Is there a link between intelligence and mental disturbances? Is there a link between high intelligence or creativity, measured with currently valid psychometrics, such as IQ tests or tests of creativity and mental disorders like depression, anxiety, or bipolarity?

I like Mr Smitherson's consideration, which is indeed in the realm of possibilities. I haven't read a definitive study yet, I will search and return soon.

However, for further consideration to the question from a psychological/cognitive perception I posit the following:

Persons with abnormal, on the high scale of intelligence, would perhaps have more varied considerations when presented with a situation or when presented with a problem.

People with a higher IQ would normally think deeper into a problem. This would activate more brain cells, and drain the brain of the chemicals it uses to function. This would lead to imbalance.

The second consideration is that people who are more intelligent, would think about things further. To expand on that idea, since I am not the best at explaining stuff, I'll give an example: a person, of high IQ, is presented with information on global warming, a normal (for the sake of argument) person would take in the information and perhaps think "this isn't good" and leave it there. The person of higher IQ would thinking further about the implications, perhaps research and may find the situation hopeless.

Constant barrage of these situations may lead to lower moods and the elevated hopeless thinking lead to depression fueled by anxiety for the future.

This is what I would consider to be the cause behind any correlation between intelligence and mental illness in the form or depression/anxiety (these two conditions feed each other into a spiral)


Do people estimate combined probabilities differently to uncombined ones? Suppose, somebody has to estimate the likelihood of one of the following events (or has to estimate which event is more likely):

A coin is tossed six times and each time the result is heads. (combined)
A 64-sided die is rolled and the result is 1. (uncombined)

Since 2⁶ = 64, both events are obviously equiprobable. However, somebody with less statistical prowess might think otherwise. Also, in a more complex scenario (e.g., in a board game) at least one of the probabilities may be impossible to calculate for almost anybody (at least in a short time).

I am interested in studies that investigate, whether combined probabilities (1) are estimated to be higher, lower or equal than uncombined probabilities (2), even if the actual probabilities are identical.

I am also interested in studies, which investigate the influence of the presentation of the scenario on the estimation of probabilities: Is the same scenario perceived differently, if presented in a way that emphasises combinedness? For example, one could simply ask somebody to estimate the probability that one of his close relatives will die within a year (uncombined) or one could ask him to list all his close relatives, their age and state of health first (combined). After all, a lot of probabilities with real-life applications are combined.

Note that I am not interested in which of the estimates is more accurate, only which one is higher.

I believe these questions are dealt with by "support theory," the seminal publications being:

Tversky, A., & Koehler, D. J. (1994). Support theory: A nonextensional representation of subjective probability. Psychological Review, 101(4), 547-566.
Rottenstreich, Y., & Tversky, A. (1997). Unpacking, repacking, and anchoring: advances in support theory. Psychological review, 104(2), 406.

One of the basic findings accounted for by support theory is an unpacking effect whereby people judge an event that implicitly consists of a disjunction of many events (e.g., the probability that a person will "die from a natural cause") as less probable than the sum of the probability estimates for some component events that one could "unpack" the original hypothesis into (e.g., the sum of [a] the probability a person will die from heart disease, [b] the probability a person will die from cancer, [c] the probability a person will die from other natural causes). For example, in one study reported in Tversky & Koehler (1994), participants on average judged the probability of the implicit disjunction above ("death from a natural cause") to be 58%, and the probability of the unpacked version to be 22% + 18% + 33% = 73%. In the words of Tversky & Koehler, "unpacking an implicit disjunction may increase, but not decrease, its judged probability" (p. 549).

There is a lot more to support theory than just this unpacking effect, but a more complete summary of the theory is beyond my knowledge.


Is there a definitive list of intrinsic motivators? I'm trying to work out how to get my team to understand that different people in the team get different things out of work (excluding the financial drivers).

I want to explain this in terms of intrinsic motivators. I'm trying to get a definitive list. I think they are:

Challenge - We are best motivated when we are working toward personally meaningful goals whose attainment requires activity at a continuously optimal (intermediate) level of difficulty.
Curiosity - Something in the physical environment attracts our attention or there is a discrepancy between present knowledge or skills and what these could be if we engaged in some activity.
Environment Influence - We have a basic tendency to want to control what happens to us.
Scenario-planning - We use mental images of things and situations that are not actually present to stimulate our behavior.
Competition - We feel satisfaction by comparing our performance favorably to that of others.
Cooperation - We feel satisfaction by helping others achieve our goals.
Recognition - We feel satisfaction when others recognize and appreciate our accomplishments.

But there doesn't appear to be a final word on this:

My question is: Is there a definitive list of intrinsic motivators?

While I wouldn't and cannot claim anything conclusive about intrinsic motivation, as far as I know, Self-Determination Theory (SDT, see below) is quite accredited. In short, at its core it postulates that humans are motivated by three innate psychological needs: Autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Moreover, I believe that the motivating factors listed in the question can be reduced to the three needs postulated by SDT.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68


Why do we find things fun? One may cause to argue that Fun activities are solely based off psychological and physical identification with certain activities, but surely there is a deeper analysis on why we find things fun.

Furthermore, what is the relationship of personal experience to what an individual finds fun. Some argue that what we find fun is solely defined by personal experiences, but what about activities that many individuals find fun- regardless of personal experiences.

I would argue that a positive emotional experience is something that evolved for conscious organisms in order for consciousness to function in a way that supports survival and reproduction (thus, sex and eating are pleasurable experiences).

Once having this system, an organism can then find other ways to trigger it that may not lead to better survival or reproduction, but still don't compromise survival and reproduction.  Often, this may be through human invention.  For example, our love of sugar evolved in a world where sugar indicated health (high energy foods that help you survive).  Now, we're able to produce the sugar by itself with technology; it no longer occurs only in the context of nutritional food.

Thus, humans are able to exploit their reward systems and "fun" need not pertain to healthy activities, but may have roots in the evolutionary purpose of pleasure.


Does the brain need more sleep after heavy load? Does the brain require more sleep in the following night, if you have used a lot more of its capacity that day than usually?

After stressful events the brain is energized by various (evil in this case) hormones from the adrenal system like cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. Good luck getting sleep without some medical help after trying to solve some major world, work or personal issues. So while the brain still needs its normal rejuvenation and maybe an extra 30 minutes or hour to deal with the bad stages of sleep but its probably not going to get it. That is to say there are several stages of sleep and the adreno hormones mess with the length and quality of the stages which can be fixed by a longer amount in some situations or just flat out starting over the next night and trying to catch up on the debt over the course of time.

Stress, Arousal, and Sleep
Stress is considered to be an important cause of disrupted sleep and insomnia. However, controlled and experimental studies in rodents indicate that effects of stress on sleep–wake regulation are complex and may strongly depend on the nature of the stressor. While most stressors are associated with at least a brief period of arousal and wakefulness, the subsequent amount and architecture of recovery sleep can vary dramatically across conditions even though classical markers of acute stress such as corticosterone are virtually the same. Sleep after stress appears to be highly influenced by situational variables including whether the stressor was controllable and/or predictable, whether the individual had the possibility to learn and adapt, and by the relative resilience and vulnerability of the individual experiencing stress. There are multiple brain regions and neurochemical systems linking stress and sleep, and the specific balance and interactions between these systems may ultimately determine the alterations in sleep–wake architecture. Factors that appear to play an important role in stress-induced wakefulness and sleep changes include various monominergic neurotransmitters, hypocretins, corticotropin releasing factor, and prolactin. In addition to the brain regions directly involved in stress responses such as the hypothalamus, the locus coeruleus, and the amygdala, differential effects of stressor controllability on behavior and sleep may be mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex. These various brain regions interact and influence each other and in turn affect the activity of sleep–wake controlling centers in the brain. Also, these regions likely play significant roles in memory processes and participate in the way stressful memories may affect arousal and sleep. Finally, stress-induced changes in sleep-architecture may affect sleep-related neuronal plasticity processes and thereby contribute to cognitive dysfunction and psychiatric disorders.
Stress and Neonatal Sleep
Routine circumcision, done without anesthesia in the newborn nursery, was usually followed by prolonged nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Since this form of sleep has been described as a low point on an arousal continuum, we consider its increase to be consistent with a theory of conservation-withdrawal in response to stressful stimulation.


How to refer to the phenomenon of people only absorbing evidence which confirms their beliefs? I knew a psychologist who was calling it self-referentiality.

People are always trying to see only the sentence which confirm their beliefs.

What's the correct name for this?

The actual act of "Trying to see only the sentence which confirms his beliefs" would generally be called confirmation bias.


Sex With Ghosts - Possible Clinical Diagnoses Spectrophilia, is described by Wikipedia as the sexual attraction to ghosts or sexual arousal from images in mirrors, as well as the phenomenon of sexual encounters between ghosts and humans.
A quick and easy search shows us that many people claim to have had these encounters, and seem completely convinced of their experiences.
Question:
If someone walked into a psychiatrists office with these claims, (assuming they are seemingly normal otherwise, and have no history of mental illness), what would they most likely be diagnosed with? And what medicine might they be prescribed?

Things we're assuming to be true:
Ghosts aren't real.

Sleep paralysis can sometimes result in hallucinations corollary to the paralysis experience. Similarly, bipolar I and other psychotic disorders (viz. the schizophrenia spectrum) could produce vivid enough hallucinations and delusions, though in general, vivid visual hallucinations are quite rare.

It is highly unlikely that someone who is describing these experiences is not experiencing any other symptoms.

Standard treatment would depend primarily on what other issues the patient might be experiencing.

If the patient is experiencing dissociation and misinterpreting this as sex with ghosts for some reason, cognitive or dialectical behavior therapy would be the indicated treatment.

If the patient were agitated, or disoriented to time, place, or person, the psychiatrist would likely prescribe psychotherapy and an atypical antipsychotic (e.g. risperidone, brexipiprazole).

--

Sharpless, Brian A., et al., Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2010; vol 66: pp 1292-1306.

Bell, CC, et al., " American J Psychiatry, 1986; vol 143: p 1484.

Ranier Biobehavioral Institute: "Sleep Paralysis."

Mayo Clinic. "Dissociative Disorders."


Comorbidity of Neurodevelopmental Disorders between them and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3416662/

OCD being an anxiety disorder and OCPD being a personality disorder it is entirely possible that these two can be present on the same patient.

Autism, e.g Aspergers Syndrome and ADHD have some similarities but are distinct disorders.

We learn at university that people with Aspergers are frequently obsessive.

Based on Occam's Razor "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" Psychiatrists and Neuropsychologists are intently parsimonious in diagnosing a patient with multiple disorders even if the examinee meets the criteria, is indeed experiencing the symptom, has the equivalent behaviour. And we are taught at university just that.

Is there any case in which the behaviour of the examinee undoubtedly suggests comorbidity of OCD,OCPD, ASD and ADHD mixed type maybe even along with an entirely distinct disorder like dysthimia? How exactly are these examinees' behaviours? As a medicine student professors do not answer these questions in their lectures ( one reason I am most probably converting to Law since they are slightly more open there).

I found your question hard to answer because of the multiple disorders involved. I hope my answers contains some information that is usefull to you. However, it is likely not the satifsying answers you are looking for.

According to Hansen, Oerbeck, Skirbekk, Petrovski, & Kristensen (2018) about 21 percent of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (ND) have one comorbid disorder in the category of neurodevelopmental disorders. For ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ADS), tic disorder was the most common ND. 36% of ADHD patients had tic disorder as well and 44% ASD patients had a tic disorder. As for OCD, 3.3% of the patients with ADHD also had OCD and 4.0% of the patients with ASD had OCD as well. This study did not investigate the OCPD as a possible comorbid disorder for neurodevelopmental disorders. After doing some more searching, I unfortunately could not find much information about OCPD in relation to Neurodevelopmental disorders and the specific example your provided (OCD, OCDP, ADHD and ADS). However, that does not mean it is not possible, in practice all kinds of comorbidities can occur. The behavior of these patients would likely reflect the symptoms of all the disorders present in the patient.

A big problem with our current understanding/diagnosis of disorders is that most of the disorders are categorized based on their symptoms (e.g. DSM V). In practice symptoms between disorders heavily overlap resulting in comorbidity for most patients (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2014). It is often mandatory to diagnose multiple disorders. For example, if the patient meets both the criteria for ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder, then both disorders need to be diagnosed, same goes for OCD and OCPD (see DSM V, Chapters about Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Personality Disorders). Sometimes patients are believed to have "hybrid disorders" (multiple symptoms of multiple disorders). Therefore, it would be better to classify disorders according to their causes instead of the symptoms. That would be the first step in truly explaining disorders instead of simply describing them (Davey, 2014).

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Davey G. (2014). Psychopathology: Research, Assessment & Treatment in Clinical Psychology (2nd ed). British Psychological Association and John Wiley & Sons LTD.

Hansen, B., Oerbeck, B., Skirbekk, B., Petrovski, B., & Kristensen, H. (2018). Neurodevelopmental disorders: Prevalence and comorbidity in children referred to mental health services. Nordic Journal of Psychiatry, 72(4), 285-291. doi:10.1080/08039488.2018.1444087

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2014). (Ab)normal psychology (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education


How can one induce psychogenic death? I saw something about psychogenic death. I am wondering if it can be induced by a desire. I think that it can by a person being lazy and not caring about the world. It is said to happen with prisoners of war. The article says that it is not suicide but I don't know if it is true. It cannot happen all at once, it just happens because the person does not care.
There is an article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-09/uop-pcd092018.php
Reference to the original research is: Leach, J. (2018). ‘Give-up-itis’ revisited: Neuropathology of extremis. Medical hypotheses, 120, 14-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2018.08.009

Leach's hypothesis is based upon case reports of prisoners of war subject to the most severe forms of incarceration and profound deprivation.  A minority of prisoners reportedly completely withdrew and ceased any form of goal directed behaviour (eating, drinking etc.).  Presumably, the prisoner's 'giving up' was in response to their self-evaluation that survival was impossible in the circumstances.
Leach, J. (2018). ‘Give-up-itis’ revisited: Neuropathology of extremis. Medical hypotheses, 120, 14-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2018.08.009


What is the cognitive cost of switching contexts? A common reason to use Conventions and standards in Human Computer Interaction is to limit the cost of Context Switching.

I searched to find general evidence of the cognitive costs of context switching but didn't find much, just specific articles like this that don't have very useful or generalizable results.

What is the cognitive cost (time spend, cognitive load ect) of switching contexts, such as switching from mouse input to keyboard input?

Depending on your exact definition of what you call a "context switch" there is some research available. There is plenty of research on a more high-level (multi-tasking) definition of context switches. Usually when I read about context switches they refer to this higher level concept, unlike the study you linked to which compares the cost of switching between two separate views of the same data.

Organizational contexts

Existing research suggests that people organize their work in terms of much larger and thematically connected units of work. González and Mark (2004) introduced "the concept of working spheres to explain the inherent way in which individuals conceptualize and organize their basic units of work. People worked in an average of ten different working spheres. Working spheres are also fragmented; people spend about 12 minutes in a working sphere before they switch to another."

  Individuals spend part of their day on a set of activities that is not
  connected with any specific working sphere but rather related to the
  management of all of them. We call these activities metawork. People
  spend an average of 44 1/2 min. per day conducting metawork, and
  similar to working spheres, this work is also conducted in shorter
  chunks of about six and a half minutes at any one time.

Czerwinski et al. (2004) from Microsoft Research found "that the reinstatement of complex, long-term projects is poorly supported by current software systems" by conducting a diary study.

  Beyond simply remembering, successful prospective memory requires
  recall at the appropriate  moment in time. Increasing numbers of
  interruptions and items to be remembered can wreak havoc with both
  aspects of prospective memory, and hence, can reduce an office
  worker’s daily productivity.

  ...

  Subjects reported that more complex tasks, especially those that
  lasted longer and included more documents, were more difficult to
  switch to. Tasks that required “returning to” after an interruption
  were rated significantly more difficult to switch to than others.

Victor M. González and Gloria Mark (2004) "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness": managing multiple working spheres. DOI=10.1145/985692.985707 (Free PDF)
Mary Czerwinski, Eric Horvitz, and Susan Wilhite (2004) A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175-182. DOI=10.1145/985692.985715 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985692.985715 (Free PDF)


Do animals have some kind of rudimentary personality types or preferences? I'm looking at the Myers Briggs type indicator and am trying to understand if type/personality preferences are a human only construct. I'm talking about Introversion-Extraversion, Sensing or iNtuition, Thinking-Feeling, Judging-Perceiving.

Reading books on personality, human children are frequently described as already having some type preference (for example the intuitive child versus sensing child) which gets developed as the child matures. This makes me question as to where this original preference comes from. If it comes from some brain structure, I'm interested if lower animals also have these structures.

I know that animals have alpha/beta males which determines social dominance, but are there other personality traits that have been identified in animals?

For example, a common proverb is "curiosity killed the cat" - are some cats more curious than others? Are some specimens of the same species more sociable (extraverted) than others?

Another example would be  experiments in primates, where monkeys were able to deceive their peers.

"are there other personality traits that have been identified in animals?"

There are quite a bit of hits on Google about this.

Here's a foundation dedicated to research on animal personalities:

  The Animal Personality Institute (API), founded in 2004, is an interdisciplinary group of researcher dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of personality and temperament in non-human animals.
  http://animalpersonalityinstitute.net/

Here's a summary of a study on some personality traits among ducks:

  Weissing and his colleagues ran various model simulations of scenarios that included a resource as well as responsive and unresponsive animals. He said the new model shows, for example, when it's optimal for animals to react to a change in food and when it's not. It turns out that competing personalities help to keep a healthy balance in a group.

Research on personality among fish:

  Working with Dr Bart Adriaenssens at the University of New South Wales, Dr Biro observed the behavior of adult male mosquitofish over 132 days. They found that the behavior of some individuals was consistently more predictable in a given context than others. Mosquitofish were used for the study because they are widespread and easily sampled from ponds in and around cities.
  "We observed that individuals differed in their average levels of activity, but also differed in variability about their average activity," Dr Biro explained. "Some individuals chose to be active, others chose to be sedentary, some were consistent in their chosen level of activity, others not. But, we found no association between activity levels and predictability.
  "What this tells us is that the fish differed in how unpredictable they were, and that this unpredictability is a consistent attribute over time.
  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131031092311.htm

Here's a research document on animal personalities:

  The past decade has seen a very rapid growth in research on animal
  personality. The growth is taking place across a wide variety of fields
  ranging from applied ethology, beha
  vioral ecology, and zoo management
  to biology, primatology, and comparative psychology. Having established
  that personality exists in animals and can be measured, researchers have
  begun to exploit numerous benefits of animal research, such as the
  high degree of experimental control, the ability to measure a range of
  physiological parameters, the opportunities for naturalistic observation,
  and animals’ accelerated life span.
  http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Group/AnimPersInst/Animal%20Personality%20PDFs/G/Gosling%202008.pdf

Wikipedia also has an article on the topic:

  Personality is the consistent patterns in cognitive and behavioral traits, such as affect, cognition, and behavior.[1] These traits are measurable, are found in a broad array of species, and are commonly transferable among species (Gosling, 2008).
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_in_animals


Difference between meditating and watching a movie If I meditate, I concentrate on my breathing; if my mind wanders, I bring its attention back to my breathing.

If I watch a movie/show, I concentrate on it; if my mind wanders, I bring its attention back to the movie/show.

So what's the difference? (other than one is more entertaining than the other)

You are comparing two totaly different things.

While watching a movie/show, you let allday grind behind you and consume the input you get.
This can have several effects on your consciousness, both temporal and permanent, just like meditation.
But these two points are everything what meditation and watching a movie/show are having in common.

Everyone knows what watching a movie/show is due everyone has expirience in it, so I will not go further to this point.
But I assume that you do not anderstand the point of meditation.
It's not only about watching your breath and prevent your thoughs of wandering around.
Für meditation-beginners this might be true, due they first have to lern to focus.

But meditation is a lot more. Depending on what a person wants to archive by meditation.
Essentially one focus his mind on either the body, the mind itself(like in a mirror) or both at the same time.

One can write a lot of books about what you can archive due meditation, so I avoid to write a long text.

Most people do not explore their mind. They see it as a kind of invisible organ which is just there and has a function.
But as many people do sport to train their body, other people meditate to train their mind.
Not only to focus their thoughs on one spot, but also to conditionate their thoughts, overcome traumatic memory or just to archive highest cognitive capacity without using drugs.

Due meditation, one discovers his own mind. This will take years and the exploration will never ends, due the mind changes his state with the years.
By meditation one watches the mind changing, finds his own  weakpoints, learns on wich kind of input it reacts in wich way and to avoid "bad" input and search "good" input.

Typical results of years of meditations can be:
- Acceptance to things that stressed the mind in the past.
- Or exactly the opposite: rais of the courage to change something one suffered for a while.
- More happyness due the "I really controll myself" state, like a athlete.

In the end I tell you:
If you want to know what meditation is about, you have to try it out.
If you are willing to do, I recommend you to start the "focus on breath" technique to learn the focus, but keep in mind that this is just a small step. The aim is to focus the mind.

If you want more information, sent me a message.


Official Color-Emotion relations I'm trying to find colors that trigger different sort of emotions for people. I keep finding different answers for different colors.

Ex.
Some say blue means friendly and calm. Others say that green means calm but not blue?

Is there an official chart for this that is backed up by research?

Edit:

I am a blogger so I am trying to analyze what colors I need to use in order for my audience to understand what I'm saying.

Another edit

I feel bad for not adding this. lol My blog is about learning how to blog and increasing traffic. I'm trying to learn more about color theory so that I know what colors to use to catch people's eye. Here are specific examples:

Landing page color button
Background colors to induce trust
colors that try to show creativity

Does that help?

Not really, that would be too easy!

Because there are several factors which can influence the emotion from the color. I have several in mind:

One of them is cultural background, as norms and habits, and thus cultural value, meaning, may change between people for a same color (interindividual differences).
Another one is context, as color preference may be affected by the field where it's used. For a bold example, black color would look "nice" on a luxury ad, but not so much for an health communication (intrapersonal differences). See also Bonnardel, N., Piolat, A., & Le Bigot, L. (2011). The impact of colour websites on appealing and users’ cognitive processes. Displays, 32, 2, 69-80.
And you also have physiological issues. Color perception is affected by surrounding other colors (see Johannes Itten). Therefore the emotion would change as well. As a result, it may be more relevant to elicit the emotional impact of a set of colors instead of one only. Also there are several strategies to make colors fit together.
Also in a physiological view, some people have color deficiency, and it may therefore affect their "emotional perception" (I don't have any reference on that, just a personal hypothesis).

So, what I would suggest is to test the emotions elicited by a specific set of colors, for a specific field/context, for a specific audience. You would therefore get some clues for those conditions.


What is the basis behind the idea of Dom-Tert loops in Jung Function Theory? I have come across a theory relating to Jung Function Theory normally addressed as 'Dom-Tert' loops. I will briefly explain:

In Jung Function Theory, everyone has 4 of 16 functions. They split into Introverted/Extroverted, Sensing/Intuiting, and Thinking/Feeling. These, in broad strokes, aim to explain how people function in both Information Gathering (S/N) as well as Information Processing (T/F) and whether that has a subjective base, or an objective base (I/E).

This theory lays out that the first (or dominant) function and the third (or tertiary) function form a feedback loop, and the second function becomes underdeveloped. Below is an excerpt that hopefully gives an example of this at work (Myers Briggs notation is used as shorthand here):

  ENTP/ESFJ: Ne/Fe or Fe/Ne--Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This type often behaves impulsively and manipulatively, needing constant approval and admiration from others, running around investing in new thing after new thing, but never developing the self-confidence of a strong, subjective perspective. Fe used negatively may use its awareness of the cultural standards of others to intentionally offend or upset them, in order to service Ne's curiosity about the patterns in their responses. If Ti/Si were working properly, it would give the user a balancing sense of personal, subjective importance and free him of his dependence upon the adulation and unconditional acceptance of others. (Horrible example: Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.)

The crux being that everyone must use a balance of subjective and objective reasoning and perception to function correctly.

Now I realise that Jung Function theory is a favourite with armchair psychologists, and it's validity has been questioned, but I wanted to know if this theory is either a) expressed formally in any kind of Jung Function theory study, or b) if something like this imbalance leading to personality disorders exists in other psychological theories?

Where does this idea come from? The writer of the above forum post doesn't seem to take credit for the idea or even lead us to what inspired them.

Has dom-ter loops theory been expressed formally in any kind of Jungian function theory study?
Based on a reasonably diverse search of Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus, I am concluding that dominant-tertiary loop theory seems to be an original proposal by the author of the forum post cited by the question author. It appears to be a theory which has not been peer reviewed, and which has not been validated within the theoretical Jungian or empirical psychology literature. Hence, it appears that the answer to your question A is no, dominant-tertiary loop theory has not been expressed formally in any kind of Jungian function theory study.
Can dom-ter loops explain personality disorders?
Because the theory is an original proposal which has not undergone peer review or scientific testing, we cannot say whether or to what extent it might help to explain the development or maintenance of personality disorders based on the available evidence (because there is none).
I would say it is not trivially wrong, in the sense that it doesn't appear to be internally inconsistent or inconsistent with Jungian theory in any egregious way, but at the same time, the lack of empirical evidence implies that we have no credible reason to believe that it explains anything at all. It is conceivable, but not probable, that dom-ter loops can explain personality disorders.
Does the idea exist in other personality theories?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: The more popular modern personality theories differ in fundamental ways from Jungian theory's ontology of the mind, and one of these differences in particular makes the existence of such a theoretical explanation of personality disorders unlikely to work out.
The reason is that psychodynamic theories assume personalities are a driving force underpinning behavior in a fundamentally dynamic (intrinsically time-dependent) way, while theories like the Big Five tend to be more static (time-independent) and descriptive than explanatory. That's why it's meaningful to talk about discrete types in Jungian theory, because it is conceivable that stable classes of patterns of behavior can emerge from interaction over time between these driving forces based on their relative contribution to determining behavior.
Static theories such as the Big Five or Cattell's 16PF do not have the same notion of intrinsic dynamics and interaction over time, so they can't lead to the same notion of discrete types. Instead of discrete types, the development of personality disorders is today mostly based on a statistical diathesis-stress model, which, for example, might hold that people who are high on neuroticism in the Big Five are statistically more likely to develop anxiety disorders given the right stressor. The statistical basis allows for more fine-grained analysis of interactions, but also makes them more difficult to understand and identify with.
Closing remarks
Satisfying negative answers are always difficult to write in the cognitive sciences, so I hope I have covered all the bases. Please let me know if I need to elaborate or explain on anything.


How similar are human brains within the same haplogroup? I've read about neuroscience and listen to talks like this one Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species, I'm starting to realize that humans are not all the same, and are instead quite different.

My question is: how "different" are humans from each other from a point of view of neuroscience and neurobiology?

One of the talks at TED.com gave a number that Homo Sapiens is 0.004% different from Neanderthal genetically. Another example given that olympic powerlifters have a certain genetic marker that the general population might not have.

To refine the question: just how different from the perspective of white matter tract anatomy or the distribution of receptors within our neuronal populations are humans of the same haplogroup from one another?

The following comes from my research experience using fMRI to study the human visual system.

Overall, peoples brains are similar to each other on higher scales, and become very different from each other as the scale becomes smaller.

Differences between different people start with brain size and sulci patterns. Also male and female brain anatomies will be slightly different.

Wiring patterns within same brain regions will be similar between people, but as you get to individual neurons, it starts to look very chaotic. Dendrites will have stereotypical tree shapes for certain neurons (i.e. Pyramidal cells), but individual branches will be somewhat randomly distributed within their stereotypical areas.

As you get to the synaptic receptor/ion channel level, their distribution will be even more chaotic. Keep in mind the receptors themselves will behave stochasticaly, opening and closing based on when a particular ligand molecule binds to them.

The anatomical shapes of the brains will be mostly based on genes, so people within the same haplogroup should have brain anatomies slightly more similar than general population, but even those should have individual variations. Dendrite and receptor distribution generally depends on learning, so people with different initial conditions and environments during development will have dendrites wired differently.

I think the most fascinating aspect of these differences is that human minds are essentially slightly different neural networks that perceive the world in their own slightly different ways. The closer the genes and development environment between two people, the more similar will be their perceptions of the world.


Does the time required to read a word grow linearly with the number of characters? I recently installed a speed reader on my tablet. Now I wonder how the minimal time needed to read an $N$-letter word grows.

There was this previous question on the relationship between sentence length and reading time. However, I'm particularly interested in the relationship between word length and reading specific words.

Does the time required to read an $N$-letter word grow linearly?

To answer your question, we must first understand what you mean with "read". Since you ask in the context of speed reading, you appear to be interested in extracting meaning from written text. So we can rephrase your question as:

Does the time to recognize and understand a word increase with word length?

The effect of word length has been studied for two tasks, lexical decision and naming. In a lexical decision task participants are presented with words or nonwords (e.g. "dftrpg") and have to quickly press one specific key for words, and another for nonwords, on the keyboard. The time between the presentation of the stimulus and the key press (the reaction time) is registered. Since you are reading a text in which there are no nonwords, lexical decision is irrelevant in the context of your question.

A naming task is similar to a lexical decision task, with the exception that participants read the words aloud, and their responses trigger the computer via a microphone ("voice key"). Again, the reaction times between the presentation of the stimulus and the spoken word are registered. Since we cannot directly measure understanding, we assume that naming reflects understanding. (Of course you can speak words that you do not know, and even nonwords, but the reactions times would be significantly longer, so we would notice the difference. As long as RT is reasonably short, we may probably assume that the participant knows that word and has understood it.)

Not every time a participant names a word will he or she do so in the exact same time. Sometimes someone will be a bit slower to react, sometimes a bit faster. So we calculate the average reaction time for each word. What we note is that these average reactions times are not the same for different words, that is: the reaction times vary. Now, what we want to do, is explain this variance. Is it in some way related to word length? Or does it correlate to other characteristics of the words, such as number of syllables, word type (noun, verb, adjective), word frequency (how often a word is actually used in everyday spoken language), and so on.

After a number of calculations on the data, we find that all these aspects explain a part of the variance in reaction times (Baayen, Feldman & Schreuder, 2006). Here is a table of the different word characteristics (the predictors), and how much of the variance in naming speed they predict. Only those predictors are listed that had a significant effect. The numbers are adjusted R2 × 100, i.e. the percentage of variance uniquely accounted for by each predictor over and above all other predictors. You don't have to understand the meaning of these numbers, but they show the relative strength of the effect each predictor has on naming speed.

Lower bounds for the percentage of variance (adjusted R2 × 100)
explained by the significant predictors in word naming

Frequency                           6.08
Initial diphone 2                   4.33
Initial diphone (syllable-based)    3.88
Frication/Length first phoneme      2.24
Voicedness first phoneme            1.73
PC2 Consistency                     1.28
Length                              1.14
PC1 Consistency                     0.91
Written-to-spoken ratio             0.59
Neighborhood density                0.36
PC3 Consistency                     0.36
Inflectional entropy                0.34
Residual familiarity                0.31

In all, the results are:

The overall variance in reaction times is small. In young adults they range from around 300 to around 700 ms, with about two thirds of the RTs falling into a narrow slot of only 100 ms.
All the predictors together explain only half of the variance in reaction time (R2 = 0.4999), the rest of the variance must be attributed to unknown predictors or, more likely, are artifacts of the testing situation (distraction, boredom, etc.).
The single strongest predictor of naming speed is word frequency.
The contribution of each of the other single predictors is tiny (a few microseconds each).
Word length predicts only a few microseconds in variance.
There is a word length effect only if words are presented individually, not in a text context (Meyer, Roelofs & Levelt, 2003).

  To answer your question, we can say that the length of the words has probably no noticeable effect on your text reading speed.

Sources:

Baayen, R. H., Feldman, L. B., & Schreuder, R. (2006). Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words. Journal of Memory and Language, 55(2), 290-313.
Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., Sergent-Marshall, S. D., Spieler, D. H., & Yap, M. (2004). Visual word recognition of single-syllable words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133(2), 283.
Meyer, A. S., Roelofs, A., & Levelt, W. J. (2003). Word length effects in object naming: The role of a response criterion. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(1), 131-147.


What is the current status of neuroeducation? How can we apply the cognitive neuroscience in the classroom?
What is a good general reference discussing the current status of neuroeducation?

The general is that neuroeducation or educational neuroscience holds great promise for the future, but is in a very early stage of development. There is great interest in the topic, which is evident in scientific journal, textbooks, and science centres dedicated to the topic that have recently been created. These are good sources of reference as well.

Journals:

Educational Neuroscience: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/educational-neuroscience/journal202455

Trends in Neuroscience and Education: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/trends-in-neuroscience-and-education/

Book:

Educational Neuroscience: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1119973198.html

Scientific centres:

These centres will often organise seminars, workshops, or other events and have a list of their research output and current projects on their websites.

http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk
http://www.cne.psychol.cam.ac.uk

As an introduction, I recommend the following Opinion Article:

Goswami, U. (2006). Neuroscience and education: from research to practice? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(5), 406–413. doi:10.1038/nrn1907

Please note that this is not a comprehensive list, but just some resources that I can recommend as someone working in a related field.


Is it possible to read words a person thinking about via EEG headsets? There are now a number of EEG headsets that can capture bran signals and give you raw EEG data from brain. EPOC Emotiv is one the famous one with I guess 14 channel. Now as the title of this post reads, my question is if it is really possible to analyze the raw data and print out what the person is trying to say without speaking? There is a difference between it's not possible and it's too hard to extract the data. From my understanding so far, the signals are different from person to person so perhaps there could be a training program so that the person can train it as to what word he or she meant and the program later can detect the meaning of that particular signal. Is this really possible? If it's hard, how hard it is?

What Christiaan says true. It is sheer impossible. However, there is technology that cán "see your mental pictures". In a TED-talk by Mary-Lou Jepsen she explains how fMRI and machine learning algorithms are used to recreate viewed or imagined videos from brain activity. It is a really neat TED-talk and definitely worth watching.

What is possible using EEG is to make a Brain Computer Interface. I discussed this topic briefly in another question (Brain-computer interface with EEG: how to name imaginary movement of a non-self object?). Hopes these answers help you somehow.


Under what circumstances does the brain devote resources to only the "when" of sensory events? In a recent review article (Arnal & Giraud, 2012), the authors delve into changes in cortical oscillations which assist in predicting the causes of a sensory stimulus (the "what", via predictive coding) and its timing (the "when", via predictive timing).

This allows the cortex to dampen its response to a repeated and/or predictable stimuli so that more "processing resources" can be reserved for other less predictable (and potentially more important) stimuli.

Predictive coding can be modeled using a Bayesian framework, with predictions being made about the "what" aspect conditioned on the reactions to prior stimuli.

In certain circumstances --- intense military march to a drum beat or, for the young, dancing to a bass-heavy song in a nightclub --- it seems to be possible to dampen the "what" aspect completely since the Bayesian priors on "what" are near-certainty. To what degree can the brain move resources from the "what" to the "when" to achieve a precise level of timing for conversion between sensory and motor output?

  Arnal, L.H., Giraud, A-L. (2012) Cortical oscillations and sensory prediction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16(7), 390-398.

To what degree can the brain move resources from the "what" to the "when" to achieve a precise level of timing for conversion between sensory and motor output?
I think that you may be making a false assumption here. I don't think that the 'what' and the 'when' are in competition for resources. According to Arnal and Giraud (and many others), having a valid prediction of when an event is going to occur and having a valid prediction on which event is going to occur, both lead to reduced primary sensory activity (and to a shortened reaction time). As such, you could say that the resources that go into making both types of predictions (the 'when' and the 'what'), reduce total resources used. In the opposite situation, where there is an invalid prediction, there is not only more total neural activity in primary sensory areas, but stimulus representations are also less sharp (Kok et al., 2012).
Furthermore, the differences seen in frequency space that are related to 'what' and 'when' predictions, as well as the fact that 'when' predictions seem to have a necessary stimulus-driven component while 'what' predictions do not, also point to a possible dissociation in resources used. In other words, it might not be the same neurons firing anyway. As an example, Wacongne et al (2012) suggested a model on how the feedforward and the feedback portion of predictive coding (of 'what' predictions) might work using different neurons within a single cortical column.
Finally, less resources does not necessarily translate to better sensory-motor conversion: selectively attending to a stimulus increases the amount of sensory brain activity, but decreases reaction times. It seems that it might boil down to how sharp the stimulus representation is (which is connected to valid/invalid 'what' predictions), followed by how strongly these neurons are firing (which is connected to selective attention). Squandering resources would mean having the wrong neurons firing, rather than firing more vs. less in a given sensory area. Once again, this would mean that forming any type of prediction leads to better use of total resources.
I'm still not sure if this answers your question, as the examples you give (e.g. drum beat) contain certainty on both the 'what' (sound of drum) and the 'when' (time of sound onset). If you want to dissociate the two, you could have a situation where you know what is going to come (sound of drum) but with a jittered stimulus onset asynchrony. Or, you could have a precise timing with novel sounds (a sound of a different pitch is displayed every half a second). In those cases your predictions would be mainly on the 'what' vs 'when', but in both cases hearing any of these sounds would carry an element of surprise, and would therefore lead to more primary sensory activity and a longer RT, i.e. more resources would be used.
References:

Wacongne C, Changeux JP, Dehaene S (2012) A Neuronal Model of Predictive Coding Accounting for the Mismatch Negativity. The Journal of Neuroscience 32:3665-3678.
Kok P, Jehee JFM, de Lange FP (2012) Less is more: Expectation sharpens representations in the primary visual cortex. Neuron 75:265-270.


How can neuronal networks with local learning rules predict their future inputs? Local learning rules like Contrastive Hebbian Learning, XCAL, etc. are based on the idea of strengthening edges when the neurons they connect fire simultaneously. This causes frequent patterns in the input stream to be encoded in the layers.

I understand how this attracts similar input patterns into learned activation states. However, I fail to see how this memory can be used to predict the future input. How is it possible for neurons to predict future input streams under local learning rules?

From: Introduction Hebbian learning (2005)

see Lisman, J. E. and Otmakhova, N. A. (2001), Storage, recall, and novelty detection of sequences by the hippocampus: Elaborating on the SOCRATIC model to account for normal and aberrant effects of dopamine. Hippocampus, 11: 551–568. doi: 10.1002/hipo.1071: http://wwww.bio.brandeis.edu/lismanlab/pdf/socratic.pdf for one proposed mechanism.

in short, local learning rules can develop connections between items that occur sequentially.  if you have one network that pattern completes (i.e. identifies) the input, you can pass that identification to a second network which learns temporal associations between items.


What is the difference between implicit and explicit attitudes? Although it is clear that implicit and explicit attitudes are not same, how do they differ is not. I believe establishing the relation between them would surely help deducting it's meaning in context of psychology. It seems that research  by Nosek (2007) would be relevant.

Nosek, B. A. (2007). Implicit–explicit relations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(2), 65-69.

Although implicit and explicit attitudes are not the "same" they frequently overlap (e.g. people that are explicitly racist are usually implicitly racist).  Both are a positive or negative feeling towards an object.  The primary difference between the two is found in conscious awareness of a particular attitude and how the attitude is expressed.  Implicit attitudes are unconscious while explicit attitudes are conscious.  Explicit attitudes are tempered by things like social desirability.  Work with implicit attitudes tests like the IAT have shown implicit biases against things like race, age and sex.  Most people do not explicitly subscribe to these biases but still unconsciously harbor latent preferences.

Check out Project Implicit to take a variety of IAT's and learn more:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/


Is post-traumatic stress disorder preventable? Victims of abuse, people exposed to violent situations repeatedly, and people in war zones can develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result. PTSD is very common and has lifelong effects on affected individuals.

Can people exposed to trauma be treated before PTSD develops?

Would this treatment totally prevent PTSD from developing?

Beta blockers (β1-Blockers) lower norepinephrine release (Berg, 2014), however it seems that the jury is still out on whether there is an effective and ethical way to prevent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Donovan (2010) states that there isn't enough strong evidence on its efficacy.  Another point it makes (on page 11) is that...

  Using any beta-blocker prior to combat to prevent PTSD in military personnel should not be considered, as it would likely be more detrimental than beneficial. First, the beta-adrenergic signaling system is mediated by the catecholamines, epinephrine and norepinephrine. These hormones are central to the fight-or-flight response, and they trigger the heightened awareness necessary for soldiers to survive in combat situations.

This can be the same for others who repeatedly face violent situations.

Plus there are strong arguments for preventing any interventions which would affect the memories of those who suffer traumatic events in this way as...

  Our memory preserves us and who we are and where we have been, furnishes our sense of self, and is a combination of happy moments and shameful acts.To be ourselves we cannot abandon or forget who we once were: “To alter or numb our remembrance of things past cuts to the heart of what it means to remember in a human way“.

The only ethically safe way to prevent PTSD seems to be to prevent war and all other traumatic events

References

Berg T. (2014). β1-Blockers Lower Norepinephrine Release by Inhibiting Presynaptic, Facilitating β1-Adrenoceptors in Normotensive and Hypertensive Rats. Frontiers in neurology, 5, 51. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2014.00051 pmcid: PMC3997042

Donovan, E. (2010). Propranolol use in the prevention and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder in military veterans: forgetting therapy revisited. Perspectives in biology and medicine, 53(1), 61-74. DOI: 10.1353/pbm.0.0140 PMID: 20173296


Are social phobia cases on rise, being the Internet and mobile phones with cameras the main cause for their rise? That's an hypothesis I have, that I believe makes plenty of sense, anyway I haven't found any article about that, although it's not like my search has been exhaustive.

I mean, years ago, on the case you were caught doing something that society finds unusual, the worst thing that was likely going to happen to you were that some people around you, maybe a whole village if you lived in one a bit little, heard rumors about what you did and you had problems with that people around you. On some rare ocassions what you had done would get to the news and you will be highly exposed on the whole country, but it would be extremely strange than more than that would happen.

But now if you make something unusual, there are plenty of people that could record what you are doing and you cannot possibly be aware of everyone, and if you are caught and the video of you is uploaded, for example, to a good bunch of social networks, you are in danger of hundreds of millions of people watching what you have done.

So this looks as a good reason for an increase of social phobia cases.

Are there some studies that confirm my hypothesis?

Thanks.

Studies have been done to see how technology can alleviate social phobia, by communication through the net. (Yen et al 2012)

Heavy use increases (general) anxiety: (Anxiety was measured using the Beck Anxiety Inventory.) "Logistic regression analyses indicated that heavy Internet use is associated with high anxiety; high cell-phone use is associated to being female, and having high anxiety and insomnia." (Jenaro et al, 2006) *2 A replication of this study with a comparable population might answer your question.

Other studies have shown that "social phobia was associated with the risk for smartphone addiction in young people." (Darcin et al, 2016)

A study published 2009 sets the prevalence rates of social phobia at "in community samples of children and adolescents also vary considerably, ranging from 0.9 to 13.1% [26]. The highest rates have been noted in studies of older adolescents and young adults ", and sets the numbers for the whole population, quoting other articles,  "3.9–13.7% in Western societies" (Gren-Landell et al).

The prevalence numbers seem to vary wildly depending on how the research has been done, as Furmark (2002) points out in his review of epidemiological studies from the 1980s onwards. - Doing this with current research would give more of an insight into your question.

So I'm sorry to say I couldn't, so far, find a study that specifically addresses your issue. :-(


Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Theory of Mind involves understanding another person's knowledge, beliefs, emotions, and intentions and applying that knowledge to navigate the social world.

Theory of mind refers to an ability to recognize that others have a mind, and that others may have knowledge/beliefs/motivations that are different from their own.

Children (and adults) with autism as a group have deficits in tests meant to assay theory of mind, though of course the degree of impairment depends on the individual and different tests may give different results.

Tests that assay theory of mind are often dependent on other skills, however, including language and visual social skills (such as eye contact) that are also often impaired with autism, making it more difficult to separate out those related skills from theory of mind itself. However, even after controlling for language skills, people with autism still have deficits in theory of mind.

I don't think it is correct to think of theory of mind as a binary yes/no, although some approaches to the concept do treat it as such. Neurotypically developing children show different elements of the theory of mind at different stages of development. Sometimes theory of mind is separated into "orders", where higher functioning people with autism tend to have more issues with second-order theory of mind, where one recognizes not only that someone else has a mind of their own but also that a third person is able to think about that person's thoughts.

Some individuals with autism who have theory of mind deficits are still able to develop skills to cope and can understand cognitively that others have minds different from their own. Importantly, however, "theory of mind" itself refers to an innate cognitive ability, sort of a natural or automatic accounting for the thoughts of others.

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?. Cognition, 21(1), 37-46.

Baron‐Cohen, S., Jolliffe, T., Mortimore, C., & Robertson, M. (1997). Another advanced test of theory of mind: Evidence from very high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Child psychology and Psychiatry, 38(7), 813-822.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Theory of mind and autism: A fifteen year review. Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2, 3-20.

Frith, U., & Happé, F. (1994). Autism: Beyond “theory of mind”. Cognition, 50(1-3), 115-132.

Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (1991). Executive function deficits in high‐functioning autistic individuals: relationship to theory of mind. Journal of child Psychology and Psychiatry, 32(7), 1081-1105.


Why would a behaviour effect one sex? After reading the article Regular sleeping hours really are good for children—if they are girls I started wondering what would be a good explanation for something such as sleep patterns have an affect on cognition, and specifically higher in girls?

And are their other examples where one sex is influenced at a higher rate?

When I first read the article you cited, which was actually just paraphrased from a magazine, I was hoping that the actual researchers would of come up with a hypothesis as to what would of caused this.  If you weren't able to find the actual study, all you have to do is just Google the author's name + their University/College and their page will come up with all the research they've ever done.  Academics love to do this.  And boom the actual study is here:
http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2013/06/25/jech-2012-202024

But they never sought out to at least hypothesize why...which was disheartening.  Sometimes you can find a derivative work on the side there too, which may be trying to explain.  Doesn't look like it here.  Oh well.

Back to your original questions though:

  What would be a good explanation for something such as sleep patterns have an affect on cognition, and specifically higher in girls?

Physiologically and as a general guess: hormones, the subtle differences in the ways that our brains are set up structurally as well as chemically, which could of all been set up by evolution.  The true answer is probably expressed as some sort of very subtle mechanism in the brain that we may not find for a very long time - and that mechanism has been put there by evolution.  We just don't know why yet.  I'm going to halfway guess down below though.

  And are their other examples where one sex is influenced at a higher rate?

I'm sure you can think of a few pretty general stereotypes that are likely true.  In general, girls are more influenced by emotion than guys are.  In general, guys are more influenced by logic than girls are.  I can cite this if you want, but I'm sure you can think of a million examples too.

Do you think that because this study involves cognition, a topic that is usually thought (or maybe just taught) to be independent of gender, that that is completely true?  Evolution would mold cognition just like anything else.  Cognition is a very vague word to use anyway since there are so many different tests to measure it and so many different sub types of cognition.  Admittedly the researcher did a pretty thorough job with her tests, but she didn't do all the tests out there.

As a hypothesis:  Females deal with certain types of stress differently than males do.  Evolutionarily, you could hypothesize a milleu of reasons as to why the "females that responded to this stressor this way usually survived" because of x, y, and/or z.

In this case, they may be more susceptible to disturbances in their sleep (causing stress) and thus handle that type of stress differently than males do.  The study of the underlying causes of stress for a man or a woman is actually a pretty huge field as they seem to believe (you'll see in my citations or the side citations next to them on pubmed.gov) that chronic stress = depression.  It is a widely researched topic because of this.

There is going to be some granularity to this though.  Can't make generalizations.

Here's an interesting study some researchers did that showed the males up:

  Sex differences associated with intermittent swim stress.
  Warner TA, Libman MK, Wooten KL, Drugan RC. Stress. 2013 Aug 12.
  Source Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA.     http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23930864

  Abstract
  Various animal models of depression have been used to seek a greater understanding of stress-related disorders. However, there is still a great need for novel research in this area, as many individuals suffering from depression are resistant to current treatment methods. Moreover, women gave a higher rate of depression, highlighting the need to investigate mechanisms of sex differences. Therefore, we employed a new animal model to assess symptoms of depression, known as intermittent swim stress (ISS). In this model, the animal experiences 100 trials of cold water swim stress. ISS has already been shown to cause signs of behavioral depression in males, but has yet to be assessed in females. Following ISS exposure, we looked at sex differences in the Morris water maze and forced swim test. The results indicated a spatial learning effect only in the hidden platform task between male and female controls, and stressed and control males. A consistent spatial memory effect was seen for males exposed to ISS. In the forced swim test, both sexes exposed to ISS exhibited greater immobility, and the same males and females also showed attenuated climbing and swimming, respectively. The sex differences could be due to different neural substrates for male and females. The goal of this study was to provide the first behavioral examination of sex differences following ISS exposure, so the stage of estrous cycle was not assessed for the females. This is a necessary future direction for subsequent experiments. The current paper highlights the importance of sex differences in response to stress, which may have bearing on disease mechanisms.
  PMID: 23930864 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

So, in that case the males got the blunt of it when having to go through that crazy course.  Their "spatial learning" was messed up in comparison to the female's - whose weren't - but just during one specific part of the course.

It's very granular, but still interesting nonetheless.

Here's another interesting one.  It actually seeks and does a pretty good job at explaining why females tend to overeat as a coping strategy for certain types of stress.  Actually one thing I don't like about this study is how it generalizes the word "stress" instead of the specific "stressor."  Regardless, it does quite a good and interesting job explaining the hormonal, physiological reasons why females overeat when they are "stressed" as the paper says.

  Gender differences in ghrelin response to chronic immobilization stress in
  rats: possible role of estrogen. Elbassuoni EA. Source Physiology
  Department, Minia University School of Medicine, Minia, Egypt.
  emanelbassuoni@yahoo.com. Gen Physiol Biophys. 2013 Aug 12.

  Abstract Ghrelin is a peptidergic hormone
  known to be one of the main hormones involved in the regulation of
  energy balance. Here we evaluated ghrelin response to stress in rats
  after ovariectomy and during estradiol benzoate (EB) therapy and
  compared results of males and females, to know whether ghrelin is
  involved in disordered eating behaviors in response to stress, and for
  understanding differences between males and females in food intake and
  weight gain especially during stress. 96 adult rats were classified
  into; male, female, ovariectomized (Ovx), Ovx with EB. Half animals of
  each group were exposed to immobilization stress 20 min/day for 21
  days. We found that chronic stress significantly augments serum
  ghrelin levels in both males and females, which is correlated with an
  increase in food intake and body weight. Females displayed significant
  higher ghrelin than males especially in response to stress,
  ovariectomy suppresses serum ghrelin in both unstressed and stressed
  females which is rescued by replacement with EB. EB replacement
  augments ghrelin response to stress in Ovx female, and reduces food
  intake and body weight. In conclusion, there is a clear sex difference
  in ghrelin secretion in response to stress caused by EB, since it
  amplifies ghrelin response to stress in females. PMID: 23940093
  [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Here is another really juicy and interesting one actually.  The abstract is long and translated from French, but I'm going to post and bold it to highlight more instances where X variable affects females more than males or vice versa. By the way, the article was written as this big block...I didn't write it this way.  As I began to bold things, they started making all these crazy assumptions which they actually end up proving most of.  The french went REALLY in depth here - at least psychologically.  So if you're interested in some psychological influencers and the differences between them in men and women this is for you:

  Girls are more successful than boys at the university. Gender group differences in models integrating motivational and aggressive
  components correlated with Test-Anxiety.  Masson AM, Hoyois P, Cadot
  M, Nahama V, Petit F, Ansseau M.  Service de Psychiatrie, Université
  de Liège, Belgique.  Encephale. 2004 Jan-Feb;30(1):1-15.
  Abstract
  It is surprising to note the evolution of success rates in Belgian
  universities especially in the first Year. Men are less successful
  than women and the differences are escalating in an alarming way.
  Dropouts take the same direction and women now represent a majority of
  the students at the university. In a previous study, we assessed 616
  students in the first Year at the university of Liège with Vasev, the
  English name of which was TASTE, a self report questionnaire
  constituted of 4 factors: anxiety, self confidence, procrastination
  and performance value; anxiety particularly concerned somatic
  expression of students before and during test evaluations; self
  confidence was a cognitive component close to self efficacy;
  procrastination was the behavioral component characterizing avoidance
  when students are confronted with the risk of failure; performance
  value referred to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. French
  validation of TASTE led to an abbreviated version of 50 items (THEE)
  consisting of 5 factors, the four of TASTE and an additional one, very
  consistent, at first called depression because of its correlations
  with this dimension, then called sense of competence on account of its
  semantic content. Self-competence has been described in the literature
  of Achievement Motivation and corresponded to expectancy and ability
  beliefs in performance process which was also relevant to
  self-efficacy except the particularity of comparison with others,
  which was not included in the last construct. Self-competence has been
  considered as an important part of the Worry component of test
  anxiety. Some Authors didn't hesitate to view causality flowing from
  self-competence to test anxiety and have conceptualized the latter as
  a failure of the self where one's sense of competence has been
  undermined as a result of experienced failure. In our study, only that
  factor was equally scored in women and men whereas it was scored
  higher in failed students. In other respects anxiety and performance
  value were scored higher in women, *self-confidence and procrastination
  higher in men*. Because TASTE didn't discriminate the different
  components of motivation (performance value referred to intrinsic and
  extrinsic motivations without precise distinction) we decided to use
  the MPS (Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale) which gave the
  opportunity to distinguish SOP (Self Oriented Perfectionism) ie, the
  self-imposed unrealistic standards with inability to accept faults in
  order to know and master a subject, that corresponded to intrinsic
  motivation; SPP (Socially Prescribed Perfectionism) ie, the
  exaggerated expectancies of others which are subjectively believed as
  imposed and uncontrollable leading to anxiety, feelings of failure or
  helplessness, that corresponded to extrinsic motivation; POO
  (Perfectionism Oriented to Others) ie, the unrealistic demands
  expected from significant others, which especially characterized
  males. We assumed (I apologize for the assumptions they start making, lol)
  submitted more to society exigencies.** That way extrinsic and intrinsic
  motivations were probably more combined unlike men who, dreading a
  loss of self esteem, tried to avoid failure responsibility in using
  self handicapping or aggressive behaviours, so separating motivation
  in an extrinsic part turned to performance value and an intrinsic one
  more concerned by self confidence and sense of competence with the
  result that the motivational balance was surely disrupted in case of
  high competition leading to failure or avoidance.

  In another previous study we established a structural model illustrating, according to
  gender, correlations between anxiety, sense of incompetence,
  self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism.
  Self-oriented perfectionism was less correlated to socially prescribed
  perfectionism in boys than in girls; furthermore especially by those
  who had never failed, it was negatively correlated to sense of
  incompetence, thus leading to lower scores of anxiety while in girls,
  by contrast, such a correlation didn't exist, thus involving higher
  anxiety. That way, on the one hand, intrinsic and extrinsic
  motivations by female students complementarily operated on the sense
  of incompetence and consequently on anxiety, the emotional component
  of test anxiety; on the other hand, by male students, intrinsic
  motivation had a negative correlation with the sense of incompetence
  and a lower correlation with extrinsic motivation, thereby shedding
  some light on the problem of anxiety level differences according to
  gender. More, that observation corresponded well to the model of
  self-worth where test anxiety was understood as a manifestation of
  perceived incompetence and as a defensive way to ward off negative
  self-evaluation; that model suited particularly well to boys and
  explained their attempts to maintain self-worth when risking academic
  failure. The present research assumes that independence or combination
  of motivation components is also correlated to different expressions
  of aggressiveness: hostility corresponding to threat and
  characterizing more girls while physical aggression is corresponding
  to personal challenge, a more masculine attribution. *If fighting
  against the sense of incompetence actually characterizes men and
  consequently shows too the competitive aspects of performance strong
  enough to mobilize intrinsic motivation, what would be expected
  regarding the notion of threat suspected to be predominant in girls?*
  The idea of using a questionnaire discriminating the specific
  dimensions of aggressiveness in fact the Aggression Questionnaire
  should meet the following purposes: At first establish a French
  version of that aggression questionnaire, perform the factorial
  analyses and internal consistency, compare them with other previous
  samples, then differentiate gender in general and in failure versus
  success situations. Finally include the different components of
  aggressiveness in the first described model and build a new one liable
  to define in boys the explicit pathways between test anxiety,
  perfectionism and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses have confirmed,
  in a 3 factor solution, the presence of emotional (anger), cognitive
  (hostility) and behavioural (physical aggression) components. Internal
  consistency is satisfactory. It is demonstrated that physical
  aggression characterizes boys (F=12.04, p=0.0001) while hostility
  (F=5.22, p=0.0015) and anger (F=0.49, p=0.0001) characterizes girls;
  furthermore it is noted that physical aggression characterizes more
  failed students (F=13.43, p=0.0003). Four models (see figures 2, 3, 4,
  5) have been established, at first focused on the distinction of
  correlations between motivation and cognitive and emotional components
  on the samples of boys (n=268) and girls (348), then developed on the
  samples of successful students, male (n=193) and female (n=271). They
  describe the differentiated action of intrinsic and extrinsic
  motivations on the different components of aggressiveness and
  test-anxiety according to gender and without experience of failure.
  The dynamic process of the organizational factors is different
  according to gender and psychopathology resulting from the
  combinations of behaviors, cognitions and emotions would be assumed,
  prioritizing physical aggression and psychopathy by boys, anxiety and
  depression by girls. Anyway more explanation about the evolution of
  success rates of boys and girls in Belgian universities is proposed.
  PMID: 15029071 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

I can't post anymore links cause I don't have enough rep, but if you go to pubmed.gov and search for the title of this article you'll see many many more related ones that I could just keep citing.  Anyways hope this helps, I gotta get some work done now, ha.

Alright here is more research:

I have the citation with what I feel is the most relevant sentance(s) in the abstract after scanning them.

  Luine V. Sex differences in chronic stress effects on memory in rats. Stress. 2002
  Sep;5(3):205-16. Department of Psychology, Hunter
  College of the City University of New York, NY 10021, USA.
  vluine@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu

  Relevant Sentance: "Given the same chronic stress--21 days of
  restraint for 6 h each day--males were impaired in all of the memory
  tests while females showed enhanced performance of the spatial memory
  tasks and no changes in object recognition performance."

  "recent studies show sexually differentiated cognitive responses to
  chronic stress and underline the importance of considering the
  sex/gender of subjects when studying the stress response."

  Bowman RE, Beck KD, Luine VN. Chronic stress effects on memory: sex
  differences in performance and monoaminergic activity.  Horm Behav.
  2003 Jan;43(1):48-59.  Department of Psychology, Hunter College of the
  City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA.
  bowmanr@sacredheart.edu

  "stress differentially affected central transmitter levels in the
  frontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala depending on sex"

  Bowman RE, Micik R, Gautreaux C, Fernandez L, Luine VN.  Sex-dependent
  changes in anxiety, memory, and monoamines following one week of
  stress. Physiol Behav. 2009 Apr 20;97(1):21-9. doi:
  10.1016/j.physbeh.2009.01.012. Epub 2009 Jan 22.  Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT, United States. bowmanr@sacredheart.edu

  "these sexually dimorphic neurochemical changes following stress may
  underlie the behavioral differences. Current results show that
  short-term restraint elicits sex-dependent behavioral and neural
  changes different from those previously reported for longer term
  stresses and suggest that the temporal relationship between the change
  from adaptive to maladaptive responses to stress is shorter in male
  than female rats."

Now you could easily criticize me here and say I either got too many citations from Bowman RE (which I probably did) or that these are all based in rats...and...well...humans arn't rats.

I can find some more human studies that probably map MRI or something, but part of the value you lose is in that you, for instance, can't squirt them full of estrogen or take their ovaries out and say "try again" let's see how you do (feel free to edit that last part out as it kind of grossed me out too).

Each way has it's own advantage/disadvantages.


What is the best time-effective study technique? What is the most effective way to study? For instance, assume a student has the following 4 classes in parallel:

1- C++ & Data-structure
2- Logic Design
3- Linear Algebra
4- Integration

Should the student study 1 course per day, or study all 4 courses every day to study efficiently? In other words, should a student learn big chunks of information on one course/topic, or study multiple courses/topics in parallel to learn the most in the least amount of time?

According to the distributed learning strategy which is based on a phenomenon called spacing effect, it is better to study classes in parallel.

  Distributed practice (also known as spaced repetition or spaced
  practice) is a learning strategy, where practice is broken up into a
  number of short sessions – over a longer period of time. Humans and
  animals learn items in a list more effectively when they are studied
  in several sessions spread out over a long period of time, rather than
  studied repeatedly in a short period of time, a phenomenon called the
  spacing effect.

  The opposite, massed practice, consists of fewer, longer training sessions. It is generally a less effective method of learning.

Reference :

Greene, Robert L.. Spacing effects in memory: Evidence for a two process account. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition15. 3 (May 1989): 371-377

Challis, Bradford H.. (Mar 1993). Spacing effects on cued-memory tests depend on level of processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19. 2, 389-396.


Official term for the tendency to associate with like-minded people? I want a term for the tendency of individuals to confirm their existing biases/opinions by seeking out and reinforcing their opinions with like-minded individuals (as far as I know, this is distinct from confirmation bias).

Self-selection bias is probably the best domain specific term. Generally, this is called assortativity, as in assortative mating.


Closure, an actual psychology term relating to filling in information? I'm currently reading a book called "Understand Comics" and a term has come up called closure. I've understood this concept before and the book describes closure as the process the brain goes through to fill in the missing information to formulate some conclusion.

To give a little more detail, the books describes it as observing the parts, but perceiving the whole. Everything that we perceive about the world is through our senses, but most of the time our senses can only reveal a world that is incomplete or fragmented so we depend on this idea of closure to draw conclusions.

Is this process called closure in the psychology?

The more common psychological and probably everyday use of the term closure refers to a desire  for information that may resolve an issue or situation (e.g., see closure psychology).

I think that the form of closure you describe comes from the Gestalt school of psychology. To quote the wikipedia article on Gestalt Psychology regarding Law of closure:

  The law of closure states that individuals perceive
  objects such as shapes, letters, pictures, etc., as being whole when
  they are not complete. Specifically, when parts of a whole picture are
  missing, our perception fills in the visual gap. Research has shown
  that the purpose of completing a regular figure that is not perceived
  through sensation is in order to increase the regularity of
  surrounding stimuli. For example, the figure depicting the law of
  closure portrays what we perceive to be a circle on the left side of
  the image and a square on the right side of the image. However, there
  are gaps missing from the shapes. If the law of closure did not exist,
  the image would depict an assortment of different lines with different
  lengths, rotations and curvatures, but with the law of closure, we
  perceptually combine the lines into whole shapes.

More generally, what you describe on is touched on by a number of psychological theories covering different phenomena. For example, there is filling-in describing the process by which visual perception is filled-in over the physiological blind spot and scomata.

Furthermore, most models of cognition would construe perception as the interaction of external stimuli, our cognitive architecture, and existing representations. For example, if you look at job satisfaction data, responses are often as much a function of the individual as they are of the work environment. Or to take another example, models of learning suggest that whether a stimuli is perceived as a threat depends on our prior experience with the stimuli.

It seems that the book that you are reading is extending the perceptual idea of closure to incorporate a broader cognitive component.


What are biologically plausible ways to model binocular disparity? I figure there is a vast body of literature on stereovision, both neurophysiological and computational studies. Computer Vision also provides some algorithmic insight on implementing binocular disparity. Although a lot of people are doing that and have research the topic in the past, I'm lost to find a simplest/standard yet biologically plausible approach to account for binocular disparity in a neurodynamical model.

Neural Mechanisms of Stereoscopic Vision:
This paper is a 1998 review of the experimental data surrounding stereoscopic vision.

Neural Encoding of Binocular Disparity: Energy Models, Position Shifts, and Phase Shifts:
In this paper, Heeger puts forward computational models of binocular disparity using phenomenological models of neurons (i.e., using receptive fields of neurons, not using biophysical mechanisms).

Neural Models of Stereoscopic Vision:
A 1991 review of computational models of neural responses to binocular disparity.


John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia and Genetic Diversity I learned about John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiment from this Youtube video. The corresponding 1962 paper isn't readily available.

What I want to know is, did Calhoun account for genetic diversity in his experiment? Apparently he started with only a few breeding pairs, all white lab mice.

Quick (short answer)

No, Calhoon did not account for genetic diversity in his experiments outlined in your question.

Full answer

Reading the article you mentioned, Calhoun (1962) started with wild Norway Rats, also referred to as common rats, brown rats, street rats, sewer rats, or Hanover rats.

  I confined a population of wild Norway rats in a quarter-acre enclosure. 'With an abundance of food and places to live and with predation and disease eliminated or minimized, only the animals' behavior with respect to one another remained as a factor that might affect the increase in their number. There could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density. By the end of 27 months the population had become stabilized at 150 adults. Yet adult mortality was so low that 5,000 adults might have been expected from the observed reproductive rate. The reason this larger population did not materialize was that infant mortality was extremely high. Even with only 150 adults in the enclosure, stress from social interaction led to such disruption of maternal behavior that few young survived.

Then he turned to a domesticated albino strain of the Norway rat under more controlled circumstances indoors, and

  The data for the present discussion come from the histories of six different populations. Each was permitted to increase to approximately twice the number that my experience had indicated could occupy the available space with only moderate stress from social interaction. In each case my associates and I maintained close surveillance of the colonies for 16 months in order to obtain detailed records of the modifications of behavior induced by population density.

There is very little genetic variation in brown rats (Ness, et al. 2012), no matter where in the world you collect them (Ness, 2013). Therefore, apart from the fact that the article was discussing data on a domesticated albino strain of the Norway rat, all the experiments mentioned used brown rats.  There were no black rats, mole rats, or any other kinds of rat used.

References

Calhoun, J.B. (1962). Population density and social pathology. Scientific American, 206, 139—48.

Ness, R. W., Zhang, Y.-H., Cong, L., Wang, Y., Zhang, J.-X., & Keightley, P. D. (2012). Nuclear Gene Variation in Wild Brown Rats. G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, 2(12), 1661—1664.DOI: 10.1534/g3.112.004713 PMCID: PMC3516487

Ness, R. (2013). Genetic diversity of wild brown rats [Online]
Retrieved from: http://sites.utm.utoronto.ca/ness/blog/01182016-1515/genetic-diversity-wild-brown-rats


Do 10.000 hours of practice make you an expert? With his book "Outliers" Malcolm Gladwell has widely popularized the idea that the requirement to become an expert in any field is largely to invest at least 10.000 hours of deliberate practice.

What is the scientific basis of this conclusion?
It seems to have originated from this research by Ericsson et al. (1993). In what way does this paper support the conclusion of a 10.000 hour rule?
What is the current state of the research on this question?

Reference

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363–406. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

The answer is more involved than it seems. Expertise research programmes, including Ericsson's line, has tended to blend quantitative and qualitative research methods (e.g., case studies, talk-aloud protocol, etc.), and there is a veritable host of critiques and qualifications that apply. For the scope of this answer, I will therefore try to err on the side of too restrictive than too broad.

10,000 hours?

The 10,000 hours figure, supposing that you are right to pin Malcolm's work on this article, appears to derive from an analysis of retrospective practice accounts of violinists. In any case, from the article, page 379.

  "The number of hours of practice accumulated by a violinist at a given age can be easily calculated by adding the yearly estimates at and below that age. The average number of hours of accumulated practice for each of the four groups is shown in Figure 9 as a function of age."

In my experience, rather than giving the 10,000 hours figure, Ericsson himself instead often proffers 10 years, as he does in the abstract of this article. This is more consistent with recent research on effects like spaced repetition and the generation effect, since using hours seems to imply that hours of deliberate practice are interchangeable and independent, which they are evidently not. I don't know if it's meaningful to give a year value, but I subjectively doubt it.

Is deliberate practice effective?

I will interpret the second question as, "What is the state of research on the training efficacy of deliberate practice?" instead of the alternative meaning about 10,000 hours, which I have argued is flashy, but not meaningful or central to expertise acquisition.

Deliberate practice has been studied and compared with traditional training and educational methods fairly extensively across a number of domains. Here, I will restrict myself to studies dated 2011-2015 which were not published by K. A. Ericsson himself. I found a convenient meta-review of 14 studies, which found deliberate practice combined with simulations to be effective for clinical training (McGaghie et al., 2011), the area in which deliberate practice sees the most use by far.

Multiple recent studies have taken a critical view of Ericsson's strong theory of deliberate practice (i.e., performance is a monotonic function of deliberate practice), but no one appears to seriously dispute that it is a substantial factor in expertise acquisition for some domains. A critical meta-analysis of deliberate practice by Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald (2014) reported:

  "We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions."

Concluding remarks

For the purpose of this question, I would say this: on the one hand, the number of hours is meaningless and more likely than not to vary substantially between domains, persons and situations. The 10,000 hours figure is therefore only illustrative, not practically meaningful.

On the other hand, there is evidence to support the efficacy of deliberate practice as a learning strategy. Finally, though it remains influential, recent research suggests that deliberate practice alone is not sufficient to explain expertise acquisition, and that interacting factors need to be considered.

Despite the waning star of strong-form deliberate practice theory, I thoroughly recommend Ericsson et al.'s Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006) for an introduction to this increasingly relevant area of psychology. Personally, I think the recent studies finding that deliberate practice doesn't seem to predict anything in some domains are absolutely fascinating, but I can only speculate as to why.

References

Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P. J., & Hoffman, R. R. (Eds.). (2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge University Press.
Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions A Meta-Analysis. Psychological science, 25(8), 1608-1618.
McGaghie, W. C., Issenberg, S. B., Cohen, M. E. R., Barsuk, J. H., & Wayne, D. B. (2011). Does simulation-based medical education with deliberate practice yield better results than traditional clinical education? A meta-analytic comparative review of the evidence. Academic medicine: journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 86(6), 706.


How does it come about that specific areas of the brain are associated with specific functions? During the development of the human brain, specific areas come to perform specific functions. How (and when) does this differentiation come about?

Presumably, some areas of the brain naturally take on a function that is based on their physical proximity - for example, the visual cortex is the brain area directly connected to the optic pathway. Hence from a developmental perspective, it is natural for it to take on the role of processing visual information.

However, the production of language, for example, could potentially take place in any area of the brain adjacent to the auditory cortex. So how does it come about that it typically always gets processed in Wernicke's area?

Is it predetermined genetically? And if so, how? (pre-mapped synapses?)
Or is it determined later through some kind of learning process?  And if so, what is the explanation for the similarity of brain maps between individuals?

Short answer
Neural wiring is governed by nature and nurture.

Background
I'm not a language person, but I will try to address the question on more familiar grounds to me, namely sensory systems.

A bunch of most intriguing studies have addressed your question directly. Among these is the study from Frost & Metin (1985), who severed the optic tracts of newborn hamsters and found that optic axons would project to the somatosensory thalamic (ventrobasal) nucleus instead. The experimentally induced retinal projection to the somatosensory nucleus occurred through the stabilization of an early, normally transient projection. Moreover, visual stimulation reliably evoked neural responses in the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices (SI and SII) in treated hamsters. Not only that - the representations of the visual field in SI and SII showed a partially retinotopic organization. In other words, the animals had effectively converted (part of) their somatosensory cortex into visual cortex.

Later, Sur et al. (1988) showed with a similar procedure that retinal cells could be induced to project to the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN), the principal auditory thalamic nucleus, in newborn ferrets. They showed that many MGN cells were then visually driven and that the auditory cortex became visually responsive. Some visual cells in auditory cortex were direction-selective or orientation-sensitive, resembling the complex cells in primary visual cortex.

Hence, functional visual projections can be routed into nonvisual structures in higher mammals, suggesting that the modality of a sensory thalamic nucleus or cortical area may be specified by its inputs during development. However, there is a short time window where the extent of neural plasticity will allow such gross abnormalities to develop - both studies used newborn animals therefore.

References
- Frost & Metin, Nature (1985); 317(6033): 162-4
- Sur et al. Science (1988); 242(4884): 1437-41


Function of heart neural network? I have found articles the try to give a possible biological neural network for the movement of limbs, neurons in the eyes, etc. Is there an explanation on how the neural network that controls the heart works?

The heart isn't really "controlled" by the nervous system in the same way, say, the limbs are.  Heart muscle cells (cardiac myocytes) beat with a steady rhythm even in complete isolation.  Collections of isolated cardiac myocytes will beat synchronously.  The beating of the heart is controlled internally by two bundles of specialized cardiac myocytes, the sinoatrial node being the primary controller and the atrioventricular node regulating how the beat changes between the upper and lower chambers of the heart.

Although the heart beating it controlled internally, the nervous system does have an influence.  This comes more generally from the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, which control how our bodies respond to various levels of arousal and stress.  These systems influence many parts of the body, but they influence the heart by "instructing" the sinoatrial node to alter its rate of beating.  This is controlled primarily by the vagus nerve, if you are wondering about the specific neural anatomy.  That nerve is involved in a wide variety of tasks, but it is particular important for the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.