Are there reliable ways to distinguish anger from fear, be it through body, mind, internally, externally? I've read about some of the differences, but they may be opinions not supported by best scientific evidence.

I think the limbic system, in particular amygdala and hippocampus would be activated in both, and in many other emotional reactions.

But even more relevant, given that this is cog-sci exchange, is that there is the idea that fear and anger are cognitively similar in that they both focus and narrow the mind, but that anger focuses the mind much more because fearing a certain object also makes one hypervigilant so the person could potentially react to lots of other potential signs of danger at the same time.  But my thinking is that anger can also lead to arousal and person being irritated by lots of other previously-neutral stimuli.

Another idea I remember is that apparently fear leads to feeling cold in the extremities but anger the head and particularly the arms can remain or get warmer.  Or as this NPR article says, fear leads to feelings in the chest area, but anger is one of the few feelings that activates the arms.

Internally it is my own experience that fear leads to shrinking and weakness while anger leads to a kind of activation and strength.

Externally there are behavioral differences but also in terms of body language and facial expression, apparently one can tell anger and fear apart.  Clenching jaws and fists in anger...

But the problem is people rarely express these emotions so fully in their body or their face.

Or to be more accurate, it depends on the person and how expressive they are and how frightened/angry they feel, culture, age, etc.  But such facial expressions as ones below are not ones I see around me often.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~andrei/expressions/

Lastly, I once had a talk with a doctoral candidate and very briefly we touched on this, which is obviously quite a big topic, but he told me one of the difficulties is that the feelings that follow each other very fast and also that a person might react to feelings with other feelings.  For instance, you become angry at your child but then almost instantly you might feel fear at how angry you are, etc.

So the above are sort of what I've read or remember about the differences.  I really like to learn more about this so if you feel this question is too broad, just choose the area that you know most about and correct my thinking there.  Since this was the only psychology section of the forum, I posted it here, and surely anger/fear distinction not only can be studied by different branches of psychology (biopsych, behavioral psych, cog psych, clinical psych, etc), but as a human emotion, it can also be studied by anthropology, for instance, on the cultural level.  So I'm aware of that.

The most conservative answer is that we can reliably distinguish anger from fear if we constrain our examination to a particular context, a set of stimuli, or a person.   However, studies on emotions within single individuals have only begun to attract funding, so we don't quite know yet how well we can do this.

If we ignore contextual and individual differences, then our ability to reliably distinguish between these emotions drops significantly. This is because fear and anger can manifest very differently depending on the context and/or person (there's large variability in a bunch of response systems: facial, bodily, neural, behavioral, etc.), which prevents us from classifying them accurately or in a perceiver-independent (i.e., objective) way.

But let's look at some papers...

Brain

Here are the results from this meta-analysis for anger and fear:

Body

I've read a meta-analysis under review that used fancy statistical analyses to distinguish emotions by physiology.  The conclusion was that we can't distinguish emotions based on physiological variables, so as of right now we don't believe there are reliable physiological differences.

For relevant reading, see this paper, which provides a systematic qualitative review.

Face

This is still under study.  The idea of universal facial expressions is incredibly controversial (e.g., Nelson & Russell, 2013), so it's best not to take it as fact, independent of your theoretical orientation.  It's quite possible that under many circumstances we can distinguish "anger faces" and "fear faces," but others we cannot.

However, the most important point is that it's not even clear that we can reliably know that an "anger face" is actually an "anger face" and a "fear face" is actually a "fear face," given that there can be so much variability in facial production and perception (e.g., this recent study).  I've never even seen Ekman's "universal" fear face in real life.

Behavior

Anger and fear are traditionally contrasted in terms of approach and withdrawal, respectively.  However, this probably isn't a reliable difference (e.g., this paper), as it depends on goals, environmental constraints, etc.

Overall... it's pretty difficult to objectively determine if someone is experiencing a certain emotion, let alone distinguishing between two of them. We might be able to do it better as we take a more idiographic approach, but studies like that have only begun to emerge.  Some people argue that multivariate analyses are the answer, but even these aren't reliable classifiers from one context to another.


what does “dominants” mean in psychology I am reading the book "The Psychedelic Experience".
In the following two sentences word "dominants" is used

1. ...world of psychic “dominants” from which the ego originally emancipated itself with enormous effort

2. ...and the terrifying dream evoked by karma and played out by the unconscious “dominants” begins

What does "dominants" mean in these sentences. I googled if "dominants" has any special meaning in psychology but couldn't find any results.

I have just been doing some research on this piece of writing and I wonder if anyone really should take heed to what is written.  The reason is that the writing seems to be an attempt on a

  psychedelic version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead
  (source)

It is not something I personally would take any notice of, however, from my understanding after reading the above source, this writing is talking about "transcendence" and the "pre-mortem-death-rebirth experience" through the stages of ego-loss, hallucinations and "reentry" created by ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc.

  Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Where it says

  ...the terrifying dream evoked by karma and played out by the unconscious "dominants" begins.

it seems to be talking about the "second stage" called the Chonyid state (hallucination state) where you have "reached your goal" of ego-loss in the Fruedian sense and now you are allowing your thoughts to come to play as though they are reality as the preceding part of the sentence says

  The "thought-forms" appear as realities, fantasy takes on real form

This is the effect of taking these psychedelic drugs.  The ego is diminished and therefore you lose touch with reality, norms and rules.

I believe the "dominants" in this writing is referring to the dominant thoughts.

edit - for further info

I am in the middle of learning about analytical psychology and for the authors to refer to Carl Jung as someone who was interested in the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) and that he would possibly advocate their "psychedelic version" interested me.

Carl Jung apparently suffered from a form of psychosis and as a result, he suffered with visions and hallucinations.

  Jung spent time in his study inducing the visions and hallucinations. He did this not through the use of any kind of drug, apparently, but instead through his own personal methods that allowed his unconscious mind to become totally open and flowing forth. (source)


Should always selecting the same response on the IOWA Gambling Test result in a good value? I was taking the Iowa Gambling Task.
I examined what happens when the same option is selected on every run.
To my surprise I got a pretty good value when choosing options C and D (\$4500) in every run and a pretty bad one ($-500) with options A and B.

Is this intended by the test or is it a bug / feature of my downloaded program?

(I got $4700 when mixing some A's among plenty of C's)

In the standard version of the task there are "good" decks (overall positive payoff) and "bad" decks (overall negative payoff), so the optimal strategy is to figure out which ones are the good decks and stick with those. In principle, which deck is which should be randomized, but I don't know if your version implements that. There are also many variations that manipulate amount of gain/loss (e.g., rare big gains vs. consistent small gains) or change the payoffs in the middle, so the optimal strategy can vary.


How do laypeople form a judgment that another person is smart or intelligent? I am curious: When do we label a person as being 'intelligent', 'smart' or 'clever'? This is subjective, and it seems unlikely that it is possible to reach a bulletproof definition. A high IQ has been used for some time, but it seems that taking IQ tests is a learnable skill as any other, see 1 (other sources contradict this fact, however, see 2). But when do we say when somebody is 'smart'? It is not rare to hear people utter 'Wow, he's really smart!'. Does he have a high IQ score? Does he know all the capitals of all countries in the world? Does he play piano extremely well, have a Ph.D. in mathematics or paint incredibly beautiful paintings?

So the question is:

How do laypeople form a judgment that another person is smart or intelligent?

References:

http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence
http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/what-an-iq-test-measure

Okay here's the answer. What you are talking about doesn't have a name yet. There a many different types of intelligence and an IQ test only tests some of them. So you are right in the sense you can't really tell how "smart" someone is off of that. For the purposes of this discussion we will now refer to the word that doesn't really exist yet as "smart or smartness". How do you know if someone is "smarter" than you? That's subjective all on it's own. I think you meant to say, how are the "smartnesses"(i know oh god bad english but i had to say it that way) of any two people different and either what process is behind our ability to "tell" if someone is smart or you want to know how can someone who is less smart than someone can tell? Well, if there is a big enough difference in IQ, most people can tell just by talking to a person. A long time ago I heard that if there is a difference of 30 IQ points then it becomes difficult to understand a person because of the difference in known vocab and daily use of that vocab. But there are many different ways of seeing if someone is smart or not.

That's boring so let's talk about why everyone is wrong about intelligence. I think you are more after that then anything else. So know that the only reason we have an IQ test, is to test for the difference in the standard deviations between the "intelligence" of children to see if they need help or advancement. 2 SDs below or above makes you different from everyone else and you help special needs in some aspect. That's an extremely crude way of explaining that all, but it works for the purposes of what I am trying to explain now. (That's 30 IQ points up or down from 100 by the way). For the most part, IQ tests for adults don't really tell us what we are trying to find out, they were designed for children. If you want to see if someone is actually intelligent across all aspects of adult "smartnessess", you can't use an IQ test. Think of the IQ test being used for adults as a way of measuring how well they may do in school or a similar area. But if we want to really find out how "smart" adults are we do need all aspects of intelligence that we currently know. For example, ever heard of street smarts? Some people claim they have street smarts and they don't need a formal edu because of this and that's what makes them "smart" or smarter then everyone else. Street smarts can mean a million different things but lets assume it means skills that have been picked up only by "living" on the streets, AKA a low econ area with high crime or moderate crime in most cases. Not that you are self taught in all aspects of intelligence. So while "street smarts" could be an aspect of intelligence, not the full picture. Also someone with street smarts might just mean they are self taught in all aspect and they very well could be our definitions of smart. Remember that school is designed for the average person and it is not suited for people that stray too far from the average(in any aspect of "smartness" but in the case of school we can say IQ). A smart person will be smart regardless of a formal edu or not and so will a intellectually challenged or disabled person will always be that way(brain damage in their case doesn't go away). As long as the damage is physical and not psychological. Anyways, I personally don't think we have mapped out everything yet as far as our true intelligence goes because for the simple reason of we just haven't gotten to it yet. Unless you have an idea on how knowing your real adult IQ could help anyone besides helping find people with intellectual disabilities which need help(which the current test can already do), there is no application for it. Also it's been proven in the past that it's harmful for people to know how "smart" they really are.(look up army test alpha and beta i think, something like that), everyone overestimates their "smartness:. I personally think it would be harmful to the public if they had that info. In the US that is. I dunno about other countries but they are probably the same in first world countries. I doubt anyone who has to worry about survival, worries about how smart they are. Well I hope that answered your question. If you want sources, I am lazy and there is enough info for you to check any claim i've made on google. You wanted the answer anyways so you do the leg work if you don't believe me. There's also my opinion but i;ve stated which of this is my opinion. The rest is from about 7 years of college in psychology and another 3 years or so of personal research in the area of psych. So...I could be an expert just based on all the hours I've spent in the field of psych. So the opinion of an expert in his field is probably good for his word on some of his opinions yes?
I mean no malicious in anything I say, I am just normally sarcastic, so no offense on anything if you have taken it that way. I meant none.


Why fear is the opposite of desire and not disgust? Wikipedia page on desire has the following passage:

  A 2008 study by the University of Michigan indicated that, while humans experience desire and fear as psychological opposites, they share the same brain circuit.

Personally, I feel that fear and disgust  are different. Former is what you can feel when there is something dangerous or risky. Latter is when you just perceive something like awful smell or flavor.

So, why and how fear and not disgust is the opposite of desire?

Just because two phenomena (partially!) share brain architecture does not mean they are experientially similar or opposite. There is little understanding of how neuronal activity creates conscious experiences. There is a lot of controversy in taxonomies of emotion because it is not clear what the emotions are or how many there are. Also, note that psychologists tend to define emotion in a narrow way, in particular referencing how transitory it is compared to moods or personality traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification

So, you feel disgust and fear are different: I anecdotally agree, some models of emotion agree, and they do not have the exact same neural correlates.

Major theories of emotion generally classify emotions on two dimensions: approach vs. avoidance motivation, and pleasant vs. unpleasant. Fear and disgust are both avoid/unpleasant. Desire is in this sense the opposite of fear: approach/pleasant. An example of this model is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification#Circumplex_model


How many calories do we burn when we try to understand mathematical proofs? While thinking we burn calories. For comparison: "And if it’s the right wood and the right chess grand masters in the middle of a tournament, they are going through 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day thinking" from here...

How many calories do we burn when we try to understand mathematical proofs?
How does it depend on the representation of the proof? For example, there are plenty of proofs for the Pythagorean theorem, even some without words...

Not many.

  Although firing neurons summon extra blood, oxygen and glucose, any local increases in energy consumption are tiny compared with the brain's gluttonous baseline intake. So, in most cases, short periods of additional mental effort require a little more brainpower than usual, but not much more. Most laboratory experiments, however, have not subjected volunteers to several hours' worth of challenging mental acrobatics.

-Scientific America Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?

  Our results conclude that the measured Ff,ATPase reflects the oxidative phosphorylation rate in resting rat brains, that this flux is tightly correlated to the change of energy demand under varied brain activity levels, and that a significant amount of ATP energy is required for “housekeeping” under the isoelectric state. These findings reveal distinguishable characteristics of ATP metabolism between the brain and heart, and they highlight the importance of in vivo 31P MT approach to potentially provide a unique and powerful neuroimaging modality for noninvasively studying the cerebral ATP metabolic network and its central role in bioenergetics associated with brain function, activation, and diseases.

-PNAS Tightly coupled brain activity and cerebral ATP metabolic rate


Why do con artists like Frank Abagnale Jr. not feel guilt? I just finished watching a video of Frank Abagnale Jr discuss his life history. Who knows if its true, but it is an amazing story. For those who don't know, Frank Abagnale is one of the most infamous con artists in history according to Wikipedia.

What really strikes me about his story is the following: he seems to have an extraordinary memory and storytelling ability. Couple this with good looks, height, and a face that looks older than he is and you can see how he would have the tools to be con artist. But those are also skills that can be used for many many many other disciplines and could have been put to good uses. He could have been a salesman or any number of things.

Some criminals seem really messed up psychologically. He doesn't come across as that. He seems to have an intact psyche that isn't riddled with some abused past. But he is missing some basic emotions like guilt. For instance, he decided to work in a hospital without even considering the safety of patients around him and, according to Wikipedia nearly killed an infant. Another instance is that he took control of a plane when he didn't know how to fly one, obviously putting all the passengers and his own life at risk.  That seems insane! Only until he actually gets in a situation where lives are at stake did he really realize what could happen. Thus, he also seems to have no imagination for the consequences of his actions. He would tell strings of lies basically continuously and never think twice about it, never considering the consequences for businesses of the money they lost.

What part of the brain fails such that a person would act that way? What goes wrong?

Cognitive science generally does not try to explain individual behavior, but rather the behavior of all people. We can meaningfully speak about what may cause a deficient ability to feel guilt and remorse, or other features that characterize an individual, but we cannot speak directly about the individual's behavior outside an applied or clinical context. Therefore, and I cannot stress this enough: please do not read this answer and then start looking for signs of APD in individuals.

Antisocial Personality Disorder
Deficient ability to feel guilt and remorse is a cardinal trait of antisocial personality disorder, or APD (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), which may offer a tentative framework. APD is a complex personality disorder with many different facets and characteristics that, at least at face value, seems to describe a behavioral pattern matching the popular image of a con man, such as Frank Abagnale Jr. surely represents in the popular mind.
Diagnosing APD
Under the DSM-IV-TR definition, satisfying the APD diagnostic criteria requires an individual to A) be over 18 years old, B) exhibit evidence of conduct disorder before age 15, C) not exhibit antisocial behavior exclusively during manic or schizophrenic episodes, and D) exhibit at least three of the following seven symptoms suggesting a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since 15 years old:

Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.
Reckless disregard for the safety of self and/or others.
Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.
Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another.

It's worth noting that the DSM-IV-TR and DSM-V definitions of APD differ somewhat. Because the DSM-V is still so recent, most empirical research at time of writing has used the DSM-IV-TR definition. How well the new definitions correspond with the old ones is ultimately an empirical question, so I will focus on the DSM-IV-TR literature here to avoid speculating.
Cognitive neuroscience of APD
A number of neurocognitive deficits have been identified in patients with DSM-IV-TR antisocial personality disorder. As with most mental disorders and cognitive functions, it's difficult to pin down any one region or set of regions and say "here is where X is." However, Blair and Frith (2000) reviewed three common trends, reporting support for the latter two:

... [1] an impairment in executive functioning implicating prefrontal cortex, [2] an impairment in executive emotion's processing implicating orbito-frontal cortex, and [3] an impairment in emotion processing implicating the amygdala ...

Amygdala

CG illustration of the amygdala's location
One of the main regions commonly associated with APD and antisocial behavior, and in particular with its remorselessness criterion, are the amygdala (Blair and Frith, 2000). However, while the amygdala's heavy involvement in emotional processing is well established (Kandel, 2013), and a veritable sea of studies support an emotional processing deficits and abnormalities in the amygdala for general antisocial behavior (e.g., Coccaro et al., 2006; Narayan et al., 2007; Veit et al., 2002) over different antisocial disorders, I couldn't find any direct investigations of amygdaloid activity in APD patients.
Orbitofrontal Cortex

Model and sagittal MRI of the orbitofrontal cortex
The other region commonly implicated in association with APD and antisocial behavior is the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (Blair and Frith, 2000). For example, Völlm et al. (2004) reported fMRI evidence for a go-no-go task suggesting that APD patients exhibited reduced OFC activity for response inhibition as compared with controls. Dinn and Harris (2000) reported that "APD subjects showed greater neuropsychological deficits on measures sensitive to orbitofrontal dysfunction in comparison to control participants." The OFC seems to be associated with increased impulsivity and risk-taking via deficient response inhibition.
Did Frank Abagnale Jr. have APD?
At this point, one may be tempted to answer, "Clearly, he did!" and start looking for APD in oneself, or others. This would be a mistake. Identifying APD in a person requires a considerable amount of well-structured information about that person. Nothing could illustrate that we lack such information here better than Abagnale's own words:

In 2002, Abagnale himself addressed the issue of his story's truthfulness with a statement posted on his company's website which said in part: "I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over-dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography."

With respect to Abagnale himself, therefore, cognitive science does not have anything to say about his story, because we don't have any way to independently verify most of it. We can probably surmise that some of it is accurate, some of it is not, but we can't empirically say which is which. People don't necessarily need to be pathological in order to be jerks.
References

American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., Text Revision). Washington, DC: Author.
Blair, J., & Frith, U. (2000). Neurocognitive explanations of the antisocial personality disorders. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.
Coccaro, E. F., McCloskey, M. S., Fitzgerald, D. A., & Phan, K. L. (2007). Amygdala and orbitofrontal reactivity to social threat in individuals with impulsive aggression. Biological psychiatry, 62(2), 168-178.
Dinn, W. M., & Harris, C. L. (2000). Neurocognitive function in antisocial personality disorder. Psychiatry research, 97(2), 173-190.
Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessell, T. M., Siegelbaum, S. A., Hudspeth, A. J. (Eds.). (2013). Principles of neural science (Vol. 5). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Narayan, V. M., Narr, K. L., Kumari, V., Woods, R. P., Thompson, P. M., Toga, A. W., & Sharma, T. (2007). Regional cortical thinning in subjects with violent antisocial personality disorder or schizophrenia.
Veit, R., Flor, H., Erb, M., Hermann, C., Lotze, M., Grodd, W., & Birbaumer, N. (2002). Brain circuits involved in emotional learning in antisocial behavior and social phobia in humans. Neuroscience letters, 328(3), 233-236.
Völlm, B., Richardson, P., Stirling, J., Elliott, R., Dolan, M., Chaudhry, I., ... & Deakin, B. (2004). Neurobiological substrates of antisocial and borderline personality disorder: preliminary results of a functional fMRI study. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 14(1), 39-54.


How do hallucinations appear through reversing goggles? If one is experiencing elaborated visual hallucinations, what will happen when one puts on reversing goggles? Will hallucinations change their orientations as well? Links to relevant papers will be most welcome.

Karl Jaspers describes clinical reports in which patients hallucinatory perception was changed in accordance with the optical distortion. For example, a prism would double the images of devils, binoculars enlarge or decrease the image, colored glasses make it colored, etc. He refers "Seppilli, Contributo allo studio delie allucinazioni unilaterali. Riv. sper. di fren. 16, 82. 1890" and "Pick. Beitrage zur Lehre von den Halluzinationen. N. C. 11. 329. 1892" Now, the question is, has anyone done a study on that in the 20th century.


What psychophysical research published its data? Can you point to published research in psychophysics that made its original* data available?

*by 'original' I mean the trial-by-trial responses for each subject, and not some kind of aggregate that is usually reported (such as overall percent correct for each condition, or even each stimulus pair).

I am specifically interested in discrimination studies, using 2-alternative-forced-choice design, but any other psychophysical work is also welcome.

I'm aware of this great question and went over its answers when looking for data. It seems the published data in those datasets is mostly social science, "soft" psychological data and imaging data, and I found only few psychophysical studies, none of them involving discrimination tasks.

It's not exactly what you're after, but the Newcastle Cognition Lab has a data repository. It includes a number of learning curve datasets and other studies that measured response time to various simple cognitive tasks.


Cannot find a journal paper on a study on caffeine, even though it is registered at clinicaltrials.gov Can somebody help me find the following study:
Effects of Low Doses of Caffeine on Mood, Physiology and Mental Function, listed under trial identifier NCT00487227 on ClinicalTrials.gov.
It's a very interesting study regarding the effect of very low doses of caffeine on cognitive variables. The study is listed as completed but I'm unable to find the study on google, google scholar or pubmed

Short answer
Haskall et al., The effects of L-theanine, caffeine and their
combination on cognition and mood, Biol Psych (2008); 77: 113–22.
Background
Here's some of the detective work I've done:
The principal investigator of this study is listed on your link on ClinicalTrials.gov as Andrew Scholey of Northumbria University.
Looking on Google Scholar, and searching with the key terms "Andrew + Scholey + Caffeine" and looking for publications after the study's 'actual completion date', as listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, I found an article by Scholey & coworkers, namely:
Haskall et al., Biol Psych (2008); 77: 113–22.
The study doesn't mention 'ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00487227' explicitly, but given the study's senior author (Scholey), the publication date (2008) being a few years after the clinical study's completion date (2005), and the topic of the paper (cognitive effects of caffeine) that closely resembles the clinical trial's topic, I bet this is the article you're after.
Otherwise, I should simply contact Scholey - most researchers appreciate an email enquiry about their work. More often than not they're eager to spread their work across the scientific community.


Has fiction or the study of fiction ever made meaningful contributions to Psychology? Those who study fiction often make certain claims, such as fiction allowing us to "gain depth into the human experience" and such. Psychology is the academic field which studies human behavior, and by proxy, the human mind and experience.

My question is, has a fictional work or the study fiction (literary analysis) ever made a meaningful contribution to the field of psychology? Like, has a literary analyzer written a paper on friendship of fictional characters, which ended up making a contribution to some psychological theory of friendship. Or are the claims that fiction gives insight into human experience empty?

Psychological scientists often cite works of fiction as sources of inspiration. In some cases, literary examples are used as illustrations of the phenomenon of interest. In others, researchers set out to test the hypotheses that are proposed or implied in fictional works.

Golding's Lord of the Flies and Zimbardo's research on deindividuation

For example, Zimbardo notes that his research on the effects of deindividuation in the late 1960s (Zimbardo, 1969) was inspired by literature:

  "Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about Golding's Lord of the Flies."

The Macbeth effect

Shakespeare is frequently cited as a source of inspiration. As one example, Zhong and Lilienquist (2006) have investigated whether sinful behavior prompts the need for physical cleansing - the "Macbeth effect", named after Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth who is compelled to wash her hands because of the crimes she and her husband have committed.

The Proust phenomenon

In the famous Madeleine Episode of Marcel Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu", the narrator describes that the sensory perception of a tea-soaked madeleine has the power to elicit detailed and affectively-laden memories of a distant past. This hypothesis, which some call "the Proust phenomenon" has prompted a variety of empirical investigations. For example, in two experiments conducted by Chu and Downs (2002) "odor-cued autobiographical memories were reliably different in terms of qualitative ratings and reliably superior in the amount of detail yielded". (Also see this earlier question.)

References

Chu, S., & Downes, J. J. (2002). Proust nose best: Odors are better cues of autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 30, 511–518. doi:10.3758/BF03194952

Zhong, C.-B., & Liljenquist, K. (2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science, 313, 1451–1452. doi:10.1126/science.1130726

Zimbardo, P. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order vs. deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In: Arnold, W.J. and Levine, D. (eds). Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 237-307.


Why do some individuals enjoy watching scary videos? Does watching scary videos affect mental health?
Are some individuals more/less prone to feeling scared than others?

Below are some reasons why some people enjoy and what happens when watching a scary movie:

Horror entertainment can trigger the fight-or-flight response, which comes with a boost in adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine. The brain can then process surroundings and conclude that the experience is not a genuine threat.

Below are some causes and effects of watching a scary movie:

Excitation transfer: This theory states that people who experience an emotional response to horror also experience more enjoyment when threats are resolved.

Individual empathy: People who are less empathetic enjoy horror films more, according to Professor Ron Tamborini. He suggests that “viewers with high levels of empathy should dislike horror films because they react negatively to the suffering of others.”

Sensation-seeking: People who watch horror movies may want to stimulate sensory reactions. Studies indicate these viewers may be more aggressive than other people.

Source of Reference - Concordia University


What are the neurobiological triggers for sleepwalking? This phenomena has always fascinated me, ever since my parents told me (and filmed me) doing exactly that - sleepwalking.

I have read the pamphlet "Sleepwalking" from the Sleep Health Foundation, that lists several possible causes:

  For some people, sleep walking is an inherited condition.
  For children it may also be related to a stage of
  development. Not getting enough sleep, having irregular
  sleep hours, stress, drugs and some medicines increase
  the risk of sleepwalking. In addition, medical conditions
  such as sleep apnoea, seizures and fever can contribute
  to the likelihood of sleepwalking. If you are prone to
  sleepwalking, then sounds that disturb your sleep can
  also make you sleepwalk. However, not uncommonly a
  cause cannot be found.

However, my question is not about the potential causes, but what is/are the neurobiological triggers for sleepwalking?

Specifically, I am after authoritive (non-Wikipedia) explanations from refereed articles.

You know where I'd start if I were you?  I'd start looking at the sleep medications that cause people to sleepwalk whom normally don't (or if they already do, it exacerbates it) - such as ambien.  What are they doing?  How do they work in the brain on a physiological level?

I'm sure there are some studies that directly study the physiology of what is happening in the brain during a sleepwalk, but when it involves a big drug with big pharma behind it - alot more research tends to go into the area.

That will help you put a sturdy frame around the potential answer, then the rest of it is just extrapolating the Y out of when scientists thought X drug caused Y physiological response, which caused Z (sleepwalking).  Then you gotta do some reverse engineering.

You'll find there to be no real true answer as the extent of human knowledge only goes so far, but this might be a credible path to start down.  Here's a good starting point:

  Desensitization of GABAergic receptors as a mechanism of zolpidem-induced somnambulism.
  Juszczak GR.
  Source Department of Animal Behavior, Institute of Genetics and Animal Breeding, Jastrzebiec, Poland. gjuszczak@yahoo.com
  Med Hypotheses. 2011 Aug;77(2):230-3. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2011.04.019. Epub 2011 May 11.
  Abstract
  Sleepwalking is a frequently reported side effect of zolpidem which is a short-acting hypnotic drug potentiating activity of GABA(A) receptors. Paradoxically, the most commonly used medications for somnambulism are benzodiazepines, especially clonazepam, which also potentiate activity of GABA(A) receptors. It is proposed that zolpidem-induced sleepwalking can be explained by the desensitization of GABAergic receptors located on serotonergic neurons. According to the proposed model, the delay between desensitization of GABA receptors and a compensatory decrease in serotonin release constitutes the time window for parasomnias. The occurrence of sleepwalking depends on individual differences in receptor desensitization, autoregulation of serotonin release and drug pharmacokinetics. The proposed mechanism of interaction between GABAergic and serotonergic systems can be also relevant for zolpidem abuse and zolpidem-induced hallucinations. It is therefore suggested that special care should be taken when zolpidem is used in patients taking at the same time selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
  Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
  PMID: 21565448 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21565448


Do introverts tend to experience more psychological problems? Are there any evidence suggesting that the more introvert people could be more subject to psychological problems?

Is possible to hypothesize that one of the causes is the lack of ideas in comparison with other people from the community?

Several other disorders relate to introversion, including:

Avoidant personality disorder (Morey et al., 2002)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (Samuels et al., 2000)
Schizotypal personality disorder (Funder, 1997? Don't have it on-hand, but will try to verify this later when I do.)
Schizoid personality disorder (Morey et al., 2002)
Generalized anxiety disorder in young adults (ages 25–39; Kessler et al., 2008)

I would not expect lack of ideas to mediate these relationships. Introversion is sometimes thought to relate to "richer inner worlds" (can't recall where I read that, and I don't put a lot of stock in the claim). Introversion relates negatively to openness to experience, but seems to have a complex relationship with creativity. A common theory about introversion is that it relates to interest in reading (found some such evidence in Chinese adolescents so far; Lau & Cheung, 1988); this would certainly help with any lack of ideas.

References
- Funder, D. C. (1997). The personality puzzle. W. W. Norton & Co.
- Kessler, R. C., Gruber, M., Hettema, J. M., Hwang, I., Sampson, N., & Yonkers, K. A. (2008).  Comorbid major depression and generalized anxiety disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey follow-up.  Psychological Medicine, 38(3), 365–374.
- Lau, S., & Cheung, S. M. (1988). Reading interests of Chinese adolescents: Effects of personal and social factors. International Journal of Psychology, 23(1-6), 695–705.
- Morey, L. C., Gunderson, J. G., Quigley, B. D., Shea, M. T., Skodol, A. E., McGlashan, T. H., ... & Zanarini, M. C. (2002). The representation of borderline, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, and schizotypal personality disorders by the five-factor model. Journal of Personality Disorders, 16(3), 215–234.
- Samuels, J., Nestadt, G., Bienvenu, O. J., Costa, P. T., Riddle, M. A., Liang, K. Y., ... & Cullen, B. (2000). Personality disorders and normal personality dimensions in obsessive—compulsive disorder. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 177(5), 457–462. Retrieved from http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/177/5/457.long.


What is the effect of ADD/ADHD on performance variability on cognitive tests over time? I've read research reporting that lower IQ is correlated with higher variability in reaction time.  But such research does not seem to disentangle the possible effect of ADD, in which case you might have a separate cluster that does not follow the general trend.

So, if ADD/ADHD subjects are given a cognitive test on different days, will the variability in their outcomes be higher than that in controls?

General thoughts on factors influencing test-retest correlations

From a theoretical perspective, it makes sense that groups that experience temporary states that lower state intelligence or lead to a poorer test taking orientation would have lower test-retest cognitive test correlations. By lower state intelligence, I'm referring to states of being such as are observed with extreme sleep deprivation, alcohol intoxication, or while on psychedelic drugs that would temporarily lower actual cognitive functioning. By test taking orientation I'm referring to motivation and concentration issues related to taking a test. Because such factors are transient, they may be present in one test session and not another, and as such would be a source of error in measurement and would reduce test-retest correlations. In groups where such factors are greater or more prevalent, then test-retest correlations should be reduced more than other groups.

A clinician that administers a high-quality intelligence test should be aware of these transient factors when administering the test. If a test-taker is not taking a test seriously, is distracted, and so on, then the scores may have to be disregarded. Some studies might use group testing protocols that don't pick up these issues. And perhaps sometimes teasing out what is transient and what is permanent may be difficult.

In general, latent ability on a task is conceptualised in terms of an individual applying reasonable and normal levels of effort, under normal and healthy conditions, in a normal and reasonable environment. Under such conditions, a person is not able to improve their performance (discounting practice and cheating effects), but there are many ways that performance can decline. Sackett et al (1988) talks about the difference between typical and maximal performance. Test performance is meant to be conducted under conditions of maximal performance, where the test taker is meant to be applying maximal effort to the task.

Thoughts about ADHD

Research does show that in general individuals diagnosed with ADHD tend to score lower on intelligence tests. Frazier et al (2004) peformed a large-scale meta analysis and found that healthy participants scored on average 0.61 standard deviations (i.e., weighted d) higher on full scale IQ than ADHD participants.

Many of the symptoms of ADHD, such as being easily distracted, experiencing boredom on a task, and other problems related to sustained attention would make the administration of some cognitive tests difficult.
It is possible for any measure of an individual's IQ to fall below what the person is capable, where such an effect can be due, in addition to random variation between testing sessions, to systematic variability in transient factors. Thus, it seems plausible that individuals with ADHD could more frequently experience such factors, and as such, experience lower test-retest correlations.

Caveat: ADHD research is not my area. I imagine there are some  empirical studies that have compared test-retest correlations of tests between ADHD and other groups. I just haven't found them.

References

Frazier, T., Demaree, H., and Youngstrom, E. (2004). Meta-analysis of
intellectual and neuropsychological test performance in
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Neuropsychology, 18(3):543.
Sackett, P. R., Zedeck, S., and Fogli, L. (1988). Relations between
measures of typical and maximum job performance. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 73:482-486.


Perception of probability of being right The probability that people percept may be different from the real one due to a number of factors, including the form in which their are presented, their context and biases (due to misinformation or wishful thinking).

My question if there is any research showing the subjective probability judgement of being correct ($p_\mathrm{perceived}$) as a function of actual probability of correctness ($p_\mathrm{real}$) for situation were people estimate the chance that they are right in a test/trial (e.g. in a two answers forced choice task)?

Also, I am interested mathematical models with foundation in experimental data.

You'd probably want to take a look at signal detection theory. This is a set of tools that you use to analyse how well a person (or an animal, or a machine) is able to discern trials where there is a signal present (e.g. a picture is shown that has been shown before, a tumour is present in an x-ray image, a dot on a radar is an enemy aircraft) from trials where there is no-signal present (e.g. a picture is shown that hasn't been shown before, a tumour is not present in an x-ray image, a dot on a radar is not an enemy aircraft).

Whether a person perceives a signal or not is not always easy to discern. There will always be a certain interplay between the hit rate and the false alarm rate (in that you for example, if you always answered "signal", would have a perfect hit rate, although your false alarm rate would be terrible), and based on a number of criterias (time pressure, instructions, reward structure et cetera) one can manipulate the response patterns of a certain individual.

There has been attempts to create models where accuracy, speed and certainty all are taken into concideration; see for example Plescak and Busemeyer (2010).


Does the peripheral nervous system processes information like central neurons do? Neural coding deals with the problem on how neurons or a network of neurons processes a stimulus and creates a response in form of electrical action potentials. Information then might be encoded in the rate of the action potentials or their timing.

My questions now are:

Do nerves, e.g. in the arm of a human, merely "relay" any information, or do they also process incoming signals in any way? As a result, the electrical signal would then differ when measured at the beginning and the end of a nerve.
Can a nerve be stimulated at one point with a certain electrical signal as input (with varying rate etc. to encode information) and can the output be measured at another point?

If I understood correctly, this is done at a electroneuronography (ENoG) only that the electrical stimulus is not varying in rate or other properties.

Any links to research that deals with similar things would be great.

Short answer

Peripheral nerves can be stimulated by, e.g., electrical pulses and their responses can be recorded back by using recording electrodes.
Peripheral nerves generally do not process the signal. However, they can, and likely will, behave in a nonlinear manner, meaning that their transfer characteristics may change over time, depending on the stimulus.

Background
I'll approach this question based on the cochlear implant (CI). In short, these devices are implanted into the inner ear in people with pronounced hearing loss (Fig. 1). CIs stimulate the auditory nerve directly with electrical pulses, thereby bypassing the degenerate hair cells and restoring functional hearing.

The auditory nerve responses elicited by CIs are routinely recorded to assess implant functionality. These recordings are called electrically evoked compound action potential (eCAP) responses (Fig. 2). Basically, one electrode is stimulated and the nerve response is measured by another electrode. All the action potentials of the individual auditory nerve fibers are basically recorded synchronously, resulting in a compound action potential (CAP). This will probably answer your second question, namely yes, nerve responses can be elicited electrically and recorded back with the proper recording setup.

To go back to your first question - nerve responses are nonlinear, as neural responses show adaptation to the stimulation. Basically, nerves get tired of firing after a while. To go back to the CI example; if high rates of electrical stimuli are applied to the inner ear, the auditory nerve shows a slow adaptive behavior, causing the nerve response amplitude to decline slowly over time, this is caused because more and more fibers become less responsive. Then there is a short-term effect caused by refractoriness of individual fibers. A few milliseconds after a fiber has fired, it is unresponsive to a following stimulus. This causes some fibers to skip the stimulus. During a high-rate pulse train, this results in e eCAP to  alternatingly have a normal and low amplitude (Fig. 3). This answers your first question, in a nutshell, namely that nerves can alter the input signal for sure. The process of adaptatin is widespread in the periphery, for example all sensory systems show it to some degree. It is, however, not a real processing such as the processing happening in the peripheral retina for example where complex circuitry markedly alters retinal output to the optic nerve.

Fig. 1. Cochlear implant. source: Speech Buddy

Fig. 2. Princple of eCAP recording. source: A.D. Costlow

Fig. 3. eCAP amplitudes during high-rate (900 pulses/s) stimulation of a CI. figure excerpt adapted from: Hughes et al. (2014)

Reference
- Hughes et al., Hear Res (2014); 316: 44-56


Popular science books introducing therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs I'm not a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, but I have the impression that research of therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs (MDMA, LSD, DMT, etc) is undergoing a revival and is very slowly being accepted by the medical establishment.

Are there introductory books covering this topic which are scientifically credible?

Yes, the psychedelic Renaissance/ third wave (as I've heard it being called) is steadily gaining momentum. I almost feel like mentioning How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan here is too obvious, but just to be safe, here's a few links and a cultural review. There is also an exhaustive summary on Trippingly.net!


Can anticholinergics like benztropine be used to treat Catatonia? I found an old paper describing a case study where a catatonic patient was successfully treated with benztropine (Cogentin). However, I can't find any modern guidelines that calls for this treatment (first-line is usually benzodiazepams). Is there any reason not to use anticholinergics for catatonia treatment?
Sources:

Albucher RC, DeQuardo J, Tandon R. Treatment of catatonia with an anticholinergic agent. Biol Psychiatry. 1991;29(5):513-514. doi:10.1016/0006-3223(91)90281-p
Francis A. Catatonia: diagnosis, classification, and treatment. Curr Psychiatry Rep 2010; 12:180.

Anticholinergics by themselves commonly have sedative effects. The reason you read about benztropine being used is that it has dopaminergic activity as well (in addition to anticholinergic activity). Specifically, benztropine and its derivatives are also dopamine reuptake inhibitors.
So from the perspective that benztropine is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, i.e. a stimulant in the traditional sense, it would probably be a bad idea to use as a treatment for catatonia. If I remember right, its particular binding affinity is significant at the dopamine transporter.


How does one identify relevant variables when performing research on perception? Suppose, hypothetically, that I wanted to do a blind taste test into preference for Coke or Pepsi. I organize hundreds of volunteers and find that a certain group prefers one and another group the other.

As I work for some marketing company, they ask me to account for this. After all, they reason, preference for Coke vs Pepsi is not random.

Perhaps there's a socioeconomic explanation, perhaps it relates to gender, hormones, age or ethnicity. Who knows! There are hundreds of variables commonly studied in the academic community.

Even if I find a couple of variables that correlate, say hypothetically, BMI and employment status, I have no way to determine if those are "good" variables or if this is just a coincidence.

How are researchers in psych experiments trained to deal with this sort of scenario?

Researchers are trained to address this problem by using literature reviews to isolate the specific variables that should be of most interest. At the start of research you generally examine the knowns and unknowns in the particular area of interest, so as to determine the state of the art in that area. Once you know the state of the art you have a better idea of how to proceed with the research.

For example, if you found that something was known about your research area then you could use this literature to justify looking at a specific set of variables when examining the problem. This relevant prior literature need not have examined the exact same area as the problem you are looking at. For example, if you were looking at factors that influence preferences for coke and pepsi you could look at research that examined brand preferences, or even something more fundamental such as the factors that lead to positive beliefs and attitudes. This research would give you an idea as to which particular variables were most deserving of consideration.

Depending on the extent that you could argue that little was known about the particular problem,  you could also consider doing exploratory or descriptive research to attempt to identify or categorize the different variables involved. In this case you might use an interview to get some factors that set up your experiment and then use experiment to assess their relative impacts on the behaviour.


Do all types of synapses in the brain change based on spike-timing-dependent plasticity? Synapses likely change their strengths based on a form of spike-timing-dependent plasticity. Is this true for all types of synapses in all parts of the human brain? I wonder if there are also synapses with hard-wired connectivity, i.e. that do not depend on the activations of nearby neurons or do not change at all.

Probably not. STDP has mostly been demonstrated in excitatory glutamatergic neurons in the hippocampus. Considering all the other types of cells in the brain (dopaminergic, serotonergic, inhibitory, those located in cortical areas with closed plasticity windows those in the brain stem), it's erroneous to assume they all implement STDP like rules. That said, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head...


How to measure student activity, participation, tendency to ask questions, etc? We would like to compare students from different education systems on the following variables:

tendency to actively participate on lessons
tendency to ask questions
tendency and experience in presenting own opinion
etc.

Questions

What studies provide examples of measuring these variables?
What methods are typically used to answer questions related to these variables?
What survey papers provide a good starting point?

I recommend this one as it seems quite standardized and backed by many citations of it's use.  It does seem to focus a lot on psychopathology at times, but there are many different versions of it that many different countries have made.  I believe by studying these and adding in a few twists you can get the jist of why this has become such a widely accepted measure of child-age 16 measures of, well, alot of stuff.

It seems as if methods are already in place (even with instructions on how to interpret the results using common statistical software) to extrapolate almost anything you want/need based upon the questions here.

Thus, I think you're looking for the

STRENGTHS AND DIFFICULTIES QUESTIONNAIRE

(Their website is really, really helpful and to be fair I'm just copy and pasting most of it, lol.)  Btw, it's here: http://www.sdqinfo.org/a0.html

What is the SDQ?

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire about 3-16 year olds. It exists in several versions to meet the needs of researchers, clinicians and educationalists. Each version includes between one and three of the following components:

  A) 25 items on psychological attributes.

  All versions of the SDQ ask about 25 attributes, some positive and others negative.  These >25 items are divided between 5 scales:

  1) emotional symptoms (5 items)
  2) conduct problems (5 items)
  3) hyperactivity/inattention (5 items)
  4) peer relationship problems (5 items)
  5) prosocial behaviour (5 items)

  Note: 1) to 4) added together to generate a total  difficulties score  (based on 20 items)

  The same 25 items are included in questionnaires for completion by the parents or teachers >of 4-16 year olds (Goodman, 1997).

  A slightly modified informant-rated version for the parents or nursery teachers of 3 (and >4) year olds. 22 items are identical, the item on reflectiveness is softened, and 2 items >on antisocial behaviour are replaced by items on oppositionality.
  Questionnaires for self-completion by adolescents ask about the same 25 traits, though the >wording is slightly different (Goodman et al, 1998). This self-report version is suitable >for young people aged around 11-16, depending on their level of understanding and >literacy.
  In low-risk or general population samples, it may be better to use an alternative three->subscale division of the SDQ into 'internalising problems' (emotional+peer symptoms, 10 >items), 'externalising problems' (conduct+hyperactivity symptoms, 10 items) and the >prosocial scale (5 items) ( Goodman et al, 2010).

  B) An impact supplement

  Several two-sided versions of the SDQ are available with the 25 items on strengths and >difficulties on the front of the page and an impact supplement on the back. These extended >versions of the SDQ ask whether the respondent thinks the young person has a problem, and >if so, enquire further about chronicity, distress, social impairment, and burden to >others.  This provides useful additional information for clinicians and researchers with >an interest in psychiatric caseness and the determinants of service use (Goodman, 1999).

  C) Follow-up questions

  The follow-up versions of the SDQ include not only the 25 basic items and the impact >question, but also two additional follow-up questions for use after an intervention. Has >the intervention reduced problems? Has the intervention helped in other ways, e.g. making >the problems more bearable? To increase the chance of detecting change, the follow-up >versions of the SDQ ask about 'the last month', as opposed to 'the last six months or this >school year', which is the reference period for the standard versions. Follow-up versions >also omit the question about the chronicity of problems.

Handouts:

You can find several different versions of the survey here:

http://www.sdqinfo.org/py/sdqinfo/b3.py?language=Englishqz(USA)

Scoring:

http://www.sdqinfo.org/py/sdqinfo/c0.py

Citations from SDQ Website Listed for Convenience, Title Scannability, and to Show the Scope of Who, Where, and How the SDQ has been used:

  Goodman R (1999) The extended version of the
  Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire as a guide to child
  psychiatric caseness and consequent burden. Journal of Child
  Psychology and Psychiatry, 40, 791-801.  Goodman R, Scott S
  (1999) Comparing the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and the
  Child Behavior Checklist: Is small beautiful? Journal of Abnormal
  Child Psychology, 27, 17-24.  Smedje H, Broman J-E, Hetta J,
  von Knorring A-L (1999) Psychometric properties of a Swedish version
  of the "Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire". European Child and
  Adolescent Psychiatry, 8, 63-70.  Goodman R, Ford T, Simmons
  H, Gatward R, Meltzer H (2000) Using the Strengths and Difficulties
  Questionnaire (SDQ) to screen for child psychiatric disorders in a
  community sample. British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 534-539.
   Goodman R, Renfrew D, Mullick M (2000) Predicting type of
  psychiatric disorder from Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire
  (SDQ) scores in child mental health clinics in London and Dhaka.
  European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 9, 129-134.  Klasen
  H, Woerner W, Wolke D, Meyer R, Overmeyer S, Kaschnitz W, Rothenberger
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   Koskelainen M, Sourander A, Kaljonen A (2000) The Strengths
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  adolescents. European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 9, 277-284.
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  Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 40, 1337-1345.  Mullick MSI,
  Goodman R (2001) Questionnaire screening for mental health problems in
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  18 month follow up. BMJ, 324, 1496-7.  Mathai J, Anderson P,
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  Advancement of Mental Health, 1, Issue 3.  ,  (Zusammenfassung) Cury CR,
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  study of school children in Ribeirao Preto. Rev Bras Psiquiatr, 25,
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  evidence for its reliability and validity in a community sample of
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  informants? European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 13 Suppl 2,
  II17-24.  Becker A, Woerner W, Hasselhorn M, Banaschewski T,
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  clinical sample. European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 13 Suppl 2,
  II11-6.  Goodman R, Ford T, Corbin T, Meltzer H (2004) Using
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  algorithm to screen looked-after children for psychiatric disorders.
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   Hawes DJ, Dadds MR (2004) Australian data and psychometric
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  and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 38, 644-651.
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  a big difference to mean scores: a cautionary tale. Social Psychiatry
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  evaluating effectiveness in child mental health interventions. British
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  Greek adolescents. Ann Gen Psychiatry, 8, 20.  Goodman A,
  Goodman R (2009) Strengths and difficulties questionnaire as a
  dimensional measure of child mental health. Journal of the American
  Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 48, 400-3.
  Janssens A, Deboutte D (2009) Screening for psychopathology in child
  welfare: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) compared
  with the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA).
  European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 18, 691-700.
  Shahrivar Z, Tehrani-Doost M, Pakbaz B, Rezaie A, Ahmadi F (2009)
  Normative data and psychometric properties of the parent and teacher
  versions of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) in an
  Iranian community sample. J Res Med Sci, 14, 69-77.  Syed EU,
  Hussein SA, Azam SI, Khan AG (2009) Comparison of Urdu version of
  Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Child Behaviour
  Check List (CBCL) amongst primary school children in Karachi. J Coll
  Physicians Surg Pak, 19, 375-9.  Goodman A, Lamping DL,
  Ploubidis GB (2010) When to use broader internalising and
  externalising subscales instead of the hypothesised five subscales on
  the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ): data from British
  parents, teachers and children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology,
  38, 1179-1191.  Goodman A, Goodman R (2011) Population mean
  scores predict child mental disorder rates: validating SDQ prevalence
  estimators in Britain. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52,
  100-8.  Goodman A, Heiervang E, Fleitlich-Bilyk B, Alyahri A,
  Patel V, Mullick MS, Slobodskaya H, Dos Santos DN, Goodman R (2011)
  Cross-national differences in questionnaires do not necessarily
  reflect comparable differences in disorder prevalence. Social
  Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.  Richter J, Sagatun A,
  Heyerdahl S, Oppedal B, Roysamb E (2011) The Strengths and
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Many times this test is used in an attempt to discover if there are any psychopathologies in a certain sample or group of children/adolescents.  Don't let that fool you though - look at the sample survey sheet - you'll recognize that this can be used for nearly any purpose - which is part of the genius in it's design - which I believe you'll recognize.  Look at the above research titles to see what sort of studies this type of survey has been used in - it has a large scope and there have been a wide variety of instances where this test has been applied.


Are good students truly good at all things? Source: 'Putting a Bolder Face on Google' By LAURA M. HOLSON

  At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy League schools, whom she wanted to meet as part of a program to foster in-house talent. In essence, math is used to solve a human problem: How do you predict whether an employee has the potential for success?

  A scrum of executives sit around a table, laptops in front of them, as
  they sort through résumés, college transcripts and quarterly reviews.
  The conversation is unemotional, at times a little brutal.

  One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms.
  [Marissa] Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.”

  Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a
  supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her
  manager’s expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her
  rating hasn’t changed in several quarters.

What does research indicate about this claim? For example, can a preeminent literature or law student truly struggle in math, and vice versa, or is this just a common excuse/pretext? What branch of psychology does my question here concern?

I would say that the reasoning behind a statement such as "good students are good in all things" is not one concerning the possibly wide variety of interests and abilities but one of emotional stability and general life competency.

No one in their right mind would doubt that different people are interested in different things and therefore not equally motivated to learn all skills and all knowledge. Most people would probably also agree that not everyone is equally talented at everything. Even the best students can be divided into those that excel at one topic and those that excel at another. There are rare individuals who excel in a lot of areas, but usually the best violinist is not also the best physicist, etc. So while "good" students are probably "good" in most areas, they are not the best everywhere. This makes the statement in question less severe, allowing us to rephrase it as:

"In most individuals, there appears to be a correlation between performance in different areas. Only very rarely is one person a top achiever in one field and a total looser in another."

The reason for this is that performance is, as we view "intelligence" today, not the result of an area-specific talent for, say, language versus maths, but that people differ in such characteristics as memory capaciy or processing speed, and that all skills depend on all of these physiological capacities. You need good memory for both language and math, you need processing speed for music as well as for physics. Therefore, someone who is good at maths is potentially also good at most everything else.

But more important than that all performance in all areas is based on the same physiological requirements is that the statement in question is, as I see it, not about ability at all, but about mental health.

What that woman is saying is that a person successful at life knows that good marks in school or college are important and has the will to get those good marks. Consistent good marks show not superior ability alone, but that a person has the emotional stability, familial support, and the physiological requirements to be successful in their lives in general.

If someone does not have straight As, with maybe a rare B, then you can almost always assume that they (a) are not good, or (b) have personal problems, or (c) are not interested. You want neither in an applicant. In that sense, a "good" (as in "good for our company") employee is (at least) "good" (that is, B) everywhere.


Do the Jungian Cognitive Functions/ Processes really exist? Background
Many of us must have come across personality theories like MBTI which use part of Carl Jung's concepts to make a theoretical system used to divide people into types. For example, MBTI says that if the person is not neurotic or something like that, then he/she must fall into one among the 16 personality types that have been defined. Over simplification of the MBTI over the Internet has made the base of this theory unknown to many people, but talking about that in this question helps nobody.
MBTI as taken by psychologists, seems to be centered more around the concept of Functions more than the four letter model. Typing a person is done generally after recognizing their Dominant function. Some psychologists seem to have made their own different models about these Cognitive Functions (like John Beebe and Lenore Thomson for example). Some claiming 8 exist in the human Psyche, and some claiming 4 exist, some saying they gradually develop, some opposing the views and so on...
Recently, I have come across a Youtube video in which a researcher claims to have made this theory scientifically observable and researchable - and seeing that this video has been made at Google Talks makes it believable.
I think Jung's concepts - which are based on observation, introspection, Energy flow etc. seem to be somewhat like Pseudoscience to any scientific mind. However, after watching this video I started to wonder whether what he says is really true or not?
Additional Material

An extract from Carl Jung's Psychological Types where Jung speaks about these types.

An online forum where each personality type profile exists as a sticky thread in its own subforum. These profiles use what seems like a modified version of the Cognitive Functions concept.

EDIT: What Dario Nardi speaks about in the video is essentially an outline of what he published in his book. I have found a forum post where a summary of material he published in his book has been written. Please take a look at it if you don't have time to watch the whole video. Here's the link to the presentation he shows in the video (a pdf file).

Questions

Short version: Is the evidence quoted in the above source (the forum link) a valid evidence to support a concept like Cognitive Functions as described by Jung?

Long version: There are two main things in the above source (the forum link) that I want someone to confirm as a proper evidence.

Firstly, as quoted by the source above, Nardi speaks about various regions in Neo Cortex region where he placed these EEG sensors. From what I have read, it seems that he mapped the regions to some activities.

Here's what he says about these regions is like:

Fp1 "Chief Judge"  (is used when/to)

Provide a reason

Decide between options

Detect an error

Writing all of them here would make this question look like a book, but I want to know whether all this is as rigid as it looks or not. I want to know where Nardi is making a mistake in this research. (There could be some activities which might have been mapped wrongly, or those which have deeper mechanisms in brain rather than just in Neocortex region.)
Secondly, I will not be long here, but there is a similar part where he speaks about various patterns (in regions of brain "lighting up") he observed during this observation. Although asking for an evidence to this would be basically an extension to the first question, but my question here would be whether such patterns (not necessarily the same ones) have ever been classified/suggested in literature already?
Lastly, (this might be rhetoric question) if the answer to the above question is affirmative, Does this imply that theories like MBTI are really valid, and that there are really types among people's brains? (Nardi tried to map those patterns into types of people, as I said their dominant function)

The research done by Dardio Nardi (the researcher you're referring to) clearly shows that something is there. Although, he would have no way of knowing as to whether his samples were of the particular type, or if what's being demonstrated really demonstrates use of that particular cognitive function. E.g doing something logical doesn't necessarily mean you're 'using' Ti.

I do believe we have innate, instinctive preferences and can classify them into types as such, but I truly doubt that Jung's work would be 100% accurate. Even Jung was hesitant to be exacting in his understanding of the psyche - which lead him to leave a lot of holes in his model.

Myers and Briggs filled those holes with many assumptions - which is why the functions are a far better application to finding somebody's 'type'.

So yes, I would say that they do exist. But probably not exactly in the way they were described by Jung. Hopefully people begin to think critically about this, then maybe we can actually see some results.


Bias by which we tend to accept vague descriptions of ourselves There's an effective strategy employed by horoscopes and "psychics" where they say vague statements like "You like being with friends but you value your time alone"; statements that basically "cover their bases" in multiple extremes and thus apply to just about anyone.

As a typical example in high school our Psychology teacher gave us a "handwriting evaluation" which gave our "personality types" based on our handwriting; the results were just random statements. Everyone got the same statements but most of the class claimed their results were accurate.

What is the name of these types of statements or the bias by which people tend to believe them?

This is referred to as The Forer Effect after Bertram Forer.
Wikipedia describes it accurately:

  The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum's observation that "we've got something for everyone") is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, and some types of personality tests.

Forer gave the results of a "personality test" to a group of his students composed of random vague statements compiled from horoscopes. Students were asked to rate it's accuracy on a scale from 0 to 5, and the mean score was 4.26.

Forer discussed these findings and the "experiment" in his article The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility.


Does schizophrenia cause a loss of intelligence? Does having schizophrenia cause a loss of intelligence (as measured by IQ tests)? How does present research comment on this connection, if it exists?

Furthermore, is it possible to recover from this decline in IQ? If so, under what conditions?

Regarding schizophrenia and loss of IQ:

I don't know how much we can say about the 'loss' of IQ in schizophrenia patients. If anything, it appears to me that a decrease in overall IQ is augmented by the cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia. This isn't to say that you can't increase your IQ with certain interventions, which I will touch on briefly in a second.

But first, understand that IQ depends on a number of neuroanatomical factors. Among them is volume of grey and white matter in the brain, which is notably decreased at an accelerated pace in early-onset schizophrenic patients.

General intelligence (g) is also highly correlated with fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence generally correlates with measures of abstract reasoning and puzzle solving, whereas crystallized intelligence correlates with abilities that depend on knowledge and experience, such as vocabulary, general information, and analogies (see: Factor structure). Administered IQ tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) are particularly concerned with measuring fluid intelligence. For this reason, a deficit in one usually mandates a deficit in overall IQ.

Fluid intelligence is more susceptible to brain injury, and in particular appears to be affected by both frontal lobe damage and deficits in working memory. There is evidence that suggests that patients with schizophrenia have dysregulated prefrontal cortices among other frontal lobe abnormalities. Furthermore, schizophrenia patients often have abnormal deficits in working memory. For these reasons, schizophrenia may be associated with impairments in cognitive / executive functioning and fluid intelligence, thus lending towards a lower overall IQ.

That being said, there are studies that have not found conclusive evidence that suggests a direct link between schizophrenia and low IQ in adulthood (though there may be some link in childhood).

Regarding the recovery of lost IQ:

Medications used to treat cognitive deficits (such as those used to treat ADHD) have repeatedly shown an increase in overall IQ score after long-term use, so I am thinking that medication would be the best route for IQ recovery. Note that this effect does not apply to otherwise high-functioning individuals. In other words, those without cognitive impairment tend to react to psychostimulant medication in ways that are wholly negative and harmful.

I also mentioned above that there is no clear link between adulthood schizophrenia and low IQ, though there is a 7-8 average point decrease found in children. This is similarly consistent with other neurodevelopmental disorders, and may be related to the malleability in the brain. In other words, time and dedication (possibly including brain training, though there is controversy surrounding its benefits) can help restore cognitive abilities that may be reduced or damaged due to schizophrenia.

On a related note, it is worth mentioning that there is a modern-day theory going around surrounding the topic of latent inhibition and schizophrenia. The assumption is that schizophrenia is linked to low latent inhibition (with LI referring to the ability to ignorant irrelevant sensory stimuli), and this persistent cognitive overload leads to psychosis, difficulty in focusing on cognitively-intensive tasks, and occasional creative genius. This effect appears to be reduced in patients who seek medical treatment for their schizophrenia.

  With human subjects, there is evidence that acute, non-medicated schizophrenics show reduced LI compared to chronic, medicated schizophrenics and to healthy subjects, while there is no difference in the amount of LI in the latter two groups. [....] In summary, the basic LI phenomenon represents some output of a selective attention process that results in learning to ignore irrelevant stimuli. It has become an important tool for understanding information processing in general, as well as attentional dysfunctions in schizophrenia, and it has implications for a variety of practical problems.


How is the term "physiological measurement" defined? Does the measurement have to be subconscious?

Can measurement such as eye-tracking be counted as physiological measurement? (I thought it is because of its relatively subconscious nature until I saw this.)

Physiology is a very broad term that includes neuroscience:

  Physiology is the scientific study of the functions and mechanisms
  which work within a living system.

Within the cognitive sciences, physiology typically refers to non-behavioral inputs and outputs of the nervous system (including parts of the brain), but physiological measures may include behavior:

  Physiological responses also can be measured via instruments that read
  bodily events such as heart rate change, electrodermal activity (EDA),
  muscle tension, and cardiac output. Many indices are part of modern
  psychophysiology, including brain waves (electroencephalography, EEG),
  fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), electrodermal activity
  (a standardized term encompassing skin conductance response, SCR, and
  galvanic skin response, GSR), cardiovascular measures (heart rate, HR;
  beats per minute, BPM; heart rate variability, HRV; vasomotor
  activity), muscle activity (electromyography, EMG), electrogastrogram
  (EGG) changes in pupil diameter with thought and emotion
  (pupillometry), eye movements, recorded via the electro-oculogram
  (EOG) and direction-of-gaze methods, and cardiodynamics, recorded via
  impedance cardiography.


Is there a term for behaving to the opposite extreme of a way one has been forced to behave? I believe I'm having so much trouble figuring this out because I'm not sure what question to ask. As a few examples,

A child of an extremely religious family engaging heavily in behaviors considered unacceptable under their family's beliefs.

Someone who hates their career in an extremely analytical field switching to an extremely creative one (e.g. a software developer becoming a fashion photographer).

Reaction formation seemed to fit the bill, but that involves an extreme reaction to an unacceptable impulse rather than chronic exposure to a stressor. Compensation also doesn't seem to apply because that's a reaction to a self-identified weakness or deficiency.

The pattern of behavior you are describing is called psychological reactance.

Reactance as a concept has been formalized in Jack Brehm's work in the 1960s, who has proposed a Theory of Psychological Reactance (1966). The theory posits that threats to personal freedom cause motivational arousal directed at reestablishing freedom. Consequently, the attractiveness of those behavioral choices that are eliminated or threatened can be increased.

A textbook example is a study (Brehm, Stires, Sensenig, & Shaban, 1966) in which students were promised to choose one of several music recordings. When one of the alternatives was taken away, it was perceived to be more attractive (but only when the students had the expectation that they could decide freely).

Since then, the concept has been applied to a wide variety of settings such as the role of eliminated freedom in consumer behavior (e.g., Clee & Wicklund, 1980), the persuasive effects of promotional health messages (e.g., Dillard & Shen, 2005), or patient noncompliance in therapeutic settings (e.g., Fogarty, 1997).

References

Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. New York: Academic Press.

Brehm, J. W., Stires, L. K., Sensenig, J., & Shaban, J. (1966). The attractiveness of an eliminated choice alternative. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 301–313. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(66)90086-2

Clee, M. A., & Wicklund, R. A. (1980). Consumer behavior and psychological reactance. Journal of Consumer Research, 6, 389–405.

Dillard, J. P., & Shen, L. (2005). On the nature of reactance and its role in persuasive health communication. Communication Monographs, 72, 144–168. doi:10.1080/03637750500111815

Fogarty, J. S. (1997). Reactance theory and patient noncompliance. Social Science & Medicine, 45, 1277–1288. doi:10.1016/S0277-9536(97)00055-5


Most common cognitive biases? I'm an amateur student of cognitive biases and psychological traps and have been reading some of the work of Kahneman, Tversky, Gilovich et al. along with more popular books like Cialdini's "Influence."  Has any work has been done on which of the cognitive biases/shortcomings are the most prevalent and widespread?

In layman's terms, I'm trying to answer the question: which behavioral traps are the most common?  I'm aware that this is a loaded question in that different sociocultural influences can have a huge impact on what is "common".
Any pointers much appreciated!  Thanks.

This question is not answerable without having a measure of what the most common day-to-day scenarios are. However, I can try a guess: since most people interact in a public, anonymous setting on a daily basis, I would think the fundamental attribution error is most probable. This is especially true while driving -- "did that idiot just cut me off?!"

However, my estimation of fundamental attribution error as the most common cognitive bias may itself be an instance of availability heuristic.


Converting Big 5 questionnaire data to Big 5 scores using R I'll preface this with I have no knowledge of psychology, but my goal is to produce some graphics dealing with correlations, and one example that I had thought of is how the Big 5 personality traits correlate with each other. I came across the R dataset ``qgraph" which has the results of a 240 item questionnaire (48 questions per Big 5 trait), but this only gives me the responses to questions. I want to be able to aggregate the questionnaire data in such a way that I can accurately assign Big 5 trait percentile scores to each respondent; however, it is not at all clear to me how this should be done. What is the process of taking questionnaire data and getting percentile values for each of the Big 5 traits for the respondents? Alternatively, if there's a dataset that already include percentile scores for the respondents, I'd be interested in that.

Here are some resources that will show you how to score the Big 5 using R.

The main function that I like is called scoreItems in the psych package. It handles item reversal, imputation, and multiple scales. It will also give you things like alphas and item total correlations.

William Revelle has this tutorial:
http://personality-project.org/r/psych/HowTo/scoring.pdf

I have this video ( which has an associated github repository):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFFW5sK3Bhk

See in particular, this bit of the code: https://github.com/jeromyanglim/score-tests-with-r-exercise/blob/master/finished-analysis/munge/01-munge.R

sc <- scoreItems(meta.bfi[,v$scales], ccases[,meta.bfi$name])
ccases[,colnames(sc$scores)] <- sc$scores


Is the Resting Potential and Action Potential Thresholds the same across all neurons in a network? Does the action potential and resting potential of a given neuron differ from another neuron within the same network or is it constant? If not what determines and affects these potentials and can they change overtime? If so what factor contribute to this change and how?

In short no. The speed at which and Action Potential (AP) occurs, resting membrane potential, and threshold to AP all vary across types of neutron. See the graph below (Bean, 2007)

The reasons for these differences are various, as you will see if you read the referenced article, which I highly recommend as everything I write from here is based upon it. The main factors influencing AP differences are firstly that the classical AP diagram is based on an isolate squid giant axon (not neuron) in a superficial environment.

When we investigate neurons in mammals we investigate them relative to surrounding neurons, which influences chemoelectric potentials and subsequently APs. Furthermore neurons aren't uniform in shape which also has an influence. Secondly voltage gating varies within and between ions gates in the neural membranes for instance "the kinetics of sodium currents differ in detail between different types of neurons62 and, remarkably, even between different regions of the same neuron, with sodium channels in hippocampal mossy fibre boutons (formed by the axons of granule cells of the dentate gyrus) inactivating twice as fast as the sodium channels in the granule cell sonata" Bean (2007). Potassium channels appear to lack uniformity as well. See below for difference in voltages across ion channels between neurons.

And there are other factors as well of course, such as frequency of activation influencing voltage required to depolarise. Depolarisation rates, and differences between fast spiking neurons, such as purkinji, and others.

Overall the brain is not uniform, despite what you may learn or have learnt in text books in classes. This is done to ease learning, can you imagine trying to learnt this without the basics? However this fundamental research has important implications for neural imaging, psychopharmatuics, and of course cognitive processes such as speed of processing etc.

In case you can't access the reference...
The referenced journal article is a brilliant review in nature about this exact topic, its called "The action potential in mammalian central neurons" By Bruce P Bean


Positive and negative reinforcement and punishment effectiveness According to Skinner, positive reinforcement is superior to punishment in altering behavior.

  As Skinner discussed, positive reinforcement is superior to punishment
  in altering behavior. He maintained that punishment was not simply the
  opposite of positive reinforcement; positive reinforcement results in
  lasting behavioral modification, whereas punishment changes behavior
  only temporarily and presents many detrimental side effects.

From the different combinations of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment, which has been shown to be the most effective in behaviour modification?
Also, does combining stimuli like positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, become more effective?

In a two-alternative forced choice task with Mongolian Gerbils, Illango et al. (2010) compared the effectiveness of appetitive, aversive, and a combination of appetitive and aversive reinforcers. They conclude that the combination of appetitive and aversive reinforcers led

to the highest speed of acquisition
to maximum possible performance
and delayed extinction

Note, however, that this does not have to be an effect of the reinforcers, but might also be an effect of the informational feedback. In a study on human category learning, Ashby & O'Brian (2007) compared the effectiveness of positive and negative feedback (i.e., not reinforcers) in a two-alternative forced choice task. They also found that a combination of positive and negative feedback results in the best performance.

References

Ashby FG, O'Brien JB. (2007) The effects of positive versus negative feedback on information-integration category learning. Percept Psychophys 69(6):865-78. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18018967

Ilango A, Wetzel W, Scheich H, Ohl FW. (2010) The combination of appetitive and aversive reinforcers and the nature of their interaction during auditory learning. Neuroscience. 166(3):752-62. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20080152


What motivates someone to key a Tesla Background
Over the last few months there have been multiple reports of random strangers keying Teslas.

I am interested in understanding the mental state of of the person carry out the act? I have already read the following article https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/05/what-motivates-someone-to-key-a-tesla/ which is quite insightful . But I am looking for a generic predisposition that plagues these peoples mind - Are there any day to day examples of the same ? Do we all have these predisposition though of varying degrees (examples) ?

How can one change their mentality to not fall prey to performing these actions?

I recommend looking at the literature on aggressive behavior, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggression. There are many potential causes for such an act. In terms of generic predispositions, consider personality types (e.g., low Agreeableness), but don't overlook the importance of context and culture (e.g., high wealth inequality).

As to the final question, self-help questions are out of scope for this forum.


How are related self-confidence and self-esteem? What is the difference between self-confidence and self-esteem?
Is it that self-confidence is more about feeling secure concerning one's own capacity to address problems, while self-esteem is more about a global appreciation of one-self?
Are they separate, and to what extent? Is it possible to have high self-esteem but low self-confidence, and low self-esteem but high-self-confidence?
I guess that normally the two are correlated

Technically, this is an English Language question really rather than about psychology or neuroscience.
Esteem is about respect and admiration. See https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/esteem
Therefore, someone who has self-esteem respects themselves and admires their achievements.
So to expand on that, if you have self-esteem, that helps to have self-confidence which leads to a sense of security in an emotional sense.