It’s widely acknowledged that it’s nearly impossible to publish negative results in scientific journals. “We didn’t see anything” is a much harder sell than finding that a hypothesis is clearly right. Findings of no effect tend to either be shuffled off to low-profile journals or left behind as unpublished lab lore.
The high-profile journal Nature, however, made a notable exception this week, publishing a study that tells us that a bunch of methods we have been using to try to measure a key emotional ability don’t seem to be measuring the same thing. The results mean that we don’t have a good way to measure the impact of a concept that is the basis of a key method in therapy.
