What is the correlation between feeling superior and well-being? I have noticed in myself and others, when people perceive themselves as "better off" than the majority of others (e.g., smarter, better looking, higher social status, better brain function, more insight, more capable, etc.) they tend to feel greater  well-being, peace, and self-assurance.

Are there any studies on this?
Is it just primal parts of the brain being activated?
If so, how can we activate that without the external circumstance?

EDIT
For example, just found this one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430590/

Diener et al's (1999) review in Psychological Bulletin provides an excellent entry point into the well-being literature. It reviews the literature with regards to the many causes and correlates of well-being.

Individual Differences

First, individual differences explain a lot of variance in well-being. This is often seen in terms of personality traits such as neuroticism and extraversion (e.g., see the huge meta-analysis of DeNeve and Cooper, 1998). People with low neuroticism and high extraversion tend to experience more well-being. In relation to social comparison, it may be that these personality traits influence lenses of social comparisons both in terms of the standards that are set and how circumstances are appraised relative to those circumstances.

Discrepancy theories and social comparison

I recommend reading page 282 and 283 of Diener et al (1999) where the authors review discrepancy and social comparison theories in relation to subjective well-being. First the authors mention an early discrepancy theory by Michalos:

  According to Michalos's theory, individuals compare themselves to
  multiple standards including other people, past conditions,
  aspirations and ideal levels of satisfaction, and needs or goals.
  Satisfaction judgments are then based on discrepancies between current
  conditions and these standards. A discrepancy that involves an upward
  comparison (i.e., where the comparison standard is higher) will result
  in decreased satisfaction, whereas a downward comparison will result
  in increased satisfaction.

The authors then discuss how subsequent research has shown the situation to be more complex than originally conceptualised: e.g.,

There is a degree of flexibility in which social comparisons we adopt.
Adopting high expectations and thereby creating a discrepancy does not necessarily induce lower well-being, especially if people feel like they are making progress towards theirs goals.
Comparisons are not just social, but can come from a variety of sources.
There's a difference between short-term and more enduring effects on well-being.

Superiority versus positive social comparison

It is also worth making a distinction between a positive social comparison and superiority.  We might see a positive social comparison as an evaluation of  life circumstances as better than some comparison group. In contrast superiority can be quite close to arrogance. Taken to its extreme we can see superiority as an element in narcissism (e.g., "Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements" DSM IV-TR). When the basis of such positive self-evaluations is fragile, I believe this can be related to lower or more volatile self-esteem.

Various factors

Although you mention that it is perception, there is research on various measures that you mention. To take a couple:

intelligence: Several meta-analyses suggest the relationship is fairly minimal (e.g., Sigelman, 1981; Wilson, 1967)
social status - income: Diener et al discuss how the relationship between income and well-being is modest at best.

Primal Factors and Brains

I'm not sure how necessary it is to think of the process in terms of brains. Certainly the process of well-being at some level must be explained in terms of biological processes, but I'm not sure if such a level of explanation is required to understand the relationship between social comparison and well-being.

You might want to read about evolutionary perspectives to well-being.
For example, Grinde (2002) discusses this perspective (See reference and PDF below).

Activating without external circumstances

There is a lot of research in positive psychology on how to attain happiness.
A starting point could be to look at Seligman's ideas around three paths to happiness. Perhaps check out this TED talk by Martin Seligman

References

DeNeve, K.M. & Cooper, H. (1998). The happy personality: a meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being.. Psychological bulletin, 124, 197. PDF
Diener, E., Suh, E.M., Lucas, R.E. & Smith, H.L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress.. Psychological bulletin, 125, 276. PDF
Grinde, B. (2002). Happiness in the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Journal of Happiness Studies, 3, 331-354. PDF
Michalos, A. C. (1985). Multiple discrepancies theory (MDT) Social
Indicators Research, 16, 347-413.
Sigelman, L. (1981). Is ignorance bliss? A reconsideration of the folk
wisdom. Human Relations, 34, 965-974.
Wilson, W. (1967). Correlates of avowed happiness. Psychological Bulletin, 67, 294-306.


What are some criticisms of HEXACO from the Big Five camp? I read the 2009 review-ish chapter of McCrae in The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology and I noticed he never once mentions HEXACO (or its 6th axis: honesty-humility), although McCrae does spend the spacetime to debunk a (totally obscure to me) Polish model of personality that had added a 6th spirituality factor. That to me felt like sweeping HEXACO under the rug, so to speak.

Most of the research on relating HEXACO to Big Five has come (unsurprisingly) from the researchers/proponents of the former, see e.g. What are the correlations between HEXACO and NEO-PI factors?

So, has there been some explicit criticism of HEXACO from the Big Five "heavyweights" (well known researchers/promoters)?

There is a passage in the same book in another chapter by Boele De Raad noting that:

  While the Big Five structure has found large adherence, claims for psycholexically
  based factors beyond the Big Five have been made, for two reasons mainly.
  The first reason is that the correlation matrices may not be optimally exhausted,
  and the second reason is that the trait domain may not be truly exhausted. This
  second reason comes in two versions, one suggesting that the psycholexical
  approach has been too restrictive in selecting personality descriptors (Almagor,
  Tellegen andWaller 1995), and the other suggesting that the psycholexical approach
  has been restricted to the use of trait-descriptive adjectives (cf., De Raad and
  Hofstee 1993).

  Ashton and Lee (2001) argued along the lines of exhausting the correlation matrix.
  They suggested that an additional Honesty-Humility factor, representing such
  traits as honest, sincere, fair and just, versus dishonest, conceited and boasting,
  could systematically be extracted. Support for this sixth factor was observed in
  several languages (Ashton, Lee, Perugini et al. 2004), but not, or not clearly, in all
  languages where this sixth factor was studied, as in American-English (Ashton,
  Lee and Goldberg 2004), Turkish (Somer and Goldberg 1999) and Croatian
  (Mlacic and Ostendorf 2005).

This is basically lexical criticism, but since the lexical perspective was hardly dominant in the development of the Big Five (according to the highly cited review of McCrae and John, 1992), this lexical criticism seems like a rather minor point.

Also note that De Raad himself appears to favor lexicalism, having proposed an eight-factor model from the latter perspective, by extending analysis to more parts of speech than the traditional approach using just adjectives. So De Raad's criticism of HEXACO being from a lexical perspective isn't surprising.

We had a discussion of the pros and cons of the HEXACO model in a recent article that draws on arguments and evidence presented by the "heavyweights" of the Big 5 (Anglim, & O'Connor, 2019).
Here is the quote of the paragraph that focusses specifically on the critiques:

Although the HEXACO model is receiving growing support, the necessity
of a sixth broad trait, as well as the nature of this trait are
subjects of current debate.

First, other prominent six factor
inventories including the Hogan Personality Inventory (Hogan & Hogan,
1992), the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire (Jackson, Paunonen, &
Tremblay, 2000), and Saucier's Big Six (Saucier, 2009) have not
converged on the same sixth factor in the same way that has broadly
occurred with the Big Five (De Raad, Barelds, Mlačić, et al., 2010).
Second, while several lexical studies have broadly supported the
HEXACO model, the support is far from universal.
Third, Saucier and
Ostendorf (1999) have argued that any broad trait in addition to the
Big Five will correlate highly with one of the existing Big Five, and
honesty-humility correlates relatively highly with agreeableness (r =
.67 in Gaughan, Miller, & Lynam, 2012). Honesty-humility also
correlates reasonably well with straightforwardness and modesty facets
of agreeableness in the NEO-PI-R, suggesting that a comprehensive
facet-level model using the Big Five may provide similar predictive
benefits (Costa & McCrae, 1995; Gaughan et al., 2012).
Fourth,
Barford, Zhao, and Smillie (2015) mapped the Big Five and HEXACO
traits to a common space provided by the interpersonal circumplex, and
found that honesty-humility occupied a fairly similar space to the
politeness aspect of B5 agreeableness.
Finally, Condon (2017) assessed
the covariance structure of approximately 700 statement-based
personality test items drawn from the most commonly used public-domain
personality measures (including an approximately equal representation
of items from prominent five and six-factor measures). While he found
support for a large number of narrow traits, factor analysis suggested
five broad traits, and when six factors were extracted, the sixth
factor did not correspond to honesty-humility.

References:

Anglim, J., & O'Connor, P. (2019). Measurement and Research Using the Big Five, HEXACO, and Narrow Traits: A Primer for Researchers and Practitioners. Australian Journal of Psychology, 71, 16-25. https://psyarxiv.com/a78g2/download


Do personality survey responses correlate to the success or failure of minimum wage employees? I recently watched a friend fill out a personality survey for a minimum wage job. These surveys generally have a few dozen to as many as a couple hundred statements with which the applicant must agree, disagree, or stay neutral. The survey is designed to filter candidates. What puzzles me is what basis they use for this filtering.
Some of the questions are obvious correlates with negative employee qualities:

Sometimes I shout at customers to get my point across.

Well, gee, I wonder if I should "strongly agree" with that one?  Others, however, are not so clear:

I will work hard to get a job as an executive at a large company.

My former bosses all say I'm the best employee they've ever had.

I spend a lot of time thinking through about a problem before solving it.

For example, being a self-starter might help or hinder a job behind a cash register. Exercising leadership is great until you're one of 40 people restocking the shelves. Thinking through problems is a useful skill unless the problem facing you is trivial, in which case "consideration" might be construed as "procrastination". Based on examples like these, it's not inherently obvious if these questions measure positive or negative qualities, or what the model response might be.
Moreover, the size, type, and prevalence of these questionnaires suggests a level of sophistication in the selection process that I'm not convinced it is due. Supposing they test 5-10 core competencies, qualities like leadership, professionalism, and decorum, there are more than enough responses to establish inter-survey response validity. Of course, that assumes these employers spent millions of dollars developing valid, proprietary psychometrical measures, or co-opted something in the academic domain.
So what are these surveys really testing?  Tongue-in-cheek, if faced with such a test, what would agreeing, disagreeing, or remaining neutral with the statement, "Employer personality tests correlate with success or failure in the workplace?" reflect about an individual?

Do personality tests predict job performance in general?

There is a large academic literature correlating personality test scores with job performance. You might want to check out the meta-analysis by Barrick et al (2001). It reports the meta-analytic correlations often based on hundreds of studies between Big 5 personality test scores and job performance.

In general the correlations reported in the meta analysis are relatively small (e.g., $r=.12$ for conscientiousness is the biggest). These correlations get a little bigger if you adjust for measurement error in job performance.
So, in summary, in general Big 5 measures of personality tend to predict job performance; however, the predictive validity is not that high.
To see this in the context of other selection tests check out the meta-analysis by Schmitt and Hunter (1998).

Do personality tests predict job performance for minimum wage jobs?

I'm not sure if the category "minimum wage" necessarily captures the right distinction given such a category could refer to a diverse range of jobs.

That said, in terms of breaking analyses down by occupation, at least at this very broad meta-analytic level, the correlation between conscientiousness and job performance appeared to be fairly similar across sales performance ($r=.11$), managerial performance ($r=.12$), and skilled or semi-skilled ($r=.12$) (Barrick et al 2001).

Thus, at least from this meta-analysis, these measures of personality appear to predict job performance about as well for minimum wage jobs as they do for other jobs.

So what are these surveys really testing?

Tests can be developed in a variety of ways. In general, there are theory driven processes and there are empirically driven processes of test development. From a theory driven perspective, constructs of interest can be defined, and items can be developed. From an empirically driven perspective, various statistical techniques can be applied to check for test properties such as the degree to which items intercorrelate in meaningful ways.

Particularly in the applied setting, items or scales can be selected based on the degree to which they provide predictive validity (e.g., correlations with job performance).

More generally, personality tests provide a sampling of behaviour in a standardised way. If items have been developed in a more empirical way, then an explicit theory may not necessarily exist for the meaning of every item. Rather, it is the scale as a whole that takes on meaning which can be informed by a wide range of information including correlations within the test and correlations between the scales of the test and other measures of interest.

References

Barrick, M.R., Mount, M.K. & Judge, T.A. (2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next?. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9-30. PDF
Schmidt, F.L. & Hunter, J.E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.. Psychological Bulletin; Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262. PDF


How can surprise be labelled conscious when mismatch negativity shows that surprise takes place earlier than conscious states? Mismatch negativity (MMN) is the brain response to violations of a rule. The MMN peaks at about 100–250 ms after change onset.
If MMN occurs so early, before conscious perception, why is surprise considered a cognitive phenomenon?
Isn't it rather connected with autonomic processes that take place earlier than cognitive process.
Surprise is considered as belonging to cognitive processes. Among emotion theories, the appraisal theory of emotions, considers that there can be no emotion unless I consciously 'label' it. Here I wonder - how can there be any conscious 'labeling' of surprise when MMN shows that surprise takes place earlier than conscious states? If we accept that surprise does not need conscious awareness for taking place then the appraisal theories that connect surprise with unexpected events are mistaken. See Ortony, Reisenzein and many other appraisal theorists on surprise.

As often in this area, the problem seems to be entirely created by confusions about definitions and terminology and the difficulties resulting from the use of common-sense concepts like “surprise” in scientific theories. One answer would be “Why not?” Basically you seem to object to the definition of surprise used by some theorists but definitions are neither true or false, they are merely common or unusual, and useful or not. Emotions in particular have received so many definitions that there isn't much of a basis to claim any particular one as the “correct” one anymore. Those theorists are just talking about something else than mismatch negativity, it's as simple as that.

Obviously there is a such a thing as being consciously surprised and we have a word for it: “surprise”. There is no way around that without redefining the word to something unrecognizable to most speakers of the English language. It's only with a way to clearly distinguish (1) physiological processes (2) cognitive processes and (3) subjective experiences that we can begin to explore the relationship between them, describe the physiological underpinnings of surprise and account for the experience as such. This experience is a basic fact that you can always “define away” from the scope of your interest but would still need to be explained. Said differently, the “labeling” process is an interesting object of study in itself, whether or not you are prepared to include it in the definition of surprise or want to define emotion through, say, autonomic activation.

If you just assume “surprise” to mean “mismatch negativity”, what you have is neither an empirical finding nor an interesting theory of the conscious experience of surprise. You have just deprived yourself of the ability to clearly speak about the core phenomenon of surprise. In my view, interesting questions to ask would therefore be “What reason is there to conflate surprise with mismatch negativity (or, for that matter, any other brain process)?” or “To what extent does our experience of surprise coincide/follow from mismatch negativity?”


Does it take more cognitive effort to tell the time when reading a digital clock instead of analog? Following a question on UX.Stackexchange about whether or not to use an analog or digital clock on a website from a user-interface perspective it occurs to me that there is probably a psychological difference between using one or the other.

My hypothesis is that it takes longer to know the time when reading digital instead of analog because as children we are taught to understand time via analog clocks (5 past, half past, quarter to etc) so when confronted with a digital clock we have to do some internal calculations to convert from digital numbers into a mental analog clock before we actually understand what the time is. ("07:47, ok so if 07:45 is quarter-to that means it's now half-way between quarter-to and ten-to eight...").

However I'm aware this may just be my own internal process I'm citing rather than being how people in general use clocks so I'm interested to know if my hypothesis is actually supported / disproved.

The answer depends of course on the factors mentioned in the comments; however, one important factor to consider is the intended purpose of reading the clock.

An analog clock presents information in graphical form, in a similar way to how a pie chart might present information. This is opposed to a digital clock, which presents symbolic information, in a similar way to what might be found in a table of values.

Cognitive Fit Theory
According to research by Iris Vessey (cognitive fit theory,) the least cognitive effort will be required when the presentation format of the data matches the intended cognitive use. Vessey's research shows that symoblic information, such as that presented by a digital clock, is best when one needs to evaluate a single number (for example, to answer the question "What time is it now?").  On the other hand, graphical information, such as that presented by the analog clock, is best when one desires to make a comparison between different numbers (for example, to answer the question "How much time has elapsed?").

Therefore, your example in the question (how much time has elapsed past the hour) is best answered with an analog clock, whereas if I want to know what time my alarm is set for, the digital clock on my cell phone is a better format.

I might argue that the analog clock format does not do a good job presenting the graphical information, but that is best saved for another paper.


Can a person with delusions completely acknowledge their delusions I wanted to ask a question for a story I'm writing;

Can a person with delusions completely acknowledge that they have delusions? For example, if someone claims that for a long time he believed certain crucial things about his life to be true (possible things, nothing bizarre; Like his parents being dead and then seeing them at home, him going to a certain school but the school doesn't exist and he actually went to an entirely different one etc.) and then was proven otherwise.

He has no fixations to his previous believes, he's completely open to the possibility of him not being able to differentiate reality (He was open the second he suspected something to be awry).

Would he still fall under the delusional category? If not would it at least be considered an unordinary case?

The short answer to your question Can a person with delusions completely acknowledge their delusions is yes. But it depends.

There are quite a few psychological disorders that have symptoms of delusion or hallucination.

Bentall et al. (2009) took a look at the structure of paranoid delusions. They concluded that emotion related and cognitive processes are involved in paranoid delusions of participants.

I think that a more complex answer to your question is that in the way you have described, the delusions would likely have been attempted to be shattered by loved ones and other people that are involved in the person with delusions life.

Hallucinations can be symptoms of many psychological disorders such as:

Unipolar and Bipolar Affective Disorders (Black & Nasrallah, 1989)
Mood Disorders (Signer, et al., 1989)
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd) (Scott et al., 2007)

This article may be very helpful to your story, the authors discuss delusional thought among non clinical patients i.e., people with no discernible psychological disorder (Freeman, 2006).

References:

Bentall, R. P., Rowse, G., Shryane, N., Kinderman, P., Howard, R., Blackwood, N., ... & Corcoran, R. (2009). The cognitive and affective structure of paranoid delusions: a transdiagnostic investigation of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and depression. Archives of general psychiatry, 66(3), 236-247. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.1

Black D. W. & Nasrallah A. (1989). Hallucinations and Delusions in 1,715 Patients with Unipolar and Bipolar Affective Disorders. Psychopathology 22(1), 28-34. doi: 10.1159/000284576

Freeman, D. (2006). Delusions in the nonclinical population
 Current Psychiatry Reports 8(3), 191-204. doi: 10.1007/s11920-006-0023-1

Scott, J. G., Nurcombe, B., Sheridan, J. & McFarland M. (2007) Hallucinations in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder and psychotic disorder, Australasian Psychiatry, 15(1), 44-48, DOI: 10.1080/10398560601083084

Signer, S. F., Cummings, J. L., & Benson, D. F. (1989). Delusions and mood disorders in patients with chronic aphasia. The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 1(1), 40-45.
doi: 10.1176/jnp.1.1.40


What genetic polymorphisms are linked to aggression or violence? Anecdotally, there are reports of varenicline causing agression, but larger studies tended towards the finding of no effect over controls.

This got me into thinking about possible genetic polymorphisms that are implicated in aggression. Varenicline acts as a partial agonist of α4β2-nicotinic receptors -- maybe if you did a study of a prison population, you'd find those some polymorphism in this receptor among those incarcerated for a violent crime? (There isn't).

More broadly, are there any good candidate genes implicated in aggression/violence?

I had a similar experience 8 years ago, I felt rage that I have never felt before. The day I nearly punched the wall, I understood my completely uncharacteristic behaviour was induced by the drug. Then I asked everyone close if they had noticed recent changes in me, they had. I talked to my doctor and I weaned off of it, my behaviour returned to normal and now at nearly 50 years of age, this was the only such brief period of episodal rage I have ever experienced. It was intense, I've often thought of the poor souls who have comitted suicide and their loved ones who hypothesize the drug is to blame. I would believe it, given my experience.

I am female, have the low MAOA activity gene (homozygous), I also possess 2 homozygous mutations in COMT genes, these affect (slow) degradation of neurotransmitters. I also possess mutations related to dopamine receptor inefficiency, decreased BH4 production (precursor to dopamine), and folate metabolism (precursor to BH4). I am naturally and consstently one of the most even tempered people I know, I have rarely even experienced PMS and my reproductive years will soon be over. Interestly, the MAOA mutation I have has been called the "happiness" gene for woman (not-so for men, infact it's the opposite). I have 2 copies, resulting in even more self-reported happiness in day to day life, which is true for me, but was not for my time on the drug when I had anger, aggression, and rage, like never before. Incidently, it did work for me in giving up the cigerettes.


How does PRIMs solve the binding problem? I was reading this paper by Neil Taatgen on primitive information processing elements (PRIMs), as a type of machine-language for ACT-R. In the paper he claims:

  The absence of variables means that the binding problem is no longer
  an issue

From what I understand, the binding problem is about how variables are represented neurologically. Namely how they can be combined and retrieved, which has typically been a problem for most Connectionist architectures.

Why does the lack of variables in PRIMs (they seem to be just operations) mean that the binding problem is no longer an issue?

PRIMs doesn't claim to solve to binding problem. It just passes on the responsibility of representing the symbols and combining them accordingly. In this way the binding problem "is no longer an issue" of PRIMs, however it is a problem of whatever representational system it's working on top of. Whether it be symbolic like ACT-R or more neural, such as the NEF.


Retrieving information: how can we know so fast that we don't know something? If someone asks us something that we don't know, how can we know so fast that that's the case? Shouldn't we spend a considerable amount of time scanning our memories until we realize the information is unknown?

I am not an expert but I think this is because the brain would find existing memories instead of looking for memories that might not be there.

For example:

Say you have a good knowledge in C# but don't have that good of a knowledge in C++, but you know the extent of your knowledge.

You'd immediately know you cannot answer a question when asked about a concept in C++ you have not heard of / are not up to yet.

Another example:

When asked where you last saw someone, you can remember quickly or you can't.

For example, you have a friend that went missing unexpectedly but when you last saw her the confrontation was so casual you can't even remember it.. except that you can.. just slightly.

If you see your friend and give them a quick wave, but are in an area you aren't familiar with (Say a shopping district you've never went to), you'd have a difficult time recalling the PLACE where you found them. This is especially true if you're just acquaintances who just say "Hi" and "Bye!"

But if you are in a grey area, say you've been to a certain place before and saw your friend/acquaintance there, you may not remember or you will remember, that is just subjective. You'd be likely to remember quicker if it was a large event between you two. (Like a wedding!)

All in all, usually when asked that type of question images will flash by while you're saying "Hmm.. umm.. well I think I last saw (him/her) at this place." or you can be unsure and blank out.

Sorry for my inexperience, I am just giving an example to explain what I cannot really formally write.


Has there been any serious research on subliminal messaging? I certainly don't question the existence of subliminal perception which has been demonstrated many times in priming studies like those of Daniel Schacter and many others, nor do I reject the notion of the cognitive unconscious introduced by Kihlstrom (I definitely have my doubts on the psychodynamic unconscious however).

My question is about certain big claims like those of Bryan Wilson Key on subliminal messages with sexual content and consumer behaviour, those about subliminal self-help tapes or those even more suspicious that are about subliminal messages detering shoplifters to steal. Other than null results or junk science I haven't seen any convincing study supporting these claims.

On the other hand, studies by Vockey and Read (1985) challenged the effect of subliminal messages in songs and a meta-analysis carried out by Charles Trappey (1996) showed a negligible effect on consumer behavior. Also, what I get from most psychology textbooks is that the general consensus is that subliminal messaging has a poor and temporary effect (Schacter, Gilbert and Wegner, 2009).

Of course, one has to consider if subliminal perception is qualitatively and quantitatively different depending on the modality of the stimuli but then again I am unconvinced of a considerable effect of subliminal messaging on behaviour.

Any thoughts on that?

References

Schacter, D. L., Gilbert, D. T. & Wegner, D. M. (2009). Psychology. New York, NY: Worth Publishers

Trappey, C. (1996). A meta-analysis of consumer choice and subliminal advertising, Psychology & Marketing, 13(5): pp. 517—530DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6793(199608)13:5<517::AID-MAR5>3.0.CO;2-CPDF Available FREE from National Chiao Tung University

Vokey, J. R. & Read, J. D. (1985). Subliminal messages: Between the devil and the media, American Psychologist, 40(11): pp. 1231—1239PMID: 4083611 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.40.11.1231

First we need to define what "subliminal messaging" means. I take it you mean to send a subliminal command and make someone obey that command.
Based on that definition, here's some of what I find from googling:

  Effectiveness
  The effectiveness in subliminal messaging has been demonstrated to prime individual responses and stimulate mild emotional activity.[3][4] Applications, however, often base themselves on the persuasiveness of the message. Importantly, research on action priming has shown that subliminal stimuli can trigger only those actions that one plans to perform anyway: an action can be triggered subliminally only if the person already has the specific intention to perform this specific action.[5] The following sections have more information on specific studies in which the effectiveness of subliminal stimuli are investigated.[6][7]
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

An article with several links to research on the topic:

  In 1979 that nearly 50 department stores in the U.S. and Canada had been using subliminal messages over their music systems which had resulted in a significant reduction in both customer based shoplifting and employee theft.
  One East Coast chain amounted savings of 600,000 over a nine-month period.
  Another story in the Wall Street Journal in 1980 stated that subliminal messaging a New Orleans supermarket resulted in an all time low within 6 months of use - from 50,000 per six month period to a figure of 13,000! Furthermore cashier shortages dropped from 125 per week to below 10 per week.
  http://www.realsubliminal.com/subliminal-messages-scientific-research

Subliminal advertising:

  University College London researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain's attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their mark on the brain.
  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070308121938.htm

More information on subliminal and supraliminal messages and the differences:

  Generally, there are three types of subliminal messages:
  1. Subvisual messages – visual cues that are flashed so quickly (generally a few milliseconds) that people don’t perceive them.
  2. Subaudible messages – low volume audio cues that are inserted into a louder audio source, such as music.
  3. Backmasking – an audio message that is recorded backwards, with the intention of playing it forward to disguise the reversed message.
  Does that mean subliminal messages don’t work? A few decades ago, researchers would have agreed that subliminal messages were BS. They found little, if any, support that they were effective (Vokey & Read, 1985).
  In recent decades, however, things have been changing. Emerging research has shown that subliminal messages can influence our thoughts and behavior (see Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980 for one of the first notable studies).
  For instance, new research has shown that subliminal messages in advertising can, in fact, influence our purchasing behavior. For example, participants in one study were significantly more likely to choose a Lipton Ice drink when they were subliminally primed with “Lipton Ice” (Karremans, Stroebe, & Claus, 2006). Pretty cool.
  http://www.nickkolenda.com/subliminal-messages/

..And lots more articles, if you were to ask a more specific question.


Paper finding that explicitly welcomed minorities felt less welcome I'm trying to track down a research paper that I have lost the details for. Any help tracking it down would be very, very welcome!

It described an experiment where a US college showed prospective students a promotional video with one of two narration tracks: one which said that all students are welcome; and another where various minority groups were specifically said to be welcome. I seem to recall that the video itself, which showed a variety of students, was the same for both groups.

The results showed that students from those minority groups rated the video that singled out demographic groups as less welcoming.

The conclusion was that by singling out demographics as needing to be welcomed separately, this made people feel different and therefore less welcome.

I think the description provided (if accurate) should be enough to find the paper, unless it is not available online, or is only available in a different language.  Sometimes authors of books and certain review papers will reference unpublished research, so it may have come up in that context.  Or it may not exist at all.

The results described are in line with what diversity training guides often recommend, for example:

  Do talk about everybody’s differences. Teaching about cultural differences must be inclusive of all people, at all times.

  Don’t single out particular groups, such as ‘ethnic groups’.

Unfortunately, such materials rarely provide references to support recommendations.

This area of research falls under "multiculturalism vs colorblindness" - the question of whether it is best to highlight differences between groups, or to ignore them.  A recent review (2018), that also references 3 other recent comprehensive reviews, echoes the findings of over 25 years of research (eg, see earlier review (1993)) that the multicultural approach is generally superior across a wide variety of outcome measures.

That said, there are certainly many ways in which attempts to foster diversity can go wrong, and can be more clearly refined.  Perhaps singling out specific groups, as suggested by some training guides, is one of those pitfalls (for a similar example, see the minority spotlight effect).  It would be interesting to see a study that addresses this question directly.


How many participants are needed for online reaction time studies? I am a Master's student focusing on psycholinguistics and I am preparing for my thesis. What I will be looking at are register effects and for that I will be conducting 2 online experiments using Ibex (participants will hear context sentences, be presented with a set of  visual stimuli and then react to the visual stimuli). As far as I know, online RT studies are not as reliable as those which are conducted in the lab in the sense that they are noisier and less accurate. There is a great thread which discusses this topic How valid are reaction times collected from online studies? and where it is claimed that online RTs studies can be reliable if they are well powered. All in all it makes sense but I am confused as to how many participants are too little and how many are just enough. Your help is very much appreciated!

There are four variables of interest in a statistical power analysis: power (often chosen as 0.8 or 0.9 by convention, this is the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis if it is false), tolerated false-positive rate (alpha, often chosen as 0.05 by convention), sample size, and the effect size (which in turn depends on the variability of the observations and the difference between groups).
When you do a power analysis, you can choose any one of those variables to calculate provided you have all the others. In your case, you want to know the sample size you need so you need to choose or estimate the other numbers.
If you know what statistical test you are using, there are numerous online calculators to help you choose a sample size. Personally, I like to use the free software G*Power.
Power and alpha are typically chosen by convention, so what you still need to know to determine your necessary sample size is the effect size you are looking for. If you have an experiment that you expect to have a large impact on reaction times, you don't need as many participants. If you are looking for a subtle effect, you need more. You can choose that threshold based on what is reasonably interesting/clinically relevant (this is ideal but sometimes frustratingly difficult to settle on), or you can base it on pilot data (can be dangerous when pilots are based on small sample sizes).
If you don't have any preliminary data, the best way to estimate the variance in observations would be to look at other similar studies collecting online reaction time data.
Overall, if you want to make sure you have a sufficiently powered study, it's good to use conservative estimates. If you guess that your effect is smaller and the variability is larger than what you hope, then you have a better chance of a sufficiently powered study.


What happens inside the brain when we concentrate? What happens inside the brain when we concentrate (meditate), and why does a person find it difficult to continuously concentrate for a long time? That is, why does one need a break after working or studying for a given time, or why do we lose our concentration after a certain time?

The Neurons become refractory which means that they can't fire again until time has passed. Look up Action Potential and the limits of firing rating.
There is also a competition for different circuits to become conscious so when one becomes tried the other takes over. This is why it is hard to continue to think about one thing, without soon considering something else.


Is a concept of good and bad innate or learned? Some people would say that without religion, there would be no moral code to tell us what is good and bad.

Some Darwinist's like Dawkins say that acts like sharing and feelings like guilt are innate and that we don't need religion. And that we can have morals without religion. He gives the examples of a monkey sharing it's food.

However there appear to be some religions, e.g. human sacrifice in paganism, or death for apostasy in Islam, which seem to suggest that the notion of what constitutes good and bad is more flexible. And the feeling of guilt would be more a social construct.

Sure we can have laws without religion. But these laws might just suit the majority not the minority.

So for instance would a person who had never been taught that murder is bad. But that murder as a revenge for steeling (for example) is good. Would they then feel guilt after comitting a murder? (As Dawkin's might posit). Or feel like they have done a good deed?

Thus, from a psychological standpoint, is Dawkin's correct in thinking that humans would be kind to each other in the absence of society built on the foundations of a religious code. If so what exactly is "guilt" if it only exists with respect to social expectations.

Psychologically, guilt can be described as "a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined" (Dictionary.com).

Guilt is an emotion triggered by a belief that you did something wrong, based on what you think is wrong. You can feel guilty after breaking your New year resolution. You can also feel guilty when doing something what is considered wrong by social, moral or religious criteria set by others but only when you believe that what you did is wrong.

So, you can feel guilty when you do something against your personal beliefs. I'm not answering to "Is a concept of good and bad innate or learned?" because, this is not a psychological question...The question what is innate and learned, of course, can be a psychological question. I believe that the capability of feeling guilt (not guilt by itself) is innate.


Name of cognitive bias where people try to use all given information regardless of quality? In psych class, I recall learning about a cognitive bias where people are inclined to use all information available to them when making a decision, even if some of the information would be better ignored.

I believe the example given was a study in which participants were asked to evaluate the (college?) application of a candidate. Some participants were given just the conventional application information, while others were additionally given irrelevant information in the form of a portfolio of the candidate's elementary school artwork. The finding was that the artwork influenced the participant's decisions when it was provided.

What I don't remember is what this bias is called!

It's probably related to information overload "the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue". As for a more specific term...

In the full text of https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1403_7 it's called the irrelevant attribute effect. I'm not sure how widespread this term is. Therein it's defined as the scenario when

  irrelevant information may influence choice even when there is an easily
  justified basis for choice other than the irrelevant attribute.

There are a lot papers out there on how irrelevant information affects choice, but most don't seem to use this precise term but some reasonably close expression.

There's even one paper which discussed a sub-form of this, namely the dilution effect, which

  occurs when a person’s consideration of irrelevant information leads to a less extreme judgment.

Even though it's narrower in meaning, this last term is more widespread.


What is considered an error in the sustained attention to response task (SART)? The traditional SART task requires key presses to all digits appearing on the screen. However, the key press should be withheld if the digit is a 3

When aggregating the collected data, what is considered an error?

Is it simply the number of times the key was pressed when a 3 is on the screen? Or does it also include incorrectly withheld key presses (i.e. when the digit is anything other than 3)?

Both are errors indeed. Pressing when a 3 is shown is called a false alarm, and not pressing when a three is shown is a miss. Correct responses are (1) hits (pressing when anything but a three is shown) or (2) correct rejections (not pressing with a three).

These classifications are used in signal detection theory (Wiki). More specifically, they are used to calculate sensitivity and bias.

Sensitivity, or d-prime (see also other questions on CogSci, e.g. Calculating d-prime), is the metric for how well one can distinguish targets from distractors. Bias, on the other hand, is:

  the extent to which one response is more probable than another (Wiki)


What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent? Following the work of Stanley Stevens, psychophysical functions of stimulus intensity are commonly assumed to follow power laws, as illustrated below:

This appears to be true for a wide variety of different types of stimuli and sensations. A table that is often presented to illustrate this generality is from Stevens, 1975:

However, it is not obvious from perusing this table what kinds of stimuli tend to be associated with what kinds of power exponents -- in particular, what kinds of stimuli tend to be associated with positively accelerated psychophysical functions of intensity vs. negatively accelerated psychophysical functions of intensity. Indeed, the exponents in the table above appear to be distributed rather haphazardly to me, and I have not seen any mention of work suggesting it is otherwise in my admittedly limited literature search.

So my question is: Is anyone aware of research that attempts to characterize what kinds of stimuli tend to be associated with what kinds of psychophysical functions of stimulus intensity? If so, what is the basic summary from this research, and what are some suggested readings? As hinted above, I am particularly interested in stimulus features that predict positively vs. negatively accelerated psychophysical functions of stimulus intensity, but references to and descriptions of more specific research questions are also quite welcome.

Update: I thought it might help to say just a little bit more about exactly what I'm interested in finding out here, in as clear and concise a way as I know how. What I am looking for are any references to review papers and/or research articles that are about (or even that just mention) predicting the form of the psychophysical power law across a range of different stimuli, using stimulus-level predictors. It is hard to extract any general conclusions about this from Stevens's table above, given that the power law exponent appears to vary widely, sometimes being >1 and sometimes <1, even for stimuli on the same psychological continuum, as in the cases of "Taste" and "Warmth." The point of the table (and indeed the body of research that it is based on) is just to show that these functions follow power laws of some kind or other -- while this is mildly interesting, what I really want to know is how well we can predict what kinds of power laws different stimuli will follow. Please let me know if I can offer any additional clarification.

Mainly: the choice of variables.

Beware that the exponent depends on the choice of parameters; or even worse - relations can change from power-law to linear, logarithmic or exponential, with redefining variables.

E.g. you can measure sound volume in either amplitude, energy density (square of the amplitude) or dB (logarithm of the first one). None of it is privileged. Moreover, "psychological magnitude" needs exact definition, for the same reason (so not only to specify which type of reaction is that but what is the exact physical quantity being measured).

In general, if you consider only qualitative parameters, then you can look at only at qualitative behaviour of the relation (e.g. if it is monotonous). To calculate exponents (or even - to claim that a certain relation is a power function) it is not enough.

Of course, there are many adaptations to make sensitivity higher (e.g. edge detection) or lower (e.g. to see well in lighting conditions differing by order of magnitude, in terms of light intensity). But to compare their exponents, for the comparison to make sense, you need to have a very good justification for the right choice of variables.


What are the rules that govern neuron behavior? This is what I know so far:

Neurons are nodes with a number called the threshold.

Neurons are connected to other neurons through directed axons.

Axons take the signals produced by neurons and deposit them on other neurons, these signals can be "negative" or "positive".

Once all the signals coming into a particular neuron are added up, if the sum is greater than the threshold, that neuron fires.

My question is: are these all the rules? And do all neurons have the same rules?

My question is: are these all the rules?

No.

Some things you left out:

Plasticity (change)

Very-short-term synaptic "plasticity" (changes in synaptic strength); at least a few different forms of this (post-tetanic potentiation, short term synaptic depression, synaptic facilitation).
Very-short-term intrinsic "plasticity" (changes in spiking behavior): spiking accommodation, etc.
Medium to long-term synaptic plasticity; several forms of this: classical Long Term Potentiation or Depression, Spike Timing Dependent Potentiation, synaptic underpinnings of habituation and sensitization in, e.g., Aplysia, synaptic scaling.
Medium to long-term plasticity of intrinsic properties, like threshold, input resistance, firing properties.
Metaplasticity (changing the changeability)

Neuromodulation

Co-transmission of classical neurotransmitters with a neuropeptides
Neuromodulation of ionic conductances directly, postsynaptically
Neuromodulation of ionic conductances directly, presynaptically
Neuromodulation via metabotropic receptors and signaling to the nucleus
Why there are dozens of neuromodulators just for controlling a crab's digestion. (ref)

Odds n' Ends

Electrical "synapses" ("gap junctions")
Refractory periods preventing firing even if above threshold
Extrasynaptic and presynaptic receptors
Retrograde transmission
Axonal failures and branch points
Non-traditional innervation (dendro-axonic, dendro-dendritic, autapses, etc.)
Ephatic coupling (ref) (through local electrical fields)
Wiggling dendritic spines
Glial function as a modifier of neuronal function.

And I'm sure I'm leaving out another 20 or so interesting ones. Arguably, everything I've listed here modifies or has causal relevance to the simple set of rules you provided above. And of course, I'm still leaving out an enormous amount of detail of neuroscience (cell types, architecture/circuit diagrams, molecular cascades, cytoskeletal aspects, development, etc.) that have relevance to "the rules" as well.

  And do all neurons have the same rules?

No. Any of the above may vary depending on cell type, part of the nervous system, individual differences, development, species, sex, time of day or other cycles, environmental factors, and possibly other factors.


Signal detection theory: How to calculate c' when d' is 0? Reframed the original question to include more background information:

My experiment concerns the recall ability of individuals concerning information about animals. Within-subject design: Whether an animal is dangerous or safe (danger). Whether an animal lives in Africa or Australia (location). In the recall phase, participants had to identify the animals they saw as dangerous/safe, African/Australian.
Responses were coded as Hit (stimuli danger, response danger), Miss (stimuli danger, response Safe), correct rejection (Stimuli safe, response safe) and finally false alarm (stimuli safe, response danger)
We expected that sensitivity depends on the importance of the information to wellbeing (this has been found in other studies as well), but also that bias is affected by individual differences. D’ refers to sensitivity as it is the difference between the signal (danger) and noise distribution (safe). C refers to the bias (the criterion of the respondent, a tendency to say yes or no) and c’ is c relative to d’ . However, d’ in some cases is 0, when the proportion of hits (hits/(hits+misses) is equal to the proportion of false alarms (false alarms/(fa+correct rejections)) making it impossible to compute c’ (c/d'). As such, my question is whether there is a commonly used and supported correction?
More information about signal detection theory and its use in cognitive sciences can be found here

Thank you for the comments so far, I hope the question is clearer now.

Original question:
As described in Detection theory: A user's guide page 28, bias indicator c can be normalized into c' by dividing it by d'. In short, d' = z(H)-Z(FA); c = -0.5(z(H)+Z(FA)); c' = c/d'.
However, in some of my cases d' is 0 (For instance, H=.72, FA =.72). Is there a standard correction that allows for the calculation of c'?

As you mention Macmillan and Creelman, they talk about 3 types of bias: c, c', and beta. As I said in this answer it normally does not matter which one you use since they are pretty easy to switch between. When d' is zero, then c' and beta are no longer as informative as c. I would suggest reporting c, possibly along with c', in this case. Alternatively, you could report hit and false alarm rates. If you only report c' and d', you will not be telling the whole story.


By learning to read and write upside down, what did I do to myself? If you've ever read Encyclopedia Brown books, you'll be familiar with the backwards writing in the back of the book that explains the solution to the case.

When I was in my mid-late teens (I don't remember the age exactly) I decided to teach myself to read/write upside down (and backwards?). I can read most text fairly well when the page is upside down (and have no problems with the upside down unicode text people post on Facebook), and I am able to write upside down with relative ease.

However, since developing that skill I have fairly extreme difficulties remembering how to write lowercase b's and d's, and I've had to use a trick I've heard dyslexics use and I remind myself that a 'b' points towards the end of a word.

I have no problems reading words with the characters, or typing them on the computer when I want a 'b' or a 'd', only when I'm writing it.

Did I give myself a very limited form of dyslexia?

Negative Transfer

A common scientific term to describe what you are talking about is called negative transfer. I.e., where learning one skill actually results in lower performance on another skill. This is contrasted with positive transfer, when learning one skill facilitates performance on another skill. In general (although I don't have refs on hands) positive transfer is generally a greater effect than negative transfer. Negative transfer tends to be localised to particular aspects of the task (e.g., b's and d's).

For a extended encyclopedia entry see Perkins and Salomon's (1992) article on transfer of learning.

Research on Mirror Reading and Writing

There's even research specifically on reading and writing upside down and back to front (e.g., see google scholarfor 'mirror writing' and 'mirror reading'). I haven't read much of this literature.

To take but one article, Gottfried, Sancar, and Chatterjee (2003) discuss acquired mirror writing.

They note, perhaps relevant to your question, that:

  Young children, developmental dyslexics, and some healthy left-handed
  adults may produce mirror text.

I assume that in the above cases (as opposed to your case where it is acquired with deliberate practice), writing in reverse is involuntary, in which case I suppose you could describe writing a few letters back to front involuntarily as representing a symptom shared with some developmental dyslexics.

As an interesting historical aside, they note that

  Perhaps the most celebrated mirror writer, Leonardo da Vinci,
  generated over 5000 notebook pages in reverse.

So, you're in good company.

References

Gottfried, J., Sancar, F., and Chatterjee, A. (2003). Acquired mirror
writing and reading: evidence for reflected graphemic representations.
Neuropsychologia, 41(1):96-107. FREE PDF
Perkins, D. and Salomon, G. (1992). Transfer of learning. International
encyclopedia of education. FREE LINK


Is there a name for the tendency to use proper nouns often in conversation? I think it may happen with people who have lack of confidence, for example shy people. So in conversation they often add proper nouns (eg. names of persons or countries) to give "evidence" and weight of their sayings.
In fact, I am interested either such a phenomenon exists, not necessarily having a name for it.

Example:

  -Do you like cheese?
  -Yes, but not the types they have here, like the commercial Mozarrela.  Now, if you were in a Mediterranean country, that's other
  story. Like in Spain or Italy. I remember the tasty cheeses from my
  trip in Sicilia.
  -Hey, that place has a bad reputation...
  -Ha, I felt like Michael Corleone

The behavior to lend credibility or importance to one's statements is called "name dropping".

Name dropping is a typical ingratiation tactic. Other ingratiation tactics are: other-enhancement, opinion conformity, self-enhancement, self-depreciation, instrumental dependency, and a variety of situation specific behaviors. While ingratiating behavior is strongest towards superiors across all people, there are people who show more or less ingratiating behavior across all situations and relationships (Bohra & Pandey, 1984).

Besides this function of name dropping "to position oneself in a status hierarchy", where people "may claim connections to celebrities or other high-status people to raise their own status" and impress their listeners, "[n]ame display is also used to discover whether there is a common bond between new acquaintances. People who lived in the same city or attended the same school may go through long lists of names seeking common ground." (Donath & Boyd, 2004)

This function of "seeking common ground" can not only be achieved by dropping personal names of possible common acquaintances, but also by naming authors, movies or products that you enjoy: if your partner knows and likes Mozzarella or Michael Corleone, too, these common interests form a basis for a new friendship that would have otherwise been difficult to build.

In short: you have to be careful and porperly analyze the person and situation to understand the causes and aims of name dropping.

References:

Bohra, K. A., & Pandey, J. (1984). Ingratiation toward strangers, friends, and bosses. Journal of Social Psychology, 122(2), 217-222. doi:10.1080/00224545.1984.9713483
Donath, J., & Boyd, D. (2004). Public Displays of Connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 71-82. doi:10.1023/B:BTTJ.0000047585.06264.cc


Why do humans/primates laugh/smile when they are happy, and not cry? This might sound funny. But I have been wondering why do humans/primates laugh or smile when they are happy or find something funny?

Why don't they cry when they are happy and laugh/*smile* when they are sad?

Subcortical unconscious programming originating in distance evolutionary relatives cause humans to smile when they feel happy.

-Consciousness, Volition, and the Neuropsychology of Facial Expressions of Emotion

There are disorders like the Pseudobulbar affect which cause people to express a different emotion than what is typical like crying instead of smiling. With PBA the emotions displayed are sudden, frequent, extreme and uncontrollable.


How can employee anxiety over poor evaluation be avoided by management? When implementing gamification, what are steps that management can take to prevent a culture of anxiety among employees, when employees feel they are constantly being monitored and begin to worry that they will be judged as poor performers at their work?

For example, employees may grow anxious over things like:

Ranking near the bottom of some leaderboard
Having fewer badges than others
Not being as excited about the gamification of their work as other employees

What should management avoid to prevent this kind of anxiety?

What can management do proactively to prevent such fears or put them to rest, without getting rid of competition altogether?

Make it less obvious.

If you can implement gamification a bit more subtly, then any anxiety employees may have of being evaluated based on a leaderboard will be reduced.

For example a 'leaderboard' could implemented as a statistical tool, to determine the usability of an application. If you take feedback from less performant employees, then they may feel that they are benefitting. This keeps the competition element present, but also has the added advantage of improving your application.

The top answer to this question raises a good point about keeping the stakes low, if you do offer any tangible rewards (which would help with those less interested in badges) you must ensure that they are of low value. Focusing on rewarding employees for good work is (typically) better than ranking them based on performance, this could also be on a team level to take stress away from individuals.


What does "diffuse slowing" mean in the context of EEG and Alzheimer's? Horvath et al. (2018) mention that:

  The disappearance of posterior dominant alpha rhythm and the diffuse
  slowing in AD (alzheimer disease) are easily detectable EEG signs for the experienced
  eyes.

What does diffuse slowing mean in this context? I tried searching it up online but I only found papers that take its meaning for granted.

Reference
1. Horvath, A., Szucs, A., Csukly, G., Sakovics, A., Stefanics, G. and Kamondi, A., 2018. EEG and ERP biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease: a critical review. Frontiers in bioscience (Landmark edition), 23, pp.183-220

Medscape defines diffuse as generalized, in the context of EEG. Generalized means activity recorded across large portions of the cortex. This opposes focal patterns, that occur locally. In turn this is reflected in generalized epilepsy and focal epilepsy. Generalized epilepsias are characterized by gross paroxysmal activity across the cortex, associated with a loss of consciousness. Focal epilepsy is localized in the cortex and stays restricted to one hemisphere and is not associated with a loss of consciousness.

Britton et al. (2016) explain generalized and focal slowing in the EEG as follows:

  The two main types of slowing are focal and generalized slowing. As
  previously discussed, generalized background slowing in the theta and
  delta frequency ranges is a normal finding on EEG when it represents
  developmental slowing [] or the evolution of drowsiness and sleep activity. However, when there is intermittent or persistent focal slowing seen consistently over one head region, or persistent, unvarying, and unreactive focal or generalized slow wave activity in a vigilant adult patient, this slow wave activity should be considered pathologic and indicates
  corresponding focal or generalized cerebral dysfunction or both.

Reference
- Britton et al. The Abnormal EEG. In: St. Louis & Frey (eds). Electroencephalography (EEG): An Introductory Text and Atlas of Normal and Abnormal Findings in Adults, Children, and Infants. Chicago: American Epilepsy Society; 2016


What is the effectiveness of self-prescribed marijuana for depression? How common is it for patients diagnosed with depression to self-prescribe themselves marijuana after trying prescription anti-depressants? Is there any evidence that this self-treatment is effective or satisfies some need that is not filled with typical prescription medication?

Question 1: I am unaware of any studies directly addressing the epidemiology of self-medication with cannabis in cases of treatment-resistant depression (it seems like that is what you are asking about). However, there are several lines of therapy that have demonstrated effectiveness in depression beyond the first line antidepressants (CANMAT Depression Guidelines). None of these include marijuana or cannabinoids.

Question 2: There is (to my knowledge) absolutely no evidence that marijuana is an effective treatment for depression. The article by Volkow et al. (2014) although titled "Adverse Effects," also reviews conditions for which evidence of effectiveness exists for symptomatic treatment with marijuana or cannabinoids. These conditions include glaucoma, nausea, AIDS-associated anorexia and wasting syndrome, chronic pain, inflammation, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy (Volkow et al. 2014). That being said, the quality of that evidence is unclear to me.

It must also be mentioned that studies will generally be limited by heterogeneous cannabinoid content in the active compound. Not all cannabinoids are created equal, and from what I understand one of the potentially most medically useful cannabinoids is cannabidiol (CBD; Curran et al., 2016); THC and CBD may have opposing effects, with THC generally associated with impairments across several psychological functions (Curran et al. 2016). On the other hand, small studies have suggested a potential role for CBD (but not THC) in augmenting psychotherapeutic treatment of some anxiety disorders. The evidence thus far seems to suggest that marijuana would not have a role in treatment of psychiatric disorders in general, let alone depression, but that further research about the effects of isolated CBD might be warranted.

Reference

Volkow, N. D., et al. (2014). Adverse Health Effects of Marijuana Use. New England Journal of Medicine, 370(23), 2219–2227.
Curran, H. V, Freeman, T, P., Mokrysz, C., Lewis D, A., Morgan, C, J, A., & Parsons, L. H. (2016). Keep off the grass? Cannabis, cognition and addiction. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(5), 293–306.
Baldwin, D. S., Anderson, I. M., Nutt, D. J., Allgulander, C., Bandelow, B., den Boer, J. a, … Wittchen, H.-U. (2014). Evidence-based pharmacological treatment of anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder: a revision of the 2005 guidelines from the British Association for Psychopharmacology. Journal of Psychopharmacology (Oxford, England), 28, 403–39.


Do lonely people get addicted more easily than social counterparts? The so-called "Rat Park" study conducted in the late 1970s indicated that lonely rats get drug addicted more easily than social ones.

Does anyone know if there are more recent studies about the topic? About drug addictions or other addictions?

Reference

Alexander, B. K., Coambs, R. B., & Hadaway, P. F. (1978). The effect of housing and gender on morphine self-administration in rats. Psychopharmacology, 58(2), 175-179. doi:10.1007/BF00426903

First of all, the rat experience is not so relevant to  a great extent to the question.
Animals can't reason (they can't have their own belief system and plan for the future).

However, there is some similarity with rats and humans. Rats are social creatures too. It could be that loneliness causes bad feelings and a distraction technique could be the drugs to which they got addicted.
That might explain why the rats got addicted to the drugs. For animals is all about stimuli, they don't have a belief system. I think that even if a social rat saw the drug and tried it once and a few more times it would get addicted. Same for people, drugs can be as part of a recreational/social activity.

Another comment, is that loneliness is basically the feeling of stress (because it is an inner feeling of unhappiness and a mix of anxiety, all which brings the person to rationalize that he is lonely). I would argue that since loneliness creates stress, to relief stress the individual turns to an avoidant stress coping strategy which is  drugs consumption.

My account is one, there are more accounts of that relationship that other people add. But I struggle to bring any other relationships that will not be seen as being too much based correlation.

Also note that there are different mentality behind different psychology. Addiction of gambling is not the same as being addicted of drugs. In the former, the addict is addicted to win and in the latter the addict is addicted to the drug that kills the mental/physiological pain s/he has.

Some research:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X03001779


What does it mean to "accept my shortcomings"? The need to accept one's faults and shortcomings; or accept oneself in whole, with all faults and shortcomings; or self-acceptance is being repeatedly stressed by psychologists.

However, I've always had problems with this. Whenever I was hearing something along the lines of "acceptance is a necessary precondition of change" from a professional therapists I would usually start arguing with him. This is what was reaching me:

  To be able to change something in your life you must decide you want to change nothing.

So for example, an alcohol addict must decide he will continue drinking until he meets his grave in order to be able to stop drinking? This seemed to me to be either an oxymoron or a particularly twisted form of self-delusion.

Today I read in a newspaper an interview with a professional psychologist and dietician, who was criticizing people who oppose the promotion of self-acceptance among obese people. She elaborated that the dichotomy between obese people accepting their bodies and the fact that obesity is unhealthy and is a both personal and societal problem to be solved is a false one. She pointed out that people who think that way are thinking stereotypically, that this stems from lack of knowledge, that this is a way people cope with cognitive dissonances, etc etc. She claimed that according to research positive motivation is far better than negative motivation that stems from the society rejecting obese people and from obese people not accepting their bodies; instead, if the society accepts obese people and obese people accept themselves, we will take a step closer towards solving the problem of obesity. She explicitly claimed that this does not mean, contrary to a popular belief, that an obese people will not wish to lose weight.

Ah. So apparently, contrary to what I was understanding, "acceptance" in the mouths of psychologists does not mean "decision not to change". Then what does "acceptance" mean?

These are the definitions of 'accept' according to the Cambridge Dictionary:

  to agree to take something
  to say yes to an offer or invitation
  to consider something or someone as satisfactory
  to believe that something is true

Definitions 1-2 seem clearly not relevant here.

Definition 3 seems to me to be this exact faulty definition that I had in mind and that was preventing me from understanding was psychologists were really trying to communicate. For example, I suppose, the verb "accept" is used here in the same definition as in the sentence "*The editorial board rejected Mr. Smith's paper two times already, but finally accepted the third revision for publication*". So the paper had to be changed two times until finally it was deemed satisfactory and no longer in need of change.

Finally, definition 4, while not obviously inapplicable, nonetheless doesn't seem to be relevant here: I have feeling psychologists, when they are saying that obese people should accept themselves, don't actually mean "obese people should stop deluding themselves into thinking they are thin".

Therefore, what does a psychologist mean when they say "acceptance" or "to accept"?

I suppose the word "accept" you hear comes from the acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. According to the link, the healthy attitudes towards the problem (e.g. obesity) are:

Accept your reactions and be present
Choose a valued direction
Take action

So to answer your question, it is about accepting your reactions, your emotions about the problem, not the problem itself. An obese person can be shame, guilt or embarrass about their obseity, and they want to avoid such emotions. This, according to my understanding about the approach, means that they want to avoid facing the truth that they are obese, and thus the action to change cannot be followed. By accepting such emotions, they can dissipate them.

Therefore, it's not about you want to change nothing, nor finding the problematic situation satisfactory, nor believing you don't have such problem, but about accepting the negative emotions when facing the reality.


How to think about things when it's the right time? Is there a good way to train that?

To be able to pause thinking about something that you can't change right now, until it's actually time. That might be one day, one week or one month later.

What you refer to is probably 'controlling' your mind, which is a common practice called 'mindfulness training', i.e., learning to observe thoughts without interacting with them.


How to achieve homeostasis and cognitive closure, while living with more infinite unanswered questions and concrete explanations? In this question we learn, curiosity (and scientific research in general) is a cycle that arises when one connects dots when analyzing new answers, which most of the time leads to more unanswered questions and the more unanswered questions, the more cognitive dissonance.

We also learn that the way to end the loop and dissonance is with no desire to continue "the infinite quest".

However, is it possible to reach homeostasis and/or cognitive closure while still living with more infinite unanswered questions an or concrete explanations?

If so, what methods have been found to harmonize this cause and effect?

(I would imagine some sort of elite Military training would touch on this to some degree?)

Unanswered questions don't necessarily cause cognitive dissonance. Need for closure varies across individuals; some of us don't mind having some (or even many) unanswered questions much at all.

One also moves forward along a path while "looping," and that path isn't necessarily infinite; in fact, it probably isn't for any mortal, practically speaking. For people with relatively low personal need for structure, novelty (and presumably uncertainty) may even be somewhat reassuring when confronting one's mortality (Vess, Routledge, Landau, & Arndt, 2009). Maybe accepting mortality and one's inability to individually pursue the path to completion (regardless of whether completion is possible in any sense) is just another way to not desire the impossible, but it is not impossible to continue the quest for some distance. Depending on what one really wants, not continuing might be a more dissonant alternative to simply continuing as far as one can. If one wants to complete the quest in the sense that one can't, some dissonance may be inevitable; if one wants to participate in the quest without concern for completion, only stopping should cause dissonance with that motive.

Here's an interesting quote from Heflick (2006) relating mortality salience to need for closure:

  Landau and colleagues (2004) found that mortality salience increases desire for clear, well structured information and for paintings that have a clear, coherent meaning (Landau et al., 2006). Further, death salience has been found to increase preference for more cultivated landscapes (Koole & Van den Berg, 2003 [published 2005]), for letter sequences that have clear patterns (e.g., AAAABBBB instead of ABBBAABA; Dechesne & Wigboldus, 2002) and stereotypical individuals (Schimel et al., 1998 [1999 in references]). Lastly, these effects are typically stronger among people that are high in epistemic needs (e.g., Landau et al., 2004), including need for closure (e.g., Schimel et al., 2004 [not sure what is being cited here]).

This evidence further suggests (rather indirectly) that some people do find the the thought of uncertainty troubling in light of a threat to their ability to resolve it, but some people don't mind uncertainty all that much, depending partly on individual differences in need for closure. It might even have something to do with your political preferences (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Jost et al., 2007)!

References

Dechesne, M., & Wigboldus, D. (2002). [Terror management in a minimal worldview paradigm.] Unpublished raw data. [As referenced here with year 2001.]

Heflick, N. A. (2006). Terror management and self-enhancement: The moderating role of self-esteem and need for closure (Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida). Available online, URL: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3005&context=etd. Retrieved January 25, 2014.

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339.

Jost, J. T., Napier, J. L., Thorisdottir, H., Gosling, S. D., Palfai, T. P., & Ostafin, B. (2007). Are needs to manage uncertainty and threat associated with political conservatism or ideological extremity? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(7), 989-1007. Available online, URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6216707_Are_needs_to_manage_uncertainty_and_threat_associated_with_political_conservatism_or_ideological_extremity/file/9fcfd507eeb6a8980d.pdf. Retrieved January 25, 2014.

Koole, S. L., & Van den Berg, A. E. (2005). Lost in the wilderness: Terror management,
action orientation, and nature evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 1014-1028.

Landau, M., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T. & Martens, A. (2006). Windows
into nothingness: Terror management, meaninglessness and negative reactions to modern art.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 879-892.

Landau, M., Johns, M., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Martens, A., Goldenberg, J.L. &
Solomon, S. (2004). A function of form: Terror management and the structuring of the social world. Journal of Personality of Social Psychology, 87, 190-210.

Schimel, J., Simon, L., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Waxmonski, J., &
Arndt, J. (1999). Support for a functional perspective on stereotypes: Evidence
that mortality salience enhances stereotypic thinking and preferences. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 905-926.

Vess, M., Routledge, C., Landau, M. J., & Arndt, J. (2009). The dynamics of death and meaning: the effects of death-relevant cognitions and personal need for structure on perceptions of meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(4), 728. Available online, URL: http://existentialandselfprocesseslab.yolasite.com/resources/Vess_et_al_2009.JPSP.deathmeaning.pdf. Retrieved January 25, 2014.


Motivation vs Goal Oriented Behavior What's the difference between these two terms when used in the context of cognitive psychology? To the best of my knowledge, research on 'Goal Oriented Behavior' refers to the subset of motivation that involves translating explicitly construed goals into actions the agent can perform in order to accomplish these goals (e.g. means-ends analysis). However, its hard for me to grasp when this is not the case insofar as theories of motivation are concerned.

So are these terms effectively synonyms with 'Goal Oriented Behavior' simply being the more modern verbiage? Or is 'Goal Oriented Behavior' a special subset of Motivation? Or is the relationship between the two terms something else entirely (perhaps each is used in a different field of study).

Major theories of motivation distinguish between implicit and explicit motives - the first refering to (relatively) unconscious, automatically operating motives, the second refering to motives and goals which are accessible for self-reports (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). Explicit motives are translated into conscious goals, whereas implicit motives influence spontaneous, uncontrolled, and long-term behavior (without goal-planning behavior).

Furthermore, 'Motivation' referes to a larger process (e.g., selective attention, comparison of set points with actual situations, the processing of situational incentives), where the translation into goals and actions only is the last part of a sequence of processing steps.

Concerning your question, I would say that 'goal oriented behavior' indeed is a subset of motivation, namely explicit motivation.

References

McClelland, D. C., Koestner, R., & Weinberger, J. (1989). How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological Review, 96, 690-702.

Schultheiss, O. C. (2008). Implicit motives. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology: Theory and research (3rd ed.). (pp. 603-633). New York, NY US: Guilford Press.


How much does money (or any desired good) influence a person on average? I'd like to know if there's any study about that, I'm specially interested if it determines how much it influences a certain person behavior in a certain given percentage and the quantities from where a person wouldn't do a certain thing but for more money they end up doing them.
I'm not discovering anything new saying that there are tasks we wouldn't do if we don't earn money, that's basically what most jobs are about. But point is it does not end in that, most people can end up doing things that go against their morals if they are given enough money. I even believe that most people would do anything that goes extremely against their morals if very huge quantities of money were given to them.
Are there studies on how much that influences the behavior of a person on average?

Here are two studies may be relevant to your question:

Seeing green: Mere exposure to money triggers a business decision frame and unethical outcomes. The authors report that "individuals primed with money were more likely to demonstrate unethical intentions than those in the control group" and "money cues triggered a business decision frame, which led to a greater likelihood of unethical intentions and behavior." This article explains that the researchers "primed" the participants by showing them either "money-related" phrases or "neutral" phrases and measured how that affected their decisions in hypothetical scenarios or games. So even when there is no actual money involved, the study found that thinking about money can influence people's behavior.

Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy. The authors report that "individuals of a lower social class are more empathically accurate in judging the emotions of other people." In this article, a study co-author points out that people with more modest financial resources need to depend on others more than people who are more able to solve their problems with money. This may give them more experience cooperating with people and developing empathy. So in this case it's the money that someone accumulates throughout their life that may prompt them to act in a less empathetic way.


Why is solitary confinement used so widely? Prison isolation is likely so hard for inmates because people are sociable creatures. Yet, isolation is still used in prisons ('supermax prisons'), in mental hospitals, but also as a strategy to educate children, given that some parents lock their kids in their room.

Why are those isolations in use? Do they have beneficial effects on prisoners or psychiatric patients? Does it treat their symptoms or criminal traits?

Solitary confinement serves no therapeutic purpose. Two uses of solitary confinement are generally acknowledged, namely as safety measure to protect the individual from themselves or to protect others from harm, or as a measure of discipline (that is, punishment).

Deprived of normal human interaction, many segregated prisoners reportedly suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia, aggression and depression (Haney, 2003). In experimental subjects hallucinations have been reported too (source: Frontline).

To the question why these psychological effects happen there is not much known, as research into the topic is obviously deemed not ethical, and the use of it in correctional facilities and psychiatric wards is scrutinized. In fact, its use in psychiatric environments is starting to decline (source: APA).

However, some guesses might be made on the effects of solitary confinement on the brain. Hallucinations may be caused by the fact that sensory perception is accustomed to dealing with a large quantity of information. In fact, one of the major goals of the higher sensory centers is the filtering of irrelevant information rather than processing all of it. When sensory input is deprived, the brain starts to make up things, just as deaf people may develop tinnitus and blind people may see phosphenes and other visual hallucinations (source: BBC Future). The psychological deficits may be sought in the fact that we derive meaning from our emotional states largely through contact with others. Human emotions are thought to have evolved because they aided co-operation among our early ancestors who benefited from living in groups. With no one to mediate our feelings or to determine their appropriateness, the sense of self becomes distorted and the sense of reality disintegrates (source: BBC Future).

Reference
- Haney, Crime & Delinquency (2003); 49(1): 124-56


What are presynaptic puncta? What are presynaptic puncta? And what makes them different from presynaptic terminals?

In the article you provided (Molofsky et al., 2014) the authors refer back to (Arber, 2012) and surprisingly, the term puncta is not used in the latter. So that's pretty much a dead end.

I found another article (Ippolito & Eroglu, 2010) in which the authors do explicitly clarify their use of the word puncta. In this article, puncta is a term used in the Puncta Analyzer plugin for ImageJ. Image J is freeware to analyze histological preparations and features many options for histological analyses. ImageJ was also used in the article you originally referred to (Molofsky et al., 2014). The plugin specifically analyzes co-localizing spots identified in a preparation. Co-localization can be studied by, e.g.,  labeling of two different antigens (double-labeling). Co-localizing fluorescent markers in a preparation often indicate that the two proteins are localized very closely in the cell, and are probably involved in the same mechanism.

To extrapolate the information back to your question we could formulate a hypothetical histological example involving neurotransmission. Presynaptic puncta could then be formed when (e.g. red) fluorescent antibodies for an autoreceptor and another (e.g. green) fluoresecent antibody targeting a modulator of the autoreceptor would colocalize on a presynaptic membrane of a certain synapse. The green and red would appear as a purple spot in the overlaid image, and the plugin would identify this as puncta, in turn showing that the two are very close in the synapse on the presynaptic membrane.

In all, given the heterogeneity of the articles reviewed and their use of the term puncta, I think 'puncta' can be loosely defined as: "(immuno-)histological locations defined by computer algorithms using ImageJ and related plugins".


How many hours of speech do kids hear before learning a language? I'd like some estimates of how many hours of English speech kids typically are exposed to before reaching various levels of mastery.

I realize this is a very fuzzy question, but I'm sure ballpark numbers must exist. The motivation for this question is trying to get a lower bound for the required size of a training corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.

Children, when they learn their first language, do not learn this language, rather they "learn the world". An adult spends some time of his day on learning a (second) language, and much time on other tasks. For an adult, the two (or more) activities are mostly separate. For a child learning a first language, learning this language is inseparably entwined with learning about what his perceptions mean and what his actions effect. It takes a normal child about 12 to 16 years to fully grasp the depths of his mother tongue, because a basic understanding of the world takes that long. And with "the depths" I do not mean all the words and perfect grammar, but a basic average ability to understand and express yourself in your mother tongue.

For a teenage or adult native English speaker learning a second language, an average of 575 (for "easy" languages) and 2200 class hours (for "difficult" languages) was estimated to reach a high level of proficiency (sources at Wikipedia). To this you have to add homework and self-directed learning for and after classes, so your overall learning hours will multiply. Numbers will differ for native speakers of other languages (because learning a language that is similar or even related to your own is easier).

(Do not forget that humans need time for knowledge to "settle". If you try to learn to much in too little time, the new knowledge pushes out what has not yet been "fixed" in your long term memory. So you need to spread these actual learning hours over several months or years, allowing for rest and active practise.)


Is there an R implementation of the linear ballistic accumulator model or Ratcliff's diffusion model for measuring response time and accuracy? I am looking for an implementation of the linear ballistic accumulator model or Ratcliff's diffusion model (e.g. in R, MATLAB, or Python).

Here are a few options. I have not tried them yet personally.

As mentioned below, the rtdists package in R is able to fit both LBA and diffusion models.

Other Options

LBA

Scott Brown has a copy of Donkin et al (2009) on his web page with some code in R, Excel, and WinBUGS for fitting the LBA model:

http://www.newcl.org/publications/DonkinAverellEtAl2009BRM.pdf
http://www.newcl.org/members/chris/fitLBA.zip

There's also the glba package on CRAN by Ingmar Visser.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glba/index.html

Diffusion model

The Diffussion model is available as a matlab toolbox called (DMAT).

References

Donkin, C., Averell, L., Brown, S.D., & Heathcote, A. (2009) Getting more from accuracy and response time data: Methods for fitting the Linear Ballistic Accumulator model. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 1095-1110. PDF
Vandekerckhove, J., & Tuerlinckx, F. (2008). Diffusion model analysis with MATLAB: A DMAT primer. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 61-72. doi:10.3758/BRM.40.1.61 PDF


Increasing pitch perception of the same auditory stimuli I was trying to work up a small clip of repeating beep sounds I recorded from a mobile game. This series of sounds, when played, gave an unmistakable perception of increasing pitch with every rendition of the beep. I recorded the sound and plotted a spectrogram of the sound, and also a frequency spectra of the first and the last rendition in a series of 10 repetitions (which should apparently have the largest difference in the pitch perception). What was surprising, is that, visibly, on the spectrogram, and also on the frequency spectra, they were exactly the same. Using an enhanced autocorrelation function too, the two repetitions hardly had any gross differences.

Since this is primarily based on visual differences in the plots, there could be subtle shifts which would not be visibly apparent. But in listening, there is a very noticeable rise in pitch, which seems less probable to be a consequence of subtle shifts of the autocorrelation-maxima. Why then does this seem to be the case? Is it only a subtle shift that I am unable to appreciate or is it something more higher-order than that?

The pictures contain the spectrogram of the sound in question, the autocorrelation plots (which I understand to be more neurally relevant then the freq spectra) for the highlighted window (the plot with the blue heading) and a similarly placed window around the last repetition (the plot with the white heading). Do let me know if any further information is required. I don't know how can I get the sound uploaded in here.

I am unsure if the provided spectra are rendered non-informative due to ambient noise, for the recording has been done in a noisy environment using a laptop mic. All analysis via Audacity.

Ignoring your pictures for a second, it sounds like what you are referring to is pitch circularity. Diana Deutsch was a pioneer in this area. The key is that generating these sounds is tricky and that unless you inspect the "correct" dimensions of the stimuli you will not see the differences.


Can observing neutral objects prime the brain to integrate them into new ideas in the waking state? I'm aware of a few concepts, primarily from dream research, which indicate that dreams feature or integrate observed objects from the past several days into dream content.

For example, seeing a bike commercial can make a person dream of riding a bike; finding a molten piece of chocolate in one's pocket can make one dream of something brown and sticky. The colloquial term for this phenomenon is "day residue", invented by Freud.

Anecdotal evidence from my own life makes me question if something similar happens in the waking state. Do events from the past few days "prime" the brain to create new ideas based on those events?

Have there been studies that demonstrated that exposing a person to emotionally neutral objects causes them to come up with ideas related to those objects in the next few days? For example, is seeing art supplies more likely people to start an art project?

There is some support for a short-term day residue effect in the literature, but no support for a more extended dream-lag effect.

Nielsen and Powell (1992) published a test of the day residue effect (incorporation of material from the immediately preceding day) and the dream-lag effect (incorporation of material from 6–8 days prior). Based on dream journals and self-reports of daily events, they found evidence to support the day residue effect, but not the dream-lag effect.

A short 2005 Nature article by the same first author provides a review of the literature for memory's general relationship to dreaming, and includes a very nice summary of the different theories that are in play right now (Nielsen and Stenstrom, 2005).

References

Nielsen, T. A., & Powell, R. A. (1992). The day-residue and dream-lag effects: A literature review and limited replication of two temporal effects in dream formation. Dreaming, 2(2), 67.
Nielsen, T. A., & Stenstrom, P. (2005). What are the memory sources of dreaming?. Nature, 437(7063), 1286-1289.


Are there any cases of a person with misophonia for which the condition has been passed on to their child? genetics increase one's risk of PTSD, as well PTSD can be developed through vicarious trauma.

Misophonia condition appears to have the following in common with PTSD;
Anger , muscle tension, feeling of stress, loss of concentration
in reaction to specific sounds

If a parent has misophonia does that increase the risk for the child to develop the condition as well?

Are there any known cases that both parent and child have misophonia ?

I can't find research on whether it has been confirmed if misophonia is a stream of PTSD. Or if it has been confirmed if it is genetic.

Noise sensitivity aggregates in families and the estimate of heritability is 36% (Shepherd et al., 2015).

A popular scientific source states that misophonia is not caused by a traumatic event, but might as well be caused by (seemingly) harmless sounds in the past that become associated with stress responses. Both PTSD and misophonia are classified as classical conditioning, though, so there seem to be parallels there (source: Misophonia Institute), but I don't think they misophonia is a form of PTSD.

Heritability of PTSD is approximately 30% in males, and in females it seems even higher (Sartor et al., 2012).

References
- Sartor et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry (2012); 69(3): 293–9
- Shepherd et al., Noise Health (2015); 17(76): 165–71