory

Does it meet WP:Notability? So far the article does not meet the "significant attention from independent sources" requirement. I tagged the article, but sb removed the tag without taking action to fix this issue. --151.75.1.229 (talk) 19:51, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Personology

Dear psychology experts: I came across this disambiguation page, which has two items. Is this a useful page, or should it be deleted? —Anne Delong (talk) 18:11, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

There's a draft article which could be a replacement for this page, Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Murray’s Theory of Personality. It needs some work, though. —Anne Delong (talk) 19:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Hello - Assignment

Hi everyone! My name is Laura and I am new to the Wiki world.

I am currently a student at Virginia Tech, and am double majoring in Biology and Psychology. I am in a class called physiological psychology and for an assignment we must add information to a wiki stub or create a new article on a topic of choice. I decided I would like to add to a stub, and stumbled across one for novelty seeking. I have created some information in my Sandbox and was wondering if there was a way to get your approval before trying to add it to the page. I have copy and pasted it below and I hope it doesn't ruin anything in terms of the formatting.

Thank you for your time and I hope to hear back from someone/all soon!

Laura Giovannoni

Novelty seeking

Lead?

Causes and Effects

Although the exact causes for novelty seeking behaviors is unknown, there may be a link to genetics. Studies have found an area on the Dopamine receptor D4 gene on chromosome 11 that is characterized by several repeats in a particular base sequence. Multiple studies have identified a link to genetics, in particular one conducted by Dr. Benjamin and colleagues, where individuals who had longer alleles of this gene had higher novelty-seeking scores than individuals with the shorter allele (). In another study relating to the gene and financial risk, Dr. Dreber and colleagues found a correlation between increased risk-taking and the DRD4 gene in young males(). Although there are studies that support the link between NS and dopaminergic activity via DRD4, there are also studies that do not exhibit a strong correlation. More studies need to be conducted to confirm the importance of DRD4 in novelty seeking.

Dopamine

In addition to potential heredity, novelty seeking behaviors are seen with the modulation of dopamine. The overall effect of dopamine when exposed to a novel stimuli is a mass release of the neurotransmitter in reward systems of the brain including the mesolimbic pathway (). The mesolimbic pathway is active in every type of addiction and is involved with reinforcement. Because of this activation in the brain, NS has been linked to personality disorders as well as substance abuse and other addictive behaviors. DRD4 receptors are highly expressed in areas of the limbic system associated with emotion and cognition.

Relation with age

It is important to note the individual's age with novelty seeking. This behavior will decrease with time, especially as the brains of adolescents and young adults finalize in development. More studies need to be conducted to identify factors of variation including gender, ethnicity, temperament and environment.

Responses

I like it, though it meeds some copy-editing. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 20:42, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Large scale changes to multiple articles

There have been recent massive refactorings of articles egocentrism, obedience (human behavior) and minority influence, at least some of which are in this project's scope. Similar changes to another article, egocentric bias, were reverted by JorisvS with an edit summary of "rv: too many poor-quality edits". I'm therefore drawing attention to these other edits as well, so that you can ensure quality of these articles is not compromised. Regards, Samsara 02:19, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

The changes to egocentrism were similarly horrible looking (you were quite right to revert that). Those to the other two are not as superficially terrible. Obedience (human behavior) has been shortened very much and part of a quote has been deleted, in all significantly reducing its quality (so I've reverted it too). Yet, minority influence has more content, the "Studies" section has, correctly, been incorporated into the rest of the article, and the removal of the header "Further research" is also quite appropriate. --JorisvS (talk) 08:25, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Dependent personality disorder

Hello. I am interested in adding some significant statistical measures to the dependent personality disorder page. Any feedback is welcome and greatly appreciated. Here is the future added information:

"A 2004 twin study suggests a heritability of .81 for developing dependent personality disorder. Because of this, there is significant evidence that this disorder runs in families. Children and adolescents with a history of anxiety disorders and physical illnesses are more susceptible to acquiring this disorder."

I will cite the textbook of which this information was generated. Here it is: Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan (2014). Abnormal Psychology (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

I think it is necessary to include statistics on how significant the correlation is between the disorder and its prevalence in families.There is limited information in the article about the topic, so I thought this might help. --Kpatelzimbabwe (talk) 03:45, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Cultural Psychology Page

Where's the fourth I in the 4 I's section of the cultural psychology page? Or are there only 3 I's?

Problems with implicit cognition article

The article on implicit cognition is not written to the usual Wikipedia level of clarity, readability, and grammatical correctness. The information in the article may very well be correct and helpful, but it needs to be edited.

Thanks for your comments. This is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and you don't have to register to edit. Feel free to begin the cleanup. It might help the rest of us if you could explain some of the details about your concerns at Talk: Implicit cognition. If you need any help on how to do things around here, place {{helpme}} on your talk page, or ask me on my talk page. Sundayclose (talk) 16:35, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Low frustration tolerance

Might it be a good idea to reference conditions that are co-morbid with low frustration tolerance? For example, depression, Aspberger's syndrome, and/or ADHD.

References:

Yogator (talk) 17:19, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Review request of a possible walled garden of Oettingen/Gollwitzer works

Hello project psychology,

Disclaimers first: I am a complete stranger to psychology, though I know a bit about research in general (and in physics specifically). I checked only archives 6 and 7 in passing for that talk page, feel free to WP:TROUT me if the subject has already been discussed and/or solved.

I came across the AfD for WOOP (scientific strategy) which lead me to mental contrasting and implementation intention, articles for which I would like to see some external review.

Those articles have some issues (for instance, Mental_contrasting#Application is not-very-subtle WP:ADMASQ), but I am wondering whether the whole thing is not WP:UNDUE weight given to the works of Oettingen and Gollwitzer (plus maybe PhD students or close colleagues). The references include maybe 90% of papers where either of the two is author or co-author.

It is not technically a walled garden since those do not link anywhere, but the general idea fits: a specific subdomain of dubious notability with no ingoing or outgoing links (except maybe to very general subjects). I simply cannot tell between a famous subdomain with two world-leading specialists and a crusade by two crazies trying to sell their research/books.

Thank you, Tigraan (talk) 09:45, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

You're right. I'm not a psych-expert and I'm not even a member of this WikiProject (oops), but I read through those articles and their references and we definitely have some sort of a walled garden issue with these, plus the way the articles are written is not quite encyclopedic. Here are the thoughts i expressed in my edit summaries: Mental contrasting: "This article is an advert and mostly sourced from Oettingen's writings"; Implementation intention: "written like an essay; I also suspect that some of the non-Gollwitzer sources don't directly talk about/refer to the topic of this article specifically"; WOOP (scientific strategy): "This article is an advert and primarily sourced from Oettingen and Gollwitzer's writings"; also Talk:Gabriele Oettingen: "I'm not gonna put tags on this article but I think it's slightly advert-like and too many of the supporting refs are primary sources." — Jeraphine Gryphon ^(talk) 16:55, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

If Peter Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen are "two crazies" as User:Tigraan suspects above, they are certainly fooling a lot of people, as judged by the number of citations of their work on Google Scholar: author:PM Gollwitzer and author:G Oettingen. Biogeographist (talk) 13:43, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Citation stats (especially counting self-cites) are not a good measure of scientific value, it gives a rough idea at best. You have a point that they are not unknown in the academic world, but caution is still needed. Michel Maffesoli has huge citation counts... Tigraan (talk) 09:16, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree that caution is always needed, but there is a fine line between caution and innuendo, neutrality and disconfirmation bias, skepticism and pseudoskepticism. It is not difficult to find controversy about Michel Maffesoli; indeed, it is documented in his Wikipedia article. But I have not yet found any controversy about Gollwitzer and Oettingen, and it appears that User:Tigraan has not found any controversy either (correct me if I'm wrong). Gollwitzer and Oettingen have coauthored publications with John Bargh, and some of Bargh's work has recently become controversial after other researchers failed to replicate his findings (this controversy is documented in Bargh's Wikipedia article). Neither Gollwitzer nor Oettingen were coauthors on the studies that failed to replicate. Controversy about Gollwitzer and Oettingen's work could, of course, emerge if other psychologists fail to replicate their studies. Let's hope that such replication attempts continue not only for the sake of science but also to provide more sources for the Wikipedia articles on implementation intention and mental contrasting. To date I have seen nothing written about Gollwitzer or Oettingen that warrants a suspicion of craziness. Biogeographist (talk) 13:37, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

"To date I have seen nothing written about Gollwitzer or Oettingen that warrants a suspicion of craziness." Neither have I. My rant was more about the principle (more citations = good) than the issue at hand. (By "craziness" I mean being the sole promoters of ideas that the rest of the field views at best as uninteresting and at worse as ludicrous.)

However, as per my discussion of sources at [4], I am fairly sure Oettingen or her editor called every journalist they could for book promotion, so I see a possibility that the drums and trumpets made them more famous than their academic status warrants. (There are countless examples of the mainstream press publishing "scientific" articles that were in reality nothing more than "X answered our phone call and we paraphrased everything they said", or even "we answered X's phone call and…".) This, in turn, might or might not have impacted Wikipedia coverage of related areas, and someone with moderate knowledge of the field could check that better than me. Tigraan (talk) 08:36, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I see your points. I'm not especially concerned about implementation intention and mental contrasting, but I agree that psychologists in general (and editors that write about the field on Wikipedia) need to pay attention to the issues you raise. Here's a recent article on the subject:

• Strickland, Brent; Mercier, Hugo (March 2014). "Bias neglect: a blind spot in the evaluation of scientific results" (PDF). Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 67 (3): 570--580. doi:10.1080/17470218.2013.821510. PMID 23944157. Experimenter bias occurs when scientists' hypotheses influence their results, even if involuntarily. Meta-analyses have suggested that in some domains, such as psychology, up to a third of the studies could be unreliable due to such biases. A series of experiments demonstrates that while people are aware of the possibility that scientists can be more biased when the conclusions of their experiments fit their initial hypotheses, they robustly fail to appreciate that they should also be more sceptical of such results. This is true even when participants read descriptions of studies that have been shown to be biased. Moreover, participants take other sources of bias—such as financial incentives—into account, showing that this bias neglect may be specific to theory-driven hypothesis testing. In combination with a common style of scientific reporting, bias neglect could lead the public to accept premature conclusions. Biogeographist (talk) 14:35, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Suggestions for production blocking

Hello everyone,

My name is Ana and I am currently an undergraduate student who enrolled in an independent study course that is asking us to edit existing Wikipedia articles in Psychology. The article I chose to edit was a Psychology stub: production blocking. I realized that it would have been a better idea if someone read over my sandbox draft before I made it go live. Since that already happened, I would really appreciate it if someone took some time to read over my contributions. For future purposes, I will definitely be asking for advice and suggestions before editing an article.

Thank you and I hope to hear from someone soon!

Ana L. Cortez (talk) 20:39, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation and the 2015 APS conference

Hi WikiProject Psychology,

The Wiki Education Foundation will be hosting a booth and a workshop at the Association for Psychological Science convention in New York later this month. We'd love to meet WikiProject Psych folks, so if you're going to be there, I hope you'll stop by and say hello! --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:07, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Draft:Self system

Please could someone with a knowledge of Psychology please have a look at Draft:Self system - I have no subject knowledge, so cannot tell if it's ready to be published or not. Joseph2302 (talk) 16:28, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

I've accepted the article -- thanks for bringing it here. Looie496 (talk) 18:04, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Drafts relevant to psychology

I have created a number of drafts in various stages of development that are (to varying degrees) relevant to psychology. Any assistance getting these done and moved to mainspace (where they will supplant existing disambiguation pages where primary topics should sit) would be appreciated. They are:

• Draft:Accusation
• Draft:Atonement
• Draft:Captivity
• Draft:Confrontation
• Draft:Guess (almost done, already proposed to move to mainspace)
• Draft:Mental state (obviously)
• Draft:Mockery
• Draft:Rivalry‎

Cheers! bd2412 T 20:09, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Article on Avi Tuschman and Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

This article is up for deletion, if people want to have a look here. -- Avi Tuschman (talk 22:52, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Deletion of Convergent and divergent production

Hello,

Some days ago, I proposed that the article Convergent and divergent production be deleted as it is a "content fork". Looking at the AFD instructions, it seems I should have notified people here to attract attention. The discussion is here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Convergent and divergent production. OsFish (talk) 01:28, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Chinese whispers listed at Requested moves

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Rationalization (making excuses) listed at Requested moves

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Lisztomania (phenomenon) listed at Requested moves

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Campus rape listed at Requested moves

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Coulrophobia

...wondering whether anyone here would care to improve the content/framing of Coulrophobia#Research.

Please see/discuss at WT:MED#Coulrophobia thread. Thanks, 109.146.70.40 (talk) 12:24, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Review of Article

After review of this article I feel that it can use improvements. The first paragraph in the "definition" section does not seem to have a reference. It was unclear if this paragraph went with the next paragraph (which was cited) or not. If it does belong with the 3rd paragraph I would suggest combining the two so that readers can tell where the information came from. In reference to the 3rd paragraph, I have some concerns about the reference from enotes.com. Whenever I click on the link it takes me to a website that has a comment from a 'college teacher'. How reliable is this source? The other references are from peer-reviewed journals, which are much more credible than a note-taking website.

The section that relates Law of Effect to natural selection also does not list a reference. This example seems like more of an inference or assumption from the author, instead of a fact. Also the Colwill and Rescorla example seemed out of place. It was a one line sentence with a reference behind it. Had I not clicked on the reference note I would not have known that this example came from a scholarly journal that analyzes Thorndike's effect. This example could have used an introduction explaining why it was relevant to this article. In the same section the article discusses Skinner, but provides no reference to how Skinner and Thorndyke can be related.

The only link that I found to not work was the 'connectionism' link.

Overall, I found this article to be well written, with minor defaults that can be easily fixed.

CCMcgrew (talk) 18:59, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Which article are you referring to? AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:07, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary—Featured Article Candidate

I have nominated the article for Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary—an autobiographical account of a man suffering from OCD—as a Featured Article Candidate. Please take part in the review at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary/archive1! Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 07:49, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Blue eye image and blue eye primacy for the image caption at the Physical attractiveness article

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Physical attractiveness#Blue eye image and blue eye primacy for the image caption. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 (talk) 05:58, 11 July 2015 (UTC)