how does our brain know how to provide the right instructions to pronounce words? Children learn to speak by hearing others and then trying to pronounce these words.
What I don't understand is: how does their brain know the right instructions to give to the tongue, lips and the vocal cords to produce a sound that is similar to what they hear? How does the brain of child who is trying to pronounce letters for the first time know how to move the tongue to produce 'N' sound, for example?
Why do we find it hard to pronounce foreign letters that doesn't exist in our first language as adults? Does our brain lose the ability to figure out how to pronounce new letters?

Children experiment and practice. They produce sounds and then listen to their own sounds as well as those produced by others around them.
Part of this experiment and practice is the stage of language development referred to as babbling. During babbling, infants work towards producing sounds specific to the language they've been exposed to and gradually develop more and more sophisticated sounds that still (mostly) lack meaning. Infants select and repeat those sounds they make that replicate the language they hear from others.
Periods during development when certain skills are learned preferentially are called critical periods. There are early critical periods in language development after which it is more difficult (but not impossible!) to learn to pronounce new syllables because the practice/experimentation phase is passed.

de Boysson-Bardies, B., & Vihman, M. M. (1991). Adaptation to language: Evidence from babbling and first words in four languages. Language, 67(2), 297-319.
Hallé, P. A., De Boysson-Bardies, B., & Vihman, M. M. (1991). Beginnings of prosodic organization: Intonation and duration patterns of disyllables produced by Japanese and French infants. Language and speech, 34(4), 299-318.
Oller, D. K., Wieman, L. A., Doyle, W. J., & Ross, C. (1976). Infant babbling and speech. Journal of child Language, 3(1), 1-11.


Are introverts more talkative in written form than extroverts? We all know that extroverts are in general more talkative than introverts in oral form. But how about written communication?

After having talked with lots of people on the internet and met several of them, I have the impression that the most talkative online are the most introverted offline and vice versa.

Half a year after posting this question I've got a personal confirmation from one extrovert I talked to: He told me doesn't like to write much, because he prefers the more 'personal' communication from spoken communication.
Another extrovert told me he prefers speaking on the phone rather than writing messages.
Introverts, on the other hand, often dislike phones and prefer messages.

So there does indeed seem to be something in my theory, but I need more objective, statistical datas on it.

1. Are extraverts more talkative than introverts in oral communication?

Yes they are. The (probably) best evidence can be found in research by Mehl et al. (2006) who "tracked 96 participants over 2 days using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), which samples snippets of ambient sounds in
participants’ immediate environments". The correlation of extraversion with word count was .29, indicating that extraversion was related to more talkativeness.

2. Are introverts more talkative in written communication?

It does not seem so. A study that addresses your question has been done by Gill and Oberlander  (2002). They asked participants to compose two emails to a good friend. The more extraverted they were, the longer were the emails (beta = .20). Thus, this study was not in line with your intuition that introverts are more talkative in written form. Of course, you may argue that under some circumstances (maybe when writing a diary or a book) your hypothesis may still hold. However, judging from this study, if it exists at all, this does not seem to be a general effect.

There are some differences in writing style and content, however. For example, introverts seem to use a more concrete and focused language (Gill & Oberlander, 2002). Furthermore, introverts tend to use longer words (Mehl et al., 2006) which may be in line with Alex Stone's comment.

References

Gill, A., & Oberlander, J. (2002, August). Taking care of the linguistic features of extraversion. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference
of the Cognitive Science Society. Fairfax, VA.

Mehl, M. R., Gosling, S. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Personality in its natural habitat: Manifestations and implicit folk theories of personality in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 862–877. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.862


Which statistical test should I use when there are multiple latent predictors and multiple latent outcomes? Which statistical method should I use when Predicting organization commitment (composed of 3 latent variables) using the five factors of personality?

Its a cross-sectional design with survey data. The Personality factors are Five independent factors (derived out of factor analysis) and each factor is measured on a likert scale, same goes for the three components of commitment and they are also measured on a likert type scale.

The studies I have read upto now uses partial correlations and hierarchical regression to link these contructs but I somehow think there has to be a better way.

Note: this question was originally asked here on Stats.SE, but the moderator there suggested posting it on cogsci.se

I'm guessing you are relating the Big 5 factors of personality to Meyer and Allen's three factor model of commitment (normative, continuance, affective).

You certainly could adopt the simple approach of creating observed composite scores for each variable and reporting the correlation matrix and a set of multiple regressions.

However, the language of your question also suggests that you are interested in modelling latent variables rather than observed variables. This may suggest a structural equation modelling approach may be suitable.

Benefits of structural equation modelling approach

You can model your measurement model (i.e., do the observed variables load appropriately on your 8 latent factors; is there an overall higher order commitment factor that represents the three commitment factors)
You could model relationships between latent factors rather than observed variables (i.e., you can adjust for reliability of measurement); this often aligns analyses more with theoretical interests in psychology.
You could explore more sophisticated model comparison approaches. One approach I really like involves comparing models with various constraints in either the correlations or regression coefficients between the predictor set (i.e., personality) and the outcome set (i.e., commitment). E.g., one model could constrain all 15 regression coefficients between personality and commitment variables to be the same; another model could say that the relationships are constrained to be equal across commitment variables but different across personality variables.


How many words are toddlers "making up"? My 20-month old has learned many words to express herself.  In addition she says many other words that are indecipherable from context nor pronunciation.  It's most noticeable in novel or unusual situations.

Is she inventing words to express the new or not-yet-learned situation?  If so, (until she learns the "correct" word), will she continue to use the invented word for a while, or will she invent a different word should the situation recur? What does the literature in developmental psychology have to say about this?

From my knowledge.  Children do make up words and sounds that feel similar to the ones they are intended to mean.  However, as the child develops these pseudo-words begin to disappear.  New temporary replacement words may form as they begin to understand that they are not using the correct words.  However, developmentally a child should be speaking in full sentences by about 3 years old and definitely by 4 years old.  They will most likely continue to have problems with various connecting words, plurals, and saying words how they appear to sound (even if they say them wrong).

It helps with their learning to break down words into syllables so that they can grasp how each sound works together to form the words that you are using to communicate with them.  I'll see if I can find my old developmental psychology book to back this up more, but I'm going on a class I took years ago.  That and watching 3 kids move through the stages (got a 22 month old, 3, and 7 year old myself).


Why do I always screw up when people are watching? I’m wondering why people are more likely to fail when they know people are watching and or counting on them. For example in a football game where there is 2 seconds left in the game, and team A has the ball and they’re 2 points behind team B. They go for a field goal and the kicker misses by a mile after going say 20 for 20 field goals all season before that kick. What explains the cause for underperformance when the stakes are high, or someone is watching, etc?

There are quite a few studies on this, but a nice recent one is this:
Lee, Taraz G., et al. "Limiting motor skill knowledge via incidental training protects against choking under pressure." Psychonomic bulletin & review 26.1 (2019): 279-290.

(https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-018-1486-x)

They consider a few possible mechanisms, but end up leaning towards a 'high incentives are distracting' story. (Another candidate that can't be ruled out is 'high incentives encourage top-down control processes, and those are just not very good at driving motor sequences'). The main evidence hinges on differences between implicit and explicit learning of a key-sequence task: only the people who got explicit instruction show choking under pressure, even though both groups are doing the same task. If you just want the final take-home, it's "our results lead us to conclude that a training regime that seeks to restrict awareness of movement strategies and structure could lead to more stable performance under pressure, potentially via reduced performance deficits in the face of distraction." but underneath that claim there's a bunch of cool structure in the patterns of performance across the two groups that they dig into in some detail.


Early foreign language experience and ease of learning foreign languages I've been wondering recently about the factors that affect the process of learning foreign languages. Specifically, whether early contact and experiences with a foreign language can have any impact on the ease of learning a foreign language later in life.

I know that I am cable of learning foreign languages faster than others (not everyone, of course) and, on the other hand, I find it quite difficult to learning programming or math. What I am wondering about is whether this is because I started learning English when I was 8 years old and whether, at that young age, I was able to work out certain mechanisms or ways of copying and handling this kind of knowledge.

Psychologists would probably say that some people have certain capabilities and others don't, which makes us so unique. What I would like to know is if there is any scientific way to prove/refute a relationship between early language experience with the ease of learning a language.

This is an interesting question. Language development is a fascinating topic!

There are two types of language learning:
1. Learning a natural language (a language that is learned without any conscious effort)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language
2. Learning a second-language

Nearly all babies learn a natural language and some may learn more than one (they are what we call, bilingual babies).

There are some critical periods for learning any languages and these vary depending on the aspects of language one looks at (syntax, semantics, etc...). (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3451048/)

Recent research shows that the approximate critical period for learning a second language appears to be at around 17 years old. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027718300994) This does NOT mean that you will not be able to learn a second language after this, simply that it will be harder. Hence why it might have been easier for you to learn English at 8 years-old.

Now, depending on what languages you speak, it might be easier to learn some languages rather than others. For example, French and Spanish have very similar rhythms, phonemes, and are both romance languages, which would make it easier to learn one or the other, as long as you were fluent in one of them. However, it would be much harder for an English or French speaking person to learn Mandarin, because this tonal language is so different on many different aspects (for one, there are phonemes to which speakers of non-tonal languages are not sensitive, meaning that they cannot tell the difference between them). So yes, sometimes a language can be easy to learn, but at other times, it becomes much more complicated than having to learn a computer language.

As for being better at learning languages because you are bilingual, that is a possibility, but again, within the limits mentioned above of the language you decide to learn. Someone who knows French and Spanish may find it very easy to learn Italian, but still extremely hard to learn Cantonese. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-bilingual/201506/can-second-language-help-you-learn-third)

Finally, psychologists do not agree on whether or not we have 'certain capabilities'. Many argue that anybody can become anything with the proper training and experience. Sure, as we grow, we become better in certain things, but you may find that by overcoming your preconceived ideas about yourself (ex: you are not good at learning computer languages), you can learn new things! I recommend reading Peak by Anders Ericsson. In his book, he really highlights how all the 'experts' were not born with special talents, but learned everything thanks to deliberate practice.


How to change someone's beliefs? I tried to change my brother's beliefs. He gets motivated by some bad ideas. Following my attempt to change his beliefs, his beliefs have become even stronger.

It's a little unclear to me from what you've said that your efforts are truly affecting your brother's ideas. It's also unclear whether those ideas are objectively bad, or whether you should be trying to change them. In general, we have to be careful to avoid recommending specific actions for specific people here.

That being said, the general phenomenon you seem to describe is reactance. Excerpts from Wikipedia:

  Reactance is a motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms [(Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981)]. Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away his or her choices or limiting the range of alternatives.

  Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion. People using reverse psychology are playing on at least an informal awareness of reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request...

  According to William R. Miller [(2000),] "Research demonstrates that a counselor can drive resistance (denial) levels up and down dramatically according to his or her personal counseling style". Use of a "respectful, reflective approach" described in motivational interviewing and applied as motivation enhancement therapy, rather than by argumentation, the accusation of "being in denial", and direct confrontations, lead to the motivation to change and avoid the resistance and denial, or reactance, elicited by strong direct confrontation [(Miller & Rollnick, 1991)]...

  Silvia's 2005 study Deflecting reactance: The role of similarity in increasing compliance and reducing resistance concluded that one way to increase the activity of a threatened freedom is to censor it, or provide a threatening message toward the activity. In turn a "boomerang effect" occurs, in which people choose forbidden alternatives. This study also shows that social influence has better results when it does not threaten one's core freedoms. Two concepts revealed in this study are that a communicator may be able to increase the positive force towards compliance by increasing their credibility, and that increasing the positive communication force and decreasing the negative communication force simultaneously should increase compliance [(Silvia, 2005)].

You may want to follow some of the hyperlinks above. They're all useful concepts for this issue, and may help you understand what you're doing and what your alternatives are. As a general principle, counselors and therapists avoid trying to change others' beliefs and attitudes explicitly and directly. Instead, they focus on understanding their clients, and in the process, they prompt their clients to reexamine themselves and find their own reasons to change. It's subtle yet impressive social jujutsu.

References

- Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Academic Press.
- Brehm, S. S., & Brehm, J. W. (1981). Psychological reactance: A theory of freedom and control. Academic Press.
- Miller, W. R. (2000) Motivational enhancement therapy: Description of counseling approach. In J. J. Boren, L. S. Onken, & K. M. Carroll (Eds.), Approaches to Drug Abuse Counseling (pp. 89–93). National Institute on Drug Abuse.
- Miller, W.R. & Rollnick, S. (1991). Motivational interviewing: Preparing people to change addictive behavior. New York: Guilford Press.
- Silvia, P. J. (2005). Deflecting reactance: The role of similarity in increasing compliance and reducing resistance. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 27, 277–284. Retrieved from http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/psyc624/Silvia%20%282005%29.pdf.


What is the metabolic load of the visual system? The brain consumes energy at eight times the rate that would be predicted from mass alone (20% of total organismic load).

How much of this is drawn from the visual system?
How does the metabolic load change among the blind?
How about for people with their eyes closed?

I don't have an answer in terms of percentages, but I thought I could offer at least some insight I may have. Really cool question though, never really thought of this.

So two ways to go about this answer. For one, when you close your eyes you immediately can register so called alpha waves from an EEG (electroencephalography). This was actually how EEG was first discovered, it's the easiest brain oscillation we can capture through scalp potentials and see with our bare eyes. You find these alpha oscillations at occipital and parietal locations, and are slow waves (8-12Hz). If you compare an alert person in an awake state, and someone who is tired or even deep sleep, you see a difference in oscillatory activity, so more alert higher frequencies (gamma bursts >50Hz) versus asleep slow wave (theta, delta). I may be wrong and this, and someone do correct me if I am, but I would propose that high frequencies would indicate more neuronal activity, whereas low frequencies less so. There is of course a preference in neuronal populations to have a frequency they best oscillate at, so then maybe that hypothesis is out the door. In any case, as soon as you shut your eyes, you get these slower oscillations.

But even when your eyes are open and processing visual information, already 100ms later does that information get to other brain areas. So things like ERPs (event related potentials) have shown emotional differences in those waveforms already after 100, 200ms. This indicates that already the brain is processing that stimulus, not JUST the visual cortex.

At the same time though, that is only lower-tier visual cortex. Almost the entire back portion of our heads and part of the temporal lobes are all higher order processing. We are very unique among vertebrates for having so much of our brain devoted to visual processing. Most other mammals rely mostly on olfaction.

So taken together, I would say that just due to the amount of neuronal mass that is committed to processing visual information, yes a significant amount of the energy budget goes to vision. If you look at fMRI images, you can see the entire occipital cortex light up, only when viewing pictures, as well as other areas talking to the visual cortex.

Very cool question, I'm curious if someone has a more accurate prediction of just how much energy it takes for our camera to work!


Is there literature support for the 'pop' claim that people "marry their parent"/choose a partner with traits similar to their parent(s)? I have read multiple times that we tend to marry one of our parents. Some even claim there is no way around it. I don't really see it. There are some aspects that are similar between my spouse and my parent, but since a character has very many facets, I could find some similar facets to any person.
Obviously, a person is influenced by their surrounding, especially their close relationships, like their parents. And also, obviously, we tend to stick with what we know - including people that are similar to us and what we know. But that basically just means we tend to marry someone who is similar to us and the milieu we grew up with. I don't see any need for arguing that we marry one of our parents.
What is the evidence and accompanying reasoning for the claim that we marry our parents?
Examples of such claims:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-marriage-counselors-mean-by-we-marry-our-parents-or-we-marry-at-our-level-of-dysfunction-How-can-we-make-sure-not-to-do-that
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/tech-support/201405/why-your-partner-may-be-your-parent
https://www.tesh.com/articles/why-do-we-marry-people-who-are-similar-to-our-parents/

Yes, much literature supports this notion. Mary Ainsworth's attachment theory has a lot to say about parental attachments and how important they are for future growth; this journal article is directly related to your query. There is also related research in evolutionary psychology, see this and this.
As for why we get attracted to parental traits: the most popular explanation is sexual imprinting, which comes from evolutionary psychology: as the human species evolved, the humans who learned early on what humans looked like were more likely to mate with the same species and pass on their genes, leading to an evolutionary benefit for learning traits from your parents.


What are the correlation between the Big 5 (OCEAN) dimensions of personality? I'm looking for quantitative research on the correlation between the five dimensions in OCEAN psychometric models. Would appreciate any references.

My answer to the question on evidence for the GFP provides numerous references on the correlations between the Big 5:

What is the support for a global personality factor?

The key bit of the answer is as follows:

  van der Linden et al 2010 extend the work of Musek (2007) by presenting a meta-analysis of Big 5 intercorrelation matrices
   in order to assess the evidence for a General Factor of Personality.
  Table 2 shows the meta-analytic average scale intercorrelations for the big 5 measures included in the meta-analysis. It shows how across a wide range of measures and measurement procedures, the Big 5 scales moderately intercorrelate. The average absolute unadjusted correlations between the Big Five was 0.23.

You can also check out other work discussing higher-order factors (typically one or two factor models). These imply a correlation between the Big 5.

To quote my own primer on the Big 5 (Anglim & O'Connor, 2018: https://psyarxiv.com/a78g2/download):

  Researchers have posited one and two factor higher-order models of personality suggesting that the Big Five may not be the broadest meaningful level of personality analysis (Anusic, Schimmack, Pinkus, & Lockwood, 2009; Digman, 1997; Musek, 2007; Veselka et al., 2009). Notably, a single, broad factor (termed the General Factor of Personality; GFP) has been proposed to account for meaningful trait variance at the highest level (e.g., Musek, 2007), although see various critical perspectives (Davies et al., 2015; De Vries, 2011; Revelle & Wilt, 2013) .

Thus, you could check out those references for further background on one and two-factor models. Such papers will generally also discuss the structure of correlations between the Big 5 and arguments for and against why they are meaningful.

References

Anglim, J., & O'Connor, P. (2018). Measurement and Research Using the Big Five, HEXACO,
and Narrow Traits: A Primer for Researchers and Practitioners. Australian Journal of Psychology. https://psyarxiv.com/a78g2/download
van der Linden, D., te Nijenhuis, J., & Bakker, A. B. (2010). The general factor of personality: A meta-analysis of Big Five intercorrelations and a criterion-related validity study. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(3), 315-327.


Solving T-shaped maze (probability learning): differences between rats and humans From Jonah Lehrer's book "How We Decide", he mentions the experiments with rats and Yale undergraduates.

I found the paper that (presumably) matches the experiment of rats.

  Brunswik, E. (1939). Probability as a determiner of rat behavior. Journal of Experimental
  Psychology, 25, 175–197. [Reprinted in Hammond, K. R., & Stewart, T. R., 2001]

But the results seem to be somewhat different from what he described.

Could anyone tell me where I can find the paper about Yale graduates performing the maze task?

Here's the excerpt from the book,

  "Look, for example, at this elegant little experiment:
  A rat was put in a T-shaped maze with a few morsels of food
  placed on either the far right or the far left side of the enclosure.
  The placement of the food was random, but the dice were rigged:
  over the long run, the food was placed on the left side 60 percent
  of the time. How did the rat respond? It quickly realized that the
  left side was more rewarding. As a result, it always went to the
  left of the maze, which resulted in a 60 percent success rate. The
  rat didn't strive for perfection. It didn't search for a unified theory
  of the T-shaped maze. It just accepted the inherent uncertainty
  of the reward and learned to settle for the option that usually
  gave the best outcome.
  The experiment was repeated with Yale undergraduates. Unlike
  the rat, the students, with their elaborate networks of dopamine
  neurons, stubbornly searched for the elusive pattern that
  determined the placement of the reward. They made predictions
  and then tried to learn from their prediction errors. The problem
  was that there was nothing to predict; the apparent randomness
  was real. Because the students refused to settle for a 60 percent
  success rate, they ended up with a 52 percent success rate. Although
  most of the students were convinced that they were making
  progress toward identifying the underlying algorithm, they
  were, in actuality, outsmarted by a rat."

I was unable to find this in a scientific paper, and it is not clear from the sources I did locate that this work was ever actually published. However, I found other sources that reference this work and several similar studies comparing humans to rats.

The study you mention is also referenced briefly in Tetlock's (2005) book on political judgment; a discussion of Tetlock's interpretation of the results can be seen on University of Pennsylvania's Language Log (2005). That blog post also indicates the experiments are discussed to some extent in a textbook by Gallistel (1993); finding that book may provide more information.

A paper by Spragg (1934) describes exploring anticipatory responses in both rats and human (student) subjects. Overall and Brown (1959) examined decision making behavior in rats and humans (students) using a maze task.

Gallistel, Charles R. (1993). The organization of learning (Learning,
development, and conceptual change). A Bradford Book: 662 pages.
ISBN-13: 978-0262570985
Language Log. (December 11,2005). Rats beat Yalies? Doing better by
getting less information? Retrieved from
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002700.html
Overall, J. E., & Brown, W. L. (1959). A comparison of the
decision-behavior of rats and of human subjects. The American Journal
of Psychology, 72(2) 258-261.
Spragg, S. S. (1934). Anticipatory responses in the maze. Journal of
Comparative Psychology, 18(1), 51-73.
Tetlock, P. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How
can we know?. Princeton University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0691128719


Basis for "we make 35,000 decisions a day" statistic In an advertisement by Microsoft for their To-Do product they use a statistic that we "make over 35,000" decisions a day.  Unsurprisingly, they don't cite a source.  Is there any scholarly basis for such a figure?

Even though there are usually 86400 seconds in a day (that works out to one decision every ~2.5 seconds if you include time sleeping) you could reasonably make an argument for that number.  I say that, however, without a good operational definition for "decision".  Executive function researchers may outright say that figure is bunk.

Q: Careless usage aside, is there a source for this statistic and/or a more scholarly correct number for the "number of decisions we make each day"?

Apparently the statistic is widely "cited" (without proper citation) online.  Here are a few instances (if any are left as comments I'll include them below):

http://go.roberts.edu/leadingedge/the-great-choices-of-strategic-leaders
https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/how-to-make-great-decisions-most-of-the-time.html

This question was asked on Skeptics SE, but closed without a response:
Do people make 35000 decisions a day? [closed]

Concurring with the comments on the Skeptics question, I am also not aware of a standardized operationalization of "number of decisions" that could be used to produce a meaningful measure for this, and to my knowledge no (serious) research has attempted to calculate a daily tally.

This clearly poses little challenge for the numerous references to this and other unsourced/uncited statistics.  While references on various blogs, social media, self-help books, and other questionable sources are not of much note, there are a few citations made on media outlets that readers might take more seriously, such as:

The Telegraph UK (2016):

  They say the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.

Huffington Post UK (2014):

  According to newspaper ‘USA Today’ the average adult makes about
  35,000 decisions each day.

Phrasings such as "they say...", "it is thought that...", "according to various online sources...", etc are not very committal about validity, and the above quotes do only appear in the "Lifestyle" sections of these newspapers, so there is not much impetus for journalistic integrity.

Articles often mention other corroborating research to make the "35,000" statistic sound more plausible.  An example from a different Huffington Post UK (2011) article (found on Mirror magazine as well):

  The average Brit makes 773,618 decisions in a lifetime but lives to
  regret as many as 143,262 of them, a study has found. ... The study of
  2,000 indecisive Brits, by Nintendo Puzzler Mind Gym 3D, found that
  ...

That's right, Nintendo - the game system company - purportedly conducted this apparently unpublished poll, giving a much lower number of decisions statistic (around 27 per day).

Another example on a Psychology Today (2012) article:

  According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher,
  Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious
  decisions every day.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia, also apparently did not publish her survey findings, but she does discuss it on TED (2012):

  I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average
  number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70
  in a typical day.

Here is something from reference.com:

  Each individual is different, so it is impossible to pinpoint a
  specific number of daily decisions that applies to every individual,
  but Time magazine puts the number in the thousands.

The referenced Time Magazine article indeed says:

  Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor ...

How silly.  Here is another interesting item from reference.com:

  The average person has about 48.6 thoughts per minute, according to
  the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of Southern
  California. That adds up to a total of 70,000 thoughts per day.

The source cited for this amazing claim does not corroborate this ... any more, but it did!

  How many thoughts does the average person have per day?
  *70,000

So let's see, 70k thoughts per day, 35k decisions per day ... that's about 1 out of every 2 thoughts is a decision?  The other 1 in 2 thoughts must be the ones about sex.  But wait, what's the asterisk (*) about?  Ah:

  *This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very
  preliminary studies using undergraduate student volunteers and have
  estimated that one may expect around 60-70K thoughts per day. These
  results are not peer-reviewed/published. There is no generally
  accepted definition of what "thought" is or how it is created. In our
  study, we had assumed that a "thought" is a sporadic single-idea
  cognitive concept resulting from the act of thinking, or produced by
  spontaneous systems-level cognitive brain activations.

The most credible corroborating research I've seen so far is the Wansink & Sobal (2007) paper: "Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook", published in the journal Environment and Behavior.  Keeping in mind that neither author is a cognitive scientist, and that this article concerns nutritional health, not psychological measurements, this is nonetheless a very well cited paper.  In the paper, the authors explain:

  One hundred and fifty adults ... were initially asked to estimate how
  many total decisions about foods and beverages they make in one day.
  They were then asked six questions about snacks, six questions about
  meals, and six questions about beverages. ... While the typical person
  estimated they made around 15 food and beverage decisions in a day,
  the average that was calculated from subsequent questioning was 219,
  approximately 200 more.

I'm not sure if the authors truly believe that this methodology conclusively sets the total number of daily food-related decisions, or if they were just pointing out that we are often not aware of many of the decisions that we make, but it is not difficult to imagine that if the survey contained more or fewer detailed "subsequent" questioning, then the total number of decisions would increase or decrease accordingly.  Regardless, this paper is an important reference for the author's self-help book - Mindless Eating (2006):

  The phrase "mindless eating" refers to the empirical finding that
  people make nearly 20 times more daily decisions about food than they
  are aware of (an average of around 200 each day).

With a range of between 27 and 35,000 decisions per day, I think you can just pick any number you want for this statistic.  These types of claims are often associated with reference to research on decision fatigue and ego-depletion - a controversial idea about the limits of human capacity for decision making.

Anyways, I hope you had as much fun reading this answer as I had writing it.  Also, according to the Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better, so be sure to improve your average daily decision making by showing your support!


Is there a survey regarding the meaning of distress in the definition of mental disorder? Although without a doubt discussed in professional circles for a long time before, the definition of mental disorder has been recently brought to the limelight by Trump narcissism debate:

“Everyone has a personality,” [Allen] Frances says. “It’s not wrong to have a personality; it’s not mentally ill to have a personality. It’s only a disorder when it causes extreme distress, suffering, and impairment.” [...]
Gartner — who has a PhD and treats patients in a private practice — wholeheartedly disagrees with Frances’s position. “The thing about people with personality disorders … they don’t have distress related to their disorder; they cause distress in other people,” he says. “They’re in complete denial about the nature of their illness or even having an illness.”

I'm not going to ask here what is your take on the controversy because that would be primarily opinion based. What I want to know is whether any surveys have been conducted of psychiatrists or psychologists on this issue, i.e. on where to draw the line with respect to harm/distress. Asking them this will not violate any ethics rules, I think. (I know where the DSM letter stands; for others' convenience here are links to DSM-IV's and DSM-5's version.)

When it comes to any surveys on how mental health is assessed, you can't go far wrong with looking at the DSM-5

  In 2010, the APA launched a unique Web site to facilitate public and professional input into DSM-5. All draft diagnostic criteria and proposed changes in organization were posted on www.dsm5.org for a 2-month comment period. Feedback totaled more than 8,000 submissions, which were systematically reviewed by each of the 13 work groups, whose members, where appropriate, integrated questions and comments into discussions of draft revisions and plans for field trial testing. After revisions to the initial draft criteria and proposed chapter organization, a second posting occurred in 2011. Work groups considered feedback from both Web postings and the results of the DSM-5 Field Trials when drafting proposed final criteria, which were posted on the Web site for a third and final time in 2012. These three iterations of external review produced more than 13,000 individually signed comments on the Web site that were received and reviewed by the work groups, plus thousands of organized petition signers for and against some proposed revisions, all of which allowed the task force to actively address concerns of DSM users, as well as patients and advocacy groups, and ensure that clinical utility remained a high priority. (Source: Page 8 of DSM-5)

My copy of DSM-5 has the following definition for Mental Disorder:

Notice that it said:

  Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability

So therefore, Allen Frances was only slightly incorrect with what he said as there can be social or occupational disabilities without distress, but then based on the findings of Miller at al (2007), John Gartner was also wrong.  An example is that Narcisistic Personality Disorder has "weak but significant" relation with intrapersonal distress (Miller, et al. 2007).  However, in defense of John Gartner is the fact that;

  the strongest impairment associated with NPD is the distress or “pain and suffering” experienced not by the narcissist but by his or her significant others.

References

Miller, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Pilkonis, P. A. (2007). Narcissistic personality disorder: Relations with distress and functional impairment. Comprehensive psychiatry, 48(2), 170-177.DOI: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2006.10.003 PMCID: PMC1857317Free PDF: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1857317/pdf/nihms18536.pdf


Have the abilities of John Lorber's patients with limited cortical mass been further evaluated in adulthood? Short of minor lesions or infarcts, most high-functioning adults have an intact cerebral cortex.  Yet, a surprising result published anecdotally in Science in 1980 caused a lot of scientists to take note of Dr. John Lorber's hydrocephalus patients in England.

Most famously, Lorber reported:

  There's a young student at this university...who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal.  And yet the boy has virtually no brain...instead of the normal 4.5 centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so.

Now, arguing that the subject had "virtually no brain" is perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but the fact remains, he had accomplished an academic feat which many "normal" humans have not.  What's even more astonishing about this particular case is that this subject was purportedly not even aware of his condition until the initial brain scans were performed.

Aside from 1-2 other publications in peripheral journals around the same time period, I have never heard anything further about these patients that Dr. Lorber was following.

In the intervening 30+ years, have there been any follow-up scans/studies of these patients particularly those featuring the mathematics scholar mentioned above?

What mechanisms does the cortex use in these unusual circumstances to counter the effects of decreased cortical thickness?  Are the cortical columns shorter, and in what sense does their connectivity compensate for lower neuron counts/lower cell densities?

  Lewin, R. (1980).  Is your brain really necessary?  Science 210(4475):1232-1234.

It's unclear whether follow-up tests were ever performed on Lorber's patients, and in particular the student referenced by Lewin. Patient confidentiality precludes a systematic search of the literature, particularly because the Lewin (1980) article does not provide a pseudonym with which we can use to track the patient (e.g. "HM"). It is possible that this patient has been the subject of other scientific studies, but there does not appear to be any information that would uniquely identify him as the patient referred to in this article. John Lorber has since passed away (1996), making it unlikely that we'll know for sure.

However, the condition itself has not been ignored. Lorber himself has later studies which look at the brains structure of hydrocephalus patients (Jackson & Lorber, 1984). A more recent study by Feuillet et al. (2007) seems to show similar results with regard to brain tissue, but the IQ of Feuillet's patient was measured at 75. He appeared to function normally in society, but his intelligence is regarded as significantly below average. A news article about this study, including CT images, can be found here.

In 2011, a review article by De Oliveira et al. discussed the above two cases and others. However, no mention of a follow-up to Lorber's original patient is discussed. It seems likely that if a follow-up were performed, it would be mentioned in this review.

There does not appear to be a concrete answer with respect to how these patients can function despite a deficit in cortical tissue. However, De Oliveira and colleagues discuss one hypothesis, as quoted below:

  Computational models such as the “small-world” and “scale-free”
  network might explain clinical resilience in various situations
  (Friston and Price, 2003; Noppeney et al., 2004; Achard and Bullmore,
  2007; Van den Heuvel et al., 2008). Small-world networks predicts that
  neuronal cells are engaged in clustered connectivity with fewer
  long-range connections (Friston and Price, 2003; Achard et al., 2006).
  Thus, there would be a shorter path length between any pair of neurons
  or Brain regions, resulting in higher dynamical complexity, lower
  wiring costs, and resilience to tissue insults. A scale-free network
  is characterized by the existence of a small number of nodes having
  more connections than the other nodes. The nodes that have such a high
  connectivity degree are referred to as hub-nodes and are suggested to
  play an important role in the overall network organization (Friston
  and Price, 2003).

  Brain resilience may be also the final result of processes such as
  redundancy, degeneracy, and pluripotentiality of neural systems
  (Friston and Price, 2003; Noppeney et al., 2004). Another possible
  mechanism would be the local neurogenesis already reported in
  structures such as the basal ganglia, with preferential distribution
  in sub-regions of the ventral striatum (Stopczynski et al., 2008).

References

  De Oliveira, M. F., Pinto, F. C. G., Nishikuni, K., Botelho, R. V.,
  Lima, A. M., & Rotta, J. M. (2011). Revisiting hydrocephalus as a
  model to study brain resilience. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 5.
  PDF

  Feuillet, L., Dufour, H., & Pelletier, J. (2007). Brain of a
  white-collar worker. The Lancet, 370(9583), 262.

  Jackson, P. H., & Lorber, J. (1984). Brain and ventricular volume in
  hydrocephalus. Z Kinderchir, 39(Suppl 2), 91-93.


Is habituation responsible for inaccurate airport security screenings? The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has "red teams" who try to sneak dangerous items through airport security.  The security personnel often fail up to 95% of these tests. Is this high failure rate to be expected because of habituation to visual stimulus?  Specifically, a screening agent is expected to find a single weapon amidst thousands of X-rays without a weapon.

If this is habituation, are there techniques for reducing its impact in scenarios such as this?

The main reason for these failures is mental fatigue and lost of concentration, in conjuction with the weak target signals.

  Vigilance decrement is defined as "deterioration in the ability to
  remain vigilant for critical signals with time, as indicated by a
  decline in the rate of the correct detection of signals". Vigilance
  decrement is most commonly associated with monitoring to detect a weak
  target signal. Detection performance loss is less likely to occur in
  cases where the target signal exhibits a high saliency. ... Under most
  conditions, vigilance decrement becomes significant within the first
  15 minutes of attention, but a decline in detection performance can
  occur more quickly if the task demand conditions are high ... More recent studies
  indicate that vigilance is hard work, requiring the allocation of
  significant cognitive resources, and inducing significant levels of
  stress.

Habituation plays very little role in these failures.

  Early theories of vigilance explained the reduction of
  electrophysiological activity over time associated with the vigilance
  decrement as a result of neural habituation. ... More recent ERP
  studies indicate that when performance declines during a vigilance
  task, N100 amplitude was not diminished. These results indicate that
  vigilance is not the result of boredom or a reduction in neurological
  sensitivity

Training and motivation can decrease failures.

  Training and practice significantly reduce the vigilance decrement,
  reduce the false alarm rate, and may improve sensitivity for many
  sustained attention tasks. Training improvements may also occur due to
  the reduced mental workload associated with task automaticity. In
  pilotage and airport security screening experiments, trained or expert
  subjects exhibit better detection of low salience targets, a reduction
  in false alarms, improved sensitivity, and a significantly reduced
  vigilance decrement. In some cases the vigilance decrement was
  eliminated or not apparent.


Role of extreme experiences in psychological development I would kindly like to ask for literature on the role of:

Overcoming extreme experiences (suffering - psychological, physical, etc. -, fear, etc.), in personal development
Sports psychology in personal development

after a quick search on the second topic i was able to find the following:
https://hastebin.com/osokoniwed.erl

not sure if all this literature is relevant, reason why i am asking. then on the hand of resilience psychology i found this https://hastebin.com/rebojuxeke.erl


Which human instincts do gamification systems appeal to? As a Stack Exchange user, I spent quite a while thinking about how they managed to trick me into putting so much effort into it.  Reputation, badges, etc., are all virtually useless, yet I put great effort into gaining them.

I've come to the conclusion that the system at least partially exploits that I am not an entirely rational being but instead rely on instincts, for example by exploiting the urge to collect badges. What other instincts do gamification systems appealed to?

In general, I believe gamification taps into 2 main human behaviours. Competition & Pride (in that order)

Competition should drive more engagement and Pride should help breed loyalty (b/c their stature is linked on your projects stature)

1. Competition

contests (top editor of week)
leaderboards
featured users

2. Pride

badges
achievements
unlocked features

Various systems balance these differently, and of course it's also very subjective but I believe that when people first sign up, it's about competition, and after they compete (and win trophies) it's about Pride.

Update: OCT-25-2013

The above 2 drivers really refer to those users who indeed buy-in and engage with your gamifications - But if you run a public website where buy-in rate could be considerably low you may have many users simply exploring. Below are some considerations to keep these users involved in your gamifications and hopefully convert them to competitive patrons.

3. Exploration (Look Before Leap Users)

public profiles (customizations, badges)
public leaderboards
faq / knowledge-base for details on rewards


Is there a standardised questionnaire measuring tendency to think emotionally versus logically? I want to conduct a research on the effect of emotions on decision. It is about the role of affective and cognitive processes in making a decision. I want to know if an individual relies more on emotions or logical thinking, but could not find any validated measure/questionnaire for that. I found some that measures the dual process theory : rational or intuitive but that is not what I am looking for.
Wondering if there is any survey/test for this?

I studied the Child and Adolescent participation in decision-making questionnaire of L. O'Hare, O. Santin, K. Winter, C. McGuinness

They found that children and young people's involvement in decision-making, when it went well, had a four stranded positive ‘therapeutic effect’ in that it led to better child/professional relationships, higher levels of self-esteem in children and young people, increased their sense of mastery and control and reduced their stress and anxiety.

Some items are:

Information to make a decision is presented to me in a way I understand
I am given the full information to make a decision
I feel involved in making decisions in my life
I am given the opportunity to weigh up the pros and cons to make a decision
I have the ability to weigh up the pros and cons to make a decision

(...)
I wish this questionnaire will be useful for your research.

REFERENCES:

L. O'Hare, O. Santin, K. Winter, C. McGuinness (2016), "The reliability and validity of a child and adolescent participation in decision-making questionnaire", "Child: care, health and development",5,692-698.

LINK :  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12369/full


Is the "fear of death" the most powerful impulse of the spirit? Here is an iconic dialogue from The Dark Knight Rises:

Blind Prisoner: You do not fear death.
                You think this makes you strong. It makes you weak.
Bruce Wayne:    Why?
Blind Prisoner: How can you move faster than possible, fight longer
                than possible without the most powerful impulse of the
                spirit: the fear of death.
Bruce Wayne:    I do fear death. I fear dying in here, while my city burns,
                and there's no one there to save it.
Blind Prisoner: Then make the climb.
Bruce Wayne:    How?
Blind Prisoner: As the child did. Without the rope.
                Then fear will find you again.

Questions:

How can this dialogue be interpreted in scientific terms?
Is there any scientific support and explanation for this or is it just literary freedom for dramatic effect?

First off, there is no "spirit" in psychological theory. "Spirit" is a philosophical term denoting a non-corporeal substance emanated from a God.

Also, fear is not an impulse. Fear causes an impulse. Fear is an emotion, and an emotion can serve as a motivator.

Therefore I understand your question to ask:

Is 'fear of death' the most powerful motivator?

Since literary tropes and devices often avail themselves of psychoanalytic theories, I believe it is adequate to attempt a preliminary answer with Freud.

Freud believed that there is no native fear of death. He wrote (1908, p. 167) that the fear of death of a people increases as libido is suppressed and accumulates in the unconscious.

For Freud the libido (the drive towards life) is the strongest drive. Only in his later theories it is balanced in a healthy individual with the death drive (the drive towards dissolution, annihilation and the cessation of all activity). Therefore fear of death would have to exceed libido, to be the strongest motivator.

Psychological theory is rarely psychological in nature, but rather derives its models from contemporary high tech. In the first half of the twentieth century quantum physics gave psychology its probabilistic foundation, during the second half of the 20th century psychology was dominated by the brain-as-computer metaphor, today quantum physics and neuroimaging drive psychological theories. Since Freudian theory derives its basic model from the pneumatics of the steam engine, it is probably save to hypothesize that in Freuds theory fear of death would be as large as the suppressed libido, with its theoretical maximum being the total size of libido. If more than half of the libido were repressed, then fear of death would be greater than libido and therefore the most powerful motivator.

The level and motivating force of Bruce Wayne's fear of death would depend on his and his society's volume of suppressed libido and the pressure generated by it.

For developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, fear of death signified the absence of integrity (1965, p. 260) and a result of the despair of having lead a life experienced as meaningless. From this theory, fear of death would most probably not serve as a motivator, rather it is a symptom of a subjectively failed life.

The loner Bruce Wayne, leading a life of compulsive-obsessive crime hunting, might well despair at the lack of generativity and intimacy in his life, and fear death more than a beloved father of several adult children.

Leaving psychoanalysis behind, fear of death has been the subject of empirical psychology predominantly in two contexts: as an ailment of the sick (e.g. cancer patients) and old that  palliative psychology attempts to alleviate; and as a cause (or correlate) of religiosity. Both fields yield no results concerning the relation between fear of death and motivation. The dearth of experimental studies on the effects of fear of death are probably due to the impossibility to induce this emotion in an ethical way.

But there is a vast amount of research into fear as a motivator, mostly from the perspective of persuasion in education (stop smoking) or advertisement (buy this or else). Motivation psychology postulates a variety of basic motivators: physiological needs such as hunger, sleep, and sex; social desires such as belonging and appreciation; changing goals and spontaneous emotions; etc. And it has been found that different personalities are motivated more strongly by different motivators. I would suspect that there are people for whom fear of death is "the strongest motivator", and others for whom it isn't, because they are more motivated by positive goals (approach motivation, which correlates with extroversion, positive emotionality, and behavioral activation) than negative goals (avoidance motivation, which correlates with neuroticism, negative emotionality, and behavioral inhibition).

Bruce Wayne being introverted, neurotic, and emotionally negative (but active), is a good candidate for being motivated by avoidance and fear in his social life (but an aggressive desire to succeed in his career as a crime hunter). I would guess that fear of death would drive him strongly, if the Blind Prisoner managed to associate (or prime) climbing without a rope with Batman's lack of a social life (e.g. show him visions of the women that loved him but he did not love back), but that he would be rather unafraid, if the rope was withheld in the context of Batman battling crime.

Sources:

Freud, Sigmund (1908). Die "kulturelle" Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität. GW VII, 143-167. [english Translation: "Civilized" sexual morality and modern nervous illness. SE 9, 177-204; online available as "Civilized" sexual morality and modern nervousness, quote from p. 40]
Erikson, Erik H. (1965 [1950]) Childhood and Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.


Is gender biologically or socially determined? I guess the word "gender" needs to be defined, but that is part of the problem I suppose, since it can mean many different things to many different people. By gender, I do not mean anatomical physical sexual structures( like breasts, or a penis). Maybe the best definition I could conceive is: whether one identifies as man or women or w/e gender intermediate.

The question is in the title, and I am aware that it could be due to both effects, and was curious about this question due to the existence of transgender people, which in my mind means gender is more of a social concept. But then some transpeople claim they have "felt" that they were a women or man at birth, which implies a biological origin. And even though both are "story-based" evidence, I was hoping for something more conclusive from this stackexchange.

There has been a lot of debate amongst scientist, and they are not in agreement on any one argument. In general, there is a trend towards thinking that gender identity is based on biology.

Argument that gender identity is based on biology:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150213112317.htm
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/transgender-kids-show-consistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html
http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/21032/20150109/gender-identity-determined-brain-region-cross-links.htm

The arguments here are that the brain patterns of transgendered people are more similar to the brain patterns of people of the gender that they identify with, which seems to indicate that gender identity is based in biology.

Argument that there is a lot more to be understood:

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/opus/issues/2011/spring/gender_identity_development

  "Neither the affects of prenatal and puberty hormones nor socialization alone are enough to explain gender identity development, the process must lie in a brain structure."


Why don't we get regular checkups for mental health, as in physical health? It's standard practice to get a checkup from your primary care doctor once a year. Why is this not so for a mental health professional? Is your primary supposed to catch possible mental and emotional problems and refer you to a specialist?

The short version is that in Europe and North America, at least, the answer is predominantly yes: your GP is supposed to refer you to a relevant mental practitioner on a case by case basis. This can be prompted either by voluntary disclosure (i.e., the patient brings up mental health issues themselves) or suggested based on comments made by the patients. GPs do not generally have a responsibility to 'catch' mental health problems unless they are potentially life threatening (e.g., suicidal ideation).

This is the most that can be said without knowing which country or countries you are interested in. There are vastly different models of mental health care at work in various countries, and the practice of mental health care varies accordingly. For example, the United States' health care model is primarily based on private insurance, while Britain's is an integrated public-private model, which affects how real practice is conducted. Besides the different incentive structures, countries also have different philosophies of mental health service.

You can often find information about a particular country's mental health care model and philosophy on the website of their public health institution (e.g., department/ministry of health).


Combining unbiased hit rates I am analysing data on an emotion perception task, where participants must decide if a given face is happy, sad, angry or fearful (essentially a forced choice between 4 options).

I am confident that I want to calculate an unbiased hit rate for each emotion (as in Wagner 1993). This takes a confusion matrix (toy example below):

        Happy    Sad    Angry   Fearful
Happy     4       1       0        1
Sad       0       3       2        1
Angry     0       0       6        0
Fearful   2       0       0        4

And the unbiased hit rate is then the correct answers squared, divided by the number of times that answer is used multiplied by the number of trials where that answer was correct. So in the above example:

Hu(Happy) = 4^2 / ((4+0+0+2)*6) = 16/36 = 0.444
Hu(Sad) = 9/24 = 0.375
Hu(Angry) = 36/48 = 0.75
Hu(Fearful) = 16/36 = 0.444

These are then converted with an arcsine tranformation on the square root for use as the dependent variable in regression.

However, I want to use this data to assess general ability at emotion recognition in faces - what is the correct way to combine the unbiased hit rates? That is, can I generate a single value that accounts for all off these, or should I run four separate analyses and examine the overlap in the results?

Reference

Wagner, H. L. (1993). On measuring performance in category judgment studies of nonverbal behavior. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 17(1), 3-28.

The purpose of unbiased hit rate is to avoid invalid conclusions in cases where subjects indiscriminately use one (or only few) response options. To give an example (responses in rows, stimuli in columns):

        Happy    Sad    Angry   Fearful
Happy     1       0       0        1
Sad       7       8       6        5
Angry     0       0       0        0
Fearful   2       0       0        1

Consider sad faces. The uncorrected and biased hit rate for sad faces is $h_b(\mathrm{Sad})=8/8=1$. The unbiased hit rate is $h_b(\mathrm{Sad})=8^2/(8 \cdot24)=1/3$. The latter estimate better corresponds to our intuition. The subject responds almost always $\mathrm{Sad}$ and should be assigned a score slightly better than a random performance ($=1/4$).

You are looking for a total score. By definition a total score will account for this kind of bias as it uses all elements of the confusion matrix. Hence, there is no point in looking for a unbiased total hit rate and there is no point in trying to combine the unbiased hit rates.

Wagner (1993) makes it clear on page 4 that the question regarding a total score is distinct and different from the one he is trying to answer with his unbiased hit rate. In a footnote 1 on pages 27-28 he mentions methods for computing the total score:

  There are numerous ways of examining overall performance in judgment
  studies. In psychophysics, the confusion matrix resulting from the
  method of absolute identification (as the type of
  judgment study discussed here is known) has been examined with the tools
  of information theory (see Baird & Noma, 1978, for a clear exposition
  of this). [...] Other examples of measures of accuracy for  the whole
  matrix are Cohen's $\kappa$ (Cohen, 1960), and Rosenthal and Rubin's $\pi$
  (Rosenthal & Rubin, 1989).

Literature

Baird, J. C., & Noma, E. J. (1978). Fundamentals of scaling and psychophysics. John Wiley & Sons.

Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and psychological measurement, 20(1), 37-46.

Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (1989). Effect size estimation for one-sample multiple-choice-type data: Design, analysis, and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 106(2), 332.


What is the term used to describe a situation where person doesnt know that he/she actually knows something? I was watching "Molly's Game" where a conversation between Molly and her psychologist dad appear in later life of Molly (Molly didnt have very good relationship with her dad and wanted to piss him off often when she was young)
The transcript:

Dad: I knew that you know that I cheated with mom
Molly: i didnt know that till I was 20 years old
Dad: You knew it when you saw me with someone in my car, you were 5
years old, you didnt know what you saw but you have known since then

What is this psychlogical effect where one doesnt yet know that he/she knows something and perhaps act out something to its effect?

I've seen that movie, it's awesome!
I'd call that "subconscious knowledge" - because you know about something and it influences your behaviour, but your brain and reasoning aren't yet developed enough to understand what you know (and to link it to the behaviour).


How to recruit participants for fMRI study who do not fall asleep during experiment? I'm in a psychology lab and we're having trouble getting participants for an fMRI study. We pay $150 per subject and we need to have several hundred healthy controls for one study. For the 20-minute study, the participant has to look at certain words and think about them, like imagining a scenario where "family" or "pride" was important.

We keep finding participants from recruiting around campus who will seem enthusiastic, then fall asleep immediately in the scanner. Our IRB states that we have to let them sleep for the full scan and pay them the full amount. I don't know how to prevent this. We've wasted thousands of dollars and weeks to months of time running studies with garbage data. Has anyone figured out how to recruit better participants?

Based on my own experience as a student, the problem is probably not that your participants are lazy... the problem is that, like many university students, they're severely sleep-deprived.

While a student, I once agreed to participate in a friend's (non-MRI) study, which involved listening to sounds and clicking buttons in response. To my embarrassment, despite being enthusiastic about participating, I kept drifting off briefly during the study. I managed to complete it, but I'm sure my results were affected. I'm pretty sure that if I had ever tried to participate in an MRI study, I would have fallen completely asleep.

I don't have experience running MRI studies so I'm not really sure what to suggest to solve this problem, other than to try recruiting from less sleep-deprived populations, or redesigning the study tasks to be more engaging.


What important psychological results would not have been discovered without experiments on non-human animals? Many psychological experiments involve shocking animals, playing loud sounds near them, depriving them of social contact, etc. For example, Martin Seligman's studies of learned helplessness in dogs are of this nature.

However, to my understanding, studies of learned helplessness in dogs at best provide an analogy to depression in humans, and it seems unlikely that actually shocking and trapping dogs was necessary for insight into human depression.

Similarly, Harry Harlow's studies of deprivation of maternal contact in monkeys seem to give extraordinarily obvious results, telling us what almost anyone already knows - that infants crave maternal contact. I don't think I need socially maladjusted monkeys in a laboratory in order to understand this point.

Is this wrong, or if not, what are some other counter-examples? What experiments involving inflicting physical or psychological pain on animals were necessary parts of important results in human psychology?

I think this necessarily involves some speculation. It's very hard to tell whether certain important findings would have been discovered without studies in non-human animals. We should also keep the hindsight bias in mind, that is, the tendency to retroactively claim that we 'knew it all along'.

Another aspect to consider is that only experiments enable us to investigate the causality of a relationship that we might have already observed in a non-experimental context. For example, we might have already observed that people with depression also show signs of helplessness, but this usually isn't enough to assume a causal link between these two.

Finally, I do think there are a few findings that would have been almost impossible without research in non-human animals. For example, any knowledge that stems from the recording of individual neurons in the brain. It's currently infeasible to record data from individual neurons in humans (apart from a few patients that have medical devices implanted due to neurological disorders). So for example, our knowledge of dopamine neurons signaling reward prediction errors depended critically on research in non-human animals (Schultz et al., 1997, Science).


Are there statistics about how many assertive people there are in the world? Based on my own experience, assertiveness is a rather rare commodity to be found among people, which in my opinion causes most of the troubles this world has.

Are there any statistics that attempt to measure how many assertive people there are in the world (or at least in some societies) compared to passive, aggressive and passive-aggressive people?

One method of estimating assertiveness would be to look at scores on self-report tests that aim to measure assertiveness. Measuring in this way suggests that assertiveness, as with other traits, is on a continuum. Thus, classifying someone as assertive or not assertive would involve a judgement call.
Nonetheless, once you have an estimate of the proportion passing such a threshold, you could then multiply population size by proportion classified as assertive to get a population estimate of assertiveness.

The NEO-IPIP has an assertiveness scale. But you'd have to hunt down some reasonable test norms. Alternatively, the NEO-PI would also be useful and the test manual would provide means and standard deviations for the corresponding assertiveness scale.

E3: ASSERTIVENESS (.84)
+ keyed
    Take charge.
    Try to lead others.
    Can talk others into doing things.
    Seek to influence others.
    Take control of things.

– keyed
    Wait for others to lead the way.
    Keep in the background.
    Have little to say.
    Don't like to draw attention to myself.
    Hold back my opinions.

Herzberger et al (1984) provides one simple example.
They created what they called the Assertiveness Self-Report Inventory.
It included items like

  When my date has acted rudely at a party, I don' hesitate to let him/her know I don'd like it.
  After eating an excellent meal at a restaurant, I do not hesitate to compliment the chef.
  When people use my car and don't refill the tank, I let them know I feel unfairly treated.

Overall there were 25 items True/False items like this. Using a relatively small university sample (around 150 all up),  mean number of items endorsed was around 10 and the standard deviation was around 4. You could potentially look more carefully at such items perhaps using expert raters of scores to generate a threshold above which constitutes an assertive personality. For sake of example, you might determine that participants who have endorsed  12 items or more are deemed to be "assertive". If you had the raw data, you could determine what sample endorsed 12 or more items. Failing that, you could get an approximate estimate using a normal distribution approximation based on the mean and standard deviation or some variant on this approach.

Of course, there are many limitations to this approach:

Self-reported personality is not the same as behaviour or some more objective or other report measure of personality.
defining the cut-off can be somewhat arbitrary.
You would need to define more clearly how you want to conceptualise assertiveness, in that you seem to be distinguishing a more adaptive form of assertiveness in contrast to a more aggressive approach.
Getting representative and large norms for even one country is difficult, let alone the entire world. That said, the NEO-PI and IPIP are likely to offer reasonable existing sources.
As others have mentioned, cultural norms should have a dramatic effect on what constitutes reasonable ways of asserting your interests in social ettings. This sociological perspective may even provide a better understanding the phenomena of interest.

References

Herzberger, S. D., Chan, E., & Katz, J. (1984). The development of an assertiveness self-report inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48(3), 317-323.


What's that vulnerability/weakness of human psychology which is consciously/subconsciously utilized by politicians or people with authority/fame? Below is just an example:

I am from India and I remember that we were promised by our PM, Narendra Modi, that he would bring all the black money from Swiss banks and he will deposit around 15 lac INR into every Indian citizen's account.

Like this, he made a lot of promises. He said "good days will come" in 2014 and most of these promises are have not yet been fulfilled, but still most of the people are highly impressed by him.

I know that he is a good orator, but what I don't know is, what is the weakness of "Being impressed and convinced and remain the same over the time" is called? And why sometimes the realization takes time to come?

I think that one of the reason people believe in those things is that they are those who prefer to give part of their lives into other people's hands rather than take care of it by themselves. In other words, they prefer to be given a fish instead of a rod so when they hear 'I will give you money' they just vote for them blindly believing this is going to happen. Other reasons might include the rule called 'birds of a feather flock together'. Some people are attracted to people who voice cenrtain opions to which they tend to incline. I would also agree with @user3169 who said that some people simply believe in people in positions of authorities and struggle to act against them. In order to dig into more details in this topic you might want to watch Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures available on YouTube.


Is it possible for a person to have anterograde amnesia and be aware of it? In "Memento" the main character has got anterograde amnesia, but he's aware of it. Is it even possible and how, if it is? Compare it to "50 First Dates" — the heroine is not aware of her condition.

Imagine you wake up in the morning. How would you come to awareness that you've got anterograde amnesia, if you don't remember anything since the moment you got it, including that? And even if you find this out by logical thinking, you'll forget it soon (in "Memento", what, in several minutes?)

Yes it is possible. It is very common for normal individuals to feel like they should remember something, but are then unable to actually recall the contents of that particular memory. This feeling of knowing is called metamemory.

This study by Art Shimamura and Larry Squire found that

  patients with severe anterograde amnesia can produce accurate
  feeling-of-knowing judgments. Thus, impaired feeling-of-knowing
  accuracy is not an obligatory feature of amnesia

So, some of those patients may wake up each morning and soon realize that something is amiss, as they are unable to recall facts or events that they feel they should be able to recall.


Is mutually consensual BDSM a symptom of a sick mind or an expression of freedom from social constraints? BDSM an acronym for bondage and discipline; dominant and submissive; sado-masochism; slave and master.

Assume such a relationships or sexual practices are genuinely mutually consenting; and by consent I mean, meaning two well informed, mature, sober, drug free adults.
In such cases, are BDSM practices or relationships a symptom of a sick mind or the true freedom from social conditioning to play and experiment as desired?

When answering one must be mindful to put the moral judgment that away.
Answers based purely on opinion and without references will be down voted and flagged, as it is not a site for moral argument, but built on latest scientific research.

If your question is, whether practitioners of BDSM are in some way pathological, then Pamela Connolly (2006) answered it. Her abstract summarizes her research and findings nicely (emphasis added):

  A demographic questionnaire and 7 psychometric tests were administered
  to 32 self-identified Bondage/Domination/SadoMasochism (BDSM)
  practitioners. Although psychoanalytic literature suggests that high
  levels of certain types of psychopathology should be prevalent among
  BDSM practitioners, this sample failed to produce widespread, high
  levels of psychopathology on psychometric measures of depression,
  anxiety, obsessive-compulsion, psychological sadism, psychological
  masochism, or PTSD. In fact, on measures of clinical psychopathology
  and severe personality pathology, this sample appeared to be
  comparable to both published test norms and to DSM-IV-TR estimates for
  the general population. There were, however, some exceptions to this
  general pattern, most notably the higher-than-average levels of
  narcissism and nonspecific dissociative symptoms found in the sample.
  This study also raises significant concern about the appropriateness
  of the diagnosis of sexual masochism and sadism in the Diagnostic and
  Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association or,
  minimally, the diagnostic criteria of these disorders.

But BDSM practitioners aren't only normal, they feel "more better", too: An Australian study (Richters, De Visser, Rissel, Grulich, & Smith, 2008) found that "men who had engaged in BDSM scored significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men" (emphasis added).

This higher level of well-being may be explained by conscious and systematic "relationship management", including no-holds-barred open communication and clear agreement on mutual relationship roles, resulting in highly functional relationships, as well as a commitment to personal growth, both of which are common among BDSM couples (Cutler, 2003). Contrary to common views of BDSM, Cutler states, BDSM activities include non-sexual motivations: "hormonal studies have shown BDSM activities to be more similar to sports than sex, complete with stress relief qualities" (emphasis added).

Today, BDSM is a best-selling mainstream media phenomenon, and it has become increasingly difficult to draw a clear distinction between "deviant" and "normal" sexuality. When a little rope play is just another practice for the average couple, BDSM certainly isn't deviant any longer, and many practitioners are as "normal" as you and me. The difference in practice is, I believe, gradual: BDSM couples indulge in "normal" sex just as normal couples pay visits to the land of bondage and submission (and other kinks).

Connolly, P. H. (2006). Psychological Functioning of Bondage/Domination/Sado-Masochism (BDSM) Practitioners. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 18, 79-120. doi:10.1300/J056v18n01_05
Cutler, B. (2003). Partner Selection, Power Dynamics, and Sexual Bargaining in Self-Defined BDSM Couples (Doctoral dissertation, Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality). Retrieved from http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/bdsm/Cutler%20(2003).pdf
Richters, J., De Visser, R. O., Rissel, C. E., Grulich, A. E., & Smith, A. M. A.
(2008). Demographic and psychosocial features of participants in bondage and discipline, "sadomasochism" or dominance and submission (BDSM): Data from a National Survey. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 5, 1660–1668. doi: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2008.00795.x


Is there any evidence that fluid intelligence is malleable? So although working memory training was somewhat of a fad (and I guess some benefits did come out of training, like improved attention/executive function), reviews such as Melby-Lervåg et al. (2016) show that even though WMC changes, fluid intelligence does not through WM training.

I'm wondering if there's any evidence out there that fluid intelligence can change. If so, are there any proven interventions that can change fluid intelligence; or are we still looking for those interventions with the trust that something will prove successful in terms of fluid intelligence improvement?

Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T. S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of “far transfer” evidence from a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512-534. [PDF]

Is there any evidence of malleability of fluid intelligence?

In the downward direction, definitely yes.
There are many ways you can directly pull fluid intelligence downwards. Things like being exposed to much lead, suffering from iodine deficiency (especially a developing fetus during pregnancy, see e.g. (Qian et al, 2005)), or by not getting decent nutrition. Anything that interferes with a healthy development of the brain might be implicated in intelligence. Similarly, you could presumably push intelligence downward by directly harming the brain (Brain lesions, anyone?). Fluid intelligence also lowers with ageing (Whitley et al, 2016), and so anything that slows down the ageing process may also have an effect.
Next, let's consider the more interesting question:

Besides avoiding decreases in fluid intelligence, can we push it up?

There does not seem to be a reliable way of increasing intelligence known (as of yet), perhaps except for one.
Here we have to turn to Richard Haier, the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence, as he has written extensively on this topic. Perhaps disappointingly, we refer to his article Increased Intelligence is a Myth (So Far). The title says it all. He goes into details with the difficulties of establishing increased intelligence. You need to show that you're not just raising test scores, but actually something that transfers over to general intelligence. He also goes into further detail regarding the topic of increasing intelligence in his book The Neuroscience of Intelligence.
To truly appreciate the difficulty of increasing intelligence, you really need to understand the history of methods being suggested. This also helps you develop a healthy amount of scepticism -- you should not believe any method without a substantial amount of evidence backing it up. What has been suggested to increase intelligence? First, the Mozart effect. Meta-analyses show no convincing effect especially when you consider the evidence of publication bias (Pietschnig et al, 2010). The second craze was memory training as you've already noted. Again, not convincing (Melby-Lervåg et al, 2016). Similarly, chess training has been suggested as a way of improving intelligence, but the results are not great (Sala & Gobet, 2017). Now the craze is video games, although it suffers from many of the same methodological issues: (very) small sample sizes, and probably publication bias.
While people can cite all kinds of studies showing increases in intelligence, the real question is really whether these can withstand hard scientific scrutiny.
It is likely not impossible to raise intelligence. Haier suggests some plausible ways of increasing intelligence in his book, but no massive evidence yet. Currently there does not seem to be a very convincing way of increasing intelligence...
...Perhaps except for one way?
Education has been suggested as a candidate for improving intelligence. There is a question whether education really increases general intelligence or just specific skills (Ritchie, Bates, Deary, 2015), but currently education is the best bet (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, Preprint 2017). Ritchie and Tucker-Drob report the following:

Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

However, even here we should withhold some scepticism. First, it may simply be increases of specific skills. Secondly, the fadeout effect is pervasive in psychological research of intelligence. Intelligence increases do not seem to last. For example, massive programs such as Head Start showed some initial increases in intelligence measurements, but this boost eventually fades out (Protzko, 2015).
Like Head Start, other programs have been created with the purpose of increasing school performance. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program Gates Effective Teaching Initiative did not see the benefits it hoped.
It might also be hypothesized that expensive private schools would improve the intelligence of the pupils (beyond regular schools). It is well known that pupils of these private schools show higher average scores, but the question is: is it because of the schools? These schools are also highly selective; the pupils attending these expensive private schools are not representative of the general population. This has been tested in at least one large sample. They found that after controlling for factors involved in prior pupil selection, there remained no statistical difference (Smith-Woolley,..., Kovas, Plomin, 2018). In other words, they found that expensive private schools did not demonstrate improvements in intelligence beyond what ordinary schools did.
In fact, all of this goes back to Arthur Jensen's infamous 1969 paper How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement, which made intelligence research controversial if it wasn't already. He concluded already back then that teaching intervention did not show noticeable improvements. Jensen's opening line in his long paper:

Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.

So currently, if education can increase intelligence it does not appear to be through teaching intervention, but simply through longer education.

Summary

Many methods for increasing intelligence have been suggested. They tend to not withstand proper scientific scrutiny.
Therefore, it is important to have some healthy scepticism to suggested methods, and accept them only when a high evidential threshold has been reached.
Currently, the most backed up way of increasing intelligence is through longer education. However, even here it is not certain, and more research is needed to understand the relationship between education and intelligence.


What psychological or sociological concepts form the basis of Principled Negotiation? Although the various forwards mention that organizational behavior and social psychology are two of the fields that form the basis for the techniques taught at Harvard Law School's Negotiation and Leadership Program, the majority of the material that I've read (Getting to Yes, Getting Past No, Difficult Conversations) tends to frame things in contexts that the average person can easily grasp - romantic relationships, the office environment, and other social conversations.

I want to understand the psychological and sociological underpinnings to this idea, in addition to the application of it (which is covered well in the books I mentioned). However, I'm not sure what exactly terms I should be looking for, and most of my searches are resulting in more business-eqsue style publications.

What concepts can I research to understand the basis of Principled Negotiation and the other communication techniques presented in these works?

That' a very difficult question because research on negotiations is so varied and multidisciplinary. There is prescriptive research stemming from a decision analysis approach and game theory, descriptive research from behavioral economics, and more process-oriented, social-cognitive research.

As an excellent starting point into psychological research on negotiation I would recommend Leigh Thompson's book:

Thompson, Leigh. 2013. The Mind and the Heart of the Negotiator. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 6th ed.


What is the difference between conditioning and learning? The more I think about the difference between learning and Pavlovian conditioning, the more I'm unable to see how they differ. Even though in theory associative learning is just a portion of learning.
Here is the classical conditioning:

What if we have an observer watching the process? I think that even when the food and the bell are not for them, the fact that they observe their effects to the dog can lead them to a condition response as well. The process is as follow:

Before conditioning: the observer has a belief that that food will make the dog excretes salivation, but bell alone is not. We say that the belief "food will make the dog excretes salivation" is an unconditioned belief, and "bell won't make the dog excretes salivation" a no-conditioned belief.
After conditioning: the observer has a new belief that "bell alone will still make the dog excretes salivation". This belief is a conditioned belief.

We have this analogy:

Unconditioned observation: Observe that the dog is fed
Conditioned observation: Observe that the dog hears the bell
Conditioned belief: Food will make the dog salivating
Unconditioned belief: Bell alone will still make the dog salivating

Am I missing something?

In Pavlov experiment, the unconditioned response and conditioned response is the same (both are salivating). In the analogy, the unconditioned belief is not the same with the conditioned belief.

In Pavlov experiment, the unconditioned response can only happen after the unconditioned stimulus. In the analogy, the unconditioned belief can be recalled ("activated") even though there is no unconditioned observation.


What are the cognitive effects of increasing testosterone levels in men? I've recently became interested in the effects if testosterone on the cognitive function in men, but cannot find much hard scientific evidence on the subject.

What are the cognitive effects of increasing testosterone levels in men?. There's a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence from body builders, etc, but I'm looking for hard science, where the levels were measured before and after, and the trials were less than a month long.

Some of the claims made about increased testosterone levels seem very interesting, and I would like to know if any of that is true.

does increasing testosterone levels increase subjective feeling of well being in men?
does increased testosterone benefit concentration ?
does increased testosterone benefit non-sexual motivation or ambition?
does increased testosterone benefit logical/math/engineering endeavors?

Here's what I see on Wikipedia snippet on testosterone and brain:

  The literature suggests that attention, memory, and spatial ability
  are key cognitive functions affected by testosterone in humans.
  Preliminary evidence suggests that low testosterone levels may be a
  risk factor for cognitive decline and possibly for dementia of the
  Alzheimer's type,[70][71][72][73] a key argument in life extension
  medicine for the use of testosterone in anti-aging therapies. Much of
  the literature, however, suggests a curvilinear or even quadratic
  relationship between spatial performance and circulating
  testosterone,[74] where both hypo- and hypersecretion (deficient- and
  excessive-secretion) of circulating androgens have negative effects on
  cognition.

I've discussed a lot of this recently on my answer to this question: Are there recent theories on physiognomy? In summary, yes.

Can't remember which of the tons I referenced mentioned well-being, but if you run a search function (Ctrl F, or ⌘F if you don't like good computers) on the text of the freely available articles I provided hyperlinks for, I guarantee you'll find it, and it was a positive relationship with testosterone.
Testosterone ($T$) might affect concentration, but I'd bet it's not a beneficial effect if so, or at least that it's moderated strongly by context. $T$ relates to spatial intelligence, but also to aggression, which may reflect some effect on impulsivity.
$T$ affects motivation, but again, I wouldn't call it a benefit, as the specific motives it affects probably aren't optimally healthy to say the least, and every action has its opportunity cost. Specifically, $T$ increases dominance and competitiveness in men, which is probably to say that it increases the need for power. It also increases sensation seeking and risk tolerance / decreases risk aversion, which is probably to say that it affects the behavioral activation and inhibition systems. Some evidence suggests testosterone interacts with competitive experiences differently for women.
For logical/math/engineering problems, $T$ is probably more unequivocally beneficial, because it relates to spatial intelligence.

$T$ is probably most studied in men; I'm not sure effects are similar for women in general. Estradiol in women may act more like testosterone in men in some ways.  I can copy content from my other answer here if desired, or expand on particular points if there is further interest. Please comment if so; I would also welcome collaborative edits.


Why is the theory of mind named as such? Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, knowledge, etc.—to oneself, and to others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.

So am I correct in saying that for a dyadic relationship, there are 2 "theories of mind", and for a group of $n$ person, there would be $n^2-n$ "theories of mind"? I understand a system of inferences is properly called as "theory", but when so many people has different theory it loses the universal connotation as commonly used in "theory of planned behavior" or "theory of gravitation". Should it better be named as "theory-forming of other's minds"?

Probably because it was defined as:

An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others. [...]
In this paper we speculate about the possibility that the chimpanzee
may have a "theory of mind," one not markedly different
from our own. In saying that an individual has a theory of mind,
we mean that the individual imputes mental states to himself and
to others (either to conspecifics or to other species as well). A
system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a theory,
first, because such states are not directly observable, and second,
because the system can be used to make predictions, specifically
about the behavior of other organisms.

Since this definition entails that roughly the same "theory" applies to all minds from a given organism's point of view, I don't see why your proposal(s) would be useful. And as far as I know neither did the thousands of papers citing that seminal work.
If you want an alternative terminology that is reasonably widely,
"mental state reasoning" is a good candidate... but it is somewhat narrower in that some research distinguishes between decoding and reasoning.


Is there any evidence that language is the limit of the world? Philosopher Wittgenstein says that "the limit of my language means the limit of my world". One theory that supports this statement is that people couldn't see the blue colour until they have the word blue. However, it has been proven to be false in Skeptics: Could people perceive the color blue in ancient times?

So, is there any scientific evidence that prove (or at least agree with) this statement?

This is not quite your question, but it's the closest thing I know of.  There's a significant amount of work suggesting that purely morphological attributes can shape conceptualization: looking at the impact of grammatical gender on the attributes assigned to the nouns that have a specific grammatical gender--that is, grammatically male nouns are rated higher on stereotypically masculine attributes and lower on stereotypically feminine attributes.  You could argue that morphological sway on the semantic content of the noun is a "limit", I suppose.

Some studies have done nice pairing of languages to demonstrate reverse effects on the same nouns according to different grammatical gender. If you're interested in reading the studies, Konishi 1993 is a good place to start.