Psychotherapy was a marvellous invention, but initial enthusiasm regarding its efficacy has now been obfuscated due to scientific biases that systematically inflate estimates

Raising awareness for the replication crisis in clinical psychology by focusing on inconsistencies in psychotherapy research: how much can we rely on published findings from efficacy trials? Michael P. Hengartner. Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00256

Summary and conclusions: As in other psychological specialties (see Bakker et al., 2012), effect sizes published in the clinical psychological literature are often heterogeneous and inflated due to various scientific biases including allegiance bias (Luborsky et al., 1999), publication bias (Driessen et al., 2015), unblinded outcome assessors (Khan et al., 2012), sponsorship bias (Cristea et al., 2017b), or small sample sizes (Cuijpers et al., 2010b). After adjustment for systematic biases, efficacy estimates for various psychotherapy modalities tend to be disappointingly small (Cristea et al., 2017a; Cuijpers et al., 2010b). Some evidence suggests that when efficacy is estimated based exclusively on unbiased high-quality trials, effects of psychotherapy could fall below the threshold for clinical relevance (Cuijpers et al., 2014a). Recently, some psychotherapy researchers hence raised the controversial point that effects of both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy for depression may entirely reflect a placebo effect (Cuijpers & Cristea, 2015). Of further concern is the gap between treatment efficacy in controlled laboratory trials and treatment effectiveness in naturalistic real-world settings (Hallfors & Cho, 2007; Westen et al., 2004). The literature reviewed in this commentary was restricted to the efficacy of clinical psychological interventions, as that topic is highly relevant for clinical psychology. Nevertheless, conflicting and irreproducible findings have been detected and discussed in various other hot topics within clinical psychology, including the effect of menopause on the occurrence of depression (Hengartner, 2017; Rössler et al., 2016), the putative consequences of violent video games (Calvert et al., 2017; Ferguson and Kilburn, 2010), or inconsistent associations between psychopathology and stress physiology (Chida and Hamer, 2008; Rosmalen and Oldehinkel, 2011). Even though the replication crisis was mostly addressed within social psychology, I conclude that it is no less pernicious and prevalent in clinical psychology. Psychotherapy was a marvellous invention, but initial enthusiasm regarding its efficacy has now been obfuscated due to scientific biases that systematically inflate estimates. Being aware of these issues may certainly improve our scientific and clinical endeavours.

While women no longer tend to marry up in education, they still do in terms of earnings

The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and its Consequences for Family Life. Jan Van Bavel, Christine Schwartz, Albert Esteve. Forthcoming in Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 44, 2018. https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/611965

Abstract: While men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. We review the literature about the implications for union formation, assortative mating, the division of paid and unpaid work, and union stability in Western countries. The bulk of the evidence points to a narrowing of gender differences in mate preferences and declining aversion to female status-dominant relationships. Couples in which wives have more education than their husbands now outnumber those in which husbands have more. While such marriages were more unstable in the past, existing studies indicate that this is no longer true. In addition, recent studies show less evidence of gender display in housework when wives have higher status than their husbands. Despite these shifts, other research documents the continuing influence of the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage.

Significant liberal/conservative differences in self-reported emotional expressivity, in facial emotional expressivity measured physiologically, in the perceived emotional expressivity and ideology of political elites

In your face: Emotional expressivity as a predictor of ideology. Johnathan Caleb Peterson et al. Politics and the Life Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2017.13

Abstract: Research suggests that people can accurately predict the political affiliations of others using only information extracted from the face. It is less clear from this research, however, what particular facial physiological processes or features communicate such information. Using a model of emotion developed in psychology that treats emotional expressivity as an individual-level trait, this article provides a theoretical account of why emotional expressivity may provide reliable signals of political orientation, and it tests the theory in four empirical studies. We find statistically significant liberal/conservative differences in self-reported emotional expressivity, in facial emotional expressivity measured physiologically, in the perceived emotional expressivity and ideology of political elites, and in an experiment that finds that more emotionally expressive faces are perceived as more liberal.