Why is it easier to remember the correct response for problems with many options rather than just two? Sometimes it seems easier, at least for me, to remember an answer, when there are more than 2 options to choose from.

For example, I easily remember my pin (14 bit), but hardly the lighter switch (up or down- 1 bit) for "on".

Why is that? Or is it just a wrong impression?

The simple fact of the mater is you're talking Short Term Memory (STM) for the light switch versus Long Term Memory (LTM) for the PIN.

From Wikipedia's definition of Long Term Memory (which is fairly accurate, if simplistic)

  Long-term memory (LTM) is memory in which associations among items are stored, as part of the theory of a dual-store memory model. According to the theory, long-term memory differs structurally and functionally from working memory or short-term memory, which ostensibly stores items for only around 20–30 seconds and can be recalled easily. This differs from the theory of the single-store retrieved context model that has no differentiation between short-term and long-term memory.

You never encode simple things like light switch positions into Long Term Memory because it would be useless; it's going to change and it's not that important (you can always check it's state readily). You pay very little attention to the light switch meaning you will likely not even keep it in Short Term Memory.

Your PIN on the other hand you have rehearsed dozens of times, tried very hard to remember, gotten some sleep (which helps the encoding process into Long Term Memory) and have built up many associations (this number gives me money, reminds me of my wallet, ect).

All forms of human memory are limited, so it's very important that we bias our memory toward important stuff; in STM you have to keep working with an item constantly to remember it; "call bob call bob call bob". But once you've elaborated on that item (I need to call bob at 3PM because he owes me money), rehersed it repeatedly, written it down (maintenance and elaborative rehearsal) it might slip into long term memory. But, since unlike your PIN, it will eventually be lost to forgetting (hopefully) since you don't continue to dwell on it, and the information stops being useful.


Looking for a source for Valence/Arousal values Russell's advance circumplex model of emotion? I've been looking for a chart/table of Valence and Arousal values from the advanced Russell's model such as the one referenced in this article https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50805681_Asymmetrical_Facial_Expressions_based_on_an_Advanced_Interpretation_of_Two-dimensional_Russells_Emotional_Model

I'm unable to find anything that isn't a picture, and what I'm really looking for is a table/spreadsheet with the emotions and the valence/arousal values for each emotion.

Is there a source for this that I can reference?

Circumplex models of emotion with the dimensions 'arousal' and 'valence' are not grounded with neurobiological support.

There is however an alternative 'atlas' model with two dimensions that does have neurobiological support (Mobbs, 2020).  The atlas model uses the dimensions of 'affiliation' and 'dominance' with broad emotional categories as shown below.  The atlas is supported with a catalogue of over 3000 emotions each with precise coordinates.

The facial expressions for each location in the atlas is shown below:

Mobbs AED (2020) An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour. PLOS ONE 15(1): e0227877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227877


How do humans control saccades? I've gathered the standard rational for a visual system utilizing saccades from perception textbooks: the neural cost of processing an entire scene at a high level of detail would be prohibitive, but low-fidelity images aren't good enough to function in the world. Thus you have an retina with a high-fidelity center which can sample the scene by saccading around, presumably guided by a combination of information about the low-fidelity surround and the beliefs and goals of the perceiver.

However, I've yet to find a detailed theory that answers the question of how the next saccade target selected.

To clarify, by 'detailed theory', I mean a theory that describes the mechanisms used to accomplish the computational feats described in the standard textbook explanation I mentioned above.

Treisman & Gelade's Feature Integration Theory suggests that we are able to process an entire visual scene in parallel at the level of individual features. For example, in a visual search task, the time required to find a blue circle in a field of red circles is independent of the total number of circles. However, focused attention (typically foveal) is required to integrate independent features into a cohesive object. Thus, if searching for a red circle in a field of blue circles and red squares, search time grows linearly with the number of total objects. This is because the target is made up of two features (circle and red) which need to be integrated in order to be identified-- requiring saccades around the scene.
Several theories of visual search use this distinction to model visual attention shifts. Most notably, Jeremy Wolfe's Guided Search and Itti & Koch's visual attention model. The basic premise behind both models is somewhat similar: low level feature receptors respond automatically and in parallel to the entire visual field. Thus, there are many individual feature maps that represent bottom-up saliency of locations in the visual scene. This bottom-up saliency can be sufficient to trigger a saccade; for instance, a feature map that responds to local motion is beneficial for an organism to identify moving predators. Thus, areas with motion are given high value because they have a history of providing information that is beneficial to an organism.
During task conditions (such as visual search), top-down saliency maps may also be created based on knowledge of what things in the environment have value. If I am searching for my umbrella, I know that it is blue and long and straight, and this information can be encoded in the feature maps that drive saccades.
More generally, saccades are directed at targets that have a high expected value. (It has even been shown that the velocity of saccades is proportional to the expected value of the target: Shadmehr, et al.) This value is determined from a weighted evaluation of both top-down and bottom-up feature maps, available pre-attentively.
The exact location of a saccade is determined through a process called spatial pooling, which attempts to determine the 'center of gravity' of a target, again using low level feature maps. While saccades are amazingly quick and accurate, there is of course some error in final saccadic position which often require smaller saccades to reach the target. It has recently been suggested that this series of saccadic movements emulate Fitts' law with regards to speed-accuracy tradeoffs. A great, thorough review of the current state of saccadic eye movements can be found in Kowler, 2011.
There is obviously quite a bit of detailed information that I haven't covered here-- out of the references cited, I would start with section 3 ("Saccades") of the Kowler article, then move on to the Itti & Koch article for more concrete details on their specific model.

Wolfe, J.M. (1994). Guided Search 2.0. A revised model of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 202-238.
Itti, L., & Koch, C. (2001). Computational modelling of visual
attention. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 1-11.
Shadmehr et al. (2010). Temporal discounting of reward and the cost of
time in motor control. Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 10507-10516.
Kowler, E. (2011). Eye movements: The past 25 years. Vision Research,
51, 1457-1483.

** Note I cite Guided Search 2.0 because it is a good exposition of the whole theory, though the theory itself has progressed to 4.0


What is the word for: "I have to do" in CBT? When people think "I must", "I have to", "I should", "he should", or "people have to" it can become a problem.

It's studied by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy but I don't know the name for this kind of problem.

This is the explanation in another language (translated in english): link

You could be referring to two different things.

1) This is an example of an intermediate belief. Cognitions can be thought of as three levels: automatic thoughts (which are the first thoughts that pop into our heads), intermediate beliefs (which often take the form of rules, attitudes, and assumptions), and core beliefs (which reflect our deepest levels of thought and core values).

An example is:

Situation: Not understanding part of a lecture
Automatic thought: I'll never learn this! I'm an idiot! Why bother trying?
Intermediate beliefs: (which can take the form of should or must statements)

*Attitude: Failing at anything is terrible

*Assumption: If I challenge myself, I'm sure to fail. If I do things that come easily, I'll succeed.

*Rule: If I can't do this easily, I should just give up.
Core belief: I'm incompetent

2) The statements you mention are also examples of dysfunctional thoughts (also called cognitive distortions), specifically all-or-nothing thinking (seeing things in black or white) or "imperatives" (should or must statements).

These errors in thinking are our tendency to draw invalid conclusions or selectively pay attention to evidence to support our thinking.
Example of all-or-nothing thinking: If I don't get a 100% on the test, I'm a failure. If she doesn't return my phone call immediately, she hates me. (That second example is also a bit of jumping to conclusions).
Example of imperatives: Making any mistake is terrible; I should always do my best. If I ask for help, I am weak; I must be completely self-reliant.

Search these terms for more information: Intermediate beliefs, dysfunctional thoughts, cognitive distortions

Reference:

Beck, J.S. (2011). Cognitive Behavior Therapy. 2nd Edition. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.


What is the relationship between psychological entitlement and locus of control or other personal characteristics? I'm studying psychology and I have the assignment to write an experimental study I'm still collecting the scientific information on the topic so I would really appreciate some help.
I'm interested to know:

What is the relationship between psychological entitlement and locus of control?
What scientific studies have been conducted on the relation between psychological entitlement and locus of control or some other personal characteristic?

Psychological entitlement (the belief that one should get preferential treatment) is positively related to an external locus of control (the belief that personal outcomes are due to chance or powerful others).

For example, Anderson et al. (2013), report that the Personal Entitlement Scale (Campbell et al., 2004) is correlated with r=.43 to more external answers on the Locus of Control Scale by Rotter (1954). Similarly, for entitlement beliefs in the academic realm, Kopp et al. report positive correlations of entitlement beliefs with the Locus of Control - Chance and Locus of Control - Powerful Others subscales of the Levenson (1973) scale.

The last part of the question (what are other correlates of entitlement?) is very broad. Campbell et al.'s (2004) scale is frequently cited in research on entitlement, this should be a good starting point into this research field.

References

Anderson, D., Halberstadt, J., & Aitken, R. (2013). Entitlement Attitudes Predict Students’ Poor Performance in Challenging Academic Conditions. International Journal of Higher Education, 2. doi:10.5430/ijhe.v2n2p151

Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J., & Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological Entitlement: Interpersonal Consequences and Validation of a Self-Report Measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 83, 29–45. doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa8301_04

Kopp, J. P., Zinn, T. E., Finney, S. J., & Jurich, D. P. (2011). The Development and Evaluation of the Academic Entitlement Questionnaire. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 44, 105–129. doi:10.1177/0748175611400292

Levenson, H. (1973). Multidimensional locus of control in psychiatric patients. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 41, 397–404

Rotter, J. B. (1954). Social learning and clinical psychology. New York, NY: Prentice Hall. doi:10.1037/10788-000


What is the situation called where a strong party uses logical reasoning based on a flawed foundation? I am interested in the  situation where two parties (people or organisations) differ in their commitment to exert power where party has more commitment to exert power than the other. The two parties have a dispute on some matter. The strong party builds an argument upon an erroneous point and with great rigour proceeds with some logical conclusions. The strong party is gladly involved in philosophical dispute concerning the validity of all links, but first. The initial point is sold as an axiom.

My question is twofold:

does this situation have name?
What is the best strategy to deal with this situation for a weak party?

A partial solution:

As for the logical fallacy (unrelated to "strong" and "weak" parties), you seem to be describing a "Fallacy of Presumption," where one makes an argument based off of a false/questionable/undefended presumption. There are several more specific cases of this type of fallacy. A website that describes a few is listed below (found via a Google search).

http://www.philosophypages.com/lg/e06b.htm


Do children follow parents' phobias genetically or by learning? Children's personalities come from  two sources: Parents' genes and the environment.

Is there any research showing adults acquiring phobias as a result of being exposed to parents with the same phobia when they were a child?
For example if an adult is afraid of height, darkness or water, does this increase the probability of having parents with the same phobia?

Yes, phobias appear to be partly hereditary. This encompasses both genetic and environmental factors.

Kendler et al. (1999) review some work in this area:

  We have previously reported, from a population-based sample of female twins, that the liability
  to agoraphobia, social phobia and animal
  phobia was modestly infuenced by genetic
  factors with heritabilities estimated between 30
  and 40% (Kendler et al. 1992a). For situational
  and blood-injury phobia, by contrast, twin
  resemblance appeared to be due to familial
  environmental risk factors, which were responsible for ~30% of the variance in liability
  (Kendler et al. 1992a; Neale et al. 1994b).

A shortcoming of these studies is that they rely on single lifetime assessments, which may be unreliable. Kendler et al. (1999) tries to rectify this by following up with their original sample 8 years later. They conclude:

  Short-term reliability of the five phobias was modest (mean $\varkappa$=0.46), but higher than long-
  term stability (mean $\varkappa$=0.30). Unreliability occurred both for subject recall of unreasonable fears
  and for interviewer assessment of which fears constituted phobias. Examining fears and phobias
  together, in a multiple threshold model, results suggested that twin resemblance was due solely to
  genetic factors, with estimated total heritabilities, corrected for unreliability, of: any 43%,
  agoraphobia 67%, animal 47%, blood-injury 59%, situational 46% and social 51%.

They go on to compare their theory with other theories of phobia acquisition, such as classical conditioning and social learning theory. They state:

  By contrast, our results are supportive of an
  `inherited phobia-proneness' model (Seligman,
  1971; Gray, 1982)

This variance explained does, of course, leave considerable room for learned phobias. So, one should not overemphasize the hereditable components of fears and phobias (Delprato, 1980).

References

  Delprato, D. J. (1980). Hereditary determinants of fears and phobias: A critical review. Behavior Therapy, 11(1), 79-103.

  Gray, J. A. (1982). The Neuropsychology of Anxiety. Oxford
  University Press: New York.

  Kendler, K. S., Karkowski, L. M., & Prescott, C. A. (1999). Fears and phobias: reliability and heritability. Psychological medicine, 29(3), 539-553. PDF

  Kendler, K. S., Neale, M. C., Kessler, R. C., Heath, A. C., & Eaves, L. J. (1992). The genetic epidemiology of phobias in women: the interrelationship of agoraphobia, social phobia, situational phobia, and simple phobia. Archives of General Psychiatry, 49(4), 273.

  Neale, M. C., Walters, E. E., Eaves, L. J., Kessler, R. C., Heath, A. C., & Kendler, K. S. (1994). Genetics of blood‐injury fears and phobias: A population‐based twin study. American journal of medical genetics, 54(4), 326-334. PDF

  Seligman, M. E. P. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behavior
  Therapy 2, 307-320


Bias towards purchasing tangible vs virtual goods People may have very little hesitation in spending $3 on a coffee once a week, but when it comes to buying things online, such as virtual goods or services, they are often much more reluctant.

Is there a block when it comes to buying things online?
If so, why?
Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Is so, how can someone selling something online (e.g. an online service provider or a software company) get around this and make customers less hesitant when shopping online?

Grabner-Kräuter et al (2003) suggest that

  Lack of trust is one of the most frequently cited reasons for
  consumers not purchasing from Internet vendors.

References

Grabner-Kräuter, S., & Kaluscha, E. A. (2003). Empirical research in on-line trust: a review and critical assessment. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58(6), 783-812. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=941185


How is intelligence correlated to beauty? Recently, I read several interesting questions on the web about the relationship between IQ and general intelligence and physiological symmetry. But more importantly, what explains the correlation? Or is it even true? Because many of the world's foremost thinkers, such as Plato, and Sartre, were ugly.

Is there really a relationship between beauty (physiological symmetry) and intelligence?
And if so, does physiological symmetry cause high intelligence?

In the general population there does seem to be a positive correlation between psychometrically measured intelligence and observer rated attractiveness (Kanazawa, 2011). The power of the relationship seems to be medium to low.

Two possible explanations for this relationship are:

Intelligence and physical attractiveness both depend on physical health; meaning that people who grow up unhealthily tend to be less attractive and less intelligent.
The genes for intelligence and physical attractiveness became collocated over time as more attractive people tend to mate with more intelligent people.

References

Kanazawa, Satoshi. Intelligence and physical attractiveness. Intelligence 39.1 (2011): 7-14. (free pdf here)


What are new and exciting research areas or applications in systems neuroscience? Like the title says, what are new and exciting research areas or applications in systems neuroscience? I know the question is a broad one, so let me narrow it down a bit:

I will get my master's degree in about year from now. Currently, I have published two papers related to fMRI data analysis. I'm also familiar with PET. So, I am actually looking for a topic for my PhD.

I have considered taking part in some existing research group at my university, but to be honest, I'm not really excited about what they are doing. It seems to me that they are reinventing things (which I think is also evident from their publications records - for example, my current advisor's publications have not received much citations expect from herself).

So, the problem is that I know the basic things in my field, but nothing that could be the next big thing.

I would like to have a PhD topic on something that is new, and has potential. Any suggestions?

As Chuck says in his comment, read, read, read - as you do, consider the following factors for your potential PhD:

What topics are PhD projects in available at the universities that you are considering. Be sure to check not only the project availability, but also the research interests of academics.
A PhD is quite a commitment, which topic would light that 'fire' in you to the extent that it could become a lifelong vocation.

As you read, read, read - ask questions of the academics in that field, download their papers and have a look at what directions that particular research is taking.


What's the most appropriate statistical analysis to run for a correlational study? I am designing a correlational study experiment to test children on their performance on a task at $t_1$ and then at $t_2$ a year later, specifically using the balance-scale paradigm (Siegler, 1981). I'm not sure which statistical tests will be appropriate to run.
I want to find out if the early use of a sophisticated decision rule at $t_1$ is predictive of children using even more sophisticated rules in $t_2$. Namely, is a child who can deploy a complex decision rule quicker than most of her peers at $t_1$ more likely to use even more complex decision rules at $t_2$? I will compare these results with the $t_1$ vs $t_2$ results of children who failed to deploy that more complicated decision rule at $t_1$. These two decision rules will be operationalised as non-continuous binary variables.
What kind of statistical testing would be most appropriate here?

References
Siegler, R. S. (1981). Developmental sequences within and between concepts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 46(2), 84

Although you have two times of testing, you really just have two binary variables and you'd like to know if they are associated, there are no repeated measures here. You'd like to know if the value of one binary variable depends on the value of the other binary variable. I'll call them A,B and X,Y.
If there is no relationship between A,B and X,Y, then you expect the ratio of X:Y to be the same for A as it is for B (this is your null hypothesis). You can examine your data by building a 2x2 contingency table with cells AX, AY, BX, and BY.
You can test the null hypothesis described with a chi-square test for independence, or Fisher's exact test if the sample size is fairly small.


How many possible states does a brain have? Suppose I have a box, inside of which is a light which can be either on or off: it has exactly two states.
Suppose I wanted to take some "snapshot" of the state of this device, and store all the information about it, so that if I at some point had another device with sufficiently identical hardware + environment and a way of writing all the state to that device, I could recreate the state of that box.  There are n=two possible states (so it would require log2(n) = 1 bits to store the state).

Now suppose my box is a brain.  To the nearest order of magnitude, how many possible states does the brain have?

Assuming it's an adult human brain might make for the most useful answer to this question, but if you have more solid answers for brains of other animals while we wait on an answer for humans, feel free to post an answer stating that assumption.

2 2,752,000,000,000,000,000,000 states

  Disclaimer: This is obviously a very crude and imprecise estimation (in fact, it is ignoring some obvious parameters for the sake of simplicity). As Scott E. Page puts it: Even models that are far from accurate can teach us something.

If one considers the design of future artificial brain, you can make these rough assumptions:

A 32 bit floating point representation should suffice to capture synapse elasticity.
There are about 86 billion neurons in the brain. The connectivity of which can be represented by a square matrix of size 86 * 1018 (86 * 109 to the power of 2). Each connection is weighted, 32-bit float.

Resulting in 86 * 1018 * 32 bits =

2752000000000000000000 bits (2.75 sextillion).

These many bits result in these many states:

2 2752000000000000000000

or:

This obviously a very rough estimation - you don't account, for example, to membrane potential, although you can argue that discarding membrane potential while maintaining neural connectivity and synaptic strength should suffice to 'reignite' a frozen brain.

Perhaps more importantly, a network structure can be represented by a matrix, but more often is represented by a sparse matrix - no neuron is connected to all other neurons, I believe 1000 is the average and some sources state that there are about 1,000 trillion synaptic connections.


Cognitive explanation of why beta blockers are effective for anxiety Beta blockers essentially reduce physical effects of anxiety and panic disorder, but there is no proof that there is a direct effect on anxiety. Some scientists believe there is an indirect effect.

What is the cognitive explanation of the fact that a reduction in symptoms causes a reduction in anxiety?

One possibility is related to the Two-Factor theory of emotion. The theory describes how emotion is a product of both cognitive and physiological factors. Essentially, the mind tries to determine what emotion it is feeling by analyzing the body. By antagonizing epinephrine, they kind of inhibit the sympathetic nervous system. So, when a person would otherwise feel anxiety it would be associated with the effect of epinephrine. Without that cue, they would possibly interpret their feelings differently, as feeling less anxious.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/69/5/379/


Why doesn't psychology impose higher standards to solve its replication crisis? This question is inspired by a previous one on Physics.SE. If we believe the answer to that question, particle physics doesn't suffer nearly as much from the reproducibility crisis because it has much higher standards than the social sciences.

  The 'replication crisis' is that many effects in social sciences (and, although to a lesser extent, other scientific fields) couldn't be reproduced.

  ...

  If anything, there is a suspicion that the practices at the LHC might even result in the opposite of the 'replication crisis;' analyses that find effects that are somewhat significant might be examined and tweaked until they decrease.

But if that answer is true, that suggests a simple way to solve the reproducibility crisis in fields like psychology: just impose higher standards.

Question: why hasn't psychology (and other fields as a whole) done that? Or is that answer misrepresenting what psychologists already do?

High standards are being proposed, but not taken up very quickly.

Psychology is currently undergoing a transition in methods between the traditional approach of hypothesizing after results are known (e.g., Bem, 1980) and new statistical and design methods that have fewer false positives, such as focusing on effect sizes and confidence intervals over significance, pre-registration, Registered Reports, sharing of code and data, replication, meta-analysis, multi-site replication such as the Psychological Accelerator and Many Labs, error detection tools, etc. Note that even if these techniques are demonstrably superior for inference quality, their uptake within the discipline and coverage in undergraduate and graduate coursework depends on current faculty changing their beliefs and practices. Historically in science, this is a slow and fraught process (Kuhn, 1962); sometimes fields have had to wait for faculty to die before new methods can take full root. It doesn't look like it will take that long, but I mention this to highlight the difference between superior methods existing and whether they are implemented within a field. Psychology is currently undergoing something of a struggle between reformers and supporters of the status quo.

@Chris Rogers makes another good point that measurement of psychological constructs such as motivation is necessarily indirect, and people are exceptionally variable by context, making the design of measures more contextual than in physics. The lack of stable evidence is not an indication of standards alone.


How can pain sensations appear to originate within the person's skull? I've read that humans have some sort of a kinesthetic model of their body and muscles. This internal representation of the body is used to control and coordinate locomotion. I don't remember if feeling of pain is related to the same model.

I've checked the articles below in hopes of recalling what the correct term for the kinestetic model was, but was unable to find it. Sensory Homunculus concept seems close, but doesn't ring the bell.  Can someone suggest what the correct term for the internal representation used to coordinate motion is?

Phantom Pain

Phantom Limb

I'm interested in learning how people can feel various sensations that appear to originate within their skulls? For example, sometimes I feel headache and can say that it is in the left side, or I feel something in the back of the head. From what I understand, the brain does not have pain receptors, and there are no voluntary muscles to contract within the brain. This makes it hard for me to imagine how such positioning system can develop or what its purpose is.

With this in mind, I'm puzzled by how the location of a sensation can be determined within the skull.

Is this an extension of the kinestetic model of the body
Or is it a side effect of other pain (ex: teeth, thyroid) being
mis-mapped
or just a side effect of a headache(ex: hallucination/synestesia)?

This question might be better handled by biology.SE. I think the short answer is that there are many pain receptors around the skull.

From wikipedia:

  The brain tissue itself is not sensitive to pain because it lacks pain
  receptors. Rather, the pain is caused by disturbance of the
  pain-sensitive structures around the brain. Nine areas of the head and
  neck have these pain-sensitive structures, which are the cranium (the
  periosteum of the skull), muscles, nerves, arteries and veins,
  subcutaneous tissues, eyes, ears, sinuses and mucous membranes.


Searching for Silva Method papers I have tried to find some papers about Silva Method when that i seen this text in Wikipedia:

James Randi wrote that the Silva Method "claims to develop improved
memory, learning ability, and paranormal powers like telepathy. Much
of the course consists of 'visiting' absent persons imagined by
students and performing diagnoses on them. No tests of the validity of
this practice have been done; such tests are discouraged by the
teachers of the system."2

so i tried this tags(psychology "Silva") and not find any paper, So if there is not any paper on silva methods, why does it happen? is it not scientific issue or ...?

James Randi is a famous skeptic who challenges paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices may give the appearance of being scientific, but, are untestable. James Randi's claim is that the Silva method is untestable and, therefore, unscientific.  In other words, the Silva method has no observable (or statistically significant) effect on memory, learning or telepathy.


What's the best way to calculate an index score based on reaction time, variance and accuracy? Say I have a go/no-go task and my output data includes 3 parameters:
average reaction time, variance of reaction time, and number of errors.
I want to composite all of the parameters into a single index score.

What is the best way to do it? All of the parameters are equally important to me.

This overlaps a lot with these two questions: So check them out

How to measure group differences incorporating reaction time / accuracy trade-off?
How to analyze reaction times and accuracy together?

Regarding some specifics of your question, reaction time variance will often be strongly correlated with reaction time mean. So in routine measures of individual differences where speed is the main focus, it may be sufficient to focus on mean reaction time and accuracy. E.g., mean reaction time possibly with some sort of penalty for errors (see the above answers).

If you are wanting to get very precise, then there are a range of modelling approaches that may be relevant (e.g., this question on LBA and diffusion models).

With regards to go-no-go, I believe there are fairly standardised procedures for scoring such tests.


Why do people donate money to others engaging in activities for charity? In the UK and elsewhere individuals often engage in activities (e.g., running, shaving your head, etc.) for the purpose of eliciting sponsorship. The money raised is then donated to charity.

Questions:

What motivates people to give money to the participants who then give it to the charity?
If the cause is worthy, why not give anyway?

Possible explanations I have include:

The participant willingly endures hardship and people give money as a reward for that hardship. In other words, it is a form of an emotional blackmail. This would mean that someone apt at the type of activity should receive substantially less.
The event is fun to watch and it is merely a PR opportunity.

When people ask others whom they have a relationship with to sponsor their activities for charity, the requester is providing two things to the potential donor:

An awareness of the cause and the given charity which supports that cause (the cause is, in essence, a problem)
An prepackaged opportunity to help the person they know contribute to the cause (a solution!)

An essential prior factor here is that most people in the developed Western world have had a sense of charity and 'giving to those less fortunate' culturally drilled into us for most of our lives. That's why when we hear of some charitable cause, we're immediately inclined to feel that 'this is important!'.

In many cases, to the person being asked to donate, the personal monetary cost seems more convenient than shaving their head or running an Iron Man. The friend who is asking you to sponsor their activities is perceived to be doing something more challenging or more uncomfortable than what they are doing themselves, and we feel like they're letting us off the hook.


What is the data structure used by the brain to store data? As a computer science undergraduate I was wondering if there are any special data structures used by the brain to save data?

I am especially interested in the hash tables data structure. If data are saved in this type of data structure then you could search, insert and delete them in a short time no matter the size of the data (or technically speaking in O(1)).

I was wondering if the brain works in the same way or not?  And if it does, how does it?

Memory in the brain isn't super-well understood, so going to the level of "data-structures" isn't really possible with purely biological models. Not that a purely biolgocial description would be very useful anyways. When people ask how the brain works, they typically don't want to be told "molecule A interacts with molecule B, which triggers molecule C".

Since you're coming from computer science, I am going to assume that you're probably more interested in models or the "data-structures" (how to structure data, like a list or a tree) we assign to a brain. One way to build biologically plausible brain models is with the Neurological Engineering Framework (NEF) and there's been a couple data structures based on this that have been used. You can see more detail on this in my other answer "How is memory accounted for in the NEF?"

However, it's important to note that the NEF is a framework, thus much work is being done on implementing more complex data structures than the ones mentioned in that question. In particular, Aaron Voekler has implemented a dynamic hetero-associative memory using the framework, which functions somewhat in the same manner as a hash table.

I hope this answer gives you a good starting point for further investigation.


What type of friends do narcissists have? For some time now, I have been looking up information on narcissism; however, I have never found information on the type of friends narcissists have.

Research tends to show results about narcissistic friends which is not what I am trying to figure out.

So what is known about the types of friends narcissists have? I know that there tend to be different types of narcissists and they will probably have different types of friends, but there must be some kind of generalizations and specializations about friends.

Since I don't think this question should be closed with no answers, here's a brief summary: most of the research (never mind the popsci articles, which far outnumber actual research on this) seem to focus on the profile/personality of intimate partners who "fall" for narcissists.

Haslam and Montrose (2015) after surveying a British sample of young females (18-28 years old) say that

  Females value different traits in short-term and long-term partners. [...]
  Females with greater mating experience and those desiring marriage were more attracted to the narcissistic male personality. The narcissistic personality, whilst having many negative qualities, possesses qualities associated with status and resource provision. These traits are desirable in short and long-term mating contexts. Despite future long-term mating desires which are unlikely to be achieved with a narcissistic male and possession of substantial mate sampling experience, females view the narcissistic male as a suitable partner: a testament to the success of the narcissistic personality in facilitating short-term mating.

While this doesn't say much about the personality of the narcissists' potential mates, it does say something about their goals (aspriging for status and resource provision).

A study on speed dating by Jauk et al. (2016) found that

  Across both sexes, narcissism was positively associated with mate appeal for short- and long-term relationships. Further analyses indicated that these associations were due to the shared variance among narcissism and extraversion in men and narcissism and physical attractiveness in women, respectively. In women, psychopathy was also positively associated with mate appeal for short-term relationships. Regarding mating preferences, narcissism was found to involve greater choosiness in the rating of others' mate appeal (but not actual choices) in men, while psychopathy was associated with greater openness towards short-term relationships in women.

Again not much is said directly about the personality of the partner, but something is said about what they saw valuable in narcissists (extraversion, looks).

On non-intimate but long-term relationships, the OP himself found Maaß et al. (2016):

  Results showed that the friends' similarity in narcissism significantly predicted similarity in all Big Five domains. For the general Big Five similarity as well as extraversion, the effect of narcissism similarity was stronger for male than female or mixed friends. Similarity in psychopathy and Machiavellianism significantly predicted all domains except for openness and extraversion, respectively.

And that's basically summarized in the paper's title "Narcissists of a Feather Flock Together".


Explanatory gaps in the formation and propagation of action potentials To my understanding, the steps of an action potential are as follows:

The neuron is at rest--there is a negative charge (K ions) inside the cell, and a positive charge (Na ions) outside the cell. Pumps work hard, pumping in K and pumping out Na to maintain this polarization.
Excitatory NTs bind with the dendrites. As soon as it's over a certain threshold it triggers an action potential.
The inside of the cell depolarizes, and the depolarized "chunk" propagates through the axon.

Now here's my confusion:

A. How do neurotransmitters manage to depolarize the inside of the cell? Do they force the cell to give up pumping out Na ions? Do the neurotransmitters themselves contain positively charged ions that the ion pumps are not sensitive to?

B. When the cell depolarizes, the electrical impulse travels down the axon. When this happens, Na+ and K+ ions rapidly pass through the membrane as the signal fires. (Like this picture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential#mediaviewer/File:Action_Potential.gif

Why are ions being pumped in and out of the axon in such a way to propagate an action potential? Why isn't it just a positively charged signal running through the axon, without regard to the outside environment? (please let me know if this is unclear!)

I will try to answer all of your main and sub questions structurally below:

How do neurotransmitters manage to depolarize the inside of the cell?

Do they force the cell to give up pumping out Na ions?
No, the Na,K-ATPase (the sodium potassium pump) keeps active, also during the action potential (AP).
Do the neurotransmitters themselves contain positively charged ions that the ion pumps are not sensitive to?
They can, but neurotransmitter charge is irrelevant.
Answer: Neurotransmitters bind to their corresponding receptors. An example excitatory neurotransmitter is glutamate (Glu). Glu has many receptors and one of them is the NMDA receptor. The NMDA receptor is coupled to a cation channel that opens when Glu binds (and other conditions pertain). In turn Na+ and other depolarizing cations can enter the cell through the open channel. Other neurotransmitters and receptor mechanisms exist, but the coupling to a cation channel is a commonly encountered theme.

When the cell depolarizes, the electrical impulse travels down the axon. When this happens, Na+ and K+ ions rapidly pass through the membrane as the signal fires. [...]

Why are ions being pumped in and out of the axon in such a way to propagate an action potential?
During an action potential, the voltage changes are not the result of ions being pumped in or out of the cell. Instead, ions flow along their concentration and charge gradients out or in the cell during an action potential. For example, Na+, a key ion in any action potential, flows passively into the cell during an action potential. Passive influx occurs, because Na+ is continuously and actively pumped out of the cell into the extracellular fluid by the Na,K-ATPase. Moreover, the inside of the cell is highly negatively charged. Both the concentration gradient and charge gradient (i.e., the potential difference) will cause Na+ to surge into the cell once Na+ channels open. How then does it move across the axon? The trick is that Na+ depolarizes the cell membrane. When for example Glu binds to its NMDA receptor, Na+ enters the cell into the dendrite. Then, voltage-gated ion channels take over. Voltage-gated ion channels open or close depending on the local membrane potential. Most notably, voltage-gated sodium channels (VGSCs) open when the cell membrane depolarizes. Hence, after NMDA receptors are activated in the dendrite, Na+ enters. This in turn depolarizes the dendrite and VGSCs open. This causes further depolarization and adjacent VGSCs open etc. etc. Voltage-gated potassium channels open after the VGSCs and re-polarize the membrane. An overview is provided in the following image from Antranik.org :

Why isn't it just a positively charged signal running through the axon, without regard to the outside environment?
Charges only move to an opposite charge. A neuron is not differentially charged from dendrite to axon terminal. Hence another way of action potential transduction is needed. Step-wise opening of VGSCs is a clever trick to use a constant cell membrane potential to generate a directional action potential.


Is a drop in intellect necessary for one to be diagnosed with psychosis? Some psychiatrists claim that when someone has psychosis, there is usually a drop in intellect. Does a drop in intellect always happen, or are the boundaries for psychosis not as discrete? Why are they sometimes confused in the absence of a drop in intellect?

This question pertains to the perception of psychosis by psychiatrists and not to up-to-date interpretation of research data on psychosis classification. So I'll focus on how pure psychosis is roughly conceptualised by the average psychiatrist.

First of all, some diagnosis such as bipolar disorder or schizo-affective disorder, while usually being considered psychotic, have the additional component of problematic affective or mood states attached to it. I'll therefore leave that out to focus on the "pure psychosis" part of psychiatric diagnoses.

The notion of pychosis is usually presented as "being out of touch with reality". A more operational description of it would be to say that a psychiatrist perceives that (1) there is something about reality or your perception thereof or your lack of perception thereof that has a damaging impact on your life and (2) he does not objectify that item.

I purposely rephrased that definition since people are sometimes "persecuted" or "deluded" (or whatever else there may be, such as hypocondria, erotomania, et ceterae) in a way that is real though not objectifiable. Or at least not objectifiable at first glance.

That being said, clinical observations of psychosis have led, broadly, pure psychosis to be conceptualised as lying qualitatively on a linear spectrum extending from psychosis typical of the schizophrenia spectrum to psychosis typical of persistent delusional disorder.

Simply put, persistent delusional disorder psychosis pertains to a very well logically structured system of thought, where the patient adamantly holds some claim that seems self evident for him, and where evidence presented by him or to him is perceived discordantly by psychiatrist and patient.

On the other end of the psychosis spectrum lies schizophrenia-like psychosis. Which broadly speaking is a pattern of thought that is perceived by the psychiatrist as inconsistent, loosely organised, wishful thinking or otherwise unsupported "bullshit". This can range from "my parents are assholes, screw school" to "yeah, I've had a revelation, I can help save the world but I do not know how or why and it bothers me".

Persistent delusional disorder psychosis is a fixed set of thought pattern met by patients around 40 and that, aside from co-occuring depression or other form of distress, does not impact per se the ability to meet family obligations or job expectations. Intellect does not seem to be affected, and it is indeed used vigorously to fuel the persistent pattern of thought.

Schizophrenia-like psychosis on the other hand is considered a disorganised pattern of thought that will lead the patient into hardships family-wise or job-wise. To diagnose schizophrenia, a usual criterion is that this pattern of thought happens at the same time as a job loss, family dysfunction, or academic or school underachievement. It is conceptualised as an impairment of intellect that will get worse the more the patient undergoes further or future life hardships. Also known as "persecutions".

That is why schizophrenia-like psychosis is supposed to be diagnosed with the crucial symptom of functional impairment with respect to so-called pre-morbid intellectual or social baseline functioning. Usually, in practice, determining this premorbid baseline depends on what parents or relatives say to the psychiatrist. IQ tests are not currently used for that.

In a nutshell, if a psychiatrist meets a patient who is not on the delusional disorder side of the psychosis spectrum, with no intellectual impairment compared to its premorbid baseline functioning, he should be confused as to why the patient is now in front of him in the first place. Every medical intervention is indeed triggered one way or another by someone asking for something... He might or should be confused as to what that motive really is or was.


Can a sufficiently complex ANN simulate consciousness? Current Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are capable of doing variational inference and learning representations and factors to explain the inputs, the outside world.

When the network gets bigger and more complicated, nothing will stop it from trying to explain, learn and predict its own inner states.

I think consciousness can be generated from this close loop process.

I remember that Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach describes similar idea, I am just exicted about thinking it through. I want to know if there are references of similar or opposite ideas. I guess I am a strange loop is another book about this, but I haven't start reading it.

David Chalmers has argued against the thermostat view, suggesting that adaptation to the environment is not sufficient. John Searle also disagrees that the current state of machine learning is capable of consciousness on the grounds that information processing is not a sufficient criterion (public lecture, 2016). Both of these philosophers emphasize clarity in their presentation of arguments and I highly recommend reading some of their books for a general introduction to current problems in consciousness and perception.

Complexity

In 1998, Tononi and Edelman published a science paper on Consciousness and Complexity. One of the main proponents, from the same lineage of researchers, links the complexity criterion to consciousness: Anil Seth and colleagues have suggested that a measure of complexity is central to explaining consciousness (pdf). His works are probably a good starting point if you are interested in a possible link between (abstract formulations that are relevant to both) artificial intelligence and consciousness.

Recurrent Processing

Although "recursive complexity" is a concept in Anil Seth's work, if you are particularly interested in the role of recurrent processing for consciousness, Victor Lamme's work on vision could be a starting point: Lamme & Roelfsma (2000)

Et cetera

For various views and perspectives, visit the most complete collection of references on consciousness online: http://consc.net/online/


What is the easiest way to memorize big amounts of information (a.k.a. learning for exams)? I consider myself a person with above average intelligence, that is, I am able to understand complex systems with relative ease. My weak point however is that I've always struggled with memorizing. Back in school I excelled in math and physics, but struggled with e.g. history, not because I wasn't interested in it, but simply because I had a hard time memorizing what was necessary.

Is there a good method for memorizing?

Context: I am planning to go back to university this fall. I am learning now for the entrance exam. That is something I will manage, but I anticipate university exams themselves being harder than that, and I will attend to uni while still having a day job. That is, I have no time to waste on improper/suboptimal learning methods. I aim for BA first, then MA. I am 31 years old now.

If you want to learn something then investigating how the brain encodes memory, and looking at methods of enhancing these tasks is the way to go. Pop psychology books do the field little credit and are often riddled with academic inaccuracies. However if you are going to use a book I highly recommend Human Memory by the brilliant Alan Braddeley.

Memory is largely split between three according Atkinson and Schiffrin's (1986) model: sensory store->short term store(STM)-> long term store (LTM). Although this can then be sub-split into explicit and implicit memory, and the sensory store is what we would now call attentional processing. Broadly speaking we have little control of attentional processes than STM. So lets look at how you many enhance the encoding between STM and LTM. Much of what I'm about to mention comes developed out of the Levels of Encoding theory which essentially suggests that information is processed at different levels depending upon the complexity and relationships, the greater the depth of the encoding and associations the easier something is to remember. Many Mnemonic (memory) techniques are based on this. For instance, "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain"= the colours of the rainbow. technically this is shallow encoding because its only the first letter or each word relating to the colour in the order they occur in light refraction. But this is are easier than remember the colours based upon there discrete and unconnected names. The more associations you make the easier something is to remember as it makes more associations heres an deeper example remember this list and hide it once you have read it and try to recall after the maths test: Carrot, Monkey, Telephone, Guitar, School, Bottle, Newspaper, Mansion, Henry, Catastrophe, Worms, canopy, Hairspray.

Answer the following: 2x3.5=?, (7/2)x3=?, square root of 27?, A car accretes from 0-50 m/sec in over a distance of 34 meters how long did it take?

Recall the list?

If instead you tried to recall the list as a story it would be easier to remember all the items...

A Monkey was eating a Carrot when the Selephone rang offering Guitar lessons at a School, he/she decided to go and packed a Bottle and Newspaper. Upon leaving the Mansion he/she walked past Henry who was having a Catastrophically collecting worms under his fishing Canopy with a Hairspray can.

This is a deeper level of encoding that should be easier to remember because it has more detail applying the words in an episodic and semantic style. This activates more brain regions providing more cues for how associations for the information that one wishes to store. I literally can't write enough about neural encoding of memory there is a plethora of research, and I strongly suggest a google scholar search if you are interested. But the over riding suggestion is increase associations, for instance when I was studying for my exams I would write notes and cue cards which were highlighted, I would also create stories and words made of the items I wanted to remember. In addition I would drink a particular flavour of squash while doing my learning and revising. The reason being is that these all create associations, and if you can take a cue with you into an exam, such as apple juice, it well help you to remember. Visualisation a lot too, imagining the place you were when you learnt something and the smells and related tastes.

Finally it cannot be understated the role that affective (emotional) processing plays, information is often affectively encoded. Trying to remember how you felt or giving data affective significance can aid recall or being in the same state of affect helps.

Essentially a large part of memory can be understood in terms of Pavolivan and operant conditioning, coupled with motivational and affective relevance. In other words learnt associations and reinforcement may act as cues and learning mechanisms that strengthen memory. The relevance of these cues one can give both motivational and affective significance, and these may also be used to help recall. In addition the level of detail and information relative to the encoding process strengthens or deepens the learning process.

This is a REDUCTIONIST explanation of memory there is a lot more on it and the precise mechanisms related to what is being learnt, there is also a lot i haven't mentioned. Sorry for the lack of references I have a job to do, but you can google a lot of these topics and you will encounter most while learning about cognitive neuroscience. Memory research is probably one of the best understood areas of cognitive neuroscience along with perception.


Why does an addict always remain one? I'm asking this from a purely psychological and biological viewpoint, mainly why a drug addict is said to always remain one, even after sobering up.

Short answer, which is one of many:

One interesting hypothesis about this is the "reward hijacking" model. Essentially, when somebody becomes addicted their reward circuits become hypersensitive to drug-related cues and lack sensitivity to other rewards. Specifically, areas like their orbitofrontal cortex, which has to do with representing reward, and their ventral striatum, which has to do with dopamine and motivation, start to function strangely. So even when they replace the drug with new habits they still display heightened sensitivity to the drug. See Wrase et al, 2007 for one of many imaging studies on this. There are many neurobiological theories that explain why the reward sensitization occurs in response to addictive drugs.

The way this translates to function is that drugs appeal more and more to somebody with an addiction, while alternative habits appeal less and less. This contributes to the very high relapse rate. Interestingly, deep brain stimulation of the ventral striatum has helped curb alcohol cravings for some alcoholics. (See Knapp 2009 for rats, and Muller 2016 for a pilot study in humans.)

I hope this helps! The question you're asking is a very broad one, so you have a wide range of answers to explore.

Wrase, J., Schlagenhauf, F., Kienast, T., Wüstenberg, T., Bermpohl, F., Kahnt, T., ... & Heinz, A. (2007). Dysfunction of reward processing correlates with alcohol craving in detoxified alcoholics. Neuroimage, 35(2), 787-794.

Knapp, C. M., Tozier, L., Pak, A., Ciraulo, D. A., & Kornetsky, C. (2009). Deep brain stimulation of the nucleus accumbens reduces ethanol consumption in rats. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 92(3), 474-479.

Müller, U. J., Sturm, V., Voges, J., Heinze, H. J., Galazky, I., Büntjen, L., ... & Bogerts, B. (2016). Nucleus Accumbens Deep Brain Stimulation for Alcohol Addiction–Safety and Clinical Long-term Results of a Pilot Trial. Pharmacopsychiatry, 49(04), 170-173.


Why does munching sound unpleasant to most people? When someone who eats food is munching, it sounds quite unpleasant for most of the people.
What is the reason for this?

I have speculated that it arises from two cognitive biases — but pardon that I will present my conjecture without citations.  (This isn't my focal area)

our bias for music shows we dis-prefer arhythmic noises.
the arhythmic noise is unpredictable.

I think there may also be dissonance between a sympathetic response (to hunger at food odors and others' savoring of flavors), against a conscious choice not to be eating at that time. (only in the case where the person(s) experience misophonia are not also eating)


Why is labeling a cognitive distortion? How is it different from categorization? Is there any difference between label and category? We use categories everyday. Psychiatrists use it too. Aren't psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder just labels that are assigned to specific disorder cases that patients have?
Isn't "labeling" itself a label? People have some thoughts, but some of them are labeled as "labeling".
If I say that the bird I see is a pigeon, this is labeling as well. But I don't think that saying that the pigeon is a pigeon is a cognitive distortion.
Sorry, I am not a psychologist. But my psychotherapist said me that I assign labels to person and their actions. But I don't understand what it means and why it is bad.

As Bryan Krause suggested (above), talking with your psychotherapist is likely the most important next step for you to take.
Also, please note that what I write below is simply general information about cognitive behavioral therapy. I do not know your situation. What I share with you here is not personal advice. It is information only.
You might find it helpful to read more about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) because it might answer at least one of your questions, which I will paraphrase as: Why are cognitive distortions potentially harmful?
Brief answer with an example
What you think (assumptions, beliefs) about yourself and the world greatly influences what you do (behavior) and how you feel (emotions). Our minds often distort reality by "telling" us untruths, which in turn lead us to feel and act differently.
Example: I'm a college student majoring in psychology. I studied reasonably well for a statistics test, but I received a "B-" grade. My friend received an "A". I immediately think, "I'm not smart enough to be a psychologist." I subsequently don't study as hard and I start thinking about changing to an "easy" major. I feel down and start to smoke weed every day to feel better, which causes me to feel even less motivated.
Thus, according to cognitive behavioral theory, my negative (distorted) thoughts about the "B-" grade led to a downward spiral of maladaptive behaviors and depressed mood.
Very brief history
[Edit of 17 Dec 2020: Thank you to tale852150 for calling attention to my egregious and baffling omission (see the Comments, below). I added this section about Albert Ellis because Ellis was indeed the first cognitive-behavioral theorist and clinician.]
Albert Ellis (1913–2007)
In the mid-1950s, Albert E. Ellis, Ph.D., developed the first systematic cognitive therapy, which he originally called "rational therapy", with the therapy approach evolving, the name changed to "rational-emotive therapy" (RET), and finally, "rational-emotive behavior therapy" (REBT). This book chapter provides a concise, yet complete overview of REBT:
Dryden, Windy, Daniel David, and Albert Ellis. "Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy." In Handbook of Cognitive Behavioral Therapies, 3rd ed., edited by Keith S. Dobson, 226–276. New York: Guilford, 2010.
And here are few representative samples of Ellis' publications:
Ellis, Albert. "Rational Psychotherapy and Individual Psychology." Journal of Individual Psychology 13, no. 1 (1957): 38-44.
Ellis, Albert, and Robert A. Harper. A New Guide to Rational Living. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.
Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart.
Ellis, Albert. "Rational-Emotive Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Similarities and Differences." Cognitive Therapy and Research 4, no. 4 (1980): 325-340.
Ellis, Albert. "Changing Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)." Journal of Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy 13, no. 2 (1995): 85-89.
Aaron Beck (1921– )
Aaron Beck, M.D. developed "cognitive therapy" in the early 1960s. One of his first breakthrough articles was:
Beck, Aaron T. "Thinking and Depression: I. Idiosyncratic Content and Cognitive Distortions." Archives of General Psychiatry 9, No. 4 (1963): 324–333. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1963.01720160014002
Helpful articles
John M. Grohol, "15 Common Cognitive Distortions", PsychCentral (24 Jun 2019). Here is a quote from Dr. Grohol's article:

What’s a cognitive distortion and why do so many people have them?
Cognitive distortions are simply ways that our mind convinces us of
something that isn’t really true. These inaccurate thoughts are
usually used to reinforce negative thinking or emotions — telling
ourselves things that sound rational and accurate, but really only
serve to keep us feeling bad about ourselves.

Cherry, Kendra. "What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?" verywellmind (13 June 2020). This is a quote from the article:

Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on changing the automatic
negative thoughts that can contribute to and worsen emotional
difficulties, depression, and anxiety. These spontaneous negative
thoughts have a detrimental influence on mood.

Note that "automatic negative thoughts" and "cognitive distortions", as used by most psychotherapists, have very similar if not identical meanings.
Best-selling book
The top-selling cognitive behavioral therapy book on Amazon.com currently is:
Gillihan, Seth J. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Made Simple: 10 Strategies for Managing Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Panic, and Worry. Emeryville, CA: Althea Press (Callisto Media), 2018. (Amazon rating/reviews: 4.6 stars; ReviewMeta: 4.6 stars)
I haven't read Gillihan's book, but a ReviewMeta rating of 4.6 based on 97 reviews suggests it's been helpful to most people.
Of course, there are scores of good online articles and books about cognitive behavioral therapy. The ones I mentioned are just a select sample to (hopefully) get you started learning more.


Perception: thinking a minority behavior in a minority group is the majority of said group I once heard that we tend to have some perception bias : we tend to think that a behavior by a minority of a minority group is in fact the representation of the majority of this minirity group.
Classical example would be that we tend to think that people from another state drive badly. This would come due to the fact that when we see a car driver behaving badly on the road, we will see the license plate from another state and that would ´stick’ better in our memories. And from there, we would generalize that people from that region are bad drivers as we don’t check the license plate of good drivers.
Is there such a thing? If so, is there a term/denomination for such perception bias?
I hope that I was clear enough as English is not my primary language

I think the term you are looking is out-group homogeneity.

  The out-group homogeneity effect is one's perception of out-group
  members as more similar to one another than are in-group members, e.g.
  "they are alike; we are diverse". ... Perceivers tend to have
  impressions about the diversity or variability of group members around
  those central tendencies or typical attributes of those group members.
  Thus, outgroup stereotypicality judgments are overestimated,
  supporting the view that out-group stereotypes are
  overgeneralizations.


Sleep deprivation and task performance Case: In case of an adult, the average adult sleep time required is 7.5 to 8 hours. Suppose the person (aged between 23-29) has slept only 6 hours, or less than the average time (7.5 to 8 hours).

Does sleep deprivation lasting for a day cause mood swings in that
particular day?
Do we loose grasping abilities due to sleep deprivation?
Does sleep deprivation affect our reasoning abilities?

Does sleep deprivation cause mood swings?
Few studies have focused on mood changes in healthy subjects following sleep deprivation. It seems that there is evidence for sleep deprivation causing mood changes on the subsequent day, but there is no evidence for or against it causing mood swings.
Hart et al. (1987) found significantly higher self-reported hostility for sleep-deprived medical residents compared with controls, but did not report an effect size. A later study compared college students' self-reported moods between "morning/evening person" and total/partial sleep deprivation, and reported general support for mood changes in morning persons, but not in evening persons (Selvi, Gulec, Agargun and Besiroglu, 2007).
Does sleep deprivation impair grasping?
A reasonable search of Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus did not reveal any research on the association between sleep deprivation and grasping behaviors as such. One study of surgical residents reported that sleep-deprived residents made more errors and took more time to complete a surgical simulation, the "Minimally Invasive Surgery Trainer VR", mostly involving grasping behavior (Eastridge et al., 2003).
Does sleep deprivation affect reasoning?
Reasoning is by far the most well-studied domain with respect to sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation seems to have a substantial negative effect on many aspects of reasoning. Pilcher and Walters (1997) reported that sleep-deprived college students not only performed worse on Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, but also rated their concentration and effort as higher than controls following total sleep deprivation. Herscovitch, Stuss and Broughton (1980) found that partial sleep deprivation was associated with decreased strategic flexibility on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task. Hart et al. (1997) reported that partially sleep-deprived medical residents retained less information and exhibited slower responses on a set of cognitive tasks.
References

Eastridge, B. J., Hamilton, E. C., O’Keefe, G. E., Rege, R. V., Valentine, R. J., Jones, D. J., ... & Thal, E. R. (2003). Effect of sleep deprivation on the performance of simulated laparoscopic surgical skill. The American Journal of Surgery, 186(2), 169-174.
Hart, R. P., Buchsbaum, D. G., Wade, J. B., Hamer, R. M., & Kwentus, J. A. (1987). Effect of sleep deprivation on first-year residents' response times, memory, and mood. Academic Medicine, 62(11), 940-2.
Herscovitch, J., Stuss, D., & Broughton, R. (1980). Changes in cognitive processing following short-term cumulative partial sleep deprivation and recovery oversleeping. Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 2(4), 301-319.
Pilcher, J. J., & Walters, A. S. (1997). How sleep deprivation affects psychological variables related to college students' cognitive performance. Journal of American College Health, 46(3), 121-126.
Selvi, Y., Gulec, M., Agargun, M. Y., & Besiroglu, L. (2007). Mood changes after sleep deprivation in morningness–eveningness chronotypes in healthy individuals. Journal of sleep research, 16(3), 241-244.


What is the difference between having a crush on someone and loving someone? What is the difference between having a crush on someone and loving someone?
What is the psychological basis of this?

You may find Sternberg's triangular theory of love as useful framework for distinguishing different types of love. Quoting wikipedia, the theory describes types of love in terms of three dimensions:

  Intimacy – Which encompasses feelings of attachment, closeness, connectedness, and bondedness.
  Passion – Which encompasses drives connected to both limerence and sexual attraction.
  Commitment – Which encompasses, in the short term, the decision to remain with another, and in the long term, plans made with that other.

Using this framework, "loving someone" is the general term, and "having a crush" would be a more specific variant. So perhaps a crush could be conceptualised more in terms of passion and less in terms of long term intimacy and commitment.

Alternatively, you could just look at definitional concepts of a crush. For example, the term "crush" is commonly used in contexts where feelings are not reciprocated. I associate it with younger people (or when seen in older adults, a youthful approach to love). A crush often implies a short term quality, such that the feelings may change from one month to the next.


What sources of randomness does the brain use for sampling? As an applied mathematician, I have a growing interest in the mechanisms for uncertainty representation and computation in the human brain. In fact, I recently compiled a list of papers on this subject. But, so far I haven't found many papers which answer a fundamental sub-question:

  What sources of randomness does the brain use for sampling?

Dan Goodman, a neuroscientist, suggested that I have a look into neuronal noise. The neuronal variability perspective is quite popular among computational neuroscientists and 'Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes'(2006) is an example of a publication which demonstrates its use:

  At first sight, it would seem that the high variability in the
  responses of cortical neurons would make it difficult to implement
  such optimal statistical inference in cortical circuits. We argue
  that, in fact, this variability implies that populations of neurons
  automatically represent probability distributions over the stimulus, a
  type of code we call probabilistic population codes. Moreover, we
  demonstrate that the Poissonlike variability observed in cortex
  reduces a broad class of Bayesian inference to simple linear
  combinations of populations of neural activity. These results hold for
  arbitrary probability distributions over the stimulus, for tuning
  curves of arbitrary shape and for realistic neuronal variability.

However, a recent paper published in 2018 [3] presents compelling counter-arguments against the utility of neuronal noise for sampling in the brain.

In particular, the authors make the following case in their abstract:

  Since the precise statistical properties of neural activity are
  important in this context, many models assume an ad-hoc source of
  well-behaved, explicit noise, either on the input or on the output
  side of single neuron dynamics, most often assuming an independent
  Poisson process in either case. However, these assumptions are
  somewhat problematic: neighboring neurons tend to share receptive
  fields, rendering both their input and their output correlated; at the
  same time, neurons are known to behave largely deterministically, as a
  function of their membrane potential and conductance.

While I find the arguments in [3] compelling due to their fundamental nature, this makes me wonder whether there are other fundamental contributions to this problem that I ignore.

Note: Cian O'Donnell recently shared his PhD thesis with me on Twitter [4]. The neural noise vs. no neural noise variant of this question is still very much an open problem.

References:

Wei Ji Ma, J. Beck, P. Latham & A. Pouget. Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes. Nature Neuroscience. 2006.
Andre Longtin. Neuronal noise. Scholarpedia. 2013.
D. Dold et al. Stochasticity from function - why the Bayesian brain may need no noise. Arxiv. 2018.
R. Cannon , C. O'Donnell , M. Nolan . Stochastic Ion Channel Gating in Dendritic Neurons: Morphology Dependence and Probabilistic Synaptic Activation of Dendritic Spikes. PLOS. 2010.

Not sure if I am getting your question right. You are asking for noise that has an inherently information processing function? I would add an other aspect of noises

Noise as an emerging property

On a large scale, when massive amounts of neurons are
synchronising, then you can detect Noise with Electrodes, like in
the case of EEG. EEG follows an 1/f² or 1/f³ law (brownian
noise, red noise, pink noise, depending on the literature). This
principle can be found anywhere in the world. It states that higher
frequencies / faster oscillating signals have increasingly smaller
amplitudes, similar to smaller and larger waves on the sea and so
on.
In this case is noise a byproduct of other (stochastic) processes.
On a small scale, which would probably be something you would
    measure by using 'clamping'-technique on single neurons.  The
    firing rate of a neuron (a neuron chemically charging, until it
    reaches a threshold, which turns into a all-or-nothing case) also
    follows some 'systematic randomness' on which probabilistic,
    stochastic and noisy properties might be useful to describe these
    processes.
    In this case is noise a property that emerges from natural stochastic single-neuron firing processes.

Noise emerging from signals related to certain anatomic sources

In how far I remember (I do not have a good resource on that) the
    hippocampus, which is highly relevant for memories, has a strong randomization aspect inherently in its functioning.
    This might be my closest guess to your question?!
Another very distinct 'stochastic' process created by the
Thalamus, a largely dominant, pace-giving rhythm within the brain.

Ressource: Buszaki Rhythms of the Brain is a nice read on various of these topics

On noise as an error process

Maybe I got your question a little wrong, but thinking of the brain that in the run of evolution turned out to be highly efficient and energy saving, does not want to have any noise that does not fulfill any purpose. (But as I understand, your question was related to the functional aspect of noise.)


What, if any, objective tests were designed for the assessment of altruism? In an article by Santacreu et al. (2006) there is a mention of altruism assessment within the framework of the Character Education Inquiry (CEI):

  If we return to the first half of the last century, we can find
  important precedents of objective assessment of Personality that were
  embodied in solid and coherent research programs carried out by
  important authors in this field. Amongst these, works by Hartshorne
  and May (1928, Hartshorne, May & Maller, 1929, Hartshorne, May &
  Shuttleworth 1930) must be mentioned. These authors developed a set of
  tests included in their Character Education Inquiry (CEI) oriented,
  amongst other things, to measure honesty or altruism.

At the present moment I do not have access to the report of the CEI to verify how Hugh Hartshorne and his colleagues were assessing "honesty or altruism". However, Robert W. Friedrichs (1960) cites the report of the CEI (along with a couple of other investigations) and claims that these studies did not have as their objective the assessment of altruism. These, so he implies, are the only studies undertaken in the field of psychology which may attract attention of those interested in the study of altruism. I tried to find attempts at objective assessment of altruism in the work published since 1960, but without success. So I'm here looking for assistance.

I admit that I may use the term 'objective test' incorrectly. In order to exclude any misunderstanding I would like to add that I conceive of objective test designed to assess altruism as simulated conditions in which an individual (or a group of them) is put at a moral choice being unable to uncover the simulated nature of the proceedings or to identify the qualities under scrutiny. I will be very grateful to all who help me to find reports of applications of such methods to the assessment of altruism.

Santacreu, J., Rubio, V. J., & Hernández, J. M. (2006). The objective assessment of personality: Cattells's T-data revisited and more. Psychology Science, 48(1), 53.
Friedrichs, R. W. (1960). Alter versus ego: An exploratory assessment of altruism. American Sociological Review, 496-508.

The following scale; The altruistic personality and
the self-report altruism scale, a commonly used measure of altruistic tendency in psychological research. It has 745 citations at this time November 2017. The scale is also freely available online.

Rushton, J.P., Chrisjohn, R.D., Fekken, G.C., 1981. The altruistic personality and
the self-report altruism scale. Personality and Individual Differences 7,
293–302.

This has been discussed as psychometrically adequate for measuring altruism, and has good the SRAS has good inter-rater reliability. However the SRAS has two main weaknesses: its expansive, in terms of its definition of altruism, it also it frames of reference are unspecified, and unclear.

There are other measures that investigate aspects of altruism such as the Internalised subscale of the Self-importance of Moral Identity Scale (ISMIS). In the following article they discuss moral behaviour to outgroups, which the scale measures. This is also a highly cited source for measuring altruism or moral behaviour.

There are a few other scales or methods of measuring altruism, I do not have time to go into detail...

Empathic Concern questionaire (EC)

Compassionate love for others

Sprecher, S. & Fehr, B. (2005). Compassionate love for close others and humanity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22, 629-651.

State Based Empathy. Empathy is more of a measure of motivation to act kindly which is a precursor to altruism but not actually altruism itself.

I highly recommend you read the following blog on measuring altruism, which discusses it in far greater detail than the answer here.

T. Farsides. (2014, October 18). Conception and measurement of altruism. Retrieved from http://tomfarsides.blogspot.com/2014/10/conceptualisation-and-measurement-of.html


How are ocular dominance columns monocular despite binocular complex cells? Orientation columns in the primary visual cortex are known to have (mostly) simple cells in layers 4 and 6, and (mostly) complex cells in layers 2,3 and 5. Orientation columns spanning an entire range of orientations (0-180 degrees) are “grouped” into ocular dominance columns.

My question: Ocular dominance columns are monocular columns, corresponding either to the contralateral or the ipsilateral eye. Complex cells, however, are binocular. How do these two things go together?

Ocular dominance columns are not purely monocular, nor are simple cells purely monocular.

Simple and complex cells both exhibit a range of ocular preference, from preferring one to the other. See this figure from Hubel and Wiesel, 1962:

Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. The Journal of physiology, 160(1), 106-154.


Technical term for the loss of words in your mother-tongue when speaking a different language I am basically looking for two words which are, though, related to some degree. It might even be that ultimately the same word is the answer to both parts of this question.
I split them up into two questions. That's the related question.

Anyhow, here's what I'm trying to give it a name.
My mother-tongue is German. I, obviously, speak German very fluently and can convey any kind of ideas. However, if I speak in English for a while and then have to translate something into German, I sometimes fail to come up with German phrases. In that very moment, only English idioms come to my mind. Under different circumstances I certainly could say it in German, but right in that moment I feel like German would be my second language.

Is there a technical term for the inability to express certain things with words or phrases which you actually know by heart and that you would use off-the-cuff under normal circumstances?

It seems to me that it'd be a type of a tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon caused by bilingualism. If you don't use German regularly, it might be attributed to language attrition, but this seems unlikely if you're still being exposed to German more than English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip-of-the-tongue_phenomenon#Effects_of_bilingualism


Are There National Personality Archetypes? I feel like in the U.S where I was born and raised there are definable personality archetypes which fall into obvious stereotypes such as a dry as dust country type accent and life-style, snob, ultra conservative old woman etc What I want to know is if these behaviors have been catalogued and defined. For instances, writers have alleged that there are 11 different "nations" in the United States.

What are their bases and why do people conform so rigidly to these types?

News reporter Colin Woodard has published a book describing "11 nations" of North America, each with its unique personality, that also influences the individuals that live within their confines. For instance, Puritain northeasterners tend to well-educated, liberal "good government" types. Slightly to the south and west are the commercially oriented "New Netherlands" types that retain the early Dutch influence. The Midlanders and Appalachians are more fragmented and less pro-Government than others. The Tidewater and the South are more "traditional" areas that prefer state to Federal authority. The rugged western parts of the country value hard work and self-sufficiency and (mostly) have libertarian tendencies. "New France" and "First" (Indian) nations are unique subcultures within this group.

Each area was initially shaped by its historical experience, and later attracted the immigrants that were most like it.


Why is the order of brainwaves not labelled "alphabetically"? The brainwave - frequency breakdown is as follows:

Delta wave – (0.1 – 3 Hz)
Theta wave – (4 – 7 Hz)
Alpha wave – (8 – 15 Hz)
Mu wave – (7.5 – 12.5 Hz)
SMR wave – (12.5 – 15.5 Hz)
Beta wave – (16 – 31 Hz)
Gamma wave – (32 – 100 Hz)

Just looking at the greek names, we're going: delta, theta, alpha, mu, beta, gamma (in order of ascending Hz).

Why don't we just relabel them as: mu(0.1-3Hz), theta, delta, gamma, beta, alpha(32-100Hz)? This seems to make more sense to me because the names are now ordinal, like the greek alphabet. Is there a reason that neuroscientists don't care about the order of the greek alphabet?

They are ordered based on when they were discovered/named (as pointed about by Ana's comment). Alpha and beta waves were among the first signals observed in EEG data. From Wikipedia:

  Alpha waves were discovered by German neurologist Hans Berger, most famous for his invention of the EEG. Alpha waves were among the first waves documented by Berger, along with beta waves, and he displayed an interest in "alpha blockage", the process by which alpha waves decrease and beta waves increase upon a subject opening their eyes. This distinction earned the alpha wave the alternate title of "Berger's Wave".

Hans Berger documented alpha and beta waves in a series of articles from 1929-1933.

Gamma waves took a few more decades to identify, because the higher frequency necessitates faster sampling. The earliest EEG systems were unable to measure oscillations at such fast frequencies.


What is the psychological cause and meaning of "common sense"? To what extent is common sense innate versus influenced by interactions with others?
If someone has grown up with minimal interaction with other people, would their common sense be different?

It is difficult to say that "common sense" is rigidly defined enough to be studied in the way stated above. There are interesting topics concerning common sense in Psychology, but most don't come from the angle you are suggesting. For instance, here is a really decent article discussing cognitive bias and common sense:

http://www.elkinsappsych.com/uploads/8/4/3/5/8435157/cognition-_cognitive_biases_make_common_sense_neither.pdf

You also have to consider that common sense doesn't tend to employ rigid enough requirements for theories; we also allow for conflicting theories to serve as 'valid' explanations. Take for instance:

Birds of a feather flock together vs. opposites attract.


How can one describe personal space and its comfortable area I have noticed people get a little frustrated or uncomfortable when a unknown or known person invade the personal space .
How can one define Personal Space . Why do people get uncomfortable .

Personal Space may be seen as one's working area for carrying out autonomous actions and thoughts. When someone invades that space, you have decreased capacity to act autonomously. For example, when someone is physically too close, you have decreased freedom of locomotion and movement. When someone is being nosy or intellectually getting into your business, they are interfering with your ability to act by your own feelings and beliefs. The reason is that you begin to consider how that person might judge your actions and motivations. The key problem is interference with autonomy.

Put another way, invading someone's personal space interferes with that person's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness by imposing external opinions or forces the individual does not desire in his or her life. Naturally social actions and interactions are meant to accommodate the feelings and desires of bystanders, but some actions are purely personal.

The situation is a bit different when we are talking about close friends or relatives. Presumably the reason here is that these external parties have already been screened for agreeability and likeability, so not only is there less likelihood of opposition, but there is also a personal desire to find agreement. Moreover, the less agreeable a person appears to be, the less you would want that person interfering with or even knowing your personal feelings, plans, and circumstances.


What is the extent of social grooming in humankind? Is it mostly intellectual (correcting people's pronunciation, explaining errors in their logic) or physical (fixing their clothing, letting them know about flaws they may be unaware of ("your shirt's on backward"), providing advice about appearance or health, etc.

The literature on social grooming in humans mentions

  examples of grooming, most of which are unique to humans, include: running fingers through another’s hair, giving massages, washing the body or hair, shaving, removing lint or hair from another’s clothing, swatting away insects, and giving manicures or pedicures, and removing pus from blemishes or wounds. Grooming for humans can also include applying something to the skin or body as with lotion, nail polish, or make-up.

However, probably the more prominent and interesting line of research in this regard concerns language. The foundational BBS article by Dunbar (1993) argues that

  Group size covaries with relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates. This regression equation predicts a group size for modern humans very similar to that for hunter-gatherer and traditional horticulturalist societies. Similar group sizes are found in other contemporary and historical societies. Nonhuman primates maintain group cohesion through social grooming; among the Old World monkeys and apes, social grooming time is linearly related to group size. Maintaining stability of human-sized groups by grooming alone would make intolerable time demands. It is therefore suggested (1) that the evolution of large groups in the human lineage depended on developing a more efficient method for time-sharing the processes of social bonding and (2) that language uniquely fulfills this requirement. Data on the size of conversational and other small interacting groups of humans accord with the predicted relative efficiency of conversation compared to grooming as a bonding process. In human conversations about 60% of time is spent gossiping about relationships and personal experiences. Language may accordingly have evolved to allow individuals to learn about the behavioural characteristics of other group members more rapidly than was feasible by direct observation alone.

In short, under Dunbar's proposal, because human groups are so large and complex, if we were to use the regular, manual grooming of our relatives, we would have to spend around half (e.g. 42% in Dunbar 1993) of our time grooming, which is entirely unsustainable. Language is instead used (and evolved) to more economically fulfill that role. Linguistic gestures, especially small talk, largely overtake the role of manual grooming in humans.

Make of this what you will, it's certainly an important and interesting proposal.


How do we get used to smells? How do we get used to smells?

For example, you walk into a room with a certain stench, but it seems no matter how strong it may be, spending enough time in the room will allow you to stop smelling it.

What's going on here?

As Ben Brocka mentioned, what you're describing is Habituation, which Wikipedia defines as:

  Habituation is a decrease in an elicited behavior resulting from the repeated presentation of an eliciting stimulus (a simple form of learning.

More specifically, it's technically called Neural adaptation. To quote Wikipedia again:

  Neural adaptation or sensory adaptation is a change over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus. It is usually experienced as a change in the stimulus. For example, if one rests one's hand on a table, one immediately feels the table's surface on one's skin. Within a few seconds, however, one ceases to feel the table's surface. The sensory neurons stimulated by the table's surface respond immediately, but then respond less and less until they may not respond at all; this is neural adaptation

As this was explained to me in Psychology 101, this is the same phenomenon which allows us to not feel our shoes shortly after putting them on. It's also what enables people to perform really dirty, smelly jobs like sewer maintenance and garbage collection.

The process works exactly as you described, and many people can instantly relate to it: The longer you are exposed to a given stimulus (like a smell) the less you continue to react to the stimulus. The stimulus becomes more "normal" to you, and you start to think of it less. As soon as the stimulus is removed, the effect begins to reverse. The Characteristics of Habituation section of the Wikipedia article covers this.


Representations of negated propositions The following question is quite hypothetical, and just to get an idea.

Assume any model of how positive propositions $p$ are actively (opposed to synaptically) represented in a neural network, e.g. "the cat sat on the mat". Presumably, this will be by some kind of firing of some neurons or neuron assemblies.

I wonder how the corresponding negative proposition $\neg p$ might be represented, e.g. "the cat sat not on the mat". Will there be an extra NOT-neuron firing? Will the same neurons fire in NOT-mode? Will the cat sit on a NON-mat? Or completely different. Or are such propositions not represented at all, i.e. we can only "think positively", and only report verbally, that we do or did not think that $p$ (which would be some kind of a meta-report)?

Which proposals are around for the representation of negated propositions?

A plausible candidate for that is interneurons subnetwork.

Lets say some entity may be green and cold. It also may be yellow and hot, but not cold and hot. So, we can say that for this type of entities there are 2 independant variables, describing its state. If right now the variable 'color' is set to the value "red" - that means the negation of all other values of that variable (not green, not blue, ... infinity of them). The question is only how to store the construct "variable" in the neural tissue?

One can gather all possible values of the variable and wire them all with dense lateral inhibition circuit. Activation of one neuron inside that ensemble will kill the activations of the others.

And look - we've got a good instrument for detection of mistakes in our model of the world now! If the network has wired some entities' representations by lateral inhibition - it means that the network has stated a hypothesis that these entities (in some context) are just different values of the same driving factor. If in the next moment strong feedforward signal has activated 2 principal neurons inside the circle - the hypothesis was not correct. The network has detected "paradox".

This explanation is plausible because of 3 facts:

There is a famous pinwheel pattern in the visual cortex:

The figure above depicts reconstructed map of different values of the variable "spatial orienation" in the visual cortex. They are arranged in non-random order.

Superimposition of inhibitory neurons onto that map shows that one interneuron can work with different "values" of spatial orienation.

There is a scientific proposition, that underlaying algorithm is the same in all parts of the cortex (i.e. differences are more likely in hyperparameters, than in essence). We dont know the algorythm (and I dont pretend that my aswer is correct), but scientists do not see dramatical differences in the microbiology of tissue in different cortex regions. So.. if some "variable - value" relation appears in the most good studied part of the cortex (primary one) than we, probably, have some ground to expect such tendensies in other parts.

source of pictures - Neurobiology: Turning a corner in vision research,1999,Nature


Can lucid dreaming detract from the recuperative effect of REM sleep? Imagine you mastered lucid dreaming, so you have a lucid dream every night.
You might want to use this phase to do creative work or problem solving.

Would this have a negative influence on the recuperative effect of sleep?

Lucid dreaming is a half-way state between normal REM sleep and wakefulness. Lucid dreaming probably has less of a recuperative effect than normal REM sleep. On the other hand, there is usually less sleep inertia when waking from a lucid dream than when waking from a non-lucid dream.

The function of REM sleep is still a mystery, so very little is known about how lucid dreaming affects sleep quality.

However, going in the other direction, it is known that sleep quality affects the likelihood of lucid dreaming. More specifically, REM rebound following sleep deprivation, going back to sleep after a morning awakening and being sufficiently sleep deprived to take naps before noon are all common triggers for lucid dreams.

In my experience, I have never had a lucid dream after eight hours of unbroken sleep but if I wake up early in the morning and go back to sleep or if I take a daytime nap then I will quite often get a lucid dream, especially if I have consumed caffeine prior to falling asleep.

  Smith, B. V., & Blagrove, M. (2015). Lucid dreaming frequency and
  alarm clock snooze button use. Dreaming, 25(4), 291-299.
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/drm0000012

  Dresler, Martin et al. “Neural correlates of dream lucidity obtained
  from contrasting lucid versus non-lucid REM sleep: a combined EEG/fMRI
  case study.” Sleep vol. 35,7 1017-20. 1 Jul. 2012,
  https://dx.doi.org/10.5665%2Fsleep.1974


Why do people want to harm those who harmed them? Several social psychologists try to explain the science behind revenge.

For example, Ian McKee of Adelaide University in Australia writes in Social Justice Research (Vol. 138, No. 2), linking vengeful tendencies primarily with two social attitudes: right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance.

Popular social psychologist Dan Arieli in The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (New York:  Harper Collins, 2010) suggests that revenge has a biological basis and feels pleasurable.

I am looking for new research explaining this topic.

There are at least two additional domains you can investigate.

The first is reciprocity as a means towards justice. In The Fourth Arm of Justice: The Art and Science of Revenge (1997), Judi Parks looks at this from the perspective an employee, but cites Susan Jacoby's report on the survivors of the Majdanek concentration camp in her 1983 Wild justice: The evolution of revenge:

  A desire for retribution does not require rationalization. "A victim wants to see an assailant punished not only for reasons of pragmatic deterrence but also as a means to repairing a damaged sense of civic order and personal identity. Deterrence and retribution are hardly identical, but the former invariably involves an element of the latter.

A more recent book that explores this dimension is Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge (Barash & Lipton, 2011).

Since deterrence is quite salient in game theory, this aspect shows up there, too. See, for example, The Paradox of Revenge in Conflicts (Amegashie & Runkel, 2012).

The second is identity theory. An example in “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Social identity salience moderates support for retaliation in response to collective threat (Fischer, Haslam, & Smith, 2010)):

  Specifically, we found that a threat to national identity (the 7/7/2005 London bombings) led to greater aggression and greater support for revenge when national rather than gender identity was salient. In contrast, a threat to gender identity (Taliban misogyny) led to greater aggression and greater support for revenge when gender rather than national identity was salient.