Is Jordan Peterson correct when he states that "as societies become more egalitarian, personality differences across genders maximize"? There are many videos (for example, here, here, and here) where Jordan Peterson claims that as societies become more egalitarian, personality differences across genders increase. He is often stating that these results have been replicated over and over and published in the most leading scientific journals (such as Science) and claiming that this is an established fact.

On a quick search, I was not able to find any Science articles that debate this specific topic (only in other journals whose quality (as an outsider) I cannot judge (e.g. here)). Also, since in my own profession (economics) many famous professors tend to overstate that their view is the established one, how debated are these claims within the academic (not political or media!) landscape today?

Searching the first three pages of "personality gender egalitarianism" on Google Scholar, I found five studies on this topic. All of them support the view finding of increased gender differences in more egalitarian countries, and I didn't find any that were against. [Edit: added a Falk 2018 as noted in a comment.]
Most of the studies analyze the Big Five personality traits. Schmitt 2017 also claims increased differences in "Dark Triad traits, self‐esteem, subjective well‐being, depression and values", and Falk 2018 finds increased differences in "willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust". One study, Lippa 2010 argues that the differences in the Big Five are quite small, whereas "gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’". The study authors agree that this shows some inadequacies in social role theory and is more consistent, attributional, and social comparison theories.
Costa Jr., Paul T.,Terracciano, Antonio,McCrae, Robert R.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 81(2), Aug 2001, 322-331. link

Secondary analyses of Revised NEO Personality inventory data from 26 cultures (N =23,031) suggest that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas. Contrary to predictions from evolutionary theory, the magnitude of gender differences varied across cultures. Contrary to predictions from the social role model, gender differences were most pronounced in European and American cultures in which traditional sex roles are minimized. Possible explanations for this surprising finding are discussed, including the attribution of masculine and feminine behaviors to roles rather than traits in traditional cultures.

Schmitt, David P.,Realo, Anu,Voracek, Martin,Allik, Jüri
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 94(1), Jan 2008, 168-182. link:

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. …

Lippa, R. A. (2010), Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4: 1098-1110. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x. link

How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.

Schmitt, D. P., Long, A. E., McPhearson, A. , O'Brien, K. , Remmert, B. and Shah, S. H. (2017), Personality and gender differences in global perspective. Int J Psychol, 52: 45-56. doi:10.1002/ijop.12265. link

… Several large cross‐cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality—Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self‐esteem, subjective well‐being, depression and values—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically‐evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

Falk, Armin and Hermle, Johannes (2018), Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality. Science. doi:10.1126/science.aas9899. link

[According to the resource hypothesis,] greater availability of material and social resources removes the gender-neutral goal of subsistence, which creates the scope for gender-specific ambitions and desires. In addition, more gender-equal access to those resources may allow women and men to express preferences independently from each other. As a consequence, one would expect gender differences in preferences to be positively associated with higher levels of economic development and gender equality.
We tested these competing predictions using data on experimentally validated measures of willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust for 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples. So that the data would be geographically representative, the dataset was chosen so as to include all continents and a broad range of cultures and economic development levels. In total, the data represent about 90% of both the world population and global income.
The data revealed substantial cross-country variation in gender differences in preferences. Gender differences were found to be strongly positively associated with economic development as well as gender equality. These relationships held for each preference separately as well as for a summary index of differences in all preferences jointly. Quantitatively, this summary index exhibited correlations of 0.67 (P < 0.0001) with log GDP per capita and 0.56 (P < 0.0001) with a Gender Equality Index (a joint measure of four indices of gender equality), respectively. To isolate the separate impacts of economic development and gender equality, we conducted a conditional analysis, finding a quantitatively large and statistically significant association between gender differences and log GDP per capita conditional on the Gender Equality Index, and vice versa. These findings remained robust in several validation tests, such as accounting for potential culture-specific survey response behavior, aggregation bias, and nonlinear relationships.

Mac Giolla, E. and Kajonius, P. J. (2019), Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding. Int J Psychol. doi:10.1002/ijop.12529. link

Sex differences in personality have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries. We advance this research by using an extensive personality measure, the IPIP‐NEO‐120, with large country samples (N > 1000), from 22 countries. Furthermore, to capture the multidimensionality of personality we measure sex differences with a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis distance D). Results indicate that past research, using univariate measures of effect size, have underestimated the size of between‐country sex differences in personality. Confirming past research, there was a strong correlation (r = .69) between a country's sex differences in personality and their Gender Equality Index. Additional analyses showed that women typically score higher than men on all five trait factors (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness), and that these relative differences are larger in more gender equal countries.


Whether to ask satisfaction and importance questions for each item in a survey? Job satisfaction and opinion surveys ask respondents to provide ratings on a set of items. One response scale might be a five point rating scale measuring satisfaction (e.g., 5-point strongly dissatisfied to strongly satisfied) with the item content (e.g., "Opportunities for promotion"). Some tests also gather for each item "importance" ratings.

What are the psychometric properties of importance versus satisfaction scales?
To what extent is the incremental information provided by importance ratings justified?

Computing overall satisfaction

There is discussion in the literature about whether measures of overall satisfaction should be calculated as some form of weighted composite of facet satisfaction where weights are derived from importance ratings.
These debates have been applied to various types of satisfaction including life, job, and customer. In this context, it does not seem like weighting by importance makes much difference, and it may even be detrimental.

For examples, Trauer et al (2001) state that:

  Many Quality of Life (QoL) instruments ask respondents to rate a
  number of life domains in terms of satisfaction and personal
  importance, and derive weighted satisfaction scores by multiplying the
  two rat- ings. This paper demonstrates that this practice is both
  undesirable and unnecessary. QoL domains are selected on the basis of
  their inherent importance, rendering separate importance rating
  partially redun- dant. Weighted scores present difficulties in
  interpretation. Further, we show that multiplicative composites have
  undesirable psychometric properties. There is evidence that
  multiplicative composites have little or no advantage over unweighted
  ratings in correlational or predictive studies. Apart from the face
  validity and the intuitive appeal of multiplying satisfaction ratings
  by importance ratings, there appear to be no sound reasons for doing
  so, and several good reasons not to do so.

A similar critique of importance ratings in the job satisfaction domain can be seen in Blood (1971).

Nonetheless, this all assumes that importance measurement is a means for  forming an overall composite. In some instances, measurement of importance is of substantive interest. Trauer et al (2001) acknowledge this when they write:

  It is not suggested that the assessment of the importance of domains
  of satisfaction is inconsequential. It has been shown that domains
  that are closer to the personal core (e.g. health, marriage, family)
  are typically judged as more im- portant than more peripheral domains
  (e.g. membership of organizations)...

Study of mean importance ratings

Importance ratings can be used to assess average perceptions of importance which might inform causal hypotheses regarding what is influencing satisfaction.

Take for example, Rice et al (1991) among many other things, they report importance ratings of various job facets. Among other things the authors asked 97 employed college students to rate

  facet importance on a 9-point scale with two verbal
  anchors: not at all important and extremely important (e.g., "How
  important to you is the amount of opportunity for promotion?").

If we sort the results reported in Table 1 by importance we see the following:

Job Facet                     Mean Importance
Hourly pay (dollars)              7.4
Hours per week                    7.3
Control over schedule             7.3
Opportunity to learn skills       6.7
Decision making                   6.4
Promotion opportunity             6.3
Mental effort required            6.1
Conversation with co-workers      6.0
Customer or client contact        5.7
Physical effort required          5.4
Supervisor contact                5.3
Commuting time (minutes)          4.3

This is presumably an interesting empirical finding in itself.

Relationship between importance and satisfaction

Some researchers have explicitly studied the relationship between importance and satisfaction to see whether there is a relationship. E.g., Borg (1991) provides an example of job satisfaction exploring how intra-individual variability in facet job satisfaction relates to facet importance. They find support both for the idea that more important facets are deemed more satisfying and for a u-shaped relationship where it is the most and least satisfied facets that are the most important. This variation depends on the domain being studied.

References

Blood, M.R. (1971). The validity of importance.. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 55, 487.
Borg, I. (1991). On the relationship between importance and satisfaction ratings on job aspects. Applied Psychology, 40, 81-92.
Rice, R.W., Gentile, D.A. & McFarlin, D.B. (1991). Facet importance and job satisfaction.. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76, 31.
Trauer, T. & Mackinnon, A. (2001). Why are we weighting? The role of importance ratings in quality of life measurement. Quality of life research, 10, 579-585.


What is the rationale behind filler words? When we talk, we tend to use filler words like "ehm", "um", "uh", etc.
What is the rationale behind those constructs from a neurolinguistic point of view?
It seems this happens while we are thinking or searching for an answer to a question.

What is the rationale behind those constructs from a neurolinguistic point of view?

A simple conversation engages multiple areas of the brain, there are temporal areas for recognizing, planning & generating speech, motor areas for executing it,Frontal & PreFrontal areas for making sense of it,defining social context, and memory subsystems for holding both to small sound bites and longer conversational threads.

In my view,filler words are the speech equivalent of learned reflexes for movement or conditioned responses in the context of a conversation. Additionally, since we are also capable of overriding and co-opting such mechanisms, they can also be thrown in consciously (when stalling for time as you note) or avoided when public speaking by breaking cadence with silence.

From a neurolinguistics point of view, they most likely involve wernicke's area which is involved in the planning and selecting of words for speech ( along with recognition) and might involve PF-Temporal Areas trying to catch up in word and ideas selection or comprehension while maintaining cadence.

Source: Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, ( The language chapter)


At what point does a complex become pathological? I've a first question so I apologize if the format is completely awry.

I'm reading Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature and I came across this passage by Edward C. Whitmont:

  The shadow cannot be eliminated. It is the ever present dark brother or sister. Whenever we fail to see where it stands, there is likely to be trouble afoot. For then it is certain to be standing behind us. The adequate question therefore never is: Have I a shadow problem? Have I a negative side? But rather: Where does it happen to be right now? When we cannot see it, it is time to beware! And it is helpful to remember Jung's formulation that a complex is not pathological per se. It becomes pathological only when we assume that we do not have it; because then it has us.

The bold is my own addition to emphasize where my question stems from. This is the whole paragraph to the end of the chapter so as much context as I could give on it. To me (psychology as an interest/hobby with no classes or experience) this means that when we ignore the effects a complex has on us then it becomes pathological.

An example: Say I have an amputated hand and am lividly jealous at the sight of people doing things two-handed. By refusing to acknowledge and deal with this dilemma, I am relegating it to others to deal with by default and it thusly becomes pathological.

Is this accurate? Are there other important factors to take into consideration when considering a complex pathological?

I don't think there is an easy answer to this question. It is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string. Really what you are asking is, what is the defining point between a lesser problem and a greater problem, that it can be diagnosed as a pathological.

My answer would be once a complex impacts on an individual's ability to function normally, becomes a more persistent within the person's thoughts or in any way crippling then it is pathological. Or better put in the following quote:

  psychoneurosis, also called neurosis, plural psychoneuroses, or
  neuroses ,  mental disorder that causes a sense of distress and
  deficit in functioning.

Firstly to define what Jung considered to be a complex.

  Jung's theory of complexes with key citations.
  A "complex" meaning a personal unconscious, core pattern of emotions,
  memories, perceptions, and wishes organized around a common theme
  (Shultz and Shultz, 2009). .../...

  Jung often used the term "complex" to describe a usually unconscious,
  repressed, yet highly influential symbolic material that is
  incompatible with the consciousness (Daniels, 2010).  .../...

  Some complexes usurp power from the ego and can cause constant
  psychological disturbances and symptoms of neurosis (Daniels, 2010)

So given that  when a complex becomes a greater problem, it's a  neurosis. We need to define neurosis.

  Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving
  distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is
  not outside socially acceptable norms.1 It is also known as
  psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it
  are said to be neurotic. The term essentially describes an "invisible
  injury" and the resulting condition.

Now we compare this with the definition of what pathology is in psychology.

  Psychological Pathology   Definition   The scientific study of
  psychological disorders and their causes.   Description
  Psychological pathology is the study of the causes, components,
  course, and consequences of psychological disorders. These are
  characterized by abnormality and dysfunction.   Abnormality
  Psychological disorders are defined by diagnostic criteria, like those
  outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
  (DSM; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000) or the
  International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related
  Health Conditions (ICD; World Health Organization, 2007).

The inclusion of neurosis in the DSM has been controversial and neurosis is not considered a part of anxiety conditions.


Is the energy of an action potential divided among multiple axon terminals? My understanding is that the bulk of an axon is myelinated, greatly adding to the efficiency of transmitting action potentials. However, the axon terminals are not myelinated. I'm wondering if the energy of an action potential is divided among the various branched terminals of an axon and, if so, how it's divided. For the purpose of this question, I think it's safe to assume that an action potential loses no energy while travelling down the main myelinated part of an axon.

From my understanding, no, this is not the case: action potentials, in the axon terminal(s) and other non-myelinated areas, travel like a wave, thus activating all terminals with the same starting energy.

In the myelinated areas of the axon, however, the charge instead performs Saltatory conduction, where the charge jumps from one node of Ranvier to the next extremely quickly.

You may be interested in the Wikipedia article on Neurotransmission.  Unfortunately, a few of the citation links on that page are dead, but it should offer some good material anyway.


What does Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi mean by Nautilus? I'm not sure that this is the best site for the question but given it is a psychology book I figured better here than nowhere.

I'm reading flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and on page 47 the following quote is made:

“they will go on diets, join health clubs, do aerobics, buy a Nautilus, or undergo plastic surgery.”

What i meant by "Buy a Nautilus"? I've never heard of someone acquiring the shelled invertebrate as a response to stresses of life, in my entire existence, and based on my research a $10,000+ watch isn't a "normal" response either so i'm not sure what is being communicated in this sentence.

There is lots of opportunity here for jokes about generational differences, as both Csikszentmihalyi and I were born before generational names were even invented, but I will go straight to the answer. It was probably in the 1960s that Nautilus was the brand name of one of the first manufacturers of home exercise/weight machines. In those days there weren't any exercise clubs to join, and, if you didn't like the YMCA scene, then the only option was to buy a set of barbells, which were clumsy and not well adapted to many muscle groups. The Nautilus machine filled that economic gap and became very popular; you see their many descendants in all the exercise clubs today.


How can we get rid of the problems of misconception, assumption, and expectation? I watched a TedX Talk that called "The Surprising Secret of Solving Problems Quickly" by Collins Key, about 3 problems that most greatly hinder our ability to solve intriguing problems. These 3 problems are Misconception, Assumption, and Expectation.

Misconception, as he explains, is when we misunderstand a certain part of a problem because of how we are used to seeing it or because of how it is presented.

Assumption is when we assume something about part of the solution that we have little reason to assume, but it seems to us as if we do have reason to assume this.

Expectation is when we expect the solution to go in a certain direction, thus stopping us from thinking in other directions.

If you do not understand the exact differences between the three in this context, please watch the Ted Talk.

My question: How can these complications be eliminated? How can we check to make sure we have no misconceptions? How can we block ourselves off from assuming something? And how can we "mindblank" ourselves enough to not expect anything, without entirely blocking off our thinking process?

I seem to have realized/learned part of the answer:

  For assumptions: the trick is not blocking what you assume; rather the inverse. Most assumptions are implicit. By making them explicit (consciously formulating them) they become more noticeable and open for scrutiny. Enter, rationality and science!

In other words, when solving a problem, you should realize and highlight any assumptions you might have, and then ridicule them (point out to yourself why or why not they hold).

Expectations: this is slightly more challenging (and more vague), but similarly to assumptions, you should analyze which direction you expect the solution to go in and formulate a few other possible hypotheses.

Misconceptions: the solution to this I do not fully understand yet, but maybe one should try to fiddle around with the problem and try to present it in a different way. (For example, with the candle problem, you can rearrange the elements. With a math problem, you can rephrase it or shift the expressions.)


Are people who have a crush on someone generally delusional with respect to their crush? This question came up in relationships.SE (still in beta) in this lengthy thread (which I hope you can get access to).

Basically the disagreement goes as follows:

Telling somebody with a crush

  It's possible that your crush object may never see you in a romantic light

will let them disregard the 'never' in favor of "possible", because of what DVK calls "confirmation bias" (see note at the bottom). So they would draw possibly false hope from it.

The presupposition is, that people with a crush on someone generally are delusional, at least with respect to said crush, thus suffering from this "confirmation bias".

Now I disagree with the presupposition, but want to put the question, whether it's true or not, here, to ideally get a definitive answer.

Note from DVK's comment:

As a side note - I'm aware that "Confirmation bias" may be a technically incorrect term - call it "Wishful thinking" if you prefer. Basically, the fact that a person with a crush will only hear facts, or interpret anything they hear, in a way that is positive to their desired outcome.

Unrequited love is so common that it is funny. Most childhood crushes begin as such because children are unable to identify who is interested in them. More difficult it becomes when no one is inclined to be in love with them. Being a normal person attachments form to those nearest who show compassion or have some physically appealing trait. Such beings irrational behavior based on the lack of psychological health in a person's life. Therapy can help identify why a person needs love from that individual and why they can't accept the lack of interest. Then it can help identify more suitable candidates for love who bear the same attractable traits. Finally it helps someone develop greater self-esteem and help them move on and cope with the strong pain of rejection.

Due to the symptoms of their illnesses, those with dependency, attachment or borderline personality disorders are more likely to experience unrequited love or even become obsessed with a person.

In the most extreme and rare form stalking and erotomania can happen as a result of psychosis. These instances are actually disillusion. Normally this occurs with those who have a history of bipolar or schizo typical and are symptomatic, not under a doctors care or taking anti-psychotics.

The literature describes the changes which happen in a normal person's brain caused by love not as delusion but as bias. It has been shown that if you trust someone and you love them your more likely to overlook their faults and systematically misremember their transgressions. Moreover though beauty is in the eye of the beholder it is likewise enhanced by love. The person you love appears more attractive than they would otherwise. This is probably an evolutionary adaption to promote long lasting relationships.


Using "it sounds" instead of "it tastes" 99% of the time I use in the conversation (or when I am thinking) the phrase "it sounds" instead of "it tastes" when I am talking about the food, or drinks, etc.

For example: "This coffee sounds very good.", "I like how this hamburger sounds."

I do not do it intentionally, sometimes I "say" it in my head and then say out loud the "normal" version.

Has this something a name? Or this is probably just my association and there is nothing to it?

EDIT: And recently I have used it in sentence: "I wonder how this will play." (of course it was about the food, but this time I wondered how it will SMELL)

Has this something a name?

In general Speech Errors

In your case (Depends on context and your particulars) it could be considered semantic substitution,(a correct word is substituted with an erroneous but similar word) although verbs seem to be rare and it happens more with nouns. (Hotopf  1980's).


Why brain can't get used to low dopamine levels? When you use dopamine increasing drugs (such as cocaine) for long time the brain down-regulates dopamine receptors.Then dopamine has less sites to bind, therefore not making the same effect as before, which decrease our happiness and mood.

On the other hand low dopamine levels can cause ADHD or depression.I wonder why our brains cannot do the reverse of it (up-regulate receptors) when our dopamine levels are low?

Look at it this way. When rain falls on a roof, the water runs into a gutter. Up to a point, that water can run down to the drainpipe. The gutter has caught all the water, and the system is in equilibrium.

In your first example, the problem is too much water. The gutter overflows. The drain is accepting the same amount of water, but the gutter can't hold all the incoming water.

In the other example, the problem is not enough water. The gutter is sending it all to the drain, and the drain is taking it all away. There's less water coming out of the system because there's less coming into the system. Even if you made the gutter larger, you'd have the same throughput.

To answer the actual question, those receptors can only process as much as they get. If there's not enough dopamine coming in, the receptors can't make more out of nothing. They can't multiply the effect, only dampen what's there.


Why is it difficult for employees to express hatred to their boss? Suppose Bob hates his boss. Note that Bob is an "average" person. Also suppose that he shouts as loudly as possible "[Curse] my boss" (with nobody else around but him).

Why is it so difficult for Bob to say this directly to his boss? Is this based on social norms or is there a specific brain region which restrains this outburst?

While there may be many social norms operating that discourage expression of hatred to your boss, typically there would be many rational reasons not to express such hatred:

The employee's job could be terminated, which may result in lower income for the employee or  a worse job in the future. Swearing in the workplace would often be considered harassment which would often be grounds for termination.
Even where an employee has arranged another job to go to (but then technically, the relationship is not really one of employee to boss), there is the risk associated with reputation damage that can result from verbally abusing a boss.
If the outburst does not result in loss of job, a boss typically has extensive control over the employee. Bosses can typically influence your work duties, when you get leave, when you have to be at work, whether he supports a promotion, who is terminated during a redundancy process, etc. If your boss likes you, then they often have substantial discretion to make your life easier. In all those kinds of situations, life is easier if your boss is on your side.
Independent of the power relationship, you need to spend time with co-workers, and many people find it more pleasant to exist in a pleasant social work environment.

Thus, I don't think we need to resort to a neural explanation to adequately understand this behaviour.

Furthermore, presumably there are legitimate ways of expressing displeasure with your boss that would be more effective in achieving your goals. This might broadly come under the heading of "negotiation".


Myelin and Myelin Sheath https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002261.htm

Why is Myelin used as a term to mean the Myelin Sheath as opposed to the proper term?

It is apparent to me that Myelin is the substance itself regardless of structure and the Myelin Sheath is the structure around the axis to insulate Electro-Chemically the nervous system composed of this substance.

But Media and Physicians frequently use Myelin instead of Myelin Sheath as opposed to textbooks that make the distinction

As Wikipedia points out:

  Myelin is a lipid-rich (fatty) substance formed in the central nervous system (CNS) by glial cells called oligodendrocytes, and in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) by Schwann cells.

When referring to the sheath, you are referring to the covering which is made of myelin.

  Myelin sheaths are sleeves of fatty tissue that protect your nerve cells from damage (WebMD).

The thing is that myelin formed in the CNS and PNS is only used in the form of a sheath  to protect your nerve cells, so when physicians refer to the myelin, they are referring to the sheath.

With demyelination, the integrity of the sheath is being compromised.


How do certain individuals, like Quang Duc, develop the ability to remain calm when enduring significant nociceptive pain? A famous picture depicts Quang Duc self-immolating himself in protest of the Vietnam War. David Halberstram: "As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound [...]. His face  seemed to remain fairly calm until it was so blackened by the flames  that you couldn’t make it out anymore." I'm ignoring shock and hormonal responses in this question, as he remained calm during the initial stage of the burning (where these effects are unlikely to have been live). I'm also (perhaps wrongly) assuming that he wasn't under the influence of drugs and didn't have a cognitive impairment that made him unable to feel the pain.

A question like this has been asked before on Quora, but I'm not satisfied by any of the given answers. Specifically:

Based on personal/anecdotal experiences, I'm not convinced that confidence/motivation/conviction or any rationalization is able to trigger this ability.
I also don't see how one can use deliberate practice in this task (i.e., build up tolerance with systematic desensitization or connecting the pain signal with positive thoughts/experiences) without seriously damaging the body.
I'm also not convinced that traditional/standard mindfulness meditation has this kind of efficacy. I remember seeing various efficacy quantities of mindfulness meditation (and therapy) in a meta study and none of them seemed to be at the quantity required to remain calm in response to this extreme stimulus.
I'm also skeptical that detachment is viable in this scenario, given the sheer magnitude of the nociceptive stimulus (also, I was under the impression that Buddhist meditation advises the practitioner to be aware to the pain, not detach from it).
If the explanation is elevated gamma-wave activity, how does one reliably reach this state "on-demand" and how does one maintain it during the endurance of significant nociceptive pain?

I should note that I'm not sure how different the mindfulness-based techniques of today are from the Buddhist meditation practiced by Quang Duc.

Perhaps the research shows that one of the points I'm skeptical about is actually effective in remaining calm in the face of extreme pain. If so, I'd love to hear about it.

As mentioned in Can calmness happen during the fight-flight response?, with looking at the possibility of calmness during stress and trauma, you only have to look at the situation with rape victims and soldiers witnessing severe traumatic events who dissociate (Ellert, et al. 2011)(Waller, et al. 2001) during the event.

Dissociation is a psychological defence mechanism (Cardeña, 1994) which helps the person to get through the situation with as little harm as possible.  Think about it like throwing a switch on conscious awareness.

Whilst some define dissociation as a combination of 2 distinct psychological mechanisms (Brown, 2006), the psychobiological mechanism of dissociation is little understood; but, when someone is dissociated from the event, the detachment of conscious awareness from the event can make the person appear very calm.

With Thích Quảng Đức, I would hypothesise that he somehow managed to "mentally switch off from the event" by dissociating through detachment.  Quảng Đức set light to himself as a protest because he felt there was no other way to convey such a strong message. As far as he believed, he had no choice, just like rape victims and soldiers can have no choice.

The thing with the football fan at the Bradford Fire @Robin mentioned, was that he was inevitably pumped full of adrenaline from his adrenal glands to assist in the Flight/Fright response. Cortisol is also released at the same time and Cortisol is good for numbing any present pain in order for you to flee.

Fear of impending pain could activate the flight/fight response releasing the Adrenaline and Cortisol which could be what was happening in the scenario mentioned in the question.

Needless to say that once the Cortisol has lowered he will feel the pain caused.

References

Brown, R. J. (2006). Different types of “dissociation” have different psychological mechanisms. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 7(4), 7-28.DOI: 10.1300/J229v07n04_02

Cardeña, E. (1994) The domain of dissociation. In: Dissociation: Clinical and theoretical aspects, Edited by: Lynn, S. J. and Rhue, J. W. 5–31. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis PhD & Onno van der Hart PhD (2011) Dissociation in Trauma: A New Definition and Comparison with Previous Formulations, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(4), 416-445.DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2011.570592

Waller, G., Hamilton, K., Elliott, P., Lewendon, J., Stopa, L., Waters, A., ... & Hargreaves, I. (2001). Somatoform dissociation, psychological dissociation, and specific forms of trauma. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 1(4), 81-98.DOI: 10.1300/J229v01n04_05


How long can neuron adaptation last? One way to model a neuron which adapts to input current is an Adaptive LIF [1]. In this model, the input current is subtracted by $n$, which changes with $dn=\frac{-n}{\tau_n}dt$ [2] and $n$ is incremented by $\text{inc}_n$ every time the neuron spikes. $\tau_n$ can be considered as the Adaptation Time constant, given it affects how quickly the adaptation state decays to zero.

What ranges of $\frac{-n}{\tau_n}$ have been found in biology?

[1] Koch, Christof. Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing
       in Single Neurons. Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 339

[2] Nengo Neural Simulator code

An Adaptive LIF is just one approximation of a biological learning rule. It is not a model for how biology actually works.

The most-studied biological learning rule is long-term potentiation in the hippocampus, though similar processes occur elsewhere including neocortex. "LTP" can come in shorter or longer forms, but the longest forms of LTP are potentially permanent. The processes for maintaining this permanence are referred to as maintenance and consolidation. Some of the longer lasting forms of LTP have been shown to last weeks to years (for example, see Abraham et al., 2002).

At that point, any 'adaptation' is just as well thought of as additional plasticity, because living neurons are constantly getting input and adjusting synaptic weights. Depression is just as important in biological circuits as is potentiation, and depressed circuits can atrophy completely, effectively being permanently lost.

All nervous connectivity is due to some sort of plasticity at some point in development, and some of those connections will persist throughout the lifetime of the organism. However, synapse weights are constantly being updated in a living system. It isn't really appropriate to think of any certain weight as being permanent, while also not appropriate to think of any arbitrary synapse as possessing an adaptation time constant.

References

Abraham, W. C., Logan, B., Greenwood, J. M., & Dragunow, M. (2002). Induction and experience-dependent consolidation of stable long-term potentiation lasting months in the hippocampus. Journal of Neuroscience, 22(21), 9626-9634.

Collingridge, G. L., Peineau, S., Howland, J. G., & Wang, Y. T. (2010). Long-term depression in the CNS. Nature reviews neuroscience, 11(7), 459.

Malenka, R. C., & Nicoll, R. A. (1999). Long-term potentiation--a decade of progress?. Science, 285(5435), 1870-1874.

Lynch, M. A. (2004). Long-term potentiation and memory. Physiological reviews, 84(1), 87-136.


What to call theory where next activity following a fun activity is also perceived as fun? What is the name of the theory that states:

  "if someone is having fun beforehand, the next activity they do will also seem fun regardless of what the activity is."

so like continuing fun... Any similar theories is welcome. I heard about this theory from my lecturer but I can't remember the name of it.

The most related experiment that I can think, is the one that people were willing to drink more water after seeing a happy face, because they evaluated the water as more positive. See full article bellow :

Face Value: Hidden Smiles Influence Consumption And Judgment.


Psychology of Sympathizing with Death Why do we sympathize in general when we see something or someone dying even if we personally don't know it/them?
Is there any species other than humans which sympathize with the death of its own species?
Is there any species other than humans which sympathize with the death of other species?

Empathy (exists because cooperation can lead to better survival chances)
Elephants, apes (chimpanzee), donkeys.
Dolphins at least see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Evolution

https://books.google.ch/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tNaTfIlMh8wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=empathy+death+animal&ots=2J8RPQfOy3&sig=BJuNrb4k7JtiVAFqmWEbeZjiFB8#v=onepage&q=dolphin&f=false


Why can't people solve a riddle if you tell them irrelevant information? Suppose you tell a riddle to your friend, e.g. a situation puzzle:

  A man walks into a bar, and asks the bartender for a drink of water. The bartender pulls out a gun, points it at the man, and cocks it. The man says "Thank you" and leaves. What happened?

Then during the question and answer phase you accidentally let slip irrelevant information:

  The man was a cowboy. Sorry, he wasn't a cowboy. Actually, this is irrelevant.

Even after explicitly stating that the information is irrelevant, there is a chance the friend is now unable to clear the mind from the cowboy bit, and the thinking goes astray. The friend thinks about Wild West, saloons, duels etc, reasoning that there might be a reason why you mentioned the cowboy bit.

What is the name of this cognitive effect? Why does it happen and what are its properties? Please describe in detail.

I hope you still see this. I don't know a specific term for the exact kind of problem you mentioned. However, I would think that it can be explained by linguistic as well as cognitive or memory processes. Hence, my proposed explanation comes in two parts.

Linguistics

One view would be that it has to do with how we interpret language, specifically that we usually try to avoid irrelevant information. A classic in pragmatics (the field of linguistics that deals with how we actually use language to achieve things - make someone understand something, request things, or pose riddles) is the work by Paul Grice (1975).

Grice posited that we usually try to communicate cooperatively, i.e. in such a manner that it is easy for our communication partner to understand what we are saying. He said that we usually adhere to four conversational maxims: information (say as much but not more than is required for understanding the message), truth (say what you think is true), relation (be relevant), and manner (be clear and brief).

The important part is that, when trying to understand what someone has said, we also assume that the other is also following that rule. So when you say the cowboy thing, we usually assume that it's informative, relevant, and true and base all our interpretations and deliberations on that. This essentially means that to understand a statement you have to accept it as true. (Actually, Grice has fallen a bit out of favour with linguists, but newer accounts like relevance theory would lead to roughly the same conclusion.)

Memory

But that would not explain why that should still be the case after you tell the guesser that the information is actually irrelevant. This can likely be explained by the way memory works. A good start on this is the article by Lewandowsky and colleagues (2012). As soon as we get some information, we connect it to other information that is also currently relevant in our memory. That means that as soon as you say that the man is a cowboy, he is one in our memory. We connect the man (which was before just a non-descript man in a bar) with our mental concept of a cowboy. These connections get stronger the more they are used.

Your assertion that he actually wasn't a cowboy doesn't delete that connection, it likely only adds a "NOT" tag to it, but the connection itself is still there and has actually been strengthened further by the repeated mention. What is more, you do not provide an alternative (e.g., he's a truck driver or whatever) which could have lead to another, competing connection. To actually consider that "NOT" connection is effortful and strengthens the man--cowboy connection even further. Research usually calls this the misinformation effect or continued influence of misinformation.

Hope this helps! If someone with a better grip on pragmatics and/or memory processes is willing to correct (ha!) my explanation, I'd appreciate it.

References

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 3). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012) Misinformation and its correction: continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest (13). doi:10.1177/1529100612451018


Psychology Research, Questionnaire Help Needed I am Computer Science student and studying Psychology as an elective. Now I was required to conduct a research on any topic. I chose: Negative Effects of Permissive Parenting Style on Youth of Pakistan. I am having difficulty in making Questionnaire (since I have very little experience about it). I want your expertise to know which approach is better. I have following two approaches of making questionnaire.

First Approach:

Topic: Negative Effects of Permissive Parenting Style on Youth of Pakistan

1-Do you think that permissive parenting style has negative effects on Pakistani youth?

2-Would you like to adopt permissive parenting style if you happen to become a parent?

3-Do you think that permissive parenting is one of the reasons that Pakistani youth lacks self-discipline?

4-Do you think that the element of not listening to anyone, in Pakistani youth is because of their brought up by permissive parents?

5-Do you think that students of universities in Pakistan do not perform well in academics because they are not afraid of their parents' reaction on getting failed?

6-Do you think that parents should be friendly enough, so that their children do not hesitate to share any problem?

7-Do you think that in Pakistan, permissive parenting should be encouraged?

8-Do you think that blurred line between parents and children leads to domestic conflicts?

9-Do you think that children become creative in a restriction free environment?

10-Do you think that permissive parenting makes relationship with children conflict-free?

11-Do you think that youth of Pakistan do not abide by rules because they are not enforced by any rule under the permissive environment?

12-Do you think that, in Pakistan, drugs is more often among the youngesters having permissive parents?

13-Do you think that the parents being soft spoken, builds strong emotional understanding in children?

14-Do you think that under permissive environment, children will lack decision-making skills?

15-Do you think that friendly environment in home teaches children social skills?

Second Approach: What do you think about the following statements?

⦁ Your parent really expect you to follow family rules.

⦁ Your parent try to know where you go at night.

⦁ Your parent know exactly where you are most afternoons after school.

⦁ When your parent tell you to do something, they expect you to do it immediately without any question.

⦁ Your parent get very upset if you try to disagree with them.

⦁ It is a bad idea to question authority.

⦁ A person must have clear long term goals.

⦁ You would rather do something beside studying during extra time.

⦁ If you like something, you want to have it no matter what.

⦁ You have a healthy diet.

In the first approach, direct questions with binary options are given.

In the second approach, first 5 questions are used to depict whether the subject is permissive or not. Next five questions are used to know what are the effects on permissive parenting.

You said in your comments

  my goal of research is to figure out actual possible effects. In second approach, effects are being tried to figure out from the audience. While in first approach, direct questions mentioning effects with binary options are asked. I think in that case, second approach is better. What would you have chosen?

Opinion-based questions are off-topic here as we require questions which can be answered based on science rather than what individuals think is correct.

In order to answer your question without opinion being involved, I am going to have to reflect it back to you in order for you to be able to determine the best approach for your needs.

First of all, you need to ask yourself

  How can I work out the possible effects of permissive parenting via a questionnaire?

Once you have your answer to that question you are almost there on deciding how your are going to approach the questions within the questionnaire.

If you look at the questions in the first approach, with the exception of question 2, they all start with

  Do you think....?

These questions are looking for your audiences opinion on permissive parenting.  You need to ask yourself if you can gain knowledge of the actual effects of permissive parenting from these questions.  If you can, then great.  Go down that route and devise a list of questions which can give you the results.  If not, then look at another approach.

Your second approach looks at what kind of parenting your audience may have had and then looks at their opinion on a range of things.  Will their opinion-based answers in the second half give you what you need to determine the possible effects of the parenting style they were brought up on?  If so, then that is the approach you need with your questionnaire.


Can anyone see what is wrong with this implementation of the Pinsky-Rinzel model in Brian2? Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I've been attempting to implement the Pinsky-Rinzel model in the Brian2 simulator. I'm basing my implementation off the original article here: http://www.caam.rice.edu/~cox/neuro/pinskyrinzel.pdf and I've borrowed some of the formalism from the XPP version of the model here: http://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDB/showmodel.cshtml?model=35358&file=/b04feb12/booth_bose.ode (Though they are shifted 60mV from where I'm working)

I've got it to replicate the somatic firing (as you can see if you set gc to zero), but I can't figure out how to get the complex dendritc and somatic interplay  I'm supposed to see as seen in figure 2 and figure 3 of the model and my q and Ca values don't replicate the model at all. I think there is something wrong in how I'm handling the calcium currents, or the units I'm using there.

Does anyone have any ideas of where I'm going wrong?

My code:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Created on Sat Oct 24 11:21:30 2015

@author: Conor
"""

from __future__ import division
import numpy as np
from brian2 import *
defaultclock.dt = 0.05*ms

gbarl=0.1*msiemens
gbarna=30.0*msiemens
gbarkDr=15.0*msiemens
gbarCa=10.0*msiemens
gbarkc=15.0*msiemens

gkahp=0.8*msiemens
gNMDA=0*msiemens
gampa=0*msiemens

Vna=120.0*mV
Vca=140.0*mV
Vk=-15.0*mV
Vl=0*mV
Vsyn=60*mV
Id=0*uamp
Is=.15*uamp
gc=2.1*msiemens
p=0.5
Cm=3*uF
eqs='''
alpham=0.32*(13.1-Vs/mV)/(exp((13.1-Vs/mV)/4)-1)/ms : Hz
betam=0.28*(Vs/mV-40.1)/(exp((Vs/mV-40.1)/5)-1)/ms : Hz
alphan=0.016*(35.1-Vs/mV)/(exp((35.1-Vs/mV)/5)-1)/ms : Hz
betan=0.25*exp(0.5-0.025*Vs/mV)/ms : Hz
alphah=0.128*exp((17-Vs/mV)/18)/ms : Hz
betah=4/(1+exp((40-Vs/mV)/5))/ms : Hz
alphas=1.6/(1+exp(-0.072*(Vd/mV-65)))/ms : Hz
betas=.02*(Vd/mV-51.1)/(exp((Vd/mV-51.1)/5)-1)/ms : Hz
alphac=(exp((Vd/mV-10)/11)-exp((Vd/mV-6.5)/27))/(18.975)* (Vd<=50*mV)/ms+2*exp((6.5-Vd/mV)/27)*(Vd>50*mV)/ms : Hz
betac=((2*exp((6.5-Vd/mV)/27))/ms-alphac)*(Vd<(50*mV)) +0/ms : Hz
alphaq=clip(.00002*Ca,0,0.01)/ms :Hz
betaq=0.001/ms : Hz
Xca=clip(Ca/250,0,1) : 1
dh/dt= (alphah*(1-h)-betah*h) : 1
dn/dt = (alphan*(1-n)-betan*n) : 1
ds/dt = alphas*(1-s)-betas*s : 1
dc/dt = alphac*(1-c)-betac*c : 1
dq/dt= (alphaq*(1-q)-betaq*q) : 1
dCa/dt=-0.13*Ica/uamp/ms-0.075*Ca/ms : 1
Minfs=alpham/(alpham+betam) : 1
ILeakVs=gbarl*(Vs-Vl) : amp
ILeakVd=gbarl*(Vd-Vl) : amp
INa=gbarna*(Minfs**2)*h*(Vs-Vna) : amp
Ik_dr=gbarkDr*n*(Vs-Vk) : amp
Ica=gbarCa*s*s*(Vd-Vca) : amp
IK_c=gbarkc*Xca*c*(Vd-Vk) : amp
IK_AHP=gkahp*q*(Vd-Vk) : amp
dVs/dt=(-ILeakVs-INa-Ik_dr+gc/p*(Vd-Vs)+Is/p)/Cm : volt
dVd/dt=(-ILeakVd-Ica-IK_AHP-IK_c+gc/(1-p)*(Vs-Vd)+INMDA/(1-p))/Cm : volt
INMDA=gNMDA*Si*(1+0.28*exp(-0.062*(Vs/mV-60)))**(-1)*(Vd-Vsyn) : amp
Hxs=0<=((Vs/mV-10)*1) : 1
Hxw=0<=((Vs/mV-20)*1) : 1
dSi/dt=(Hxs-Si/150)/ms : 1
'''
neurons = NeuronGroup(1, eqs)
neurons.Vs=-4.6*mV
neurons.Vd=-4.7*mV
neurons.h=.999
neurons.n=.0001
neurons.s=.009
neurons.c=.007
neurons.q=.01
neurons.Ca=0
neurons.Si=.3
M = StateMonitor(neurons, True ,record=True,dt=.1*ms)

run(500*ms, report='text')
plt.cla()
plt.clf()
plot(M.t/ms, M[0].Vs/mV)
plot(M.t/ms, M[0].Vd/mV)
show()

If anyone ever finds this and has the same problem: The original paper has a flaw in the paper:

alphac=(exp((Vd/mV-10)/11)-exp((Vd/mV-6.5)/27))/(18.975)* (Vd<=50*mV)/ms+2*exp((6.5-Vd/mV)/27)*(Vd>50*mV)/ms : Hz

An errata published later changes this to:

alphac=(exp((Vd/mV-10)/11-(Vd/mV-6.5)/27)/18.975)*(Vd<=50*mV)/ms+2*exp((6.5-Vd/mV)/27)*(Vd>50*mV)/ms : Hz

After making this change it acts exactly how it should.


Psychological behavior of talking alone in front of mirror. My child, 5 years old girl recently talked to herself about she just changed to new school in front of mirror. It was alone and she just talked to herself on mirror. Is it psychologically normal condition or what should parents do about it?

By itself, a single incident like this, or even a habit of talking to oneself in the mirror, doesn't qualify as a mental disorder, in the opinion of one psychiatrist.
For a bit more background on the research in this area, there's a NYT article. Alas it doesn't get into children... and children to have more behavior that few adults have, like imaginary friends.
So the contents of the external self-talk is probably more important than the mere fact she does it.
The introductory part of an article focused on self-talk in Down syndrome mentions that

Self-talk or talking out loud to oneself (also referred to as 'private speech') is a common behavior in young children and plays an important role in the development of higher-level thinking and self-directional skills. Developmentally, children engage in self-talk to coordinate their actions and thoughts. During focused goal-directed activities, self-talk/private speech systematically becomes more selective in 4-year-old children than in 3 year olds[1]. By the age of 6 or 7 years, most children stop talking out loud to themselves and develop an internal dialogue when working out problems or challenging tasks[2].
In certain situations, people engage in self-talk (either positive or negative) during periods of stress or conflict or to motivate themselves. Negative self-talk has been found to increase during levels of affective stress in children and adolescents with anxiety and depression[3,4]. Studies of the use of self-talk in people engaged in exercise and competitive sports have found that exercisers and athletes use self-talk as a positive, motivating behavior to enhance their performance[5,6,7]. Few studies have been conducted on self-talk behavior in people with intellectual disabilities. Self-talk has been a common observation by parents of children and adults with Down syndrome[8,9]. It was postulated that self-talk is an important aspect of the thought processes of people with Down syndrome when they are working out difficult situations, expressing feelings, and entertaining themselves[10]. No association was found between self-talk/private speech and behavior problems, communication difficulties, or social isolation. However, self-talk in adults with Down syndrome has sometimes been incorrectly considered to be hallucinatory behavior [11,12].


Are most self-help books properly rooted in cognitive sciences? The following books are explained from a cognitive sciences perspective and rely strongly on psychology or sociology.

Self-help books

Dale Carnegie - Social Intelligence (empathy, emotional intelligence)
Wayne Dyer - Your Erroneous Zones
No more Mr. Nice guy
Dale Carnegie - How to win friends and influence people

Books about Seduction

The mystery method

For example one of the books about seduction speaks of Pavlovian conditioning. Additionally, even though they don't often use words like "rationalization" the books are often written by psychologist.

Are these books classified as psychology books?

Further clarification

Under the name of Cognitive Sciences are going a lot topics.
From very low level science to more applied. But the books I've cited are at a very high level (and since that also less verifiable). This kind of stuff is still classified as "applied psychology" or something like that?

They don't deal with stuff like "rationalization" but with the consequences of it. (i.e. childish behaviour, assertive behaviour, seduction, manipulation, conditioning, emotions, self-esteem handling, NLP, and so on..)

You can probably classify non-fiction books written for a lay audience into three categories:

Books written by experts and summarizing research in a non-technical language that can be understood by non-experts. The only difference between such a book and a research article is that this book simplifies the findings and cites its sources in a vague and general manner.
Books written by non-experts who quote only those research findings that appear to support their opinion and dismiss (and do not mention) what contradicts them.
Fantasy, prejudice, and other ignorant ramblings.

Most of the Pick Up theory falls into the second category. People like Mystery are successful with their pick up routines in a specific setting and with a highly select sample of women (US, white, middle-class, club goers). So their methods are valid. What is completely false is their assumption that all women (and men) are the same and that their methods will work for everyone everywhere. They read some popular science books, and whenever they read something that resonates with their experience, they believe they have found the scientific proof for how and why what they did worked for them and they quote it in their books to give them credence. European Pick Up Adepts have found that much of what people like Mystery recommend (e.g. peacocking) does not work in their culture. Many others find that many women do not react favourably to other routines (e.g. push-and-pull). The very fact that even "master" PUAs have to "next" many women (or stand on the street for minutes before they find someone whose body language signals the right kind of susceptibility) shows that the popular claim that you can pick up any woman any time is nothing but a power fantasy and marketing lie. Pick Up only works for those women and men for whom it works, and that is all the "science" there is to it.

Dale Carnegie is a motivational speaker. His books fall into the third category. They are as true as religion. They have positive effects for those who believe in them, but you can be equally successful by doing everything completely different than he recommends. They don't "work", because they are true, but because they make you believe in yourself and give you the courage to try.


does getting top marks and ranks in school or college make one intelligent? Please do not discuses about IQ tests that have problems like: 2,4,8,16,... what is the next number? having the answer as 32, because one can relate any number of random numbers mathematically! Whenever I ask this question to someone they would just say: yes!  getting top marks and ranks in school or college does make one intelligent because they could just score a top rank in IQ tests!
This paradox about such IQ tests not being correct can obviously be reasoned, but are top rank holders in proper subjects at school or college more intelligent than the rest of the students?
I agree upon the fact that there can be diverse definitions for the word "intelligent". The definition I use for the term intelligent is: a person who has the ability to learn any kind of subject that involves reasoning and extend his abilities to be able to develop that subject**; time frame is not a problem in my definition. To be elegant, I believe that one who has the ability to learn and research on any subject is intelligent. I do not consider people who could do stuff any computer program can do, as the existence of an algorithm to solve that task makes that task less imaginative but could involve high calculation ability (a weight lifter is different from a martial artist) . Scientists haven't achieved human level intelligence in machines and that makes me set machines as my reference point for intelligence.
please provide references enough to convince me and others on your answer.
*lets imagine relating a series 2,4,8,16,111; to do this we would first have to define a 5th degree polynomial with unknown coefficient values. equate: $f(1) = 2, f(2) = 4,...f(5) =111$. Its obviously possible to solve and get 4 values for each coefficients and the rest 2 coefficients end up being linearly related to each other (substitute any value other than zero for one and get the other). So hence you have a polynomial relating 2,4,8,16,111!
**when I say "develop that subject" I do not mean writing books and teaching, but I refer to the method of using one's creativity to enlighten themselves on the deepest regions of that subject.
P.S. also please suggest the best possible ways to measure one's intelligence.
update:
could you also please explain why we rely on tests that do not have defined answers to its questions for measuring one's IQ? Whenever I see a question that first gives a series like 2, 4, 6, 8. ? and ask for the missing number, I would be tempted to write 15356346546434 instead of 10 and form a polynomial relation that expresses the term in the series given its term number (like $f(n)$ would express the $n^{th}$ term).
I have also seen IQ question papers with questions that has a star drawn on with random numbers displayed within each blank loop we find within the star and a question mark in one of the blank loops which asks for the answer. Even they have arbitrary answers.

I think you have three core questions:

What is true intelligence and how can it be measured?
To what extent does school performance correlate with true intelligence?
To what extent does school performance cause  true intelligence to change?

Intelligence tests provide the best known means to measure general cognitive ability. There is a huge literature on intelligence tests. Good intelligence tests will generally sample from a wide range of cognitive domains (e.g., verbal, spatial, numerical, etc.). The literature on intelligence tests shows them to be a strong predictor of a wide range of important life outcomes.

So in essence, I reject your assumption that seems to dismiss the validity of intelligence tests. Over a hundred years of research and thousands of studies tell a rich story about the inter-correlation of different ability tests and their correlations with variables like educational performance, work performance, and many other variables. The review by Neisser et al (1996) is an excellent introduction to this literature.

I think this existing question on the correlation between GPA and IQ provides a reasonable answer to your question about the association between school performance and intelligence. In short, there is a very strong correlation between the two variables.

The final question is actually very interesting. I.e., what is the causal effect of education on intelligence? and what is the effect of a student applying additional effort to their education on intelligence?

I'm not as familiar with literature evaluating the causal question. The default assumption given the stability of intelligence and the plausible causal mechanisms is that intelligence causes school performance.

That said, education must on some level cause forms of intelligence to develop. My sense is that interventions targeted at increasing intelligence have generally not had sustained success. Also, twin studies generally show a negligible correlation between adopting parent intelligence and child intelligence, which also reinforces the strong role of genetics. There may also be differences between education increasing domain specific knowledge as opposed to increasing general intelligence.

References

Neisser, Ulrich; Boodoo, Gwyneth; Bouchard, Thomas J.; Boykin, A. Wade; Brody, Nathan; Ceci, Stephen J.; Halpern, Diane F.; Loehlin, John C.; Perloff, Robert; Sternberg, Robert J.; Urbina, Susana (1996). "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". American Psychologist. 51:77–101.


Severe depression/anxiety can't be treated with CBT Is there any evidence that supports the idea that a severe depression/anxiety can't be treated with CBT?

Since, it's in severe state, and one has to use anti-depressants to lower the level, and then obviously CBT can help reduce a moderate to low level depression. Is a severe depression/anxiety too strong to be healed by CBT, and it makes the usage of anti-depressants necessary?

Yes, that is the consensus view among psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (e.g., Parker et al., 2012). A commonly referenced authoritative guideline for treatment of major depressive disorder is the NICE guide.

Reference
Parker et al., Acta Psychiatr Scand (2013); 128(4): 271-81


Intrapersonal drawbacks of landscaped open spaces Preparing a dissertation, I would be interested in finding studies/articles concerning work conditions in open space offices.

Regarding what is expected and advocated by the benefits, I would currently hypothesize that this environment has a negative impact on long-term individual motivation, and it is more difficult to concentrate and to avoid preemption.
If I find some clues in this direction, my first and current plan would be something like:

The benefits wanted by companies in terms of group:

Team cohesion
Fluidity of communication (see theory of information processing) and knowledge sharing
Motivation (by collective emulation and cohesion and/or better hierarchical surveillance)

Disadvantages

Leveling / erasing of people (intrinsic individual characteristics are flattened into a group mean, probably the resulting form of the most influential and extrovert behaviors)
Distraction: a single person can create a unplanned meeting (whatever personal/professional topics) or a game (for example starting throwing a single soft ball) that will degenerate into massive service interruption (because nobody is really in charge of that, and hierarchy may think it is part of cohesion)
Insecurity* and lack of autonomy, loosing ability to create a personal space of withdrawal)
(* in this context, insecurity would be related to this quotes "These openings would foster a sense of insecurity related to the failure to exercise a comfortable grip on his/her personal space/sphere, especially in some situations where the distance with the hierarchical instance is lower." translated from one of my book)

Particularly, and for now, I would be interested by reading researchers that may have studied directly or indirectly any of:

open space drawbacks
productivity (before/after comparison)
knowledge sharing before/after (before/after comparison)
intimacy feeling/private sphere respect before/after (before/after comparison)
concentration/focus (before/after comparison)
spontaneous criticisms in small "human sized" desk (3-4 persons) versus "keep it for me" and have bad feelings concerning troublemakers because it may be herder to spot a problem in front of a bigger audience
accumulated distraction moments (before/after comparison)
etc.

I have some books in my native language but they are not related directly to these questions, and I find it hard to get some English literature.

Could you suggest some pointers or books or methodology on how you would find such articles ?

Thanks,

A partial answer to the question.

Literature about before/after comparisons may be found searching for the phrase "office redesign".

For example:

McElroy, J. C., & Morrow, P. C. (2010). Employee reactions to office redesign: A naturally occurring quasi-field experiment in a multi-generational setting. Human Relations, 63(5), 609–636.


How does the brain structure 3D visual data? Adobe Illustrator has taken over five minutes (and counting) to render a vector 2D image rotated 18° in 3D on my computer. And yet, I and nearly anyone else can easily visualize the subject rotated almost instantaneously, and with little effort rotate the object continuously in real time in the mind's eye.

I'm not asking how the brain stores representations of objects, as that's clearly up for debate. But how does the brain structure its internal representation of 3D visual data?

It's almost definitely not in some pixel-based format, as can be shown by simply visualizing an object of some sort, and then zooming in mentally on some detail and noticing the image retains its sharpness. It's probably not breaking down objects into geometric shapes either, because at least I personally don't visualize my friends as stick figures. It could be a vector format, but then it should be easier to visualize complex shapes that are mathematically simple, like this one:

So it would seem that the brain uses some other format. To the best knowledge of modern cognitive, how does this work?

This question cannot be answered in the form in which you asked it both because of the limits of current neuroscientific theories and methodologies when it comes to determining the structures of complex neural representations (although we have made headway in a few cases such as place cells and grid cells), and because neural representations are not really analogous to our colloquial concepts of simple mappings from numbers to images (ex. pixel, vector, wavelet, etc. bases for digital image representation).

I would encourage you to think, not only in terms of these representational formats privileged by Von Neumann style computer architectures (i.e. normal computers) with separate processing and digital memory systems, but in terms of a neural computer with distributed computation and memory. Neuroscientists typically think of neural representation in visual perception as occurring at a number of stages of increased abstraction. At the retina, the image is represented roughly in terms of what you might think of as pixels, but it is really just a set of photosensors and attached neurons that are activated due to light hitting the retina in different places at different frequencies and amplitudes. In V1 or primary visual cortex, the representation is in terms of what can be thought of as "edge detectors." In V2, the cells are tuned for a variety of slightly more complex properties such as  such as orientation, spatial frequency, color, and binocular disparity (an important piece of information for 3D perception.) As you go up through V3, V4, V5, and V6, the representations becomes more and more complex until they contain information about the structure of the underlying concept itself.

The 3-dimensionality does not come in until the visual information from both eyes is combined with top-down information about how things tend to be in the world (which comes from other senses and experiences as well) in order to infer the likely shape of the object. It is unclear whether there is any place in the brain where an image is represented explicitly as a 3D model of a visual object. More likely the raw perceptual data such as colors and patterns is represented in one area and is associated with the more object-centric structural representation in another area and this association causes the co-activation of all the neurons relevant to the perception of the object in it's three dimensional form. The information is neither represented in one area of the brain nor in one scheme but is distributed across a large number of neurons with different degrees of activation.

We can also think of this in terms of the contemporary theory of enactive perception, which states that the brain represents information in terms of state-action-observation contingencies. In this theory, there is no "image" present at all, but only a set of neural activations which correlate with prior experience (where the correlations are stored in terms of associative links between neurons creating a causal activation path along which "information" travels) and relationships between potential actions (either low level motor actions of the retina or other muscles, or higher level actions such as taking a step forward) and their likely consequences (both low level perceptual consequences such as the expected changes in the sensory data when an action such as moving the head is taken and higher level perceptual and conceptual consequences such as a cup falling when you choose to open your hand and the associated experiences.) In this more comprehensive picture, visual information cannot be strictly separated from from conceptual and multi-sensory information and so three-dimensional visual information is represented both in terms of neural activations causally associated with the structure of the perceived object as well as the activations associated with all the other conceptual beliefs and perceptual expectations that relate.

If you want to read more, these sources should be a good start: distributed neural memory, distributed neural representation of a higher order process, perception as associations between actions and observations

There are also a few sources that offer direct experimental evidence towards your question, but do not provide as much of a conceptual introduction to neural computation and representation. See "Neural computations underlying depth perception", Binocular depth perception and the cerebral cortex as a start.

Your question also makes reference to rotating an object "in the mind's eye." There is also a very large body of research on this phenomenon, which is called "mental rotation." The wikipedia article is a good place to start but there is a lot more to say about this interesting phenomenon, so feel free to ask a related question if you are curious!


Empirical proof for social network models I've recently encountered the domain of social network modelling while reading the papers on models of strategic voting (unpublished), opinion dynamics and influence spread.

All of these papers create complex computational models, usually modelling social networks as graphs and inferring that their behaviour match actual social behaviour.

However, I don't understand how these models can be empirically rigorous. It seems to me that the ways to validate a model is to match with empirical data, either via data matching or prediction. This doesn't seem to be done in any of those papers.

Consequently, how are these models validated?

Existing Papers
I found three papers in the same vein with considerably more empirical evidence.
1. Modeling the Size of Wars
In the paper, provinces and conflicts are modeled to justify Richardson's observation that the proportion of conflict severity in relation to their frequency is described by a power law. In other words, the more space there is between each conflict, the more casualties will result. The models uses a lot of detail. A geographical map is created and conflicts (down to technological advancement, political structural change and resource allocation) are simulated in models with dozens of parameters. More importantly, the level of detail in the paper allows parameters to be set to test historical scenarios to disprove or give further evidence to the model.
2. The Dynamics of Polarisation
The focus of the paper is modeling the change of public opinion in the United States as a way to provide explanation for two phenomenon:

Polarization of opinion is rare despite being perceived otherwise
Opinion homogeneity is rare, despite being perceive otherwise.

To model these phenomenon, a network similar to that of the Opinion Dynamics paper from the question is built, with imposed homophily. However, the paper grounds it's parameters in reality (for example, take-off issues that stimulate much discussion are considered rare). In contrast, the Opinion Dynamics paper creates parameters for skepticism and empathy, without giving much consideration for the mechanisms behind these attributes and how they might change over time.
3. A Psychologically-Motivated Model of Opinion Change with Applications to American Politics
This paper justifies modeling 2D distributed agents using the psychological parameters Influence, Susceptibility and Conformity and their interaction. The model is then validated on American political opinions as they shift over time.
Conclusion
There are papers with empirical basis in the domain of social network models. Typically, this realism is achieved by basing parameters on empirical evidence, rather than simplification of cognitive phenomena.
Reply from author of Social Network papers
The author of two of the papers I cited in the question, Alan Tsang, was kind enough to provide a rebuttal to my scepticism via personal correspondence:

The premise behind both the papers was to examine the effects of a
particular psychological phenomenon by examining it in isolation.  We
base our work on more conventional agent models from economics, which
assume completely rational actors.  We want to see what happens when
the rational behavior is tweaked to incorporate a behavioral
component.  In particular, we are interested in the qualitative
effects that are produced, and the mechanisms by which these are
achieved.  An agent based simulation is the ideal way of studying
this, because it allows us to drill down and take measurements that
would be impossible or very difficult to do in an actual community.
So what we are doing is more mathematics and less science.  The
results of the papers provide qualitative insights on what are
plausible effects of these behaviors on a larger system.  The next
step could certainly be to validate the model against real data, but
the goal of the paper is not to perform "full stack" science.  Rather,
we hope it would prove useful component in a more detailed model to be
used on data collect in the wild.
That said, we are also interested in validating our model against real
data as well, but they are difficult to come by.  For instance,
Facebook almost certainly has access to data that can be used to
detect homophily in networks, and how they might affect opinions over
time.  But the data is very proprietary and, even if we were to get
it, ethical concerns might limit how it can be used.  As you've
pointed out in the follow-up post, there are a few papers that examine
political affiliation, and those could potentially be useful ground
truth.  But I don't have the background to properly assemble such a
data set from scratch (as it would need both a time series of
opinions, and the underlying network structure).  Moreover, there are
sure to be other effects at work as well, which may confound the
analysis.  We're giving some thought to gathering data for the last
Canadian election, since strategic voting was so widespread and
successful, but any data we collect will likely be disconnected from
social network structure.  Maybe some aggregate network properties
could be inferred (ex: based on region), but it would be a
multi-layered problem.


Why do dreams lose clarity quickly over time after we awaken? Right after you wake up from a dream, you seem to be able to remember most if not all of the details.  Then, over time, these details fade and often disappear.

Is this a form of regression?  Why is it harder to solidify memories of dreams?

Short answer: Because areas of the brain needed for remembering are turned off during dreaming.

Dream Amnesia:

The process of converting perception into a memory construct that can be stored is called encoding, and is essentially the same during both wakefulness and sleep: That is, the same factors can hamper or promote successful encoding when awake or dreaming.  During sleep, the brain undergoes cyclical changes in which activity in some parts of the brain increases (hyperactive), while other areas decrease in activity (hypoactive).  Some areas of the brain associated with memory encoding are hypoactive during dreaming, resulting in most dreams being forgotten.

Red = hyperactive; Blue = hypoactive; F = prefrontal cortex

The most prominent area implicated in memory encoding of episodic memories is the prefrontal cortex (PFC).  Activity in this region is correlated with memory in studies conducted in awake subjects, and is similarly correlated with dream amnesia: During dreaming, this area is typically hypoactive (turned off), and its level of activity is predictive of dream recall.  Activity in the PFC during sleep may be modulated by levels of acetylcholine, dopamine, and other neurotransmitters.

Vanishing Memory:

Nir & Tononi (2010) review the issue:

  Unless the dreamer wakes up, most dreams are forever lost. Upon
  awakening, memory for the dream often vanishes rapidly unless written
  down or recorded, even for intense emotional dreams. It is not clear
  why this is the case since from a neuroimaging perspective, limbic
  circuits in the medial temporal lobe that are implicated in memory
  processes, are highly active during REM sleep. Perhaps the
  hypoactivity of prefrontal cortex, also implicated in mnemonic
  processes, plays an important role in dream amnesia.

Theoretically, waking up reactivates the areas of the brain that are turned off during sleep, allowing for memories to be encoded.  This process is unreliable, as memory encoding in both awake and sleeping subjects is modulated by attention - also a function of the PFC - so how much and how well dream content is remembered also depends on how much attention is given to it during waking.  Without attention, the memory trace fades quickly.  This interpretation is consistent with the reduced dream recall in awakenings from deep (slow-wave) sleep, that are characterized by disorientation and lower PFC activity, and with higher dream recall of lucid dreaming, characterized by awareness, control, and higher PFC activity.

Note: The above is certainly an over-simplification of a complex and poorly understood system, but it does suggest that any factor affecting the processes involved in memory encoding and attention (such as certain neurotransmitters, psychoactive drugs, lesions, mood disorders, training, experience, etc) may impact dream recall.  On the other hand, NMDA, a neurotransmitter involved in long-term memory consolidation (LTP) - a different activity that is increased (hyperactive) during dreaming - is less likely to be implicated in dream amnesia.


Would an electroencephalogram detect a chip in you brain that is sending signals? To clarify the question, if you had a chip inside your brain that is sending bytes via wi-fii, bluethoot or other kind of waves, would the encephalogram detect anomalous activity?

Are the waves amplitude of normal brain electromagnetic activity very different from what a chip sends?

EEG electrodes are designed to record the electrical activity of the brain over the scalp. As @Bryan said the frequency of interest is usually less than 200 Hz, although it is possible to record up to 5KHz(e.g. BrainAmp). But we should keep in mind that even in the higher sampling frequencies, it is only recording the electrical potential over the scalp, while the communication devices you mentioned are using electromagnetic fields (Bluetooth and wifi) or radio frequencies (e.g RF modules) for communication, and seems irrelevant to compare these frequency ranges to the sampling rate of the recording device (apples and oranges).

However, any electronic device needs the power to run, and your device needs to be supplied with electrical source (i.e. batteries), and depending on how it is powered I think it would be possible to detected it with altered EEG on the electrodes above it. There exist passive implants that do not need external sources of energy to function, but they are not good enough to transfer data at the bitrates you mentioned. Bluetooth and wifi have a lot of power consumption and need batteries to function.

To sum up, it depends on how your device is powered, and if there is a source of electrical activity, it will alter the EEG and you can detect it, although, you might not be able to say on which frequency exactly is working on (is it Bluetooth, wifi, RF, etc. ?).


Does your voice pitch affect your perceived authority? I heard a claim that people with lower voice pitch are perceived as more credible than people with higher pitch.

Is there any research on this?

There's quite a bit of research related to this topic:

Male CEOs with deeper voices make more money and manage larger companies (Mayew et al., 2013).
People are more likely to say they would vote for a political candidate with a deeper voice (Klofstad et al., 2012; Tigue et al., 2011).
People rate lower-pitched voices as more persuasive than higher-pitched voices (Apple et al., 1979).
Somewhat contrary to the above findings, people tend to raise the pitch of their voice when they are in a position of authority (Ko et al., 2014).


Can a person do things against their own will and be conscious of it at the same time? I am a firm believer of the principle of free-will, but wanted to see if there was any examples(or case examples) of people knowingly doing things against their own will.

I know that we can be pressured to do things and make hard choices, but the choice is still that of the individual.

Can a person do things they know they are not willing to do?

Can a person do things against their own will and be conscious of it at the same time?
Can a person do things they know they are not willing to do?

This is a little tricky to answer without parsing it as follows: can someone's earnestly stated desires be different to the desires implied by their actions?
Phrasing your question this way is important because what someone wants is unknowable: people could be lying to themselves, or lying to us, or simply lacking the insight to fully understand the motivations underpinning their behaviour. The intent behind a behaviour is even more unknowable: it can only be inferred from observation. Thus, although we presume that a dog eats because its hungry, and drinks water because it's thirsty, we need to be careful in recognising that while this is certainly a reasonable inference, nonetheless it is still only an inference.
I am sure you will also find some very rare syndrome that is sexier e.g. alien claw hand or similar, but conceptually I would suggest drug addiction is the best example of this.
Although not immediately apparent, the phenomenology of the drug-taking behaviour is very reminiscent of what you're describing. The two core features of addiction are craving and compulsion -- the latter is of relevance to your question. At its core, compulsive drug-taking behaviour is a decoupling of an earnestly stated (or believed) desire and action that suggests something entirely to the contrary.

I am a firm believer of the principle of free-will, but wanted to see if there was any examples(or case examples) of people knowingly doing things against their own will.

Typically, drug addicts will consciously state that they do not want to consume drugs, but that they are lead to do so by some uncontrollable compulsion. That is, they continue to consume drugs despite the clear acknowledgement that it is no longer in their interests to do so and conveying an earnest desire to not consume drugs.

I know that we can be pressured to do things and make hard choices, but the choice is still that of the individual.

The concept of drug addiction creates problems for proponents of free will: if addiction is a choice, then so are the harms. The moral culpability of the addict came be framed in either two ways:
Deviancy. The drug addict values the wrong things. They belong in prison.
Weakness. The drug addict has the same values as us, but is too weak-willed to pursue/obtain/keep them. In recognising their weakness, they deserve help.
Generally, to reconcile the concept of addiction as choice (free will) versus addiction as disease (addiction) those in the literature will attempt to describe the initial use of drugs as a volitional act, but one which becomes less and less freely chosen over time. The adaptive changes that are observed in the brain with repetitive drug administration i.e. addiction support are generally used to argue this point.


How should I report results of a likelihood ratio test? I'm using likelihood ratio testing to assess whether a behavioral model is a better description of my data than a simpler (so called restricted) model.

How should results of such statistical tests be reported?

General reporting recommendations such as that of APA Manual apply. One should report exact p-value and an effect size along with its confidence interval. In the case of likelihood ratio test one should report the test's p-value and how much more likely the data is under model A than under model B.

Example: The data is 7.3, 95% CI [6.8,8.1] times more likely under Model A than under Model B. The hypothesis that the data is equally likely under the two models was rejected with p=0.006.

The above statements already indicate that likelihood ratio test does not tell you which

  model is a better description of my data

as the likelihood is $p(\mathrm{Data}|\mathrm{Model})$ and to learn which model is a better description of the data you need to compute $p(\mathrm{Model}|\mathrm{Data})$.


Licensing when using the NEO-FFI instrument I would like to use the NEO-FFI instrument to measure the Big 5 psychological traits.  Is a license needed?   Are there any open, free, or public domain Big 5 tests that can be used for no (or minimal) cost?

Yes, a license is needed for most uses of the NEO-FFI. Here's a quote from PAR's Permissions & Licensing page:

  Tests, test protocols, test items, normative data, score reports, and other related materials are copyrighted and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from PAR. The reproduction of any part of PAR’s copyrighted tests and related materials in any way, without permission, whether the reproductions are sold or provided free for use, is a violation of federal copyright law.

  If you plan to use a test in its entirety, please purchase the published version of the test...

  If you plan to modify or use only part of a test, written permission is required prior to using any PAR proprietary material. Written permission is required prior to:

  Using a translation. All of our translations have been approved. Back-translations have been conducted by an individual unfamiliar with the English version of the test and the back-translation has been forwarded to the author/PAR for review and approval.
  Using any part of a test;
  Using a modified format of a test;
  Translating a test into a language for which it is not currently available;
  Including a few sample items or other materials (i.e., tables, charts, graphs) in a publication or appendix of a dissertation or thesis. PAR will not grant permission to include an entire test or scale in any publication, including dissertations and theses.

Anyway, yes, there are plenty of free tests! One such resource my former advisor (Dan Ozer, personality assessor extraordinaire) has always seemed to favor is the International Personality Item Pool. It might give you a headache to see how many options you actually have just through this source, just for measuring broad personality traits akin to the Big Five. In our work, we've generally used the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991), which is also freely available for non-commercial use, but is somewhat basic (44 items, 5 factors, no facets). If that's not basic enough for you, you may also want to consider Saucier's (1994) Mini-Markers, which has 40 items and one fewer Likert scale option. Even shorter is Rammstedt and John's (2007) 10-item short version of the BFI!

I should add that this question is a partial duplicate: @JeromyAnglim already asked (and answered!) the question about free alternatives here: What free scientific measures of Big 5 personality are available? His list is more comprehensive, and I'm about to go add Rammstedt and John's over there, so this post won't have anything unique from that thread once I do (except the bit about the NEO-FFI licensing).

One might almost be inclined to say there are too many options! As for me, I'm with Martha Stewart on this one: "It's a good thing."

References

John, O. P., Donahue, E. M., & Kentle, R. L. (1991). The big five inventory—versions 4a and 54. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Personality and Social Research.

Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(1), 203–212. Available online, URL: http://www.westmont.edu/_academics/departments/psychology/documents/Rammstedt_and_John.pdf.

Saucier, G. (1994). Mini-markers: A brief version of Goldberg's unipolar Big-Five markers. Journal of Personality Assessment, 63(3), 506–516. Available online, URL: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~prsnlty/SAUCIER/Saucier.Minimarkers.Full.pdf.


Is Dr. Russo’s “endocannabinoid deficiency” a valid theory? There was a study published in Neuro Endocrinology Letters by Dr. Ethan Russo in 2004 that says many diseases being treated with cannabis correlate with an “endocannabinoid deficiency”, but I cannot read the study or find any more information about this.

Are there other studies that can confirm or deny this? Or are there strong or weak arguments in Russo’s study that can help us understand whether it’s a valid theory?

I'd say it is a low-impact theory. The original (2004) paper in which this was proposed has around 60 citations in Google Scholar. That's pretty low for a paper like this (if the theory were influential). For contrast a 2000 paper on the monoamine hypothesis for depression (which is far from being the first paper proposing it) has around 460 citations and another one on the same topic from the same year [probably a theme issue in that journal] has 440, again according to Google Scholar.

There have been some reappraisals of endocannabinoid deficiency theory, e.g. in 2014 by different authors but in the same low-impact publication (IF < 1) as the original proposal.

The initial propomotor of this theory has published his own reappraisal in 2016, but I can't even find the impact factor of this latter venue.

In general, deficiency in a given neurotransmitter has failed to satisfactorily explain any single widespread psychiatric disorder. For depression and the monoamines (serotonin etc.) at least here are experimental protocols to test the hypotheses (e.g. ATD), but the results are fairly mixed. Briefly looking at the 2016 paper on endocannabinoid deficiency theory,  I'm not even seeing an experimental way to test it like that. So it looks like the evidence is more circumstantial.


Term for using hyperbole to make a softer argument seem more palatable? Say that I wanted to convince a person that oranges tasted nice. One particular method I could use would be to go on an hour long spiel, where I take on two voices - a hyperbolic voice (which says that we should ONLY eat oranges every single day because they are LITERALLY the best tasting thing ever) and a rational voice (which is more subtle, gives reasonable arguments as to why oranges taste nice like 'they have high sugar content', and is generally less explosive)

After hearing the hyperbolic "WE SHOULD ONLY EAT ORANGES" message, which the person will probably immediately reject, it seems likely that the person will accept the more rational message that 'oranges taste pretty nice' as a compromise.

This might sound very vague, but I feel like I've read about this theory (in some form) a few years ago, I just can't remember what it's called? Is there a specific term in psychology for this effect, or does this make no sense?

There are several cognitive biases which describe why people are often more likely to accept a position after being presented with an unreasonable position.

Focalism

Focalism or anchoring is the cognitive bias in which humans rely heavily on the first piece of presented information (the anchor) to make subsequent judgments. From the wiki definition:

  For example, the initial price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that prices lower than the initial price seem more reasonable even if they are still higher than what the car is really worth.

Door-in-the-face technique

The DITF method is a compliance manipulation technique in which a persuader attempts to convince a respondent to agree or comply with an argument by initially making a substantial and unreasonable request, and then when it is turned down, making a second more reasonable request. See Cialdini (1975) for the founding investigation.