Publications by Kristoffer Magnusson
Does mindfulness aid insight problem solving? New study suggest so
A new study (Ostafin, B. D., & Kassman, K. T, In Press) examined whether mindfulness meditation could help improve participants’ insight problem solving skills. Their hypothesis was that mindfulness might aid in solving of problems that require creative, nonhabitual responses. Insight problems These are problems that typically generate an eure...
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How to work with Google n-gram data sets in R using MySQL
Tweet Introduction Google Ngram is a corpus of n-grams compiled from data from Google Books. Here I’m going to show how to analyze individual word counts from Google 1-grams in R using MySQL. I’ve also written an R script to automatically extract and plot multiple word counts. To read more about the datasets go to: http://books.google.com/ng...
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Mindfulness and pain: new research review hints at unique mechanism for pain relief
Introduction Even though the effectiveness of mindfulness to reduce pain has been proven in numerous empirical studies its efficacy still remain unclear. Meaning that the effectiveness of mindfulness could be due to some other variable than the specific technique. Potential placebo responses or regression toward the mean could dilute the validity...
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The (Un)disputed Champion of Psychotherapy – Clinical psychologists and their theoretical orientations
Tweet Clinical Psychologists Theoretical Orientations 1960–2010 A recent study by Norcross & Karpiak (2012) looked at survey data from members of APA Division 12 (Society of Clinical Psychology). In their study they included data that has been collected and published regularly since 1960, via self-administered questionnaires. In this new study...
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An R Script to Automatically download PubMed Citation Counts By Year of Publication
Tweet Background I believe there’s some information to be gained from looking at publication trends over time. But it’s really troublesome to do it by hand; fortunately it’s not so troublesome to do it in R statistical software. Though, data like these should be interpreted with extreme caution. How the script works I tried to use the RISm...
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Meditation, mindfulness, and executive control: results from a new EEG study
Introduction It’s not really surprising that meditation might aid in executive control, since the act of meditation is basically an exercise in executive control. Take mindfulness, for example, I would say that the fundamental aspects of mindfulness practice is present moment awareness and emotional acceptance; practices that easily could be de...
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Short R script to plot effect sizes (Cohen’s d) and shade overlapping area
Update: I have created an interactive effect size visualization here Introduction to effect sizes Many times you read in a study that “x and y were significantly different, p < .05”, which is another way of saying that “assuming that the null hypothesis is true, the probability of getting the observed value simply by chance alone is less th...
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Short R script to plot effect sizes (Cohen’s d) and shade overlapping area
Tweet Introduction to effect sizes Many times you read in a study that “x and y were significantly different, p < .05”, which is another way of saying that “assuming that the null hypothesis is true, the probability of getting the observed value simply by chance alone is less than 0.05” But that’s not really that interesting, though is...
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Further evidence that mindfulness meditation might bolster creativity
Introduction I recently wrote an article about if mindfulness could aid in insight problem solving. The problem with the study, I referenced to in my article, was that it did not strictly investigate the mechanism behind mindfulness’ effect, or the impact of different techniques. However, last week a new study by a group of Dutch scientist got ...
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More PubMed data mining: looking at top 20 CBT journals
Tweet Introduction Continuing from what I wrote in my article An R Script to Automatically download PubMed Citation Counts By Year of Publication, I’ve now looked at article counts for journals. I did this by extending my script to download the complete article records in XML from inside R. Then I simply extracted journal names from each artic...
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