Writer’s block

[mafief]

Upper (1974) paper is making the rounds again on an academic social media account that I follow. This has been my giggle for the day and I thought I’d share it. The links go to the corresponding journal article reference.

It all started here…
Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block”. J Appl Behav Anal. 7, 497.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/?page=1
Reviewer A’s comment is gold.

The cross-cultural replicate (no one asked for):
Didden, R., et al., A multisite cross-cultural replication of Upper’s (1974) unsuccessful self-treatment of writer’s block. J Appl Behav Anal. 40, 773
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078566/pdf/jaba-40-04-773.pdf
Stay for the editor’s comment

Studies should be repeated to see if similar findings can be reproduced. It’s under a paywall (stupid), but you get the idea.
Artino, A. R. (2016) The unsuccessful treatment of a case of ‘Writer’s Block’: a replication in medical education. Med Edu. 50, 1262.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/medu.13003/abstract

The meta-analysis of the literature on the unsuccessful treatments of ‘Writer’s Block” since more than one person did this! The authors suggest that single papers on the subject are wordier than group papers. In reality, there is one single author paper that has 32 words and the rest of the literature has 0.

McLean, D. C. and Thomas, B. R. (2014) Unsuccessful treatments of “writer’s block”: a meta-analysis. ‎Psychol. Rep. 115, 276.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/28.PR0.115c12z0

Oh, academics…