"Junior researchers face a choice: a high or low road to success?" James C. Coyne presentation

[Dolphin]

(No references to ME/CFS, but of course rigour and the lack of it in some cases in psychology and psychiatry, is of interest to some of us).

James C. Coyne could be described as a renegade psychology researcher.
He likes rigour and is willing to challenge instances where it is lacking.
One example is that he says there is no evidence psychological therapies extend life in Cancer.

Here's his latest blog post:

Junior researchers face a choice: a high or low road to success?

http://blogs.plos.org/mindthebrain/...-face-a-choice-a-high-or-low-road-to-success/

The slides are probably best looked at after reading the text (or indeed, there is no need to read them, but I found it revision to look through them again).

He goes into more details in other blog posts, so I suppose there is the possibility people might find this presentation unsatisfactory as he covers lots of topics without going into depth in them.

 

[Dolphin]

I notice he says the following:

Many celebrated findings in the field of psycho-oncology are really null findings, if you carefully look at them.

These include

• Spiegel, D., Kraemer, H., Bloom, J., & Gottheil, E. (1989). Effect of psychosocial treatment on survival of patients with metastatic breast cancer. The Lancet, 334(8668), 888-891.
• Fawzy, F. I., Fawzy, N. W., Hyun, C. S., Elashoff, R., Guthrie, D., Fahey, J. L., & Morton, D. L. (1993). Malignant melanoma: effects of an early structured psychiatric intervention, coping, and affective state on recurrence and survival 6 years later. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50(9), 681.
• Antoni, M. H., Lehman, J. M., Klibourn, K. M., Boyers, A. E., Culver, J. L., Alferi, S. M., … & Carver, C. S. (2001). Cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention decreases the prevalence of depression and enhances benefit finding among women under treatment for early-stage breast cancer.Health Psychology, 20(1), 20.
• Andersen, B. L., Yang, H. C., Farrar, W. B., Golden‐Kreutz, D. M., Emery, C. F., Thornton, L. M., … & Carson, W. E. (2008). Psychologic intervention improves survival for breast cancer patients. Cancer, 113(12), 3450-3458.

Antoni often works with Nancy Klimas (there are 43 references for "Klimas Antonia", none of which might be other people on a quick look.
They are currently doing a Cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention study.

 

[Dolphin]

No matter what your results, in your discussion section claim they confirm the dominant view and reaffirm that view, even if it is irrelevant or contradicted by your findings.

See that quite a bit in the ME/CFS field e.g. studies that find improvements in subjective measures but no improvement in objective measures still talking about how good the graded activity/exercise model is for the illness.

 

[Valentijn]

See that quite a bit in the ME/CFS field e.g. studies that find improvements in subjective measures but no improvement in objective measures still talking about how good the graded activity/exercise model is for the illness.

I always assumed they were just idiots who couldn't read. I didn't realize they might be doing it deliberately to get patted on the head by the big boys.