Category: psychology

Bucking the advice of university investigators, a journal founded by Hans Eysenck has issued expressions of concern — not retractions — for three articles by the deceased psychologist whose work has been dogged by controversy since the 1980s. 

The move comes barely a week after other journals opted to retract 13 papers by Eysenck, who died in 1997. Those retractions were prompted by the findings of a 2019 investigation by King’s College London, where Eysenck worked until 1983. That inquiry concluded that: 

Two journals have retracted 13 papers co-authored by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, following a university investigation that found dozens of his papers to be “unsafe.”

One of the journals, Perceptual and Motor Skills, subjected 36 of Eysenck’s papers to expressions of concern, while another — Psychological Reports — subjected 25 of them to the same flag. Both journals are published by SAGE.

A May 2019 report by King’s College London into the work of Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, apparently of the University Heidelberg, that more than two dozen papers be retracted. Among other issues, the report cited

The Journal of Consumer Research has retracted a 2019 paper because it overlapped significantly with a study previously published in Chinese by the same authors.

But whether both authors agreed to the previous submission is a subject of some confusion on the part of one of them.

The journal, published by Oxford Academic, added “RETRACTED” to the beginning of the paper’s title, “Sorry by Size: How the Number of Apologizers Affects Apology Effectiveness,” but did not include a retraction notice, nor any other explanation. The notice, second author Sam Maglio, of the University of Toronto, told Retraction Watch, will read:

The International Journal of Sport Psychology has retracted a paper by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, whose work has faced doubts since the early 1990s.

The paper, published in 1990, was one of dozens by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek found to be “unsafe” by King’s College London, but appears to be the first to be retracted.

Here’s the abstract of “Psychological factors as determinants of success in football and boxing: The effects of behaviour therapy”:

Robert Sternberg, a Cornell psychology professor whose work has earned three retractions for duplication, has had another paper retracted for the same reason.

Here’s the notice:

A journal on adolescent issues has retracted a pair of papers linking exposure to violent media to aggressive behavior in youth after critics questioned the validity of the data. 

The studies, which appeared in Youth & Society, were led by Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in Chongqing, China and were published in 2018. 

According to the retraction notice, which covers both “Short-term exposure to movie violence and implicit aggression during adolescence,” and “The priming effect of violent game play on aggression among adolescents”:

A Dutch university has found a former psychology researcher at the institution guilty of misconduct for several offenses, including lack of ethics approval for some of her studies and fabricating results in grant applications. 

In a Nov. 11, 2019, report, officials at the University of Leiden stated that the researcher, whom it does not identify, violated academic integrity in the following ways: 

A psychology researcher at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has left a tenure-track position there less than a year after she and a co-author retracted a paper whose methods had been questioned online, Retraction Watch has learned.

Ping Dong and Chen-bo Zhong, a professor at the University of Toronto, where Dong received her PhD, retracted a paper from Psychological Science in November 2018, six months after publishing it. As we reported at the time, the paper

A group of researchers in the United States and China have retracted their 2018 paper on hand hygiene, admitting that they can’t account for “data anomalies” in their work.

The article in question, “The decoy effect as a nudge: Boosting hand hygiene with a worse option,” appeared in Psychological Science last May. Meng Li, of the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver, and Hui Chen, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported results from experiments designed to increase the use of hand sanitizer in the workplace through the use of a “decoy” bottle: