Is autodidactism a feature that can only be possessed by special kinds of individuals? I am from Brazil – at the current moment, education in this country is undoubtedly poor. I've been learning some things over the years on my own, mostly downloading content from the internet and reading.

Whenever I tell people (in my country) that I learn in such way, they usually say that I am an autodidact – and when arguing about this, they seem to imply that this is a unique feature for some special people that are born with this (they don't think that it's an ability that anyone could develop). However, I'm a little skeptical about this, and I'm expanding the reasons below:

As I pointed out in the beginning, the education in our country is a failure. We're not taught how to think and develop solutions to problems with minimal information beforehand. Education is more of a fake spectacle provided by the government to pretend the country is a good place for international investors.
Trying to learn after being a student that spent years in such a scheme is usually painful, and I say this from experience. Managing energy, motivation, discipline, systems for controlling procrastination, the idea that you yourself have to manage such features and other aspects of learning alone is hard.
Our school gives us the impression that learning is linear and continuous, that there aren't pitfalls and that spending some days stuck with a problem means that one cannot learn something alone.
When speaking with people from other countries, it seems utterly trivial to learn something alone. I've even gotten some syllabi from universities such as Cambridge and Oxford, and the way these syllabi are written seems to be made for a student that has been taught in a more sophisticated and independent way. They list the topics that need to be learned, they give the student a manual on how to study, and they give them the list of books – I'm finding it perfect to learn using their syllabi as a guide. On the other hand, the syllabi of Brazilian universities are terrible, they don't mention books, they don't mention a order for which the topics must be studied, they just list everything only with dates, and there's no guide for self-study: The syllabi seems to be made for a completely dependent student.

Given the arguments above, I'd like to know: Is autodidactism really a unique, rare feature that I possess? I ask because I do not feel so; I feel that I could teach it to everyone, and that some of our beliefs about education and self-education are wrong.

I'd recommend checking out Wikipedia's article on autodidacticism for a start. This might give you a better sense of the context surrounding the word, and whether it really means so much as you feel it does. My first impression is that this is not much more than a semantic issue (but I have a second impression, which I'll get to next). The literal definition seems to be, "A self-taught person," which isn't very interesting. In this sense, of course you are. That's what you're describing: self-teaching.

My second impression is that this is interesting inasmuch as self-teaching is actually rare. That seems odd to me; in what sense doesn't everyone teach themselves to some extent? If we interpret it instead as "primarily self-taught", then I could see autodidacticism being rarer. People usually find educational systems guided by others preferable (or mandatory, as is the case in the USA), but maybe not in a situation such as you describe (whether it's true of Brazil in general or not). When educational systems provided by traditional, mainstream, or public infrastructure are poor, it seems quite likely that one would opt to take advantage of other educational sources as you have. In the past decade or so, the internet has been particularly instrumental in providing this option globally.

I get the impression that using others' educational materials (including syllabi) for otherwise self-guided education doesn't violate the generally intended meaning of autodidact. A stricter definition might limit it only to learning through direct experience with life, but it's hard to imagine anyone short of a feral child fitting this definition truly enough. If an autodidact can learn through contact with others and their guidance and still be an autodidact simply because one has pursued education independently of structured guidance in the form of a professional relationship with a particular teacher, then I agree, it's not that unusual. If it's a question of whether you're primarily self-taught, that might be unusual, but it's not unique. Your particular circumstances seem especially likely to result in such a choice. The ongoing advent of internet-based educational resources makes it more likely that people will "teach themselves" in the same way you do, though it's an interesting semantic issue to consider whether this is truly self-teaching when you're taking advantage of structured lessons provided by others without their knowledge. It seems likely to me that the term "autodidact" itself will begin to lose its meaning in this evolving context of freely, globally available information. In any case, if autodidacticism is at all unique now, it seems unlikely to remain that way.


Does selfishness increase in periods of extreme anxiety Does an individual going through a period of extreme anxiety, show increased levels of selfishness during that period ?

When this period ends, does the individual returns back to normal levels of selfishness ?

The following extract is from this  article, which describes the personal experience of a person with anxiety/depression.

  When we’re anxious, we become lost in our own thoughts, waging a
  battle so distracting in its intensity that it makes it nearly
  impossible to notice the outside world. It’s not that we don’t care,
  but rather that we’re so distracted by our discomfort that it is only
  with great effort that we’re able to look out and truly see others.

This somehow verifies my intuition, that extreme anxiety increases selfshiness. There is so much anxiety related activity in the head, that other aspects like other people, are neglected.

This is just a personal report though, I need more solid research data.

It is hard to argue that anxiety makes you more "selfish". Your definition of "extreme periods anxiety" is rather vague and hard to operationalize, same goes for selfishness in this context. The article you cited is not based on scientific literature but much rather a personal look on anxiety and selfishness. Therefore it is in no way conclusive evidence.

Anxiety is a natural body response to certain dangers. When anxiety becomes abnormal it can  be diagnosed as an Anxiety disorder (see DSM V for criteria for certain anxiety disorders). There has been a lot of research on General Anxiety Disorder (one of the anxiety disorders) and the worry-process. However, too my knowledge there are hardly any studies that describe individuals become more selfish. Like I said, this is also definition question. Certainly people with anxiety worry more and are more focused on the thoughts in their head. However, as far as I know there is no convincing evidence that people with strong anxiety do not care about others except for themselves. On the contrary some people with Anxiety disorders excessively call their loved ones to make sure that they are alright.

Further reading: Butcher, Hooley and Mineka, Abnormal Psychology 16th Edition, Chapter 6.


How is light processed by the human brain when awake and in dreams? I've recently seen this great video: How your brain tells you where you are. The video discusses how certain cells within the brain fire based on proximity to objects. There are great examples of experiments with brain cells and location.

I'm wondering if there's similar insight about how the brain processes light. I'm particularly interested in how light is processed in dreams, when no light stimulus is coming from the eyes.

It is possible to have dreams that are dark or light, but changing the level of ambient light is generally difficult in dreams. In fact, a common test for dreaming involves flipping a light switch. If the effect is unexpected, the person may be dreaming.

How do our brains actually process light?

There is a range of evidence to suggest that our brain processes self-generated visual information in much the same way that we process visual information from the environment.

There is a really great review article by Kosslyn, Ganis, and Thompson (2001) that goes over evidence for activity in modality-specific brain areas during visual, auditory, and motor visualization.  One interesting effect is that damage to areas of the brain that process object properties yields the inability to visualize shape, and damage to areas of the brain that process spatial properties yields the inability to visualize location in space.  Similar deficits have been observed in imagery deficits for color and faces following specific types of brain damage.

One question that is still debated is whether the very early visual processing areas (V1, Brodmann areas 17 and 18) are involved in visual imagery.  These are areas that receive input from the eyes, provide the first cortical processing of light properties, and have a spatial layout similar to the retina.  From the review, 34/50 neuroimaging studies have shown evidence of activity in the early visual cortex during visualization. More evidence has emerged since the Kosslyn review supporting the role of early visual areas during mental imagery (e.g. Slotnick et al., 2005).

Because early visual areas are thought to be active during self-generated imagery, it sets the stage for being able to "read out" what you are visualizing.  Horikawa et al. (2013) trained a set of machine learning classifiers on awake subjects, and were then able to create crude reconstructions of what the subjects were visualizing while they were dreaming.  No joke!

Horikawa T, Tamaki M, Miyawaki Y, Kamitani T. (2103) Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science, 340(6132), 639-642.
Kosslyn SM, Ganis G, and Thomson WL. (2001) Neural foundations of imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 635-642.
Sotnick SD, Thompson WL, and Kosslyn SM. (2005) Visual mental imagery induces retinotopically organized activation of early visual areas. Cerebral Cortex, 15(10), 1570-1583.


What are the real life applications for Probability Learning? Probability learning is a principle that states probability of a response tends to match the probability of the reinforcement.

How does one achieve such rationality under uncertainty? What are the real-life applications of this concept?

I'm looking for lucid answers as I'm a lay person.

Reference: http://implab.hu/wiki/images/8/81/Aczel_-_Strategy_Analysis_of_Probability_Learning.pdf

It's actually much simpler - on the surface - than what that quoted item implies!

Probability learning is literally "learning" what the "probability" is of certain things, the study of how people and other animals learn about real world probabilities outside a statistics classroom, and in cognitive science (like in the PDF you linked) the concern is about strategies, methods, and the real world mechanics of how intelligent creatures actually manage to figure this stuff out; of course, sometimes the answer is just "wow, people are really bad at this!"

When your quoted text says that "probability of a response tends to match the probability of the reinforcement", this is not a maxim to live by - it does not describe, necessarily, how you should behave. Put in jargon, it's descriptive, not prescriptive. It's not a question of rationality at all.

What it does correctly describe is that many animals are pretty good at modifying their behavior to match the unpredictable nature of our world. In the real world, this means things like:

what route to take to work to avoid delays or accidents
how to dress for the weather (hot/cold, rain/snow, etc)
gambling games of all kinds ("come on Box Cars!")
where to eat to avoid food poisoning

In animal research, that paper by Aczel mentions experiments where rats have a T-maze, where they look for food to the left or to the right. Originally behaviorists were just interested in learning and unlearning of things like "the cheese is always on the left side", and they found that rats figured this out and would (sensibly) usually go to the left side first in expectation of the food.

Then some smarty-pantses wondered what would happen if there was only a certain probability of food being in a certain place, and how this might effect the rat behavior. It turns out that they end up figuring out what the best place to go is and altering their behavior according to how lopsided the observed probability seems (so if it's 60:40 they might hardly prefer one side to the other at all, but with 75:25 they don't exclusively search the one side that is more likely - they just prefer it according to the probability). This means that the probability of the response (choosing the left side) tended to match the probability of the reinforcement (getting food). Makes sense, right?

This also explains why most people aren't compelled to run along every vending machine they see to search for forgotten change; sure, sometimes you do get change this way, but you usually don't, and from this we can reasonably predict that most people won't engage in this sort of change-tray-obsessed behavior. Obviously this system is open to peculiarity, like the lottery or insistence on behavior that no past experience indicates will work.

And this leaves us to cognitive research, where enterprising folks try to figure out the HOW of dealing with the probabilistic nature of life, where you never know what you are going to get - yet we do seem to get a 'feel' for how likely something is without having a statistician run 10000 trials and give us an analysis a year later. How do we do that, anyway? I dunno - I haven't read enough probability learning research!

As to how to use this in your everyday life, it would I suppose be about how to get better at doing it yourself by avoiding poor strategies (though you'd probably be better learning more about statistics directly), or about teaching others to get better at the same. I don't know if learning about the 'how' of probability learning is as useful as the 'how' of memory, but this is pretty well outside my field of interest so I can't say.


How to control subject's response bias in 2-interval force choice task I am using a two-interval force choice (2IFC) task to estimate detection threshold and choose an appropriate signal level for my following experiment, by estimating sensitivity ($d'$) for each signal level.

Since it is a 2IFC task with signal equally distributed on two intervals, I expect close-to-zero response bias and plan to estimate $d'$ directly from proportion correct. After running experiment on 3 subjects (one complete 2500 trials, two complete 1250 trials), two of them show slight response bias (ratio of response to interval 1 vs. 2 is 0.91 and 1.12), but one subject shows large response bias (ratio of response to interval 1 vs. 2 is 0.53).

Here is my question:

For the subject with large response bias, is it still valid to estimate $d'$ from proportion correct anymore? And is it still valid to estimate $d'$ directly from hit rate and false-alarm rate?
If I hope to let this subject to continue participating in this experiment, how should I let him/her to lower response bias? Directly telling him/her "You have pressed key #1 too often, press key #2 more when you are not sure"? Is it going to interfere the experiment?
For future naïve participants, should I let them know do not bias toward one response too much before the start of experiment, or should I tell them only when they have made too much bias? If the latter case, how much bias is considered to be "too much"?

For the subject with large response bias, is it still valid to estimate d′ from proportion correct anymore?

No. Within the signal detection theory framework, a 2I-2AFC paradigm is identical to a 1I-2AFC paradigm except that the decision variable Y in the 2I-2AFC paradigm is X2-X1 (difference between the observations on the first and second intervals). The effects of bias are the same and d' needs to account for any bias.

  And is it still valid to estimate d′ directly from hit rate and false-alarm rate?

Maybe. If all of the assumptions from the 1I-2AFC paradigm still hold, then with appropriately defined hits and false alarms (e.g., a hit is when the subject responds "1" when the signal in the first interval) and you account for the $\sqrt(2)/2$ improvement from having two intervals, then yes you can still calculate d'. That said, with typical assumptions, the 2I-2AFC paradigm results in distributions that are symmetric about zero and therefore we don't expect a response bias. I would be worried that with a non-zero bias that the subject is not behaving as assumed. If that is the case, d' does not really mean anything.

  If I hope to let this subject to continue participating in this experiment, how should I let him/her to lower response bias? Directly telling him/her "You have pressed key #1 too often, press key #2 more when you are not sure"? Is it going to interfere the experiment?

Correct answer feedback sometimes works, but not always. The effect of influencing the preferred response bias of a subject depends on the subject and experiment.

  For future naïve participants, should I let them know do not bias toward one response too much before the start of experiment, or should I tell them only when they have made too much bias? If the latter case, how much bias is considered to be "too much"?

This comes down to the experimental design. If possible, I would exclude the subject from the analysis. If you are looking at population statistics, you need to include everyone. If instead, you are interested in the best subjects, a subject with an odd bias is probably not worth your time of dealing with.


How does neural spiking begin in the fetus? I'm interested in modeling human brain spiking activity. How does the very first spiking activity begin in the fetus?

I imagine all spiking activity is initiated by the senses and internal oscillators. Am I right? Or are there other initiators of spiking activity?

Many parts of the fetus brain begin showing neural activity before the senses that feed them are sufficiently developed to provide actual sensory information. In other words, it is unlikely that spiking activity in the brain is initiated by the senses. Some of the cells that become sensory organs, however, often fire in very specific patterns similar to the patterns they will use when they start actually sensing.
An example from Penn & Shatz (1999): in the human fetus, the connections from the eye to the visual cortex form before the retina is developed enough to respond to light. However, at this time the retinal ganglion cells spontaneously generate highly correlated bursts of action potentials. These bursts are similar to the sort of data they will generate once they actual start sensing, and these preliminary bursts allow the human fetus to start developing its visual cortex before it even has functional retina. This is not unique to humans, and similar activity was first observed in rats (Galli & Maffei, 1988).
The take away message, is that the cell in the brain start firing spontaneously before they has any sensory input. Some of this early firing is 'random' in the sense you asked before. However, neurons that develop into future sensory organs, tend to have their spontaneous firing resemble what their typical sensory production will look like in the future (once they start sensing). This allows the downstream circuitry to start adapting to the firing pattens before any real sensory infromation becomes available.
References

Galli, L., & Maffei, L. (1988) "Spontaneous impulse activity of rat retinal ganglion cells in prenatal life". Science 242(4875): 90-91.

Penn, A.A., & Shatz, C.J. (1999) "Brain Waves and Brain Wiring: The Role of Endogenous and Sensory-Driven Neural Activity in Development". Pediatric Research 45: 447–458.


Does white noise impair studying, reading, recall/memory or learning? I recently have been trying to look into whether or not white noise works as a means to block out external sounds so I can concentrate. However, I want to know whether it actually impairs studying and reading. I do not care if it has no benefit, as long as it has no negative effects.

I am trying to block out the sounds of my brother through the walls when he is playing his xbox. As I am hyper-sensitive to noise and any abrupt noises what so ever throw me out of my concentration.

There are recent studies that suggest that unstructured background noise, including white noise, may actually improve studying and recall. The benefits are unclear and likely person-dependent, but there is at least no obvious bad effect.

Bottom line: sounds like a safe strategy for you to try.


Why is amygdala located on paleo mamalian part of the brain? We got 3 brains right. Reptilian. Mamalian. And the neo cortex thingy that makes us primate. And humans supposedly have tons of neo cortex and that what makes us human allowing us to code and code.

That means, things that reptilian have should be in reptilian brain.

Yet amygdala is located not on brain stem or reptilian brain, but in middle brain.

How come?

The reason why the amygdalae are in the middle of the brain is because they are not part of the reptilian brain.  The amygdalae interact with many areas of the brain and are in the limbic system.  They are often referred to being the "fear centre", but they have roles beyond just being a simple threat detector.

Studies have found the amygdalae to be active not just during fear conditioning, but also when learning to link a previously neutral stimulus with a positive experience by

interacting with reward areas of the brain like the ventral striatum, which is in the reptilian brain
playing an important role in forming memories associated with drug use.
being an important region for the consolidation of memories that have any strong emotional component - whether positive or negative.

the amygdalae (Source: Wikipedia)

There are functional differences between the right and left amygdala. In one study, electrical stimulations of the right amygdala induced negative emotions, especially fear and sadness. In contrast, stimulation of the left amygdala was able to induce either pleasant (happiness) or unpleasant (fear, anxiety, sadness) emotions.

For the idea of 3 parts to the brain, this idea was started by American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean.  He originally formulated the triune brain model in the 1960s and propounded it at length in his 1990 book The Triune Brain in Evolution.

The triune brain consists of the reptilian complex (also known as the "reptilian brain"), the paleomammalian complex (limbic system), and the neomammalian complex (neocortex).

The reptilian complex, was the name MacLean gave to the basal ganglia which consists of the dorsal striatum (caudate nucleus and putamen), ventral striatum (nucleus accumbens and olfactory tubercle), globus pallidus, ventral pallidum, substantia nigra, and subthalamic nucleus.

basal ganglia (source: Wikipedia)

The neomammalian complex (neocortex) is a part of the mammalian brain.  The neocortex consists of the grey matter, or neuronal cell bodies and unmyelinated fibers, surrounding the deeper white matter (myelinated axons) in the cerebrum.

neocortex - Human brain right dissected lateral view, showing grey matter (the darker outer parts), and white matter (the inner and prominently whiter parts) - source: Wikipedia

The paleomammalian complex (limbic system) consists of olfactory bulbs, hippocampus, hypothalamus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, fornix, columns of fornix, mammillary body, septum pellucidum, habenular commissure, cingulategyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, limbic cortex, and limbic midbrain areas
the limbic system (source: Wikipedia)


Which schools of psychotherapy are most credible to a hard scientist? There is a problem in all therapies that if the client doesn't have faith or trust in the therapist then it is unlikely that anything can be achieved.  Therefore effective therapy for an extreme skeptic relies on convincing them that the therapist does indeed have some talent and ability.

Consider a profile that has something akin to the following views on common therapies:

  When looking at psychotherapy and therapists the list of different "types" seems endless.  On the one end, "Freudian" or "Psychoanalysis" is widely discredited quakery.  Carl Jung believed in "synchronicity", which puts him firmly in the quack bin.  Plenty of other therapist start talking "spirituality" and so again, sadly are filed under "not proper scientific medicine".

If someone has the above attitude to therapy and psychotherapy, what sort of therapist is going to be most credible?  We are talking about finding a credible therapy for someone who would self describe as a skeptic, atheist, scientist, etc.

For several reasons, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) should have a good fit for someone who has a skeptic and scientific outlook on life.

There is a large body of research showing that CBT is effective (see e.g., Hofmann et al. 2012). Obviously, this also depends on the kind of disorder. And of course, other forms of therapy can be effective too. However, for some disorders, CBT may be more effective than other therapies. For example, in a recent randomized trial, CBT was more effective in treating Bulimia Nervosa (Poulson et al., 2014) than psychoanalytic therapy (the other main form of psychotherapy). By and large, most empirical evidence we have about psychotherapy regards CBT. Despite your premise that the question is not about effectiveness, I believe that a skeptic would love that.
CBT is informed by and has inspired much basic research about the cognitive processes that may underlie different disorders. For example, there is much research about attentional processes in affective disorders (e.g., MacLeod et al., 2002). A skeptic should value this.
Another way to frame this is to say that CBT is scientific in the sense that it is based on testable theories and disorder models. In contrast many concepts in psychoanalysis, such as resistance or repression may be criticized as unfalsifiable (Popper, 1963). Again, a skeptic should prefer a more scientific therapy form.
A core technique in CBT is to question wrong beliefs and assumptions. CBT has a very rational, thought-focused way of explaining an dealing with problems (some say overly). A central tenet of CBT is that people often hold wrong (self-defeating) beliefs about the world and that they engage in schematic thought processes (e.g. someone who has social phobia may have "catastrophizing" thoughts about how others might react to him in public and therefore avoid such situations). Questioning such beliefs should be right up a skeptic's alley.
Conducting behavioral experiments to collect evidence about oneself is an important therapeutic tool in CBT (e.g., Brennet-Levy et al. 2004). Whereas psychoanalytical approaches strongly rely on the interpretation of clients' (unconscious) conflicts, CBT encourages people to collect data about their thoughts and behaviors and to conduct experiments that clarify important questions about themselves. Skeptics should love this facts-driven approach.
Whereas psychoanalytic therapies are focused on trying to solve core, unconscious intrapersonal conflicts (brought from the past) in (mostly) long therapies, CBT is problem- and behavior-focused and short. A skeptic should like this pragmatism of CBT.
Even though your question highlights the role of the therapist, this is actually not an important feature of CBT. CBT relies on structured therapeutic manuals, and not so much on talent or personality of the therapist. In fact, CBT may be effective if conducted via the internet (Andersson et al., 2009), or even in the form of self-help books (Anderson et al., 2005). A skeptic should value that CBT is focused on technique and not on the therapist.

References

Andersson, G. (2009). Using the Internet to provide cognitive behaviour therapy. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 47, 175–180. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2009.01.010

Anderson, L., Lewis, G., Araya, R., Elgie, R., Harrison, G., Proudfoot, J., et al. (2005). Self-help books for depression: how can practitioners and patients make the right choice. British Journal of General Practice, 55, 387-392.

Bennett-Levy, J., Butler, G., Fennell, M., Hackmann, A., Mueller, M., Westbrook, D., & Rouf, K. (2004). Oxford Guide to Behavioural Experiments in Cognitive Therapy. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: Science and Practice.

Hofmann, S. G., Asnaani, A., Vonk, I. J. J., Sawyer, A. T., & Fang, A. (2012). The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-analyses. Cognitive therapy and research, 36, 427–440. doi:10.1007/s10608-012-9476-1

MacLeod, C., Rutherford, E., Campbell, L., Ebsworthy, G., & Holker, L. (2002). Selective attention and emotional vulnerability: assessing the causal basis of their association through the experimental manipulation of attentional bias. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 107–123.

Popper, K.R. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Poulsen, S., Lunn, S., Daniel, S. I. F., Folke, S., Mathiesen, B. B., Katznelson, H., & Fairburn, C. G. (2014). A Randomized Controlled Trial of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy or Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Bulimia Nervosa. American Journal of Psychiatry, 171, 109–116. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.12121511


Introduction or Tutorial on Continuous EEG Collection Procedures and Initial Processing? Are there any tutorials or introductions (specifically not slides from talks) on the very basic details of EEG data collection and processing? Things like:

Discussions of reference systems (montages)
The "usual" sequence of initial processing steps
Identification of artifacts by type and usual procedures for dealing with them
Precise methods of electrode placement (such as good ways to measure electrodes on the head, etc.)
Etc.

Basically I am looking for a sketch of standard or usual procedures used either widely in EEG or, failing that, commonly in EEG studies that make use of longer, continuous recordings (as opposed to ERPs). What is sometimes called "lab lore" or the common things you need to know that are often glossed over in journal articles. (Something akin to the very introductory textbooks available for fMRI.)

The usual response to this is Steven Luck's book: Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique -- but that book is so centered on ERP recordings, that it is very hard to follow for other types of EEG collection, such as long continuous recordings. On the other side, journal articles are generally too brief about their recording and initial data analysis procedures to replicate their work.

Additionally, open-access/open-source information is preferable; we don't have the money for the usually priced textbooks. (I'll accept those if there are no open answers, but open is better!)

Note that this other article "Getting Started with EEG" either recommends Luck's book (which is good, but too ERP focused) or begs the original question of learning how to collect and process EEG by basically saying "just collect it on yourself and do it." So this is strictly not a duplicate question.

There are plenty of books and courses about EEG. I personally can recommend the book from Mike Cohen "Analyzing Neural Time Series Data". It´s well written, simple and condense introduction into EEG, electrophysiology, experimental design, data acquisition and, mostly, basic-to-advance analytical techniques. Book comes with the demo data and code for the analysis in Matlab.

Alternatively, you can go directly to the website of any big EEG community that developing an analytical toolbox (like EEGLab, Fieldtrip, or Brainstorm). Each of them provides sufficient amount of the introductory materials and step-by-step tutorials, including video lectures.


Is there a metric of the overall excitation of the brain or nervous system? I'm thinking of a way to describe what's happening to a single channel EEG/MEG sensor output. I've noticed that there is significant difference in the readings from a quiet observations, versus a person who's engaged in a conversation. I'm looking for some way to quantify the two distinct states, so a computer algorithm may have a chance of distinguishing the two. Potentially, in the future I would like to compare readings from one individual to the next, or compare the arousal of two individuals engaged in a conversation.

It would be helpful to know what are the names of metrics that may be used to measure the overall arousal/excitation of a person, that person's nervous system or brain. I can think of Actigraphy (the study of human motion) as one, its units are arbitrary activity count, or m/s^3. These are scored as "zero point crossings", or "area under the curve" of an accelerometer graph. But are there any other metrics or units of human activity/excitation? Maybe some of them are related to an EEG/EMG readings? Like an obscure algorithm named after some scientist?

MEGs using SQUIDs can detect magnetic flux density measured in teslas. Away from sleep studies and epileptic brain activity, this should be a useful indicator of relative brain arousal. Readings from two different people on this scale should be comparable  based on the orders of magnitude for the unit measurement. As for comparative measurements of brain arousal, I don't think Actigraphy would be useful, nor any other method of measuring somatic motion. These can certainly determine weather a person is sleeping, sedentary, or exercising, but discriminating between different sedentary behaviors would be difficult and determining relative brain activity for those behaviors would be reliant on more traditional methods (EEG,MEG, etc). MRI methods might be useful, as the total change in blood oxygen volume from a base state or inactive state can be distinguished from a more active state.


Is there a name for arguing with other people in one's mind? Is there a name for the phenomenon of arguing with other people in one's mind?
I don't mean simply replaying memories of arguments (or modifications thereof), although that may fall under this too but also predicting arguments and debating people preemptively in one's imagination.

I'm not aware of a term specifically for this phenomenon.

Having a conversation in one's head has been termed dialogic inner speech by several researchers.  You didn't mention if the people you are arguing with reply back - if they don't, then it's just regular (monologic) inner speech.

One common function of inner speech is sometimes referred to as speech rehearsal - ie, where one might practice a monologue or dialogue (eg, debate) in their mind ahead of time.

In a more pathological context, repeatedly looping through a conversation in one's head can be a form of rumination, and simulating a future argument could be considered action rumination if it is a reaction to a recently failed argument.


What is the mechanism behind unihemispheric sleep in animals? It is known that dolphins have the ability to sleep with only one half of their brain at a time.

According to this popular science source:

  Dolphins sleep by resting one half of their brain at a time. This is called unihemispheric sleep. The brain waves of captive dolphins that are sleeping show that one side of the dolphin's brain "awake" while the other in a deep sleep ("slow-wave sleep"). Also, during this time, one eye is open (the eye opposite the sleeping half of the brain) while the other is closed.

Given that the dolphin probably depends on bilateral brainstem mechanisms for respiration, my assumption is that this "shutting down" mainly involves the cortex.

Is this true, or are areas like the thalamus also suppressed unilaterally?
How is this "switching" (from hemisphere to hemisphere) managed?  Is it accomplished at the level of the thalamus, or within the brainstem?
Were a dolphin to be dominant in one hemisphere (surely Flipper was "right-finned"?), how is the representation of the dominant side of the body managed when the opposite cortex is suppressed?

In general, I don't think the answers to these questions are known.  This paper is a good review of unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS); the section on neurophysiological mechanisms is largely speculation based on how slow-wave sleep is generally thought to function--despite its lack of answers, that section is good reading anyhow, since it covers current evidence (in 2000, anyway!) and lines of inquiry.  I dug through its citing articles as well, hoping for a more informative update; the best I found was this paper, which shows small differences (which may or may not be statistically significant) between the openness of the ipsi & contralateral eyes to the sleeping hemisphere based on right/left--which does suggest at least some hemispheric dominance at play. Eared seals also sleep on their side during USWS, and leave the sleeping side of the body out of the water, while the awake side of the body paddles to keep their nostrils from submerging; I found nothing suggesting hemispheric dominance issues there, though.

As far as hemisphere-switching mechanisms go, that first paper mentions work finding that unihemispheric slow-wave sleep develops only following sagittal transsection of the lower brainstem in cats--even when the interhemispheric commissures were not involved; that implies some kind of uncoupling of lower brainstem sleep regions, but that's about as far as anybody's got (or as far as I could find!).

An interesting question!  If you find more work, come back and tell me about it.

References
1 Rattenborg, Amlaner, & Lima (2000). Behavioral, neurophysiological and evolutionary perspectives on unihemispheric sleep. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews Volume 24, Issue 8, December 2000, Pages 817–842.
2 Lyamin, O., & al. (2002). Unihemispheric slow wave sleep and the state of the eyes in a white whale. Behavioural Brain Research Volume 129, Issue 1-2, 1 February 2002, Pages 125-129.


What makes it necessary to define autism beyond perceptual dysfunction? One would think perceptual dysfunctions would be sufficient to define the condition since the inability to discern or perceive phenomena and failure to execute or adjust behavior due to lack of proper feedback could explain most if not all characteristic behavior

Unusual gestures and speech, improper social behavior would be explained by the inability to fully discern speech and gestures and learning them in a partial manner while repetitive behavior and rigid thinking would be explained by a limited range of feedback causing a failure to diverge. Even the stereotypes like lining up cars by color, spending hours watching washing machines spin, being really obsessed by specific sorts of machinery etc. can be explained by low-level patterns like color gradients, mechanical movement etc. registering much more dominantly than higher-level patterns with a larger number of elements and chaoticity.

I don't see how Occam's Razor would not apply here. What makes it necessary to define autism in such a nebulous way then? Is it the history behind it, or is it more nuanced than I think?

Edit: I should clarify, by 'perceptual dysfunction' I am speculating about a more general form of sensory processing disorder. There is no reason the mechanism behind sensory processing disorders would not affect perception of higher order emergent phenomena in the same manner.

For example, think about a chain of emergence like

points -> curves -> shapes -> faces -> expressions -> nonverbal messages

With sensory processing disorder in my example shapes might fail to register or dominate and disturb perception at a noticeably higher rate than without. I believe the same can also apply for a 'perceptional dysfunction' where faces, expressions etc. have a higher chance failing to register with or without disturbance in perception of lower level patterns.

There are several other aspects that I think are not just "perceptions" but something more complicated.

Having an weak or a different theory of mind; that hinders processing in general how other people may perceive or interpret something.

Having difficulty with cognitive empathy; that hinders understanding others' motives and intentions.

Having difficulty with consequences of something especially in social situations.

Problems with planning.

Problems with working memory.


By which neuronal mechanisms does music make us happy or sad? There are brain regions (X) that show stronger activation for joyful music, regions (Y) that show stronger activation for sad music, and regions (Z) that show similar activation for both.

Assuming that joyful or sad music activates similar brain regions as other tasks designed to induce a joyful or sad mood, we know more specifically:

Both joyful and sad music produce similar activation of the amygdala-hippocampal area, with activation extending into the parahippocampal gyrus, as well as activation of the prefrontal, temporal, and anterior cingulate cortices and the precuneus (regions Z).
Joyful music produces stronger activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cingulate gyrus, the inferior temporal gyrus, the cerebellum, and in the vicinity of the ventral medial frontal cortex (regions X).

On the other side, it has repeatedly been found that happy music is characterized by fast tempo and major mode, whereas sad music is typically played in slow tempo and minor
mode.

Bringing these findings together the question arises

  By which specific neuronal mechanisms does fast tempo and major mode
  music activate more strongly brain regions X than regions Y? And vice
  versa.

Is it by some kind of fine-tuned resonance (involving feedback) between the sensory input from the ears and the brain regions involved?

Are there specific theoretical (computational) models, and have they been tested?

How can - by these mechanisms - the subtle difference between a major and a minor third become so significant, both neuronally and emotionally?

References:

A systematic review of the neural correlates of positive emotions
A Functional MRI Study of Happy and Sad Emotions in Music with and without Lyrics
Brain correlates of music-evoked emotions
Music and Emotions. Research on the Theory of Musical Equilibration
The Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience

In a comprehensive review that included 140+ primary research papers, Juslin & Laukka (2003) explain that there is a close relationship between vocal expression of emotions and the musical expression of emotions. Indeed, music and speech have similar characteristics and therefore can illicit similar emotions (table 1).

Table 1. Commonalities of speech and music in emotional expression. source: KTH Sweden

Wikipedia states that emotion is indeed linked with tonality in both music and speech:

  The tones in music seem like a characterization of the tones in human
  speech, which indicate emotional content. The vowels in the phonemes
  of a song are elongated for a dramatic effect, and it seems as though
  musical tones are simply exaggerations of the normal verbal tonality.

References
- Gramfors & Johansson, thesis KTH Sweden
- Juslin & Laukka, Psych Bullet (2003); 129(5): 770–814


Does the heart play a role in the occurrence of emotions? It is a common belief that the heart is somehow related to emotions. When we are nervous,our heartbeat is effected (increased heart rate) and when we are happy, another pattern in heart function can be observed.

My question is the following. Does the heart have a significant role in the occurence of emotions, or is it that the heart is just an organ that pumps blood and these physiological changes are merely a by-product of processes relevant to emotion?
Is the heart's function of interest to any cognitive scientific field of study?

As it has been pointed in the other answers and the comments, the heart is indeed only an organ that pumps blood and all the processes responsible for emotions are carried out by the brain. However, the heart and generally the autonomous nervous system is of critical importance to somatic theories of emotion. These theories propose that bodily responses in the presence of a certain stimulus, initiate emotional processing. However, it is not that the heart, for instance, creates an emotion. It is the brain that notices any significant physiological changes like the heart rate being increased and makes an interpretation of this internal state taking into account the available stimuli. This idea originates with William James' theory of emotion but it was also incorporated in more recent approaches like the somatic marker hypothesis by Antonio Damasio.


Do ability tests predict maximal more than typical job performance? I have often read that ability tests are indicative of what people "can do", but that job performance also depends on what people "will do".

For example, Ackerman and Beier (2012) wrote that:

  There is a fundamental mismatch between what is measured by extant
  intelligence tests and the criteria one is most interested in, when
  predicting job-related performance measures, that is, the mismatch
  between typical and maximal behaviors. ... Although assessments of
  what someone can do will serve as an assessment of the upper bound of
  a person’s performance on the day that the applicant is assessed, I–O
  psychologists and managers are most interested in what the applicant
  will do on a day-to-day basis on the job—that is, the individual’s
  typical performance.

Thus, my questions are:

What is the  correlation between maximal job performance and typical job performance?
To what extent do ability tests predict maximal performance more than typical performance?

I'm interested in learning about empirical studies that have tested these ideas. I also imagine that findings will vary based on factors related to the work setting, and so forth (e.g., some work environments permit greater variability in discretionary effort). Also, presumably the degree to which ability-performance correlations differ between typical and maximal will be greater where the correlation between typical and maximal is lower. I'm also interested in understanding more about the methodological challenges associated with operationalising typical and maximal performance.

References

Ackerman, P. L., Beier, M. (2012) The problem is in the defition: g and intelligence in I-O psychology. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 5 149–188.

The distinction between maximum and typical performance was originally established by Sackett et al. (1988), and since then, how to predict either and their relation to one another seems to have been a very active area of research. In fact, there is a prohibitively large literature on the matter for a full review.
Fortunately, your questions were recently addressed comprehensively, along with other inquiries about the relationship between typical and maximum performance, in the December 2007 issue of Human Performance. To start, one paper by Barnes and Morgeson (2007) which provides support for Ackerman and Beier's claim, in its descriptive sense, that typical performance is that which is of interest to employers, which found that compensation was predicted by typical performance and intra-individual performance variability, but not by maximum performance. I suspect the claim was made in a prescriptive sense, though, so let's continue and see where the evidence takes us.
In the same issue, Marcus et al. (2007) reported support for the long-standing claims that measures of cognitive ability, such as g, serve as predictors of maximum performance, whereas measures of personality serve as predictors of typical performance. Tables provided in this paper also suggest, to me, that a meaningful correlation between typical and maximum performance may be tricky or impossible to elicit, as does another paper in the same issue of the journal.
This paper, by Mangos et al. (2007), suggests that job performance in an ecologically valid setting tends to be characterized by a mixture of need for typical and maximum performance, which I think makes life somewhat difficult for Ackerman and Beier's claim about what IO psychologists and managers are interested in, in the prescriptive sense, with respect to performance. Methodologically, it is not clear how we ought to dissociate the two, and theoretically, it is not clear why we would want to.
In conclusion, based on this special issue on the matter, it seems the simplest answer to your question about ability tests and maximum performance is that ability test scores seem to account for a large amount of the observed variance. With respect to your question about the correlation between maximum and typical performance, it unfortunately appears the answer to your question is complex and not readily summarized.
References

Barnes, C. M., & Morgeson, F. P. (2007). Typical performance, maximal performance, and performance variability: Expanding our understanding of how organizations value performance. Human Performance, 20(3), 259-274.
Mangos, P. M., Steele-Johnson, D., LaHuis, D., & White III, E. D. (2007). A multiple-task measurement framework for assessing maximum-typical performance. Human Performance, 20(3), 241-258.
Marcus, B., Goffin, R. D., Johnston, N. G., & Rothstein, M. G. (2007). Personality and cognitive ability as predictors of typical and maximum managerial performance. Human Performance, 20(3), 275-285.
Sackett, P. R., Zedeck, S., & Fogli, L. (1988). Relations between measures of typical and maximum job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73(3), 482.


Are there recent theories on physiognomy? What are recent theories on the relation between personality and facial or body shape, and are there studies to support them?

See Wikipedia on physiognomy and somatotypes & constitutional psychology for background.

I would be most happy if you could go beyond the well-known facts about intelligence and beauty.

Facial shape

Aggression relates to facial width-to-height ratio (Carré, McCormick, & Mondloch, 2009; Carré & McCormick, 2008). The width-to-height ratio is the distance between the left and right zygion (the outside of the cheek bone) divided by the distance between the top of the upper lip and the mid-brow. Here's a useful image displaying the meaning of this ratio from the 2009 article:

Carré et al. found that the lower the width-to-height ratio, i.e. the shorter the distance between lip and brow in relation to the distance from cheekbone to cheekbone, the more aggressive the person is (as measured through a well-validated laboratory task) and is perceived by strangers.

Also, the Big Five differ in observability (Penton-Voak, Pound, Little, & Perrett, 2006). Participants were asked to rate the Big 5 aspects of the personality of strangers. There was a strong agreement between these ratings and the results of a personality test the depicted persons had filled in (reliability calculated as Cronbach's $\alpha=.70\text{–}.89$ for all dimensions, only male conscientiousness was $.63)$. Similar results were found with composite images.

Here are some composite facial images from that article:

Differences are subtle, but perceptible! BTW, I think I came across this from The Personality Puzzle (Funder, 1997) originally, but I'm not 100% certain.

Some of these facial differences may relate to testosterone. Dominance and masculinity relate to perceptible differences in male facial shape due to the prenatal influence of testosterone, but fortunately for the scope of this answer, these differences do not affect attractiveness to females (Neave, Laing, Fink, & Manning, 2003; Swaddle & Reierson, 2002).

Body shape

Body mass index

There is some evidence that body mass index (BMI) relates to higher extraversion and psychoticism and lower neuroticism in middle-aged Japanese people (Kakizaki et al., 2008), impulsivity (Murphy, Stojek, & MacKillop, 2014; first citation of the new year!), hypomania (Valenti, Omizo, & Mehl-Madrona, 2011), and worse cognitive executive functioning (Gunstad et al., 2007). However, one study did not find a relationship between BMI and personality psychopathology (Picot & Lilenfeld, 2003). Another study found a positive relationship between neuroticism and BMI in middle-aged American women only (the opposite of the relationship in the Japanese population according to Kakizaki et al., who did not mention prominent sex differences) and extraversion among men only (same direction as in Kakizaki et al., but again, more sex differences), as well as negative relationships with openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (Brummett et al., 2006). Low conscientiousness related more strongly to BMI in women, and predicted BMI increases over time.

Testosterone

Another set of correlations between personality and body shape are mediated by testosterone, which affects several, readily observable, physical characteristics, including muscle mass, bone length, vocal pitch and tone, hair growth patterns, body odor, dermal oil secretion and acne, subcutaneous facial fat and facial bone contours, and prominence of the Adam's apple. Testosterone relates to many behavioral patterns in romantic relations, the general trend being toward more competitive promiscuity and less long-term fidelity with increasing testosterone (e.g., Burnham et al., 2003). Testosterone increases in men anticipating competition, but may decrease in women (Mazur, Susman, & Edelbrock, 1997). This effect may be moderated by implicit power motivation (Schultheiss, Campbell, & McClelland, 1999); if so, it's conceivable that personality could affect appearance over time by altering testosterone levels. Power motivation interacts in complex ways with sex and the outcome of social contexts in affecting testosterone (Schultheiss et al., 2005; Schultheiss, Wirth, & Stanton, 2004).

One of the underlying personality differences associated with testosterone appears to be in sexual motivation, which manifests in non-human animals as well. Testosterone also relates to sensation-seeking (Roberti, 2004; Gerra et al., 1999; Daitzman & Zuckerman, 1980; Zuckerman, Buchsbaum, & Murphy, 1980) and risk tolerance (Sapienza, Zingales, & Maestripieri, 2009; Stanton et al., 2011; Stanton, Liening, & Schultheiss, 2011), though the relationship exhibits some complexities across domains of risk (Stenstrom, Saad, Nepomuceno, & Mendenhall, 2011). The relationship between testosterone and risk aversion may be mediated by abstract reasoning ability (Brañas-Garza & Rustichini, 2011).

Testosterone also relates to dominance (Mazur & Booth, 1998), aggression (Archer, 2006; Birger et al., 2003; Ehrenkranz, Bliss, & Sheard, 1974; Archer, Birring, & Wu, 1998), and lack of empathy, the last of which appears to be an empirically established effect of testosterone (Chapman et al., 2006; Knickmeyer, Baron-Cohen, Raggatt, Taylor, & Hackett, 2006; van Honk et al., 2011; Ronay & Carney, 2013; see also Auyeung & Baron-Cohen, 2013). Testosterone may even explain deficits in social development (Knickmeyer & Baron-Cohen, 2006) and autistic traits in general (Auyeung et al., 2009; Ingudomnukul, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Knickmeyer, 2007), according to a theory that conceptualizes autism as extreme cognitive maleness (Baron-Cohen, 2002; Baron-Cohen, Knickmeyer, & Belmonte, 2005; Chakrabarti et al., 2009).

Testosterone relates positively to emotional arousal and anger, but also relates positively to attentiveness to angry facial expressions in others (van Honk et al., 1999). This latter result demonstrates that testosterone doesn't unilaterally decrease awareness of others' emotional states, especially to whatever extent they pose immediate threat. The relationship between testosterone and antisocial behavior is also moderated by socioeconomic status (Dabbs & Morris, 1990). These complexities may limit the otherwise impressive relationships between personality and testosterone.

In women, estradiol may instead play a similar role to testosterone in men, modifying dominance motivation (Stanton & Schultheiss, 2009). Wikipedia lists some observable physiological effects of estradiol, but these claims currently lack supporting citations.

References (there's a ton; I recommend zooming in with Ctrl++ or copy-pasting into a word processor)

· Archer, J. (2006). Testosterone and human aggression: An evaluation of the challenge hypothesis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(3), 319–345. Retrieved from http://aggroreview.googlecode.com/svn-history/r31/sources/downloaded/testosterone/Archer_2004.pdf.
· Archer, J., Birring, S. S., & Wu, F. C. (1998). The association between testosterone and aggression among young men: Empirical findings and a meta‐analysis. Aggressive Behavior, 24(6), 411–420.
· Auyeung, B., Baron‐Cohen, S., Ashwin, E., Knickmeyer, R., Taylor, K., & Hackett, G. (2009). Fetal testosterone and autistic traits. British Journal of Psychology, 100(1), 1–22. Retrieved from http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~sxs02dtf/auyeung2009.pdf.
· Auyeung, B., & Baron‐Cohen, S. (2013). Prenatal and postnatal testosterone effects on human social and emotional behavior. In S. Baron-Cohen, M. Lombardo, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from developmental social neuroscience. Oxford University Press.
· Baron-Cohen, S. (2002). The extreme male brain theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(6), 248–254. Retrieved from http://cogsci.bme.hu/~ivady/bscs/read/bc.pdf.
· Baron-Cohen, S., Knickmeyer, R. C., & Belmonte, M. K. (2005). Sex differences in the brain: implications for explaining autism. Science, 310(5749), 819–823. Retrieved from http://docentes.cs.urjc.es/~odeluis/Docencia/ABP/Articulos/baroncohen.pdf.
· Birger, M., Swartz, M., Cohen, D., Alesh, Y. A., Grishpan, C., & Kotelr, M. (2003). Aggression: The testosterone-serotonin link. IMAJ-RAMAT GAN-, 5(9), 653–658. Retrieved from http://www.ima.org.il/FilesUpload/IMAJ/0/54/27288.pdf.
· Brañas-Garza, P., & Rustichini, A. (2011). Organizing effects of testosterone and economic behavior: Not just risk taking. PLoS ONE, 6(12), e29842. Retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029842#pone-0029842-g001.
· Brummett, B. H., Babyak, M. A., Williams, R. B., Barefoot, J. C., Costa, P. T., & Siegler, I. C. (2006). NEO personality domains and gender predict levels and trends in body mass index over 14 years during midlife. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(3), 222–236. Retrieved from ResearchGate.
· Burnham, T. C., Chapman, J. F., Gray, P. B., McIntyre, M. H., Lipson, S. F., & Ellison, P. T. (2003). Men in committed, romantic relationships have lower testosterone. Hormones and Behavior, 44(2), 119–122. Retrieved from http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Gray_10-20-03.pdf.
· Carré, J. M., & McCormick, C. M. (2008). In your face: Facial metrics predict aggressive behaviour in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275(1651), 2651–2656. Retrieved from http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1651/2651.full.pdf%20html.
· Carré, J. M., McCormick, C. M., & Mondloch, C. J. (2009). Facial structure is a reliable cue of aggressive behavior. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1194–1198. Retrieved from http://carrelab.com/Carre_et_al_2009_Psyc_Sci.pdf.
· Chakrabarti, B., Dudbridge, F., Kent, L., Wheelwright, S., Hill‐Cawthorne, G., Allison, C., ... & Baron‐Cohen, S. (2009). Genes related to sex steroids, neural growth, and social–emotional behavior are associated with autistic traits, empathy, and Asperger syndrome. Autism Research, 2(3), 157–177. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.80/full.
· Chapman, E., Baron-Cohen, S., Auyeung, B., Knickmeyer, R., Taylor, K., & Hackett, G. (2006). Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the empathy quotient (EQ) and the “reading the mind in the eyes” test. Social Neuroscience, 1(2), 135–148. Retrieved from http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2006_Chapman_etal.pdf.
· Daitzman, R. J., & Zuckerman, M. (1980). Disinhibitory sensation seeking and gonadal hormones. Personality and Individual Differences, 1, 103–110.
· Dabbs, J. M., & Morris, R. (1990). Testosterone, social class, and antisocial behavior in a sample of 4,462 men. Psychological Science, 1(3), 209–211. Retrieved from http://connect.issaquah.wednet.edu/cfs-file.ashx/__key/telligent-evolution-components-attachments/13-8431-00-00-00-04-77-28/Testosterone-and-Antisocial-behavior.pdf
· Ehrenkranz, J., Bliss, E., & Sheard, M. H. (1974). Plasma testosterone: Correlation with aggressive behavior and social dominance in man. Psychosomatic Medicine, 36(6), 469–475.
· Funder, D. C. (1997). The personality puzzle. W. W. Norton & Co.
· Gerra, G., Avanzini, P., Zaimovic, A., Sartori, R., Bocchi, C., Timpano, M., Zambelli, U., Delsignore, R., Gardini, F., Talarico, E., & Brambilla, F. (1999). Neurotransmitters, neuroendocrine correlates of sensation-seeking temperament in normal humans. Neuropsychobiology, 39, 207–213.
· Gunstad, J., Paul, R. H., Cohen, R. A., Tate, D. F., Spitznagel, M. B., & Gordon, E. (2007). Elevated body mass index is associated with executive dysfunction in otherwise healthy adults. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 48(1), 57–61. Retrieved from http://postcog.ucd.ie/files/Gunsted.pdf.
· Ingudomnukul, E., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Knickmeyer, R. (2007). Elevated rates of testosterone-related disorders in women with autism spectrum conditions. Hormones and Behavior, 51(5), 597–604. Retrieved from http://beyond-belief.org.uk/sites/beyond-belief.org.uk/files/Baron-Cohen%20hormonesandbehavior.pdf.
· Kakizaki, M., Kuriyama, S., Sato, Y., Shimazu, T., Matsuda-Ohmori, K., Nakaya, N., ... & Tsuji, I. (2008). Personality and body mass index: A cross-sectional analysis from the Miyagi Cohort Study. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 64(1), 71–80.
· Knickmeyer, R. C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2006). Fetal testosterone and sex differences. Early Human Development, 82(12), 755–760.
· Knickmeyer, R., Baron-Cohen, S., Raggatt, P., Taylor, K., & Hackett, G. (2006). Fetal testosterone and empathy. Hormones and Behavior, 49(3), 282–292. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/7540638_Fetal_testosterone_and_empathy/file/50463515da285cea18.pdf.
· Mazur, A., & Booth, A. (1998). Testosterone and dominance in men. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(3), 353–363. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/663/1/bbs_mazur.html.
· Mazur, A., Susman, E. J., & Edelbrock, S. (1997). Sex difference in testosterone response to a video game contest. Evolution and Human Behavior, 18(5), 317–326. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/630/1/Pong.html.
· Murphy, C. M., Stojek, M. K., & MacKillop, J. (2014). Interrelationships among impulsive personality traits, food addiction, and Body Mass Index. Appetite, 73, 45–50.
· Neave, N., Laing, S., Fink, B., & Manning, J. T. (2003). Second to fourth digit ratio, testosterone and perceived male dominance. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 270(1529), 2167–2172. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691489/pdf/14561281.pdf.
· Penton-Voak, I. S., Pound, N., Little, A. C., & Perrett, D. I. (2006). Personality judgments from natural and composite facial images: More evidence for a “kernel of truth” in social perception. Social Cognition, 24(5), 607–640. Retrieved from http://www.alittlelab.stir.ac.uk/pubs/Penton-Voak_06_kernaloftruth_SocCog.pdf.
· Picot, A. K., & Lilenfeld, L. R. (2003). The relationship among binge severity, personality psychopathology, and body mass index. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 34(1), 98–107.
· Roberti, J. W. (2004). A review of behavioral and biological correlates of sensation seeking. Journal of Research in Personality, 38(3), 256–279. Retrieved from ftp://psyftp.psychology.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/Papers/DawnPatrol/Roberti2004.pdf.
· Ronay, R., & Carney, D. R. (2013). Testosterone’s negative relationship with empathic accuracy and perceived leadership ability. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(1), 92–99. Retrieved from http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana_carney/published.Ronay%26Carney.2012.SPPS.pdf.
· Sapienza, P., Zingales, L., & Maestripieri, D. (2009). Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(36), 15268–15273. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741240/.
· Schultheiss, O. C., Campbell, K. L., & McClelland, D. C. (1999). Implicit power motivation moderates men's testosterone responses to imagined and real dominance success. Hormones and Behavior, 36(3), 234–241. Retrieved from http://www.psych2.phil.fau.de/~oschult/humanlab/publications/scm1999.pdf.
· Schultheiss, O. C., Wirth, M. M., & Stanton, S. J. (2004). Effects of affiliation and power motivation arousal on salivary progesterone and testosterone. Hormones and Behavior, 46(5), 592–599. Retrieved from http://www.psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publications/sws2004hb.pdf.
· Schultheiss, O. C., Wirth, M. M., Torges, C. M., Pang, J. S., Villacorta, M. A., & Welsh, K. M. (2005). Effects of implicit power motivation on men's and women's implicit learning and testosterone changes after social victory or defeat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(1), 174–188. Retrieved from http://www.psych2.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~oschult/humanlab/publications/s2005jpsp.pdf.
· Stanton, S. J., Liening, S. H., & Schultheiss, O. C. (2011). Testosterone is positively associated with risk taking in the Iowa Gambling Task. Hormones and Behavior, 59(2), 252–256. Retrieved from http://www.scottliening.com/research/publications/StantonLieningSchultheiss_HB.pdf.
· Stanton, S. J., O’Dhaniel, A., McLaurin, R. E., Kuhn, C. M., LaBar, K. S., Platt, M. L., & Huettel, S. A. (2011). Low-and high-testosterone individuals exhibit decreased aversion to economic risk. Psychological Science, 22(4), 447–453. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/.
· Stanton, S. J., & Schultheiss, O. C. (2009). The hormonal correlates of implicit power motivation. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(5), 942–949. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2818294/.
· Stenstrom, E., Saad, G., Nepomuceno, M. V., & Mendenhall, Z. (2011). Testosterone and domain-specific risk: Digit ratios (2D: 4D and rel2) as predictors of recreational, financial, and social risk-taking behaviors. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(4), 412–416.
· Swaddle, J. P., & Reierson, G. W. (2002). Testosterone increases perceived dominance but not attractiveness in human males. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 269(1507), 2285–2289. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691166/pdf/12495494.pdf.
· Valenti, M. P., Omizo, M. M., & Mehl-Madrona, L. (2011). Personality and obese Body Mass Index. The New School Psychology Bulletin, 9(1), 34–38. Retrieved from http://www.nspb.net/index.php/nspb/article/viewFile/204/294.
· van Honk, J., Schutter, D. J., Bos, P. A., Kruijt, A. W., Lentjes, E. G., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). Testosterone administration impairs cognitive empathy in women depending on second-to-fourth digit ratio. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(8), 3448–3452. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/49817064_Testosterone_administration_impairs_cognitive_empathy_in_women_depending_on_second-to-fourth_digit_ratio/file/d912f50b5d773ca9e0.pdf.
· van Honk, J., Tuiten, A., Verbaten, R., van den Hout, M., Koppeschaar, H., Thijssen, J., & de Haan, E. (1999). Correlations among salivary testosterone, mood, and selective attention to threat in humans. Hormones and Behavior, 36(1), 17–24.
· Zuckerman, M., Buchsbaum, M. S., & Murphy, D. L. (1980). Sensation seeking and its biological correlates. Psychological Bulletin, 88(1), 187–214.


Difference vs. Ratio of evidence in sequential sampling models In sequential sampling models - for instance Ratcliff and Smith, (2006) - participants' responses in a binary choice experiment are modelled by a particle, which moves up or down towards the boundaries for selecting each response over time according to the evidence in favour of each, or, analogously, their expected utility (Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993), in a way that looks something like this:

My question is if anyone knows, and preferably can provide a reference for, whether in such a model responses are best predicted by

the difference in the evidence for/expected utility of each response (i.e. $P(Response\ A) = Evidence\ for\ A - Evidence\ for\ B$) or
the ratio of evidence/expected utility (i.e. $P(Response\ A) = \frac{Evidence\ for\ A}{Evidence\ for\ B}$)

My intuition is that it's the ratio between the two responses, rather than the absolute difference, which should best predict responses, but I can't find a reference for this, and I'm sure this question has been answered somewhere before.

Has anyone any ideas here?

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, ratio of evidence is actually a terrible method because that would end up with an immediate decision as soon as any evidence is encountered for either side, giving a ratio of infinity for that side (something/0 is greater than any finite decision threshold).

Try Gold and Shadlen 2007 for a review http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/gold_shadlen07_annu_rev_neurosci.pdf


Are the incidents of autism spectrum disorder on the rise, or is there an increase due to better definition of diagnostic criteria? Statistics offered by the CDC indicate that the prevalance of autism spectrum disorder in the U.S. went from 1-in-150 children in 2002, up to 1-in-88 by 2008:

A new report released in 2013 shows that this number has risen to 1-in-50.
The most recent study concludes that it is likely that the changes in prevalence are due to an improved awareness/survey techniques:

While it is not
possible to definitively determine the
underlying reason for this trend, several
previous studies that also examined
changes over time in ASD prevalence
estimates within selected birth cohorts
suggest that increasing recognition of
children with ASD has had an important
impact. Evidence from
epidemiologic, genetic, and neuroscience
research points to the prenatal period as
the key exposure window for ASD risk
factors. If the causes of ASD are
related to factors that exist prior to or
occur just after birth, it is unlikely that
changes in ASD prevalence within the
cohorts of children aged 6–13 in
2011–2012 reflect ‘‘true’’ increases in
susceptibility to the condition at these
ages. Rather, changes in prevalence of
parent-reported ASD within these birth
cohorts (children born in 1998–2005)
likely reflect either changes in the
recognition of ASD by health
professionals or survey-based
measurement changes over time

However, there also seems to be a significant support for the idea that ASD is rising to epidemic proportions, and that anything from changes in how many older couples are having children to various environmental factors may be increasing the rate of ASD incidents.

These rising rates inspired Bob Wright, co-founder of Autism Speaks, to say, "We have an epidemic on our hands.... It is imperative that the U.S. government steps up its commitment to helping people living with autism today." Last November, the first congressional hearing on autism in 10 years was held to determine what the federal response should be. (It didn't exactly make front-page news: It aired on CSPAN-3.)

...and...

"Now we know there's a host of genetic and environmental factors that are likely involved," says Dr. Susan Hyman, professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics subcommittee on autism.
One possible contributor to autism's rise is that people are having babies later. The chance for gene glitches increases as parents -- especially dads -- age, explains Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist at the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis.
But delayed childbearing explains only a very small fraction of the rise in autism rates. Environmental factors may turn many autism genes "on" or "off," says Hyman.
"The best studies we have now point to things that babies are exposed to in the womb, when the brain is forming," says Hertz-Picciotto. Living in areas with high levels of air pollution (such as near a freeway), having low levels of folic acid, being overweight or diabetic, and having a high fever during pregnancy all seem to up a woman's risk of having a child with autism.

What studies or evidence support an actual increase in the rate of children with ASD?  Presumably there are stronger connections to environmental factors than the infamous Wakefield study, given the comments by Dr. Hyman?
Are there studies that show a strong correlation with increased rates with changes in the  diagnostic criteria, which would support the hypothesis that a significant portion of the increased prevalence is due to improvements in identifying individuals on the spectrum?

Sociologists King and Bearman have been looking into this (see King & Bearman, 2009a; King & Bearman, 2009b; King & Bearman, 2011; King et al., 2009). They estimate that some of the increases in ASD identification are due to the following:

25% attributed to diagnostic accretion - particularly children with mental retardation now being concurrently diagnosed with ASD.
15% attributed to improved awareness of ASD.
10% attributed to the increase in the age of mothers choosing to have children.
4% to geographic clustering - that is, families might move to an area where services are available, leading to increased diagnoses in specific areas.

This leaves a significant proportion of the increase in ASD identification unexplained, and in need of further investigations.


Book about Asperger's for Asperger's Is there a book that people with Asperger's can read to better understand their diagnosis and how to cooperate with people?

Aspergers as a diagnosis is no more its been merged into autism spectrum disorder. Its really not that bad of a diagnosis compared to full blown Autism or something like Schizo, Bipolar or BPD.

Here are some books and resources:

ASD Me Learning Functioning Spectrum

Autism Spectrum Disorders: Foundations, Characteristics, and Effective Strategies

Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew: Updated and Expanded Edition

Asperger's From Wikipedia

I can speak from personal experience the therapies for AS listed on wiki sometimes really work; CBT and anxiety medication really helped me. My brain kinda adapted to the anti-depressant though and I haven't found or really needed anything anxiety in a few months. You'll find social skills like cooperation are this wonderful thing you can practice online with friends and if you mess it up they will be really kind and understanding. I really fail when interacting with frenemies.

I have fun talking to people at Wrong Planet (an autism community) as well. Some people there are less functioning than AS so you have to have compassion and understanding. Others still are higher functioning than me which of course makes me a little jealous but I've learned that I'm not alone and neither are you.


Measuring serotonin in the brain with a sample of spinal fluid Is it possible to measure serotonin with a sample of spinal fluid?

It is entirely possible to sample serotonin levels from cerebral spinal fluid (CFS) taken via a lumbar puncture, also known as a spinal tap, to the spinal column from the central nervous system (CNS).

This is the most accurate method of measuring neurotransmitter levels in the brain* without risking damage to cerebral tissue, although it is safer and almost as accurate to take the sample from platelets extracted a blood sample. The reason it is safer is because you don't have to go through nerve tissue, and because CSF does not contain the defences of blood to deal with toxins and pathogens (potential infections).
note. It is perhaps more accurate to use a tissue sample, although this would take longer to analyse and damage grey matter. In animal studies we use in vivo microdialysis, but this is only worthwhile in controlled (extremely clean) experimental conditions.


What is the "static" in human vision called? Sort of like a cheap digital Camera, the human eye has certain feedback that's perceived but doesn't actually exist in the real world; a little layer of Static that's especially noticeable in pitch black lighting or when one's eyes are closed. It's (in my experience) sort of rainbow colored.

What is the name/term for that rainbow static when you close your eyes? I've been trying to find information about this but I don't know the word for it.

It's essentially shot noise.

  In optics, shot noise describes the fluctuations of the number of photons detected (or simply counted in the abstract) due to their occurrence independent of each other. This is therefore another consequence of discretization, in this case of the energy in the electromagnetic field in terms of photons. In the case of photon detection, the relevant process is the random conversion of photons into photo-electrons for instance, thus leading to a larger effective shot noise level when using a detector with a quantum efficiency below unity.

Researchers have taken notice of this as early as the 1960s See [2]  I was unable to access this, but the abstract notes that it is probably not ideal shot noise, but I don't know what the De Lange filter adds to the shot noise model, it may be a small corrective factor.

  A noise model incorporating the De Lange filter is applied to visual threshold performance. The model gives better agreement with the experimentally observed Weber-Fechner relation than does the ideal shot noise limited model, and it predicts that the critical time duration for integration of threshold stimuli depends upon the mean luminance level of the background field.

As noted in the introduction to [1], the noise stems from the transduction stage in the retina:

  On the other hand, people working on vertebrate photoreceptor believe that the responses of rods to single photons are locally saturated and that the "quantum" responses in
  rods are surprisingly stereotyped. Thus the variability in responses to dim light flashes is believed to be basically due to the absorption of one, two, . .. , few photons [they cite (Baylor et al., 1984)].

Refs:

  [1] Petracchi D., Cercignani, G., Lucia, S. (1996) Photoreceptor Sensitivity and the Shot Noise of Chemical Processes.  Biophysical Journal, 70: 111-120.
  pdf

  [2] Ruddock, K.H. (1969)Some aspects of human visual threshold performance in relation to temporal frequency response characteristics.  Optics Communications 1(4): 173-179.doi


What is this type of graph called? It is common to represent various attributes on a pair of axes as in the examples below. In general, what is this sort of graph called?

It is, perhaps, useful to think in these terms and we can recognise the resulting types/points. Examples of the such graphs are included below (Control vs Warmth of Parenting, belief vs knowledge in Religion, morals vs ethics or social vs economics) to produce different graphs.

TLDR version: some common generic names include "business matrix" and "quadrant analysis", but these are mostly used in business. The former seems a little more general as it has been applied to 3x3 partitions a well. Social sciences in a general seem to lack a common term for this type of graph. But "quadrant chart" or "four-quadrant chart" is probably not too wrong (for the 2x2 case) even though you can't easily find explicit definitions of these terms. "Nine box" grid/matrix/chart seems used for the 3x3 case, again usually without an explicit definition.

The divisions in your first three examples are called quadrants in math.

In business, Gartner is somewhat [in]famous for their "magic" quadrants. A more generic term is "quadrant analysis", as marketing book lets us know:

  Quadrant analysis is a variation of cross-tabulation in which response to two rating scales questions are plotted in four quadrants of a two-dimensional table.

Also "quadrant chart" or "four-quadrant chart" is sometimes used to denote these although almost nobody bothers to define what those terms mean. An IBM piece of software (Cognos) defines them as a type of bubble chart (with quadrants highlighted), but surely others use them without bubbles.

The information visualisation book of Harris genericized this as "business matrix".

  When a chart or graph is divided into four generally small sections, it is sometime described as having four quadrants. Two widely used applications are the business matrix, shown on the left and the traditional graph format on the right. In some cases the quadrants are numbered, as in the graph on the right. In other cases the quadrants are identified by word description as in the business matrix. Because four quadrants are formed does not mean that all four will be used.

  -- R.L. Harris, Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference, Oxford University Press, 1999

There is at least some software that uses the same term and I found two more books that call the generic form of Gartner's graph by same generic "business matrix" name. The first one only exemplifies the notion with an "export matrix" (strength/weakness X threats/opportunities)  The second book is a bit more elaborate:

  Two of the classic strategic development tools are business matrices – the market growth/market share and strength/attractiveness matrices – also known as the BCG (figure 100) and GE matrices.

  The business matrices, sometimes called portfolio matrices, graphically display
  the overall competitive standing of a portfolio of businesses. Each matrix positions
  the company and its business units according to two dimensions (axes).

  -- N. Adler, Tools for Project Management, Workshops and Consulting:  A Must-Have Compendium of Essential Tools and Techniques, Wiley 2011

The "portfolio matrix" synonym suggest by this latter book also seems to have some traction, but Wikipedia uses it to refer just to the  BCG-matrix (which takes its name from the Boston Consulting Group)... which also goes by quite a few other names. As you can probably tell from the Wikipedia BCG example, sometimes a third dimension is plotted using circle radii. Adler also mentions this:

  You can plot ‘bubbles’ around the points to indicate the relative market size of each business unit.

So those may or may not be strictly the kind of graph you look for. But he also shows a 3x3 business matrix (more like your last D&D example).

The latter 3x3 seems to be called the "GE-McKinsey Matrix" in other places, sometimes with a "nine box" designation added. Actually "nine box matrix" seems a genericized version of this, potentially with other things on the axes, e.g. leadership potential vs performance.

There's one presentation that has 10 of these variations used in business, but it just calls them "useful matrices" as an umbrella term. Some of the examples given there don't clearly have obviously ordinal axes though, e.g. the Ansoff matrix , but I suppose one can quantify newness. Other examples include the risk (management) matrix and Covey's time management matrix, the latter being a derivative of the Eisenhower method/matrix/box.

As far as I can tell, outside business neither is the word "quadrant" nor the word "matrix" really used to refer to this kind of chart, but the chart has a more specific name, e.g. political "compass" (which you gave as an example); the version of that with center zone is called a Nolan chart, but it's probably not a term used outside politics.

An example of a chart like Nolan's but from organizational/negotiation psychology is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI):

And a perception-related Nolan-like chart, somewhat based on the Aristotelian system of the four elements
:

I don't know if anyone has come up with a remotely generic name for this center-separating quadrant-chart variation.

Math-wise if you use more than the four quadrants, you're doing some arbitrary partitioning of a plane although the term "plane partitioning" has a different meaning (in combinatorics); instead space partitioning is the term used for the partitioning of Euclidean spaces, such as the plane. A non-orthogonal example of the latter is the Voronoi diagram

Also if the scores (plotted on the axes) are bounded, you're not really using/partitioning the whole plane, but just a region thereof.

Probably the most complex example I know of a Voronoi-like diagram that that is reasonably widespread use is the USDA NRCS "soil textural triangle", itself a (barycentric) ternary plot, i.e. it's actually a projected tridimensional plot.

This example is, of course, very remote from your original question. See also piper diagram for another partitioned plot similar to that USDA triangle, but used in water chemistry.

Also, I should mention that a reason that you probably don't see these more often in psychology is that even the (now dated) MBTI personality had 4 dimensions. Although its proponents often drew the 16 (extreme) combinations in boxes, it's not easy to put these on explicit axes in a plane figure.  MBTI diagrams often use just colors or letters for the dimensions. The more modern psychological personality theories have 5 (Big Five aka FFM) or 6 (HEXACO) axes, which makes any graphing even more difficult.

The latter also shun "boxing" just based on extreme values like MBTI did. Boxing the extremes is a fairly silly idea given that these dimensions have normal distribution in the population. So I guess that has created a bit of an "anti-quadrant" reflex in some psychologists. By the way, even the D&D "personalities" from your last chart are superior to MBTI in this sense that the D&D matrix acknowledges the "middle" personality type on both of its dimensions.

On the other hand, even the currently widely accepted models of personality, each of the axes does have a fairly natural dual interpretation: introversion vs extroversion etc.

Of course boxing your opponents is very popular in political discourse, even resulting in pun charts like:

Or even


What extent is non linear dynamics and chaos helpful to study brain function? Recently I've started reading dynamical systems in neuroscience by izhikevich and was fascinated by the subject. I would like to pursue PhD in computational neuroscience after my masters. Is it worth to choose this area as my Phd topic? or will it lead me to dead end? If possible can some one suggest the leading researchers/labs working in this direction?

Since this an active and relatively new area of research, nobody can tell you for certain where it will lead.

Whether it will "dead end" is perhaps the wrong way to think about it too. All lines of research have their limits, and when those limits are reached, those researchers who found the limits are often the ones best equipped to move on to the next "thing". If you choose to study it and it turns out to be a less productive area than you had hoped, you will still have learned a large set of useful skills that you can apply to other methods.

As for the usefulness of brain dynamics, the short answer is they have their place and are very promising in certain areas of behavioral science. In particular, coordination and motor control appear to be very well suited to these models. A small but growing body of scientists believe dynamics is the next big thing in cognitive science, though it is still unclear whether this is the case. It sounds like you already have a good primer on the utility of nonlinear dynamics for computational neuroscience with what you're reading. For a more general discussion of their promise and potential for other areas of cognitive science, and a proposal that dynamical systems can essentially replace computational neuroscience, see Chemero (2011). For a concise criticism of the approach see Wagenmakers, van der Mass, and Farrell (2012).

1: Chemero, A. (2011). Radical embodied cognitive science. MIT press.

2:
Wagenmakers, E. J., van der Maas, H. L., & Farrell, S. (2012). Abstract Concepts Require Concrete Models: Why Cognitive Scientists Have Not Yet Embraced Nonlinearly Coupled, Dynamical, Self‐Organized Critical, Synergistic, Scale‐Free, Exquisitely Context‐Sensitive, Interaction‐Dominant, Multifractal, Interdependent Brain‐Body‐Niche Systems. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(1), 87-93.


Study showing how different ages of children learn about balancing objects I'm trying to track down a source for an idea I saw in a documentary a while ago (sorry, no idea where!) It demonstrated how children learn differently at different ages, through showing them balancing an unevenly weighted bar (in other words, a bar that looks the same along its length, but is in fact heavier at one end).

Loosely, the programme suggested that: young children (toddlers?) can get such a bar to balance intuitively, through "trial-and-error"; slightly older children (5?) try to balance the bar half way, and so say "it won't balance"; older children again, understand that the bar is not evenly weighted and so once again realise that experimentation is needed to find the balancing point.

Am I completely imagining that I saw some research of this kind? Or does anybody know where I can find a link to such a piece of research?

I suspect you are thinking of Karmiloff-Smith's work. Here's an excerpt from an '88 article almost exactly matching the description.

    Children were asked to balance a series of blocks on a narrow metal support. Some of the blocks had their weight evenly distributed and balanced at their geometric centre. Others had been drilled with lead in one end and, although they looked identical to the first type, they actually balanced way off centre.

    [...]

    Very briefly, it was shown that 4 and 5 year olds could do this task very easily. They simply picked up each block, moved it along the support until they felt the direction of imbalance, and corrected that by using proprioceptive feedback until the block balanced. By contrast, 6 to 7 year olds placed every block at its geometric centre and were thus incapable of balancing anything but the blocks where the weight was evenly distributed. Finally, 8 to 9 year olds were able to balance all the types of block, as had the youngest subjects.

I'm not super familiar with the author, but given the publication time and terminology, this seems like a theoretical predecessor to the more recent work on embodied cognition, dynamic systems and ecological psychology.

  Karmiloff‐Smith, A. (1988). The Child is a Theoretician, Not an Inductivist*. Mind & Language, 3(3), 183-196.


What techniques can be used to differentiate between correlation and causation? Psychology is unique among other medical sciences in that it cannot ask test participants to like, prefer or support something. As such a vast body of psychological studies are purely observational and can find correlation but not causation.

For example if there is a link between self-awareness and empathy, how to test if being more empathetic increases self-awareness, being more self-aware increases empathy, or, let's say, level of some hormone control both and they are otherwise independent of each other?

Problem

Let's compare those two situations:

A study found that people who eat a lot of sugar are fat. How researchers can test whether a) eating sugar makes people fat b) being fat makes people eat more sugar or c) both sugar consumption and body fat are influenced by the same external factor?
A study found that people who like yellow color are more likely to be psychopaths. How researchers can test whether a) liking yellow turns people into psychopaths b) being a psychopath makes people like yellow c) being a psychopath and liking yellow are both influenced by the same external factor?

In first scenario the answer is easy - split test subjects into two groups, force one group to restrict sugar intake and monitor their weight, help second group lose weight and monitor their sugar intake.

In second - I cannot find the answer. Because psychology generally concerns itself with what people are as opposed to what they do, the standard approach in medicine described above cannot be utilized. Researchers can't force someone to like yellow, neither can they turn someone into a psychopath.

Question

When researchers find a statistical correlation between character traits or preferences, how do they test whether there is a causal relationship between those characteristic, if traits cannot be adjusted?

There is no statistical test for distinguishing mere correlation from causation. It has to come from ulterior (model) considerations.
Having said that, a common way is to design a new experiment, called a controlled study, in which [based on ulterior model considerations] you change something in some but not all the items/subjects observed. This is basically what you describe (propose to do) in your situation 1.
If you have no way whatsoever to change/adjust anything, then you are stuck so to speak; there's no way to go beyond observational studies. In practice, researchers come up with an idea of what causes what and try to "eliminate" (or rather account for) confounders--what you call an "external factor". There are various degrees of statistical sophistication at which you can do this, e.g. the so called path analysis. However, coming up with a complete list of confounders is hopeless.

A science in which by necessity many or most studies are observational is called an observational science (duh). Psychology is not the only science where you find a lot of observational studies. Archeology, geology, epidemiology or astronomy are other, perhaps more exterme examples. In general, a science being (mostly) observational entails that it's more difficult to replicate the results of studies findings... but some contend that this state of affairs is something people got used to... so the so-called "replication crisis" has mostly to do with controlled rather than observational studies. Quoting from the previous link:

But Peng also describes his own field, epidemiology, in the top left of the chart, as having largely been spared the reproducibility crisis, even though it is as theoretically rudderless as medicine or psychology (or archaeology). His contention is that in fields that rely on experimentation, breeds an unreasonable expectation that the results of single experiments (if well-designed and statistically validated) are true. Meanwhile, observational sciences, which are accustomed to the fact that they have little control over their observations and that single results may well be wrong, have already learned the core lesson of the reproducibility crisis: don’t trust that that isn’t replicated.

In fact some of the most controversial results in psychology have both a theoretical (albeit not deeply so) basis and rely on controlled rather that observational studies, e.g. the ego depletion hypothesis, which is roughly that sugar restores willpower.


Does sexual orientation influence gender bias? Let's take three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. Suppose Alice is heterosexual. That should imply that Alice finds Bob attractive at some level, but not Carol. Does this mean Alice is more likely to be biased in favor of Bob (and the reverse if Alice is homosexual)?

I've not found anything directly analyzing this. Closest was this paper, The Influence of Sexual Orientation on the Perceived Fit of Male Applicants for Both Male- and Female-Typed Jobs, but it dealt with whether the sexual orientation of the applicant affected whether the applicant was perceived by the hiring manager as suitable, i.e. it's not the sexual orientation of the hiring manager that's being investigated.

Presumably if the answer to the title question is "yes", then it would be advisable to appoint asexual people to e.g. settle sexual harassment complaints.

The issue around attraction needs to be clarified and assumptions challenged and proven.

To imply that sexual orientation is solely and wholly responsible for attraction is a severe and gross oversimplification verging on stereotyping and discrimination. As Wiki argues physical attractiveness is distinct from sexual attraction. Just because someone is physically attractive and also falls within one's sexual orientation, that person may also not be attracted to the person. The person may already be in a fulfilling relationship or the other person has a wedding ring, to imply that humans are animalistic and therefore their desires translate into behaviour without much other consideration is quite improper and unscientific. You should not draw a specific scenario like studies on hiring interviews to imply that the evidence is not present. There are enough studies on attraction and behaviour in other fields to disprove the specific example of hiring interviewers. I am sure you would not like your race, age or any other stereotyping physical attribute to be the sole determinant for how people and the public assess you? Would you?

On that note, there has been research on attractiveness according to sexual orientation. If attraction is the basis of hiring decision-making process, this study disproves this. However, if you are implying sexual orientation goes through a different mechanism to affect the decision-making process at the hiring interview, then I would be keen to hear it. This 1992 study of 52 subjects (four groups of 13) found minimal or no difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals on the assessment of attractiveness. Both heterosexual and homosexual men rated younger sex subjects higher than older subjects. Your question implies that homosexual men should rate women lower than men as they are not sexually attracted to them. If there are no differences between attractiveness depending on sexual orientation, it seems hard to argue that asexual people should be used on hiring interview panels.

References:

Jankowiak, W.R., Hill, E.M., Donovan, J.M., (1992). The effects of sex and sexual orientation on attractiveness judgments: An evolutionary interpretation. Ethology and Sociobiology. Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 73-85.