With psychological projection originating in psychoanalysis, is the concept currently considered valid? In a recent accepted and highly up voted answer by one of our respected users, psychological projection as a defense mechanism was brought forward as the relevant terminology/explanation of what the OP was looking for.

According to wikipedia, the concept of psychological projection seems to have originated from psychoanalysis.
Within research, much of Freud's work is now considered pseudoscience, to the degree that we even had a discussion on whether or not questions on psychoanalysis should be allowed on this site.

Since Freud, has the concept of psychological projection carried over into modern science?
Does additional evidence obtained by modern science mostly support or oppose this concept?

There are several important aspects to your question.

Firstly it would be good to know what you would understand by modern science. Psychoanalysis is clearly outside the range of physics, mathematics or computer science. If you look deeper into it - so is an awful lot, if not all, of positivistic psychologies (especially when applied to psychological therapies) that are currently considered a valid field of study at university level.

What psychoanalysis is first and foremost, in my opinion, it is a clinical discipline. Psychoanalysis is not something that you can learn from books or Wikipedia; there is not even such a thing as a universally recognised textbook of psychoanalysis. But there are such textbooks in biochemistry, physics and mathematics. Furthermore - writings from various psychoanalytic authors tend to look at similar presentations to a significant extent differently.

Hence the answer to your question is rather complicated. The concept of projection is alive and well within the field. It is part of the language of psychoanalysis; language that is being used to describe human experience and as such it has a clear face validity. It is a term often also used within psychiatry and in practice of non-psychoanalytic psychologies. On the other hand presence or absence of the phenomenon of projection is equally clearly a subjective decision. Here your expectations of what modern science is are important.

Lastly I would like to mention that insights from biology and neuroscience do matter. They are very important and do add to our understanding of human brain and mind. But as for practical aspects of psychological therapies of any kind that I know of they are relevant mostly as a tool for triangulation between biological descriptions and psychological. When I first started in this rather complicated field I had an expectation of the  great importance of neuroscience to the practice of psychological therapies. The insights are important, of course, but not really for the practice except as far as they change what the therapist thinks of the human condition. At least for now and, sadly, I cannot see it being more than that for the next decades. And please do not get me wrong I firmly believe that psychoanalysis itself would benefit from more research, perhaps especially on the information that is provided by the patients.

One could say then, of course, does this archaic practice of psychoanalysis or therapies derived from it matter? Well, it does matter a lot, the moment you or your relative develop serious enough psychological problems to think that life is not worth living or you feel trapped in problems that just seem to hit you again and again. Depending on your predilection you may seek phrmacological help and/or psychological.

In terms of references I could offer several kinds: there are studies about what kind of psychological therapies professionals choose for themselves; there are  outcome studies for various psychological therapies. Then there are articles directly on the subject of psychoanalysis as a scientific theory. None could however provide a direct and valid answer to your question.

It seems that your question is sparked by Arnon Weinberg's answer to the question: Is there a term that describes the behaviour of a person which transfers personal problems to other people and tries to solve them there? That question describes a clinically defined problem and Weinberg's answer is clinically valid. I think it may be relevant to direct also to the famous stackoverflow answer that starts with: You can't parse [X]HTML with regex.


To what extent is control over when a substance is used relevant to addiction? For example, let's say someone uses X amount of heroin a week, and no more than Y a day. If somehow their arm is connected to a device that randomly (unpredictably, but within their "waking leisure hours") administers heroin at no more than Y a day and X per week, would users feel as addicted or dependent on the substance? Or would the loss of control, not even necessarily being able to look forward to using the substance every day or at a certain time or after certain events or feelings, make it not nearly as satisfying or addictive?

This is a tough question to answer definitively. I won't address heroin specifically but rather drugs of abuse more generally since a lot of the addictive patterns are the same and heroin is less often studied in the lab.

I am not aware of studies that specifically use the protocol you are describing in human subjects; although you might be able to make some inference based on drug seeking behavior after hospital administration of opiates, for example.

However, in animal studies, drug sensitization protocols have been used where animals are given injections of some drug, and later are allowed to self-administer the drug. Typically, animals who were previously given injections of the drug are quick to develop self-administration habits compared to unexposed animals. It's hard to ask an animal what they "feel" and this may not be the same as "feeling addicted/dependent" but at least when they have an opportunity to self-administer they are more prone to take the opportunity.

This effect is sensitive to the particulars of the experiment, though: Higher self-administration doses don't show the effect (because undosed animals also quickly develop a habit). Limited exposure tends to create less or absent sensitization. Sensitization effects tend to be easier to detect when animals have to work harder for subsequent doses in a progressive ratio paradigm; on a fixed ratio paradigm the differences are minor or non-existent.

A great experiment to most directly address your question would be to dose one animal according to the self-administration patterns of another and compare them on addictive behaviors; however, one difficulty in such a comparison is that the animals that haven't been dosing themselves still need to learn how to dose themselves. I am not aware of a study that has done this but I hope if it has been done someone else can point it out!

Ferrario, C. R., Gorny, G., Crombag, H. S., Li, Y., Kolb, B., & Robinson, T. E. (2005). Neural and behavioral plasticity associated with the transition from controlled to escalated cocaine use. Biological psychiatry, 58(9), 751-759.

Lett, B. T. (1989). Repeated exposures intensify rather than diminish the rewarding effects of amphetamine, morphine, and cocaine. Psychopharmacology, 98(3), 357-362.

Lorrain, D. S., Arnold, G. M., & Vezina, P. (2000). Previous exposure to amphetamine increases incentive to obtain the drug: long-lasting effects revealed by the progressive ratio schedule. Behavioural brain research, 107(1-2), 9-19.

Mendrek, A., Blaha, C. D., & Phillips, A. G. (1998). Pre-exposure of rats to amphetamine sensitizes self-administration of this drug under a progressive ratio schedule. Psychopharmacology, 135(4), 416-422.


Is mapping sound frequencies to the vertical axis universal? Shrill notes are said to be "high", and rumbles are said to be "low".  Humans seem to metaphorically map frequency to the vertical axis, and in the cultures that I know of, high frequency is considered "up".

Is this a universal phenomenon? Are there any cultures that map it upside-down, or in a completely different way? (For example, smaller objects tend to produce higher pitches. Are there any cultures that say that a pitch is "small" instead of "high"?)
Does this convention pre-date the scientific understanding of sound waves?
If it is universal (or nearly so), is there any neurological hard-wiring that would cause that mapping?

Humans technically don't perceive frequencies, they perceive pitch. According to Wikipedia:

  the idiom relating vertical height to sound pitch is shared by most languages.

citing a 1930 article by Pratt, which in turn says that:

  Stumpf has found that adjectives meaning high and low (or words closely related in meaning) have been applied to tones in almost every known language.[2]  But why should tones be characterized as high or low? Do these characteristics refer to differences in spatial height and depth? The answer to this second question has been almost without exception in the negative. A high tone does not mean a tone which is high in space. The phrase is merely figurative, and must be accounted for in terms of secondary criteria such as, e.g., the apparent localization of high vocal tones in the head and low ones in the chest.  The composer Berlioz makes sport of such explanations and reminds his readers that high and low tones for the pianist lie in the horizontal directions of right and left and that the violoncellist must reach downward to produce high tones, and suggests that those composers of opera who use descending passages for a person falling downstairs have stupidly transferred to the tones the arbitrary downward character of the printed notes on the staff. And yet Stumpf, convinced that there can be no intrinsic height and depth in tones, has felt obliged to argue that here again some associative mechanism, strangely obscure and elusive, has been at work. Even Wundt was forced to agree with Stumpf in calling these terms metaphorical when applied to tones [3], and most psychologists who have given the matter any thought have expressed similar views [4].

  [2]:   C. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, 1883, I, 192 ff.

  [3]:   W. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 1910, 11, 78.

  [4]:   J. Redfield, Music: a Science and an Art, 1928, 42 ff.

All these sources are pretty dated alas.

There are however some newer papers on this; e.g. Fernandez-Prieto et al. (2017) which do qualify such statements, e.g.:

  Higher frequency and louder sounds are associated with higher positions whereas lower frequency
  and quieter sounds are associated with lower locations. In English, ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ are used to
  label pitch, loudness, and spatial verticality. By contrast, different words are preferentially used, in
  Catalan and Spanish, for pitch (high: ‘‘agut/agudo’’; low: ‘‘greu/grave’’) and for loudness/verticality
  (high: ‘‘alt/alto’’; low: ‘‘baix/bajo’’). Thus, English and Catalan/Spanish differ in the spatial
  connotations for pitch. To analyze the influence of language on these crossmodal associations, a
  task was conducted in which English and Spanish/Catalan speakers had to judge whether a tone
  was higher or lower (in pitch or loudness) than a reference tone. The response buttons were
  located at crossmodally congruent or incongruent positions with respect to the probe tone.
  Crossmodal correspondences were evidenced in both language groups. However, English
  speakers showed greater effects for pitch, suggesting an influence of linguistic background.

They also cite an older review paper (Cassanto, 2013) which highlights a similar studies (co-authored by Cassanto) on Dutch vs Farsi:

  Like English, Dutch describes pitches as ‘high’ (hoog) or ‘low’ (laag),
  but this is not the only possible spatial metaphor for pitch. In Farsi, high
  pitches are ‘thin’ (nāzok) and low pitches are ‘thick’ (koloft). Dutch and
  Farsi speakers’ performance on non-linguistic pitch reproduction tasks reflects
  these linguistic differences (Dolscheid, Shayan, Majid, and Casasanto
  2013). Participants were asked to reproduce the pitch of tones that they
  heard in the presence of irrelevant spatial information: lines that varied in
  their height (height interference task) or their thickness (thickness interference task). Dutch speakers’ pitch estimates showed stronger crossdimensional
  interference from spatial height, and Farsi speakers’ from the
  thickness of visually presented stimuli. This effect was not explained by
  differences in accuracy, or in musical training. When trained to talk about
  pitches using Farsi-like metaphors (e.g. a tuba sounds thicker than a flute)
  for 20-30 minutes, Dutch speakers’ performance on the non-linguistic
  thickness interference task became indistinguishable from native Farsi
  speakers’. Experience using one kind of spatial metaphor or another in language
  can have a causal influence on non-linguistic pitch representations. [...]

  infants as young as four months old are sensitive to the height-pitch mapping
  found in Dutch-speaking adults (but not in Farsi-speaking adults), and
  also to the thickness-pitch mapping found in Farsi-speaking adults (but not
  in Dutch-speaking adults; Dolscheid, Hunnius, Casasanto, and Majid 2012).
  There is no need, therefore, to posit that using linguistic metaphors causes
  people to construct these mappings de novo.

A somewhat similar paper on infants, perhaps with stronger claims is from Walker et al., 2010:

  Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaesthetic
  correspondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitched
  sounds induce visual images that are brighter, smaller, higher in space, and sharper than those induced by lower pitched sounds.
  Claims that neonatal perception is synaesthetic imply that such correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception. To
  date, the youngest children in whom such correspondences have been confirmed with any certainty were 2- to 3-year-olds.
  We examined preferential looking to assess 3- to 4-month-old preverbal infants’ sensitivity to the correspondences linking
  auditory pitch to visuospatial height and visual sharpness. The infants looked longer at a changing visual display when this was
  accompanied by a sound whose changing pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with these correspondences. This is
  the strongest indication to date that synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception.

Cassanto and colleagues also develop a Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT) according to which

  correlational mental metaphors develop in two stages, the second of which may extend throughout the lifetime.
  The mental metaphors that adults typically use are specific instances
  of more general families of mappings. These families may be evident in
  behavior from infancy, and reflect regularities in humans’ experiences of
  the physical and social world, many of which may be universal. As children
  are exposed to peculiar aspects of their languages, cultures, or even their
  own bodies, certain mappings from a given source-target family become
  strengthened through repeated use, which weakens ‘sibling’ mappings as a
  consequence. The result is that people tend to think in language-specific,
  culture-specific, or body-specific mental metaphors: Relativity emerges
  from universals. [...]

  One prediction of HMMT is that specific source-target mappings
  should be easy to activate via linguistic training so long as they are members
  of one of the families of source-target mappings encoded in our minds
  (over phylogenetic or ontogenetic time) on the basis of observable sourcetarget
  correspondences in the world. Mappings that are not members of a
  pre-linguistically established family (and that do not reflect correlations in
  our experience) should be relatively hard to activate via training, because
  these mappings would need to be created, not just strengthened.

  In a test of this prediction, Dutch speakers were trained to used a thickness-
  pitch mapping that is the reverse of the mapping found in Farsi, and in
  the natural world: thin=low and thick=high. These ‘reverse-Farsi’ trained
  participants received the same amount of training as the participants trained
  to use the Farsi-like mapping. Whereas Farsi-like training had a significant
  effect on participants’ nonlinguistic pitch representations, reverse-Farsi
  training had no effect (Dolscheid et al. 2013). Thus, brief linguistic experience
  caused participants to use the thickness-pitch mapping that reflects
  correlations between thickness and pitch in the world (and is evident in prelinguistic
  infants). Yet, the same amount of linguistic experience was not
  effective at instilling the opposite thickness-pitch mapping, which has no
  obvious experiential correlates, and is therefore not predicted to be among
  the pre-linguistically established space-pitch mappings.

That's referring to the same paper as the first citation in the previous quote. Oddly this experiment isn't summarized in the paper's abstract, but does appear in the paper (as Experiment 4). Cassanto has a free pdf of that paper as well.

A 2014 PNAS paper by Parise et al.
proposes that the low-high pitch metaphor has a natural basis in the elevation of the sources of such sounds in nature.


How does daily amount of sleep vary within and between healthy adults? I'm interested in research that has employed the following or similar research design:

Measure the daily amount of sleep
every day for an for an extended period (e.g., more than a month)
in a relatively large sample (e.g., $n > 100$) of "normal" healthy adults

This would give rise to sleep measurements on multiple days and for multiple individuals. Thus, we could define $y_{ij}$ as the amount of sleep of person $i$ on day $j$. Descriptive statistics could be calculated on the set of daily sleep measurements of person $i$ such as the mean and standard deviation. These within-person descriptive statistics could also be summarised at the group-level.

Questions

In general, what are the main descriptive statistics of such data?

More specifically, I'd be interested in knowing:

What is the mean of the within-person mean of daily amount of sleep?
What is the standard deviation of the within-person mean of daily amount of sleep?
What is the mean of the within-person standard deviation of daily amount of sleep?
What is the standard deviation of the within-persons standard deviation of daily amount of sleep?

Presumably such results are contingent on how sleep is defined and measured, as well as many other factors such as the nature of the target population. Thus, any comments about these factors would also be welcome.

Just a starting point.
Jean-Louis et al (2000) provide one sample of population adult sample using objective sleep measures. To quote the abstract

  Using Actillumes, we investigated whether self-reported sleep
  durations were indicative of a population decline in sleep duration.
  We also explored illumination and activity patterns. Methods: San
  Diego adults (n = 273, age range: 40–64) were recruited through random
  telephone calls and were monitored at home while engaging in usual
  daily routines. Results: Volunteers slept an average of 6.22 hours and
  received an average of 554 lux (environmental illumination). The
  timing of sleep, illumination, and activity occurred at 2:44, 12:57,
  and 13:43, respectively.

References

Jean-Louis, G., Kripke, D.F., Ancoli-Israel, S., Klauber, M.R. & Sepulveda, R.S. (2000). Sleep duration, illumination, and activity patterns in a population sample: effects of gender and ethnicity. Biological psychiatry, 47, 921-927.


What is the current status of tetrachromacy in humans? Tetrachromacy is a condition of having four colour channels. There is a hypothesis that some women posses 4 different types of cone cells (each with different opsin responsible for different absorption spectrum) and can process them.

Despite some initial research (e.g. Jameson et al.,
Richer color experience in observers with multiple photopigment opsin gene (2001)) I have found surprisingly little follow-ups.

What is the current status of tetrachromacy in humans? Is it sufficiently confirmed by the experiment, refuted or unresolved?

I am aware that among medical researchers positive 'deviations' can attract less attention than deficits or diseases. Moreover, they may be more prone to methodological mistakes as it is easier to measure deficits against standard criteria.

Jordan et al. (2010) tested humans that carry the genetic predisposition for having 4 classes of cone receptors. However, only one of their 24 subjects was able to discriminate three color dimensions, thus, demonstrated tetrachromacy.

  Jordan G, Deeb SS, Bosten JM, Mollon JD. (2010). The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy. Journal of Vision. 10(8):12. [Free PDF]

  Abstract

  Some 12% of women are carriers of the mild, X-linked forms of color vision deficiencies called "anomalous trichromacy." Owing to random X chromosome inactivation, their retinae must contain four classes of cone rather than the normal three; and it has previously been speculated that these female carriers might be tetrachromatic, capable of discriminating spectral stimuli that are indistinguishable to the normal trichromat. However, the existing evidence is sparse and inconclusive. Here, we address the question using (a) a forced-choice version of the Rayleigh test, (b) a test using multidimensional scaling to reveal directly the dimensionality of the participants' color space, and (c) molecular genetic analyses to estimate the X-linked cone peak sensitivities of a selected sample of strong candidates for tetrachromacy. Our results suggest that most carriers of color anomaly do not exhibit four-dimensional color vision, and so we believe that anomalous trichromacy is unlikely to be maintained by an advantage to the carriers in discriminating colors. However, 1 of 24 obligate carriers of deuteranomaly exhibited tetrachromatic behavior on all our tests; this participant has three well-separated cone photopigments in the long-wave spectral region in addition to her short-wave cone. We assess the likelihood that behavioral tetrachromacy exists in the human population.


Is there a disorder similar to dyscalculia but only for time/date arithmetic? (also memory) Something that might be used to describe an individual who:

can perform arithmetic at an advanced level (e.g. post graduate)
does not generally struggle with memory
can easily remember the relative ordering of past events
is young/not at an advanced age
struggles to perform basic calculations when the numbers represent units of time (e.g. "it is 6pm, what time will it be 5 hours from now?")
has difficulty reading an analogue clock
has difficulty remembering the year/date an event occurred
has difficulty remembering the current date/their age

Dyscalculia includes or at least is closely related to difficulty reading an analog clock, says Wikipedia citing a PhD thesis which I haven't checked myself. Also, without a citation this time, Wikipedia adds "Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early." General comorbidity with ADHD is also mentioned.

There are obscure forms of marginal dyslexia (there was a question here recently), so I don't doubt there are probably obscure/marginal forms of dyscalculia that may or may not have received much attention separately. Research into the heterogeneity of dyscalculia is a fairly recent endeavor. Quoting from a recent paper on the topic

  time processing [is] more often affected by number processing than vice versa. (e.g., Cappelletti et al., 2011) Also space and time have demonstrated to exert reciprocal influence on each other.

So what you describe (time but not general number dyscalculia) is probably fairly rare. The more focused article of interest by Cappelletti et al. looks only at acquired cases, following brain lesions; however if my analogy with marginal forms of dyslexia holds, my crystal ball says eventually the developmental version will be found and studied.

As for the final part of your list of symptoms, I don't know how researched the relationship between remembering times and manipulating them is, but it seems obvious that the former can affect the latter.

References (spelled out):

Ulf Träff et al., Heterogeneity of Developmental Dyscalculia: Cases with Different Deficit Profiles, Front Psychol. 2016; 7: 2000. doi:  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02000
Cappelletti M., Freeman E. D., Cipolotti L. (2011). Numbers and time doubly dissociate. Neuropsychologia 49, 3078–3092. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.07.014


Counterfactual thinking and the origin of language I want to apologize in advance for my dearth of knowledge concerning cognitive science research and history, I'm an AI student.

I've been reading up on cognitive science/linguistics literature mostly to get a better grasp on the physical symbol system hypothesis/language of thought vs connectionism debate.

I read this very interesting review of Berwick and Chomsky's book "Why Only Us" by Ian Tattersall, in which he exposes the authors' idea that language suddenly appeared as a result of a minor mutation in our ancestors' brain 80,000 years ago. However, because of the lack of linguistic archeological artefacts, it is impossible to prove. He then goes on:

  If that is true, perhaps the best proxies we can seek for language in
  the human archaeological record are objects or activities that reflect the working of symbolic human minds: minds capable
  of envisioning that the world could be otherwise than it is at this moment.

And my question is then: why does counterfactual thinking require a symbolic mind? It seems perfectly plausible to imagine a species who can't talk but can still imagine "other world" scenarios using his visual system. However, a counter-argument is that animals have a highly developed visual system, yet they can't think counterfactually. (Hariri is famous for saying "You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee Heaven.")

This all seems related to the LoT vs Connectionism debate: did we first grow a mind strong enough to do counterfactual thinking, which was also able to process language, or is language and symbolic thought really the precursor to higher level thinking like counterfactual thinking?

This is controversial, to say the least, and possibly false according to one interpretation on such experiments with monkeys. But note that there is a subtlety here: the way counterfactuals are usually tested with monkeys involves them having seen what a reward could have been, but had not received.

Recent studies on reinforcement learning in primates indicate that humans are not alone in
our ability to think about hypothetical outcomes. For example, Lee and colleagues (Abe & Lee
2011, Lee et al. 2005) presented rhesus monkeys with a computer-based version of the game rock-
paper-scissors. When they examined the strategies that the monkeys used over time, they found
that monkeys did not simply adjust their choices based on what they received on the previous trial.
Surprisingly, monkeys also adjusted their strategy to account for rewards they would have received
had they chosen a different option. Using a similar computer-based setup, Hayden and colleagues
(2009) presented rhesus monkeys with a risky decision-making task with eight possible choices.
Whereas seven of the options consistently provided small juice rewards, the final option was
variable: Sometimes it provided a much larger reward, and sometimes it provided a much smaller
reward. Critically, monkeys were given feedback about what the risky option would have provided
on every trial. In this way, monkeys could see how much juice they would have gotten from the
risky option, regardless of whether they had chosen it. As in the rock-paper-scissors task, modeling
of the monkeys’ behaviors showed that the monkeys adjusted their future strategies on the basis of
what they would have received. In cases where the risky option would have provided the high-value
outcome on one trial, monkeys were especially likely to seek this option out in future trials. In this
way, monkeys—like humans—change their future choices according to counterfactual situations
that could have (but did not) happen.

(There's subsequent para that discusses that monkeys, like us, seem to be driven by regret-like emotional responses in such matters.)
More recent experiments indicate that monkeys intentionally explore the "counterfactual space", i.e. try to find out what rewards they might have missed, even if they aren't just shown these potential rewards without them incurring an actual cost (in terms of missing other rewards, already known to them). Rather unsurprisingly, monkeys are willing to pay, in terms of missing certain rewards for finding out "what else is there", i.e. they ("deliberately") pay for information.
I think Chomsky isn't really talking about this though; actually he's not even using "counterfactual" in the para you cited but "minds capable of envisioning that the world could be otherwise than it is at this moment". Basically: do the monkeys merely think of the world in a seen-potential-reward and seeking-information-about-unknown-rewards fashion, or do they "truly imagine" there could be rewards they didn't ever see? That's probably (very) difficult to test. Basically, his thesis/question isn't really about counterfactual thinking, but whether monkeys "have imagination" in some kind of "visual language" perhaps...


How to differentiate attentiveness, arousal and memory via gamma oscillations I am planning an experiment using mice with in vivo extracellular recordings (and maybe also optogenetic stimulation). In these kinds of experiments, the mouse is getting a reward after executing a (short term) memory involved task.

I noticed that in the papers I read, it is not really possible to know if the observed $\gamma$-oscillations (for instance), derive from memory activation, or arousal (from thinking of the reward), or from attentiveness (from trying to execute the task correctly).

Are there any ideas or a good reference for this problem of distinguishing between these related cognitive activities?

Examples of experiments with humans will also help. Maybe not directly but will give some ideas about how these notions can be separated.

You'd need to "shut down arousal" to give a causal dissociation of arousal and memory reactivation, right?

E.g.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174240/

Then you'd need to define what do you mean by "memory activation", physiologically, and record there simultaneously with the above. This will introduce additional difficulty in a mouse due to its small size, -- depending on where do you want to record when looking for "memory activation".

However, you may try using a simpler to implement EEG screw to get the oscillations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5802558/

But the above link is for a rat, and you'd have to confirm in the literature that you can get the gamma through an EEG screw in a mouse. Also consider that in conjunction with your search for the area where you want to record the gamma.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333145/

which itself is tied to the experimental design (task) that captures "memory activation".

During training, and for validation you may employ a proxy for arousal in a form of pupil dilation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612940/
There you again need to confirm  if someone has successfully used this measure in a mouse (the link is for humans, and it's possible in rats too).


Why are some people unable to easily memorize the lyrics to a song? Although I have listened some songs hundred of times I can't sing the lyrics to any of these songs from beginning to end without pauses. However I am able to whistle the whole song without difficulty.

It seems other people are complaining about this annoying condition as well. This particular answer claims it is quite likely related to the interhemispheric communication:

  I also find that when I take the supplement piracetam, my ability
  improves. (It has in fact improved over time anyway)

  Piracetam has something to do with interhemispheric communication.

Any answers for what causes this condition?

From an information processing perspective, I'd conjecture the following points:

Many songs have lyrics that are difficult to decipher. If you can't decipher the words, then you wont be able to recall them. If you decipher alternate words, then this may reduce the degree to which the words have semantic meaning, and therefore the ease with which the lyrics can be retained and recalled.
Even when the words of the lyrics are readily discernible, lyrics vary in the degree to which (a) they have easily discernible meaning; (b) follow standard grammatical structures; (c) repeat lyrics, etc. Recalling meaningful sentences that follow standard grammatical structure is much easier than recalling random words, and increasing the depth of processing (i.e., greater meaning) of the material should also help with recall (see this discussion of level of processing effect). There would probably also be a range of other effects related to properties of the lyrics which would make a given song easier or harder to recall (e.g., rhyming and rhythm in lyrics might make lyrics easier to discern).
Practice is a fundamental effect in recall. Thus, the more times a person has heard a  song, the better they should be at recalling. However, I think this should be qualified with the above points. If a person has heard a song 100 times without actually being able to decipher some of the words or understand their meaning, then that practice may be largely wasted.
Practice also applies to recall, and this would be closely related to context effects. Thus, if practice always occurs within the context of the music being played with singer present to assist with any forgotten lyrics, then the person has never practiced in the absence of such cues and may be dependent on the cues. Practicing trying to recall the song without the song in the background, and then with feedback on failed sections would presumably be more effective than just singing along.
All the above also relates to the distinction in the expertise literature between deliberate practice and play (see, Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993, PDF). When people listen to songs, the aim is typically to have a good time rather than to learn the lyrics. Deliberate practice in contrast would involve a deliberate effortful practice regime aimed at learning the lyrics. For example, it might involve a detailed study of the semantic meaning of the lyrics, then repeated recall of the lyrics without assistance, and then correcting on failed sections (e.g., think of an expert pianist learning a piano piece and working on difficult sections, etc.).

Individual differences

You ask the question of why some people appear to be better than others at recalling lyrics. It's an empirical question as to whether there is a domain general difference.
Presumably, it would reflect a combination of the above effects: e.g., different levels of practice; different levels of understanding of the song lyrics, and perhaps also some more
general ability related to verbal recall.

Recalling melody versus lyrics

You also ask about why you can recall the melody but not the lyrics. hearing a melody does not require you to understand the lyrics, even if understanding the lyrics might act as useful cue. Thus, in the context where a person does not completely understand the lyrics, he or she may have years of practice hearing the melody, but almost no practice with a semantically meaningful understanding of the lyrics.
There would also presumably be a wide range of variables in the person that would make them better at recalling a melody (in particular, pitch perception, singing, and musical ability come to mind as factors that should simplify the task of learning a melody).
Then one could also look at characteristics of the melody which made it harder or easier to recall (e.g., degree of repetition, simplicity of intervals, familiarity of the intervals and structure, etc.).


How liking and disliking mechanism is developed? Every one likes different things, places, people, colors, flowers etc.
I am interested to know how this mechanism is developed in individuals. If we suppose that it is started from home.

Then why siblings have different interests.

If it is from society then living in same society still siblings have different interests. Like if two brothers are class fellows too and live in same people. still they will have different interests.

Considering the classical discussion of nature versus nurture, we can assume here that part of the causality is nature (genes, epigenetics) and part is nurture (environment, upbringing). We are all born with a whole bunch of instincts, probably hundreds. Not all these instincts are in effect at a given time, and a baby of course is not going to be displaying those instincts which are not important to its current circumstances, needs, and capabilities. As a child grows, he or she will learn how the world functions and what causes what. This person will slowly build associations between various desires (and urges) and those objects, actions, and places that satisfy said desires and urges. Because each person has different biological needs (different genes means slightly different nutritional needs, ideal temperature, physical needs, et cetera), each person, even if brought up in exactly the same environment, will build different associations with different stimuli and ideas over time. Through a long chain of trial and error with satisfying one's inner needs, each person will further differentiate in preferences.

Although I have no proof on the matter, I suspect that of the various specific (non-general) instincts a person can have, different people have different ones enabled and disabled. This would make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective since you would not want everyone to react the same way to the world around them -- they might all go extinct at the same time if they all reacted disadvantageously to an occurrence that became common. Not everyone (probably nobody) is good at avoiding all kinds of danger and solving all kinds of problems. Plus, a society is far more productive if different people are good at different things, so there is strong selective pressure for a "rolling of the dice" on specific personality characteristics.


Is there a mental health disorder related to a harmful lack of anxiety and stress? Ataraxia is the freedom from distress or worry in ancient Greek philosophy.  However, emotions play a vital role in motivation and decision making.  Many disorders relate to having excessive emotional reactions or inappropriate triggers for them.  There are also a few concerning a lack of or dulled emotional responses.  While high levels of stress and anxiety are seen as harmful, the same concern is rarely shown for the opposite end of the spectrum.

I have been unable to find any information about disorders related to dulled or absent anxiety or stress reactions.  I assume this is due to the lower perceived harm, or conflation with depression disorders, but I find it hard to believe no one has done any work in this area. Clinical apathy is not what I'm looking for, since that seems to be typified by acute lack of response or interest in immediate stimulus or short time spans.

Sociopaths (people with Antisocial Personality Disorder) report lower levels of anxiety and stress than the general population. Psychopathic traits tend to foster resiliency and are protective against anxiety.

I'm a board-certified psychiatrist. There is ample evidence in the literature (and basic psych textbooks) that sociopathy have low levels of harm avoidance, decreased physiological responses to stress, and lower overall reported anxiety and fear. There is evidence supporting this.

In fairness, this association has come into question and there are some newer studies that are reevaluating the association between anxiety and sociopathy. Anecdotally, I have never encountered an ASPD patient with comorbid anxiety. I’m sure they exist: I’ve just never seen it, and suspect that it’s rare.

Hofmann, S. G., Korte, K. J., & Suvak, M. K. (2009). The upside of being socially anxious: Psychopathic attributes and social anxiety are negatively associated. Journal of social and clinical psychology, 28(6), 714-727.
Dinn, W. M., & Harris, C. L. (2000). Neurocognitive function in antisocial personality disorder. Psychiatry research, 97(2-3), 173-190.
Dolan, M. C., & Rennie, C. E. (2007). Is juvenile psychopathy associated with low anxiety and fear in conduct-disordered male offenders? Journal of anxiety disorders, 21(8), 1028-1038.


How to report an F statistic in APA style? How do you report F statistics in APA format? I am working on PHD and am not certain that I am reporting the F statistics in the proper manner.

I have been reporting it as F (_,_). The second space I am unclear as to what number gets placed there.

The F ratio statistic has a numerator and denominator degrees of freedom. Thus, you report:

F (numerator_df, denominator_df) = F_value, p = ..., effect size = ...

The numerator degrees of freedom relates to the factor of interest; the denominator degrees of freedom corresponds to the degrees of freedom for the error variance.

The exact way that these degrees of freedom are calculated depends on the statistical test you are using. Standard textbooks will describe these approaches.
For example, in a standard one-way between subjects ANOVA with $k$ groups and $n$ participants per group, you would have $k-1$ numerator degrees of freedom and $kn-k$.

Generally, you will be able to read off these numbers from the output of your statistics package.

Example

Here is an example with k=3 groups and n=5 participants. See the df in the "group" row and the "error" row.

F(2, 12) = 24.667, p < .001.


Is it possible to convince a group of people that they master something, when they in fact don't? Is it possible to prove that a bunch of individuals were (or could be) convinced to be good at something (even really difficult), but it was in fact their illusion of knowledge?

Here's a bit more detail: let's take an average class at school. Let's give them a math teacher, whose way of teaching math is extremely mnemonic, still facing hard subjects. They'll be asked exactly what they were told at lesson, without any reworking demanded. The teacher will assign the highest marks to those students who are able to repeat the better. Will some of them eventually get to believe they are good at math, when in fact they can scarcely ever apply what they're studying or explain the ideas behind?

I did not find what I was looking for in the Wikipedia persuasion though.

Your question relates a bit to the self-efficacy literature.

Underlying ability is one cause of self-efficacy. And presumably, there are many mechanisms by which people can form an accurate opinion of their ability.

That said, there are various known ways of increasing or decreasing self-efficacy without changing actual efficacy.

For example, there is the big-fish-little-pond effect. Basically, you can increase self-efficacy by putting people in an environment with others who are less capable.

Similarly, giving people feedback that they are good or giving people tasks suited to their ability will increase a sense of self-efficacy.
Some of these strategies are considered effective teaching especially if it helps overcome obstacles related to students even trying. But it can also be problematic if people allocate resources based on an inaccurate belief about their strengths and weaknesses.


Does stress impair your short term memory? I have noticed frequently, when in a very stressful situation (particularly emotional stress), I will forget things very quickly. To give an example:

Recently, I got in a heated argument with a friend. During the fight, a third friend came in and tried to break it up. "What is this about?" he asked. I was about to answer, and then it occurred to me I didn't know. I was still angry, but the information had already escaped my mind.

I have noticed this happen more than once. I asked someone about it, and they said they had had similar experiences.

Is there some hard science to support the idea that stress negatively affects short term memory?

It really depends on the timing of the stressful event, as well as anticipation. From an evolutionary standpoint, "stress" developed for a reason in the context of heightened arousal, attention, preparation for action, etc. Say you encounter a lion in your backyard: Not only will your sympathetic nervous system be on full speed, but several cortices are also geared up to processing what's going on. The idea is that you want to make a quick behavioral response, so inducing stress short term actually facilitates many different processes, including encoding of memory. See the link below for some research on this, I grabbed one that should be open access.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22483973

Basically short term, acute stress may help encoding of memory, whereas long term, chronic stress not so much. Also consider whether or not you are learning something and then hear a loud human scream in your ear. This may disrupt encoding. So again, it's the timing that is important. And I would say it depends on the type of stress.


Do direct cortical pathways exist in the visual system, or do they all go via the thalamus? Do visual cortical signals always go back and forth between the thalamus, or other subcortical structures, or can they travel directly from one region in the cortex to another?

Short answer
Intracortical projections can be routed directly to other cortical areas (cortico-cortical projections), or via the thalamus (cortico-thalamo-cortical projections).

Background
Intracortical projections do not have to cross the thalamus or other subcortical structures. Take for example the visual system - it features many cortical projections and these connections do not always enter the thalamus or other subcortical structures (Fig. 1). These connections are called cortico-cortical projections (e.g., Guandalani, 1998). Connections going via the thalamus, however, also exist in the visual cortex (e.g., Kato, 1990) and are referred generally to as cortico-thalamo-cortical projections.

Fig. 1. Visual system. source: McGill

The projections from the LGN to primary cortex (V1 in Fig. 1) and via V2, V3, V4 up to V5 all may occur without visual information entering the thalamus or other subcortical structures.

Also note that on the cellular scale direct cortico-cortical connections in the cortex are abundant (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Local cellular connections in the visual cortex. source: Kang et al. (2014)

Reference
- Guandalani, Brain Res Bull; 47(4): 377–85
- Kang et al., Front Syst Neurosci (2014); 8: 172
- Kato, Brain Res; 509(1): 150–2


Does a condition exist that resembles autism, but featuring much instead of little empathy? I recently read a book by an autistic author who relates his experiences in professional life in IT. (He was diagnosed only in mid adulthood.) Colleagues see him as highly intelligent but also stubborn and egocentric. He explains that he cannot read people's faces  and therefore misses out on the non-verbal part of human communication, which is 80%. Because he cannot remember faces, he often cannot greet acquaintances, which obviously causes consternations. One also gets the sense that neither would be inclined to do so because he abhors all situations with idle small talk.

Many outer markers of his biography reminded me of a friend of mine: also high IQ, also in IT, with his private life (perennial single) and professional life now somewhat in shambles. That friend also often irritates people and avoids small talk. But while he seems similar to an autist on the surface he may be very different on a deeper level.

Whereas the autistic author (at least by his own account) has very little empathy, this friend may have too much. He can (or "can") read the faces of other humans, but somehow he does not seem to be able to trust much of what he sees. Some of his intelligence seems to stem from being constantly on the guard, as if to form models in his head about what really is going on and where he can fit in, but never arriving at safe conclusions. I know that there were unspoken tensions between his parents when he grew up. He is not obviously constrained in public and dear to some who know him well, but struggles with the scale of human relationships in between at a severe price.

My question is this: Does this ring any bells? Is there a name for this condition? Any books that I might follow-up and/or recommend?

There are many issues packed into this question. I am pretty sure the answers will lead to many more questions.

People diagnosed with autism tend to perform worse than the average population on standard IQ tests, but there is evidence that alternative measures of "intelligence" (whatever that is) are more accurate and demonstrate that autistic persons, as a group, are not cognitively impaired. The high IQ of the book author is almost certainly unrelated to his autism.
For your friend, my perception is that many of the details that he shares with the book author are coincidental and distracting from the real problem. (The previous statement is harsh because it strongly implies that your friend has a disorder, but he might not have a disorder.) I believe your friend's IQ and occupation are irrelevant.
Let's take a break from your friend and directly address the question, "Does a condition exist that resembles autism, but featuring much instead of little empathy?" In short, no. However, Williams syndrome is often called "the opposite of autism" specifically because people with Williams syndrome are exceptionally sociable, friendly, talkative, have relatively low inhibitions in social situations, more willing than a normal-developing person to interact with strangers, are aware of negative social actions of others but have reduced negative reactions to other people's actions (such as criticism), and many other remarkable traits related to sociability and empathy. Unlike autism, however, people with Williams syndrome, as a group, have significant cognitive impairment and important differences in physical development that affect their lives in multiple and significant ways. Williams syndrome is not the true opposite of autism.
Your description of your friend's social interaction are clearly not Williams syndrome. Based on your description, I would be surprised if he were diagnosed with hyper-empathy disorder, which is a personality disorder (not otherwise specified), because people with hyper-empathy disorder are hyper social and tend to prioritize the needs of others so highly that their own life is damaged.
In your description of your friend, some phrases jumped out at me: "life now somewhat in shambles", "irritates people", "not ... able to trust ... what he sees", "constantly on the guard" modeling (evaluating?) the actions of other people, and "never arriving at safe conclusions [about the intentions or actions of other people]".
If your friend has a disorder (please start with the assumption that he does not have a disorder), I feel your description most strongly points towards borderline personality disorder. I feel this because I sense a lack of stability and predictability and relatively poor ability to form typical relationships with most people. You mention he has some good relationships, but I am speaking to my impression that the majority of his relationships and interactions are disordered in some way.
On the other hand, many of the things you mention suggest some type of paranoia, most especially paranoid personality disorder. If he is constantly evaluating other people for potential threats and regularly perceives threats then that is well outside of normal emotional reactions. But paranoia is most often accompanied by schizoid or schizophrenia symptoms and you did not describe anything that suggests either issue to me. Still, it is possible to have PPD without schizoid disorder and PPD and BPD are common bedfellows, so it is possible that your friend is struggling with both disorders.
Finally, if you don't mind, I want to suggest a small shift in perspective. A "disorder" is anything that interferes with normal life functioning. Hoarding of mustard could be a disorder if it interfered with normal life functioning. The specific label, such as autism, BPD, or PPD, is most useful to professionals creating a treatment plan. For the rest of us, one of the best ways to help our friends is to pay little attention to the label and to pay a lot of attention to anything that is interfering with normal life functioning. Let a professional therapist try to figure out if the disorder was triggered by daddy issues or a car accident. As the person's friend, and as a non-professional, it is much easier for you to help gently steer your friend away from actions and situations that will interfere with normal life functioning and towards habits and actions that will allow your friend to have a healthier life.

In any event, whether or not your friend has a disorder, he is lucky to have people in his life who notice that his life is in shambles and want to help him improve things. Kudos to you.


Why dreams can be surprising? If we all agree that dreams are created by our own minds, then how could some dreams surprise us, since, after all, all the things that could happen in a dream are made up by us, and should be utterly predictable and be of no surprise at all?  For example, if you are awake and doing some day dreaming, you would never be surprised by what you are imagining, right?

Then why some dreams are surprising, and kind of unpredictable?

Let's first dispel this myth: "all the things that could happen in a dream are made up by us, and should be utterly predictable".  This is a common fallacy known as the introspection illusion:

  The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly
  think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental
  states. ... In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make
  confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called "causal
  theories") or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.

This is a common notion in psychology research.  So the more interesting question is not why are we surprised by our dreams, so much as why are we not surprised by our non-dreams.  But I digress.

Dream imagery is often generated partly from long-term memory rather than external stimuli.  Unlike normal perception, which is continuous and generally sensical, dream imagery is disjointed and not sensical.  Interestingly however, subjects of dream research report only realizing the bizarre nature of their dreams after they wake - they are not "surprised" by the imagery during the dream:

  During most dreams, the person dreaming is not aware that they are
  dreaming, no matter how absurd or eccentric the dream is. The reason
  for this may be that the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain
  responsible for logic and planning, exhibits decreased activity during
  dreams.


What is the most readable screen font? Fonts (i.e. letters) that facilitate reading in print don't always read well on a computer screen. New fonts such as Verdana have been developed especially for screen presentation of text.

There is some research that compares the readability of those fonts that are available across most operating systems: Times, Arial, Helvetica and Arial. For example, this study found that Times New Roman can be read faster than Verdana.

But there are thousands of other fonts, and maybe one font not commonly shipped with any OS would be even more easily readable, or at smaller sizes. Of course no empirical research can include all fonts that exist, but maybe there is some research that goes beyond the common websafe fonts.

Have there been attempts to create the most readable screen font that were supported by empirical tests? Or is there empirical research into screen font readability including non-websafe fonts?

For print (Generally)

  In his book Cashvertising, Drew Eric Whitman cites a 1986 study of fonts (printed on paper) that found only 12 percent of participants effectively comprehended a paragraph set in sans-serif type versus 67 percent who were given a version set in serif typeface ...

  In a test of three different fonts, two serifs (Garamond and Times New Roman) and one sans serif (Helvetica), he found

  66 percent were able to comprehend Garamond;
  31.5 percent Times New Roman, and
  12.5 percent Helvetica(out of a total of 1,010,000 people surveyed).

  (Source)

On screen (Generally)

  Several observations can be made regarding the examined font types. First, no significant differences in reading efficiency were detected between the font types at any size. There were, however, significant differences in reading time. Generally, Times and Arial were read faster than Courier, Schoolbook, and Georgia. Fonts at the 12-point size were read faster than fonts at the 10-point size. In addition, a font type x size interaction was found for the perception of font legibility. In general, however, Arial, Courier, and Georgia were perceived as the most legible.

  For font attractiveness, Georgia was perceived as being more attractive than Arial, Courier, and Comic, while Times was perceived as more attractive than Courier. (Bernard, et al. 2002)

But it is not that simple

Dyslexia sufferers can have different requirements.  Most of the recommendations come from associations for people with dyslexia and they agree in using sans-serif fonts. The British Dyslexia Association recommends

Use Arial, Comic Sans or, as alternatives to these, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic, and Trebuchet
Most users prefer dark print on a pale background but colour preferences vary
Avoid green and red/pink as these are difficult for colour-blind individuals. (British Dyslexia Association, 2012).

Also

WebAIM also has articles and resources for those with accessibility in mind

References

Bernard, M. et al. (2002). A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which Size and Type is Best? [Online]
Available at: Wichita State University Software Usability and Research Laboratoryhttp://usabilitynews.org/a-comparison-of-popular-online-fonts-which-size-and-type-is-best

British Dyslexia Association. (2012). Dyslexia style guide [Online]
Available at: http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/common/ckeditor/filemanager/userfiles/About_Us/policies/Dyslexia_Style_Guide.pdf


What is the difference between computational neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience, and neuroinformatics (if there is one)? In particular, theoretical and computational neuroscience seem to be synonymous with each other. Neuroinformatics at least seems to deal somewhat more with solving things numerically and the usage and creation of algorithms and programs.

There is no difference between "computational neuroscience" and "theoretical neuroscience" in practice.  The two are almost always used interchangeably.

Neuroinformatics, like bioinformatics, is more about managing data and designing analysis software (that's always somehow integrated with data storage and management).  Generally, it is informational specialists that work in neuroinformatics, as it is basically applied information science (applied to neuroscience, specifically).  In some ways, neuroinformatics can serve as a bridge between experimentalist and theoretician.  Experimentalists use neuroinformatic software to analyze and save their data and store their results... then the theoreticians can take that and make a model, then informatics can design a new program that incorporates the model to help experimentalists analyze their data.  This is a very ideal simplification, but it gives an idea of how the three play off each other.


Does belief in an afterlife play a role in suicide rates? Religious beliefs, in particular views on the afterlife, could plausibly influence suicide.

Is there some study which tries to look at how belief systems play a role in the number of suicides in some country or in the world?

I think, from a statistical point of view, this question will be impossible to answer, because belief in an afterlife is almost always tied to powerful confounding factors, such as participation in a community of fellow believers, marital status, age, etc. I imagine that religious affiliation probably can have a strong protective effect regarding suicide - though I don't have any statistics to back that up - but I can't envisage how you would separate out the various components of religious affiliation and prove which component(s) made the crucial difference.

You might have heard of Émile Durkheim's famous book Suicide. (Forgive me if I'm assuming either too little or too much knowledge on your part.) Durkheim looked specifically at the effect of religious affiliation on suicide: he found that Jews in late nineteenth century France had the lowest rate of suicide, Protestants the highest, and Roman Catholics somewhere in the middle. Durkheim, however, attributed these findings to the fact that Jews tended to form very tight-knit communities, and that Protestants tended to be much more individualistic, than to any doctrinal difference.

On a more personal note, as a believer who has been through two episodes of severe depression, I think that, broadly speaking, belief in an afterlife probably does have a protective effect with regard to suicide - although there are plenty of factors whose effect is more potent. I have no background in academic psychology, so my advice is probably both unwelcome and unsound, but, if this is part of a formal research project, a good place to start would be to interview believers who had gone through, or were going through, an episode of severe depression. Also, John Donne's Biathanatos provides a very left-field exploration of Christian attitudes to suicide.


Matching patterns in auditory signals How do people match audio signals from memory? For example, consider the simplest case where there is a single channel sound being applied to one headphone. If the subject was previously presented a set of audio signals and then has to identify if the presented signal was present in the set, what features do humans tend to focus on? Is amplitude (volume), frequency (pitch) or something else entirely? Alternatively, a reference to what this type of experiment is called would be appreciated.

I don't know if there is a name to this type of experiment, but this basically sounds like a test of recognition memory.

The features that subjects focus on would depend entirely on the task. If you ask them to match volume, they would pay attention to volume. If you ask them to detect a frequency match, they'll focus on pitch. If you run an experiment without specifying a feature, humans generally tend to weight the different features according to their reliability (signal-to-noise ratio). So if pitch is more informative in detecting a match, they would focus largely on pitch.

For example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026557704054


Is it possible to quantify/measure the effect of certain medication on our neurotransmitters and hormones? Is it possible to display the effect of taking for example Prozac on level of Serotonin and other neurotransmitters/hormones in the body?

More generally speaking s is it possible to say: taking 1mg of medication A increases hormones B and C within 3 months by 2 units for the majority of people? or perhaps not this accurate but by some accuracy?

or taking food A, increases hormones C and D?

In other words is it possible to quantify the effect of any drug/food to the body?

Yes it is possible, but it is difficult. The way it would be done currently is to insert a needle into the base of your spinal cord to measure the concentration of a metabolite of serotonin, 5-HIAA, in the fluid surrounding your brain.

It is also possible to measure levels of this metabolite in saliva, urine, or in the bloodstream, but these measures would not necessarily represent the levels of serotonin in your central nervous system (brain). This is because serotonin plays a role in other (non-brain) bodily functions, and serotonin can not cross the blood-brain barrier. In other words, only serotonin that has been produced in the brain can be used by the brain.


Is volition a reality or an illusion? Keeping religious sentiments aside, here is a question raised on the Buddhism SE that attempts to answer a similar question from the Buddhist point of view.

You see, Buddhism has a concept of anatman or no-self that attempts to explain the conditioned-self as a cause-and-effect phenomena arising through the interaction of the five aggregates (sensations, mental-formations, thoughts, feelings, etc.) and doesn't have a permanent or essential existence of its own. However, I would like to know what does the science or psychology has to say about this?

Does something called I exists as a soul/essence separate from the physical body? More importantly, does volition, or more commonly called will-power exists or it is just an illusion?

A practical Experiment:

Suppose I (as soul/mind/any-other-hypothetical) decide to lift my arm right now, and the very next instant my arm lifted in the air. I would like to know what exactly triggered the decision to lift? If it were I (soul/mind/etc..) that made the decision, then why would  electrodes attached to my brain show that the impulse to move the hand came before I was aware of it? The electrodes reading seem to imply that:

Either the arm has a mind of its own apart from the primary mind (sort of a separate CPU core in a multi-core processor) that took the decision (seems less likely to me). OR
Some external force (in nature) triggered the decision (seems more likely to me).

I would like to know what is Psychology's take on this?

EDIT: The conventional explanation to this in terms of the subconscious being the causal factor seems incomplete at best. As mentioned in a comment on @ArnonWeinberg's answer, all it means is that we don't know. Subconscious seems like a hypothetical chaos that we ascribe all phenomena that we are unable to explain scientifically. In the above experiment for instance, what caused the subconscious mind to make that decision at that exact moment?

This question is very similar to others on this forum, and I think almost everything in the question is answered there.

Does something exist separate from the physical body?

I don't think you will find the answer to that question in cognitive science, but rather in philosophy.  Taken from one of the answers:

  Your thought experiment hinges on the debate of materialism (the mind
  is a physical thing) versus dualism (the mind is a different kind of
  thing than other physical things). Most cognitive scientists believe
  that materialism is the correct view.

It is unclear whether or not science will ever definitively settle this question, but it may place some constraints on the role (if any) of non-physical entities.  As I mentioned in my reply:

  The large body of research that was spurred on by Libet's experiment
  has significantly changed our understanding of the role of "thought"
  or "will" or "volition" in the causal chain, such that they now appear
  to be a side-effect rather than cause of physical action.

Why would electrodes show that the impulse to move the hand came earlier than I was aware of it?

I think you are missing a 3rd option: Much of what happens in the brain is outside of our awareness.  This is called the unconscious mind.  The brain is a very complicated system, so exact causes for behaviours are still elusive, but the implication behind the Libet experiment is that the decision to move is made unconsciously - still inside the brain, but outside awareness.

EDIT (re updated question):

I'm not sure what you mean by "Subconscious seems like a hypothetical chaos that we ascribe all phenomena that we are unable to explain scientifically"...  Non-scientific terms such as "soul" or "mind" or "will" certainly fall under that category, as they don't add any information, and there are no tools available to study them, thus we know nothing about them.  The "unconscious mind" on the other hand, refers to physical, measurable processes in the brain, just ones outside our conscious awareness.  Cognitive scientists learn about unconscious processes through cognitive research, fMRI scans, and other tools of neuroscience for example.  Thus we have a great deal of knowledge about how the unconscious mind works.

What causes the unconscious mind to make decisions?

Again, this question comes down to the choice between materialism and dualism - the choice is yours to make.

Consider a simpler question: Say a computer makes a beeping sound a few seconds after someone presses a key - what caused it to do that?  (1) The computer needs a speaker with which to make the sound (hardware); (2) the computer needs a program that uses the speaker (software); and (3) it needs a user to press a key to run the program (input).

Now consider a much more complex machine: Say a human lifts their arm a few seconds after someone says "atten-hut!" - what caused them to do that?  (1) The human needs an arm to lift (biology); (2) the human needs to know when to salute (learning); and (3) they need someone to call them to attention (stimulus).  Like any machine, all actions are a result of its internal mechanisms, current state, and external environment.

But what if the computer makes a beeping sound with no one around to press a key?  Maybe at some point in the past someone ran a program that makes beeping sounds randomly every once in a while.  Or maybe it did it of its own "free will"?  What do you think?

And what if a human lifts their arm with no one around to salute?  Maybe at some point in their past, the person learned to salute for fun when they are bored and alone.  Or maybe it was their "free will"?  What do you think?


What are the cognitive and neurological bases for apathy? Apathy, or effectively the feeling of "not caring" or putting it colloquially, "not giving a rats", is something that most of us get sometime or another in varying degrees.

My question is, what are the cognitive and neurological bases for apathy?  Why is it that some experience it far stronger and more often than others?

Assuming the original poster (now departed) was considering apathy as a distinct phenomena from depression, then current evidence points to the current neurological basis of apathy being connectivity in the pre-motor brain systems according to "Individual Differences in Premotor Brain Systems Underlie Behavioral Apathy" by Bonelle et al. (2016):

  The results demonstrate that behavioral apathy is associated with
  increased effort sensitivity as well as greater recruitment of neural
  systems involved in action anticipation: supplementary motor area
  (SMA) and cingulate motor zones. In addition, decreased structural and
  functional connectivity between anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and
  SMA were associated with increased behavioral apathy. These findings
  reveal that effort sensitivity and translation of intentions into
  actions might make a critical contribution to behavioral apathy. We
  propose a mechanism whereby inefficient communication between ACC and
  SMA might lead to increased physiological cost—and greater effort
  sensitivity—for action initiation in more apathetic people.

Note that the authors of the paper controlled for depression using questionnaires:

  Self-reports of apathy traits were obtained using a modified, extended
  version of the original Lille Apathy Rating Scale (LARS-e), available
  online in Bonnelle et al. (2014) (see Supplementary Material for more
  details). The LARS-e uses subscales that allow assessment of apathy
  traits along several domains reflecting the distinct component of
  apathy (behavioral, cognitive, and emotional). We used the “Action
  Initiation” (AI) subscale of the LARS-e, which measures every-day
  productivity and initiative and is an index of behavioral apathy
  (Sockeel et al. 2006). This subscale was previously found specifically
  to relate to the willingness to engage in an effort response in order
  to obtain a reward on our paradigm (Bonnelle et al. 2014). In
  addition, to control for a potential confound of depression and
  anhedonia, we also used the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scales (DASS)
  (Lovibond and Lovibond 1995), a questionnaire developed in nonclinical
  populations to measure depression, and the Snaith–Hamilton Pleasure
  Scale (Snaith et al. 1995), which assesses anhedonia.

The authors assessed patients according to their willingness to complete a task while stakes (a combination of expected reward and expected effort) were manipulated. They found a high correlation between sensitivity to effort and behavioural apathy as assessed via the questionnaires in the previous quote. They then examined connectivity via fMRI of the patients completing the task and determined certain areas were more connected in patients with lower behavioural apathy. Specifically, the pre-motor brain systems were better connected in non-apathetic individuals.

It's unclear what this means cognitively, but the authors hypothesize, based on other activation, that this: "might be due to higher 'subjective experience' of effort cost in individuals who are more apathetic".


What is the conceptual relationship between higher order thinking and inductive reasoning? Higher order thinking seems like a larger construct than inductive reasoning but the constructs also seem related.

What is the connection between inductive reasoning and higher order thinking?
Is inductive reasoning a subset of higher order thinking or is inductive reasoning a mental process of higher order thinking?

A few thoughts:

I think of higher order thinking as a  fuzzy concept. It is often used in educational psychology to between surface and deeper levels of subject engagement. It can also be used to discriminate between the kinds of thinking processes often seen as unique to humans.

Inductive reasoning is also a multifaceted construct, but it has both rich links both with philosophy and with cognitive psychology as can be seen in literatures on category learning and causal inference.

Certainly the principled and methodical processes of scientific induction (e.g., inference from data) involves many higher level thinking processes. However, many of the implicit processes of inferring categories and causal processes from experience might not be seen as higher order thinking.


Categorization studies with a procedure similar to Shepard et al (1961) and Medin & Schaffer (1978) I am looking for performance results from categorization studies with discrete stimulus features and reinforcement feedback. I need something like this:

stimulus  - correct response - performance after X trials
(1,1,1,0) -         0        -   20.1% correct
(1,1,0,1) -         1        -   23.3% correct
(1,0,0,0) -         1        -   82.0% correct
...

(e.g. Shepard, Hovland & Jenkins, 1961; Medin & Schaffer, 1978)

Medin, D. L., & Schaffer, M. M. (1978). Context theory of classification learning. Psychological Review; Psychological Review, 85(3), 207.
Shepard, R. N., Hovland, C. I., & Jenkins, H. M. (1961). Learning and memorization of classifications. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 75(13), 1-42.

You've described a very general type of study design which has probably been employed in hundreds of studies or more. Your question might profit from a more specific description of the type of study you're looking for.

A few examples that fit the bill just off the top of my head are:

Goldstone (1996) Isolated and interrelated concepts

Zaki and Homa (1999) Concepts and transformational knowledge

Kornell and Bjork (2008) Learning concepts and categories: is spacing the "enemy of induction"?


Does the fusiform face area in patients with Prosopagnosia (face blindness) show lower activity under an fMRI? I watched last night's episode of 60 minutes (and part 2) about Prosopagnosia (Face Blindness) and found it absolutely fascinating. They mentioned in the segment (Around 5:22 into the second part of the online video) that Nancy Kanwisher of MIT has studied the MRI scans of people without Prosopagnosia and found that the fusiform face area lit up on an MRI when an individual was shown an image of a face.

Nancy Kanwisher then goes on to state the following:

  I really did not expect to see a fusiform face area [on an MRI scan of a patient with Prosopagnosia]. [...] And we looked at the data and his face area was beautiful, it was textbook. [...] It tells us that the problem is not that this thing [(the fusiform face area)] does not exist, there it is!

The image shows an MRI scan of a patient who has Prosopagnosia, demonstrating that the patient does have a fusiform face area. However, it was unclear to me whether the fusiform face area of an individual suffering from Prosopagnosia is less active when presented with a face than that of an individual without Prosopagnosia.

What did Nancy Kanwisher find with regards to that? Does the fusiform face area in individuals with Prosopagnosia exist but remains dormant? Or is it just as active but for some other (probably unknown) reason simply fail to relay the proper information to the rest of the brain?

It is not widely thought that impaired function or destruction of the fusiform is sufficient to produce prosoganosia. It is currently widely held that face processing involves a network of regions in the occipital and temporal lobes (e.g., the occipital face area, posterior superior temporal sulus, anterior superior temporal sulus, anterior collateral sulcus). For example, Bruno Rossion reports a patient with prosopagnoisa who has widespread damage to bilateral occipital and temporal brain regions but with a spared right FFA. Moreover, work by Marlene Behrmann has shown that people with developmental prosopagnosia have disrupted connections between the posterior temporal lobes (ie near the FFA) and the anterior temporal lobes. This is significant because there is growing evidence that there may be face selective regions in the anterior temporal lobes and that they are more directly involved in face recognition. Moreover there is some evidence that this anterior temporal region modulates the activity in the FFA (Nestor, Plaut, Behrmann, 2011 PNAS). So it might very well be that the FFA does show decreased activity in a face recognition task, but this might be due to impaired feedback to this region. On this view, lower activity in FFA is the effect of prosopagnosia not the cause, so making comparisons on levels of activity within one region might not be as meaningful as you think.

References

Nestor, A., Plaut, D.C., & Behrmann, M. (2011). Unraveling the distributed neural code of facial identity through spatiotemporal pattern analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 9998. LINK


Is there a neural network model of Pavlovian Learning? I am trying to find a computer simulation of Pavlovian learning. i.e. an action such as salivation in response to a stimulus such as a bell ringing.

Most neural network models I've seen seem to be more about trying to recognise things such as handwriting or speech rather than the stimulus-response model. And they don't usually incorporate the temporal nature of Pavlovian learning. e.g. Ring a bell, wait a bit, give dog food.

Are there any computer simulations of this? (Do they have a name?) Is there a connected neuron model of this?

In general, what you're looking for is a biologically plausible model of reinforcement learning and/or conditioning. I know of two publications in particular that address this.

The first is A Biologically Plausible Spiking Neuron Model of Fear Conditioning and the second is A Spiking Neural Integrator Model of the Adaptive Control of Action by the Medial Prefrontal Cortex. They both using the Neural Engineering Framework and a learning rule to modify the connection weights between ensembles of biologically plausible spiking neurons. These connections are modified to create and destroy associations between stimuli and an action. However, in the second paper, it's shown that the mechanism can also learn timing information.


What is the name for the psychological therapy involving socially isolating a patient? At a hospital I work in (as a new psychiatry trainee), some admitted patients - especially those with conversion disorder - are made by psychologists to:

Stop meeting their friends or family
Spend the entire day in isolation on their beds
Only eat simple (but not aversive) food such as bread with milk.

This treatment lasts for weeks. They call it "extinction therapy". However, in attempts of finding scientific evidence relating to this practice, I looked it up online and couldn't find any references to "extinction therapy".

My question is:
Is the above psychological management a known and named concept? If so, what is it called?

In my recent graduate school psychology training, no therapy of this type was ever mentioned. In fact, conversion disorders are under some scrutiny because, in at least 33% of cases, an organic cause eventually is discerned. Medscape on conversion disorders
In-patient treatment is uncommon these days, and most modern psychological treatment includes increasing social support, activating the patient with exercise and meaningful activity.
I would be concerned about the nutritional and, more seriously, the emotional impact of this unusual form of "treatment".
BTW, Extinction, as a therapy, usually refers to a phobia treatment with relaxation training and progressive exposure to the feared stimulus.


What is this stratagem called when someone talks to you like you're a slow-witted kid? What is this conversational stratagem called when someone wants to fish out certain information from you but, because they don't want to ask you about it directly (as they expect you might get uncomfortable, distressed or angry), they ask you simple innocent-looking questions instead; answers to these questions will make up for them a picture of what they actually want to know, whilst you are supposed to NOT comprehend/realize their sly plan?

That stratagem is often employed by parents on their small kids not yet witted enough to get that they're being puppeted, psychiatrists on their patients, or simply by someone mistakenly thinking they're smarter than their interlocutor and so their tricks won't be comprehended.

There are a few terms which can be used for this.  The answer from @AlwaysConfused could describe the situation if you are actually talking to them like a child as stipulated in the title, but therapists should not sound patronising or condescending so I wonder if you may be referring to a form of "circumnavigation".

The use of circumnavigation may not necessarily be a case of being sly. Therapists may do this to build a complete picture of a situation as you suggest, but it can also get their client to look at things from a different angle too.

Maybe looking directly at the situation is going to be too psychologically painful right now so circumnavigating the direct path can help.

Other than this, when a therapist "wants to fish out certain information from you", there can be certain protocols which need to be followed, for example, if therapy is being given due to a situation which may lead to a court case.

A therapist in this situation cannot be seen to be leading a potential witness in a court case, so they must ask open and indirect questions.

Again, this can be see as circumnavigation of a sort, but it is more a case of open and indirect questioning.


Is the decline of fluid IQ with age less severe for professors and scientists than it is for other people? This article in Time magazine suggests that engaging in challenging mental tasks may be associated with lower rates of mental decline in older adults.
The article states that:

  In one study, presented last year at the Cognitive Neuroscientist
  Society's annual meeting, psychologist and neuroscientist Helena
  Westerberg of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm compared the
  cognitive abilities of 45 young adults (average age 25) with those of
  55 older adults (average age 65). She found that after five weeks of
  computerized training on tasks ranging from reproducing a series of
  light flashes to repeating digits in the opposite order that they were
  given, the older group was able to reach the same level of working
  memory, attention and reaction time that the younger group had at the
  outset. (Notably, the younger group had even greater improvements by
  the end of the training period.) "The program is always pushing them
  to do better," says Westerberg, who notes that an advantage of
  video-game training is that the programs' difficulty level continually
  adjusts upward to match players' evolving abilities. "They have
  feedback and can see their scores."

This might suggest that scientists and professors might have less decline in fluid IQ with age. Is there any support for this idea?

Seattle Longitudinal Study:

You might want to have a read about The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence.
There's a summary of the study on this website.
To quote the website:

  The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence has followed a
  group of more than 5000 people for well over four decades. The program
  began in 1956 and participants have been tested across a whole gamut
  of mental and physical abilities at seven year intervals since that
  date.

With regards to preventing cognitive decline the website suggests that

  The following variables may reduce the risk of cognitive decline in old age:

  absence of chronic diseases
  a complex and intellectually stimulating environment
  a flexible personality style at mid-life
  high intellectual status of spouse
  maintenance of high levels of perceptual processing speed

If these general points are true, then presumably an argument could be made that scientists and professors have more complex and intellectually stimulating environments. However, the age related declines may be most pronounced in what are potentially post retirement ages (e.g., 60 or 70 +), where the environment would be different.

Some general points

Professors and scientists have some of the highest levels of intelligence among the professions (see this table based on this working paper by Hauser, 2002, PDF). Thus, if everyone did decline cognitively at an identical rate, people from such professions would still tend to have higher intelligence (e.g., a 10-point decline from  130 is 120, versus 90 to 80). So, people with initially high intelligence even with decline can still be intelligent. However, this initially high intelligence is most likely due to genetics or some undefined source than to the stimulation of the profession itself.
Thus, indirectly, the above points (high intelligence of scientists and professors) and potentially environmentally stimulating environments suggest that they will be more intelligent at older age. But my guess is that most of that effect will be due to base line differences in intelligence.


Should I define each and every term while writing an article for a psychology journal? I am writing a review article on dialectical behavioral therapy. If in the article, there are technical terms related to behavioral therapy, so, should I define each of the terms while writing the article or should I assume that the readers/editor/reviewers of the psychology journal know all these terms. For example: A term, cognitove behavioral therapy (CBT). Should I explain what is CBT or should I assume that readers know this type of term.

This question may be better directed to academia.se.
In the first instance, you should check the editorial requirements of the journal you are targeting.  Most journals prescribe that it is mandatory to spell out acronyms with first usage.  It is possible that some very specific technical journals will allow common terminology through without being specific.
Your question is interesting in that you have used the acronym CAB for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, for which I use the acronym CBT.  I personally associate CAB with Clinical Assessment of Behaviour.  Clearly the acronyms CAB and CBT are not as well established as I had understood.


What is the psychology behind blind spots? Why do we fail to see, what others see so clearly about us? It’s absolutely imperative to identify our blind spots. I believe that they are impediment for one to reach his full potential. But how does one, see his blind spot - #oxymoron?
What is the psychology behind it?

What you are talking about is something psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) looked at in 1955.  They developed a 4-pane window visualisation called the Johari Window (named by combining the first parts of their first names).

The model is also denoted as feedback/disclosure model of self-awareness (Luft, J., & Ingham, 1961).  Each window pane is an arena within which holds information about you.  This is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise, however, it is increasingly being used elsewhere such as in clinical supervision as a useful tool to develop self awareness and reflection (Halpern, 2009; Beach, 1982).
Example of Johari Window
As an example, when you get a job, your co-workers know a little about you and in this context there will be more information about you in the unknown and hidden arenas.  The open arena will have little information. As the others don’t know much about you the blind spot also has little information.
In order for you to know what is in each arena, you MUST be:

open and honest with yourself
open to honest feedback from others

As more knowledge about you is gathered, the relevant arena gets filled with that knowledge.  Let's say your co-workers see you as someone who doesn't want to talk to them, yet you see yourself as approachable.  The fact that you are seen that way will be in your blind spot.
Know what is in your blind spot
In order to know what is in your blind spot (as with other arenas), you need to seek for it through communication with your co-workers. You could ask them for their views on you, allowing them to be open and honest.
What is in your hidden arena
The same goes with the hidden arena.  Your co-workers will only know what you disclose or reveal unknowingly.  You don't need to reveal deep secrets you don't want them to know, but to reduce the amount in the hidden arena, you need to disclose what you wish them to know.
This can have a benefit to you.
As people know more, they understand you more.  What is seen as you being standoffish may not be quite how they see it.  Maybe you are quiet because you just lost a close friend or relative. They may see it differently once they know.
How do I find out what is totally unknown (Unknown Arena)
Well that is the trickier one.  You don't know what is there and neither does anyone else.  The only way you are going to know is by reflection on what you know in the other arenas.  Clinical supervision is one place where your thoughts and feelings about the work you have done can help with this.  Maybe you have hidden prejudices you were not aware of.  There may have been hints of it in your blind spot or hidden arena.  Listening to what others have said is in your blindspot along with your thoughts and feelings will bring them out into your awareness.
Blind spot analysis
What is said in the Wikipedia article @Fizz linked in the comments seems to say, in a roundabout way, the same as what I said in my answer. Just in a different way.  You need to holistically look at your environment and examine it in order to find your blind spots.
References
Beach, E. K. (1982). Johari's window as a framework for needs assessment. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 13(3), 28-32. doi: 10.3928/0022-0124-19820501-07
Halpern, H. (2009). Supervision and the Johari window: a framework for asking questions. Education for Primary Care, 20(1), 10-14. doi: 10.1080/14739879.2009.11493757
Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1961). The johari window. Human relations training news, 5(1), 6-7. Receivable from: http://www.richerexperiences.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Johari-Window.pdf


Is there scientific evidence that narcissists cannot be treated? I've often heard that people affected by narcissism cannot recover.

I can understand that it's a long path and that a narcissist may lack the motivation and so on, but I wonder why cognitive therapy (for example) should be ineffective towards this kind of pathology.

Are there statistics on the treatment of narcissists?

It appears you have heard correctly, at least in a sense: there are no peer reviewed treatments for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) itself. On the other hand, this does not constitute evidence that narcissists cannot be treated, either.

A review of the NPD literature by Dhawan, Kunik, Oldham and Coverdale (2010) reported an absence of evidence one way or another in no uncertain terms:

  To determine the most efficacious treatments for NPD without other comorbidities, we performed searches using Narcissis*, pharmacology, clinical pharmacology, therapeutics, and psychotherapy for reports of controlled trials from January 1980 to August 2008. [...] We identified 7 prevalence studies that had used a structured or semistructured interview, 5 of which scored 5/6 using the epidemiologic quality tool. Mean prevalence was 1.06%, and the range was 0% to 6.2%. We found no studies of treatment meeting our inclusion criteria.

The prevalence numbers refer to how many people satisfied the DSM-IV-TR NPD criteria. The epidemiological quality tool referred to is defined as follows:

  Articles received 1 point for each of the following: surveying a national population (because personality disorders are more prevalent closer to city centers, this disparity could influence locally obtained samples), obtaining a sample that was representative of the population being surveyed, accounting for nonrespondents, using a valid diagnostic instrument, having adequate training of interviewers, and assessing reliability. Assessment of the above criteria was determined after each question for each study was independently rated by each author. Then the authors met twice and came to a consensus regarding the scoring of each question.

My own review of the 2009-2015 literature did not find any new developments. There simply does not appear to be any treatment studies for NPD, efficacious or otherwise.

References

Dhawan, N., Kunik, M. E., Oldham, J., & Coverdale, J. (2010). Prevalence and treatment of narcissistic personality disorder in the community: a systematic review. Comprehensive psychiatry, 51(4), 333-339.