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The Research Programme Blog
Have you been in a position to convince someone that they should read a book that changed all your perspective or to inform your friends about the efficacy of a specific type of psychotherapy but you couldn’t let go of the scientific language? I am sure that a major part of you encountered similar situations so we are inviting you to be part of the Research Programme Blog. You heard that right! We aim to offer a broader set of possibilities for students to involve in promoting scientific content that can easily be understood by everyone. Besides that, we are encouraging students from around the world to strengthen their writing…
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Call for Research Programme Student Researchers 2022-2023
The Call for EFPSA Research Programme 2022 Participants is now open! Are you a motivated European Bachelor or Master-level psychology student? And are you interested in conducting a one-year cross-cultural research project together with students from all over Europe? Do you want to gain experience in every aspect of research, from designing the study to data collection to communicating the results? If your answer is yes, apply to become a student researcher in the EFPSA Research Programme! Who: European Bachelor’s and Master-level students in psychology! What: Research Programme Deadline: 10th of June, 23:59 CEST What is EFPSA Research Programme? The EFPSA Research Programme (EFPSA RP) is an EFPSA Service, consisting…
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Psychedelics as a Scientific Tool for Mental Health
An Interview with Marvin Däumichen, MA, co-founder of the MIND Foundation Psychedelic drugs might become the next big therapeutic tool to fight depression and other psychiatric disorders as “changes in self-experience, emotional processing and social cognition may contribute to the potential therapeutic effects” (Vollenweider & Preller, 2020). Classical psychedelics like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) that are administered with appropriate guidance and in a controlled therapeutic setting that includes preparation and reflexion upon the experience were shown to enhance mental health (Walton & Liknaitzky, 2020). We talked to Marvin Däumichen who is a co-founder of the MIND Foundation about the history and potential of psychedelics as a…
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How to Score a Perfect PhD
Finding a perfect PhD is somewhat like dating: there is no such thing as a soulmate-PhD, but some are still better than others; the number of options seems overwhelming at first, but most of them crumble once inspected carefully; and, of course, once committed, the choice will significantly influence the rest of your life. To make it even more challenging, the soulmate-PhD problem is also expected to be dealt with at the most vulnerable point in the lifetime of a student—as if by Murphy’s law, the deadlines usually land somewhere between the final in the sequence of many exams and the Masters thesis defense. Under such conditions, even the most…
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Open Science in Times of Corona
How research has changed through the pandemic Let’s talk about the movement towards connected and open science that has happened and is still happening right now due to the pandemic that the corona virus brought upon us. You may have noticed as well that research has started to stretch its boundaries remarkably in the presence of the virus. Facing death, the fear of losing people close to your heart and the threat of our very own existential foundations has turned not only our personal but the economic and scientific world upside down. Open Science in times of Corona It is evident that the more data researchers can access, the more…
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Open Science Bottom Up – An interview with SIOS (Student Initiative for Open Science)
The field of psychology has been profoundly impacted by the replication and reproducibility crises – which unearthed many issues in the way psychological science is conducted (if you are unfamiliar or want to refresh your knowledge, Galetzka, 2019, offers a short summary). As a reaction to these issues, many initiatives across the world are now trying to implement changes in our research culture – changes that are usually referred to under the umbrella term “Open Science”. One of the fundamental characteristics is that many of these initiatives are lead by young researchers eager to do the best research they can. These are mostly PhD students or PostDocs, but under-/graduate students…
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Doing Open Science in a Developing Country – An Interview with Dr. Chuan-Peng Hu
Open Science practices are becoming increasingly common and we at the Journal of European Psychology Students, are committed to Open Science practices and to promote researchers engaging in them. Today, we have the privilege of interviewing one of these researchers. Dr. Chuan-Peng Hu is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Resilience Center (Deutsches Resilienz Zentrum, DRZ) in Mainz and an Assistant Director at the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA). After studying Law and Psychology at University, he completed a Master’s programme in Social Psychology in Wuhan, China. In 2007, he completed his PhD in Beijing before moving to Germany. His research investigates the consolidation of positive memories, which may play a…
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Exploratory and Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing
Introduction The replication crisis has spread all across the scientific community. In the field of psychology, scientists were not able to replicate more than half of previous findings (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). For a long time this problem went unnoticed, but a critical moment occurred when Daryl Bem published his now infamous paper on humans’ ability to quite literally predict the future (Bem, 2011). Many readers doubted his findings as there was no logical basis for the ability to predict the future and years later Daniel Engber summarized it nicely when he wrote: “(…) the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. (…).…
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Editors’ Picks: Summer Reading List
Your semester has ended and you are already bored by how much time the holidays freed up? Do you want to dive deeper into issues around psychological science, but did not know where to start? For the next weeks, we are going to be sharing our editors’ recommendations for your summer readings & listenings on different psychological topics. These will include all sorts of media, from newspaper articles or podcasts to journal articles we thought you should definitely read. We will be continously updating this list over the summer and have decided to group our suggestions broadly by topic. These topics are (in order of publishing): -Open Science -Philosophy of…
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Open Science Bottom-Up: An Interview with OSIP (PsyFaKo’s Open Science Initiative)
For the Editors of JEPS, one of the most important topics in current psychological science and beyond are the issues of replicability and reproducibility [for an introduction, see Galetzka, 2019], as well as possible paths to solutions. The keyword here is Open Science, an umbrella term for activities which strive to make science more transparent, openly accessible, and reproducible, in an effort to increase our confidence in the results we read in the body of scientific literature. While many Open Science initiatives are led by more senior researchers, the movement is fundamentally driven by bottom-up initiatives of early-career researchers, but students as well. For this interview, we sat down and…
