Category Archives: Discussion

Enunciation on Open Access: The practitioners’ perspective

A continually  growing body of student organizations, as well as scientists, have been advocating for an Open Access to scientific publications. The European Federation of Psychology Students Associations (EFPSA) has been part of this effort for a long time and this blog hosts an extensive cover of the numerous aspects of the Open Access initiative. Checking the Open Access tag, here at the bulletin, will give you a comprehensive list of the already covered topics by the JEPS editors and their associates.

To begin, in working for advocating and raising awareness, the collaboration of many organizations and institutions has already produced results and we have seen governmental and intergovernmental bodies already taking steps to favour open publication policies. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Research Councils’ policy on Open Access and EU Commission’s inclusion of Open Access as a general principle in the Horizon 2020 projects are high level decisions that will ensure extended access to scientific knowledge and awareness of the issues amongst researchers.

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Dimitris Parperis

Dimitris is a master student at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and has a degree in Psychology from the University of Cyprus. His main research interests focus on health, social, and clinical questions around sexuality and gender issues. He has served EFPSA from a number of positions and is a former Vice-President of the organisation.

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How to Collect Data Effectively? An Overview of the Best Online Survey Providers

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This post will talk about the pros and cons of a few selected providers of online survey services and may help you find the best survey service provider for your research purposes. With the information given in this post, your future data collections will become much easier due to the overview of survey providers for quantitative research you will receive. After giving you an insight into the diversity of survey tools and the general features they provide, four of the best featured and most frequently used survey tool providers will be presented in greater detail.

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Sina Scherer

Sina Scherer

Sina Scherer, studying at University of Münster, Germany, and University of Padova, Italy. I have previously worked as JEPS Bulletin Editor and am active in a NMUN project simulating the political work of the United Nations as voluntary work. I am interested in cognitive neuroscience and intercultural psychology, anthropology and organizational psychology (aspects of work-life balance, expatriation).

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Are the Methods of Psychology to Blame for its Unscientific Image? The Basis of Public Perceptions of ‘Scientific’ Research

Crystal-ball2Psychology is defined to students as the scientific study of human behaviour. However, when the American Psychological Association surveyed 1,000 adult members of the public, 70% did not agree with the statement, ‘psychology attempts to understand the way people behave through scientific research’ (Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, 2008, p. 29). Lay people deny, what is to those within psychology, an undeniable fact: that psychology aims to test theory-grounded hypotheses in an objective, replicable and empirical manner – and is therefore scientific. Recently, psychologists have investigated the reasons for such a divide between expert and novice views of the field. In doing so, they have uncovered how lay people evaluate whether a subject deserves the scientific stamp of approval. Continue reading

Robert Blakey

Robert Blakey

Robert Blakey is a third year undergraduate student of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and was a member of the 2012-2013 cohort of EFPSA's Junior Researcher Programme. He is currently carrying out a research project on the effect of interaction on estimation accuracy and writing a dissertation on consumer neuroscience. He is also interested in social cognition and specifically, public perceptions of influences on behaviour.

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The Impostor Syndrome

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It has become increasingly clear that academia is rife with a condition known as the ‘impostor phenomenon’. The term was coined in 1978 by psychologists Clance and Imes in describing a sample of high-achieving women who were not able to internalise their many successes. Like many others today, these women felt that they had gotten to their place in life only by a series of flukes. The so-called syndrome can be debilitating; those with it feel like frauds and, worst of all, that at any moment they could be found out and exposed (Gravois, 2007). Recently, more and more people in academia have ‘admitted’ to having the impostor syndrome.

 

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Julie Lee

Julie Lee (@synapticlee) is a second year psychology undergraduate at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Her research interests are in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.

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Crowdsourcing (Gathering Data Online): Cutting Cost & Time

networkImagine a task that is simple for a human and difficult for a computer. For example, recognizing if a photograph contains a cat or a dog is a straightforward task even for a few months old child (Quinn & Eimas, 1996), but extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a computer  (Shotton et al., 2006) because the two are quite similar in terms of shape. In order to capitalize on human’s superiority over computers in some kind of tasks, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) came up with a platform called Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome), where it is possible to ask human workers to complete HITs – Human Intelligence Tasks.

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Peter Lewinski

Peter Lewinski

Peter Lewinski is Marie Curie Research Fellow in The CONsumer COmpetence Research Training (CONCORT) and in Vicarious Perception Technologies B.V. He is a PhD candidate (2012-2015) in Persuasive Communication at Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) - University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He studies facial expressions and advertisements. He was at the EFPSA Executive Board and Board of Management in 2011-2013.

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APA’s Five General Principles of Ethics: How Do They Matter to an Aspiring Scientist

875413_47541979 Ethics are a vast, key topic in psychological research. What is necessarily taken into consideration in regards to ethics before conducting research is studied and then read again and again in guidelines and codes of conduct. But what lies beyond the legislations in ethics? Where should a researcher’s moral compass be pointing to? Here are the outlines proposed by the APA and some general discussion relating to them.

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Etien Benov

Etien Benov

Etien Benov is currently a BSc Psychology student in Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" and he is serving as a Bulletin Editor in the Journal of European Psychology Students. His interests are mainly in neuroscience research and philosophy of science.

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Social Sciences: Academia & Industry – On the Edge of Two Worlds

Academia and industry are are often defined as two conflicting worlds. However, these two worlds can complement and learn from one another. In this article, I will present my experience working on the edge of academia and industry and enjoying both equally.

In addition, I will focus on the social sciences and the career prospective of the young bachelor or master graduates while taking into account the broad international context.

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Peter Lewinski

Peter Lewinski

Peter Lewinski is Marie Curie Research Fellow in The CONsumer COmpetence Research Training (CONCORT) and in Vicarious Perception Technologies B.V. He is a PhD candidate (2012-2015) in Persuasive Communication at Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) - University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He studies facial expressions and advertisements. He was at the EFPSA Executive Board and Board of Management in 2011-2013.

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On the Importance of Behavioural Research

The overarching point of this article will be to convey that behavioural psychology may be out-of-fashion, but still has many things to contribute to modern psychology.

All science is ultimately born of philosophy (see Pepper, 1942) and therefore there is no reason why this science should play second fiddle to any other. However, in the rat race to make strides in the science of behaviour, principles of science are often discarded in favour of convenience. The dominant school of thought in psychology at present is cognitivism. This school adopts a predominantly top-down approach to psychology. This involves simplifying phenomena into their perceived component parts, in order to study them. This phenomenon may constitute a set back for the way research is conducted and human behavior ultimately conceptualized.  Allow me to illustrate why this is a problem.

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Shane McLoughlin

Shane McLoughlin

Shane McLoughlin is a graduate of the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire, who awarded him with a B.Sc. in Applied Psychology in 2012. He is currently researching and writing on the modern behavioural science of Relational Frame Theory, an approach to language and cognition. His research interests are rooted in the philosophy of science, particularly applied to the study of effective thinking and fallacies which lead to ineffective thinking.

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