The dodo bird might be extinct in the real world but in the world of psychotherapy research it refuses to die. However, a group of German researchers recently put forward an article were they had randomized patients to either a PDT or CBT condition and measured the relative proficiency of the two orientations, and they found that their results delivered a convincing blow to the dodo bird verdict. Read more
All Posts by Kristoffer Magnusson
How to tell when error bars correspond to a significant p-value
Can you tell when error bars based on 95 % CIs or standard errors correspond to a significant p-value? Don’t fret if you think it’s hard, a study from 2005 showed that researchers in psychogoly, behavior neuroscience and medicine had a hard time judging when error bars from two independent groups signified a significant difference. Read more
The Higgs boson: 5-sigma and the concept of p-values
Why are physicists talking about 5-sigma, and what’s it got to do with statistics? In this short post I’ll explain what 5-sigma is and why it’s not a measure of how certain scientist are that they’ve found the Higgs boson Read more
Effect of sample size on the accuracy of Cohen’s d estimates (95 % CI)
When talking about confidence intervals, Jacob Cohen famously said: “I suspect that the main reason they are not reported is that they are so embarrassingly large!” (Cohen, 1994). In this post I’ll take a look at the relationship between the 95 % CI for Cohen’s d and it’s corresponding sample size. Read more
PubMed publications in 2011 by 202 world countries: who’s the winner?
Which country had the most PubMed citations in 2011? To find out I used R statistical software to analyze the affiliation of 986 427 articles. Read more
How to download complete XML records from PubMed and extract data
Yesterday I wrote an article that looked at the top 20 Cognitive Behavior Therapy journals with the most publications; today I will explain how I did it with R. Read more
More PubMed data mining: looking at top 20 CBT journals
In this short article I present some data of the top 20 Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) journals with the most PubMed publications, and compare that to data from 2010 and 2011. Read more
Further evidence that mindfulness meditation might bolster creativity
Last week a group of Dutch scientists published a study providing further evidence of mindfulness’ ability to bolster creativity. Specifically they looked at if open awareness differed from focused attention in increasing divergent thinking Read more
Short R script to plot effect sizes (Cohen’s d) and shade overlapping area
In this short post I take a look at how to use R and ggplot2 to visualize effect sizes (Cohen’s d) and how to shade the overlapping area of two distributions. Read more
Meditation, mindfulness, and executive control: results from a new EEG study
A new interesting study by Teper and Ingzlict (2012) examined the effect of meditation practice on executive control. Many studies have shown that meditation does indeed enhance executive control. But in this study the researchers look more at why meditation is effective in enhancing executive control, and not so much if it’s effective. Read more