Research Misconduct in the Age of Open Science: The Case of STAP Stem Cells

In early 2014, Dr Haruko Obokata and her co-authors caused a global media storm by publishing two scientific papers in Nature on stem cells. The papers proposed a surprisingly simple new method called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) to generate pluripotent stem cells for research purposes in a fast and inexpensive way. To the dismay of many, both papers were retracted within six months of their release due to data fabrication and falsification. The rise and fall of the STAP research illustrates the impacts of open science practices of quality control and validation on new scientific claims. In the STAP case, collective action generated through two online forums—the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog and PubPeer—exposed not only data manipulation in the two papers but also the irreproducibility of the purported new cellular reprogramming method. The case brings to the fore the tentative possibilities as well as potential pitfalls of ‘accelerated virtual witnessing’ through crowdsourced post-publication peer reviews that value accessibility and inclusiveness. Indeed, it calls for empirically grounded discussion on the ongoing reconfiguration of the shared system of values and norms or the moral economy of science.     

Attitude toward Christianity,sexual orientation,and parental religiosity in a sample of Italian adolescents

Literature suggests that several demographic variables are linked with religiosity in adolescence, such as gender, age and parental religiosity. The sample consisted of 910 young people (53% female) between 14 and 19 years of age, attending secular secondary schools in Rome, Italy. They self-identified as heterosexual adolescents (91.6%), and lesbian/gay (LG) adolescents (8.4%). High scores of positive attitudes toward God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer and church were associated with female gender, higher father’s religiosity, and higher mother’s religiosity, but not with age of the participants. As expected, heterosexual orientation was associated with a more positive attitude toward Christianity, controlling for sex, age, and parental religiosity.     

Paradoxical effects of famous music in retail venues

The present study analyzes the effects of famous versus nonfamous ambient music in retail venues on actual shoppers' emotions and cognitions, which, in turn, affect buying intention and brand images. Our theoretical model was basically validated by the data collected in actual shopping venues in 2 studies. Study 1 explores the effects of music famousness on buying intention through the mediation of affect, self‐congruity, and product quality (N = 304). Study 2 explores the effects of music famousness on perceived brand quality through the mediation of self‐congruity and store attitude (N = 351). As expected, famous music has positive effects on shoppers' responses according to the mediating role of affective and cognitive responses and their sequential mediating effects. Paradoxically, famous music has also negative effects on these variables because it distracts consumers from their shopping, reducing cognitive activities. We draw theoretical and managerial conclusions from these findings.     

Behavioral and Emotional Functioning of Children and Adolescents at the End of Treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Compared to Healthy Peers

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - This study describes the behavioral and emotional adjustment of 77 children and adolescents 3 months post-treatment for acute lymphoblastic...     

A modified mark test for own-body recognition in pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina)

Classic mirror self-recognition mark tests involve familiarizing the subject with its mirror image, surreptitiously applying a mark on the subject’s eyebrow, nose, or ear, and measuring self-directed behaviors toward the mark. For many non-human primate species, however, direct gaze at the face constitutes an aggressive and threatening signal. It is therefore possible that monkeys fail the mark test because they do not closely inspect their faces in a mirror and hence they have no expectations about their physical appearance. In the current study, we prevented two pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) from seeing their own faces in a mirror, and we adopted a modified version of the classic mark test in which monkeys were marked on the chest, a body region to which they normally have direct visual access but that in the current study was visible only via a mirror. Neither monkey tried to touch the mark on its chest, possibly due to a failure to understand the mirror as a reflective surface. To further the monkeys’ understanding of the mirror image, we trained them to reach for food using the mirror as the only source of information. After both monkeys had learned mirror-mediated reaching, we replicated the mark test. In this latter phase of the study, only one monkey scratched the red dye on the chest once. The results are consistent with other findings suggesting that monkeys are not capable of passing a mark test and imply that face and body recognition rely on the same cognitive abilities.     

A procedure for the incremental construction of a knowledge space

Knowledge spaces are structures for the efficient assessment of the knowledge state of a student in a given field of knowledge. Existing procedures for constructing a knowledge space by querying an expert assume that the domain of questions is known in advance, and that it is fixed during the whole query process. The outcome of these procedures is a knowledge space on the questions in that domain. If the original domain is extended with new questions, a new knowledge space on the extended domain can be produced by expert query. Since in this case a knowledge space for the original domain already exists, the available information can be used to extend the existing space in an efficient way, thus avoiding to apply expert query from scratch. Existing procedures do not provide an explicit way to use such information. Although these procedures can be adapted to this purpose, in this paper a new query algorithm that is specifically tailored for the problem above mentioned is presented.     

Latino and Latina Adolescents' Help‐seeking Behaviors and Attitudes Regarding Suicide Compared to Peers with Recent Suicidal Ideation

Although Latinas have consistently reported higher rates of suicidal behavior for the past 20 years (CDC, 1996), there is a dearth of information regarding their help‐seeking attitudes and behaviors when dealing with distress and suicide. Associations between adolescents' ideation and help‐seeking from adults were different for non‐Hispanic Whites and Latinos from 14 high schools (N = 4,983). Among females, ideators and Latinas reported lower levels of help‐seeking attitudes than nonideators and non‐Hispanic Whites. Males showed interaction effects of ideation by race/ethnicity on help‐seeking. Within sex by race/ethnicity, differences showed that while non‐Hispanic White students reported consistent differences between suicidal ideation and no reported suicidal ideation, Latinos were more similar between these groups, particularly with having support from friends and family to seek help from adults. Research should clarify how culture contributes to decreased help‐seeking norms among those with suicidal ideation.