Is there a disorder that causes one to give inanimate objects human emotions? For example, if one is using multiple pens to write something and has not used one of them in awhile, one may think it is "feeling" "left out" and so will switch to use that one. A logical mind KNOWS that inanimate objects cannot feel but one may have such empathy for all things - living or not - that one may attribute human feelings and emotions to them and an emotional brain does this automatically. It is not a conscious action, it is automatic and it dictates how one interacts with things. One can use a logical mind to recognize it but stills feel compelled to make sure everything is taken care of and included. Is this a specific disorder or just a piece of one of another disorder?

Interesting question. I have thought about this a lot, and while I cannot offer a conclusive answer, I can offer some ideas that stem from scientific literature.

I should note that this question may technically be considered off-topic, as it seems to be looking for a diagnosis (and self-help questions are prohibited on this website). However, for the sake of my own curiosity and the curiosity of others, I'll provide my answer nonetheless.

To answer your specific question: No, there is no officially-recognized disorder that causes one to assume human emotions in objects. To be fair, the condition you have described does not constitute the definition of '[mental] disorder' because, by definition, a mental disorder is a mental or behavioral pattern that causes suffering or poor ability to function in life. On the contrary, it seems that this behavioral pattern of yours is helpful to you, for reasons that I will explain below.

There is a theory that the brain forms an image of the body's homeostatic sensations in the "primary interoceptive cortex" of the brain. This area is located in the insula, which is linked to emotion (the body's homeostasis), as well as empathy. [1] This theory is supported by fMRI imaging, which shows activity in the insular cortex when one is asked to feel one's own heartbeat, or empathize with the pain or emotional state of others. [2] Coincidentally, the insula is also involved in psychopathology, or the study of mental disorders. Specifically, it is linked to anxiety disorders [3] and emotional dysregulation. [4]

The spindle neurons found at a higher density in the right frontal insular cortex are also found in the anterior cingulate cortex, and it has been speculated that these neurons are involved in cognitive-emotional processes that are specific to primates, such as empathy and self-aware emotional feelings. While the mechanisms behind the insular cortex are not well known, it is thought that these functions arise as a consequence of the insula's ability to relay its internal 'homeostasis' (or its overall well-being) to the conscious observer. [2]

Given the evidence that empathy is associated with insular activity, and given the evidence that the insula regulates the body's internal sense of 'homeostasis', it can be inferred that those who are highly sensitive (i.e. highly attuned to their internal level of homeostasis) are automatically highly attuned to the others in their environment, as well. Thus, there may be a tendency to expect similar levels of sensitivity in other things, and (by proxy) there may be a tendency to 'tread lightly' around others due to an automatic assumption that they are similarly sensitive. This may extend to inanimate objects, if one recognizes that the 'environment' that the object is in is not maintained in the body's subjective view of homeostasis.

Another thing to consider is that young children often show attachment or subjective association of feelings to objects, and that this is considered normal in young age because of the positive effects it seems to have on children. One study found that children who attended day-care full-time were significantly more likely to develop attachments to inanimate objects than children who only attended day-care part-time. It is not certain why this is the case, though it can be speculated that increased exposure to the real world (and time away from the parent or guardian) increases the child's anxiety as they learn to become independent. A prior study found that there was no link between behavioral disturbances and object attachment; on the contrary, another study found that children used object attachment as a mechanism for arousal reduction (and, thus, anxiety-reduction) in the face of adversity or discomfort in the environment. [5] As I mentioned before, it is thought that children use these objects to transition from dependence to independence.

This is different from treating objects as if they were people, because this is essentially using the object as a token of security to replace the mother as the child advances in age, thus allowing the child to become independent. However, it may reveal insight into those who naturally associate objects with emotions, because it may represent an underlying anxiety in the individual. The attachment to the object may be a way for the individual to circumvent that -- though it could also be unrelated, as this is still in a speculative stage.

Overall, however, I would say that this behavior does not implicate disorder in an individual. To the contrary, it appears to be a soothing mechanism. If I had to make an informed guess based on the information above, I would theorize that those who continue to associate emotions with inanimate objects outside of childhood may simply have stronger natural insular activity, and thus a stronger tendency towards one's internal 'homeostasis', or emotional activity. Because the individual is naturally more sensitive to the environment / emotional affect of others due to heightened activity in the insular cortex, they naturally attempt to regulate the environment's 'homeostasis' based on the individual's own bodily concept of homeostasis. Thus, if you were to feel left out if you were a pen that was not being used, then you may very well treat every pen the way you wanted to be treated. :)

Sources used:

[1]  Emeran A. Mayer (August 2011). "Gut feelings: the emerging biology of gut–brain communication". Nature Reviews Neuroscience 12: 453–466.

[2] Benedetto De Martino, Dharshan Kumaran, Ben Seymour, and Raymond J. Dolan (August 2006). "Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain". Science 313 (6): 684–687.

[3] Paulus MP, Stein MB (August 2006). "An insular view of anxiety". Biol. Psychiatry 60 (4): 383–7.

[4] Thayer JF, Lane RD (December 2000). "A model of neurovisceral integration in emotion regulation and dysregulation". J Affect Disord 61 (3): 201–16

[5] Passman R. H. (1976). Arousal reducing properties of attachment objects: testing the functional limits of the security blanket relative to the mother. Dev. Psychol. 12 468–469 10.1037/0012-1649.12.5.468


How does one distinguish BPD anger from ADHD anger? Some people with ADHD are known to have difficulties in controlling anger.

Whenever a person with ADHD has difficulties in controlling anger, how does one determine whether or not that person really has BPD? By which I mean to ask, how do we know that the anger is symptomatic of BPD rather than ADHD?

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a complicated diagnosis to understand and treat. A painful mix of emotional trouble, unstable relationships and self-destructive behavior, including suicide attempts are associated with BPD.

Experts have given a new name to BPD as Biosocial disorder. People who develop BPD are highly emotional, sensitive and reactive, more immediately and intensely than most people. And once a powerful emotion is triggered, it takes them longer to return to their emotional baseline.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a chronic condition which includes attention difficulties, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness.

ADHD is often seen in childhood persisting into adolescence and adulthood, which contributes to hyperactivity, low self-esteem, disturbed relationships and attention difficulties at school or work.

In relation to anger, individuals with BPD report higher traits of aggression and hostility when provoked than individuals with ADHD.

Furthermore, individuals with BPD exhibit a higher state of anger and stress-dependent anger increase. In BPD patients, aggression and anger were positively correlated with emotion regulation deficits.

Being a Special Education Teacher at Accel Centre, there are kids and adults with special needs education who require vocational training for special needs that helps them to develop social skills and anger management.

Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5356413/


What are some examples of controversial themes in psychology? There are a number of themes that are controversial (provoke debate, are unsettled, polarize opinion, or are reflected by a range of positions) in psychology. One example involves nature vs. nurture: some people think that much of our language ability is innate, while others think that very little is innate. I've fleshed this example out a little bit as an answer below.

I will eventually gathering data on just how controversial certain themes are, as a step towards investigating what the various factors are in such differences of opinion. Until then, or a starting point, I'm happy with opinions about what you think might be controversial.

Suggestions from various subfields of psychology are welcome, but I'm looking more for issues that most people with a psychology degree might be able to form an opinion on, rather than something that is highly controversial for a small group of specialists, which the broader community won't have much interest in.

Currently I have a list of themes that I think are controversial, but I was wondering what people in the field in general think. In other words, there might be something obvious that I've missed, and this seems to be a reasonable way to reduce the probability that there is.

Short answer: Representations are a noteworthy controversy in embodied or situated psychological theories. Can we explain behavior without reference to representations?

Long answer: Most modern theories presume that information is represented somewhere, such as the brain, and that behavior is organized because that somewhere is organized. Anti-representational theories, such as ecological psychology (e.g., Richardson et al., 2008) or radical embodied cognitive psychology (Chemero 2009; Chemero, 2013 for a brief review) explicitly reject this assumption and say there are no representations. Fink, Foo and Warren (2009) provided an apt, and ingenious, demonstration of how we may explain a behavior, namely catching flyballs, without reference to representations. Embodied cognitive theories, such as enclothed cognition (Adam and Galinsky, 2012), are examples of hybrid approaches incorporating both representational and nonrepresentational features.

References

Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918-925.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Chemero, A. (2013). Radical embodied cognitive science. Review of General Psychology, 17(2), 145.
Fink, P. W., Foo, P. S., & Warren, W. H. (2009). Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 14.
Richardson, M. J., Shockley, K., Fajen, B. R., Riley, M. A., & Turvey, M. T. (2008). Ecological psychology: Six principles for an embodied–embedded approach to behavior. Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach, 161-187.


Are there any ways to increase dopamine and serotonin levels when working or learning something complex? There is much information regarding learning styles and ways to leverage them, along with boosting focus, alertness and concentration.

However, I'm looking for accompanying information that would be useful in addition to those answers.

Witnessed countless times:
When one is either learning or working with a new concept that is - complex, untangle, counter-intuitive, tedious, multi-dimensional, boring and difficult, it appears mood is altered to a lower state, very similar to that of a depressive state, however is temporary, until another concepts comes along (still new) that is simple, clear and straight forward.

Are there any studies that show correlation to dopamine and serotonin in such a case - and more importantly, are there any studies or know methods that reverse this, causing instead increased dopamine and serotonin during such events?

I'm guessing you don't want to generally increase the level of those chemicals in the brain, just in the reward-motivation area.
In order to do so, you need to be rewarded and motivated, obviously. The learning need to be exciting,  with feedback and reinforcement. Socializing it will help, too.
There is a relatively new topic, called gameificatin, that try to do exactly that. It's the process of making the learning a game, so we can learn better,based on the reward-motivation effects.
In my opinion, there is no "hacking" the brain. Doing so is using drugs, and there is a price tag for that. If you want to use the normal brain pathways, there are no shortcuts.


How many items do I need to design a measure? I have to design my own psychometric test to measure a construct. I have a construct, but part of the requirement is to include a rationale for the number of items in the instrument, which I don't know how to justify. Also, using a Likert scale, I have to justify why I am using a 5-point Likert scale. It would be great to have some literature to refer to.

Cross Validated has plenty of info on this topic; arguably it's a duplicate of some question over there. Check out "Under what conditions should Likert scales be used as ordinal or interval data?" and my synopsis of Bollen and Barb (1981) in this answer. If you have more to say about why this is a question specific to Cognitive Sciences (beyond the presumable involvement of subjective judgments and self-reporting on attitudes), you should say it; I might be able to add unique substance to this answer. (BTW, there is plenty of literature out there on this question. Frankly, I'd guess you haven't tried very hard in looking for yourself. If you have, you could also improve answers by noting what you know so far.)

As for non-unique substance that mostly approaches the problem from a statistical perspective, consider what you'll probably want to do once you have the data. If your theory of your latent construct is typical, you probably want to estimate individuals' scores on a continuous dimension, not just rank people. I.e., you probably want to be able to say how different one person is from another, not just who ranks higher and how many people are between them.

The basic problem with Likert scales is that they don't really allow you to do this inherently. E.g., the difference between ratings 3 and 4 isn't necessarily the same as the difference between 2 and 3 even if you use exactly opposite anchors like 2/4$=$dis/agree and 3 is given a completely neutral anchor. Therefore you can't really assume the sum of a few items has this property (interval-level measurement, basically) if you just treat these ratings as numbers.

Another halfway decent place to start reading is Wikipedia's classical test theory (CTT) page. This might not be the gentlest introduction to the underlying issues, but it's probably nicer than sending you straight to IRT. IMO, that's where one ultimately has to go to understand latent dimension estimation in terms of thresholds between Likert scale points...but if you can satisfy CTT assumptions, you can avoid a lot of complexity, which I assume you want to do, for better or worse.

Bollen and Barb (1981) demonstrate that Likert scales with $\ge5$ rating options can be treated like interval measures without weakening correlations too terribly much, but more is diminishingly better. Fewer simplifies the rating task somewhat in general, but can sometimes make it harder for respondents with nuanced opinions that can't be reflected accurately with fewer options...and either way, it costs you info. Conversely, having tons of options might start to elicit arbitrary noise rather than meaningfully distinct responses...so consider whether additional options actually mean something different from existing ones. If they do, you're probably not going to do any harm by adding them.

Another technical issue for which I have no better reference than my former advisor (he never told me where he read it): more scale options tends to increase the size of the general factor (in a factor-analytic sense). I suspect this has something to do with response biases like acquiescence bias and extreme response style. If you know what you're doing, you can control for "nuisance factors" like these, but it's advanced stats. See "Factor analysis of questionnaires composed of Likert items" for more.

As for the number of items, it depends somewhat on similar concerns: your abilities to approximate and estimate a continuous dimension, and your ability to differentiate items meaningfully. A minimum of three items are necessary for statistically meaningful estimation of latent factor scores (this may be true of latent score $(\theta)$ estimation using IRT as well; I'm not sure, but I think it should be). Two doesn't permit identification of a unique solution in factor analysis – there's no indication of how to weigh your two items as measures of any common factor(s). If you're trying to measure more than one latent construct (or trying to separate out nuisance factors from your construct of interest), you'll need at least one item for each that only really measures that construct, and three that measure each. That's only four items for two correlated constructs, but six for two unrelated constructs.

Again, more items is generally better for the sake of approximating and estimating a continuous latent dimension...but if you're just going to sum or average Likert ratings, you're implicitly assuming that all items measure the latent construct equally well, or that their inequalities at least balance out overall. Therefore you don't want to just add more items if they're going to be substantially worse, unless you're willing to do some nontrivial statistical work to sort them out properly.

I'd also hesitate to add overly duplicative items, because that could encourage inattentive responding and thus engender both arbitrary noise and (more) systematic bias. Using semantic opposites might be defensible: e.g., 1) Tumblers are better than pumpers; 2) Pumpers are better than tumblers...? This can help manage acquiescence bias if it's done properly, but it can also irk respondents and introduce nuisance multidimensionality.

Multidimensionality is yet another problem that can arise with too many items...but again, it's not necessarily a problem if you know what you're doing statistically. There are ways of separating factors of interest from others that might influence responses if you have enough items. If you or someone else might actually figure out how to do this someday (it's not THAT hard), it's better to have the items from the outset than to have to add or change them later, because you probably want to maintain a consistent stimulus across all data you collect over the long-term life of the measure.

However, if it's important to keep it simple for the sake of avoiding complex calculation or for the sake of reducing respondent fatigue (yet another source of inattentive responding, noise, and bias), you might want to limit yourself to 10–20 short, clearly-phrased, single-idea items. Some questionnaires have 100–500 items, but that requires some serious compensation for a participant's time and concentration; people do not like to think that hard for that long. Consider the concerns of your target population and any distracting elements in your response collection scenario, and try piloting your first draft of the test with a few people to see how it comes across and whether it takes as long to complete as you think it should. Several stages of revision aren't uncommon when this is done properly, but improper practice isn't uncommon either, nor is it much easier to fail completely than it is to pull it off perfectly.


What does Lumosity's Flexibility measure? One of the Lumosity BPI measurements is termed Flexibility.  What is this measuring?

I believe they are attempting to measure Cognitive Flexibility (there is a citation linking to Lumosity at the very end of the article).
From the Wiki article:

Cognitive flexibility has been described as the mental ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts, and to think about multiple concepts simultaneously....
Other terms for cognitive flexibility include mental flexibility, shifting, mental set or cognitive shifting, task switching/shifting, and attention switching/shifting....
Most commonly, cognitive flexibility refers to the mental ability to adjust thinking or attention in response to changing goals and/or environmental stimuli....
Lastly, the ability to simultaneously consider two aspects of an object, idea, or situation at one point in time refers to cognitive flexibility. According to this definition, when sorting cards based on specific rules, children are considered cognitively flexible rules if they can sort cards based on the color of the objects and type of objects on the card simultaneously. Similarly, cognitive flexibility has been defined as having the understanding and awareness of all possible options and alternatives simultaneously within any given situation.

I hope that helps!


Calculating statistical significance in behaviour change I have run a study on a group of 158 individuals to see if a teaching intervention can change their perceptions of scientists.

Before the intervention, all the children in the study were asked to choose 6 words to describe a scientist. This data collection was repeated at the end of a 5-week intervention, and then again 3 months after the intervention was complete.

I have begun processing the data and have categorised all the words that the children have used. When I look at the data for the cohort I can see that there has been a change in the types of words used to describe scientists (Pre 128 children used one stereotypical word, post this dropped to 67 and 64 in follow-up).

What statistical tests should I use to demonstrate the significance of these changes? All the data is tracked so I have individual data on the change of language use for each participant, I also have data for the group.

This answer should provide a reasonable discussion of how to compare the two results for statistical significance.

We have n1 = n2 = n3 = 158. We have p1 = 128/158, p2 = 67/158, and p3 = 64/168. Just run the hypothesis test on each pair to see if there is a significant shift.

However, there is a bigger issue here. This question should have been answered before you started collecting data. The first thing you should be doing is coming up with your theory to test. Then you design your experiment. And only then should you be collecting the data, unless your goal is just to collect large amounts of data for future theory testing, which does not seem to be the case here (Best Research Practices).


Psychologically, how does volunteer work help the volunteer? This question has intrigued me for a long time, ever since I experienced it first hand (and continue to do so).  Some feel a compulsion to 'step up' and lend a hand to someone in need.  An example, after spending a day cleaning up a neighbour's flood ravaged business and then some time helping at an evacuation centre, I came home sore, bruised, bleeding, battered, utterly exhausted - but, I felt great - physically, I was a mess, but psychologically, I felt incredible.

What is/are bases for the psychological benefits often felt by volunteers?

Some of the "pay-offs" of altruism, but within the more extreme circumstance of risking one's life to save another are address in this answer.

In my opinion, volunteer work fulfills a person's needs to be useful, it also places a person in a position of superiority, as they are bestowing their "gifts" upon a "lesser" person in need. There is evidence that charitable work releases chemicals akin to pleasure in the brain. [Dan Schulman]

I cite Ferguson, Eamonn; Farrell, Kathleen; Lawrence, Claire :

  The benevolence hypothesis is supported, suggesting that blood donor
  motivation is partly selfish.

Citing  from the moral maze.

  "Even in human societies we can still trace many behaviours seemingly
  carried out for the benefit of the group back to benefits for the
  individual," Stanford explains.

In the study Altruism Costs - the Cheap Signal from Amygdala, it was demonstrated that there a neurological changes within the brain when contemplating making donations.

  neural processing of the cost-benefit difference. The presentation of
  a charitable donation goal evoked an insula activity that predicted
  the later decision to donate.../...   Our findings imply that the
  emotional system has an important role in real decision making as it
  signals what kind of immediate cost and reward an outcome is
  associated with.

So in summary, I believe the pay-off is a feeling of well-being, that is in accord with supporting the individual's self-esteem and some evolutionary theories of our instincts as a species.

The Biology of Benevolence
Humans may be hardwired to cooperate. The choice to cooperate stimulates pleasure centers in the brain.
By Dan Schulman,
published on November 01, 2002 - last reviewed on May 02, 2006

Blood donation is an act of benevolence rather than altruism.
Ferguson, Eamonn; Farrell, Kathleen; Lawrence, Claire
Health Psychology, Vol 27(3), May 2008, 327-336

Altruism Costs - the Cheap Signal from Amygdala.
Gospic K, Sundberg M, Maeder J, Fransson P, Petrovic P, Isacsson G, Karlström A, Ingvar M.


What is the Mechanism of 5-HT2A-mediated psychedelia? Drugs that activate the serotonergic 5-HT2A receptor (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, mescaline) are notorious for causing psychedelic experiences and I would like to know the neurochemical mechanism behind this.

Broadband cortical desynchronization "begins at the cellular level with
excitation of layer 5 pyramidal neurons, and extends to the macroscopic
level with cortical desynchronization and decreased
brain network integrity."

"Stimulation of the 5-HT2A receptor has been shown to
enhance spontaneous EPSPs/EPSCs (excitatory postsynaptic potential /
excitatory postsynaptic current) in neocortical layer 5 pyramidal
cells by reducing outward potassium currents (Aghajanian and Marek, 1997; Lambe et al., 2000) and to cause increased glutamatergic recurrent activity in layer 5 of the cortex."

"Speculatively, if deep-layer pyramidal cells were to become hyperexcitable during the psychedelic state, information processing would be biased in the direction of inference—such that implicit models of the
world become spontaneously manifest—intruding into consciousness without prior invitation from sensory data. This could explain many of the subjective effects of psychedelics."

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/38/15171.short


How can the effects of pain on cognitive functions be tested in an ethically accepted way? I have devised a study that may provide an ethical way to invoke similar behaviours in participants, as those demonstrated by individuals in pain. Obviously it is extremely hard to correctly test people's cognitive abilites in a lab when looking at the effects of pain.

My question is, would anyone be able to mention some citations I could look into where they have attempted to recreate in a lab an ethical way to demonstrate the same responses that pain creates in order to test memory, and other cognitive processes?

My Idea is to utilize different diluted sample of capsaicin, and provide comparisons to the type of hot pepper for participants. I believe that if I could find a way to gain ethical approval that the feelings and then behaviors one experiences when eating an extremely hot pepper, are in fact similar to those of a person in the position of an aactual injury. If in fact correct it can provide a safe and controlled way to test cognitive functioning under these conditions. high fat dairy products would be on hand for the participants to assist, and in fact the distraction of participants for using on those to relieve symptoms during testing would add to the collective data. This can provide important information related to victim testimony, ability of individuals to make appropriate decisions, or give consent under pain.

I understand this is long, and that it is touchy within the ethics views, which is why I present to you my intent, thoughts, and ask for assistance in gathering other literature from those who have succeeded in attempting to study this in the lab as opposed to case studies.

Pain is a form of stress. I would replace pain with another, ethically less problematic stressor. If you would want to do it elegantly, test a group of subjects with chronic pain (anything; e.g., back pain) and use a control group where you submit a group of healthy subjects to a stress test (e.g. Stroop test - huge body of literature on this) and a third group without a stressor. See if the pain group matches the stressed group and whether they are both significantly different from the controls. If yes, you've found a way to prevent ethically kind of unacceptable tests, where the search for volunteers will likely be very difficult too.


How can I dream things that are impossible? I remember having dreams whose contents were physically impossible, to the point that when I thought about them afterwards, I couldn't reconcile them with reality in a meaningful way, although when I dreamed them, they seemed to be logical and coherent with reality. The only example I can recall: I was climbing a set of stairs, and there was a large gap in the middle where there were no stairs, and logically I shouldn't have been able to cross from the bottom step to the top, and yet I did. When I think about it afterwards, I can only visualise this as some sort of cheap visual effect, by either teleporting between the two steps, or unnaturally distorting my limbs; but I remember that while dreaming, there was no such effect. It just worked.

How is it that I could dream something that is completely incoherent with reality, or completely impossible, that I can't fully reproduce in my head while awake?

Dreams aren't logical. Your mind is in a relaxed state when you dream. Thoughts become super-imposed and intertwined with each other.

Ideas and imagination is never directly related to interpretation. When you say you imagined stairs, it's actually your idea of stairs. It has no correlation to the real world at all. Your idea of stairs or empty space by themselves have no information related to how objects can physically move from one place to another. Therefore when your mind is being lazy and not focusing, concepts like logical physical movement can be ignored entirely.

We still don't know much about dreams that isn't still speculated about. These are some pretty good places to check out; How Stuff Works - Dreams, Wikipeia - Theories,  The Scientific Study of Dreams


Why do some people only work well under pressure? It is  common for people to procrastinate. Putting off tasks until  the resulting deadlines get closer and  there comes a point at which the person will fire into action.
(whether this point leaves the person with enough time to complete task is another question).

Why is it that some people seem to only work well under pressure? Why is it that people find it difficult to discipline themselves and have all their task complete well before deadlines are due?

I have often wondered about this, as I know I do this, even setting myself arbitrary deadlines, not always with the best results.  The following is not an opinion, but based on some information found while, ironically, taking a 'break' from my PhD drafting.

According to "In Search of the Arousal Procrastinator", (Pychyl, 2008), the notion of 'working under pressure' could be based on their cognitive dissonance, concluding (in part):

  a common theme about self-deception and task delay. We often rationalize our current delay because we don't feel like  working on the task by evoking (irrational) beliefs like, "I'll feel more like it tomorrow" or "I work better under pressure." Although this may be the case on rare occasions for some tasks, on the whole these thoughts are simply rationalizations to justify further delay and make us feel good in the short run.

However, according to "Procrastination or 'intentional delay'?" (Novotney), there could be benefits in the procrastination, as it may lead to better planning of what is needed to be done, so the pressure of the deadline is not necessarily entirely harmful.

Other resources cited in the above links:

Ferrari, J. R. (1992). Psychometric validation of two procrastination inventories for adults: Arousal and avoidance measures. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 14, 97-110

Ferrari, J.R., Johnson, J.L., McCown, W.G. (1995). Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research, and Treatment. New York: Springer.

Schouwenburg, H.C., Lay, C., Pychyl, T.A., Ferrari, J.R. (Eds.) (2004). Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings. Washington, DC: APA.

Burka, J.B., & Yuen, L.M. (2nd Edition). (2008). Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now. New York City: Da Capo Lifelong Books.


How are people working in psychophysics trained? It is unclear to me how people in psychophysics are trained. Are they psychologists, or physicists, or physicians, or biologists, or physiologists? Or can they be any of those?

What if someone doing psychophysics (according to his own accord) is making statements about biological pathology?

Is Psychophysics currently a credible scientific field?

Short answer
Psychophysics is a multidisciplinary field featuring people with a Physics, Psychology, Medicine and/or Biology background.

Background
OK, here follows a lot of personal account to illustrate where psychophysicists may come from.

Traditionally, psychophysics is a part of Psychology.

I do a lot of psychophysics and I'm a Biologist by training (MSc), but learned psychophysics during a postdoc. My supervisor teaching me psychophysics was a physicist (MSc) who acquired their skills during their PhD (in visual sciences).

My current supervisor is a physicist by training (MSc), but has done heaps of psychophysics as part of his post-grad Audiology training.

Many of my psychophysics colleagues are in fact physicists.


Can a human select truly random numbers if he/she chose to? It is known that humans are worse than computers at random number generation, and that even computer's random numbers are often imperfect and predictable.

What strategies could a human employ to generate truly random numbers from a given range, and how uniformly distributed will they really be?

P.S. One trick I use, when generating a number from 1-9, is to select a random large number, say 2349, then find its digital root (2+3+4+7 = 16, 1+6=7, so digital root is 7). I don't know how random it truly is, but it's definitely better than just instinctively selecting a number from 1 to 10.

One strategy for ranges that are powers of 2 is to split the range in half and flip a coin. If it's heads, the upper half is your new range. If it's tails, the lower half is your new range. Repeat until you have a single number. This gives you a truly random number.

Another strategy comes from George Marsaglia, on this Google Groups page: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!msg/sci.math/6BIYd0cafQo/Ucipn_5T_TMJ

Choose a 2-digit number, say 23, your "seed".
Form a new 2-digit number:
the 10's digit plus 6 times the units digit.
The example sequence is
23 --> 20 --> 02 --> 12 --> 13 --> 19 --> 55 --> 35 --> ...
and its period is the order of the multiplier, 6, in the group of residues relatively prime to the modulus, 10. (59 in this case).
The "random digits" are the units digits of the 2-digit numbers, ie, 3,0,2,2,3,9,5,...  the sequence mod 10.
The arithmetic is simple enough to carry out in your head.

I don't know what the distribution is, but the numbers look random, at least to me. You could also concatenate digits to create larger numbers. You could then get a pseudo-random number for any specified length of number (i.e. 2 digits, 3 digits, etc).

A similar question with many potential answers in the comments can be found at https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1961/are-people-capable-of-generating-a-random-number.


Biological plausibility of bayesian models of cognition Inspired by this question: What are some of the drawbacks to probabilistic models of cognition?

I would like to know more about the biological plausibility of Bayesian models of cognition. Is there any neural evidence that rejects Bayesian models of cognition?

When performing certain tasks, people’s inferences approximate Bayesian inference to a remarkable degree. For example, when people receive both haptic and visual information about the size of an object, they combine this information in a manner that very closely resembles Bayesian inference, taking account of the uncertainties associated with the visual and haptic information (e.g., Ernst & Banks, 2002). This optimality can be observed in many perceptual (Knill & Pouget, 2004) and sensorimotor (Kording & Wolpert, 2004, 2006) tasks and across a range of information sources (e.g., including prior beliefs and multiple sensory inputs). These findings suggest that there must be biological mechanisms that either implement Bayesian inference or implement something that very closely resembles it.
At the same time, there is no consensus regarding how this is done. While there are proposals about how neural populations might perform Bayesian inference (e.g., Ma, Beck, Latham, & Pouget, 2006; Knill & Pouget, 2004; Kover & Bao, 2010), it is difficult to evaluate these proposals at present: the available neuroscientific evidence is quite limited. Moreover, because the most compelling evidence for Bayesian inference is limited to low-level perceptual processes, it is possible that higher-level inferences are implemented by biological mechanisms that do not perform Bayesian inference. Indeed, given the computational difficulty of Bayesian inference in general, it seems all but inevitable that many biological mechanisms will not implement Bayesian inference exactly.
In summary, some biological mechanisms must perform something like Bayesian inference, but researchers have only begun to explore how this happens, and the extent to which high-level perception and cognition rely on Bayesian computations remains unclear.
References

Knill, D. C., & Pouget, A. (2004). The Bayesian brain: the role of uncertainty in neural coding and computation. Trends in Neurosciences, 27 (12), 712-719. [pdf]
Kording, K. P., & Wolpert, D. M. (2004). Bayesian integration in sensorimotor learning. Nautre, 427, 244-247. [pdf]
Kording, K. P, & Wolpert, D. M. (2006). Bayesian decision theory in sensorimotor control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (7), 319-326. [pdf]
Ma, W. J., Beck, J. M., Latham, P. E., & Pouget, A. (2006). Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes. Nature Neuroscience, 9 (11), 1432-1438. [pdf]
Ernst, M. O., & Banks, M. S. (2002). Humans integrate visual and haptic information a statistically optimal fashion. Nature, 415, 429-433. [link]


Do the neural substrates behind motivation to retain/dispose of property govern whether certain people view their friends and partners as possessions? I'm trying to understand why people have sometimes have the ability to sever ties with valuable connections, e.g., people that have up until that time meant a lot to them.  Colloquially, people use the term "throw it all away", and I'm wondering if there's any truth to that.
Hoarders, on the other hand, can place a lot of value on objects that are generally considered to be refuse.
Looking into hoarding and it's associated disorders, I found some very recent information in Wang et al (2012) regarding some of the neural substrates of acquisitive behavior (which forms some of the physiological basis of hoarding).  These researchers found activation in the orbitalfrontal cortex (OFC), a common substrate of obsessive compulsive disorder, associated with acquisitiveness, and activation in the nucleus accumbens (a motor nucleus within the basal ganglia often associated with addictive behaviors) when possessive participants valued a popular "hot" item. There was also activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with monetary valuation of a stimulus, during "disposal" of items that they had acquired during the experiment.
Firstly, is the treatment of people like property an earmark of any notable (Axis II or otherwise) DSM disorder?
Secondly, in the case where we assume those that do treat others as property to be acquired and disposed of accordingly, do these same anatomical regions in the OFC govern this behavior?

Wang, J.M., Seidler, R.D., et al (2012),The neural bases of acquisitiveness: Decisions to acquire and discard everyday goods differ across frames, items, and individuals. Neuropsychologia, 50:939– 948

I can't speak to your first question, but I think the second question could be profitably reframed.  The orbitofrontal cortex seems to represent incentive/reward value of primary sensory information and is thus linked to the "hot" decision-making system, which manages decisions where there is a gain/loss of reward at stake or risk--this would necessarily cover property and personal relationships, which are both sources of reward.  So it's less that the part of the brain that manages property may sometimes also manage personal relationships, and more that this particular part of the brain is responsible for representing incentive or reward options, which are relevant to different kinds of rewards, including property and people.

Reference (just a good place to start, really):
Rolls ET, Grabenhorst F. The orbitofrontal cortex and beyond: from affect to decision-making. Prog Neurobiol. 2008 Nov;86(3):216-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2008.09.001


Computational Model Linking Neural Activity to Behavior A big question in neuroscience is how neural activity represents knowledge. We can use modelling to explore how different levels of neural activity- subthreshold currents, action potentials, local field potentials, etc.- relate to one another and, finally, to behavior.

Some models simulate behavior, for example which color flowers a bee prefers or how a mouse will navigate the Morris water maze. (Think Ch. 9 in Dayan & Abbot (2001).)

Other models simulate the behavior of groups of neurons. Some of those even address what knowledge that activity could be representing. (Think Ch 10 in Dayan & Abbot (2001).)

What are examples of linking the two?
(I'm aware of computational limitations, aside from computing power such as the foolishness of simulating stiff equations for long periods of time. )

EDIT:
One example is exploring how local field potentials (LFPs) could arise from  networks of integrate-and-fire neurons. Earlier models of LFPs were phenomonological. They were simply coupled oscillators with different time constants and so didn't allow one to see how more detailed levels of description could create LFPs.

There are several such models in the field of auditory perception. For example Patterson 1996 [1] suggests a model that starts with a simulation of the cochlea and the neural activity and reaches up to perception; Winkler 2006 [2] reviews the process of auditory perception, again from the cochlea up to perception.

Somewhat old and does not mention a specific model, but still a very relevant review of the neural activity - behaviour interaction debate is provided in Barlow 1972 [3].

[1] Patterson R.D., Holdsworth J., A functional model of neural activity patterns and auditory images. Advances in Speech, Hearing and Language Processing, 1996. link.

[2] Winkler I., Denham S.L., Nelken I., Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects. Trends in cognitive sciences, 2009. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.09.003

[3] Barlow B.H., Single units and sensation: A neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology? Perception, 1972. link


Advantage of active learning on classification tasks I am looking for a specific type of experimental test of active learning. Given some artificial or natural learning task that consists of classifying inputs $x$ from a large input space $X$. There is some underlying function $f: X \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ to be learned, this function can come from some restricted function class $C$. The subject knows the description of the function class, but has to learn the specific parameters that define the function.
I am looking for experiments that had two conditions of this type:

The subject is given labeled samples $(x,f(x))$ from some distribution on $X$ that they have no control over.
The subject is allowed to ask for specific $x \in X$ and receive the labeled sample $(x,f(x))$.

The first condition would correspond to passive learning, while the second to active learning.
From arm-chair expectations (or formal theories like CoLT), one would expect that on certain tasks the subjects in the active condition would be able to significantly outperform (predict the underlying function more accurately) than in the passive condition.
Can you provide references to specific experiments that would fit in this paradigm? What were their results? On what sort of tasks does active learning provide an advantage? How significant is this advantage?

Example
An example would be a subject sitting in front of a blank screen. They are told "there is a straight line that divides this screen into a red and green region. Can you find it?". Thus, the set $X$ would correspond to coordinates, and an input $x$ would be a specific coordinate, say $x = (1,3)$. The function class would be the set of straight line partitions of the screen. A specific function with $0$ meaning red and $1$ - green might be:
$$f((a,b)) = \begin{cases}0 & \mathrm{if} \; a > b \\ 1 & \mathrm{otherwise}\end{cases}$$
In the active task, the participant can click on any point $x$ on the screen to turn it from blank to either red (if $f(x) = 0$) or green (if $f(x) = 1$). In the passive trial, some number of points are selected and revealed at random to the subject.

This isn't my area of expertise, but it's an interesting question so I did some poking around and ran across a couple of relevant papers.

Human active learning

http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3456-human-active-learning

Castro, R. M., Kalish, C., Nowak, R., Qian, R., Rogers, T., & Zhu, X. (2009). Human active learning. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 241-248).

In this paper, the authors compare human performance on a classification task using (a) randomly selected samples, (b) human-selected examples (i.e., "active learning"), and (c) machine-selected samples ("machine-assisted active learning"). Participants in all three conditions were tested regularly on the classification task as they accumulated examples. Somewhat surprisingly (for me -- I would have expected the human-selected condition to learn the fastest), participants in the machine-selected example case were the fastest learners, particularly when label noise was large.

Category learning through active sampling

http://palm.mindmodeling.org/cogsci2010/papers/0041/paper0041.pdf

Markant, D., & Gureckis, T. M. (2010). Category learning through active sampling. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 248-253).

The task in this paper is a linear separation-boundary location task like the example you provide. It might be worth a look just to see whether it is similar to what you were describing.

(Also here's a more recent journal-length paper from the same authors: Markant, D. B., & Gureckis, T. M. (2014). Is it better to select or to receive? Learning via active and passive hypothesis testing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 94.)


Why isn't high functioning autism recognized by the DSM-5 or the ICD-10? I was looking at this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-functioning_autism and it said that. Aspergers is also closely related to high functioning autism but it is also not recognized anymore. Does this mean that neither of them are a "thing" anymore? Would diagnosing someone with either of these labels be inaccurate?

Asperger's being "subsumed" in DSM-5 is not the whole story. There's indeed a new DSM-5 coding for the severity of the disorder. But applying the DSM-5 actual clinical criteria results in fewer people being diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders, and the reduction is more significant for the mild versions (such as Asperger's):

A 2014 mini-review looking at 12 papers concluded:

  The application of DSM-5 diagnostic criteria resulted in an approximately one third reduction in Autism Spectrum Disorders. The reduction was approximately two thirds for mild forms of Autism.

So yeah, the DSM-5 take (intentional or not) is that a lot of "Aspies" don't have a level of dysfunction that raises to the (DSM-5) bar of a mental *disorder *.

However in an astute form of politicking, people with an existing Asperger's diagnosis were "grandfathered in" by the DSM-5. From the same review:

  The American Psychiatric Association partially acknowledged
  the exclusion of mild forms of ASD when the added
  rider to the diagnostic criteria was that “Individuals with a
  well-established DSM-IV diagnosis of autistic disorder,
  Asperger’s disorder, or pervasive developmental disorder not
  otherwise specified should be given the diagnosis of autism
  spectrum disorder”, but this approach to diagnosis of autismis
  strange. It enables individuals who previously were diagnosed
  with ASD to continue to be eligible for services, but results in
  two odd consequences. First, consider two individuals with
  identical symptoms who meet DSM-IV criteria for ASD, one
  of whom was diagnosed before the publication of DSM5 and
  one diagnosed after: The first will be diagnosed with ASD and
  eligible for services, but the second will not. The second
  consequence is that the meaning of the DSM5 term ASD is
  obfuscated as it refers to different entities using the same term.

And a 2016 meta-analysis confirms the effect of stricter criteria (using twice as many studies as the 2014 review):

  Our meta-analysis measured the percentage of people with an ASD diagnosis from the DSM-IV or DSM-IV-TR obtaining an ASD diagnosis from the DSM-5. All 24 studies identified indicated a reduction in the number of people with a DSM-IV or DSM-IV-TR ASD diagnosis being eligible for a DSM-5 ASD diagnosis, a 35 and 37 % reduction respectfully. Our meta-analysis also showed that those with a DSM-IV-TR or DSM-IV diagnosis of PDD-NOS were the least likely to qualify for a DSM-5 ASD diagnosis at 26 and 47 % followed by 55 and 19 %, respectfully of people with Asperger syndrome, and 80 and 87 %, respectfully of people with an autism diagnosis.

A more recent (2017) study on Australian children (where the use of DSM is mandated by certain government programs) found that DSM-5 did seem to stop to the previously increasing trend in rising autism diagnoses:

  De-identified data for 32,199 children aged under 7 years between 2010 and 2015 was utilised. [...] The incidence of autism increased from 2010 to 2013, and then plateaued to 2015. A significant trend-relative reduction in the number of children registered to receive autism-specific funding was evident post 2013, suggesting the more stringent DSM-5 criteria may have curbed the trend of increasing diagnoses over time.

As for why the DSM-5 removed the separate criteria (including Asperger's), quoting from the last paper:

  These previously distinct diagnostic
  categories were removed in light of empirical data
  that questioned the reliability and validity of these subtypes
  (Daniels et al. 2011; Lord 2012; Macintosh and Dissanayake
  2004; Mahjouri and Lord 2012).

Whether this was the right thing to do or not... it depends who you ask. Asperger's diagnosis definitely has its supporters, at least one of whom even predicted its return in the next version of the DSM.


What is the most robust method for peer grading? I intend to provide a group task for 30 people, split into 5 or 6 groups.

Ultimately, I want them to assess which group delivered the best result (after presenting results in front of other groups) as well as grade themselves within groups based on their contribution to the team effort.

Now, both game theory and my simple experience of observing people being unobjective
would suggest there are plenty of ways this can go wrong if I don’t introduce some robust system that would deal, at least, with problems like:

group likely to be second will give lowest grade to group they see as objectively the best so that they boost their chances of winning
group likely to be the last will give lowest grades to second to last group so that they boost their chances to replace them and not finish last
group members will tell me each person contributed to the same extent, but it will be untrue  in most scenarios. Especially the best group has no reason to lower the grade of their colleague no matter how marginal his contribution had been. On the other hand, system where they score each other with percentage contribution is also wrong as sometimes indeed all group members collaborated on the same, high level and there is no need to point best or worst performing members and lower their grades, thus even if they all worked hard they would get the same, median mark for their performance.

Does such a voting/grading system exist?

In order to incentivize the desired behavior for your first point, you can do the following.

If the group that comes out second, gave the lowest (possible) grade to the group that came out first, the punishment is at follows <specify punishment here>. An alternative condition would be: If the first group received the lowest grading from the second group. This is more stricter, but also fairer. Maybe add some tolerance (e.g. 1 grade divergence is okay).

You could try the same strategy for the second point, but that won't work. If the groups can't vote for themselves (as a group) and if we assume that the end result is a somewhat objective representation of the performance, the last group would give the second to last group the lowest grade. You could try the alternative of the first approach, though:

If the last group received, the worst grade from the second to last group and if that grade diverges by more than 1, then <specify punishment here>.

In fact, you could introduce this rule for all the ranks. First and second place, second and third, etc. But the groups would need more time then, also this assumes the performances of the groups vary to such extent that it is indeed possible to subjectively rank them.

In order to have the groups assess them themselves, you could introduce a finite number of grades or classifications (e.g. top performer, medium performer). If the grades/classification can only be awarded a fixed amount of times, each participant will have a unique rank (relative to that group). The grade will probably not compare to group members of other groups (maybe if you weigh it with the group grade). It is possible to limit the number of possible grades to number of group members, or limit it to 2 or 3 (top, medium, bottom) and have multiple grading rounds.


Neurologically, how does a thought terminate? What prevents my brain from holding the same thought forever, like a frozen computer?
How do neurons terminate a firing pattern and move onto the next?

I'm not sure if the neuroscientific community has reached a consensus on what a "thought" is, but it seems you're using it here as synonymous with a neuronal firing pattern.
If one models this as an attractor in a dynamical system of a circuit or network of neurons, then I would look into Ichiro Tsuda's concept of "chaotic itinerancy" http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Chaotic_itinerancy which gives a formalization for how attractors transition to chaos then to [usually new] attractors.
An important intuitive notion is that attractors dissipate when they become unstable.
If a sensory stimulus or a memory or imagination creates a stable pattern of neurons that fire in association with it, then what initiated the firing pattern in the first place seems like it should have something to do with how it destabilizes. There is a causal connection between stimulus and neuronal activity. I believe attention would affect what fires and for how long, and Karl Friston's "free energy principle" seems like a good formalization of how that happens, but I haven't fully studied it myself.
There is a counterintuitive observation where neurons adjacent to those of the receptive fields of a sensory stimulus can keep firing for up to 3 hrs after the stimulus (cf. "Plasticity of Receptive Fields in Early Stages of the Adult Visual System" U.T. Eysel, in "Perceptual Learning", M. Fahl & T. Poggio, eds), so maybe the neuronal substrate of thoughts last longer than they consciously appear to. My guess is they would only last forever if there was nothing else to think about


Does dopamine signal become stronger when goal distance is defined using time? Howe et al (2013) found that a dopamine signal becomes stronger as a goal is approached. The experiment involved rats running in a maze. If the rats were close to solving the maze, the dopamine signal became strong. The intensity of this signal did not depend on how fast the rats completed the maze.

Goal distance was defined in terms of space and distance (i.e. how far a rat was from the end of the maze). Would this dopamine signal also become stronger if the goal distance was defined using time instead? More specifically, if the rats were under some type of time pressure, would their dopamine signals become stronger?

Source

Mark W. Howe, Patrick L. Tierney, Stefan G. Sandberg, Paul E. M. Phillips, Ann M. Graybiel. Prolonged dopamine signalling in striatum signals proximity and value of distant rewards. Nature, 2013

Hamid et al. Mesolimbic dopamine signals the value of work. Nature Neuroscience 2016.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v19/n1/full/nn.4173.html

Here is a paper that argues that dopamine signals discounted value of future returns. This is precisely what you are asking.

the authors argue, that if rewards are further away in time or space, they are discounted, and that DA release in the ventral striatum is more strongly related to this discounted value than prediction errors (current dominant theory of DA function).

I think you should take a moment to read it! It is a seminal paper that makes a profound point about dopamine function, very neatly unifying previously disparate ideas of what the hell is DA good for.


How come that someone understands an utterance only after a few moments? I have seen and experienced the following phenomena. It often happen in a work environment but can happen anytime and anywhere:

1) Person A is doing something that requires full concentration (like reading or thinking deeply).

2) Person B suddenly ask/say something to Person A

3) Person A replied with "What do you say?" or "Pardon please" (or something similar, as if he/she doesn't hear what person B said) after some brief pause/delay.

4) Person B didn't answer back (optional)

5) Person A answers/responses (before Person B repeats what he/she said) to Person B (as if he/she heard it fully)

Is there a psychological term that describes/explain it? How it is happening? What is its effect with the brain of Person A if there is?

P.S.
I don't know what is the right tag for it.

I think what you describe can be explained by echoic memory and working memory.

  Echoic memory is one of the sensory memory registers; a component of
  sensory memory (SM) that is specific to retaining auditory
  information. The sensory memory for sounds that people have just
  perceived is the form of echoic memory. ... This particular sensory store is capable of storing large amounts of
  auditory information that is only retained for a short period of time
  (3–4 seconds). This echoic sound resonates in the mind and is replayed
  for this brief amount of time shortly after the presentation of
  auditory stimuli.

.

  Working memory, a core executive function, is a cognitive memory
  buffer with a limited capacity that is responsible for the transient
  holding, processing, and manipulation of information. Working
  memory is an important process for reasoning and the guidance of
  decision making and behavior.

.

Person A is fully concentrated and his working memory capacity is full, so he does not pay attention to what the other person is saying. But when person A asks "What do you say?", working memory resources are released and attention is diverted to the echoic memory which replays what person B said.


Are there any critiques on the Self-Determination Theory by Deci & Ryan? I am currently reading about the self-determination-theory (SDT) and tried to find an article dealing with the disadvantages of this theory. However i couldn't find anything. Does anybody know some disadvantages/ articles etc.?

The University of Zurich has a pdf file of an article which was directly from the University of Rochester School of Arts and Sciences.

The article has an outline of many criticisms of SDT from behaviourists such as Eisenberger, Cameron and Pierce, which were later discounted as invalid.

References to all relevant articles are within the pdf file.


Introductory resources on developmental psychology/neuroscience I'd like to be able to answer questions such as:

What neuro/psychological functions underly competences such as empathy (or others - see background below)?
What neurotransmitters are of particular importance in those functions?
What genes are known to be associated with those neurotransmitters?

Any suggestions on textbooks or review papers that would be a good starting point?

Background
I'm an M.Sc. student in epidemiology (with a psychology undergrad) and my thesis is on "gene x environment" interactions (GxE). The outcome I'm interested in is child competence (construct which can be subdivided in subcomponents such as compliance, attention & empathy) at 18 months. The main environmental predictor is mother sensitivity.
I now need to focus on some specific genes and would like to be able to choose those with a clear rationale (rather than, say, search through the literature to find the most commonly studied genes); However, at this point I lack the knowledge required to do so.

For an introduction to neurotransmitters (and the field of neuroscience) a good book to start with is Principles of Neural Science (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel, 2000). It is a standard reference used by many undergraduate and graduate courses in neuroscience/related fields. The next edition is due for publication in October. During development neurotransmitters act different than in adults, so you may also be interested on a review in this topic (Herlenius & Lagercrantz, 2004); Although the time frame is earlier than what you are looking at.

In general I think you should start off by looking for possible neural mechanisms and any associated brain regions underlying the specific phenomenon you are interested in (in your example, empathy, or other subcomponents of social-emotional competence measured by the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (Carter et al., 2003)). I.e. Singer (2006) reviews the neural basis of empathy (as well as Theory of Mind); one section talks about implications for development.

After knowing what brain regions to focus on, you can look into anatomical/physiological research for better understanding of cellular type/structure, connectivity, synaptic characteristics, and neurotransmitters specific to these regions as well as genes that may affect normal function of a transmitter (i.e genes that control protein channels, enzymes/transmitter metabolism etc.). Here are two newer reviews, which link empathy to neuronal circuits and genes (Chakrabarti et al., 2009; Walter, 2012).


Is there a way to avoid false memories? I saw a video on how interrogators used manipulation on the victim/criminal which lead to innocent people being arrested and one way of doing that was using false memories in which the person was giving altered facts about what happened to the point where the person really thinks they did the crime. Even people with hsam(highly superior autobiographical memory) were more susceptible to false memories. Is there any way to avoid having false memories.

Several studies using word lists have tried to see if informing participants of false recall would make them less likely to form false memories, results are a little mixed:

  1) Although subjects were not able to perform accurately under these
  conditions, the warning instruction did attenuate the false
  recognition effect. This
  illusion of memory appears to be remarkably robust and little affected
  by the instructional manipulations.

  2) forewarning did not eliminate the false recognition effect, as
  these subjects and those in the other groups made numerous false
  recognitions in this task.

  3) When a warning about false recall was provided, young adults virtually eliminated false recall by the second trial. Even though old adults also used warnings to reduce false recall on Trial 1, they were unable to decrease false memories across the remaining four study–test trials. Old adults
  also reduced false recall more with slower presentation rates. These findings suggest that old adults have a breakdown in spontaneous, self-initiated source monitoring as reflected by little change in false recall across study–test trials but a preserved ability to use warnings and slow presentation rates to reduce false memories.

References:

1) McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (1998). Attempting to avoid illusory memories: Robust false recognition of associates persists under conditions of explicit warnings and immediate testing. Journal of Memory and Language, 39(3), 508-520.

2) Gallo, D. A., Roberts, M. J., & Seamon, J. G. (1997). Remembering words not presented in lists: Can we avoid creating false memories?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4(2), 271-276.

3) Watson, J. M., Mcdermott, K. B., & Balota, D. A. (2004). Attempting to avoid false memories in the Deese/Roediger—McDermott paradigm: Assessing the combined influence of practice and warnings in young and old adults. Memory & Cognition, 32(1), 135-141.


Perception Cardinality While reading a science fiction book, Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer, I came across the following lines:

“Well, if I showed you one object - one rock, say - you would not have to count it. You would just perceive its cardinality: you would know there was one object. The same thing happens with two objects. You just look at the pair of rocks and in a single glance, without any processing, you perceive that there are two of them present. You can do the same with three, four, or five items, if you are an average human. It is only when confronted with six or more items that you actually start counting them.”

“How do you know this?”

“I watched a program about it on the Discovery Channel.”

Assuming this is a real psychological phenomenon, is there a name or reference for it? I have contacted the author but have not received a response yet.

The author responded. It is called "Subitising" or "Subitizing" or "Perceiving cardinality at-a-glance". The term was coined by Kaufman in 1949.


How to confirm that a more frequently labelled object is a better instance of the label I have some data from a study where humans are shown an object and asked to select all words from a list that apply to the object. What I am trying to do is use the data to confirm that a particular object, $o_{1}$, is a better fit of a particular word, $w$ , than another object, $o_{2}$. I am trying to use hypothesis testing to confirm this, with a null hypothesis that $o_{2}$ is an equivalent or better fit than $o_{1}$ i.e. the probability of labelling $o_{2}$ with $w$ is greater than or equal to the probability of labelling $o_{1}$ with $w$.

There are $n_{1}$ annotations for $o_{1}$, in which the object is labelled $x_{1}$ times with $w$. Similarly $o_{2}$ is labelled $x_{2}$ times in $n_{2}$ annotations.

To calculate the p-value I am working out the probability of observing the difference in the proportion of times $o_{1}$ and $o_{2}$ are labelled with $w$, $P(x_{1}/n_{1}-x_{2}/n_{2}\geq d)$, where d is the observed difference. This gives quite a long function, which relies on the actual underlying probability, $p_{1}$, of labelling $o_{1}$ with $w$, so now I suppose I have to find $p_{1}$ which maximises this function?

I feel uncertain that I'm tackling this in the right way, does this seem correct?

You could possibly use a two-proportion z-test to test against the null hypothesis that $(x_{1}/n_{1}-x_{2}/n_{2})==0$, though there may be better methods that consider the overall distribution of words chosen and accounting for differences in raters in terms of how many words they choose (your situation does not fit the assumptions of the test but may be 'close enough' for certain purposes).


Frequency of schizophrenia symptoms related to mass surveillance? Recently, mass surveillance by organisations like the NSA has become both more prevalent and more known to the public.

Has the frequency of schizophrenia symptoms concerning mass surveillance (eg. persecutory delusions) increased in line with the increase in public awareness about mass surveillance programs?

The specific revelations about global surveillance schemes that you reference like PRISM and XKeyscore are relatively recent (June 2013), so it looks like it's too early for any research to have been done into the statistical frequency of such symptoms. (I can't find any, at least!)

However, some have suggested that the common public knowledge that such programs are a reality could exacerbate symptoms in patients who already exhibit delusional narratives (eg. in schizophrenia) along these lines. A Scientific American article entitled "How Secret Spying Programs Affect the Clinically Paranoid" explains that real-life manifestations of imagined threats could interact with symptoms of psychosis. In this article, Dr. David Kimhy, Director of the Experimental Psychopathology Lab in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University says that though revelations about the NSA could increase general anxiety in the individual with schizophrenia, the scandal should only significantly affect those whose delusions mirror the news.

However, he goes on the say it could instead lessen such delusions:

  “The thought that the government is following everyone, in a paradoxical way, may take away from the delusion,” says Kimhy. Individuals with persecutory delusions usually feel that they are unique targets; thus, the broad net of surveillance that is so troubling to the NSA’s critics might reduce feeling of persecution in an individual who previously believed the government was only after him. Indeed, the therapist might use this broadness as a context in which to discuss the patient’s delusions. “You could ask, ‘What’s so unique to you? What special powers do you have? And by the way, why don’t we talk about those special powers,’” says Kimhy.

This is echoed in the writing of psychologist Daniel Freeman in the journal Clinical Psychology Review:

  The more a belief is implausible, unfounded, strongly held, not shared by others, distressing and preoccupying then the more likely it is to be considered a delusion.

Even prior to these recent revelations, it is well established that current events can impact delusional symptoms. A study published in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, "The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village" concluded that "although schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder have existed in many different cultures and times, their character and means of expression are highly influenced by the culture the patient comes from, as well as its contemporary technology."

An example of mental health symptoms being culture-sensitive was given recently in a TV documentary series about South London and Maudsley Hospital for mental health. A member of staff explained that in the '80s, when AIDS was heavily featured in the news, patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder frequently showed concern about contamination, worrying that spots of ketchup in a kitchen were blood and similar. He said that this is less common now, when AIDS is in the media less, but they've recently seen an increase in patients having intrusive thoughts that make them worry they are a paedophile, as there have been some high-profile child abuse cases in British media reently.


Have humans always had problems with motivation and laziness? I originally wanted to ask a question "Is there a drug for motivation or laziness", but google search revealed that people have been asking this question for years and there's no drug that is currently prescribed to fix those issues.

This makes me interested in the the following question: Did "motivation issues" or laziness always exist for humans, or is it something that became a much bigger problem because of the modern lifestyle or cuture?

For example, I'm thinking of peasants of "ye olde days", who had to work really hard to get by, or early factory workers, who apparently did 12+ hour shifts from a very early age. Those people had no drugs or cognitive-behavior therapy to correct their issues.

Maybe there's some "laziness scale" that could be used to look at historic trends in laziness and motivation?

UPDATE: it would be very interesting to examine if a correlation exists between laziness and workforce moving from working physically/outdoors(ex: farmers) towards working mentally indoors(office workers) over the years.

I would define laziness or motivational issues as "I will do this tomorrow" attitude (procrastination) or promising to do something, but delivering excuses as to why the task wasn't done. The task never gets started.

The change that is relevant to your question is not that from a rural farming life to an urban office-working one, but the neolithic revolution.

In early prehistory and during the palaeolithic period, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. They did nothing but hunt and gather food. When they were sated, they relaxed. Because they had no fridges, food could not be stored, so there was no purpose in "working" more than was necessary for the momentary satisfaction of hunger or repairing of tents and hunting gear.

"Laziness" can be seen as a result of the necessity of sustaining the ecosystem that the hunters were dependent upon:

  Hunting results in rapidly diminishing returns – it is a risky, arduous
  and time-consuming business. This is reflected in the fact that
  predatory animals tend to be spectacularly lazy. Lions, for example,
  sleep or doze for at least twenty hours a day, and spend another two
  hours growling and grooming. They hunt for only about two hours a day.
  Kalahari bushmen have similar been shown to hunt for only about six
  hours a week [sic!]. 'Laziness' is a way of life for the big predator. (Tudge, 1998, p. 33)

Then, about 10.000 years ago, the first humans settled down and began agriculture. From this moment onwards, each day was filled with hard labor.

  ... farming changes the rules of the game. Farming manipulates the
  environment with the express purpose of overcoming its natural
  restraints. The more you manipulate, the more food you can produce.
  The harder farmers work the more food they can produce. Laziness is
  emphatically not favoured. A hunter who works twice as hard as average
  may get twice as much food in the short term, but will soon come
  unstuck as his prey disappears. But the farmer who works ten times as
  hard as his neighbor will indeed produce ten times as much food – and
  in favourable circumstances can sustain this tenfold increase
  indefinitely. (Tudge, 1998, p. 33)

Motivation for paleolithic hunter-gatherers was simply the need to not go hungry. It was not something that you did not have. You either hunted or died. The very concept of motivation does not fit such a life, because action sprang directly from your basic needs. While those needs were satisfied, there was no need for action: "laziness, nomadism and sharing were all integral parts of the Aboriginal life-style" (Ward, 1988).

Hunter-gatherer life is the garden Eden that Adam was sent forth from: "thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread". Rowley-Conwy, in his aptly titled article "The laziness of the short-distance hunter" (1984), argues that for one Mesolithic community in western Denmark at least, "farming was not adopted until problems arose with the hunter-gatherer economy".

If you want to study how problems with motivation came about, you'll need to go look at the difference between nomadic hunter-gatherer and settled farmer life.

Evolutionary psychology assumes "that our minds and bodies are adapted for an ancestral environment", and "that we suffer the consequences of poor fit between our inherited natures and many of the constructed environments in organizational society" (Nicholson, 1997).

Geary and Bjorklund (2000) think that motivation depends on the type of ability that is necessary for performance:

  ... much of formal education is "unnatural" in that much of what
  children are taught involves tasks never encountered by our ancestors
  (Brown & Bjorklund, 1998; Geary, 1995). Although humans apparently
  have been using language for thousands of years, it is only in this
  century that the majority of people on the planet are literate. Geary
  (1995) referred to language and other evolved forms of cognition, such
  as those represented in Figure 1 [nonverbal behavior, language, facial
  processing, theory of mind, kin, in-group, out-group, social
  ideologies, flora, fauna, movement, representation, engineering], as
  biologically primary abilities, and skills that build upon these primary abilities but are principally cultural inventions, such as
  reading, as biologically secondary abilities. Biologically primary
  abilities are acquired universally and children typically have high
  motivation to perform tasks involving them. In contrast,
  biologically secondary abilities are culturally determined, and often
  tedious repetition and external motivation are necessary for their
  mastery. From this perspective, it is understandable that many
  children have difficulty with reading and higher mathematics.
  (emphasis added)

And from this perspective it is also understandable that most of us aren't very motivated to perform those of our daily chores that require biologically secondary abilities, and I would surmise that the motivation declines as we move towards abilities that build upon abilities that ... are more and more removed from our biologically primary concerns.

Sources:

Geary, D. C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2000). Evolutionary developmental psychology. Child Development, 71, 57-65. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00118
Nicholson, N. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: Toward a new view of human nature and organizational society. Human Relations, 50, 1053-1078. doi:10.1177/001872679705000901
Rowley-Conwy, P. (1984). The laziness of the short-distance hunter: The origins of agriculture in western Denmark. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 3, 300-324. doi:10.1016/0278-4165(84)90005-9
Tudge, C. (1998). Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ward, R. (1988). Aboriginal communists. Labour History, 55, 1-8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/i27508887


What is the difference between work engagement and flow? Work engagement has three aspects: vigor, dedication, and absorption.

Flow according to wikipedia "is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus".

What is the difference between the two concepts?

While there are some differences, the two concepts are closely related.
Both flow and work engagement are "positive emotional states" (Schaufeli, Bakker and Van Rhenen, 2009, p. 898).

According to Schaufeli et al. (2009, p. 895) "recent research suggests that vigor and dedication constitute the core of engagement, whereas absorption seems to be related to the concept of flow" as defined by Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre (1989).

"However, typically, flow is a more complex concept that includes many aspects and refers to rather particular, short-term ‘peak’ experiences instead of a more pervasive and persistent state of mind, as is the case with engagement" (Schaufeli et al., 2002, p. 75). Moreover, work engagement refers specifically to "identification with one's work" (Schaufeli et al., 2009, p. 895).

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & LeFevre, J. (1989). Optimal experience in work and leisure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(5), 815–822. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.56.5.815

Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B., & Van Rhenen, W. (2009). How changes in job demands and resources predict burnout, work engagement, and sickness absenteeism. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30(7), 893–917. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.595

Schaufeli, W., Salanova, M., González-romá, V., & Bakker, A. (2002). The Measurement of Engagement and Burnout: A Two Sample Confirmatory Factor Analytic Approach. Journal of Happiness Studies, 3(1), 71–92. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015630930326


What are the side effects of Anger? Are there any side effects i.e. any hormonal changes , dopamine release when we get anger or while we shout or outburst in anger?

Because we feel satisfied getting anger in a situation than keeping our emotions shut!

This is actually a pretty complicated question.

In general, there isn't a lot of consistent evidence that would suggest that discrete emotions like anger have stereotyped response patterns. Anger is a fairly heterogeneous emotion category, meaning that it may not look the same (and have the same outcomes) in any given situation. Consequently, there may not be a good (or at least simple) answer to your question. This is the "psychological constructionist" argument (for a comprehensive overview, see Barrett & Russell, 2014).

On the other hand "basic emotion" proponents (Ekman, Izard, Panksepp) would suggest that activation of an "anger circuit" in the brain reliably produces a particular response pattern (e.g., feelings of unpleasantness, high arousal, approach motivation, certain facial expressions, hormonal changes, etc.).  However, attempts to match these responses with specific emotions like anger have never quite worked out.  Also, recent meta-analyses looking at emotion in the brain don't seem to support this perspective (e.g., Lindquist et al., 2012).

Edit: I don't find Wikipedia's explanation (linked by Mike) to be particularly convincing since it cites an article published 15 years ago.  Emotion research has come a long way since then.

Edit2: Sources

For general psychological constructionist arguments about the nature of emotion, see: Barrett 2006 and Barrett 2014
For basic emotion arguments, see: Ekman & Cordaro 2011
For reviews on mapping physiological changes to emotions, see: Cacioppo et al. 2000, Stemmler 2004, and for a theory-driven review of reviews/meta-analyses see Quigley & Barrett 2014


Mapping Sustained Attention on the brain (EEG) I am doing a study to the effects of sustained attention on Situation Awareness, i.e. how well one perceives and understands the relevant information in their direct environment (in both space and time) and the ability to make predictions about the near future. I want to use EEG to measure the participants sustained attention by calculating the mean power in the Alpha frequency band, over two second periods.

I am in doubt however, over which channels I should calculate this average. Perceptual related brain responses usually occur in the occipital lobe and other more posterior located regions, but where do I draw the line? Are there some references that may support such a decision?

You should consider using subject-specific alpha channels and frequency ranges. There are differences between individuals in alpha peak frequency. Also the placement of the EEG cap as well as small differences in orientations of cortex can affect which channels pick up perceptual activity.

One way to do this would be to record data from the subject with their eyes open and then their eyes closed, say for 60 seconds each. Then you can find the channels where there is a significant difference in power around the alpha range between these two conditions. You can also use this data to determine the peak frequency of each subject's alpha.


Csikszentmihalyi on drugs and their effect This is an excerpt from pp. 169-170 of a book named Flow: the psychology of optimal experience, written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . It has become very difficult to understand the meaning of this
* Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This is a pleasant state of affairs, but it is only a misleading simulation of that enjoyment that comes from increasing opportunities for actions and the abilities to act.*                                                        Please help me to understand the meaning of this paragraph. I asked the question on english language forums to understand its meaning but it does not seem to work as it is more of a psychology related question.

Freely translated, the author says that...

"Doing drugs is fine when performed under the guidance of experts in traditional, ritual contexts. Drugs reduce our perception of what is possible, and they reduce the perception of what we ourselves can achieve. Drugs do this until the two are in balance. This is pleasant. But, it is misleading and far greater joy can be achieved when one would stimulate the chances to achieve goals, and to enhance our possibilities to do great stuff."

Honestly, I think this is a big mouthful of gibberish. But there you go.


What is the correct scientific term of having a short-term or long-term mindset (in the field of health and healthy lifestyle)? For research on changing lifestyle behaviours to prevent future disease, I am looking for literature on what the influence is of having a short-term versus a long-term oriented mindset. However, I cannot come up with the correct term for this and therefore do not manage to find useful scientific literature.
Any suggestions? Perhaps even recommendations of literature?

One search term that might be useful is temporal discounting.

Here's a relevant Psychlopedia article, and a relatively recent paper that may have some useful references for navigating the literature.


Refinements of Rescorla-Wagner model of classical conditioning The Rescorla-Wagner model is one of the most commonly discussed mathematical models of classical conditioning. It was wildly popular when it came out in 1972, and very successful. The same math, is used in the delta-rule which is a special case of back-propagation with a single layer. In neural network research, the back-propagation algorithm has been refined and replaced over the years. However, for basic classical conditioning, I am not aware of any significant advances over the RW-model. It is still often cited as the model for classical conditioning in textbooks.
However, it is well know that there are numerous conditioning experiments the RW-model cannot explain, for a detailed references, see pages 370 to 378 of Miller et al. (1995). Hence the question:
Is there a modern refinement of the Rescorla-Wagner model that addressed all 23 failures listed in Miller et al. (1995)? How does this refinement relate to refinements of back-propagation?

References
Miller, R.R., Barnet, R.C., & Grahame, N.J. (1995) "Assessment of the Rescorla-Wagner model." Psychological bulletin 117(3): 363-386 [pdf]

I don't think anyone has ever bothered (though Ralph Miller might disagree), since many of the 'failures' are outside of the model's purview. The model expresses as simply as possible the profound insight that we learn most when our expectations are not met. Many features of learning won't conform to this general principle (spontaneous recovery) but it doesn't make it wrong. Other features of learning emerge when the model is applied in layers or a hierarchy, rather than as a single unit (e.g., rapid reacquisition). Hence there is little pressure to adapt the model, although many adaptions have been proposed to account for one effect or another (e.g., Van Hamme &  Wasserman, 1994; Dickinson & Burke, 1996 etc). However these have usually limited it's generalisability due to overfitting.


What is the psychological term for disregarding correct but unwanted information? Sometimes people seem to be very resistant to information that is in conflict with prior beliefs, even when this new information is very plausible.

For example, a patient might change a doctor, because he/she does not get the diagnosis he/she expected even if the diagnosis is correct.

How is the psychological term for this tendency?

Belief perseverance is "the tendency to cling to one's initial belief even after receiving  new  information that  contradicts or dis-confirms  the basis of that belief" (Anderson, 2007).

Belief perseverance is usually regarded as a special case of the confirmation bias. (Also see these earlier questions.)

References

Anderson, C.A. (2007). Belief perseverance (pp. 109-110). In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Social Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


What are the key algorithms for learning optimal behavior of economic agents? I'm playing around with social learning of near-optimal behavioral rules on a set of agents. The idea is roughly that given an income process (or technology process, depending on the question) an optimal nonlinear, intertemporal policy rule exists. Assume this rule can be approximated closely by a linear function. Agents would like to learn this policy rule, and a first pass is to have them learn the rule simply by experimentation. "In autarky," i.e. without any information exchange with other agents, an agent would try a rule for some time, use some metric to determine how well it does against other rules he/she has tried, and perhaps reassess, perhaps try an entirely different rule via experimentation. This agent only observes his/her own history.

A second pass is to allow the agent access to all other agents' histories. Presumably this would speed up learning. A third pass might be to put these agents on an information network of some sort.

I've been perusing literature on social learning, but am not entirely sure the frameworks I am looking at are exactly what I want. Many of them appear to be Bayesian learning about a hidden state of nature, for which everyone has a private signal. I'm actively reviewing literature right now, but as I do, does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions?

Here are two computational approaches which might work:

I. Artificial neural network

A neural network consists of an interconnected group of artificial neurons, and it processes information using a connectionist approach to computation. In most cases an ANN is an adaptive system that changes its structure based on external or internal information that flows through the network during the learning phase. Modern neural networks are non-linear statistical data modelling tools. They are usually used to model complex relationships between inputs and outputs or to find patterns in data.
Perhaps the greatest advantage of ANNs is their ability to be used as an arbitrary function approximation mechanism which 'learns' from observed data. However, using them is not so straightforward and a relatively good understanding of the underlying theory is essential.

Choice of model: This will depend on the data representation and the application. Overly complex models tend to lead to problems with learning.
Learning algorithm: There are numerous trade-offs between learning algorithms. Almost any algorithm will work well with the correct hyper-parameters for training on a particular fixed dataset. However selecting and tuning an algorithm for training on unseen data requires a significant amount of experimentation.
Robustness: If the model, cost function and learning algorithm are selected appropriately the resulting ANN can be extremely robust.

II. Support vector machine

A set of related supervised learning methods that analyse data and recognize patterns, used for classification and regression analysis. The standard SVM takes a set of input data, and predicts, for each given input, which of two possible classes the input is a member of, which makes the SVM a non-probabilistic binary linear classifier. Since an SVM is a classifier, then given a set of training examples, each marked as belonging to one of two categories, an SVM training algorithm builds a model that predicts whether a new example falls into one category or the other. Intuitively, an SVM model is a representation of the examples as points in space, mapped so that the examples of the separate categories are divided by a clear gap that is as wide as possible. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall on.

Neural Networks have been used to create highly competitive computer-players for the open-source FreeCiv.  There, Neural Networks are used with Monte Carlo Methods which I've also used in simulating economic interactions in games.

Not sure if this is entirely what you're looking for but might be a start?