Nurturing Resilience

We all can benefit from scientific dialogue, particularly of a controversial nature. Somehow, "scientific" seems to have been abandoned in this piece by Dr. Ungar, and we are merely presented with an opinion by an individual, who, incidentally, has earned a Ph.D. The only fact that is clear in research on both sides of the fence regarding spanking is that there are a plethora of variables to consider that render any results to date as ambiguous and inconclusive. For example, what bodies of research have included the personalities of the children? E.g., are the children who tend to be spanked more often already predisposed to aggressive behavior that warrants more extreme punishment, and also predisposed to aggressive behaviors beyond childhood for reasons unrelated to the spanking? How many of these children have Sensory Processing Disorder, Asperger's, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc., that influence the very behaviors that invoked the spanking, and will maintain prominence in their personality long after any form of discipline is doled out? Also, is it possible that some conditions, and the children who have them, may benefit from an excessively stimulating event (i.e., a solid, single smack on the behind), as large stimuli often have a counter-intuitively calming effect? Lastly, why is intellectual laziness so deeply ingrained into the research practices surrounding the field of psychology? Do the practitioners and researchers alike miss the correlation between credibility in data, objectivity, and the popular labeling of psychology as a "pseudoscience"?