Know Thy Positive Self

2017.09.27，投稿到《科学通报》 2017.09.28，初筛退稿 谢谢您的来稿。经初步审查，来稿反映了所在研究领域的新成果，有一定的科学意义。遗憾的是，您的稿件专业性太强，不适合于我刊，建议改投有关专业性期刊。  2017.09.29，给编辑写信： 尊敬的编辑老师： 您好，前几天我们将《贝叶斯因子及其在JASP中的实现》（稿号：N972017-01031）投稿到《科学通报》。经过初步的审查之后，贵刊编辑部肯定了本文的科学性和新颖性，但认为本文专业性太强，予以退稿。来信是想借与编辑部的专家交流一下，为什么作者们认为本文并非专业性文章，希望能够借机与编辑部的专家进行探讨。由于稿件处理邮件中建议不要直接回复csb@scichina.org，所以我们斗胆给您写，如果有不当之处，请您多包涵。 诚如Salsburg (2001)[1]在《The lady tasting tea: How statistics revolutionized science in the twentieth century》中所说，统计方法在现代科学研究中占据着越来越重要的地位。几乎所有实证研究领域均采用统计推断的来辅助研究者进行推断，从而得到研究结论。然而遗憾的是，科研工作者们对统计推断方法却普遍认识不足，这一点从研究者们对研究中最常用的统计指标p值的理解程度方面可见一斑：绝大学部分研究者对p值的真正含义存在误解[2]。正是如此，2016年，美国统计学会为此专门发表申明来澄清p值的意义[3]。 我们撰写本文的主要目的，在于向国内的研究者介绍p值以外的另一种统计推断方法——贝叶斯因子，以及如何通过统计软件使用该方法。我们希望通过此文，能够起到抛砖引玉的作用，与国内同行一起讨论如何在科学研究中正确地使用统计推断方法，从而使用科学的统计方法，进行科学研究，避免国际科学界正面临的可重复性危机（reproducibility crisis）。正是如此，我们希望能够在综合的学术期刊上，与更多正在从事科学研究的同行进行讨论。可以预期，如果将本文投稿到更加专业的期刊，其可能无法与其他学科的同行进行交流与对话。例如，2016年，美国统计学会在统计学专业期刊The American Statistician上发表了关于p值的申明[3]，导致这个申明并未引起各学科研究者的广泛关注，从某种程

Maren, S. (2014). Nature and causes of the immediate extinction deficit: A brief review. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 113(Supplement C), 19-24. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2013.10.012 Last week, one of my colleagues raised a question that I didn't aware before: the immediate extinction and delayed extinction may be different substantially. This difference is so huge that, as she said, replicate a delayed extinction paradigm with an immediate extinction one may be of great danger. So I checked the literature, and do found many studies did the comparison. In the article review part, the author mentioned 17 article, including 4 studies using human subjects and 13 studies used animals (mostly rats). Although the initial reports about the immediate extinction are very positive ( immediate extinction could "erase" fear memory) (Meyers, et al., 2006), but later studies found complicated results. There are more studies reported the immediate extinction deficit, i.e., immediate

Bonanno, G. A., Westphal, M., & Mancini, A. D. (2011). Resilience to Loss and Potential Trauma. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7(1), 511-535. doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032210-104526 Today I read this review on the train from Mainz to Amsterdam, the swinging train made me a little bit impatient, so the reading experience is not so good.  In this classic review, Bonanno et al., (2013) pointed out that using new analytic method -- latent growth mixture modelling -- could overcome the disadvantages of two previous approach (i.e., psychopathology approach and  the trauma event approach).  figure 1, adapted from Banonno (2004) The interesting results from the latent growth mixture modelling are that higher percentage of resilience was found.  Then this paper reviewed factors that influence resilience: personality, exposure, SES etc. The trait self-enhancement was specially mentioned in the personality factors. Also interesting to me is that  personality  r

Dranovsky, A., & Leonardo, E. D. (2015). The power of positivity. Nature, 522, 294. doi:10.1038/522294a Ramirez, S., Liu, X., MacDonald, C. J., Moffa, A., Zhou, J., Redondo, R. L., & Tonegawa, S. (2015). Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour. Nature, 522, 335. doi:10.1038/nature14514 I didn't totally understand the experiments in Ramirez et al (2015), but it reads like a lot of works had been done by the authors.  The basic idea is simple: if we re-activated the positive memory of mice that currently depressed, the positive memory will decrease the depressive behaviours. This basic idea was clearly illustrated by Dranovsky & Leonardo (2015), see below Of course, the actual experiment is more complicated, as well as the figures: The above figure is the figure 1a of Ramirez et al. (2015). So, there are 6 groups. The key manipulation is the positive experience, which was exposed the mice to a female conspecific in a

Friedman, A. K., Walsh, J. J., Juarez, B., Ku, S. M., Chaudhury, D., Wang, J., . . . Han, M.-H. (2014). Enhancing Depression Mechanisms in Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Achieves Homeostatic Resilience. Science, 344(6181), 313-319. doi:10.1126/science.1249240 This paper is really a good read, easy to grasp what it to says. So, basically, in a series of experiments, the authors found that activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA) neurons will make the susceptible mice, which could be selected by social defeat stress paradigm, more resilient. The novelty of this paper lies in the fact that VTA DA neuron activities were previously found to be the positive correlated to depression-like behaviours. Backgrounds:  1) Tyrosine hydroxylase-driven green fluorescent protein (TH-GFP) transgenic mice were used in these series of experiments, because of they allow to visualize and reliably record from VTA DA neurons. 2) Mice can be distinguished to resilient and susceptible

Bouton, M. E. (2004). Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485-494. doi:10.1101/lm.78804 Milad, M. R., & Quirk, G. J. (2012). Fear Extinction as a Model for Translational Neuroscience: Ten Years of Progress. Annual Review of Psychology, 63(1), 129-151. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131631 Quirk, G. J., & Mueller, D. (2008). Neural Mechanisms of Extinction Learning and Retrieval. Neuropsychopharmacology, 33(1), 56-72. doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1301555 As I begin to do research using fear extinction paradigm, which is apparently very different from what I was doing during my PhD study, so I need to get familiar with this paradigm first. After reading a few papers related to fear extinction, I found that these three reviews are very good for a newcomer. Bouton (2004) is definitely the must-read. In this review, Bouton listed the different effects that can be considered as fear extinction. With a clear logic flow, this paper is easy to fo