Dutch RCT of mindfulness therapy vs methylphenidate in ADHD Meppelink et al. (2016) note that

  The effectiveness of mindfulness training for children
  and adolescents with ADHD has been demonstrated
  by a number of studies; however, research in
  this field is limited by a lack of randomised controlled
  clinical trials with large samples, standardised formats
  of mindfulness training and objective measures.
  Further assessment of mindfulness training for childhood
  ADHD is, therefore, needed. A randomised controlled
  trial, which compares mindfulness training for
  ADHD with methylphenidate, is currently being conducted
  in the Netherlands.

Has this resulting study been published since then?

This is the protocol study referred to:

https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s12888-016-0978-3

The trial only remained in a planned state:

http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/admin/rctview.asp?TC=4206

For people interested in mindfulness in ADHD I would like to mention the main evidences (I HAVE ORDINATED BY DATE):

Zylowska, L., Ackerman, D., Yang, M., Futrell, J., Horton, N., & Hale, T. et al. (2007). Mindfulness Meditation
Training in Adults and Adolescents With ADHD: A Feasibility Study. Journal Of Attention Disorders, 11,
737-746.

Smalley, S. L., Loo, S. K., Hale, T., Shrestha, A., McGough, J., Flook, L., & Reise, S. (2009). Mindfulness and attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(10), 1087-1098.

Singh, N. N., Singh, A. N., Lancioni, G. E., Singh, J., Winton, A. S., W., & Adkins, A. D. (2010). Mindfulness training for parents and their children
with ADHD increases the children's compliance. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 19(2), 157-166.

van de Weijer-Bergsma, E., Formsma, A., de Bruin, E., & Bögels, S. (2011). The Effectiveness of Mindfulness
Training on Behavioral Problems and Attentional Functioning in Adolescents with ADHD. Journal Of
Child And Family Studies, 21, 775-787.

van der Oord, S., Bögels, S., & Peijnenburg, D. (2011). The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Training for Children with
ADHD and Mindful Parenting for their Parents. Journal Of Child And Family Studies, 21, 139-147.

Carboni, J. A., Roach, A. T., & Fredrick, L. D. (2013). Impact of mindfulness training on the behavior of elementary students with attentiondeficit/
hyperactive disorder. Research in Human Development, 10(3), 234-251.

Mitchell, J., McIntyre, E., English, J., Dennis, M., Beckham, J., & Kollins, S. (2013). A Pilot Trial of Mindfulness
Meditation Training for ADHD in Adulthood: Impact on Core Symptoms, Executive Functioning, and
Emotion Dysregulation. Journal Of Attention Disorders.

Edel, M., Holter, T., Wassink, K., & Juckel, G. (2014). A Comparison of Mindfulness- Based Group Training and
Skills Group Training in Adults With ADHD: An Open Study. Journal Of Attention Disorders.

Schoenberg, P., Hepark, S., Kan, C., Barendregt, H., Buitelaar, J., & Speckens, A. (2014). Effects of mindfulnessbased
cognitive therapy on neurophysiological correlates of performance monitoring in adult attentiondeficit/
hyperactivity disorder. Clinical Neurophysiology, 125, 1407-1416.

Bueno, V., Kozasa, E., da Silva, M., Alves, T., Louzã, M., & Pompéia, S. (2015). Mindfulness Meditation Improves
Mood, Quality of Life, and Attention in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Biomed
Research International, 2015, 1-14. doi:10.1155/2015/962857

Haydicky, J., Shecter, C., Wiener, J., & Ducharme, J. M. (2015). Evaluation of MBCT for adolescents with ADHD and their parents: Impact on
individual and family functioning. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 24(1), 76-94.

Janssen, L., Kan, C. C., Carpentier, P. J., Sizoo, B., Hepark, S., Grutters, J., & Speckens, A. E. (2015). Mindfulness based cognitive therapy
versus treatment as usual in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). BMC Psychiatry, 15(1), 216.

Lo, H. H., Wong, S. Y., Wong, J. Y., Wong, S. W., & Yeung, J. W. (2016). The effect of a family-based mindfulness intervention on children with
attention deficit and hyperactivity symptoms and their parents: design and rationale for a randomized, controlled clinical trial (Study
protocol). BMC Psychiatry, 16(1), 65.


Does dream recall interfere with "reverse learning"? (Crick and Mitchison's theory of REM sleep) I've recently became aware of the idea of "reverse learning" that might happen during REM sleep - the brain's attempt to eliminate pathological attractors that might appear in neural networks. The idea was originally expressed by Crick and Mitchison in their 1983 paper on "The function of dream sleep".

I'm interested if there has any recent work that has supported that idea. I'm aware of this wikipedia article on reverse learning. More specifically, I'm interested in how dream recall (writing down or recalling dreams upon awakening) affects the process of "reverse learning"?

Recent supporting work

In a paper published in the Jan 2017 issue of Nature Neuroscience, Wei Li and colleagues propose a mechanism that supports the "reverse learning" process based on dendritic calcium spikes that regulate spine formation.

However, as the authors discuss, the implications of their findings are more nuanced. They support the idea of reverse learning but show that it is not the only thing going on in REM sleep:

  REM sleep is not simply a substitute for wakefulness to stimulate plasticity, for pruning synapses during development or for persevering genetic identities of neuronal circuits. Instead, REM sleep is important for selectively incorporating new synapses into the existing circuits. It could be viewed as a “selection committee” for building and maintaining the synaptic network.

Dream recall

If we accept that reverse learning functions by the proposed mechanism, I would guess it would not be perturbed significantly by dream recall. This is because the calcium spikes in their experiments occurred on the order of seconds, and only during REM sleep. Dream recall, on the other hand, is is a high-level mental process that is probably restricted to humans.

This is just my best intuitive guess. For all we know, any neural event anywhere in the brain can potentially influence a subsequent event anywhere else in the brain, so really all bets are still on the table.


What is the evidence that mathematicians are more likely to have autistic traits than the rest of the population? Baron-Cohen has conducted extensive studies [1,2] examining the prevalence of autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) and mathematical or scientific ability. Most of these studies, however, have focused mostly on (Cambridge) undergraduates or winners of the UK Mathematics Olympiad.

In one study, Baron-Cohen found in [2] that Olympiad winners scored the highest in the AQ test ($\mathrm{AQ}\colon 24.5,\mathrm{ SD}\colon 5.7$), with the second highest scoring group being the mathematics students ($\mathrm{AQ}\colon 21.5,\mathrm{ SD}\colon 6.4$).$^1$ This leads one to conjecture that autistic traits may be more prominent among individuals with higher mathematical ability.

Question: What is the population evidence$^2$ around autism/autistic traits in mathematics? If possible, at the postgraduate level in professional mathematicians?

Disclaimer: There is a another question focused on the postgraduate maths skill set: Is there any evidence for the distinction between undergrad and postgrad mathematics?.

$^1$Note however that the sample is small: $n=16$ for UK Olympiad winners, $n=85$ for mathematics students.

$^2$As in measuring the average AQ of mathematicians against other groups, such as graduate students, undergraduates, and controls.

References

  [1] Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Amy Burtenshaw, and Esther Hobson. "Mathematical talent is linked to autism." Human nature 18, no. 2 (2007): 125-131.

  [2] Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Richard Skinner, Joanne Martin, and Emma Clubley. "The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians." Journal of autism and developmental disorders 31, no. 1 (2001): 5-17.

No. I can't seem to find a specific study into professional mathematicians or graduate students so far, the studies always seem to group the occupations together.

However, Baron-Cohen's team has done an impressive national survey (Ruzich et al., 2015) and recruited nearly half a million people through a UK TV show. They managed to get over 450,394 survey respondents which allowed them to analyse occupations. They found that people working in STEM scored higher in an autism screening questionnaire or AQ (Autism-Spectrum Quotient) test.

  individuals working in a STEM career (m = 21.92, SD = 8.92) scored higher than individuals non-STEM careers (m = 18.92, SD = 8.48)

Unfortunately, there wasn't a specific category for mathematicians as probably it is too specific and too small a field to analyse. The three categories (figure 3) forming STEM was Comp & IT, Engineering and Sci & Tech. Mathematicians would fit into one of those occupational roles.

References

Ruzich, E., Allison, C., Chakrabarti, B., Smith, P., Musto, H., Ring, H., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2015). Sex and STEM Occupation Predict Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) Scores in Half a Million People. PLOS ONE, 10(10), e0141229.


What causes some people to unconsciously imitate the accents of others? Background: I often notice that when I talk with someone with an accent that I often unconsciously start to imitate their accent. Similarly, you see some people that very quickly after moving to a country start to adopt the local accent whereas others maintain their original accent for many years.

Questions

What causes individual differences in the tendency to unconsciously take on accents?
Has there been research on the process of unconsciously imitating accents?

TLDR When two speakers become more similar in their speech this is called convergence or accomodation (opposite: divergence). This can occur on all levels of language, phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. When mutual intellgibility is not an issue, accomodation mainly occurs when speakers like each other or want to appear likeable.

  Q: Has there been research on the process of unconsciously imitating accents?

Phonetic accommodation has been documented for a range of cases, for example for

mean intensity (Natale 1975)
perceptual similarity of individual lexical items (Pardo 2006)
vowel duration (Kim 2012, Pardo 2012)
voice onset time, fundamental frequency and the frequency of the first formant in vowels (Kim 2012)

Most studies have not studied spontaneous interaction and were mostly based on special elicitation techniques, but accommodation has also been documented in spontaneous speech (Levitan et al. 2012).

  Q: What causes individual differences in the tendency to unconsciously take on accents?

We converge with interlocutors that we like or that we want to like us (shown by, for example, Babel 2009). We diverge from those that we don't like, although this may be rarer - In general, speakers adopt pronunciations that they think are socially desirable in a situation (see Mather 2012 and the classic study by William Labov it is based on).

I beg to disagree with @Skippy's opinion that people "without a firm sense of identity or an underdeveloped ego" are more likely to accomodate or converge with another speaker. It rather appears that converging with an interlocutor is a social skill connected to empathy. You speak more like your interlocutor or a group you interact with so that you will be accepted as one of the team. This will make social interaction and achieving your aims easier than if you did not accomodate.

I don't mean to say that there are not people with "a firm sense of identity" that are particularly unlikely to converge with other speakers. But I do disagree with the implication behind these phrases, namely that "a firm sense of identity" (and not accomodating) is something desirable and an "underdeveloped ego" (and accomodating) something undesirable. On the contrary, converging with other speakers is an important and valuable social skill that helps us connect with other people and establish common ground. Those who (even unconsciously) insist on not accomodating to other speakers could also be characterised as having problems in adapting to new people or groups they come in contact with and lacking in empathy.

But I do see the point that those who are desparate for the approval of other people might go to great lengths to get it - including accomdating their speech to a high degree.


Measuring the adoption of norms I'm trying to make a survey and I'm having trouble to find a scale to measure the adoption of norms.

The people who fill in the survey have to think about a situation in which they were ashamed. For example, they stole something, got caught and the entire school knew of it. I'd like to measure to what extent they have adopted new behavioural norms to handle the situation differently in the future (e.g., not steal). The most convenient scale would be a likert scale, which is easy to analyse statistically.

I have read dozens of papers about recidivism, norm incorporation, norm adoption, ... but none of them seem to measure how I'd like to do it. My survey has to be backed up by literature, but in this case, after many hours and hours (for the past several weeks) I can't seem to find what I'm looking for. I'm disposing of a university account that has access to most academical papers

When I was looking at recidivism, the scales I found were just asking demographic questions and other questions to assess whether or not the subject would be doing the same crime again. It weren't questions that you could ask to see if the subject had incorporated new social norms. Other research about norm adoption/incorporation just handles the subject as such without assessing it. Maybe there is a common used term for norm incorporation which I can't seem to find (not a native speaker)?

Yes -- I would look into the literature of attitude change. I think this research would be relevant to your hypotheses.  Here's the Wikipedia article for attitude change, and here's a representative paper from that literature that might be useful. At any rate, I don't think the phrase "norm adoption" is the right wording for what you're studying in English. Does this help?


Is thinking with language efficient? I wondered, whether it is efficient to think with language (of course it's efficient for communication). When I'm thinking with long words, it takes longer than thinking with short words. Maybe thinking without words would be even faster?

So, do babies, who didn't learn think faster because they don't immediately try to find words for their thoughts to tell someone about them?

  For example, when we see 1 + 1 = 2, we think of every symbol as a
  word one plus one equals two. I assume, someone, who lacks language(Babies for example), would think of this without these words, but instead with emotions(maybe). See the note at the end.

In our everyday life, we almost always need to talk to others about our thoughts. This leads to us thinking with these words instead of just thinking and then finding words for it. It's like writing a manuscript just from front to end instead of first brainstorming and collecting ideas.

Main question: Is it possible to think in a two-step process(and would it be more efficient)? First, thinking with emotions(or whatever you want to call it) and then finding words for that to spread your idea?

  Note: I think the "Problem" here, is that, when we think of something, we simulate saying its name in our brain, to be prepared for a real conversation. Right?

Short answer We do think with 'both', and there is evidence to suggest that we need some sort of conscious representation of our thoughts in order to reason about our surroundings. Emotion itself is not enough.

Longer answer:

We do think with our emotional reactions, and we also think with words. When we think with emotions, these are our 'instincts' kicking in. We rely on our emotional ('gut') reactions to tell us when something or someone is dangerous, for example. The instinctual drive is certainly a very valuable thing, and it would be awfully hard to survive without it.

Is thinking 'with words' inefficient? Maybe if an emotional reaction was all you needed in that moment. There are situations -- certain social interactions, for example -- that don't necessitate thinking 'with words'.

However, you can't throw out language entirely. The field of artificial intelligence relies on the fact that the brain can think with words (and, thus, consciously reason its way through situations). The idea of Connectionism in artificial intelligence research relies on the idea that mental states are representational, and thus can be used computationally. In fact, 'neural networks' can be viewed as thinking machines, and most (if not all) research done with neural networks relies on the property that they can think with some sort of representation, language or otherwise.

Why would this be important? One idea is that you need language to make 'connections' (or associations) in your brain between abstract objects. This idea is obviously pretty central to connectionism, given its name. With a storehouse of existing connections, you can modify the 'weight' of these connections upon receiving new input (i.e. new information). In non-technical terms, this means that you can learn more advanced topics, change existing beliefs, and use existing definitions to create newer, more complex ones -- all through human reasoning with conscious representations in the form of language. Thus, language allows us to track the progression of a thought long enough to make a conclusion. If you rely on simply the feeling you get when you see, hear, or remember something, it doesn't do much to increase your ability to reason about that thing.

However, since artificial intelligence focuses almost exclusively on cognition and human reasoning, we could probably look at its shortcomings in order to see where non-representational (i.e. unconscious, perhaps 'emotional') reasoning is a more efficient approach. One obvious problem is that machines can't recognize facial expressions or social context. While you and I could probably recognize a crying face without putting much thought into it, a machine would have to reason through a storehouse of representations (in this case, images of faces instead of words) in order to find the one that represents 'crying'. It would then have to compare this face to the face before it to determine how to comfort it. Even then, it would have to reason through a storehouse of 'comforting' sentences...and you get the idea.

You mention that babies learn faster. This is largely due to the fact that babies are more sensitive to novelty in the environment (see: critical period). This has been demonstrated through studies that show that infants will look longer at a novel stimulus than a familiar stimulus [1]. Given that there is less 'familiarity' in the world of a baby, their attention is more easily captured. There is certainly more to it than that, but there isn't a lot of consensus. We do know, however, that a 'critical period' seems to exist. You might be interested in this paper, which spends some time discussing the progress of a young girl who had lived in isolation and thus had not developed a first language until age eleven. Though she made steady progress, the pace at which she acquired language was much, much slower than that of an infant.

Furthermore, you mention that word length may put a damper on the efficiency of your thought processes. Bear in mind that every language is different. If you were reasoning in Chinese, for instance, your words would be much shorter, and you could arguably think more 'thoughts' in less time (the Chinese language lacks inflection, for instance). However, longer words can also provide more room for specificity. Many modern day concepts (the concept of 'intuition', for example) came directly from German, a language notorious for its long words.

Sources used:

[1] Turk-Browne, Nicholas B., Brian J. Scholl, and Marvin M. Chun. “Babies and Brains: Habituation in Infant Cognition and Functional Neuroimaging.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2 (2008): 16. PMC. Web. 24 Aug. 2015.


Can hypnosis stop cigarette smoking? Alas, advertisements or commercials for "hypnotherapy" to stop any number of bad habits from smoking to weight gain are almost unavoidable now days.

Are there any actual unbiased studies or hard statistics on whether or not hypnosis is effective at curing an addiction to nicotine, or breaking the habit of cigarette smoking?

Green and Lynn (2000) conducted a meta analysis of 59 experiments investigating the efficacy of hypnosis on smoking cessation. Their conclusions were:

There is mixed, inconclusive evidence for whether hypnosis is any better than placebos.
Hypnosis treatments were generally confounded with educational interventions and cognitive/behavioral interventions, making it impossible to isolate hypnosis as the causal source of positive results.

In short, their conclusion is:

  Hypnosis cannot, as yet, be regarded as a well-established treatment for smoking cessation

Barnes et al. (2010) ran a meta analysis ten years later, and came to the same general conclusion. There is no evidence that hypnotherapy for smoking cessation works better than no treatment at all. They found that claims of success in the literature are generally uncontrolled studies, and that:

  The effects of hypnotherapy on smoking cessation claimed by uncontrolled studies were not confirmed by analysis of randomized controlled trials.

References

Barnes, J., Dong, C. Y., McRobbie, H., Walter, N., Mehta, M., & Stead, L. F. (2010). Hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD001008.pub2

Green, J., & Lynn, S. J. (2000). Hypnosis and suggestion-based approaches to smoking cessation: An examination of the evidence. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 48(2), 195-224.


Name for awareness of the probability of an event increasing the probability of it happening Before Christmas, NZ Police announced they would be enforcing a zero tolerance on exceeding the speed limit in December/January. Previously there was a 10kph grace unless a driver was obviously driving dangerously. The rationale would be that it would reduce the holiday road toll (deaths through motor vehicle accidents).

Unfortunately the road toll doubled over the previous year.

I'm aware that this could be an anomaly and is subject to many factors, however, is there a related psychological principal (perhaps something around 'suggestion') that states that if a person or population is made aware of a probability of an event, that the probability of that event happening is increased?

I believe what you are describing is known as self-fulfilling prophecy and has been well-studied.

  Self-fulfilling prophecy are effects in behavioral confirmation effect, in which behavior, influenced by expectations, causes those expectations to come true. It is complementary to the self-defeating prophecy.

It is due to an uncontrolled, positive feedback loop between the expectations of a group of people and their behavior.  It applies to a wide variety of situations, such as market panics and bank runs, to expectations of an individual's position in society.

In fact, your example describes a self-defeating prophecy.

  A self-defeating prophecy can be the result of rebellion to the prediction. If the audience of a prediction has an interest in seeing it falsified, and its fulfillment depends on their actions or inaction, their actions upon hearing it will make the prediction less plausible.

In essence, the people in your example didn't want the speed limit buffer to go away (in effect, making the speed limit lower) so the theory states that they purposely (if subconsciously) increased the rate at which they crashed to disprove the government's theory that lower speed would prevent crashes.


Bottom up thinking - what is it? Mlodinow has book Elastic thinking, which sounds interesting and where he mentions bottom up processes/thinking; which he equates with elastic thinking.

I have watched numerous videos about it, and even read some sample chapters of the book - but to my surprise, it is still unclear to me what exactly he means by bottom up thinking?

One unclear quote from the book is:

  Elastic thought is where your new ideas come from. Imaginative, original, and non-linear, it is “bottom-up” thinking, in which insights percolate into the mind, seemingly from nowhere.

Another unclear quote:

  Elastic thinking is about stretching your mind and using ‘bottom up’ processing in the brain rather than the top down executive functions that drive analytical thinking

Can someone please bring some simple and concrete examples from daily life, of what is bottom up thinking?

ps. His book is based on research and says it is known term in science community, this elastic thinking/bottom up thinking, and hence my hope people here may know what is it.

Hutchinson, B. (2002), an article in the book Synergy Matters by Adrian M. Castell may help in understanding what is meant by bottom up thinking and the opposite, top down thinking.

[T]he  term  ‘top  down’  is  used to  describe an  approach  to  problem solving  where  the  problem  space  is  defined  first.  The  worldviews  of  the  participants are used  to  conceptualise  the  desired  state  of  the  proposed system.  Once  this  is achieved,  the  system  is  developed  within  this  boundary.  The  components,  or subsystems  are  derived  within  the  context  of  the  predefined  desired state. The  term  ‘bottom  up’  is  used  to  describe  an  approach  where  no  assumptions  are  made about the  boundary  of  the  problem  space.  The  behaviour  of  component  parts  are rationally  observed  to  determine  the  properties they  have.  Management  decisions, or system designs  are  then  based  on  the  observed  behaviour  of  components.

An example given in the conclusions is:

[I]nvestigating a system failure in bottom up mode would look for causes at the element level, or more precisely, at their interactions. The top down mode would tend to look at the overall system, and would put ‘blame’ on the system itself and how it functions, rather than emergent properties of system element interactions.

Think of it like a brick building.  You need to build it from the bottom up, with each brick being correctly placed to form the correct shape etc.  If the bricks are placed differently, you may get a different building, or maybe you will get the same building but badly constructed.
Take the following as a more detailed example comparison...
There is a team of researchers working on a task and each member inputs their findings into a computer system which analyses the results and comes up with a conclusion.
The program relies on accurate information from each team member entry but there was a slight error in a couple of entries producing an incorrect conclusion by the system.
A top down thinker would blame the computer system analysing the results.  A bottom up thinker would analyse what the system was analysing and how, leading to them finding the real cause.
References
Hutchinson, B. (2002). Bottom up thinking. In Synergy Matters (pp. 445-450). Springer, Boston, MA. doi: 10.1007/0-306-47467-0_75Preview available in Google Books


Name for a condition where one with their limited knowledge thinks of a problem as bigger than it really is? I know about Dunning-Kruger... where to put it bluntly, one overestimates oneself.

I am looking for a definition/name, to further research and reference in discussions with my peers, for a bias, that defines the following behavior:

The person A has knowledge X in a field Y.
The person estimates a problem in the field Y as being of complexity Z.
Though, another person - B, in the field Y, having knowledge greater than X, sees Z as a much lesser problem or not a problem at all.

Implying that it's not worth solving, or that solution to a greater problem automatically solves the lesser one.

Of course, given that person B estimation is unbiased, therefore objective.

For example, I'm a software engineer with fair amount of experience and I can freely speculate (make educated guesses) about problems/solutions in fields outside of my immediate proficiency.

If, given the knowledge I have, I would estimate a problem in this outside field as generally/objectively BIG where people actually inside the field would not.

How is the condition called? (Assuming it's already defined)

This somehow might be related to Confirmation bias, but I do not commit to action, I abstain from it, because I see it as much too complex for me to tackle.

I can't provide you with a direct term that you are looking for. However, I think the level of confidence comes close.

My reasoning is as follows: Experience/knowledge increases task proficiency (Kuhlthau, 1999). Proficiency affects the level of confidence. Confidence, in turn, affects the perceived task complexity (Chang, 2005).

References
- Kuhlthau, JASIST (1999); 50(5): 399-412
- Chang, Computers Human Behav (2005); 21(5): 713-28


DISC correlation with Big Five personality Apparently DISC (dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance) is a kind of personality test.

When/where is it used and how does it correlate with Big Five?

According to Jones and Hartley (2013), it's a test seldom mentioned in textbooks, but "used extensively in industry", more precisely in business organizations. Thee same paper also provides cross-correlation with Big Five factors:

Since the names in the left column of this table are a bit unusual ("left factors"), they are (in this order)

the opposite of Extraversion
the opposite of Openness
the opposite of Agreeableness
Conscienscouness (not negated)
the opposite of Neuroticism

Also the Wikipedia descriptions of "DISC" factors don't quite agree with Jones and Hartley, which give them as

Drive/Dominance (D) – task-oriented, fast-mover, bottom-line-oriented
Influence (I) – people-oriented, energetic, desire popularity and praise
Steadiness (S) – very people and family-oriented, motivated by loyalty and security, slower-moving
Compliance/Conscientiousness (C) – task and detail-oriented, wants all information, slower-moving

The correlations are pretty weak, but some "conclusions" are amusing: to be "stable" (i.e. non-neurotic in Big Five terms) one needs to be steady/submissive (and not dominant/driven) and the opposite goes for "tough-minded", or otherwise put, being agreeable looks (again) like being submissive/steady and not dominant. Being "closed minded" is correlated with being steady/submissive and not being good at influencing/inducing other people. And an introvert is "compliant" (??) and again not good at influencing other people. These "conclusions" don't make a lot of sense to me, except maybe the last one...


how to statistically analyse accuracy data (psycholinguistics) My experiment is a naming task, in which participants name pictures and their vocal responses are recorded and the onset of vocalization. The data I am dealing with are reaction times in ms and accuracy ( correct answers in percentages. I did the analysis of reaction times and what is left is the accuracy data in which I need your valued help.

Now, just to explain what I have done so far:
Each subject has an average score results for four conditions: Condition A, scored 10/15 , B 9/15, C 6/15 , and D 7/15. I transferred the discrete numbers into percentages and intended to use a mixed anova as I have One independent variable with two levels and two dependent variables with two level each.

My questions are:

1- Do I have to run a normality test for these data? the data size is over 30?
2- what if they were not normally distributed? what should I do?
3- Is transferring data into percentage right or wrong?

Many Thanks.

Sounds interesting!
Transferring counts into percentages definitely loses some information: 1/2 is not the same evidence as 100/200, but the difference is lost as a percentage.

ANOVA is pretty popular, but as you note in the question it can have problems.
Because you have the classic linguistics/psych use-case of non-independent data (ie grouped by participant), you probably want to jump on the mixed effects model bandwagon if you possibly can. I hear it's all the rage.

Some justification/motivation here:

Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of memory and language, 59(4), 434-446.

And R package to do the heavy lifting for you here:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glmm/vignettes/intro.pdf

Sounds like you have the binomial-input case.


If ADHD is caused by brain structure, why isn't analysis of brain structure used to diagnose it? My understanding is that people with ADHD have different brain structure to people without.

If this is the case, why isn't the difference of brain structure used to diagnose ADHD, rather than a series of questions relating to behavioral symptoms?

ADHD is not 'caused' by a brain structure. However, there are observable differences in the brains of ADHD sufferers compared to non-ADHD sufferers.

For example, ADHD sufferers have a disproportionately greater decrease in volume in the left side of the prefrontal cortex, as well as the posterior parietal cortex.

In addition, there is typically a reduction in the number of dopamine receptors, as well as a sensitivity to neurotransmitter activity. Thus, stimulants and cognitive enhancements are often used to treat ADHD.

This paper does a good, in-depth job of mapping networks and brain connectivity to ADHD. If you were to read it, you might notice a problem -- it isn't the case that there is one 'brain structure' that ADHD sufferers have that non-sufferers do not have, nor is it just one brain structure that is affected. The way that ADHD seems to 'work' in the brain is very complex, and there is still much to be learned about the brain before we can go about diagnosing people based on MRI data.

Furthermore, the line between ADHD and other mental disorders is not clearly drawn. Inattentiveness could stem from depression, trauma, or insomnia, for example. Mania and/or hyperactivity could stem from bipolar disorder or histrionic personality disorder. We are so far from figuring the brain out that we can only rely on context at this point in time.


What does "veridicality" mean in terms of psychology? I'm reading the paper "Visual Space Perception and Visually Directed Action" by Loomis, Da Silva, Fujita and Fukusima (1992; pdf). In this paper, the word 'veridicality' is used in several sentences.

Some examples:

  Even with such a narrowed focus, it is apparent that no consensus on the veridicality of visual space perception exists, for the experimental results depend strongly on both the criterion of veridicality and the psychophysical method used.
  One criterion for veridicality is linearity of the function relating perceived egocentric distance to physical distance.

I used dictionaries and websites (including Wikipedia) to get a grasp of this concept, however, I found nothing that gave good meaning to this word. I assume this is a psychological term, since the linguistic meaning didn't fit well in my opinion.

What does 'veridicality' mean, and how I should interpret it in this context?

References
Loomis JM, da Silva JA, Fujita N, Fukusima SS. (1992) Visual space perception and visually directed action. Journal of experimental psychology: Human perception and performance 18(4), 906-921.

Veridicality is a term used in cognitive science; it is the degree to which your internal representation of the world accurately reflects the external world.
Some background
Since the work on Humberto Maturana in color perception, it was considered very important to not always focus on the fact that there is some external stimuli to be cognized by the subject and then reacted on, but that instead there is an internal world or representation which is then cognized and responded to. In many cases the veridicality of the internal representation is very good, and the experimenter can focus on just the easy-to-observe external stimuli. However, in many settings (like color perception) the veridicality of the internal representation is low (easiest way to imagine this: think of a difference in internal representation between a color-blind and non-color-blind person). Hence the experimenter needs to explicitly measure the internal representation and try to understand how it acts. Once you have a measure of this (a 'criterion for veridicality') then you can start to think about how the subject cognizes the stimuli.
Specific to this paper
In the context of the first sentence, what the authors are saying is: even with the narrow focus, it appears that the accuracy of the internal representation does not improve. Thus, the experimental results depend not only on the external stimuli (psychophysical method used) but how good we are at estimating the accuracy of the internal representation (criterion of veridicality).
In the second sentence they propose a metric of veridicality: ask how far you think an object is (say in meters) if the results scale linearly with actual distance, then the internal representation of space is good, else it is not.


Does procrastination imply knowledge of what is being delayed? When someone says he is procrastinating, does that imply that he knows which exact action is better than the action that he is currently doing?

Is it called procrastination when you know that your current course of action is not optimal, but you don't know exactly what course of action would be better than your current course of action?

No. A person may claim to be procrastinating without putting any real thought into specific alternatives that are known to be better. For example, one might also claim this because one is aware of more socially desirable alternatives, which aren't necessarily better, or because one has been told by someone else (who isn't necessarily right) that one's behavior is procrastinatory.

A more general definition of procrastination may be found in the intro section of the Wikipedia article on procrastination, or on the procrastination tag wiki. I don't think the case you describe fits either definition, because not knowing a better approach implies that one's choice of approach (delay, presumably) isn't necessarily needless, but one may still choose this approach for purely rational reasons that have nothing to do with anxiety.


What's the name of the quantifying preference for visual stimulus by varying size or distance as compared to a reference task? Say that you enjoy looking at two beautiful paintings (A and B). But you really can't tell which one you like more, and you want to (quantitatively).

So, you compare them both to your favorite painting (C), which you know you really like to look at (adjusting for novelty).

In order to do this, you vary the size of your favorite painting C on a computer screen (or its distance from you in real life), and find the point at which C is so much smaller that you'd rather look at A. You do the same for painting B.

You then attempt to quantify how much you prefer A to B by asking: for which painting (A or B) was C larger when you first preferred to look at that painting rather than C? This is the one that you prefer more, and the distance between the C "breakpoints" gives some measure of your relative preference.

Of course this difference will be at best an interval measurement, not a ratio one, but that's usually better than no measurement.

Here is my question: what is this procedure (or some variant of it) called? This seems like a basic enough test that it must already be in use, and I am curious to hear more about it.

Related question: How is the size of a video related to its perceived quality?

Dude. This is an awesome experiment.

Emotional Design is written by my favorite cognitive psychologist, Donald Norman. It's full of research on taste. In it, he says taste is highly subjective and based on culture.

C is probably equally distant in both cases, at the point where it becomes unreadable. Unless at that point you'd rather look at C and say, "Hey, what's that?!" Like ship sails far away in the ocean.

One last point. We have no idea why we behave. We just rationalize it afterward. What we say we like and the way we behave are totally different. Girls just want to be with a nice guy.

There was a Harvard study for a painting class. Each class painted 5 paintings (or something). At the end of the semester, the teacher gave a class one of their paintings back. For the other class, the students took home their favorite painting. They waited 6 months (or something) and interviewed the students. The students who were given their painting LOVED it. They had their painting proudly displayed somewhere. The students who were given a choice were unhappy. They kept wondering what-if? They never felt right about their painting and most of them hid it away, maybe under a bed.

There's good evidence that if you want to stay happily in a relationship with someone, DON'T THINK ABOUT WHY YOU LIKE THEM. It will end badly. There's a whole study on this as well. It got ugly.


Is there a reduction of "Brain Fog" with fewer hours of sleep? I've heard patients who complain of "brain fog" (and fatigue) claim a reduction in "brain fog" (and more mental clarity) when they get fewer hours of sleep (usually less than 5.5 hours).

Here I'd define brain fog as a lack of mental clarity, slow and muddled thinking, trouble stringing thoughts, drowsiness, a reduced ability to focus, a feeling of drifting off, and a reduced ability to shift attention.  Delirium (without hallucination) could be a close medical term.

My questions are:

Any theories on why this may happen?
Is anyone familiar with any research regarding less brain fog with less sleep?

I've read in a paper by MacLean and Datta (2007) that sleep deprivation has been successfully used to treat depression, but not so with anxiety.

  Indeed, in clinical studies, sleep deprivation has been an effective
  form of treatment for major depressive disorders in humans (Clark et
  al., 2001; Giedke et al., 2003; Gillin et al., 2001); but deprivation
  has shown little or negative results in patients diagnosed with
  anxiety disorders (Dinges et al., 1997; Labbate et al., 1998). Results
  from recent REM and total sleep deprivation studies in rodents
  demonstrate the anxiogenic effect of disrupted sleep (Silva et al.,
  2004; Suchecki et al., 2002a; Suchecki et al., 2002b).

Depression and delirium are two distinct things, and I'd be interested in hearing more about how sleep deprivation effects delirium -- since it seems that brain fog is not a widely used term.

Robert Ross MacLean and Subimal Datta (2007). The relationship between anxiety and sleep-wake behavior after stressor exposure in the rat. Brain Res. 2007 August 20; 1164: 72–80. Published online 2007 June 27. doi:  10.1016/j.brainres.2007.06.034

I'm going to update this as I learn more (until I get a reasonable answer), in attempt to both log and share what I'm learning on the subject.

  Using imaging, he found that a small area of the cerebral cortex in
  the front of the brain  — the anterior cingulate cortex — which was
  consistently overactive in depressed patients, quieted to normal
  levels of activity after the patients were deprived of sleep. And when
  the patients were allowed to sleep, the activity in this area returned
  to the elevated levels.

SEJNOWSKI, T. (2010, April 7). In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression - NYTimes.com. Opinion - Opinionator - NYTimes.com.

  A study in rats suggests that individual neurons take a nap when the
  brain is forced to stay awake, and that the basic unit of sleep is the
  electrical activity of single cortical neurons.

Colwell, C. S. (2011). Neuroscience: Sleepy neurons? Nature. Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7344/full/472427a.html

The scientific concept which most closely matches your description of "brain fog" is sleep inertia.

Any theories on why this may happen?

First, a brief detour.  Sleep is divided up into 5 stages (stages 1, 2, 3, 4, and REM). Since 2007, NREM sleep has been reclassified into stages N1, N2, N3, with N3 being a combination of the former stages 3 and 4; however, most scientific papers are still using the old system, so I'll refer to them by the old stage names.  Below, you can see a typical hypnogram, where sleep stage is plotted versus time for one night's sleep.  Cycles through the night tend to progress from 1→2→3→2→REM, but can change unexpectedly if the subject is awakened.

(image from Wikipedia)
While sleep inertia has been well researched since the late 70s, its definition relies on changes in responses to behavioral measures rather than any specific anatomical structures that might be involved.  In other words, it is difficult to "diagnose" someone with sleep inertia without seeing their performance on a demanding cognitive task.
It is known that waking up results from a signal that travels between the reticular system of the thalamus to the thalamus itself, and from the thalamus onto the cortex.  Many studies have used fMRI as a means to catch the brain as it falls asleep, but there don't seem to be too many which capture that moment of awakening.
Sleep staging (how levels of sleep are scored, as seen above) relies on EEG measures, so it is natural that after a subject wakes up from a study, their EEG signals can continue to be measured.  This gives researchers an opportunity to see into the dynamics of the cortex, but anatomical resolution and involvement of subcortical structures (like the thalamus) is not measurable.  It would be nice to have a functional picture of subcortical activity to gauge the progression of waking.
A recent EEG study by Marzano (2011) found that the waking brain had a higher degree of delta activity in occipito-parietal (more posterior) areas, and a lower degree of delta activity in the frontal areas.  They found increases in beta activity in the frontal areas, which tended to be stronger after awakening from stage 2 sleep than from REM sleep.  This study did not attempt to localize any anatomical structures, but in general indicates that more posterior portions of the brain (perhaps associated with vision and posture) tended to mimic the activity found in slow-wave sleep for a time after awakening.
Sleep inertia has been found to depend on

prior sleep duration
sleep stage prior to being awake
time of day of awakening

and last between 30 minutes and 3-4 hours depending on prior sleep deprivation and other factors.
However, the effects of it seem to vary greatly based on the task that the brain is asked to attend to during that time.

Is anyone familiar with any research regarding less brain fog with less sleep?

On the extreme timescale of a short nap, this has been shown to be true, but the results can be extrapolated to longer time scales.  Tassi (2000) reported on a study in which the subjects took 20, 50, and 80 minute naps.  The 50 minute nap-takers were found to have more intense sleep inertia, most likely due to the chance to lapse into a higher percentage of slow wave sleep during that time (stages 3 + 4 under the old system, and stage N3 in the new one) and potentially not return to stage 1 or 2 before awakening.  The 80 minute nappers, which one might think would have worse sleep inertia upon waking, were able to get into REM sleep, and so experienced less sleep inertia (this is a slight contradiction to Marzano's result above, but I think Tassi's assertion is more widespread in the literature).  However, Tassi also reported a study where decrements in performance were reported in REM sleep with a higher density of eye movements.
Sleep deprivation tends to increase the amount of deeper sleep once the person has the opportunity to rest.  In that case, regardless of stage upon awakening, the sleep inertia tends to be worse.
Matchock (2010) has reevaluated some of the experimental evidence in light of circadian influences.  He added ultradian phase (the marker of one's progress through the circadian day) and whether awakenings were forced or self-imposed to Tassi's list of factors above. Levels of cognition and performance, both hindered in sleep inertia situations, are found not to be uniform throughout the 24 hour day.  Matchock reported on studies where late afternoon naps were more restorative and hindered cognitive function less (less sleep inertia).  Other findings in his review found a relationship between both drops in core body temperature and body temperature of the extremities (both factors known to vary over the day) tended to increase sleep inertia.

[1] Marzano, C., Ferrara, M., et al (2011). Electroencephalographic sleep inertia of the awakening brain.  Neuroscience 176:308-317.
[2] Matchock, R.L. (2010). Circadian and sleep episode duration influences on cognitive performance following the process of awakening. International Review of Neurobiology, 93:129-151. doi
[3] Tassi, P., Muzet, A. (2000) Sleep Inertia. Sleep Medicine Reviews 4:341–353.


Savant syndrome and Cognitive bias Take the case of an autistic savant with exceptional memory skills.

Is this person less prone to cognitive biases involving memory skills such as availability heuristic bias than a normal person due to his exceptional memory skills?

EDIT

Does more memory skills reduce the chances of cognitive biases relating to memory or its the ability to recall them effectively that reduce the chances or is it a combination of both?

Also, does lack of information be perceived as a cognitive bias?

In general, no. People with excellent memories can just as easily misapply the availability heuristic as people with poor memories.

To see why, consider a situation where a reasoner is asked to estimate the relative frequency of murder and suicide. Because examples of murder or more "available" (i.e., more easily recalled) than examples of suicide, the reasoner may conclude that murder is more common than suicide. This conclusion would be mistaken: murder is actually less common than suicide, and murders are only more "available" because they are more likely to be reported in the media than suicides. Note that the problem with this inference is NOT inaccurate memory, but a failure to recognize that memories do not reflect the actual frequencies of murder and suicide.

Of course, someone who has specifically memorized statistics about causes of death -- something that an autistic is perhaps more likely to do -- may be able to draw on that knowledge to answer the question correctly.

  For more information on the "suicide paradox," see http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/31/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-suicide-paradox/


Lecture versus problem-based learning of psychology Studying psychology at a German university, the first two years of your curriculum will be almost entirely filled with lectures: students sit in an auditorium, listen to the professor talk for 90 minutes, they take notes, read a book or two, memorize as much of the content of lecture and books as they can, and at the end of the semester they take an exam. There are six to eight lectures per week, adding up to 12 to 14 hours, and there are an equal number of exams, adding up to the same number of hours.

From my experience and from talking to fellow students, I have the impression that we don't learn much in this way. We call it "bulimic learning": eating up huge amounts of information in a short span of time, barfing it up during the exams, and then immediately wiping our minds of it to hurriedly fill it up again for the next test. This feeling of not learning much is not wholly subjective: a large part of the early education is methodological, and the superficial and incomplete understanding of this area becomes painfully apparent once we have to apply it in more practical seminars. Most of us have to look up even basic statistical procedures that we had to know to pass our tests.

Talking to the professors that teach these courses, the replied to my critique of the current system with pointing out that there are a hundred to two hundred students visiting each lecture, and that it would be impossible to teach them in any other manner. I am not convinced of this. Other disciplines, for example in the humanities, manage the same ratio of students per professors only with seminars, none of which have more than 30 students, and completely without lectures.

Science – and I mean all science –, in my opinion, is a practically applied occupation. Even a practitioner of a more theoretical field, like metaphysics or theoretical mathematics, creates new ideas, "experiments" with them, and writes a paper about them. There is no creativity and nothing practical in learning for an exam, while there is no science that you cannot teach in an applied manner, if you are willing to be less normative about what students need to know: let them find their own problems, their own literature, their own ideas, and present them, discuss them, and revise them. Just as they would do as graduated scholars and researchers.

In a review of studies comparing problem-based learning, with learners "actively elaborating their conceptual frameworks", and traditional teaching through lectures, Reynolds (1997) found that problem-based learning "encourages deep rather than shallow strategies of learning", while "students who followed a traditional curriculum ... manifested poorer learning strategies which favoured reproducing information, with less attention to personal comprehension". Additionally, "PBL courses tend to be associated with better attendance and less distress and depression". Results regarding the increase in knowledge appears to be contradictory, however.

I wonder if there is more (and more recent) research on different methods of teaching psychology, or on the relative merits of lecture versus seminar style teaching, in or outside of psychology.

Sources:

Reynolds, F. (1997). Studying psychology at degree level: Would problem-based learning enhance students' experience? Studies in Higher Education, 22, 263-275. doi:10.1080/03075079712331380886

There is a large amount of research of research that compares the effectiveness of problem based learning (PBL) with more traditional approaches such as lectures. Most of it stems from medical science education, and attests to the positive consequences of PBL (see the meta-analysis by Walker & Leary, 2009). However, some researchers have questioned how rigorous this research is and others have doubts whether the benefits of PBL are worth its costs - as it can be quite resource demanding (for a starting point into this discussion and literature, see e.g., Pease & Kuhn, 2011).

Furthermore, there seems to be much heterogeneity in the effectiveness of PBL (e.g., Walker & Leary, 2009). Several meta-analyses have been conducted in an effort to explain these differences. A good starting point into the subject may be Strobel and van Barneveld's (2009) meta-review of PBL-meta analyses. Quoting from their abstract:

  Problem-based learning (PBL) has been utilized for over 40 years in a
  variety of different disciplines. Although extensively researched,
  there is heated debate about the effectiveness of PBL. Several
  meta-analyses were conducted that provided a synthesis of the effects
  of PBL in comparison to traditional forms of instruction. This study
  used a qualitative meta-synthesis approach to compare and contrast the
  assumptions and findings of the meta-analytical research on the
  effectiveness of PBL. Findings indicated that PBL was superior when it
  comes to long-term retention, skill development and satisfaction of
  students and teachers, while traditional approaches were more
  effective for short-term retention as measured by standardized board
  exams.

[emphasis added]

If you are looking for research on PBL in psychology, the journal Teaching in Psychology may be worth a look. The journal is more of an outlet for publications on specific exercises and teaching-related resources ("hands-on-approach"). However, the proposed teaching methods and exercises (which could be often regarded as PBL) are usually compared to traditional approaches in small evaluation studies. Other than that there doesn't seem to be much research that looks into the effectiveness of PBL in psychology on a broader level.

References

Pease, M. A., & Kuhn, D. (2011). Experimental analysis of the effective components of problem-based learning. Science Education, 95, 57–86. doi:10.1002/sce.20412

Strobel, J. , & van Barneveld, A. (2009). When is PBL More Effective? A Meta-synthesis of Meta-analyses Comparing PBL to Conventional Classrooms. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 3(1).

Walker, A. & Leary, H. (2009). A Problem Based Learning Meta Analysis: Differences Across Problem Types, Implementation Types, Disciplines, and Assessment Levels. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 3(1), 6-28.


What kind of psychologists study 'genius'? Which sub-field of psychology deals with differences in human intelligence? As in, what makes someone an intellectual genius? Or, maybe a bit more humbly, why are some people more intelligent than others? It would help if you could also mention some leading thinkers in this field (or any good resources to read more about these topics)

Thanks!

Which sub-field of psychology deals with differences in human intelligence? As in, what makes someone an intellectual genius?

Broadly speaking, the study of individual differences in psychology is called differential psychology. Psychometrics is the study of psychological measurements, an extremely important part of intelligence research.

  Or, maybe a bit more humbly, why are some people more intelligent than others?

The subfield that has been most important in establishing why some people are more intelligent than others is probably behavioural genetics. This field has been at the forefront of creating experimental designs that can give evidence for the causes of individual differences.

However, these fields overlap. It can sometimes be difficult to difficult to say when something is research in field X or Y (And often not important exactly which field you would categorize it as).

  It would help if you could also mention some leading thinkers in this field (or any good resources to read more about these topics)

There are many important researchers who study intelligence and why people differ intellectually. Here are a few examples of books that talk, in part, about why people differ in intelligence.

(1) "Intelligence" by Stuart Ritchie. This is a short introduction to intelligence research and is easy to read.

(2) "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard Haier. This book is slightly longer, but is still fairly easy to read. This book focuses on the actual brain itself.

(3) "The g Factor" by Arthur Jensen. This is a more detailed and complex book. It's not as new as the others but is considered a classic.

However, if you're talking specifically about high intelligence then there are only a few leading researchers.

There have been several leading figures if you go far enough back. All the way from Francis Galton to Lewis Terman to Julian Stanley. Two of the most important current researchers are David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They are leading the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which is a longitudinal study of highly intelligent individuals. See the link for several publications from the study.

If I could give only a single article (on the subject of very high intelligence) for you to read, it would be the following:

Lubinski, D. (2016). From Terman to today: A century of findings on intellectual precocity.

This is a review of the findings of the study of highly intelligent individuals.

There are other researchers that are important, of course. One other I know who researches high intelligence and high achievement is Jonathan Wai, see his blog if you interested. I'm sure other people could refer to several other important researchers.


Is Contrarian a Psychology Problem? I was searching Google for a name given to a person who disagrees with the majority decision regardless whether he/she truly believe in the opposing idea.

An example, if everyone in group A agrees that John is showing attraction to Julie, Jim [Contrarian] will disagree and will say is something else. Now the same scenario, but group B, if everyone agrees that John is NOT showing attraction to Julie, Jim [Contrarian] will disagree and will say something else.

If Contrarian is the right word for Jim's behavior, is it a psychological problem? If yes, what is the closest term used in psychology to describe such behavior?

Thanks,

Some time ago a contrarian (a concept more usually found in literary or journalistic circles), in psychology would be called 'contra suggestive' or 'contra suggestible'. The two are, however, subtly different.  A contra suggestible person simply believes or does the opposite of something suggested by someone else.

Being a contrarian on the other hand usually involves going against cherished societal beliefs, or against prevailing group norms, and can be related to iconoclasm.

Contra-suggestibility (sometimes hyphenated) came out of the psychoanalitic literature, with all the fun and games that entails.


Is neurogenesis driven by prediction error? Various Deep Learning algorithms [1] and neural models [2] make use of neurogenesis to reduce prediction errors. How much evidence is there that neurogenesis is driven by prediction error or novel inputs?

Neurogenesis in Deep Learning
The mechanisms for pattern completion and pattern separation in the hippocampus

This question is very difficult to provide a satisfactory answer to because the technical neuroscience definition of prediction error is murky and since your question brings up machine learning then the answer is going to depend on what you're trying to do. I'm going to assume you're referring to neurogenesis in an adult brain and not the process that happens immediately after conception because that process is more analogous to deep learning.

From the neuroscience perspective:
I'm not aware of much direct evidence that neurogenesis is a response to prediction errors because we understand very little about the phenomenon. However, it seems bizarre to think that neurogenesis just occurs spontaneously and randomly, so we come to the nature vs. nurture debate. Pure logic would tell me that neurogenesis in adults is something more of a maintenance response to DNA pressures and has little to do with any prediction errors generated by external environmental stimuli. Will explain why in my concluding paragraph.

Keep in mind that even the death of a neuron can be considered prediction error because the machine learning equivalent of "prediction error" in biology is simply a signal that communicates a "deficit" that needs to be filled in some way. In fact, to answer this properly, we must first make it clear that there are potentially dozens, hundreds, or an arbitrarily high number of other "prediction error types" in use by the brain. Here are just a few major ways, hypothetically:

Lots of different neurotransmitters
The opening/closing of various ion channel species that regulate the membrane potential
Synaptic vescicles/receptors
Neuronal firing rates (as in bursting, a rapid succession of action potentials)
Temporal coding (relative firing times to the firing of other neurons)
And I can think of 10 other more-subtle and harder to explain possibilities, but that are just as important, off the top of my head

Keep in mind that each neuron also seems to have its own differentiated mechanisms for, both, interpreting and signaling prediction error. This complicates things further. For instance, one neurotransmitter may communicate prediction error to one particular neuron, but has no effect (or a different effect) on a different neuron. It may even be that neurotransmitter X must be present while temporal code Y happens for the event to be interpreted as a prediction error.

From the machine learning perspective:
In machine learning, we tend to oversimplify prediction error but the brain conforms to no such simplicity. I didn't want to mislead you by saying "yes" to your question because prediction error in artificial neural networks is traditionally a singular concept and not multiplexed like it is in neuroscience. So there is no analogy between prediction error in deep learning and prediction error in neuroscience evidence.

You might need to clarify the reason you are asking so that I can provide a more applicable response.

Deep learning is not biologically plausible, and it sounds like you are trying to discover a more accurate biological solution. If that's the case, looking into neurogenesis as a way to reduce prediction error may not be very fruitful because the new neurons created in adulthood only account for an incredibly tiny portion of the neurons that already exist, and humans encounter prediction errors potentially every second of every day. If we simply created new neurons for all prediction errors, then why are we born with pretty much all the neurons we will ever have? The brain overwhelmingly seems to have a way of learning and retaining the important information without having to create new neurons in response to prediction errors.


In fMRI analyses, what is the t-test actually comparing? In a 1st-level fMRI analysis, it is unclear to me what the t-test performed for each voxel is actually comparing. I've seen this being described in one of two different ways:

The t-test estimates how well the model (HRF curve convoluted with the design) fits the data (BOLD signal), in other words is a measure of the goodness of this fit.
The t-test compares the BOLD signal to a baseline.

I guess both of these can be conceptualized as one-sample t-tests, but it's unclear if the two comparisons would in fact be equivalent, or if different types of t-tests are used in different situations, with the two cases given above being but two examples.

The coefficient is the measure of how strongly the given factor predicts the dependent variable, or in other words how much of the variance in the dependent variable can be explained by that factor. So the coefficient itself, and not the t-statistic of the coefficient, is a measure of what you're calling how well the model (or, more correctly, the regressor) fits the data.

The t-statistic of the coefficient in a multiple regression is the statistical test of that coefficient, calculated as the coefficient divided by its standard error. So it would be most correct to say that this is a measure of how reliable the sample coefficient is, or how likely it is, given the coefficient we got, that the true coefficient is 0. But this is theoretically independent of the goodness of the fit, and you could have a very stable but small coefficient, which would get a high t-stat, or a large-on-average, but highly variable coefficient, which would receive a low t-stat. The results of the test will also, obviously, depend on your sample size and the degrees of freedom in your model.

Where the confusion might be is that the coefficient is more or less the same as a comparison to baseline, becuase the baseline is not (or shouldn't be) an explicit regressor in the model. A higher coefficient will mean, all else being equal, that the fit is better and/or that the effect is larger. But unless you're explicitly running a comparison of activation vs. baseline, this not what the coefficient actually means.

You can read more about this last issue here:
https://github.com/jdkent/tests_and_musings/blob/master/magnitude_and_delay_in_bold.ipynb?fbclid=IwAR3H-pvYmVQtMaDBzDAfexyNeuCUHHe6vuYLsV83l957rvHawv1bWJlaB9U


Does similar writing style tell us the writers are similar with respect to some measure/perspective? Does similar writing style in small texts such as on Twitter or long texts such as articles/novels tell us anything about similarity between

"thinking process"  OR
"personality"   OR
"writing preferences" etc.,

of the writers?

For some instances we can be sure about such correlation, for example persons who like to use abbreviation(short-form), e.g. nite(“night”) or abbreviation(acronym), e.g. lol (“laugh out loud”), or emoticons in short-texts like tweets, are hesitant to write long words(I couldn't find any research on this , but this is being said after a small survey by me and also this deduction seems trivial). Of course, there can be a number of reasons for some preferred writing style like role of culture.

Similarly can we say something about relation between the people who follow similar writing style? By similar writing style, I meant following kind of things,

short-text : use of emoticon vs writing emotion in plain text
short-text : use of Non-dictionary slang, e.g. that was well mint vs “that
was very good”
long-text and short-text : preference to adjectives than combination of verb and adverb

Is there any resource throwing light in this direction in a scientific way?

To me the most obvious similarity factor would be culture/schooling. And that also creates a large confounder for the things you ask about (personality etc.)

A bit of searching did find a paper from 1981 by Ruffner & Burgoon, but it has very few citations. It also uses a pretty antiquated personality test (the Omnibus Personality Inventory). The climax of the paper is predicting various stylistic aspects using personality and education aspects:


Learned dyslexia? adult predicament from childhood teacher´s incompetence? I have a friend, over 30, who is convinced she cannot really read. Of course; she can  read, but she struggles so much with sorting letters into words that she cannot absorb the content. Playing - say - Trivial Pursuit - she looks at the letters; pronounce the words, makes them into sentences, but (says) she does not understand the question until I either answer or say it back to her, or she reads it a second time. She is now, for other reasons, back to school, as she needs to find another profession. I am, in an unofficial capacity, her personal tutor.

The consensus during her school years was that she was extremely dyslectic, a hopeless case, and her teachers let her "get away with it": unlike other students, she did not have to read aloud in class etc (this makes me furious to think about, that they did not give her the help she needed).

She is nowhere near stupid, but insists she is, and that she is so dyslectic that there is nothing that can be done about it. Recently, she took a dyslectic-test and consistently get the worst scores possible.

My suspicion is that she is NOT half as dyslectic as she is made out to be: I think this is largely a learned thing. Since teachers gave up on her; why should she believe she can? Yes, she probably is dyslectic, but the result of incompetent teachers have made her predicament much, much worse.

Fact is; when she has to write things, there are not really all that many spelling mistakes, the sentences are coherent, and she is very good at the logic needed to write - say - a (slightly academic) essay, she is excellent at writing stories, petites. She does, however, have a problem extracting the essence of what she reads. I do think though, that this is largely due to the learned view "I cannot do this, I am too stupid and massively dyslectic". Interestingly, last semester she consistently got top grades in the (native) language class where both content and spelling was important.

This results in (partly learned?) dyslexia as a "gateway" to the crippling thought: "I am an idiot. Why should I try? I will simply spend my life watching television.".

We do not read single letters in words we are familiar with; we largely see the "picture" of a word and make an educated guess/reasonable assumption based on the context. She is visual enough to master this. Having given up on words; there is a possibility that she does not bother to learn them, and hence cannot recognise the word-picture.

I realise this is a very specific example, but my general question is:

How do you teach adults to read?
Is it possible to somehow measure the "I have given up" against real
dyslexia?
How is it possible to motivate an adult other than "you will get
good grades if you improve on this"? (grades, as we all know, can at
times be a little arbitrary and subjective).
Any research on learned dyslexia?
Have our acceptance of dyslexia in a way gone too far? (to the point
of accepting it and "giving up" on students?)
Anyone with experience in this?

I will answer your questions out of order. I hope that is ok.

6 I have dyslexia and other "stuff". I have been diagnosed as such by a psychologist and diagnostician multiple independant times.

2 Dyslexia is quantified as a DSM 5 Neurodevelopment Disorders subcategory Learning Disorder.

  “difficulties learning and using academic skills.”

Before DSM 5 dyslexia was identified by a difference between verbal and performance IQ which would effectively measure the severity of the dyslexia in comparison with the persons ambition. I'm sure psychiatrist have a new standard test which is able to perform such functions as well.

1 Dyslexics typically learn coping strategies at school. Without foundation of those coping strategies I know reading and writing would be even more difficult for me. I was taught to read and spell with the Scottish Rite Dyslexia method. Its basicly phonics on steroids. It seemed to work very well for myself and the others with learning disabilities though not all were dyslexics. I would recommend finding curriculum based on the framework the Masons provide and that is at least is phonetic.

3 Motivating an adult is very difficult. You might do some research on Social Influence which is ethically acceptable manipulation like what doctors use.

4 Absolutely no one knows what causes learning disabilities like dyslexia all major theories point to something biological involving the brain. Finding the source of the problem doesn't help the person. Only treating the symptoms is rational.

5 No. Your friend comes from a time just before the major push for treatment of learning disabilities in public schools. Now learning differences and disabilities are given coping strategies and other tools (primarily time and technology) to help them perform and live healthy normal lives.


Dichotic listening tasks and crosstalk In a dichotic listening task where participants listen to different (frequency-wise) musical tones through headphones, is cross talk to the contralateral cochlea of each ear through bone conduction a source of noise to be taken into consideration, or is it insignificant? If it is a source of noise, are there any ways to eliminate physically or computationally any such effect?

Crosstalk needs to be taken into consideration, but with reasonable controls it can be made insignificant. Interaural attenuation can vary between less than 40 dB to over 60 dB depending on frequency, the type of headphone, and how well it is coupled to the head. If you have 40 dB of interaural attenuation and present the sounds at less than 40 dB SL (sensation level) the cross talk will be inaudible. The further below threshold, the better off you are.

If you need to present the sounds at a level greater than the amount of interaural attenuation, crosstalk will still not matter if the other sound provides sufficient masking or you introduce sufficient masking noise. For dichotic speech tasks, the speech masks the crosstalk. For musical tones, you might need to introduce a masking noise depending on the frequency content of the tones.

It may be easier to simply spatially separate the stimuli by either presenting them over loudspeakers or using head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and presenting them over headphones. In the original work of Broadbent (1954) he used a number of different configurations while Cherry (1953) only used headphones and presented each stimulus monaurally.


what is the difference between mindfulness meditations and focusing on other things? For example:
While I'm studying(or doing anything in my life), my brain wanders around(daydreams, stresses, remembers unpleasant memories and thinks negatively about the future) so I notice that and then bring it back to focus again in studying. Isn't that the same thing as mindfulness meditation? in both things, we focus on or attend to something and when the brain wanders around, we bring it back.
I read articles before 1 2  that say the difference is that in mindfulness, you let things(that you attended to) go after you finish without thinking about it again.
Does that mean that I can call studying a mindfulness meditation if I stopped thinking about it after finishing?

It is question I've been asking myself as well in my experience with mindfulness meditation.

Meditation is not manipulating experience, it is simple noticing it. Furthermore it focuses on sensory experience which seems to be inversely correlated with our narrative experience(Farb et al., 2007).

Being focused on studying involves planning and invariably it adds a narrative feature to our experience. Mindfulness increase grey matter in areas associated with executive control(Hölzel et al., 2011), hence we can hypothesize mindfulness is good for more effective studying.

There might some type of false placebo effect in studies reporting increased focus due to meditation.

Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007). Attending to the present: Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313–322. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsm030

Hölzel, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S. M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S. W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research, 191(1), 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006


What are the effects of hebephilia? Following the Milo Yiannopoulos shebang, I had a discussion with a friend over the effects of a sexually maturing teenager (14ish) engaging in sexual behavior with a significantly older adult (at least 23 years old). In the discussion we both realized that in fact we were just spewing opinions at each-other, and in reality couldn't point to a fair study showing either the negative or positive effects of such practice. So, I am wondering "are there any fair studies exploring the effects?". (I believe that societal sentiment toward such behavior will sway the "victim's" feelings toward the experience, and hopefully the studies will somehow control for that)

I thought I would edit to add a bit of information.  First of all for those who don't know, (I didn't until I looked it up when I saw this question for the first time), the term hebephilia has been proposed to split pedophilia and denote the erotic preference for pubescent children (roughly, ages 11 or 12-14), but it has not become widely used. Along with hebephilia, there is also Pedohebephilia which is erotic preference on both pedophilic and hebephilic levels.

I would also like to address the issue of Milo Yiannopoulos who seems to have been a topic of discussion, which raised this question.  In the Wikipedia page I linked here and in my edit of the OPs question, it says:

  Yiannopoulos stated that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adults can be "perfectly consensual," because some 13-year-olds are, in his view, sexually and emotionally mature enough to consent to sex with adults; he spoke favourably both of gay 13-year-old boys having sex with adult men and straight 13-year-old boys having sex with adult women. (Source 1) (Source 2) He used his own experience as an example, saying he was mature enough to be capable of giving consent at a young age.

The page also states that

  Defending himself in a press conference, Yiannopoulos alleged that he had been the victim of child abuse, and that "his comments were a way to cope with it".

I am not going to enter into any debate or express any opinion on what Yiannopoulos said or didn't say — or even what he may have been trying to say — as this is not the forum to do this, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who has, over a period of over 17 years, supported many who have been sexually abused and raped, I can categorically say that different people use many different ways to "cope" with the effects of the past events.  Was he using repression or projection as an ego-defence mechanism? It's difficult to say.

I have been drafting my answer and editing the draft many times in order to make sure I try not to add anything which might inflame the already heated debate over Yiannopoulos, so here goes.

The question raised here is

  Are there any fair studies exploring the effects of a sexually maturing teenager (14ish) engaging in sexual behavior with a significantly older adult (at least 23 years old)?

In The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology there is an article which examines behavioural scientific research on the subject (McCord, D. 1986).

  A researcher reviewing the literature on the subject, came to the conclusion that little had been learned about child sexual abuse during the preceding twenty-five years.  He also noted that the literature dealing with the sexual abuse of minors, was "scant, unintegrated, and ambiguous. Books on the topic are rare. Articles are scattered and hidden among a wide range of journals, many in non-accessible medical and legal journals."

  One reason for the lack of solid research is simply that the subject is a very difficult one to study. Only a small percentage of cases is ever reported. In those cases that are reported, the participants are often reluctant to discuss the situation. As a result of problems like these there are methodological difficulties virtually built into most research projects in the area.

Comments from research state the following

"Children can exhibit the entire gamut of behaviors in response to a sexual assault, ranging from the negative to the positive." (Burgess, et al., 1978)
"Children's immediate reactions to an assault vary." (Leaman, 1980)
"Incest victims show a wide variety of symptom complaints or may show none at all." (Stuart & Greer, 1984; Sgroi, 1975)
"Even those professionals who have a clinical definition with which they are comfortable will still have problems in identifying sexually abused children." (Mrazek, 1987)

The reason that such a wide variety of symptoms has been noted is that child sexual abuse is very complex situation from the point of view of the victim.  This can perhaps best be illustrated by comparing it with adult rape, which is, by contrast, very unambiguous from the victim's perspective. In adult rape the victim is often but not always coerced by physical force or threats of physical force to engage in sexual activity which he or she does not desire. Under these circumstances, even when there is no physical violence, or threat of physical violence, there is no possibility of the victim enjoying the activity or emerging from the situation with any positive psychological emotions, as consent has not been given. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the reactions of adult victims to forcible rape are remarkably similar to each other and are drastically negative. By contrast, a child sexual abuse victim's feelings may be, and often are, ambivalent. The victim's will is usually much more malleable than an adult's, particularly when the perpetrator may be assuring the child that the activity is normal and even possibly suggesting that it is teaching them what they need to know.

Another point of note which can cause problems for the child in later life is that, although not in all cases, the child may even feel physical pleasure during the activity. As one researcher put it:

  Contrary to the stereotype, most victims in our study readily acknowledged the positive as well as the negative elements of their experience. They talked about the times the physical sensations felt good, or they remembered how their sexual experience with an adult or family member satisfied a longing for affection and closeness that was rarely met at any other time. (Finkelhor, 1981)

While this researcher found that 60% of adult women who had been sexually abused as children remembered the experience as primarily negative, only 7% remembered it as primarily positive.

The effects of statutory rape, and childhood sexual abuse is complex and whether or not it may be perceived to be consensual, it is generally believed that informed consent cannot be given by someone under the legal age of consent. (Abel, et al., 1984).

References

Abel, G. G., Becker, J. V., Cunningham-Rathner, J., 1984. Complications, Consent, and Cognitions in Sex Between Children and Adults. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 7(1), pp. 69-103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-2527(84)90008-6

Burgess, A. W., Groth, N. A., Holmstrom, L. L., & Sgroi, S. M., 1978. Sexual assault of children and adolescents. Lexington, MA: D.C. Health.

Finkelhor, D., 1981. Sexually victimized children. New York, NY: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan.

Leaman, K. M., 1980. Sexual abuse : the reactions of child and family in U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Sexual Abuse of Children: Selected Readings.

Mrazek, P. B., 1987. Definition and recognition of sexual child abuse: historical and cultural perspectives in Sexually abused children and their families. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press.

McCord, D., 1985. Expert Psychological Testimony about Child Complainants in Sexual Abuse Prosecutions: A Foray into the Admissibility of Novel Psychological Evidence. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 77(1), pp. 1-68.
Available Free from: http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol77/iss1/1/

Sgroi, S. M., 1975. Sexual Molestation of Children: The Last Frontier in Child Abuse, Children Today, 4(3) pp. 18-21.

Stuart, I. R., Greer, J. G, 1984. Victims of Sexual Aggression: Treatment of Children, Women, and Men. Publisher: Chapman & Hall.


Are staircases more efficient than the method of constant stimuli? A Bayesian Quest adaptive procedure (Watson and Pelli 1983) is the theoretically most efficient procedure for estimating thresholds under a certain, potentially unrealistic, set of constraints. In my field a transformed up-down method (Levitt 1971) is used much more commonly. Has any work been done comparing the efficiency of the transformed up-down method with the method of constant stimuli?

There was a special issue of the journal Perception and Psychophysics in 2001, titled Psychometric Functions and Adaptive Methods. It contains several papers relevant to your question. Klein's paper [1] references all the others and reviews what each is about. It should serve as a good starting point.

An excerpt from Klein's summary:

  The simple up–down (Brownian) staircase with threshold estimated by
     averaging levels was found to have nearly optimal efficiency in agreement
     with Green (1990). It is better to average all levels (after about four
     reversals of initial trials are thrown out) rather than average an even
     number of reversals.Both of these findings were surprising.
  As long as the starting point is not too distant from threshold, Brownian
     staircases with their moderate inertia have advantages over the more prestigious
     adaptive likelihood methods. At the beginning of a run, likelihood methods may have
     too little inertia and can jump to low stimulus strengths before the observer is
     fully familiar with the test target. At the end of the run, likelihood methods
     may have too much inertia and resist changing levels even though a non stationary
     threshold has shifted.

[1] Klein, S. A. (2001). Measuring, estimating, and understanding the psychometric function: a commentary. Perception & Psychophysics, 63(8), 1421–55. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11800466


Name of sound-induced-hunger condition When I was a student I used to notice that towards supper time, whenever I would go from my quiet study space to a place where people were talking, it people started to tell in my quiet space, i would get hungry.

Recently, I have tried the TalkBack feature on my Android device, and found, that whenever I am lying in bed, time with my stomach, and not feeling hungry, after turning TalkBack on and using it, my hunger level peaks to 100% excruciating hunger, after just five minutes of using TalkBack.

On average I can hear mild sounds in my room throughout the day and they don't bother me, (with just one or two mild exceptions, which might induce a very feather-light hunger feeling towards the evening).

I also have a generic form of misophonia whereby generic noises trigger distress, or even when pleasant, tend to alter it modify my thoughts, while some mild ones seem to pleasantly accompany or suggest or improve my thought performance in some respects in some situations.

However, I have never analyzed the hunger component before formally in a post (especially with relationship to this Android TalkBack feature).

My question is, is there a technical name for the form of extreme sound-induced-hunger I describe?

(Hunger can also be induced by medication, but that's another issue).

Thanks.

Probably not. The closest thing I am aware of is Mayor et al (2016) [The Effect of Chronic Dieting Goals on Auditory Perceptual Biases] where they

  propose the existence of “wishful hearing,” which establishes that ambient product sounds can be perceived as more spatially proximal when more desirable and thus lead to increased purchase intentions and consumption.


Is the approximation of the Medial Frontal Gyrus in the region of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex? I'm wondering if the MFG is located in the region considered the DLPFC?

No; the medial frontal gyrus is medial; it faces the sagittal midline of the brain. Medial is the opposite of lateral; the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is lateral, facing towards the outside of the brain.

Perhaps you are thinking of the middle frontal gyrus?


How can the mind be trained to accept ongoing mental or emotional suffering? We have physical, emotional and mental needs and wants; some tangible, some intangible.

In the case where we know that some of our needs and/or wants are not going to be met; how can the mind be trained to accept the reality with an ongoing craving, learn to accept the reality and live with it, as opposed to escaping within one's imagination dreaming of the past or the future?

For example:

In a committed relationship where one person is not receiving romantic, emotional and sexual pleasures, how can that person learn to accept these facts without continually fantasising and desiring these pleasures with someone else?

How can the mind be trained to accept ongoing mental or emotional
  suffering?

Experiential avoidance: avoiding what we don't like

From the lens of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the process of regressing to a favourable past experience of escapism would be a maladaptive response to experiential avoidance. We avert our attention and stray away from the very things that cause us distress, e.g. we shift our attention to favourable past experiences with previous relationships when we are fighting with our loved ones in the present. We avoid the very things we need to deal with by distracting ourselves with other behaviours.

Experiential avoidance is defined as (EA; Hayes, Strohsahl, Wilson et al., 2004):

  ... [an] unwillingness to experience feelings, thoughts and sensations as
  well as attempts to alter them.

For example, to avoid feeling loathe and resentment for their partner, a person resorts to seemingly pleasurable activities like gambling and drinking.

Mindfulness and psychological flexibility: seeing things the way they are

How do we then train the mind to address behaviours that arise from experiential avoidance?

The model of psychological flexibility is a good starting point in understand how to address ongoing distress, both physical and mental. The theory of psychological flexibility is around cultivating a sustained capability to observe experiences non-judgmentally while committing to value-driven activities (Masuda et al., 2011):

  it is an overall behavior pattern of experiencing whatever one is
  experiencing as it is fully and non-judgmentally without excessive
  defense (i.e., mindfulness), while engaging in value-directed
  activities at the same time (i.e., commitment to actions).

Firstly, in the context of a loveless marriage, the mental training involved would be around cultivating mindfulness to observe the experiences that cause the craving for 'mental and physical pleasures'. To see things clearly is paramount. The descriptor 'loveless' is not an indicator of factual evidence that a relationship is slowly dissolving. Recognising how one uses language and how it affects cognition is important in practicing mindfulness.

Secondly, values are the key catalyst for behavioural change. By systematically seeing things as they are through non-judgmental awareness, one can train their mind in focusing on acting in-line with 'what truly matters to them'. This has eudaemonic roots but has practical implications for psychological flexibility. Consider this very simple hypothetical example:

  X believes that he or she is in a 'loveless' marriage. This causes X a
  lot of  psychological distress, e.g. X feels anxious and hopeless
  about the future with Y (partner). This anxiety manifests in thoughts
  such as 'I don't love Y. Why am I with Y?'. This is the language
  component that considerably causes a high amount of distress for X. X
  recognises the distress he/she feels and learns to become
  non-judgmentally aware and accepts that these thoughts and emotions
  for what they are. X identifies the values in his life that holds
  dear. As a result, X finds that he has greater clarity around how he
  should behave - he wants to be in a committed and flourishing
  relationship and does not want to resort to seemingly pleasurable
  activites, e.g. excessive alcohol, cheating etc.

Freedom in experiencing and choosing

So the key to accepting ongoing mental or emotional suffering is to acknowledge them non-judgmentally and recognise any avoidant behaviours that are arising. Regarding the loveless marriage, the same concept applies: be aware of the thoughts and feelings causing the avoidant behaviours, tap into your values (i.e. for a better marriage, better relationship) and act accordingly to those values. Thus, rather than consumed in mental and physical pleasures - one has the freedom to take a step back and respond to their needs rather than react to ongoing emotional turmoil. This is by no means passive resignation.

Additional: Simple explanation on mindfulness and values

As humans, our thoughts and feelings seem like the only source of truth in understanding ourselves and the world. However, we can get caught up in thoughts and feelings believing that they are true when they are not. This is where mindfulness and values are important.

Mindfulness refers to non-judgmental awareness of our thoughts, feelings and experiences. In some ways, we become observers of our thoughts and feelings and we "take a step back" rather than act on them instantly. Some of these thoughts can cause behaviours where we avoid addressing how we feel rather than sort them out. For example, assume that X has a thought - "She/He never wants to have sex. I'm so frustrated about this." Because of this, X might go and cheat on his/her partner. This is the avoidant behaviour: X behaves in a way that he/she does not address how he/she feels or is thinking. Therefore, practicising mindfulness may help us recognise how we feel and think and not act so quickly.

What next? Well, clear values help us know how we want to behave. X may realise that his/her value is to have loving, intimate and sexual relationship with someone he/she cares about. He/she may then decide to communicate with his/her partner about the problem or decide to move on. Either way, X behaves according to his/her values and not simply how he/she feels.

References

Hayes, S.C., Strohsahl, K., Wilson, K.G., et al. (2004). Measuring
experiential avoidance. A preliminary test of a working model.
Psychological Record, 54, 553–578.
Masuda, A., Anderson, P.L., Wendell, J.W., Choi, Y.Y., Price, M. & Feinstein, A.B. (2011). Psychological flexibility mediates the relations between self-concealment and negative psychological outcomes. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(2), 243-247.