This is a crappy psychology study where none of the researchers is a psychologist. PNAS is a big name in medical science (?), but an unimportant journal in psychology.
There's no serious psychology journal going to publish this kind of stuff. Why? The first problem is measurement. What is the reliability of using positive/negative words to determine positive/negative emotional state? 70%? 80%?
The effect size of this study is 0.001, which would be way way way smaller than the measurement error. LOL. What a laughable "study".
In the psychological sciences, it seems like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
When a phenomenon with a large effect size is demonstrated with tens or hundreds of participants, everybody crows about how the sample size should have been larger.
On the other hand, when a small effect size requires millions of observations to detect, now the criticism is that the effect is too small to matter.
At any rate, this effect is small - but it is reliable. The only crappy part about this study is the ethical boundaries it crossed. In most other ways, this study was kindof amazing...
There's no serious psychology journal going to publish this kind of stuff. Why? The first problem is measurement. What is the reliability of using positive/negative words to determine positive/negative emotional state? 70%? 80%?
The effect size of this study is 0.001, which would be way way way smaller than the measurement error. LOL. What a laughable "study".