Can animals develop mental disorders that are unique or similar to our own? I just had a discussion with someone about mental illnesses in people (specifically talking about Capgraw delusion, alien hand syndrome, and walking corpse syndrome) and how some people's lives can be ruined by mental disorders.

Then I had a thought: Do animals also get mental disorders? I don't think I've ever heard anybody suggest it before...we all just assume animals are just animals and do animal stuff. Some people might say, "Oh, that cat is crazy." but maybe it's actually suffering from a mental disorder?

I mean, we all know animals can suffer dramatic trauma and be psychologically scarred by it...but humans can seemingly develop mental disorders without previous physical trauma and we also develop very odd mental disorders (like Capgraw delusion).

So logically, I just have to wonder if animals can develop mental disorders that are unique or similar to our own.

In the case of animals it is not common to refer to mental disorders, there is more commonly talked about behavior problems, (it is not specified in the question what kind of animals) although in essence animals can suffer the same as a human, sometimes the variations are huge, depends on which type of animal we refer (it is not the same to speak of chimpanzee or bonobo than of mammals or other animals).

Here are some examples of psychology (about mammals) that may be of interest, are nowadays sensitive and may even surprise some (OCD, bipolar, dementia, autism, Alzheimer, etc.).

(Ethology is the science that is responsible for the study of animal behavior, although it is not the only science that studies it, for example, in the studies of psychology there are 2 subjects in relation to animal behavior: biology that sometimes It is administered by an ethologist, and comparative psychology, the latter can receive different denominations in different countries. Professionals in charge of therapy and / or training vary widely depending on the country, some are: ethologists, veterinarians, trainers but there are many more).

MOTOR DISORDERS, STEREOTYPIES AND OCD:

In many cases animals are found with what some people classify as motor behavior disorders, other considerations can lead to obsessive compulsive disorders. These problems may consist of a bird that can no longer fly, a dog that stores objects of a certain characteristic (without food function); or a dog that usually turns and turns on itself. These problems can be caused by restrictions on movement, for example not letting a bird fly or not respecting the bird's flight practice (there are others that are produced by the way of life and hormones).

Examples of stereotypy at the beginning of the video, Chimpance raised with artificial mother without movement and children orphaned in institutions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6sKo-OKAuE

Other examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umKQxJ_rlO0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seWlk8B-W6w

OCD: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195561691500413

ANXIETY AND POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS:

It is well known that dogs can develop post-traumatic stress following environmental catastrophes, for example it is well known that after floods and earthquakes many times dogs experience anxiety and flashbacks.

Of course the animals can experience stress due to mistreatment.

Interesting links: https://www.cesarsway.com/dog-behavior/anxiety/post-traumatic-stress-disorder https://www.cesarsway.com/dog-behavior/anxiety/veteran-dogs-suffering-from-ptsd
http://ivcjournal.com/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-in-dogs/

SYSTEMATIZED PROBLEMS (DISORDES) DEVELOPDEP BY LEARNING, great variety.

Attachment and sociability: See Harlow experiments.
Aggressiveness. Today there is widespread debate about aggressive behavior resulting from mistreatment.
Depression / defenselessness learned. No doubt the animals have emotions, in their case not usually considered depression but learned helplessness, see Seligman experiments, also Seligman and Maier.

An article I have found about it and may be interesting as well as being related to the question, but many others may be found: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isabelle_Veissier/publication/230851712_Animals'_emotions_Studies_in_sheep_using_appraisal_theories/links/09e41505478be19677000000/Animals-emotions-Studies-in-sheep-using-appraisal-theories.pdf

Of course: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kc3CAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=animals+emotions&ots=s1J20NZ2u7&sig=Jc-MAGzmDwPMwb-WWVIlJ1z8TFo#v=onepage&q=animals%20emotions&f=false

ORGANIC DISORDERS, an incredible broad field, some examples:

Patterson, P.H. (2009). Immune involvement in schizophrenia and autism: etiology, pathology and animal models. Behav. Brain Res. 204, 313–321.

Müller, M.B. & Holsboer, F. (2006). Mice with mutations in the HPA-system as models for symptoms of depression. Biol. Psychiatry 59, 1104–1115.

Götz, J. & Ittner, L.M. (2008) Animal models of Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9, 532–544.

Jamain, S. (2008). Reduced social interaction and ultrasonic communication in a mouse model of monogenic heritable autism. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 1710–1715. Moy, S.S. & Nadler, J.J. (2008). Advances in behavioral genetics: mouse models of autism. Mol. Psychiatry 13, 4–26.

Einat, H. & Manji, H.K. (2006). Cellular plasticity cascades: genes-to-behavior pathways in animal models of bipolar disorder. Biol. Psychiatry 59, 1160–1171


When can we say that machines are conscious? We have already witnessed complex computing systems winning chess games and IBM Watson beat his human counterparts at a game of 'Jeopardy!'. However, so far we have not seen signs of consciousness amongst these machines.

Is it theoretically possible to create conscious machines? Are there any philosophical bottlenecks that will never allow the development of consciousness in any nonliving carbon-based organism?

Furthermore, can scientists ever agree on a definition of "consciousness" if a machine claims that it is conscious?

Short answer: We don't know.
Long answer: There are a few major lines of thinking on the subject currently.

Cognitive closure: One common argument is that this question is simply not answerable - at least not by humans.  By this view, it is possible that the creation of an artificial intelligence that even resembles humans sufficiently to suggest consciousness is an intractable engineering problem, or it is possible that understanding consciousness well enough to determine whether or not such an artificially intelligent system might be conscious is beyond us, or it is possible that we will never understand the question well enough to have a meaningful response.

Functionalism: Several interpretations of the implications of monism on consciousness suggest that consciousness is an intrinsic property of whatever it is that our brain does, and therefore, any machine that performs an equivalent function should be equally conscious.  This view potentially allows for a variety of machines to be conscious, as well as having different kinds of consciousness.  In this framework, it may be more meaningful to ask not whether a machine is conscious, but rather, in what way, or how does it compare to our consciousness.

Physicalism: Another interpretation of monism suggests that the function of a machine is not sufficient to determine its consciousness - its physical properties are important as well.  This possibility makes it difficult to ascertain whether a silicon-based computer program of a conscious entity could ever do more than simulate consciousness, or how many other kinds of physical systems like our brain can potentially become conscious.  A theoretical framework under this umbrella that is currently fairly popular and has some empirical support is IIT that suggests that consciousness can be measured in humans using available tools of neuroscience.  How this might be applied to non-human candidates is still unclear.

There are many other possibilities, but hopefully I've captured the most prominent ones.  Currently, there is nothing within our knowledge of physical systems that makes it obvious why (or whether) certain systems might be conscious (and not others).  Put another way: If a race of non-conscious alien robots visited Earth, they might assume that we are non-conscious machines like them - they may have no reason to believe that there is anything more going on.  Similarly, under the assumption of monism, where consciousness appears to somehow supervene on physical systems, if there were other properties aside from consciousness (or different types of consciousness) that supervened on physical systems, then we would have no reason to suspect that they exist either.  So for the moment, we just don't know.


Finding largest level of imperceptible noise in an image Suppose that we want to find the "largest level" of a random noise that can safely be added to an image such that the resultant noisy image cannot be distinguishable from the original noise-free image. For this purpose, we design the following subjective experiment:

Let I be the reference (noise-free) image. We first add a high level of noise to I to get a noisy image J. We then display I and J side by side, and ask a user to reduce the level of the noise in J gradually using a slider until he/she cannot distinguish between the reference image and the noisy image. The resultant level is then considered as the largest level of imperceptible noise for I.

But do you think that this experiment is technically sound? Also, can we use an adaptive procedure like QUEST to find the desired threshold/noise level? What do you think?

You are describing two classical psychophysical techniques. The first one is called matching: you try to perceptually match stimulus J to stimulus I. The problem I can see here is that under the level of noise for which the two images are indiscriminable (called absolute threshold), any value would be a match, so that's an ambiguous task. There is another technique where you would ask your observer to press a button when she first notices a difference between the two images while the noise is slowly increasing. You alternate with trials where the observer reports when she cannot perceive a difference between the two images while the noise is slowly decreasing (these values will be different because of perceptual hysteresis). Then you take the average of these values.

The second technique is called a 2-alternative forced choice task. It's the technique used by most psychophysical studies today. There are different ways you could implement it but the simplest would be to ask your observer which of 2 images displayed simultaneously (or successively) contains noise. Then you can indeed use an adaptive technique such as QUEST, a fixed-step staircase or any of the hundreds of staircases that exist to find the threshold at which your observer is N% correct (N being an arbitrary value you fix in advance).

A last technique could be useful. If you want to find not only the threshold at which your observer can perceive noise but the entire function that links noise level to perceived "noisiness", then you could use Maximum Likelihood Difference Scaling. See the paper below.

Sources

Any psychophysics textbook would do, this a very good one:
Kingdom, F. A., & Prins, N. (2010). Psychophysics: A practical introduction.

MLDS technique:
https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2192635


Is 'your mom will be sad' actually a good argument to pose to someone thinking of committing suicide? I often come across people pointing out that the close relatives of someone who is thinking about committing suicide will grieve, as an argument against doing it.

However, I've noticed that it is often these precise close relatives that have a lot to do with someone experiencing stress, anxiety and all the related consequences (in trying to meet their expectations; assuming their fears, etc). So, although accepting such an argument as a valid reson against committing suicide at present, couldn't it actually make it worse for them in trying to cope with the underlying problems in the long run?

I'm aware that each case is different and I'm just sharing my thoughts as a layman, but I'd like to know what a professional would make out of this?

As with many mental health concerns, the situation for each individual is unique and therefore what we do and how we deal with the concern is also unique. Nothing said in this answer is a hard and fast rule, but are loose guidelines, for more information please check out these helpful links (thanks to @ChrisRogers):

ASIST Suicide Intervention, for Canadian
Suicide Prevention Training, for the UK
Suicide Prevention Programs, for the US

I often come across people pointing out that the close relatives of someone who is thinking about committing suicide will grieve, as an argument against doing it.

This is a true fact. Family and friends of people who have committed suicide do grieve for their lost loved one, and often will blame themselves for their death. Here is an interesting article briefly outlining what family can feel when a loved one dies from suicide.
There are many reasons someone might give if they are thinking of killing themselves, and you are correct in your assumption that something like family pressures are one of them, (Linehan, et al, 1983).

Life Over Limb
You asked:

Although accepting such an argument as a valid reason against committing suicide at present, couldn't it actually make it worse for them in trying to cope with the underlying problems in the long run?

The short answer to this is yes, you could talk someone off the ledge with 'people will miss you' and yes it may make the overall depression worse in the long run.
There are two distinct situations that we can discuss:

A person actively carrying out their suicide plan
A person who has suicidal thoughts but is not currently acting on them.

In the first case, your goal as the person who is witnessing the attempted suicide is to save a life. The most important thing is to make sure that the person attempting to commit suicide is not able to complete it. A good analogy is, in a medical situation we save life over limb. Which means that in the moment, if there is imminent risk of death, you do anything to save the life, even if it means cutting off a limb. We do the same thing with suicide intervention. In this case, the long run doesn't matter, because if you don't save the life, there is no way to heal that persons depression/suicidal thoughts. This is what the ASIST and other suicide interventions teach.
In the second case, the goal is different. In this case the goal is to reduce the cause of the suicidal thoughts, Major Depressive Disorder is often (but not always) a diagnosis that produces suicidal thoughts. It would be the role of a counsellor and the client to determine the root cause of suicidal thoughts (ideations) and determine what the client can do to reduce those thoughts.
You are right that if the root cause is family issues, mentioning those issues as a reason not to commit suicide during imminent threat of suicide could cause more long term issues. But I can not stress enough how important life over limb is, when it comes to imminent suicide.
You said:

couldn't it actually make it worse for them in trying to cope with the underlying problems in the long run?

In conclusion, yes it could make it more difficult for that person to deal with the underlying issues, but if that person is not alive they can't deal with the underlying issues. (Life over Limb).

Linehan, M. M., Goodstein, J. L., Nielsen, S. L., & Chiles, J. A. (1983). Reasons for staying alive when you are thinking of killing yourself: the Reasons for Living Inventory. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 51(2), 276. doi: 10.1037/0022-006X.51.2.276


Disappointment When Goal Fulfilment is Delayed I am wondering if there's a term in psychology for a situation where you want something really bad, but you are not able to get it for the moment (or a goal that you are not able to achieve) and when you eventually do achieve the goal or get that "thing", you feel unhappy, it's a really bad feeling because you're maybe too late on something.

Here are two case scenarios that might be unrealistic, but I'm sure you will get my point:

1st case scenario: your dream is to buy a convertible car to go to the beach with your college friends, you spend 10 years saving for that car, and when you buy it you realize you're not in college any more and all your college friends got married, now you're not happy and have this bad feeling in your stomach; you wish you had the car 10 years ago.

2nd case scenario: a new gadget is released, all your friends buy it and mess with it, your dad tells you that he will get it for you next year when you get good grades (or for any other reason). Next year comes and you got good grades, your dad gets you the gadget, but nobody is talking about it any more, you're still unhappy although you have the gadget.

I can think of a term, but it's not psychology-specific: unmet expectations (that and lack of attention).  Your two case studies are basically the same in these aspects.

Unmet expectations are just that: we expect a certain emotional state when a situation is achieved (like buying a new car) - if that state isn't fully reached (which it rarely is - life is so rarely as clean cut as our minds would have it), our expectations are unmet and we are left 'to make up the difference', so to speak - disappointment, anger, frustration, all of these are possible, and more.

How important we rate the outcome is also important - and unmet expectation isn't a big deal emotionally if the outcome isn't very important to us.  This is similar to reading a book and then going to the movie adaptation of it: if you have a mental picture of how the movie 'should' look, then you may be disappointed with how the actual movie turns out.

The other half, not enough attention, is also quite straightforward: if we are paying attention (the right attention, of course) we can see that material possessions rarely bring lasting happiness (this is actually a function of a remarkably adaptive human physiology, but I don't understand it well enough to explain it over the internet, sorry).  And with attention, we know that while we may enable more experiences, fun or lasting experiences, with material possessions, pursuing the thing itself as the end, rather than the means to the end, will inevitably result in dissatisfaction.

Lastly, there are a lot of popularized articles about expectations.  Here are a few:
Psychology Today article
NCBI Paper: The effect of unmet expectations among adults presenting with physical symptoms.
Tiny Buddha: Unmet expectations

Most of these were found by Google Search for phrase unmet expectations, so there's a lot more where those came from.


What is the effect of viewing pornography on children? It is generally accepted that porn shouldn't be seen by children, and we even sometimes punish parents who fail to stop their children from finding porn.

How much are these laws based in science? Can a simple image cause real injury beyond mere disgust? Have there been any studies that track lives of people who were exposed to porn or other disturbing imagery as children or adolescents?

Note that I have also posted this question on parenting.SE.

Pornography laws are a relic of the Victorian era, and not based on any science.
Research that can conclusively determine the effect of pornography on children is hard to come by due to the resultant ethical environment.  Most research depends on self-reports: Surveys ask adolescents how much pornography they have been exposed to, and attempt to correlate this with other variables such as personal attitudes about sex.  Such surveys are subject to a variety of memory and other biases affecting accuracy, but more importantly, correlations fail to establish cause and effect - that is, it is equally likely that pornography consumption affects attitudes as it is that pre-existing attitudes affect pornography consumption.
Nonetheless, a number of reviews of current literature on adolescents conclude that there is an association between consumption of pornography and certain negative attitudes about sex, and promiscuous and/or risky sexual behaviour.  The reviews acknowledge that the data contains much contradictory evidence however, as well as failing to establish cause and effect.
UK Children's Commissioner's report (2013): "Basically... Porn is everywhere"
Owens et al (2012): "The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents"
In contrast, a paper by Kendall (2006) found a correlation between pornography accessibility and rape for 15-19 year old adolescents - but in the opposite direction, that could be interpreted to mean that access to pornography reduces rape crime in this demographic.
Research on pre-adolescents is even more scant.  A more conclusive effect is seen between exposure to depictions of violence and negative effects on attitudes and behaviour, though these may be short-lived.  A landmark study from the 1960's (no longer ethical to replicate) demonstrated that children do role model from violent media.  The reviews listed above extend this finding to attitudes and behaviours of adolescents exposed to pornography depicting violence.  Evidence linking this to criminal offences in adulthood is still controversial however.
In adults, studies across multiple countries (eg, Diamond, Jozifkova, & Weiss, 2010) have documented significant declines in physical sex offenses as accessibility of pornography increases, again suggesting the possibility that pornography provides a substitute for sex crimes.


Are all conscious experiences stored as memories? There are people with supermemories, called highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), i.e., the detailed recollection of events that occurred in the distant past. Although the recollection of, say the weather on this day 15 years ago may not be entirely accurate (errors occur) and may contain gaps (maybe an hour of sunshine on a predominantly rainy day is not recollected), their memories are clearly superior nonetheless.

I have heard these statements that all memories are stored in the brain and that the reason why we forget is because those memories are simply not accessible anymore. This would metaphorically be like the workings of a hard drive, where deletion of a file removes the flag, but the information is physically still stored, it is just invisible to the user and difficult to access. Following this reasoning, everyone would have HSAM in a way, barred that normally the memories can't readily be accessed.

Hypnosis seems to be capable of enhancing the recollection of memories in people without HSAM, and hence hypnosis is said to improve memory, indirectly indicating that memory storage indeed may generally be higher than apparent in everyday life, but that the brain needs a hand in retrieving those memories.

My question is:

Are all conscious1 memories stored, but access is permitted only when its regularly accessed, or enhanced through hypnosis or other means? In other words, does everyone have super memory like HSAM, but do people without HSAM simply lack an efficient way to access those distant memories?

1 With all conscious memories I mean memories of life events that were experienced while being awake and vigilant. For the sake of question focus, I suggest disregarding life events occurring during sleep, coma, anesthesia or other periods of reduced consciousness.

This question can be addressed in many ways. One approach that we have taken is to test memory for what has just recently happened a few seconds ago.  In these experiments we ask people to find a target in a simple visual search, and report its location.  For example we might show them 3 numbers and one letter and ask them to report the location of the letter.  After several minutes of doing this task, we give them a surprise question in which we ask them to tell us the actual letter that they had just located in the most recent trial (which they saw just a few seconds ago).  What we find is that it is easy to find situations in which our participants have very little memory of that letter. What is interesting about this is that they had just located the letter by virtue of the fact that it was a letter.  We presume, therefore, that the letter had briefly entered their awareness.  This can be debated, if one assumes that one can search for letters without actually experiencing the letters.  However we also found the same result with digit-parity tasks (i.e. find the odd number among evens or vice versa).

We called this effect attribute amnesia, since people seem to have amnesia for a specific attribute of a stimulus they had just selected.

So while there are lots of ways to interpret this finding, the clearest result seems to be that performing a mental operation that selects a piece of visual information can leave a memory trace so weak that it cannot be remembered just a few seconds later.  Our interpretation is that the memory was never created in the first place.  We believe that the brain has filters on memory encoding that allow us to process information without remembering it.  It is also possible that it was encoded into memory and immediately forgotten but we do not favor this view as it seems less parsimonious than the filter that prevents encoding in the first place.

Here are some articles on this phenomenon:
Chen, H., & Wyble, B. (2015). Amnesia for object attributes: Failure to report attended information that had just reached conscious awareness. Psychological science, 26(2), 203-210.

Chen, H., Swan, G., & Wyble, B. (2016). Prolonged focal attention without binding: Tracking a ball for half a minute without remembering its color. Cognition, 147, 144-148.

Chen, H., & Wyble, B. (2016). Attribute amnesia reflects a lack of memory consolidation for attended information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(2), 225.

Here are some freely-available pre-prints of related articles if you cannot access the ones above:
https://psyarxiv.com/gbdcr/
https://psyarxiv.com/87yg2/

I apologize that not all of our work is available on preprint servers yet.  I'd be happy to email copies of published articles if you email me at bwyble@gmail.com


Current diagnostic interviews for DSM-V I was wondering if there are currently any diagnostic interview schedules that have been made/adapted to fit DSM-V criteria? Have you heard of anything?

Specifically, I am looking for interviews for children.

The SCID  is a Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders.

The SCID website talks about a version designed for children called the KID-SCID.

You mention a specific interest in DSM-V. Under "what's new", the SCID website states:

  January 2013: Development efforts are underway for the SCID for DSM-5
  and updated training materials, which are expected to be released in
  the fall/winter 2013.


Spike-timing-dependent plasticity versus Homeostatic plasticity How can spike-timing-dependent plasticity and homeostatic plasticity both be right? If spike-timing-dependent plasticity consistently tries to strengthen connections, but homeostatic plasticity consistently tries to weaken strong connections, wouldn't the two cancel each other out, causing no net plasticity to occur and consequently brains couldn't learn?

I have a pretty good understanding of spike-timing-dependent plasticity, but I just recently came across homeostatic plasticity and I'm trying to understand how both theories can be right. What am I misunderstanding? Can someone help me understand homeostatic plasticity better and how it applies to spike-timing-dependent plasticity?

Homoestatic plasticity can be used with spike-dependent plasticity given they have two different goals and aren't applied uniformly across neural population. To support this argument, I'm going to use a computation model taken from "Simultaneous unsupervised and supervised learning of cognitive functions in biologically plausible spiking neural networks" by Bekolay et al.

In the model, an ensemble of neurons with input and output weights [1], is trying to learn how to change their output weights to approximate a given function. PES (STDP rule) changes the output weights of the neurons to approximate. The BCM (homeostatic rule) increases the sparsity of the input weights. When used together as hPES, they allow for less parameter sensitivity of the ensemble and a lower overall spiking rate, allowing the group of neurons to conserve energy.

[1] For a visual explanation of what this means, see this blog post.


Does writing something down help memorize it? This is a question inspired by this recent question on the Chinese Language & Usage website.

Someone asked why they needed to learn how to write Chinese characters, since today we mostly use computers or text messages to do so. Several users replied that writing Chinese characters help remembering them more easily, including for reading purposes.

However, another user argued that there was no reason to believe that it was true, and that writing characters doesn't necessarily help one remember them (compared for example to simply reading them and looking at them).

Is that the case? Does writing generally help remember glyphs (or more generally information) or not? Is there any conclusive research about this or about the relation between writing and memorizing in general?

Yes, writing increases the modality and attention given to a piece of information. Increasing the effort and the ways that you have experienced a bit of information helps you encode that information better; this is Elaborative Encoding.

More generally the more deeply you process a thing the more likely you are to properly encode the memory for future retrieval. Simply looking at characters is very shallow processing; writing and constructing them is relatively deep. This is the Modality Effect.

Explaining how things work and showing others or doing a task is also a much better way to remember things than just reading about them; in the case of remembering Chinese Characters there's less you can do other than write them, but practice methods like writing a brief paper can help you learn to use them. This is why essays are a common task in language classes.

Note however that Transfer-Appropriate Processing is also relevant: retrieval is more likely when we attempt to retrieve information in a similar or appropriate context to when encoding occurred. Therefore writing symbols could arguably be a bit less appropriate way to learn to read symbols; however it is an extremely relevant way of learning how to write and construct those symbols.

I've found some general reference sites eluding to this effect such as this post on Lifehack: Writing and Remembering: Why We Remember What We Write, but could not find experimental results supporting this specific idea. I know my advanced course on Memory covered this specifically but I don't recall exact studies.


Participant / Subject Pool Management Solutions I am searching for a subject pool management system for human subject research. Almost all institutions appear to use Sona-systems. Do any alternatives exist?

here is an open source project: http://www.goeritz.net/panelware/

With a paper: http://www.goeritz.net/panelware/BRM4.pdf

Might be a little outdated but still work ...


The Art of Teaching: What are the most effective & proven methods for successfully imparting a concept/idea to another I'm aware this is a bit of a general question & subjectively broad. It's that way on purpose.  It felt like cogsci was the best place for this question and I couldn't find anything really like it anywhere on stackexchange.

I want to know in general, if I need to teach someone a concept and I really want them to understand it...what method, techniques, strategies are there out there which appear to have the biggest impact on the success of a teacher teaching the student a concept?

What other factors should one possibly consider when teaching something to someone else?  (Bias, attention span...how do I deal with these?)

Research for backing up anything you suggest would be ideal, but I don't want that requirement to preclude someone from posting something that could potentially be very effective but just isn't cited somewhere for some reason...maybe they experienced it with a teacher they had.  There can be value in those gems too.

I'd actually like for this post to be one that has universal teaching ideas/strategy in it and not just those applicable to my context below...as sometimes the only thing precluding the use of a teaching strategy in a different or more universal domain from where it came from is the ingenuity of the teacher.

Also, I tried finding a post on stackexchange anywhere containing this question in it's general sense with answers and couldn't....there is stuff on how to teach programming, but that's just programming....some of its ideas are partially applicable universally, but not all of them.

Here is my specific context, although I don't want answers to get too wrapped up in it.

I am teaching via Youtube video and already have planned out
1) Me drawing on a digital screen things while I'm talking
2) Using easy to relate to analogies
3) Obviously any other visuals
4) Pausing to quiz their knowledge on a previous section before they can move ahead
5) Wrapping this up in a hopefully entertaining package

To provide some context and the format/audience...what I'll practically be using this information for:

I am releasing a special documentary style video with the goal making users completely understand the entire path some special research recently published takes, its reasoning for every choice it makes, and the logic for it's sequencing and timing of element.

Thus, instead of me reciting a conclusion from some research paper, I take them through the journey so they understand it.  It's a bit of an intense topic with a profound conclusion...one that most people would also brush off immediately without fully attempting to comprehend first.

It's also extremely technical and includes some involving several tricky concepts from many different domains all at the same time that must be put together all in synchronicity: overarching ideas within biology & evolution, micro & cellular biology, genetics, astronomy, astrobiology, space ethics, the nature of language, information theory & entropy, symbiotics (study of symbols), markings of culture, probabilities & combinations, and...statistics.

Your question is extremely broad so all I can do is give you an extremely broad answer. More specifically, I'll provide you a study done by John Hattie (2008), who meta-analyzed 800(!!) meta-analyses on effective teaching methods, used in primary education among others.

The linked document shows a "brief" overview of the different methods rated and sorted by their effect sizes. Some of the intervention may be more relevant to you compared to others. Providing feedback, for instance, is more difficult in indirect communications such as video's.

Hattie has also written much about providing feedback and how that affects students' learning ability (e.g. Hattie, 2007)

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.


Research on teaching / learning methods for personality types I was reading research on learning approaches and the big five personality traits, and was wondering if anyone can recommend existing research on the most effective learning methods for each personality type.

Is this even a thing? Is there proof that some learning techniques can be better for some types of personalities than others?

Starting with the most recent and working backwards, there are:

Specifically Big 5

Von Stumm, S., & Furnham, A. F. (2012). Learning approaches: Associations with Typical Intellectual Engagement, intelligence and the Big Five. Personality and Individual Differences, 53(5), 720-723.DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.05.014

  Abstract
  Learning approaches, i.e. students’ learning strategies and motives, predict academic performance but it is not clear how much variance they share with intelligence and personality. Here, the relationship of the Big Five personality traits, intelligence, and Typical Intellectual Engagement (TIE) with deep, achieving and surface learning was explored in a sample of 579 British undergraduate students. A structural equation model showed that (a) intelligence was negligibly associated with learning approaches; (b) TIE was strongly related to all three types of learning approaches; (c) deep learning shared the greatest amount of variance with TIE, while (d) achieving learning was best explained by Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Conscientiousness. Only 25% of the variance in surface learning was accounted for by intelligence and personality. Thus, personality traits and learning approaches share much variance but not enough to dismiss either construct as redundant.

Komarraju, M., Karau, S. J., Schmeck, R. R., & Avdic, A. (2011). The Big Five personality traits, learning styles, and academic achievement. Personality and individual differences, 51(4), 472-477.DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.04.019

  Abstract
  Personality and learning styles are both likely to play significant roles in influencing academic achievement. College students (308 undergraduates) completed the Five Factor Inventory and the Inventory of Learning Processes and reported their grade point average. Two of the Big Five traits, conscientiousness and agreeableness, were positively related with all four learning styles (synthesis analysis, methodical study, fact retention, and elaborative processing), whereas neuroticism was negatively related with all four learning styles. In addition, extraversion and openness were positively related with elaborative processing. The Big Five together explained 14% of the variance in grade point average (GPA), and learning styles explained an additional 3%, suggesting that both personality traits and learning styles contribute to academic performance. Further, the relationship between openness and GPA was mediated by reflective learning styles (synthesis-analysis and elaborative processing). These latter results suggest that being intellectually curious fully enhances academic performance when students combine this scholarly interest with thoughtful information processing. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of teaching techniques and curriculum design.

Busato, V. V., Prins, F. J., Elshout, J. J., & Hamaker, C. (1998). The relation between learning styles, the Big Five personality traits and achievement motivation in higher education. Personality and individual differences, 26(1), 129-140.DOI: 10.1016/S0191-8869(98)00112-3

  Abstract
  In his dissertation, Vermunt [Vermunt, J. D. H. M. (1992). Leerstijlen en sturen van leerprocessen in het hoger onderwijs. (Learning styles and guidance of learning processes in higher education). Amsterdam/Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger] postulated four different learning styles: a meaning directed, a reproduction directed, an application directed and an undirected style. Aim of this project is to investigate the relation between these learning styles, the big five personality traits and achievement motivation. Subjects were about 900 university students. Extraversion correlated positively with the meaning directed, reproduction directed and application directed learning style. Conscientiousness was associated positively with the meaning, reproduction and application directed learning style, and negatively with the undirected learning style. Openness to experience correlated positively with the meaning and application directed learning style, and negatively with the undirected learning style. Besides, it was found that neuroticism correlated positively with the undirected learning style and negatively with the meaning and reproduction directed learning style. Agreeableness was associated positively with the reproduction and application directed learning style. Positive correlations were found for achievement motivation with the meaning, reproduction and the application directed learning style, and a negative one with the undirected learning style. Regression analyses confirmed these patterns. Although there was some systematic overlap for the four learning styles with personality variables and achievement motivation, the conclusion is that it certainly makes sense to measure these three groups of variables separately in educational settings.

Other personality type research

Vincent, A., & Ross, D. (2001). Personalize training: determine learning styles, personality types and multiple intelligences online. The Learning Organization, 8(1), 36-43.DOI: 10.1108/09696470110366525

  Abstract
  Training can be personalized using online resources to determine an individual’s learning preferences and personality characteristics. This study provides an overview of learning style, personality types, and multiple intelligences theories; lists and describes selected testing instruments available on the Internet; and provides strategies for teaching and learning, considering different learning styles.

Miller, A. (1991). Personality types, learning styles and educational goals. Educational Psychology, 11(3-4), 217-238.DOI: 10.1080/0144341910110302

  Abstract
  Attempts to broaden conceptions of learning styles to represent more adequately individual differences in motivation/emotion, as well as cognition, are limited by a paucity of relevant theory. Personality theories should, but do not, provide a satisfactory conceptual framework for this endeavour. In an attempt to remedy this situation, a new personality typology is outlined which, it is argued, provides a coherent system within which to construe and conduct research upon learning styles. The implications of the theory for educational goals, couched in terms of learning styles, also are discussed.


What cognitive bias (loosely) makes us all the more susceptible to the golden age fallacy Why do the good ol' days seem better than they actually are? Is this a result of an error in human thought or is it because things are actually worsening?

The cognitive bias behind nostalgia is called rosy retrospection:

  ... the psychological phenomenon of people sometimes judging the past
  disproportionately more positively than they judge the present.

A common explanation for this phenomenon is Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST):

  The theory maintains that as time horizons shrink, as they typically
  do with age, people become increasingly selective, investing greater
  resources in emotionally meaningful goals and activities. According to
  the theory, motivational shifts also influence cognitive processing.
  Aging is associated with a relative preference for positive over
  negative information in attention and memory (called the "positivity
  effect").

Related to this, but somewhat different is the Pollyanna principle:

  ... (also called Pollyannaism or positivity bias) is the tendency for
  people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant
  ones.


What is the neurological basis for 'daredevil' behaviour? What is the neurological basis for people being seemingly fearless and engaging in risk-taking and daredevil behaviour?

I am talking about those that frequently perform or participate in activities that are often described by a lot of people as reckless and life-threateningly dangerous.

Dopamine receptor agonists related to reckless driving and gambling

There are three case reports provided by Reactions Weekly (2010) demonstrating correlations between treatment with dopamine receptor agonists and reckless driving:

  Reckless driving occurred in three patients during treatment with
  dopamine receptor agonists (DA) ... DA are associated with impulse
  control disorders, and may alter how the brain perceives and avoids
  risk. DA-associated impulse control disorders include pathological
  gambling and hypersexuality. Reckless driving may be another
  manifestation of DA-associated impulse control disorders.

Some further evidence is provided to suggest neurological correlates between dopamine receptor agonist and risky choices in a gambling task (Riba et al., 2008):

  In summary, the present findings indicate that the dopamine D2/D3
  receptor agonist pramipexole is capable of blocking reward-related
  activations in the rostral basal ganglia and midbrain and may lead to
  a behavioral disinhibition characterized by increases in risky choices
  in a gambling task.

Neurological correlates between voluntary and involuntary risk taking in the brain

A study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and administered a modified BART with an active choice mode and a passive no-choice mode in order to examine the neural correlates of voluntary and involuntary risk taking in the human brain (Rao et al., 2008):

  In summary, the present study modiﬁed the BART in both active and
  passive modes for use during fMRI and the ﬁndings provide direct
  visualization of voluntary and involuntary risk processing in the
  human brain. Regardless of the involvement of voluntary decision
  making, risk in this task is processed in visual pathway regions in
  the occipital and parietal lobes. However, during active
  decision-making, risk is associated with additional robust activation
  in dopamine rich mesolimbic (VTA-striatum) and frontal regions
  (insula, ACC/MFC, and DLPFC). Voluntary decision making per se, is
  associated with activation in the right DLPFC, which is absent in the
  involuntary no-choice condition. These results contribute to
  understanding the neural basis of normal and high risk behavior.
  Extending this paradigm to pathological populations characterized by
  impaired decisionmaking, such as patients with drug addition and
  compulsive gambling, may allow the speciﬁc neural components of
  impaired risk behavior to be distinguished, and may ultimately inform
  more effective clinical treatment interventions.

References

Reactions Weekly. (2010). Dopamine receptor agonists: reckless
driving: 3 case reports.(Adverse Reaction Case Reports)(Case
study)(Brief article), 1300, 18(1)
Riba, J., Kramer, U.M., Heldmann, M., Richter, S. & Munte, T.F. (2008). Dopamine agonist increases risk taking but blunts reward-related brain activity. PLoS One, 3(6)
Rao, H. Korczykowski, M., Pluta, J., Hoang, A. & Detre, J.A. (2008). Neural correlates of voluntary and involuntary risk taking in the human brain: An fMRI study of the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART). Neuroimage, 42, 902-910


Does inhibiting automatic processing requires attention? It's seems very likely to me that it does, but I haven't found any research that tested this assumption directly.

Terms - attention vs consciousness

I guess that by attention you mean:

  The focus of our conscious process.

Until recently, neither attention nor consciousness were rigorously defined. But now you may find the following definitions:

Selective attention - a subconscious process that selects from a multitude of candidates the most salient one.
Consciousness - a cortex-global top-down process that has access to ,and controls lower-level processes.

The latter is actually termed conscious access and the whole definition is over-simplified, but will suffice for now.

On man, chicken and ANN

The problem with using the term attention is that while it's valid to say that a human attend to something (meaning that that something is the focus of consciousness), saying the same for a chicken is problematic - a chicken may attend to something yet we doubt it is conscious. We are pretty certain that worms aren't.

Further, it is fairly easy to build an artificial neural network that has a preference to this or that stimuli (by that given an impression of attentive selection), yet isn't capable of consciousness (ie, acyclic network).

Inhibiting automatic processes

That's really a fancy name to a change in behaviour. You may argue that not all behaviour is automatic - some is conscious-controlled, so let's stick to automatic behaviour.

Whether with humans, more so with chickens, and definitely with ANNs, a change in automatic behaviour is possible with neither attention nor consciousness (well... we wouldn't be here otherwise).

With humans, for example, you may have never paid attention (consciously processed) to the lips size of your co-worker, but you will notice a botox procedure. Other examples include people with slow and gradual deterioration of a particular brain function - where these people may be oblivious to the compensation processes their brain develops.

So you can inhibit automatic processes without attention or consciousness.

But consciousness is far more effective

However, our current understanding of consciousness also demonstrates that in its core is an amplified process far stronger and global than any automatic process. What's more, consciousness often involves many feedback iterations - so the process is not only stronger, but also longer.

This means that anything that have triumphed the selective attention competition and thus have entered our consciousness has a far greater potential to alter behaviour.

Levels of processing is probably a good demonstration of this.


Attractiveness bias, based on political views I've noticed that if I agree with the political/cultural/religious views of a person, then he looks sort-of beautiful (physical appearance), even if he (or she) happens to be ugly.

I've also noticed that if people disagree strongly with a person's political views, they think he or she is ugly (as an example, think of the many caustic comments on the looks of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump).

My question is: What is the name of this phenomenon?

I know that "Attractiveness bias" is a term describing the opposite phenomenon: if a person looks beautiful, we think he's wise.

But I'm asking here about the opposite direction: if a person is wise (according to our subjective opinion, of course), then we think he looks beautiful. I tried googling this but couldn't come up with any discussion of this.

It is a negative/reverse halo effect, aka a horns (or devil) effect.


What is the difference between pre-synaptic versus post-synaptic? As a non-specialist, I am unclear as to the exact meaning of the terms pre-synaptic and post-synaptic.

Specifically, do they refer to

the same neuron, either transmitting or receiving, before and after the chemical synapse has occurred, OR
two different neurons, i.e. "pre-synaptic" = the transmitting neuron, and "post-synaptic" = the receiving neuron?

I ask this because the terms are often used in ways that do not make it clear which meaning is the one intended.

Typically 'presynaptic' and 'postsynaptic' are used to indicate two neurons that are connected, as you indicate correctly in your second example. Information flow in the nervous system basically goes one way. If one neuron fires (presynaptic cell) it can chemically activate another cell on which it synapses (the postsynaptic cell), as shown in the following figure 1.

As an illustrative example consider the auditory system (figure 2).

The cells that send their axons from the inner ear to the cochlear nucleus (the first central auditory structure in the auditory pathway) are called spiral ganglion cells. The axons from the auditory nerve cells form the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve cells release glutamate from their axon terminal into the synapse, that in turn activates the cochlear nucleus cells. In this scheme, the auditory nerve cells are presynaptic, and the cochlear nucleus cells are postsynaptic.

Translating this example into Figure 1, the axon on top would be the auditory nerve cell and the postsynaptic neuron the cochlear nucleus that receives input from the auditory nerve.

However, to continue with the peripheral auditory system as example, the auditory nerve cells receive their input peripherally from hair cells in the inner ear, while the cochlear nucleus cells send their output centrally to the olivary complex. Hence, auditory nerve cells can also be classified as postsynaptic, while cochlear nucleus cells are also presynaptic. Again, as illustrated by this auditory-system-based example, it all depends on the context and the specific system under investigation.

The terminology can, however, point to a single cell as well. In the hypothetical scenario a neuron would send a collateral axon to its own cell body, it would be the presynaptical as well as postsynaptical cell. In the figure, the axon on top of the image (still correctly labeled as presynaptic) would then come from the neuron shown on the bottom of the image (still labelled correctly as being postsynaptic).


Questions on Interpreting Factor Analysis Results and Scores I am trying to learn factor analysis and I thought it would be a good idea to try and very poorly "mimic" the computation for IQ scores with a dataset of dummy values as a way to "learn by example".

To start off, this is what I intend to do, and I don't know if this methodology is correct or not: I have the loadings for that factor determined. Now that I have the loadings, I want to generate a score for each of the samples. That will leave me with a population of scores that I can then standardize around a mean of 100. From there I would plot a normal distribution. Whenever I get a new sample, I can then generate a score for it and see where it falls on the distribution.

To get my results, I am using Python's Sklearn library, specifically the FactorAnalysis class. I noticed that the FactorAnalysis class has a score_samples() method. The output score for each sample is the log-likelihood of the sample.

Here are some of the questions I have:

Is my approach in generating a distribution based on the samples' factor scores flawed? How do they do it in practice?
Is the log-likelihood of a sample even an appropriate score to use? (If not, what alternative ways are there to score a sample?)
I have gone ahead and generated the scores using the score_samples() method for all the samples, but they range between -4 and -49. Is there a reason they would be negative?
If you are only looking for 1 latent factor, is it good practice to set the number of factors to 1 or should you leave it unspecified anyways?

Here are the loadings if I leave set the number of factors to 1:

            Factor 1
variable 1  0.082558
variable 2  0.107940
variable 3  0.199645
variable 4  0.612495
variable 5  0.623707

Here are the loadings if I do not specify the number of factors:

             Factor 1   Factor 2   Factor 3  Factor 4  Factor 5
variable 1   0.263914   0.426346  -0.012893   -0.0       0.0
variable 2   0.297078   0.415269  -0.002193    0.0      -0.0
variable 3   0.243590  -0.005131   0.085178   -0.0      -0.0
variable 4   0.487537  -0.224135  -0.019501   -0.0      -0.0
variable 5   0.484462  -0.248173  -0.008902    0.0       0.0

Is my approach in generating a distribution based on the samples' factor scores flawed? How do they do it in practice?

I found this somewhat difficult to follow. But in general, you should be able to approximate a set of test scores using a multivariate normal distribution where the covariance matrix implies positive correlations between all tests. Some might be larger and some smaller, but the idea is that all ability tests are correlated. And general mental ability can be estimated as the first unrotated factor that results from such tests.

  Is the log-likelihood of a sample even an appropriate score to use? (If not, what alternative ways are there to score a sample?)

This sounds more like how you evaluate a model. E.g., how you evaluate a factor analytic solutions.
In general, factor saved scores will be a weighted composite of the scores on the  component tests.

In R, you can use factanal

factanal(x, factors, data = NULL, covmat = NULL, n.obs = NA,
         subset, na.action, start = NULL,
         scores = c("none", "regression", "Bartlett"),
         rotation = "varimax", control = NULL, ...)

See the scores argument. There are a few different methods.

  I have gone ahead and generated the scores using the score_samples() method for all the samples, but they range between -4 and -49. Is there a reason they would be negative?

I don't know Python. But in general, factor saved scores are typically quantified in such a way that they are z-scores (e.g., mean = 0, sd = 1).

  If you are only looking for 1 latent factor, is it good practice to set the number of factors to 1 or should you leave it unspecified anyways?

You need to either extract only one factor or ensure that you apply no rotation to the extract factors. Without a rotation, the first factor will be equivalent to just one factor. If you rotate, variation will be partitioned across the extracted factors.


Can Prozac cause anxiety? I know some selective serotonin inhibitors, such as Prozac, are prescribed for anxiety, but can they also cause anxiety?

Prozac (the generic drug fluoxetine) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) and is primarily prescribed as an antidepressant, but also as an anxiolytic.

The side effects of fluoxetine indeed include anxiety, but this is a rare phenomenon (source: Drugs.com). The more common complaints are restlessness and skin rash. In fact, Mayo Clinic doesn't even list anxiety as a general side effect of SSRIs.


The effect of proper food intake on emotions and brain function Recently I wasn't eating at the proper time and I often skipped meals. I was angry, stressed before taking my meal, and suddenly, I felt good after having my dinner. I have felt the same way many times.

Does food have that much effect on brain activity and emotions?

Part of the issue is maintaining blood-glucose concentration, which one doesn't always sense is crashing until it's already low and still crashing. As @BennySkogberg's answer implies, disruptions in the energy supply threaten cognitive function. This implies a loss of functional capacity and efficiency (which, when lacking, increase the probability of frustrating outcomes), as well as implying some disinhibition of impulses. Impulsivity relates to negative emotionality (including anger and stress), and interferes with attention. Reductions in the ability to focus attention on practical problems and address them planfully (problem-focused coping, which also relates to impulsivity, but negatively) would likely result; trouble envisioning solutions to problems might then decrease confidence and increase stress.

Another part of the issue is the homeostatic equilibrium between the sympathetic ("fight-or-flight") and parasympathetic ("rest-and-digest") nervous systems. Even before getting the post-digestion blood-glucose boost, one might achieve relaxation by simply having something to digest. Food in the stomach triggers parasympathetic activation, which facilitates relaxation and dulls the senses somewhat. An increasingly urgent lack of food in the stomach might (don't actually know) trigger the sympathetic system, as hunger implies some need to wake up and act assertively to correct it and prevent starvation. Sympathetic activation promotes aggression (and thus anger) and emotional arousal (and thus stress, which is negatively valent emotional arousal).

For a particularly extreme example of the effects of starvation, you might find the results of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment interesting. Food definitely has profound effects on psychological function; what you've felt may be a lesser shade of what these research participants reported after more prolonged deprivation. Also, FWIW, I've noticed the same effects you describe in myself and others I know well when starving (if only in the "first world problems" sense of being really hungry, having waited a couple hours too long to fix a meal). One doesn't need to prolong it to start seeing effects, especially when there's some violation of implicit expectations or customary levels of need satisfaction. Our bodies adapt to how well or how poorly we're fed on a regular basis, so those of us who are used to eating regularly may have exacerbated reactions to the rare violations of our habits, as our bodies haven't had the chance to adapt to deprivation gradually when the onset is sudden and unusual.

Edit: BTW, you might also find this question interesting (I've answered it similarly):
How is fasting related to insomnia?


What causes Capgras ("imposter") Syndrome? Capgras Syndrome is a rare disorder in which a person believes his or her loved ones have been replaced by identical-looking impostors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion). What causes this condition?

There have been many proposed explanations for the condition. The explanation which seems to have gained traction states that an individual with Capgras syndrome experiences a "disconnect" between the part of the brain that recognizes faces and the part of the brain that processes emotion. Thus, the person may see someone who looks like his brother, but does not experience the feelings of familiarity, love, etc. associated with the brother (Ramachandran, 1998). In an effort to make sense of this, the person constructs a delusion that the brother has been replaced by a duplicate.

There have been studies which have found Capgras patients have reduced physiological responses associated with emotional reactions when looking at all faces, even for people they do not believe to be duplicants (Ellis, Young, Quayle, & De Pauw, 1997); the authors proposed that the delusion is only constructed for loved ones because of the intensity of the emotional reaction expected during those encounters. Interestingly, individuals with Capgras syndrome often retain appropriate emotional responses to hearing the voice of the loved one (Ellis et al., 1997; Ramachandran, 1998) and can experience a range of emotions, indicating the issues is specific to visual-emotional processing.

The reason for this proposed disconnect is not clear (Brighetti, Bonifacci, Borlimi, & Ottaviani, 2007; Edelstyn & Oyebode, 1999). Some have suggested it is a disconnected between "processing streams" in the brain (Ellis & Lewis, 2001). This theory proposes that normal face processing occurs when information from the visual cortex is filtered through two different paths in the brain. One path allows for recognition of faces, while the other path allows for recognition of emotional responses. When the input from both paths is accurate, the person correctly identifies the person they see and has the appropriate reaction to that person. If the emotional path is damaged, the person does not experience the expected emotion and so attributes this reaction to the person being replaced. (This model also proposes that if the emotional component is intact but the "face recognition component" is damaged, the person will experience prosopagnosia, also called "face blindness.") Ellis & Lewis (2001) provide a nice overview of the research that led to this model. A slightly different model proposes a disconnect between the visual areas in the temporal lobes of the brain and how emotion is processed in the amygdala, but does not propose a two-path approach (Ramachandran, 1998).

While most studies focus on a unidirectional explanation for the delusion (e.g., the neurological issue leads the person to create the delusion as an explanation), Young (2008) proposed that the two processes actually interact with a feedback loop. In this model, first the person doesn't experience the expected emotion and constructs the delusion to cope; however, their strong belief feeds back to their perceptual experience so they actually begin to see the person as an impostor. That perception then feeds back into the delusion, strengthening it. Young argues this is why the delusion is so difficult to challenge (2008).

References

•   Brighetti, G., Bonifacci, P., Borlimi, R., & Ottaviani, C. (2007). “Far from the heart far from the eye”: evidence from the Capgras delusion. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 12(3), 189-197.

•   Edelstyn, N. M. J., & Oyebode, F. (1999). A review of the phenomenology and cognitive neuropsychological origins of the Capgras syndrome. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, (14), 48-59.

•   Ellis, H. D., & Lewis, M. B. (2001). Capgras delusion: a window on face recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(4), 149-156.

•   Ellis, H. D., Young, A. W., Quayle, A. H., & De Pauw, K. W. (1997). Reduced autonomic responses to faces in Capgras delusion. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 264(1384), 1085-1092.

•   Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Consciousness and body image: lessons from phantom limbs, Capgras syndrome and pain asymbolia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 353(1377), 1851-1859.

•   Young, G. (2008). Capgras delusion: an interactionist model. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(3), 863-876.

Additional Reading

•   Young, G. (2007). Clarifying" familiarity": Examining differences in the phenomenal experiences of patients suffering from prosopagnosia and capgras delusion. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 14(1), 29-37.

•   Young, A. W., Leafhead, K. M., & Szulecka, T. K. (1994). The
Capgras and Cotard delusions. Psychopathology, 27(3-5), 226-231.


Learning of new concepts being impeded by an error in previous work Note: I'm framing this question in terms of tutoring math since that's what I tutor most, though it applies to a wide range of subject matters.

I do a decent amount of tutoring, and this is one phenomenon I see popping up constantly, and I occasionally catch myself doing the same thing, though less often since I've become aware of it

What happens is a student learns a new concept/formula/algorithm in class and then does practice or assignment questions. They will then come up to me and ask me to check their work because the answer they are getting doesn't make sense, or doesn't line up with a known answer. Sometimes, they will even have spent hours double or triple checking their work on this new formula.

I will look over their work and confirm its correctness. I have learned to ask "Can I see the work you did to get to this point?" They then show me this work, and most of the time, there is a simple arithmetic error or oversight (and if its a misunderstanding of previous material, then its a whole other issue).

What has happened is that the assignment question involves multiple steps, the student makes a simple error in an early step, and assumes the error to be in the later steps involving the newly taught equations, and wastes hours looking for an error there.

My related questions are:

Does this phenomenon have a name, and if so what is it?
What are the psychological processes behind this, i.e. why does the student not double check all of the work?
Is there any way to mitigate this behaviour besides simply being aware of it?

There is a difference between being wrong and knowing you're wrong.

I like to think of this with the analogy of Wiley the Coyote from looney toons. He would usually try to catch the runner, and run off the cliff, but keep running for a while, and only fall when he realizes that he ran off a cliff.

The point in which your student is doing the assignments based on incorrect previous calculations is that point between coyote running off the cliff and realizing he has done so.

I'm not sure of the terminology about this phenomena, but here's my theory on why people tend to do this:
Most of the students nowadays are conditioned to feel right about everything because knowing, that you are wrong feels bad, they feel like there is something wrong with them (rather then just being wrong), while the alternative, of being wrong and not knowing about it that feels exactly as being right.

This conditioning is introduced in our educational system very early and often results in not taking chances that could result in them being wrong, or (more related) in not even considering the possibility that they might be wrong at some point (when most of the time they are).

I think that the only way of fixing this is deconditioning ourselves (or your students) in this case, that being wrong is something bad. Instead, indicating being wrong as a sign of progress. I think Einstein said:

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Encouraging your students questioning even things that might be established as truth by others is the key in my opinion.


What percentage of questions on Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV 23 deal with environmental issues and climate change? It is generally accepted that humans are the only intelligent species on the earth.  I would submit that due to our proclivity to destroy the habitat that gives rise to our existence: we are the only unintelligent species on the planet.  I am interested to know whether environmental questions are included in IQ tests.  I suspect that there aren't or that they are grossly under-represented. This would further support my thesis.  I tried doing a Google search but no luck.

Your environmental issue is more a matter of philosophy than intelligence, as it is determined mainly subjectively by views and beliefs, driven by ideologies. It's not what the current, more objective definition is of intelligence

For example, standard IQ tests consist mainly of more objective questions on things like:

Block Design, that measures an individual’s ability to analyze and synthesize an abstract design and reproduce that design from colored plastic blocks;
Similarities, that measures logical thinking, verbal concept formation and verbal abstract reasoning;
Digit Span, measuring short-term auditory memory and attention;
Picture Concepts, to measure categorical, abstract reasoning;
Coding, that measures visual-motor dexterity, associative nonverbal learning, and nonverbal short-term memory;
etc etc etc.

Although I, personally, totally agree with you that smart people care about the future, the harsh reality is that people totally ignorant, and even baldly dismissive of the global impact of man, causing the 6th mass extinction (Holocene extinction) and all, can still score highly on the intelligence scale on the currently accepted outcome measures of IQ [no explicit political examples due to my position as moderator here].


What is the relationship between the ego, amygdala and consciousness? I've been reading a lot about emotional responses lately, and the following points seem to surface in different writings:

  "Amygdala is a very ancient system, intended to quickly alert a
  person of danger".

At the same time, we have a part of our consciousness, where thoughts of danger, lack or negativity towards others may arise. I've seen spiritual/personal development writers attribute these thoughts to the function of the ego. I'm not sure if they are using the term correctly, as they have a mostly negative perception of the ego, as something that strives to dominate cognition and act out of fearful/selfish desires.  Here's a description from wikipedia:

  The ego is the organized part of the personality structure that
  includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive
  functions.

I'm trying to understand - Is person's ego a projection of the responses of their amygdala onto the conscious experience?

I've looked around and see some bloggers like this one make a claim that the amygdala and the ego are one and the same. Is this true?

To clarify my question - I'm seeking to understand if there's a structure/process in cognition that integrates input from various "lower mammal brain" structures and translates them into thoughts?

Assuming your question is "Is person's ego a projection of the responses of their amygdala onto the conscious experience?", I think it would translate to "Does the amygdala determines or houses the ego". In that light, the question hinges on the meaning of ego. Given the question is asked at Cognitive Sciences SE, I assume the ego is "The part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity". In that case I would say no, the amygdala is not involved in the ego.

Generally, the amygdala is considered to be an essential part of the limbic system. The limbic system controls the core emotions (fear, pleasure, anger) and drives behaviors essential to life (hunger, sex, and the care of offspring). The functions of the amygdala are indeed mainly associated with emotions, but also with learning and memory (Martin & Hans, 1985). A notable example is post-traumatic stress disorder (Shin et al., 2006), where it mediates imprinting of memories through fear.

However, the amygdala definitely shapes "the self". Given the Latin meaning of "ego" (literally, "I") one could definitely argue for an essential role of the amygdala in the ego. In that context, though, arguably every single part of the brain at the macroscopic level is an essential part of the ego.

PS: the 'blog' you linked is an advertisement for the services of Sara Harvey, a personal coach for folks with executive functions. Not the most reliable source of information.

References
- Martin & Hans, Behav Neurosci (1985); 99(2):342-80
- Shin et al., Ann NY Acad Sci (2006); 1071: 67–7


How to change the brain in order to change how one habitually thinks and feels? In this snippet from "You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life" by Jeffrey Schwartz

Schwartz states that refocusing attention can actually change brain structure so that habitual ways of the brain are physically broken and other new healthy behaviors become habitual with new connections in the brain.

Are their any other studies along these lines that mention how to change how one thinks and feels habitually?

There's over 100 years of learning research and theorization now that pretty well establishes that yes, if your behaviour changes then your brain changes (and vice versa).  When you learned to tie your shoes your brain changed.  It quickly became a habit and you don't even think of it... can't even do it if you do.  When you learned to speak your brain changed.  When you had a child of your own and spent 6 weeks without regular sleep your brain changed.  It's hard to give you a specific reference for any of that.  The brain is what guides your behaviour.  If your behaviour is changing then your brain is changing.  Your brain changing is neither magical or surprising, that's how you learn.

That said, I've never seen the "habit" centre.

If you really want a reference start with this.

[Aside: It's kind of absurd that he talks about how you are not your brain but now you're going to change your brain to make a new you.]


Does looking into a mirror relieve eye strain in a similar way to looking at distant objects? Sometimes when having an eye exam the eye chart is viewed through a mirror to increase the distance between the person and the chart.

When using consoles, it is recommended to look away from the console and look into the distance.

My question is:

For the purposes of relieving eye strain, does the perceived increased distance of looking at an object in a mirror, serve the same purpose as looking at the same object from twice the distance?

As far as I understand it and as per explained by my eye doctor,

If we separate this variable from the other possible ones that can cause eye strain while staring at a monitor like amount of "blue light" (check out the program f.lux), overall brightness, refresh rate, etc., then-

-the variable that can cause eye strain as you explain, "looking at something too close for to long," is caused by overextending the muscles and/or the way in which they contract (some combination of this most likely) in your eyes that causes you to focus on something up close.

So, by looking off into the distance, you are stretching those muscles (changing the way their contracting kinda) and/or giving them a chance to relax for a bit.

I'm quite sure that you and not your environment are actually the true controllers over how these muscles contract.

Try this experiment: Imagine there are mountains behind your computer screen and try to look through your computer screen in order to see them.  It may feel unusual at first, and a bit difficult - however if done right you'll be able to feel it.

Here's another experiment: Find some shadow or corner in your room where absolutely no light shines into.  It could be a crevice or whatever - you could even make it artificially. It could even be in the depths between the keys in your keyboard.   Just as long as it's pitch black.  When you look into something that is pitch black, from a visual perspective, neither you nor your eyes know how far that darkness extends - meaning it's left up to you to determine how you focus or not focus on it.  I can look between the keys on my keyboard and see pitch black - I know that only extends a a few millimeters if any in reality...but my sight isn't telling me that.  For a sight perspective, those depths might really end at the center of the earth or travel on for millions of miles.

ie. you can change this focus just like as if you were changing the focus on a camera.  It is somewhat of a skill, but not too hard of one to acquire.

Now trying to achieve this effect is easier admittedly when there is true distance to look at or into.  If you're trying to fake it, I also wouldn't recommend trying to look through your computer screen as in my example above for relief.  That was just an extreme example to prove a point - it's possible, but not ideal (and you are still also left with other variables like refresh rate, brightness, etc.).

So as long as you are able to induce this change in eye muscle contractions by actually looking off into the distance, or artificially induce it by tricking your eyes into thinking they are doing so - it doesn't matter as the end goal was accomplished either way.  The only thing that differs is the potential intensity of this relief you'll get when trying to induce artificially in contrast to doing so in reality; the artificially part is obviously dependent upon your skill and belief that you can actually do that though.

  For the purposes of relieving eye strain, does the perceived increased
  distance of looking at an object in a mirror, serve the same purpose
  as looking at the same object from twice the distance?

If you perceive it to be true, then your eyes will too - so it would cause the same change in muscle contraction/stretching/relaxation effect that accompanies changes in focus.

After thinking about your mirror trick, I don't actually think it would work.  Your perception of the objects will be just as close as if you were looking right at them.


Psychological journal that focuses on publishing interesting psychological datasets There are a range of data repositories around. There are also journals that permit online attachments. That said, my general experience with such online attachments is that the data sharing is an after thought. It is not optimised for accessibility. The information is often not sufficient to truly understand the data.

I'd like to see a journal that specialises in publishing interesting psychological datasets. Such a journal would ensure that the dataset was well documented. It would have clear, machine-readable meta-data. Scripts for processing raw data might be provided.

Are there any psychological journals that specialise in publishing psychological datasets?

Scientific Data:
After asking my question, I did a quick search and found one promising journal that will commence in 2014 called Scientific Data.

  Scientific Data is a new open-access, online-only publication for
  descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets. It introduces a new
  type of content called the Data Descriptor, which will combine
  traditional narrative content with curated, structured descriptions of
  research data, including detailed methods and technical analyses
  supporting data quality. Scientific Data will initially focus on the
  life, biomedical and environmental science communities, but will be
  open to content from a wide range of scientific disciplines.
  Publications will be complementary to both traditional research
  journals and data repositories, and will be designed to foster data
  sharing and reuse, and ultimately to accelerate scientific discovery.

  Scientific Data will launch in Spring 2014 and be open for submissions
  in Autumn 2013. Sign up for our e-mail alerts or follow us to stay
  informed.

  Scientific Data will be open to submissions from a broad range of
  scientific disciplines, ...[including] Behavioural data – psychology
  or neuroscience studies

Archives of Scientific Psychology: This is a new open access journal from the APA. It requires that raw data be made available in a suitable repository. However, publication of data is not the main purpose of the journal. Also, the journal appears to mandate that data only be available once a a request form has been submitted and approved.

  The authors have made available the data that underlie the analyses presented in the article. The data can be used by others for
  verification or extension of the study’s results. The data are
  available from APA or another approved repository upon agreement
  regarding usage. If deposited with APA, next users agree to offer to
  the researchers who generated the data involvement in any subsequent
  publications


Inducing Auditory-to-Visual Synesthesia I recently watched an interesting video that was discussing conveying color to the blind through language. It implied that there may be a way to insert the sensation of color into a person's mind via a series of sounds.

I have looked for articles on this and haven't been able to find much. I was just curious:

Is it possible to induce a kind of auditory-to-visual synesthesia?
Are there any articles on this?

Link to video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08

Yes I know :)

First, a definition: "Synaesthesia is a curious condition in which an otherwise normal person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimulated." [1] There are two basic explanations for this phenomenon: the hyperconnectivity
hypothesis and the disinhibition-unmasking hypothesis [2]. The former says that the condition results from excessive neural connections between two modalities, and the latter says that it results from a lack of inhibition of signals. A quick search reveals that it is indeed possible to induce this condition (with drugs, for example), and it isn't necessary to rewire any neural connections [2,3,4]. This is an example of how the brain transmits/filters information by many mechanisms, connectivity being just one of them.

[1] Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M. Hubbard. "Synaesthesia--a window into perception, thought and language." Journal of consciousness studies 8.12 (2001): 3-34.

[2] Kadosh, Roi Cohen, et al. "Induced cross-modal synaesthetic experience without abnormal neuronal connections." Psychological Science 20.2 (2009): 258-265.

[3] Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran. "Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 263.1369 (1996): 377-386.

[4] Luke, David P., and Devin B. Terhune. "The induction of synaesthesia with chemical agents: a systematic review." Frontiers in psychology 4 (2013).


Scientific findings of strobe lights and the brain While there is a lot of general discussion and articles on the web that strobe lights cause epileptic seizures - I am looking for more specific data. Perhaps scientific references, papers or articles that list what exactly changes in the brain, when exposed to strobe lights.

For example, how does it alter consciousness, what happens to the frequency of the brain after exposure, what part of the brain does most of the change happen in and if there are ways to revers the effects on the brain, etc.?

Any point in the right direction is greatly appreciated,

EDIT
This article just came out, looks like this issue will be getting more attention in the near future:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/306026/the-hobbit-and-other-movies-that-will-make-you-sick-and-may#disqus_thread

The presentation of flickering lights usually leads to so-called steady-state visual evoked potentials, that is, oscillatory responses in the visual cortex with the frequency of the stimulus as well as its harmonics. See for example:

Herrmann CS. (2001)
Human EEG responses to 1-100 Hz flicker: resonance phenomena in visual cortex and their potential correlation to cognitive phenomena.Exp Brain Res 137(3-4):346-53.  Pubmed

There is a lot of research concerning this phenomenon. For a list of papers, please see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=steady%20state%20visual%20evoked%20potential


Utility or software to visualize Neural Network? I am using Octave to generate a Neural Network with a single hidden layer, and saving it as two CSV files.

Is there a utility or software that will load the files and create an image, PDF or HTML page that displays the weights over edges connecting neurons?

If you have CSV files a quick way to generate images would be to open it in Excel (or a similar spreadsheet software) and use some sort of colour scale conditional formatting (under home>styles in Microsoft Excel) - set the width and heights of the cells to small in order to view all the data at once.

You could also use a surface chart in order to visualise the data in Excel.

Otherwise if you are familiar with a tool like Matlab or R, you might wish to use some sort of graphic tool to represent it, e.g. meshgrid in Matlab might work.

Matlab and/or R can be programmed to load several CSV files and create graphics from them.  The first two techniques I mentioned (although accessible to a more novice computer user) have to be carried out manually.


Why does the brain skip over repeated "the" words in sentences? For example, in this sentence by the the time you are done reading you will have already skipped over the double "the".

I have searched this on the internet a little, but I have found nothing that focuses on why this happens and shows actual proof and not just a hunch someone has on why it happens.  Would someone explain this and post a link to a trustworthy website that explains it in more detail.

A study by Rainer et al. (2011) has shown that words are skipped and apparently filled in mentally quite often (in the order of 8 to 30% of times).

Two important factors that increased skipping rates were the length of the word and the predictability of the word due to contextual constraints. Both cases apply on the word 'the', because it is short and highly predictable, being a common adjective and in fact one of the most used words in the English language. In other words, besides being short and predictable, it is also a very common word that has relatively little impact on the meaning of a sentence.

Reference
- Rainer et al., J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform (2011); 37(2): 514–28


Have there been followups to the Rosenhan Experiment? The famous Rosenhan experiment of 1973 showed that doctors in asylums routinely misdiagnosed normal people with various psychiatric disorders.

Have any followup studies been done to confirm these results? I am particularly interested in any studies in which the pseudopatients did not feign insanity, but act normally during the course of the experiment.

There was a follow-up to Rosenhan (1973).  The whole study was revisited by Scribner (2001).

  The present study is a replication of sorts, modified to suit the contemporary, postdeinstitutionalization state of mental health care. The findings suggest that a significant shift has occurred in mental health care since 1973. At the time of the original study by Rosenhan (1973), the troubling issue was the ease with which people could receive an unwarranted diagnosis and unnecessary treatment for a nonexistent mental disorder. In today's mental health care environment, the troubling issue is the difficulty involved in obtaining treatment that is warranted for conditions that are present.

References

Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179(4070), 250-258. DOI: 10.1126/science.179.4070.250

Scribner, C. M. (2001). Rosenhan revisited. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 32(2), 215. DOI: 10.1037/0735-7028.32.2.215


How do graphic objects in data visualisation facilitate ease of interpretation? Background: I vaguely remember reading in a book (I think it may have been Nudge - Thaler and Sunstein) about the advantages of using graphics for visualising data, such as a smiley face, or traffic lights, to communicate a message in an easily interpreted, visual language.

To what extent do graphics such as smiley faces and traffic lights in visualisations facilitate ease of interpretation?
What is the cause of this ease of interpretation?
What research has studied this phenomena?

Initial thoughts:
I imagine that the ease of interpretation is due to these items being purely visual that we quickly recognise them, and they can make complicated, unfamiliar information (for instance health results) that much easier to comprehend.
Is that an accurate summary?

If it's any further help I'm looking into this specifically for use in the communication of health results. So for example if you have a 20% risk of developing a disease, a good way to illustrate this could be 100 smiley faces - of which 20 are :( and 80 are :)

As you mentioned, data visualization and visual stimulation in general, trigger a primitive brain response, which results in an easier comprehension and engagement/rejection process - a process more trivial than sensing and comprehending symbols. Thus, numerical information such as percentages, distributions, and relativistic data in general, immediately get infused into the cognitive realm, provided the visual field is not excessively cluttered. Too much visual stimulus in a presentation results in a more laborious attempt at comprehension, and hence may lose favor.

When it comes to non-numerical / non-quantitative data, visualizations serve as a promoter of cognitive engagement. Traffic lights to draw attention, smiley faces may be used to encourage the receiver, boxes and other demarcations to engrave specific items of information in memory, the list goes on.

I think the effectiveness of the visual presentation largely depends on the creativity and imagination of the presenter to resonate with the target audience, in terms of the mood, awareness, humor (mood?), social values and other variables which maybe of interest, of the target audience.

Again, if the visual field is excessively populated, the labor involved in the comprehension process may impede the effectiveness of the presentation.

Also, the ease at which visual information is processed also depends on how distinct the objects that are communicating information in the visual are.
In your example, smiley faces to depict percentages maybe less effective compared to, say a colored pie chart, or something to that effect, because smiley faces are not easy to distinguish by themselves - even if they are ordered into separate regions. And in the possible event of conveying grim news , grim graphics may not received in the highest of spirits :P.

Cheers!


Homogeneous Poisson Process of spike train In Theoretical Neuroscience by Dayan and Abbott page 25,

  the probability $P[t_1, t_2, ..., t_n]$ that a sequence of n spikes occurs with spike $i$ falling between times $t_i$ and $t_i+\Delta t$ for $i=1,2,...,n$ is given in terms of this by the relation $P[t_1, t_2, ..., t_n]=p[t_1,...,t_n](\Delta t)^n$... the probability $P[t_1, t_2, ..., t_n]$ can be expressed in terms of another probability function $P_T[n]$, which is the probability that an arbirary sequence of exactly n spikes occurs within a trial of duration T. Assuming that the spike times are ordered so that $0 \le t_1 \le t_2 \le ... \le t_n \le T$, the relationship is
  $$P[t_1, t_2, ..., t_n] = n!P_T[n]\big({\Delta t \over T}\big)^n$$

I get that $P_T[n]$ is the probability function of $n$ spikes occurring(which later is proved to be a Poisson distribution).  I'm guessing $n!$ is different ways of re-arranging the $n$ spikes. What exactly is $\big({\Delta t \over T}\big)^n$?

First of all you should notice the assumption that spikes are independent and that every sequence of spikes over an interval has the same probability. That's why you can express $P[t_{1}, t_{2}, ..., t_{n}]$ in terms of $P_{T}[n]$.
Second, note that $p[t_{1}, t_{2}, ..., t_{n}]$ is a probability density. So you can express the probability as the integral of $p[t_{1}, t_{2}, ..., t_{n}] dt_{1}dt_{2}...dt_{n}$

$\Delta t / T$ is the probability that one spike occurs in that time interval. If $\Delta t$ is small enough, only one spike is within that interval, so just let $\Delta t \rightarrow dt_{i}$. Then  $p[t_{1}, t_{2}, ..., t_{n}] dt_{1}dt{2}...dt{n} = n!P_{T}[n]dt_{1}dt_{2}...dt_{n}(\frac{1}{T})^{n}$

You should see this as a joint probability.


Can schizophrenics who are deaf since birth hear voices? I am interested in how schizophrenia can be expressed in them, and whether it depends on the perception of the world.  Maybe they see text pop-up in the air, or something like that?

A quick Google search reveals some answers such as Atkinson, J. R. (2006).

Around half of all deaf people diagnosed with schizophrenia report experiencing “voices,” during which they sense someone communicating with them in the absence of any external stimulus. This closely parallels prevalence rates of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in hearing people with schizophrenia (50–70%). There is no evidence reported for increased frequency of psychotic hallucinations in congenitally deaf people. However, greater proportions of visual and tactile/somatic hallucinations have been noted. Around 50% of deaf people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia report visual hallucinations, and a similar proportion describe tactile/somatic hallucinations, despite the low occurrence of these phenomena in schizophrenia generally (15% and 5%, respectively).

The abstract points out that:

The study of voice-hallucinations in deaf individuals, who exploit the visuomotor rather than auditory modality for communication, provides rare insight into the relationship between sensory experience and how “voices” are perceived. Relatively little is known about the perceptual characteristics of voice-hallucinations in congenitally deaf people who use lip-reading or sign language as their preferred means of communication. The existing literature on hallucinations in deaf people is reviewed, alongside consideration of how such phenomena may fit into explanatory subvocal articulation hypotheses proposed for auditory verbal hallucinations in hearing people.

References
Atkinson, J. R. (2006). The perceptual characteristics of voice-hallucinations in deaf people: insights into the nature of subvocal thought and sensory feedback loops. Schizophrenia bulletin, 32(4), 701-708. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbj063 pubmed: PMC2632268


Tried and tested way to repair malfunctioning thought process Could someone here lead me to tried and tested methods to repair a malfunctioning thought process after depression? I have read through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder. Specifically to correct the ones here - Circumstantiality, Derailment, Echolalia, Flight of ideas, Loss of goal, Perseveration and Pressure of speech.

Psychotherapy is not something to be practiced without a licensed professional. It is very easy to cause damage to someone using tried and tested psychotherapy techniques. However from the standpoint of theory Psychodynamics, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Interpersonal Therapy are typically used to treat depression.


Is there any good alternative to the International Affective Picture System (IAPS)? I'm looking for (particularly negative) emotion inducing pictures or videos. After some research, I think the best known and widely used database is the International Affective Picture System (IAPS).

However, there is a problem. You do have to request access, then you get have to send them a letter and then it takes up to 30 days to get the pictures. For me, this is way to long. Therefore, I'm looking for a good alternative to either speed this process up significantly or to find an alternative that is also widely used.

I would recommend the 730 pictures Geneva affective picture database (GAPED).

It has been validated worldwide, and the cultural bias is more limited than other image resources.

There are general positive/neutral/negative images, with valence and activations scores. Some other more specific images are also provided (snakes, spîders).

Download the datebase and ratings here Read the .txt provided.

Dan-Glauser, E. S., & Scherer, K. R. (2011). The Geneva affective picture database (GAPED): a new 730-picture database focusing on valence and normative significance. Behavior Research Methods, 43(2), 468-477. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0064-1

EDIT: The GAPED Pictures can be downloaded from the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences site (or directly from here)