How long does it take to read a sentence with X number of characters? How does the time needed to read a sentence scale with the number of characters? Or does this time scaling depend on something more than just character count?

For example, let $X$ be the number of characters and $F(X)$ the seconds to read an entire sentence of $X$ characters long. There are 3 options:

Linear $F(X) \in \Theta(X)$:  Is the relationship linear? That is, if it takes 0.5 seconds to read "hello", it would take 1.0 second to read "hello world": $F(X) = 0.1 X$
Sublinear $F(X) \in o(X)$: Or does it decay? That is, as people read a long sentence, their reading speed increases (crazy example $F(X) = 1 / X$)
Super-linear $F(X) \in \omega(X)$: Or is it like quadratic? That is, each additional character ads more time than the previous word? (example: $F(X) = X ^ 2$)

Which of the above 3 options best describes reading speed based on length of text? Is the specific functional form of this relationship known?

Motivation

I am creating an iPhone app where I need to show transient confirmation messages. For example, when a user submits a comment, I pop up a message saying "thanks for submitting your comment". Shortly after, the message will fade away. There exist many such transient messages all over my iPhone app.

What I would like to do is to calculate the optimal time to show each message based off of the number of characters in that message. I want users to have enough time to comfortably read the message, but not so long that the message annoys them. The purely UX version of this question is here:

How long does it take to read X number of characters?

I've studied this a little bit within the context of timing responses to personality test items. General models of reading speed look at both the time to read the words as well as to comprehend. From memory, eye tracking studies have shown how the eyes will often back track to confusing parts of a sentence (apologies for lack of reference).

Some general findings that I've found in my own data on time to answer personality test items of different lengths:

Expect an initiation period. I.e., the time between displaying a message and the commencement of reading. In mathematical terms, this will translate to a non-zero constant in your model of reading time as a function of properties of the text.
The more familiar the content and the words are to the reader, the quicker they will be. This translates both in absolute terms that simple words are quicker to read, and also to interactions between individuals and the content.
In general, character count, word count, and syllable count tend to be highly correlated in normal prose. From my own data, these indices tend to have a relatively linear effect on reading speed.
More complex sentences (e.g., ones with negation, multiple clauses, etc.) take longer to read. For example, I found that sentences with "not" took systematically longer to process.
Individuals differ substantially in reading speed. Expect to see a distribution of individual differences that is a little bit positive skewed from normal. Thus, if you are designing a system where you determine the length of time text is displayed, you may need to pitch the speed of your system to capture a certain percentage of that distribution (e.g., 95, 99% etc.). Various factors explain variation in reading speed including whether English is a second language and education.
There are also outliers. People get distracted. Thus, there is reading time when people are focussed and there is reading times that incorporate distraction and other processes.

More generally, if you have the resources, you can do some pilot testing on a sample of individuals where you time how long people take to read the text, ideally within the context of the application. This could allow you to develop a domain specific model of reading speed.

Although a little tangential, some articles that discuss speed of item responding in a personality testing context include Casey and Tyron (2001) and Wagner-Menghim (2002).

References

Casey, M.M. & Tryon, W.W. (2001). Validating a double-press method for computer administration of personality inventory items.. Psychological assessment, 13, 521.
Wagner-Menghin, M. (2002). Towards the identification of non-scalable personality
questionnaire respondents: Taking response time into account.
Psychologische Beiträge, 44(1), 62-77.


Generate fMRI from neurotransmitter consumption As mentioned in this answer, it's possible to generate an fMRI BOLD signal from neurotransmitter consumption. What equation would be appropriate for this use?

The simplest equation for getting a BOLD signal from neurotransmitter that I could find was in "Tracing Problem Solving in Real Time: fMRI Analysis
of the Subject-paced Tower of Hanoi", which itself references many other publications where it was used:

$$H(t)= m \times(t/s)^a\times e^{-(t/s)}$$

The parameters $s$, $a$ and $m$ don't have an explicit meaning. Heuristically, from the text:

  $m$ is the magnitude of the response and $s$ is a time scale. The function
  peaks at time $a \times s$. The parameter a determines the shape of the
  function such that the larger $a$ is the more narrowly the function will
  be distributed around its peak.

So it seems you have to fit it to some previous data in the area you're trying to generate data from before it can be used.


Free-to-use parenting style questionnaire I'm working on a master's thesis in UX design that I might want to turn into a commercial project later on. The subject matter is use of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in parenting.

For the research phase, as part of a screener, I want to get a sense of a person's parenting style. I've been looking for questionnaires on evaluating parenting styles and found the Parental Authority Questionnaire.

However, this questionnaire was made to be evaluated by children, not by the parents themselves. Is there an alternate questionnaire for them? Would I be able to use its questions in my screener? What are the regulations regarding using questions from a different questionnaire?

There are a lot of parenting style questionnaires. Without knowing what dimensions of parenting style are of key interest, how long you want the questionnaire to be (e.g., trade-offs between validity, reliability with ease) and such, it's hard to recommend a particular one. You can see several from the parent perspective here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=parenting+style+questionnaire

As to regulations, you may need to contact the authors or journal about whether the scale is permissible for commercial use. I've only ever used scales for academic use.


Which commodity technologies offer useful neuroimaging data? Do any commodity technologies exist that offer useful neuroimaging data? By commodity I mean lowish cost and not requiring specialist technicians to run.
By useful I mean able to reliably provide some signal at different times from the same subject, even if it is of a limited nature. If so, what are the capabilities of the technology?

For instance, do the cheap EEG machines provide useful data or not?

Are any such technologies likely to become available in the foreseeable future?

The question is a little vague, but here is a partial answer.

There are a number of EEG systems available that are low-cost. Examples include Emotiv's EPOC System and the OpenBCI project. The former has been available in various models for some years now and it has been established that it records real EEG signals, as opposed to just recording signals generated in the muscles and other artifacts.

The first major validation document is by Ekanayake as a white paper, that has been updated (here). As I understand it, these are not peer reviewed, nor were they presented at a conference. But the work is quite good.

For the collection of ERP (Evoked Potentials) data, there are two substantial peer-reviewed papers by a research group: Validation of the Emotiv EPOC EEG system for research quality auditory event-related potentials in children by Badcock et al. (2015) and Validation of the Emotiv EPOC EEG gaming system for measuring research quality auditory ERPs, also by Badcock et al. (2013). While these papers are on ERP experiments, their results suggest that other collection styles, such as continuous collection, are likely to be ok as well.

Additionally, Liu et al. (2102), Implementation of SSVEP Based BCI with Emotiv EPOC, is suggestive but appears to be an unreviewed conference paper. As a counterpoint to this, there is Performance of the Emotiv Epoc headset for P300-based applications, by Duvinage et al. (2013). Searching Google Scholar for these topics, shows a trend that more recent papers are generally more positive, but I don't have time to work the statistics to show that is more than my quick opinion.

As an aside, our laboratory has been using the Emotiv system for approximately a year and a half, collecting data for approximately 6 months or so, and for continuous EEG collection (non-ERP) we are replicating the expected EEG phenomena. Hopefully we'll be added to the peer-reviewed literature above soon.


When using APA style citations, is it acceptable to have page numbers for everything? I am taking a psychology class. The professor wants us to use APA format for citations. I have read that if I am not quoting material directly, then the page numbers are not required.

However, I think its bad practice not to cite page numbers. For example, when I cite my textbook, if I don't give a page number, the person would have to go through the entire book to find the passages I am talking about. And that just seems stupid when I could simple add the page number. But I am not quoting directly, so I'm not sure if it customary to incorporate page numbers like that.

My Question:

Any suggestions for what to do? I'm sure my professor is trying to get us to practice using APA style correctly, so I'm really just trying to find out if I incorporate page numbers for everything would that be outside the norm.

In APA style, when you cite a work, you add an in-text citation in the body of the work and you add the full reference to the reference list at the end of the work.

End of text references for book chapters, journal articles, and similar works include the page range of the work in the reference. This  refers to the start and end page of the cited work (and not to the particular pages that contain the content most relevant to your citation).
In-text citations need to include page numbers when you are quoting a passage of text.
APA stye encourages but does not require the use of page numbers in in-text citations where you are paraphrasing a specific passage of text (i.e., putting a passage of text in your own words). That said, I rarely see this practice in journals, and don't be surprised if someone marking your paper is unaware of this rule.
The more common rule is that if it is not a quote, then you don't use page numbers in in-text citations.

Rationale

As @Josh points out, most citations in psychology refer to overall works. For example, a journal article may present the results of an experiment, and these results and communicated and discussed in multiple points in the article. Thus, you are citing the work as a whole, and it does not make sense to refer to specific page numbers.

That said, I think there are times where authors cite an entire book written by one author for a reference, and some form of page reference would make the citation more useful for the reader (e.g., a particular chapter might be most relevant).

Tutorials

Purdue OWL APA Format


To what category of optical illusions does this image belong? To what class of optical illusions does the below image belong?  The diagonal lines are parallel, but because of the context, the longer of the two appears bent.

To what category of optical illusions does this image belong?

This appears to be a modified Hering illusion or rather it seems to rely on the same principle:

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License: Wikipedia 2018.

  There are several possible explanations for why perceptual distortion
  produced by the radiating pattern. The illusion was ascribed by Hering
  to an overestimation of the angle made at the points of intersection.
  If true, then the straightness of the parallel lines yields to that of
  the radiating lines, implying that there is a hierarchical ordering
  among components of such illusion. Others have suggested that angle
  overestimation results from lateral inhibition in visual cortex,
  while others have postulated a bias inherent in extrapolating 3D angle
  information from 2D projections.

The modification in the case of your example with the radiant part being at the corner where the vertical rises from the tip of the left hand parallel line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hering_illusion

That being said, see Ames room illusion for comparison of a superficially similar setup.


Is it possible to detect the mental flow state with EEG? I know that it is possible to detect "focus" with a consumer EEG with a single electrode and a reference point (ear clip), even without conductive gel, but is it possible to detect a flow state with any level of technology (whether it be professional or consumer)? Are flow states and focus synonymous? Is the mechanism of flow by it's nature undetectable by EEG?

Bearing in mind the fact that I can't prove a negative, I'm going to say "No, it's not (yet) possible".

Flow is rather loosely defined (e.g. "merging of action and awareness"), so coming up with hard measures is a challenge in and of itself -- even without bringing electrophysiology into the equasion.  As a Positive Psychology concept, it belongs to the realm of "soft science" psychology, and this tends to make fuzzy things stay fuzzy.  (Please note that I'm not using "soft science" pejoratively).

I think the best you can do is measure correlates of alertness and attention (e.g. look for desynchronization in the alpha band).  If you come up with a very clever design, you might even be able to elicit ERP components related to conscious awareness of a stimulus of interest (e.g. P300b complex), but even that will be very difficult in non-laboratory conditions.

Alternatively, you could turn to machine learning to search for patterns associated with the conscious processing of a stimulus of interest.  If you want to go that route, I'd strongly encourage you to read one of my colleagues' Ph.D dissertation [1].  This dissertation proposes some novel approaches to pattern classification with EEG (and MEG/iEEG).  Note that this problem is a much easier one (classification of non-communicative patients).  That, along with the insane amount of noise you're likely to get and the need for a very inventive design, earns you a hearty "good luck" ;)

Characterizing the Electro-magnetic Signatures of Conscious Processing in Healthy and Impaired Human Brains


What, if anything, sets humans apart from other species? As I grew up, I was taught that the difference between humans and animals was that human beings have free will and animals do not. The basis is that animals will act accordingly to the nature of their species. I never fully understood this statement and still wonder whether it is a valid claim.

From an evolutionary  perspective, we would be regarded as a species at the top of the food chain. The main advantage in our development is our brains.

If we put aside the differences in what human beings are capable of, e.g. making clothes, machinery, etc., is there a real distinction between human beings and other animals? Do we really have free will, or an illusion of free will? Or are we behaving, as other animals, in accordance with the nature of our species?

I know this is a big question and could result in a range of debates over my definitions. So for the sake of clarity, let's keep this question limited to what defines a human brain as opposed to an animal brain and any evidence that supports any significant difference, allowing for the fact that the human brain is well-developed (as opposed to, e.g. to our canines).

Some articles with some information pertinent to your question, hope this helps:

According to "Human and animal cognition: Continuity and discontinuity" (Premack, 2007), that as several species have skills once thought to be unique to humans, that this suggests that there is a misleading (the article's word) disparity between 'brain' and 'mind'.  So the article's focus is on:

  What are the dissimilarities?

When examining 8 aspects, or competencies, including teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language, the authors found that the similarities to be minor, but the dissimilarities to be very large and that there is no disparity.

Each of these points are discussed in depth in the article (too big for this answer); however, the article's author concludes with a fundamental difference:

  Animal competencies are mainly adaptations restricted to a single goal. Human competencies are domain-general and serve numerous goals. For instance “planning” may be tied to episodic memory, suggesting a broad competence.

Going further, according to "Evolution of the brain and intelligence", (Roth and Dicke, 2005), that a main difference is due to:

  factors that correlate better with intelligence are
  the number of cortical neurons and conduction velocity,
  as the basis for information-processing capacity.

and critically (bolding mine):

  The outstanding intelligence of humans
  appears to result from a combination and enhancement
  of properties found in non-human primates, such as
  theory of mind, imitation and language, rather than from
  ‘unique’ properties.


Can somebody provide a standard test to measure ones working memory & short term memory I suffer from memory problem but find it difficult to undrstand whether it is more belief based or real, need a standard test to confirm.

It might be difficult to distinguish between belief-based and actual memory difficulties, especially in a self-administered test. The most objective measure would be a computerised assessment, e.g. the Automatic Working Memory Assessment, which contains measures of short-term and working memory in the verbal and spatial domain [1]. Some commonly used assessments of these constructs are [2]:

Verbal short-term memory: digit span, running span
Verbal working memory: backward digit span, n-back span
Spatial short-term memory: dot matrix, forward Corsi block task
Spatial working memory: backward Corsi block task

[1] http://doi.org/10.1080/01443410802243828
[2] http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1201


Medium-term effects of polyphasic sleep on performance Typical sleep patterns of one big block of 6 to 9 hours with no naps is usually referred to as monophasic sleep. A second natural sleep pattern is biphasic sleep which breaks up your sleep into two chunks (Wehr, 1992; Ekirch, 2001). My question concerns polyphasic sleep which partitions your sleep in 3 or more periods during the day.

From personal experience (and anecdotal evidence; this is a popular blogging topic), I know that the first one to two weeks of trying to keep a difficult polyphasic sleep schedule (say uberman that divides your day into 6 evenly spaced half-hour naps) produces very low performance. At first you are unable to fall asleep and you need your alarm clock to wake up and you feel groggy, agitated and slow. However, after the first week, a lot of these negative effects seem to disappear as you grow accustomed to the schedule. You start to get very vivid dreams during your naps (and I started to wake without the need for alarm clock) suggesting REM sleep. However, I have never subjected myself to proper performance tests while attempting polyphasic sleep.

What are the medium term (more than 2 weeks, less than a year) effects of polyphasic sleep on performance of tasks like working memory, reading speed and comprehension, and IQ tests?

Unfortunately, most sleep studies are less than two weeks in duration and report the obvious negative effects; except on working-memory which benefits from naps. Alternatively, they are military studies that only track vigilance (not having micro-sleeps)(Porcu et al., 1998; Rhodes & Gil, 2003) , or have physical measures of no interest to me (Stampi, 1989).

Disclaimer: As you have noted yourself, there aren't very many scientific researches on the topic. The only main points that I can derive are generally of blogs or sketchy speculations. As such, you are supposed to take this answer with a grain of salt.

Interesting Thing of the Day notes that polyphasic sleep may make the person awake and alert but have adverse effects on the creativity and mental agility.

  ...it may be that although one can indeed be awake and alert for 22 hours per day, creativity and mental agility suffer as a result.

Supermemo has the following to say about Polyphasic sleep:

  Yet you will definitely not want to sleep polyphasically if:

  you want to maximize your creative output
  you want to maximize your peak alertness, your average alertness, or minimize the impact of your worst alertness levels
  you want to maximize the health effects of sleep, etc.

While both the sources are not scientific findings, it does send a signal that polyphasic sleep cycles would have a negative impact on IQ tests and general activities like reading because your overall alertness is down because of sleep deprivation. Poor mental agility would have result in a lower working memory as well.


Ways to treat disorganized thinking, other than pharmacotherapy Disorganized thinking is a cognitive deficit symptomatic of thought disorders such as schizophrenia. This affects your ability to process and connect thoughts and ideas, rendering them disorganized, and fragmented. In extreme cases, disorganized speech results.

Are there any activities that have a therapeutic effect and remedy this somewhat? For example, puzzles, computer programming, writing a novel etc. Or employing certain new habits. For example, composing mind maps, writing lists of tasks on your arm etc. Finally, there's cognitive remedial therapy (CRT), and other forms etc.

Metacognitive therapy has been proposed to improve disorganized thinking. Metacognition can be thought of as our ability to "think about thinking." Essentially, it's a person's ability to organize their thoughts into a coherent narrative, reflect on their thoughts and experiences, take the perspective of others, and make sense of the world. Individuals with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis may experience disorganized thoughts, which can hamper their metacognitive ability. They may even have difficulty recognizing that other people would have thoughts or emotions about other peoples' lives or behavior.

Metacognitive therapy can take different forms, but in many cases it involves helping people organize their thoughts by eliciting narratives about their lives. For example, a therapist may ask a client to tell them about a recent trip to the store, or an event that was meaningful to them. If the client responds in a disorganized manner, the therapist can drill down to details, focusing on helping the client organize the story.

For example, imagine a client is telling a story about attending a basketball game, but has left large chunks of the story out, or has skipped around chronologically. This type of exchange might occur:

Therapist: "It sounds like you had fun, but I'm confused. When did you arrive at the game?"

Client: "Oh, about 7."

Therapist: "And did you go to the game with your friends, or meet them there?"

Client: "Sam and I met Bob there."

Therapist: "Oh, so you and Sam drove over to the game at 7pm, and met Bob."

Client: "No, Sam and I came separately, but we met up first at the game. Then later we saw Bob."

In this exchange the therapist keeps pulling for additional details, helping the client recall and organize the experience by re-telling it. The therapist also "inserts her mind" into the discussion by admitting "I'm confused." This tells the client that a) their story was not clear and b) the therapist is having thoughts and reactions to hearing the story. Over many sessions, metacognitive therapy may help clients organize their thoughts, and become more aware of other people's internal experiences.

This was a very brief explanation, and I've listed a series of papers and books about this type of intervention that can provide additional information. There may be other therapies that address disorganized thinking, but this is one I am most familiar with. I will expand this answer in the future, if time permits.

References

Brune, M., Dimaggio, G., & H Lysaker, P. (2011). Metacognition and
social functioning in schizophrenia: evidence, mechanisms of
influence and treatment implications. Current Psychiatry Reviews,
7(3), 239-247.
Dimaggio, G., & Lysaker, P. H. (Eds.). (2010). Metacognition and
severe adult mental disorders: From research to treatment. Routledge.
Hasson-Ohayon, I., Kravetz, S., Levy, I., & Roe, D. (2008).
Metacognitive and interpersonal interventions for persons with severe
mental illness: theory and practice. The Israel journal of psychiatry
and related sciences, 46(2), 141-148.
Lysaker, P. H., Gumley, A., & Dimaggio, G. (2011). Metacognitive
disturbances in persons with severe mental illness: Theory,
correlates with psychopathology and models of psychotherapy.
Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 84(1),
1-8.
Salvatore, G., Conti, L., Fiore, D., Carcione, A., Dimaggio, G., &
Semerari, A. (2006). Disorganized narratives: Problems in treatment
and therapist intervention hierarchy. Journal of Constructivist
Psychology, 19(2), 191-207.
Salvatore, G., Lysaker, P. H., Gumley, A., Popolo, R., Mari, J., &
Dimaggio, G. (2012). Out of illness experience:
metacognition-oriented therapy for promoting self-awareness in
individuals with psychosis. American journal of psychotherapy, 66(1),
85-106.


Spiking Neural Network Simulation: Measuring and Classifying Bump Attractor States I am currently working with Spiking Neural Networks and multi-(meta)-stable attractor states.

What I observe in my simulations are 'bump' attractors that appear, disappear, and may wander around. Here is a screen shot from a simulation:

Dark blue dots represent excitatory neurons' spikes (fading into white to leave a trace), and dark red triangles representing inhibitory neurons' spikes.

If neurons are currently part of a 'bump' cluster, they exhibit a high firing rate, otherwise the rate is much lower.

The neurons are arranged on a 2D torus map (periodic boundary conditions).
Thus, for every neuron I have its respective x and y coordinate plus the timing of the spikes.

What I want and need is a algorithm that

can detect and distinguish neurons within the bump state from non-bump states
measure the average size of a bump
the average number of bumps per unit time and unit map size
the average lifetime of bump (as I said they are meta-stable)
In case the bumps are "wandering" the average speed or drift of a bump

What might be a suitable clustering algorithm in order to perform these steps? Would it be more useful to convolve the spike times with a filter in order to get some rate representation?

0: As you suggested, use a temporal filter to get a smoothed rate representation
1.a: Clean up each frame by using (e.g.) a morphological opening then closing step
1.b: Locate the centres of bumps, perhaps using non-maximum suppression.
1.c: Choose a reasonable activity threshold for neurons to still be "inside" the bump: Maybe 80% of the distance between zero and the activity at the bump-centre.
1.d: Assign neurons to bumps by finding connected regions around the bump centres.
2, 2: Once you have the neurons assigned to bumps, this is just simple stats
4: Track bumps between frames by assigning nearest bump centres across frames. Apply some uniqueness criterion to detect bumps appearing and disappearing.
5: This is also easy once you have the bumps tracked.


Can I read what the person thinking through electrodes or something similar? First of all I'm not a medical student so I may miss some points here.

I know that EOG (electro-oculography) works on the corneo-retinal dipole. The cornea (front of eye) is slightly positively charged and the retina (back of eye) is slightly negatively charged. When I apply electrodes on the temples and ground circuit to my forehead (helps to stabilize readings and get rid of some 60Hz interference).

So I used that(I wrote a program) to read these signals and control some thing by moving my eyes, and follow the signals change according to my eyes movement.

Now my program can read this simple electrecity signals and convert it in order to control something else.

But this doesn't make much sense, I need to make it more understandable, for example I'm wondering if there someway to read alphabets the person thought about and receive a unique signal for it, and I mean by (someway) not just through eyes maybe with brain waves or something else I don't know about it.

I take it you want to use eye movements for data input (rather than reading people's thoughts, which would be silly to consider). It's not the greatest idea, efficiency wise, but may have its strengths in terms of convenience. From a fairly recent (2014) review of eye based HCI:

  It should be noted, though, that gaze control of WIMP is
  noticeably slower and more error prone than control by conventional mouse
  and keyboard (e.g. gaze typing reaches about 20 wpm which is far from the
  80 wpm by a touch typist, see Majaranta et al. 2009a).

And the 2009 paper they refer to for state of the art is "Fast Gaze Typing with an Adjustable Dwell Time". It's basically displaying a large virtual keyboard (like your phone/tablet does) and uses a specialized algorithm to reduce errors. I'm not familiar with the details of the latter, you'll want to read the paper for that.

Microsoft Research has a more recent (2017) paper using a cascading virtual keyboard and it claims improvements for the average user. The latter paper also makes me wonder if the previous research overstated its results, because

  Participants were able to achieve
  typing speeds of 12.39 WPM on average with our cascading
  technique, whereas participants were able to achieve typing
  speeds of 10.62 WPM on average with a static dwell time
  approach.

I don't know what discrepancies are due to; methodology or what is being reported, I guess.

By the way, there's a HCI stack exchange where I'm sure there are more knowledgeable people on this.

As for the title of your question "Can I read what the person thinking through electrodes or something similar?". This is a somewhat different topic, and perhaps too broad to address here. Most of the results in this latter area
are much more experimental in nature, i.e. farther from a practical technology right now. Wikipedia's article on thought identification
 is probably a resonable start.


When your two eyes disagree sharply Now and then, the image from each eye is so different from the other that it seems the brain has trouble combining them into a coherent image. You can create this situation by putting a hand or sheet or paper in front of one eye, then moving it about an inch away. If you open one eye at a time, you see the obstruction with one and what it obstructs with the other. If you keep both eyes open, you see a composite where the obstruction appears translucent or transparent in parts.

I've been curious about this phenomenon. Is there a name for it? Is it clear why the brain handles it this way, producing a seemingly impossible object, and not some other way?

Binocular rivalry refers to a situation where you present different images to each eye (often in the context of an experiment, although you also point out some quick 'at home' ways to achieve this), and your perception switches between what each eye observes.

This phenomenon is related to other forms of bistable/multistable perception, one of the most famous examples of which is the Necker Cube but there are many many examples.

It's hard to answer your question about why this is the case, but I think it's helpful to think about what the purpose of the brain is: making a model of the world for you to act in. It doesn't really make sense for the world to be in two different states simultaneously. Your brain is constantly making perceptual decisions that translate observations into a model.

To make just a toy example for why you may want to select a single model rather than trying to incorporate both forms of information simultaneously, imagine you are some animal trying to catch a flying insect. One eye suggests the insect is in one part of space; the other eye suggests a slightly different part of space. You can reach to only one of the two spaces. You are more likely to be successful if you choose one of the targets (at least you have a 50/50 chance), whereas if you used some other strategy like an average of the two positions, you would miss every time.

There is also a lot of literature focusing on the role of attention in binocular rivalry as well as other aspects. It's probably beyond the scope of SE to provide a full review, but hopefully this is enough information for you to do some of your own further research on.


The Dark Triad Abnormal Development or Base Human Nature? I propose the concept, that human beings, as animals have the same instincts as other animals. Even though we are social animals, we still have the basic nature of fight and flight and we teach ourselves to overrule these with the "conscious mind" or frontal lobe. To help reinforce the practice of inhibiting behaviour that "may" be destructive to other human beings, are many laws, and  social and organisational constructs of "morality" (eg religion, schooling). These practices assist in the individuals development of conscience.

This leads me to a group of people who fail to conform to the social norms that are supposed to help to  ensure that human beings have the optimal chance to overcome base desires and instincts.

The Dark Triad;
Narcissism
Machiavellianism
Psychopathy

The key features being;
lack of empathy
self-centredness
lack of remorse

From the pure analysis that the percentage of people with these diagnoses are not the norm. It can be argued that these people are defective, as they are not the norm. It has been argued these personality types can be genetic and caused by environment and every permutation between. One could, almost argue that it is the underlying "default" of human nature, when all our conditioning is stripped away.

My question is:
Are people diagnosed with Narcissism, Machiavellianism or Psychopathy  truly different; or are these set of personality traits dormant within all people?

The Dark Triad traits you speak of are subclinical personality traits, therefore they cannot be diagnosed. Everyone carries some of the characteristics of these traits. People high on these traits are also not considered to be defective, even better they may in some environments be considered to be an advantage (e.g., business areas).

You may want to read up on research on the Dark Triad, mainly that by Dr. P. K. Jonason. He is one of the main contributors to the Dark Triad research and uses an evolutionary paradigm to discuss his research, showing how the Dark Triad may be adaptive.


Quote: Mental illness is questioning the point of living I'm trying to find a quote essentially relating the sentiment that "a mind which questions the point of continuing to live, is a mind which is mentally ill", as a definition of mental illness. I thought it was Freud, but I read three pages of quotes of him and didn't find what I was looking for. I found two that are close in meaning:

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society.

SIGMUND FREUD, Civilization and Its Discontents

“About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”
― C.G. Jung

In a letter to Marie Bonaparte, Freud wrote:

  Im Moment, da man nach Sinn und Wert des Lebens fragt, ist man krank, denn beides gibt es ja in objektiver Weise nicht; man hat nur eingestanden, daß man einen Vorrat von unbefriedigender Libido hat, und irgend etwas anderes muß damit vorgefallen sein, eine Art Gärung, die zur Trauer und Depression führt. Großartig sind diese meine Aufklärungen gewiß nicht. Vielleicht weil ich selbst zu pessimistisch bin. Mir geht ein "advertisement" im Kopf herum, das ich für das kühnste und gelungenste Stück amerikanischer Reklame halte: "Why live, if you can be buried for ten Dollars?"

In English:

  The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression. I am afraid these explanations of mine are not very wonderful. Perhaps because I am too pessimistic. I have an advertisement floating about in my head which I consider the boldest and most successful piece of American publicity: "Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?"

Freud, S. (1960). Sigmund Freud an Marie Bonaparte, 13. August 1937. In E. L. Freud (ed.), Briefe 1873-1939 (p. 429). Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer.
Freud, S. (1961). Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 13. August 1937. In E. L. Freud (ed.), Letters of Sigmund Freud (p. 432), London: Hogarth.


Getting upset from the creation of your own imagination Lets say I got angry at someone who did/said something wrong. Even after this angry interaction with this person is finished, I noticed I continue to express my negative reaction in my head creating some imaginary situation where this specific person is doing/saying something wrong (which they didn't do/say in real life; it's totally in my head, a creation of my negative imagination). It wastes my time, mental energy, breaks my focus/concentration at productive work, and definitely it's long term effect on my mental health cannot be good.

I just wanted to know -
-  Is this just me, or this happens to other people too?
- What this problem/issue is known as (just so I can do a little more research online)?

Generally this is known as rumination. I don't know if there has been a more specific name for the specific type you mention, but it has been studied somewhat:

  Certain characteristics of rumination, such as compulsion to continue ruminating, occurrence of unproductive thoughts, and "why" and "what if" type questions, as well as negative emotions before and after rumination, were significantly associated with PTSD, concurrently and prospectively. These characteristics explained significantly more variance in PTSD severity than the mere presence of rumination, thereby indicating that not all ways of ruminative thinking are equally maladaptive.

A problem in this area is that there's not an agreed definition of rumination, as the intro the Wikipedia article on the topic says.

Alternatively, one can also call persistent "what if" thinking just worry. In fact there are some older papers discussing "what if" thinking under worry alone.

  The worrier is likely to engage in a series of 'What if...'
  self-statements. For example, 'What if I fail? My parents might shut off my funding, and I'll have to leave school. What
  if I can't get a job?.., etc.' There may be some attempted solutions offered (e.g. 'I'11 plead with my folks to continue
  supporting me'), but these will be followed by further 'What if... ' statements (e.g. 'What if they don't listen to me? What
  if they are too angry to listen to reason?'). This kind of mental behavior may have very different consequences for the worrier
  than for someone else who is anxious about some upcoming event but does not engage in worrisome activity. Data do
  exist that indicate that cognitive avoidance can maintain anxiety (Borkovec, 1974) and catastrophizing self-statements can
  worsen anxiety (e.g. Grayson and Borkovec, 1978), both despite repeated exposure to the feared stimulus. Although the
  stated function of worry by the worrier is to attempt to anticipate and cope with an uncertain future, the actual functional
  effect may be the maintenance of anxiety and its continued and frequent elicitation prior to actual outcomes.

More recent research trying to separate worry from rumination has generally proposed that time orientation (future or past) should be distinguishing factor:

  Several researchers have investigated the content of worry and rumination to study the differences between both
  processes. The only stable difference that has been consistently found pertains to the temporal orientation
  (Papageorgiou & Wells, 1999; Watkins, 2004; Watkins, Moulds, & Mackintosh, 2005); whereas worry is
  predominantly focused on the future, rumination is predominantly focused on the past.

In my opinion, it's a bit of grey area whether pondering about what someone has said in the past is entirely past-oriented or it if it may have a future-oriented component as well. E.g. you may worry that they'll do something else related to the past discussion like come back to you and continue it. Counterfactual thinking as to what they could have said (but didn't say) is ruminative if you don't really think they might come back and say (more) to you. On the other hand, if you project that they may do so (and you're anticipating responses to a future conversation), it could just as well be considered a worry.


How are neurotransmitter receptors discovered? Many neurotransmitter receptors are known, for example 5-HT2a, Mu, NMDA, and so on. How have these receptors been discovered?

Each receptor has its own story of discovery. I'll share here the methods used by Lefkowitz that led to the discovery of one of the first neurotransmitter receptors, namely the β2 adrenergic receptor (β2AR) from frog erythrocytes in 1981. With this I mean β2AR was among the first receptors that was identified, purified, and characterized both at the protein and DNA level.

Lefkowitz's team was the first to uncover the charactistics of a neurotransmitter  at the protein and DNA level. βARs are involved in regulating cardiovascular function. Lefkowitz was awarded the Noble prize for his early pioneering work on the discovery of these receptors.

His method was based on several steps, namely:

The development of a novel and specific radioligand binding assay to enable the measurement βAR-binding sites;
The identification of detergents to successfully solubilize a functional βAR from membrane preparations;
The synthesis of an affinity resin and photoaffinity ligands to facilitate receptor purification;
Reconstitution of the purified β2AR into phospholipid vesicles;
The demonstration that β2AR couples to, and activates the heterotrimeric G protein Gs and subsequent activation of adenylyl cyclase to produce cAMP;
Purified hamster β2AR was used for peptide sequencing that were subsequently used to synthesize oligonucleotides for cloning studies to isolate β2AR cDNA;

After β1AR, Lefkowitz's lab soon purified β1AR, α1AR, and α2AR.

References
- Benovic, Cell (2012); 151(6): 1148-50
- Lopez-Munoz & Alamo, Neural Transm (2009) 116: 515–33


Does the duration of the epoch of interest in fMRI need to be a multiple of TR? I am designing an fMRI experiment whereby, for each trial, subjects need to listen to an auditory stimulus (of arbitrary duration), and subsequently give a rating for each stimulus.

I intend to compare the BOLD signal for the different conditions under which that stimulus is presented. Thus, the part (epoch) of the trial that is of interest for analyses (contrasts) is when the stimulus is presented.

My question: is there any reason (to do perhaps with MR physics or statistical analyses) whereby the duration of the epoch of interest (i.e. of the auditory stimuli) should be an integer multiple of the TR, or can this really be arbitrary?

The biology underlying the BOLD response is much slower than typical TRs, so I would say on one hand it doesn't really matter because the TR interval is not the time scale that matters. On the other hand, if you are presenting stimuli of duration where the TR matters, those stimuli are occurring too quickly to be resolved separately using fMRI. You may be able to solve this problem by averaging over many stimulus presentations with orders in different combinations, but that may increase your scan time more than having space between epochs and requires independence assumptions that are likely to be inappropriate.

In summary, look at the structure of some auditory fMRI tasks and see how they are organized before designing your own.


What is the psychological advantage of having a happiness set point? What is the psychological advantage of having a happiness set point? If one found a way to constantly be attached to this set point, what would the advantages be (other than perpetual happiness ^^)? How could a person become grounded in a perpetual state of happiness? What specifically would pull a person out of this state? How does a person get back in if they leave?

I think you've misunderstood the set point. It's a point of balance (or imbalance) of positive and negative affect toward which a person naturally gravitates. As such, there's not much need to do anything about leaving the set point except to wait / go on living and let time, neurochemistry, and daily life do the work.

Deliberate effort is more likely to attempt to increase positive affect beyond the set point. Thus the common struggle is generally against the effect of the "hedonic treadmill" pulling oneself back down to a more neutral or discontent set point after moments of hard-won happiness. Perpetual happiness is an elusive target for almost anyone, including positive psychologists. Most positive interventions have somewhat temporary effects (again, due largely to the true nature of the set point), though the small catalog of events that induce lasting changes to happiness is growing slowly through ongoing research.

From an evolutionary perspective, advantages to this aspect of human nature might include resilience, impulse control, and stabilization of one's identity.

The hedonic set point pulls either way depending on the direction of deviation, and downward deviations are generally more threatening. The natural tendency to "bounce back" from depression, calm down from high alert, and otherwise recover from traumatic stress is the upside to the set point for most people (though some have set points that we classify as depressed, unfortunately).
Excessive exuberance can be dangerous as well. It may relate to mania and disinhibition of impulses (I'd prefer to say excessive happiness sometimes results from these, but I'm not sure enough of it). If unusual circumstances increase happiness excessively (e.g., winning the lottery), dysregulated behavior with negative consequences may result. This may also be a mechanism of regression to the set point. Anxiety and discontent can also have motivating effects, whereas survival needs aren't always well-served by a state of bliss, especially when they entail hard work and worry for the future.
Both individuals and groups may benefit from the affective stability of personality. This point is somewhat more speculative than the others on my part, but to motivate it, consider self-verification theory and the social undesirability of moodiness and anger. People prefer to be able to predict emotions in themselves and others, as the motivational impact of unexpected depression, unreliable energy, or uncontrollable anger is disruptive and sometimes dangerous. Of course, we live with this challenge anyway, but without a natural process for restoring emotional equilibrium, our vacillations could be more chaotic and troublesome than they already are.

Plenty of theoretical literature and research exists on this topic, and it's not hard to find. E.g., see the Wikipedia page you linked in your question. I listed one of those in my answer to this question:
· What exactly is meant when it is said that only you can make yourself happy?

Reference
· Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Penguin.


Survey tool with clickable version of the "Geneva emotion wheel" For my master thesis i would like to make a survey on user emotions on using a web user interface. The proband should write down his emotions using the "Geneva emotion wheel". (More information here: http://www.affective-sciences.org/gew).

Now i would like to know if there are any survey tools out there which offer this GEW as a clickable version. Or is it somewhere availlable as a "widget" which i can add then to my self created online survey?

I made up a SVG version connected to a hidden html form. It's not perfect, but it may be useful anyway. You can find it here.

Note that a sufficient screen resolution is required.

Please send me feedbacks if you use it so that I can improve it.


Applications and Limitations of EEG Electrode Pooling - Averaging across time series Is there any literature that has addressed electrode pooling? In particular, are there any standards concerning what pools (e.g. frontal, central, posterior vs. electrode pairs) could be used or any particular applications and limitations?

EDIT:
By "pooling" I am refering to the procedure in which new channels are created based on pooling the raw data from the original data electrodes. This is a preprocessing step not to be confused with variance pooling for statistical testing.

This seems to be a rather painful terminology issue.

"Pooling" is used in statistics to describe combining data / different sources of information in a single model. It's of particular interest in hierarchical modelling approaches (e.g. mixed-effects modelling), and partial pooling -- broadly, the sharing of information between groups in a model without discarding the structure of the groups -- is perhaps one of the great innovations of 20th Century regression techniques. For more on this topic, see e.g. Gelman and Hill (2007).

In this sense, the use of regions of interest (ROIs) instead of individual electrodes as a categorical variable can be seen as a form of pooling -- you're combining data sources to gain more information, but losing some structure along the way. Because of the limited spatial resolution of EEG and the high correlation between adjacent electrodes, averaging across a ROI (and this is implicitly what's happening when we use ROI as a factor in ANOVA or regression models -- this is where the term "regression to the mean" comes from), may enhance our ability to see and detect the signal in the noise (i.e. increase statistical power). The coarsening of spatial (more specifically topographic) resolution is perhaps not tragic, because we are currently not able to make precise spatial predictions. Maris (2004) suggests an alternative way of dealing with topography.

This appears to be the sense that BrainVision Analyser uses the word "pooling". You're combining multiple data channels (electrodes) into a single one (ROI) via averaging. This is one of those places where you see that "channel" and "electrode" are not completely synonymous.

Incidentally, there are other ways you can combine information from electrodes. EEG measures voltage, which is per definition potential difference. The question, of course, is "difference to what?" In traditional recording setups, you have a single reference electrode (or perhaps a few linked electrodes as in linked mastoids) and you measure the difference in the electric field between the measurement electrode and the reference -- this is called "common reference". Sometimes, a pair of electrodes is measured relative to each other as "bipolar electrodes". This seems to be more common with the electrooculogram and has the advantage there that it makes eye movements more apparent. It has the disadvantage that you have effectively made one channel from two and cannot distinguish between the two original electrodes! A further disadvantage is that techniques like independent component analysis (ICA) depend on a common reference to do their magic, and as such, bipolar electrodes are problematic for ICA. A more advanced variant of common reference is "average reference", where the voltage is measured to the average voltage of all common reference electrodes. This seems weird at first, but it has its uses and emphasizes how the electrodes differ from each other (topography). Any common reference can be computed from any other via a relatively straight forward linear transformation. For more on this, see Luck (2005, 2014).

All of this stuff with referencing is important because it is possible to compute bipolar channels offline -- they are simply the difference of two common-reference electrodes. (Depending on which electrode you substract from which, you will get a different sign.) ERPLAB allows you to combine channels in fairly arbitrary ways to get new ones. If you're doing linear combinations of channels, it's fairly straightforward to compute what the statistics of the combined channel will look like compared to the statistics of the originals, but for arbitrary combinations, this can get confusing quite fast. Incidentally, the construction of ROIs or "pooling" in the BrainVision Analyser sense can be viewed as a special case of this -- you're adding a number of channels together and dividing by a constant (i.e. calculating the mean), which is a linear transformation.

Finally, you could also use existing channels to simulate missing or bad channels -- this is called interpolation. Good interpolation takes things like the curvature of the scalp and the electric field into account and is thus computationally more complex, often using techniques like splines. A simpler interpolation method is simply taking the average of adjacent electrodes (in some sense constructing a mini-ROI!), but this is not just less accurate numerically but also fails to take into account issues with the way electric fields sum together (see also: equivalent dipoles). Despite Scott Makeig's protests, I suspect that linear interpolation for a single electrode would work quite well in a high density setup. But then again, in a high density setup, you can generally afford to leave one electrode out of your analysis!

In each of the cases above -- construction of ROIs, arbitrary combination of channels, interpolation -- you are in some sense "pooling" the data you have. You are not gaining any information that was not there (e.g. an interpolated electrode does not really add much if any statistical power to your analysis), but you may be using the information that you had more efficiently. And that's what pooling is all about in statistics.

EDIT (2015-07-07 05:51 UTC): ICA and common vs. bipolar reference

As stated in the comments, ICA is actually based on relatively general assumptions that are generally indifferent to the choice of reference. In signal terms, the key assumption is that each measured channel is the linear combination (sums and constant multiples) of a number of components, which are typically taken to represent different (neueral) generators or (EEG) sources. In other words, ICA is a type of Blind Source Separation (BSS), which can be used to decompose a set of (directly) measured signals into a set of contributing sources, based on some additional assumptions. There are many different BSS techniques, each with different assumptions / goals, and thus each answering slightly different questions. For example, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) requires that components are orthogonal, while ICA require that components are independent. Somewhat simplified, PCA tries to separate the signal in terms of successive, "maximal" trends, which ICA tries to separate the signal into a series of distinct contributions.

This can be best seen in the following figure:

(Image reproduced from Jung et al (2001).)

The first component produced by PCA is a larger diagonal one explaining the general trend of increasing $y$ for increasing $x$, while the second component is a measure of "drift" or a correction to the general trend. Importantly, the components are at right angles (orthogonal) to each other. Combining each component in different proportions (i.e. weights), you arrive at the original two measurement series. In ICA, the components are  not required to be at right angles to each other, and the result in this example is a component for each of the visually obvious  groups.

Applying this to EEG data, we can view the choice of reference as some sort of builtin "offset" for measurement channel. This will change the weights in the recovered components, but ultimately not the components themselves. It's fairly trivial to transform the data from one common reference to another, and it's also fairly trivial to change transform the component weights from one common reference to another.

Now, when the channels have a mix of references, things get a little more interesting. Bipolar (measurement) channels are still linear combinations of EEG sources, but they have unknown offsets.[1,2] This is not a problem for ICA in and of itself -- as @mmh pointed out in the comments -- and thus the decomposition into sources / components works. The bigger issue is that the offset messes with the weights a bit and thus the back-projection; i.e. the generation of scalp maps becomes somewhat more difficult and the resulting scalp maps may be not be interpretable and cannot be source localized.[1] (Moreover, bipolar channels effectively pack the signal change from two discrete spacial locations into one and thus lose some of the topography information, which is also important for things like scalp maps.)

This is ultimately why the official advice from the EEGLAB Wiki is to use common reference for all channels, including the eye channels, because you can always create bipolar channels from unipolar channels, but not vice vera:

  We advise recording eye channels (conventionally four channels, two for vertical eye movement detection and two for horizontal eye movement detection) using the same reference  as other channels, instead of using bipolar montages. One can always recover the bipolar montage activity by subtracting the activities of the electrode pairs.[2]

For the work I do, ICA is really only interesting if you can generate scalp maps or perform source localization. It is still possible to identify (some types of) problematic components and remove them (e.g. a single noisy electrode, but then again, you can often identify that without ICA), but if the scalp maps are not interpretable, then I would have serious doubts about removing components that depend on electrodes from multiple references -- removing components is effectively substracting the component-associated scalp map from the measurement-associated scalp maps and my intuition is that the resultant difference would not necessarily be the correction you're looking for.

Or more succinctly, Arnaud Delorme, one of the key figures in the development and application of ICA to EEG data, states:

  ICA on bipolar montage will not be informative. ICA will attempt to model each channel reference so that common sources may be projected to all channels in a linear fashion. [3]

ICA will work with a mixture of bipolar and common references, but it will be answering a a different question than the one we would like answered.


Is there a correlation between EQ (EI) and IQ? Is there a correlation, positive or negative, between emotional intelligence and IQ?

My understanding is that self-report measures of emotional intelligence tend to have very weak correlations with traditional measures of cognitive ability, and ability-based measures of emotional intelligence have low to moderate correlations with traditional measures of cognitive ability. The following provides relevant extracts from Conte (2005) that directly relates to these points. For a more complete picture you may wish to read the article.

Self-report measures of emotional intelligence

  The EQ-i is a 133-item self-report measure that takes approximately 30 minutes to complete (Bar-On, 2000) ...
  With respect to discriminant validity, the EQ-i correlated 0.12 with
  the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Bar-On, 2000), and the average
  correlation between the EQ-i and the Big Five personality measures was
  approximately 0.50 (Dawda & Hart, 2000)

Ability based measures of emotional intelligence

The MEIS and MSCEIT are both ability based measures of emotional intelligence.

  Data from several studies indicate that the MEIS correlates between 0.30 and 0.40 with traditional measures
  of cognitive ability (Roberts et al., 2001; Van Rooy & Viswesvaran, 2004)

Relation between ability and personality based measures

It also appears that self-report and ability based measures of emotional intelligence are measuring relatively distinct variables.

  Mayer et al. (2000) found that the MSCEIT and Bar-On scales correlated
  0.36, indicating that they share approximately 13 percent of their variance.
  In a more recent study, Brackett and Mayer (2003) found that
  the MSCEIT and Bar-On scales correlated 0.21, indicating that they
  share approximately 4 percent of their variance.

References

Bar-On, R. (2000).
Emotional and Social Intelligence: Insights from the Emotional Quotient Inventory.
In Bar-On, R.; Parker, J. (eds.).
The handbook of emotional intelligence: Theory, development, assessment, and application at home, school, and in the workplace (pp. 363–388). Jossey-Bass.
ISBN 978-0-470-90743-6
Brackett, M. A., & Mayer, J. D. (2003).
Convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity of competing measures of emotional intelligence.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(9), 1147–1158.
doi:10.1177/0146167203254596
Conte, J.M. (2005).
A review and critique of emotional intelligence measures.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(4), 433–440.
doi:10.1002/job.319.
[PDF]
Dawda, D., & Hart, S. D. (2000).
Assessing emotional intelligence: reliability and validity of the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) in university students.
Personality and Individual Differences, 28(4), 797–812.
doi:10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00139-7
Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D., & Salovey, P. (2000).
Selecting a measure of emotional intelligence: the case for ability scales.
In Bar-On, R.; Parker, J. (eds.).
The handbook of emotional intelligence: Theory, development, assessment, and application at home, school, and in the workplace (pp. 320–342). Jossey-Bass.
ISBN 978-0-470-90743-6
Roberts, R. D., Zeidner, M., & Matthews, G. (2001).
Does emotional intelligence meet traditional standards for an intelligence? Some new data and conclusions.
Emotion, 1(3), 196–231.
doi:10.1037/1528-3542.1.3.196
Van Rooy, D. L., & Viswesvaran, C. (2004).
Emotional intelligence: a meta-analytic investigation of predictive validity and nomological net.
Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65(1), 71–95.
doi:10.1016/S0001-8791(03)00076-9


Open source software for analyzing Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Heart rate variability (HRV), the change in the time intervals between adjacent heartbeats, is an emergent property of interdependent regulatory systems that operate on different time scales to adapt to challenges and achieve optimal performance (Shaffer et al., 2014).

In laymen terms, HRV is a measure of effort and exertion, either physical or mental. The time intervals between adjacent heartbeats, also referred to as RR intervals, NN intervals or InterBeat Intervals (IBI), are determined based on peak values in physiological signals. The IBI can be determined with either electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG; Madea et al., n.d.; see Figure 1).

Figure 1: ECG (top) and PPG (bottom) patterns and the marked intervals.
With these IBIs, different metrics of HRV can be calculated. These metrics can be subdivided into the time domain (e.g. mean RR, SDRR), frequency domain (e.g. high- and low frequency, or HF/LF) and non-linear metrics (For a review, see Shaffer et al., 2004). The analysis is not straightforward, however, but require some complex calculations.
What are some freely available software packages that allow easy calculation of these metrics?

References
Yuka Maeda, Masaki Sekine, Toshiyo Tamura, Koichi Mizutani (n.d.). Evaluation of green light PPG in Heart Rate Variability parameters.
Shaffer, F., McCraty, R., & Zerr, C. L. (2014). A healthy heart is not a metronome: an integrative review of the heart's anatomy and heart rate variability. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1040.

A variety of packages exist that allow the calculation of these metrics. I will describe these packages by category:

Software

Kubios is a program from Finland that has a nice GUI, in which you can import both ECG data or IBI (not PPG), to calculate all the metrics. They support some a variety of file-formats, but you can import any other text-file with some additional specifications (e.g. the time indices). The software allows several settings for filtering e.g., and allows you to easily segment and analyse the data. However, batch analyses are not possible, so all the steps must be repeated for every subject.
NB. The website has gone offline just this week. The software (for both Mac OS and Windows) can still be downloaded though. Ping me in the Axon Terminal and I'll send you the links.
*NNB. Kubios now links to a Facebook page. They are currently working on a new release. *
gHRV is implemented in Python and works with a GUI (website). Some typical formats are accepted, including IBIs in an ASCII text format. However, it cannot read the time indices. Therefore, the program will not know whether or when R-peaks and, subsequently, IBIs were missed (compare true data in Kubios vs gHRV loaded). Interpolation and time, frequency and non-linear analyses are possible.

Python

gHRV can also be used in Python itself with the source code. This give you more flexibility and allows you to batch analyze your data. I have not been able to test this, however.
hrv is a module that is currently being developed by Rhenan Bartels. At the moment, only simple time domain analyses are possible which works well with complete IBI datasets. At the moment of typing, Rhenan is developing a frequency domain analysis, and he will implement a way to interpolate missing data. He is also open to suggestions if you need a particular functionality.

R

RHRV is a complete R-package that organizes the data in a structured way. You need to import the IBIs or time indices of the beats (or some device specific files), after which all metrics can be calculated. There are also filtering methods and allows easy manual removal of outliers in GUI if necessary. The package is documented well and there are some video tutorials.

Matlab

HRV Analysis Software (HRVAS)

  is a heart rate variability (HRV) analysis tool developed using MATLAB. HRVAS can detrend and filter IBI and can perform time domain, frequency domain, time-frequency, Poincare', and nonlinear HRV analysis (From website).


How can prolonged stress lead to a sustained reduction in cognitive functioning? Background: Ten years ago or so I went through a traumatic period which resulted in a lot of stress and anxiety. I initially assumed there was some depression but cognition and short term memory was gradually affected such that I had serious difficulty understanding new concepts at night class. At one stage I was practically "cut off" from emotions. I understand that this could be partly due to something happening on the hormonal or biological level.

Questions

What does research show about the causal effects of stress on cognitive functioning?
How is the brain affected by stress? (e.g., chemical/physical, or  perhaps a "softer" level).
What could be done to minimise the negative effects of stress on cognitive functioning?

This is only one possible pathway.  There are many potential ones.  Further the fact that this is possible does not mean that it is the case always.

Stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.  For example, a meta-analysis by Dickerson et al. (2004) demonstrated that an acute laboratory based stressor reliably increased cortisol levels, a hormone downstream of the HPA.  That stress results in activation of the HPA is also well-demonstrated in animal models, where both physical (e.g., restraint or shock) and social stress (e.g., Engelman, 2004).

When stress occurs, various systems (e.g., amygdala implicated in threat detection) can lead to activation in the hypothalamus, where the paraventricular nucleus (of the hypothalamus) secretes corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH).  The CRH acts on the pituitary gland resulting in a release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH).  ACTH is released into the blood, which allows it to reach the adrenal glands, specifically the adrenal cortex.  This stimulates the adrenal cortex to produce and release glucocorticoids (GCs) into the blood (in humans primarily cortisol, in animals corticosterone).  GCs in turn have broad ranging influences on the body.  For example, they seem to play role in immune regulation and function (although whether they are anti-inflammatory or pro-inflammatory seems to depend on quantity and time (there was a lively debate about this at a Psychoneuroimmunology conference.  For utterly inadequate notes on some of the presentation see here).

GCs also act in a negative feedback loop to shut off the HPA axis.  Finally, relevant for cognitive functioning, specifically memory, GCs can regulate the hippocampus.  This is believed to be adaptive in the short term, but when the hippocampus is chronically exposed to elevated levels of GCs, it can endanger cell function (for a review of GCs and the hippocampus, see Joels, 2001).

For example, using a longitudinal design, Huang and colleagues (2009) demonstrated that in people with Alzheimer's Disease, basal plasma cortisol (cortisol levels in the blood, other major ways to measure cortisol are via saliva or urine) was predictive of a decline in cognitive function as well as atrophy in the hippocampus (specifically, the temporal horn).

Somewhere I have a slightly longer reference list on stress and aging, with an emphasis on stress effects in cognitive and physical function over time.  I do not have an answer for your final point, what can be done to minimize the effects.  The only clear suggestion would be to minimize stress.  I know there are some studies showing protective effects of physical activity for depression, physical function (that one's a no-brainer), and cognitive function.  One can speculate that if chronically elevated GCs released from the adrenal cortex are the cause, that administering an ACTH antagonist or the like may help, but to date, I know of no studies trying to block the effects of stress (in rodent models of cancer, stress effects on tumor progression and metastasis have been effectively blocked using beta blockers, but there the primary stress pathway was believed to be sympathetic nervous system activation rather than HPA).


Does masturbation in men negatively affect cognitive processes? Gary Wilson has mentioned that porn and masturbation is an addiction that negatively affect mental performance. Moreover, there is some "pseudo-science" claiming that abstaining from masturbation increases testosterone. I believe it increases serum testosterone levels after 7 day. I think that pornography negatively  affects working memory.

Does abstaining from masturbation in men significantly change cognitive processes?

There's one condition that is linked to negative cognitive effects after masturbation in a small subset of population, it is called Post Orgasmic Illness Syndrome (POIS):

  The sufferer experiences mental symptoms, physical symptoms, or both.
  Common mental symptoms include cognitive dysfunction, intense
  discomfort, irritability, anxiety, craving for relief, susceptibility
  to nervous system stresses (e.g. cold), depressed mood, and difficulty
  communicating, remembering words, reading and retaining information,
  concentrating, and socialising.14 Physical symptoms include
  severe fatigue, mild to severe headache, and flu-like and allergy-like
  symptoms, such as sneezing, itchy eyes, nasal irritation, and muscle
  pain.3 Affected individuals may also experience intense warmth

So to answer your question - masturbation/orgasm does negatively affect cognition in people affected with POIS. There's another condition that may be similar : Post-coital tristesse

This may/may not be related, but prolactin, a hormone with multiple functions is elevated for multiple days in males after experiencing orgasm. From wikipedia:

  The hormone[prolactin] counteracts the effect of dopamine, which is responsible
  for sexual arousal

I can't find a reliable source, but I read that the increase in prolactin lasts for up to 15 days following orgasm.

Looking at these dopamine and prolactin hormones on wikipedia, I saw that prolactin and dopamine suppress each other. From Dopamine article:

  Dopamine is the primary neuroendocrine inhibitor of the secretion of
  prolactin from the anterior pituitary gland

If abstaining from masturbation does change hormone levels, then Prolactin and Dopamine (within specific parts of the brain) would be most likely targets.


If we concentrate on our disappointment do we really get more disappointment? On the blog, Positive Psychology Review, I read the following:

  TRAIN YOUR BRAIN - LAW OF ATTRACTION
  Dwelling on disappointments mentally and physically trains your brain
  to attract more disappointment vibrations. When coping with
  disappointment, it’s significant to note that your thoughts multiple [sic].
  So, if you are fixated on a disappointment, instead of harnessing the
  positive power of your brain to find answers, you’re actually
  “sentencing” your brain to being imprisoned thinking about
  disappointment. Of greater significance is the fact that your brain is
  also putting out “addictive” chemicals that keep your body craving
  disappointment. Instead, notice when you’re thinking about
  disappointment and interrupt this thought pattern by thinking of
  something else… Perhaps congratulating yourself!

Is there a scientific basis for this?

I think some scientific insights on this can come from a couple of sources:

Cognitive therapy

This is a branch of psychological therapy that interprets the human experience as follows.
There is an event, then the evaluation of that event, and then the emotion. Disappointment would be the end result, the emotion. Regular therapy might focus on avoiding the event, the trigger. In cognitive therapy one would try to change the evaluation of the event, and as a result, change the triggered emotion.

To put it simply by example, if you were once bitten by a dog, you evaluate seeing a dog as a threat, and therefore experience fear when you see one. By learning to evaluate dogs as friendly and nice, the fear goes away.

So, this seems to imply that there might be things you can concentrate on that make it more likely for negative emotions to go away. But you would have to look into the details of cognitive therapy to figure out how exactly this works.

Learned optimism

Diener and Seligman have done quite some research on learned optimism. This includes the question of whether it's possible to "teach" a pessimist to become an optimist. In one of their studies (Diener & Seligman, 2002), they have identified the 10% of happiest people in a group of 222 undergraduates, and compared them to the unhappiest students. Both experienced the same amount of negative emotions, but the happy people got over it much faster because they had different cognitive interpretations of the events.

There are also some studies, not sure by who, that have shown that applying simple techniques can turn you into an "optimist" [citation needed]. A few studies (e.g., Johnstone, van Reekum, Urry, Kalin, & Davidson, 2007; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002; McRae et al., 2012; Hecht, 2013) were able to see brain activity changes and brain-density changes in the prefrontal cortex. In "optimists" the left side is more active. In "pessimists" the right side is more active. So this might support the brain and "chemicals" claims. But you'd have to Google the exact reference.

Broaden and build

Barbara Fredrickson has some interesting research (e.g., Fredrickson, B.L., 2001) on how negative emotional states limit your range of reactions to "choose" from in response to a situation. And how positive emotions increase this range. She calls it the broaden and build theory. The most limited range on this spectrum is the fight or flight reaction in times of great stress and danger.

She does describe some "spiral" effects, where the negative emotional states (e.g. disappointment) can lead to cumulatively more restricted mindsets.

Meditation

Also, maybe this is worth mentioning. There is a lot of research supporting the claim that meditation increases emotional stability. Mindfulness meditation specifically has been associated with the same changes in the brain as described earlier, associated with optimists. The "technique" taught here is to observe all events and emotions as if looking at them in third-person perspective, letting emotions rise and fall as they come without clinging to them.

This would indicate that it's not the "concentrating on disappointment" that is the problem, but it is the "type" of concentrating.

I think on most of the above topics you should be able to find references quickly on Google. I don't have time to look up the actual papers...

References

Diener, E., Seligman M.E., (2002). Very happy people. Psychological Science, 13(1):81-4. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11894851

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broadenand-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218-226. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3122271/

Hecht, D. (2013). The neural basis of optimism and pessimism. Experimental Neurobiology, 22(3), 173–199. Retrieved from http://synapse.koreamed.org/search.php?where=aview&id=10.5607/en.2013.22.3.173&code=0142EN&vmode=FULL.

Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., Urry, H. L., Kalin, N. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2007). Failure to regulate: Counterproductive recruitment of top-down prefrontal-subcortical circuitry in major depression. The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(33), 8877–8884. Retrieved from http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/33/8877.full.

McRae, K., Gross, J. J., Weber, J., Robertson, E. R., Sokol–Hessner, P., Ray, R. D., Gabrieli, J. D., & Ochsner, K. N. (2012). The development of emotion regulation: an fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal in children, adolescents and young adults. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(1), 11–22. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252634/.

Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(8), 1215–1229. Retrieved from http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/0903-EmoPaper/CogRegEmoOschner.2002.pdf.


The relationship between working memory and emotion I stumbled up on this article about working memory.
Within a table of indicators of good or poor working memory, it listed the following for adult working memory:

Indicators that a working memory needs exercise

Frequently late to work
Often underestimates time required for a
task
Has problems breaking a project into manageable steps
Often
loses temper with children and spouse

It is the last point:

Often loses temper with children and spouse

This brings me to the question:
Are there  studies examining the relationship between working memory and emotion?
If so what are the results?

Working memory and other aspects of executive function (attention, for instance) are linked. There is evidence that improving self control improves emotional outbursts (see article below).  So, improving working memory should improve self control, which should prevent emotional outbursts.

See: Denson, T. F., Capper, M. M., Oaten, M., Friese, M., & Schofield, T. P. (2011). Self-control training decreases aggression in response to provocation in aggressive individuals. Journal of Research in Personality, 45(2), 252–256. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2011.02.001


How to describe research on the effect of expectations on memory? I wanted to test a persons expectation Vs. memory. To put it simply, I want to see whether or not a person will remember more information when told they have a larger/smaller amount of information to consume and reiterate. I haven't been able to find any studies done on the topic so far. Does anyone know how I could rephrase this to get a more narrow search result?

So far I've been searching for Expectation vs. Memory, and have been getting studies that focus on a persons expectation in a different sense...

The relevant concepts are set size and span. The set size is usually the amount of items to be remembered in a memory task, but technically only refers to the amount of information that must be held in (working) memory to complete the memory task at hand, while the span is the amount actually remembered. With this in mind, your topic can be stated as being about whether expectations for set size affect memory span.

I am not aware of any studies directly investigating this. Look into the executive function/control literature, because any effect from expectations for set size on memory span will almost by definition involve some form of executive control. I can think of a number of theoretical possibilities, so I would be very interested to read a follow-up question that you answered yourself.


Can our auditory perception be used to trick our visual perception? "Our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events...The 80-millisecond rule plays all sorts of perceptual tricks on us. As long as a hand-clapper is less than 30 meters away, you hear and see the clap happen together. But beyond this distance, the sound arrives more than 80 milliseconds later than the light, and the brain no longer matches sight and sound. What is weird is that the transition is abrupt: by taking a single step away from you, the hand-clapper goes from in sync to out of sync." source

This made me curious - say we have the following experiment based on the above:

A subject (listening subject) wears headphones synchronized with the hand-clapper
the hand-clapper starts from 5 meters away and slowly moves to 60 meters away

during this time, the listening subject would hear a clapping sound as they would naturally hear the sound based on the distance of the hand-clapper

If, once the hand-clapper reaches 60 meters, the audio is tweaked such that the listening subject would hear the hand-clapping sound as if the hand-clapper were only 5 meters away:

  Would your typical listening subject visually perceive the
  hand-clapper as having suddenly moved closer (similar to the concept of how we perceive the moon as being "larger" when it's closer
  to the horizon)?

  In other words -- under what circumstances, if any, can sound influence
  our visual perception of depth/proximity?

I don't buy it the claim made in the quote. The speed of sound is roughly 1 foot per millsecond so even if you take a large 3 foot step you are changing the audio visual onset asynchrony by only 3 ms. What this means is that if you present a flash and a click with various onset asynchrony to subjects you would expect there to be a narrow range of lags (less than 3 ms) over which they stop reporting that the flash occurred first. This study was run by van Eijk et al (2008):

The relevant data are the temporal order judgements (TOJ) and it is clear that it is a smooth transition between thinking the flash was first and the click was first and not an abrupt step. Further, the transition takes around 200 ms or to get back to the original claim, about 100 steps. The 80 ms claim seems reasonable in that you do not consistently report the visual stimulus as occurring first more than 70% of the time until it occurs more than 80 ms before the sound.


How has psychology categorised different types of love? How has psychological theory categorised the different types of love?
What taxonomies of love are most accepted or useful in psychology?

EDIT:
I went through Triangular theory of love. Are there any other theories like this out there?

Sternberg's Triangular theory is certainly well-known. The field you want to dig into more is called 'close relationships'. Here's an accessible treatment of other common theories:

  Summary of psychological theories of love https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-love-and-war/201208/love-decoded

This gives a good theoretical overview using many different approaches:

  More abstract positioning of theories of relationships and attachment with relation to other fields http://www.wwnorton.com/college/psych/intimate-relationships/ch/03/summary.aspx

Here's another I learned about in grad school:

  Bem - Exotic Becomes Erotic: Interpreting the Biological Correlates of Sexual Orientation
  http://doi.org/10.1023/A:1002050303320


Do the brains of non-altruistic persons mirror the observed experience of suffering? Altruistic behavior can have different motivations: from the hope that the help you give will ultimately benefit yourself (social exchange theory) to a selfless wish to alleviate someone's suffering.

Selfless altruism is motivated by empathy. According to C. Daniel Batson, "if you feel empathy towards another person you will help them, regardless of what you can gain from it".

An observer experiences empathic concern when brain regions are activated in him that are similar to those activated in a person who is experiencing a particular sensation (cf. mirror neuron).

Do the brains of non-altruistic (selfish, egoistic) persons – i.e. persons who do not show altruistic behavior in the face of suffering – mirror the observed experience of suffering (and is this information simply ignored) or do their brains not mirror the observed emotions at all?

If selfish brains show mirroring, what hems altruistic behavior in selfish brains, or what facilitates it in selfless brains?

I'd go for the jugular in non-empathetics: sociopaths and psychopaths, people who clinically lack the ability to empathize. There is a difference in their brains.
You might be interested in the story of the neuroscientist Dr. James Fallon..
Fallon wanted to identify lack of empathy as a brain patern. He had PET scans of serial killers mixed with a host of other mental illnesses and disorders in an attempt to predict accurately psychopaths. He found a particular pattern again and again which was striking.

“I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains,” he says. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk.”
“I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.

Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon didn't hide that discovery; instead he started to study it. He found that his family line included seven alleged murderers, including Lizzie Borden*. A series of genetic tests revealed the presence of high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy.
You can see normal empathy vs. psychopath scan differences in the linked source.
*Maybe you remember this childhood rhyme (I do): Lizzie Borden took an axe/ gave her mother forty whacks./ When she saw what she had done,/ She gave her father forty-one.


What is the name of the effect or concept behind getting along better with people after time apart? I notice this happens ubiquitously. When siblings are apart in college, or kids away from parents due to college, or even long distance relationships - during a reunion (like over the holidays) only the positives tend to be highlighted, there is generally less fighting and more harmony and the overall relationship feels much better than it would be on average if the separation was not there.

What is the name of this effect, if it has one? Or are there any results/studies about this?

In general, I would have said the opposite: there's a robust literature on familiarity driving liking, even with non-social stimuli like shapes:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

This is also true with people. There may be some kind of an effect whereby people who are familiar and then separated bicker less after the break than before, but I haven't seen this studied. I'd suggest you look at terms like conflict in close relationships for psychological research, e.g.:

  Simpson, J. A., Rholes, W. S., & Phillips, D. (1996). Conflict in close relationships: An attachment perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(5), 899-914.
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.5.899


How objective are scientific measures of paraphilia? Paraphilia (from Greek para = beside and -philia = friendship, meaning love) describes the experience of intense sexual
  arousal to highly atypical objects, situations, or individuals.

Which practices that have been defined as paraphilia has changed over the course of time and with changes in "religious" control over modern society and so a freedom of moral conscience. A striking example being homosexuality, which was considered a mental illness. The educated and enlightened thinkers of many communities now find such an idea as abhorrent.

What is acceptable sexual practice varies across cultures. This in part is reflected by the age of consent across nationalities; which range from 12 to 21.
Striking disparages showing in the Phillipines where female to male age of consent is 12 and 18 for female to male respectively; but for any   male to male or female to female sex is 18. And in Burkina Faso  where the age for female to male sex is 13 for both sexes, but for male to male or female to female is 21 for both. Not to mention the places where homosexuality is illegal.

Given this great variation is what is legally acceptable (thereby one would conclude socially acceptable within that culture) and what one place would deem as acceptable another would deem as aberrant.

How can paraphilia be, scientifically, defined on behaviour alone?
Are there neurobiological differences between the brain of a "paraphilic" and a "normal"?
 What is the correlation between other mental illness and/or abnormal psychology and paraphilia?

note: this lends itself to what we define as illness or abnormal psychology

wiki's Psychopathology page should give you some insight into this issue.
First, you must realize that a psychological illness is generally different than a biological illness. The difficulty when dealing with most (not all) conditions included in the APA's DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders) is that there is no truly objective way of determining whether something should be considered a disorder. This is why they use the 4 D's to determine whether the thing someone is experiencing is a disorder.
It is not truly a paraphilia unless the behavior includes a combination of the following: highly statistically deviant, causes distress, causes the person to not be capable of doing things they normally would be able to, or causes danger to others.

Deviance: this term describes the idea that specific thoughts, behaviours and emotions are considered deviant when they are unacceptable or not common in society. Clinicians must, however, remember that minority groups are not always deemed deviant just because they may not have anything in common with other groups. Therefore, we define an individual's actions as deviant or abnormal when his or her behaviour is deemed unacceptable by the culture he or she belongs to.

(There are moves to start avoiding using this as a reason because of the complexity and it's apparent arbitrariness, but that's a different issue)

Distress: this term accounts for negative feelings by the individual with the disorder. He or she may feel deeply troubled and affected by their illness.
Dysfunction: this term involves maladaptive behaviour that impairs the individual's ability to perform normal daily functions, such as getting ready for work in the morning, or driving a car. Such maladaptive behaviours prevent the individual from living a normal, healthy lifestyle. However, dysfunctional behaviour is not always caused by a disorder; it may be voluntary, such as engaging in a hunger strike.
Danger: this term involves dangerous or violent behaviour directed at the individual, or others in the environment. An example of dangerous behaviour that may suggest a psychological disorder is engaging in suicidal activity.

So no, a paraphilia cannot be scientifically determined by behavior alone (just like the idea of love cannot be proven scientifically by behavior alone).
In short, paraphilia (just like most psychological illnesses) is definitely somewhat subjective. From a clinical standpoint, they're just a way of categorizing and defining disorders that people deal with, like happiness or sadness, not a scientific definition like whether or not someone has cancer.


Oddball experiment design in E-prime I want to set up an experiment in which there are 3 types of emotional stimuli (A, B, C). A and C would have a 1% recurrence probability, for rare and unexpected stimuli. Is there any sample of oddball paradigm for E-Prime?

Pstnet, the editor of Eprime, does not provide a sample for oddball paradigms. And sharing Eprime scripts is rare but you may find a script of interest here

http://www.nitrc.org/frs/download.php/283/AO_version110804.zip

This is part of an initiative described at http://www.birncommunity.org/resources/tools/fire-primer/multi-site-cognitive-paradigms-for-fmri-studies. File summaries are here http://www.nitrc.org/projects/fbirn (click on "see all files"). This auditory oddball file is far from being a sample though.