On Friday, the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on a story candidate Ben Carson was told about himself in his 1990 autobiography involving a fake psychology test. Now, BuzzFeed News reports, it would seem that Carson was indeed the victim of a hoax—just not the hoax that he thought. To recap this part of the Republican presidential candidate’s hero’s journey: A Yale psychology professor who told his students that their final exam paper had caught fire and that they needed to take a new exam. Carson claimed that he was the only one who showed up to retake the test, and he was >>>

Video gaming has a bad reputation. In the aisles of Wal-Mart or Target, you see potato chips or other junk foods under newly released games. In the eyes of many, video games are just a way to procrastinate or pass time. However, recent research has shown there are cognitive benefits to video gaming. According to Psychology Today, an experiment conducted by a group of psychologists found >>>

Curtis Bakal, a former editorial assistant for The Yale Record, told BuzzFeed News that he helped write the exam that Carson described taking in his 1990 book "Gifted Hands." He confirmed to the news outlet that the Record put out a January 1970 parody issue of the university's student paper, The Yale Daily News, that included a notice saying that "so-and-so section of the exam has been lost in a fire. Professor so-and-so is going to give a makeup exam." Bakal told BuzzFeed he could not confirm that Carson, or any single student, was there at the end of the fake test because he himself was not >>>

One experimental result doesn't mean much in science. To truly know whether a result is valid, it needs to be reproduced in the same way over and over again. Yet research that may not be reproduced often finds its way into well-regarded journals, due to limited resources, human error or, rarely, outright fraud. Unreplicable research is especially problematic for drug trials and other clinical research. A recent estimate put the costs associated with irreproducible preclinical research at $28 billion a year in the United States. Short of spending money to run the published experiment again, no >>>

Andrew Shurtleff/The New York Times/Redux / eyevine Researchers at the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, coordinated a team effort to replicate the findings of 100 psychology studies — and ran a betting game to see if those results could be predicted. (From left: Johanna Cohoon, Mallory Kidwell, Courtney Soderberg and Brian Nosek.] When psychologists are asked which findings in their field will pass a replication attempt, their predictions prove little better than flipping a coin. But if they >>>

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Engaging in brief, cognitive-behavioral therapy is an effective treatment for helping people with problematic caffeine use lower their caffeine consumption, according to a new study coauthored by Laura M. Juliano, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at American University. The clinically significant study found that, on average, participants reduced their caffeine consumption by 77 percent during treatment, and more than three-fourths of participants reduced consumption to below 200 mg per day. After one year, average caffeine consumption levels remained low. "These findings, which come from >>>

As news outlets continue to dig into Ben Carson's biography, the 2016 presidential candidate is playing fact-checker for his own life. But the evidence he is posting to back up his stories doesn't always clear up confusion about his claims.Among the stories in his memoir, "Gifted Hands," that have proven difficult to verify are his accounts of violent behavior as a young man and an anecdote about a psychology exam he took as a student at Yale University.Early Monday morning, Carson posted what he said was a Parade Magazine interview with his mother from May 11, 1997. >>>

Carson related the tale in his 1990 book "Gifted Hands." He wrote that he showed up to retake an exam for a psychology course, which he said was titled "Perceptions 301," after the original tests were "inadvertently burned." The retired neurosurgeon claimed in the book that all 150 students who showed up for the makeup test walked out except for him. In Carson's telling, the professor then told him the makeup test was a hoax designed "to see who was the most honest student in the class." The professor then handed him $10 and a photographer from the Yale Daily News took his photo, according to >>>

It all goes downhill after 30 — at least when it comes to happiness. “Adults over 30 are less happy than their predecessors,” concludes a study published online Thursday in the journal Social Psychology and Personality >>>