How can I take the Token Test? I want to take the Token Test

Is there some website where I can take the test for free?

Alternatively, is there some simple guide to how the test works so I can re-create it?

There are different varieties of the Token Test (e.g., Moreira (2011)). Several of them using physical tokens are explained pretty well and can likely be me made at home (e.g. here). I wasn't able to find free digital versions.

Reference
- Moreira, Rev psiquiatr clín (2011); 38(3)


Verifying this statement in a movie named Oculus I just want to verify this statement if this is a fact.

  "When people can't process something horrible. The mind creates all kinds of protections to help them cope. Once that belief's taken root, the mind takes random information and forces it to support that narrative." — Oculus

The mind creates all kind of protections to help them cope.

I would say that is a very simplified, narrative-oriented perception of certain extreme responses to trauma. From a cursory googling, I see the movie in question is refering to traumatic exposure to violence in childhood. Yes, in situations such as these, some children develop psychological defense mechanisms, which may confer a distorted view of reality.

Defense mechanisms don't really function in the extreme way generally shown in narrative, though. There are many documented defense mechanisms, all of them have their own unique characteristics, and all of them can vary in intensity. It's also vital to remember that not everyone who survives a traumatic event, no matter how violent, will develop post-traumatic symptoms.

  [T]he mind takes random information and forces it to support that narrative.

This is less post-trauma, and more the purview of cognitive psychology. Cognitive distortions exist and are quite common. How common is a matter of some controversy. This particular statement describes a kind of confirmation bias, which manifests as overconfidence in one's own views. It is not particularly related to trauma, as far as I know.

Overall, I would say that the kind of extreme reinterpretation of facts that is suggested by the quote you posted, is not a common thing. Reactions of a similar tenor may be usual, but as always, reality is more ambiguous than fiction. I would not call this statement fact so much as a directed or tendentious interpretation of facts.


Are Free Will and Motivation related? I'm aware of numerous experiments, like Stanford prison experiment, Milgram experiment which indicate that humans can act in ways opposite to their best intentions.

For the purposes of this question, let's define Free Will as ability to act and strive without external coercion. Ability to accomplish my goals and ambitions. In this context Free Will suddenly seems a lot like motivation.

Found these quotes:

  Likewise, compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according
  to one's determined motives without hindrance from other individuals

This makes me ask - Is Free Will related or is just another word for a more modern concept of "motivation"?

To want, to feel, and to think, also known as conation, emotion, and cognition are the three basic categories that psychology is traditionally concerned with. The term conation as far as I know is rather outdated (see Winch, 1909), whereas motivation is the newer term for the "drive to act".

As usual within psychology, the term "conation" is not used consistently. However, even when motivation and conation are given distinct meanings, the terms are still closely related to each other (e.g. Reitan & Wolfson, 2000).

To sum up, the concept of (free) will is a subcategory of motivation/conation whereas sibling categories are interest or desire.

References

Reitan, R. M., & Wolfson, D. (2000). Conation: A Neglected Aspect of Neuropsychological Functioning. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 15(5), 443–453. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0887-6177(99)00043-8

Winch, W. H. (1909). Conation and Mental Activity. II. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 6(19), 505–514. https://doi.org/10.2307/2012061


Could any kind of learning be framed as learning a language? People learn (or actually acquire) languages naturally. As we grow up, we learn also multiple other skills which we then use in everyday life.

A lot of these skills are often compared to a language, for example:

Mathematics
Reading
Playing musical instrument
Programming languages
Law
Playing chess (proven to rely on patterns)
Dancing
Painting or, more generally, producing works of art.

All of the above have been compared at one point to a language. They are used to communicate ideas, emotions and information.

The language is used for communication. In the same way, one person knowing the law/programming language/accounting wouldn't actually possess any useful skill without the presence of other lawyers/computers/tax system. So one can argue that all these skills are relevant and can be evaluated only in the presence of other people who receive the message expressed using them.

In the same way, if one person invents their own language but nobody else understands it, we wouldn't classify it as a language.

So, could it be that most of the skills we learn could be described as a language?
What would be arguments against it?
Is there any evidence I can look into with regards to similarities between learning different skills and learning languages?

It appears that the language and learning new skills would often (depending on the skill) be managed by different parts of the brain. It is, therefore, unlikely to be similar.

A good description of how the learning process works from neuroscience's point of view can be found here: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s4/chapter07.html.

This same course also describes how the language is managed in the brain in this chapter: http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s4/chapter08.html.

Based on the above, it doesn't seem to be the case that the mentioned skills are similar to language, at least not in terms of how the brain processes them.


Readiness Potential vs. Lateralized Readiness Potential in ERP Readiness Potential (RP) has been obviously discovered before Lateralized Readiness Potential (LRP). I wonder, is simple RP still used for something today? Is the LRP preferable over RP because of more precise localization of the effect / component?

The Lateralized Readiness Potential can be considered a later component of a more generalized Readiness Potential, i.e., an LRP would develop out of an RP. As such, RPs can be interesting if you want to determine the earliest point in time at which a movement plan "gets worked on" in the motor cortex.

For reference, I recommend reading these sources and I hope you will be able to find your way around the paywall:

Predicting Motor Intentions with Closed-Loop Brain-Computer Interfaces
The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements


What is the difference between Avolition and Laziness? What is the difference between Laziness and Avolition?

They seem behaviorally similar. Is the difference cognitive perhaps?

Robin Kramer gave a good starting point in his comment.

As he said, the difference between laziness and avolition primarily come from the causes of each behavior. Laziness is common among psychologically "normal" individuals while avolition is commonly seen in patients with schizophrenia or depression. Now I will go in depth with each to better characterize them and hopefully show the differences between the two. I will talk about avolition first because it is better defined in the field of psychology.

Avolition

Definition of avolition mainly comes from research of schizophrenia symptoms. Schizophrenia symptoms can be divided as positive and negative symptoms. Negative symptoms can be divided into diminished expression and amotivation. Amotivation consists of anhedonia and avolition (Foussias & Remington, 2008). Anhedonia is diminished capacity to experience pleasant emotions. Avolition is the loss of drive and lack of curiosity. Avolition occurs in depression as well but is different for the two disorders. Avolition comes with saddening or depressed effect for people with depression, but this is not the case for people with schizophrenia.

Since activation of prefrontal cortex is generally associated with initiation of spontaneous activity (which is less in frequency in people with avolition), hypoactivation of prefrontal cortex may be the cause of avolition in patients with schizophrenia (Sebanz & Prinz, 2006). Another study shows anti-correlation between dorsal caudate activity and negative symptoms of schizophrenia including avolition (Mucci et al., 2015). This indicates that avolition may be caused by abnormalities in the motivation-related circuit. There are two networks known to be involved in motivation-related brain network: first one includes the ventral striatum, orbito-frontal cortex (OFC), insula, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and is involved in liking, reward anticipation, reward valuation, and representation of stimulus-reward associations. The other circuit includes the dorsal caudate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and is involved in representation of the expected reward and causal connection between action and reward (Liljeholm et al., 2011). Thus, there is a theory that patients with schizophrenia may exhibit avolition because they are not able to anticipate reward from their actions.

Laziness

Laziness itself is not studied extensively in psychology primarily because it has not been well-defined. At first glance, laziness seems to be a familiar concept to the usual people. However, laziness may involve many factors of human behavior that are at times but not always exhibited in people considered to be lazy. For example, one of the requirements of being lazy may be having no motivation. Without motivation, the person is less likely to show desire to take certain actions. But plenty show desire and motivation; these motivations are just not targetted to a long term goal. With these difficulties in mind, I personally believe that one of the economics definitions of laziness is most in line with what people commonly refer to as laziness: tendency for people to focus on the activities that give immediate pleasure rather than longer-term activities (Frédéric Bastiat, 1850). Bastiat called it idleness rather than laziness, but I believe they are synonymous in this context.

For the cause of laziness, I must confess this is not something I am familiar with. However, popular sources such as this one state that there can be multiple causes for laziness. One would be lack of interest in the field itself. Another would be lacking faith that the action will be worth the effort - which is similar concept to learned helplessness. One study states that anterior frontomedian cortex is involved in making these internal judgements leading to decision making (Zysset et al., 2002). However, studies such as this does not show what causes change in the activation of the anterior frontomedian cortex.

I also noticed that a popular YouTube video about laziness refers to a mouse study that selectively bred physically active mice which led to physically active mice descendents having the same characteristics. The video uses this study to state that there are genetic factors involved in laziness. Not only is it a stretch to make a connection between laziness of humans and tendency to wheel run by mice, the study itself is flawed in that the mice were bred with their parents for the first few weeks. This means that environmental factors cannot be ruled out. Here's the paper if you want to take a look.

References

Bastiat, Frédéric. Economic Harmonies. George B. de Huszar, trans. and W. Hayden Boyers, ed. 1996. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved May 29, 2016 from the World Wide Web: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basHar20.html

Foussias, G., & Remington, G. (2010). Negative Symptoms in Schizophrenia: Avolition and Occam’s Razor. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 36(2), 359–369. http://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbn094

Leon F Seltzer (2008). Laziness: Fact or Fiction?. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/200806/laziness-fact-or-fiction

Liljeholm, M., Tricomi, E., O’Doherty, J. P., & Balleine, B. W. (2011). Neural correlates of instrumental contingency learning: Differential effects of action-reward conjunction and disjunction. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(7), 2474–2480. http://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3354-10.2011

Mucci, A., Dima, D., Soricelli, A., Volpe, U., Bucci, P., Frangou, S., … Maj, M. (2015). Is avolition in schizophrenia associated with a deficit of dorsal caudate activity? A functional magnetic resonance imaging study during reward anticipation and feedback. Psychological Medicine, 45(8), 1765–1778. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714002943

Sebanz, Natalie (Ed); Prinz, Wolfgang (Ed)
Cambridge, MA, US: MIT Press Disorders of volition. (2006). vii 493 pp.

Stefan Zysset, Oswald Huber, Evelyn Ferstl, D.Yves von Cramon, The Anterior Frontomedian Cortex and Evaluative Judgment: An fMRI Study, NeuroImage, Volume 15, Issue 4, April 2002, Pages 983-991, ISSN 1053-8119, http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2001.1008.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811901910080)


Can people alleviate a negative halo effect about them? According to Wikipedia:

  "The halo effect or halo error is a cognitive bias in which one's
  judgments of a person’s character can be influenced by one's overall
  impression of him or her."

Imagine a situation in which there is a nearly "perfect" person, where he/she would in most cases evoke a negative halo effect. Is there some way how he/she can deal with it? (Change his/her behavior? Look? Image? The first impression?)

A halo effect suggests that the overall impression of a rated object (e.g., a person) excessively influences the impression of facets of a person. This leads to correlations between facet ratings higher than would be expected were facets rated accurately.

If someone is a nearly perfect person, then presumably the overall impression they create would be very positive. The halo effect would not influence this overall very positive rating. It will merely increase ratings for facets that should be rated below the overall rating and decrease ratings for facets that should be rated above the overall rating..

Worked example:

Let's simplify it and assume that your person's true rating on all the facets that matter  out of 10 are:

Facet A = 6
Facet B = 10
Facet C = 10
Facet D = 10

If we further simplify to say that overall impression is just the mean of the facets, we have overall impression of (6+10+10+10)/4 = 9.
So, an example of a rater influenced by the halo effect would be one who gave rating such as:

Facet A = 9
Facet B = 9
Facet C = 9
Facet D = 9

or

Facet A = 8
Facet B = 9.33
Facet C = 9.33
Facet D = 9.33

Conclusion:

The point is that facets that are worse than the general impression are pulled up, and facets better than the general impression are pulled down. The mean of the facets has not changed. It is just the accuracy of facet ratings has declined.  While this is an idealised example, the question relates to a theoretical effect.

A classic examples of a halo effect is where a teacher is marking an assignment and each section of the assignment is graded. If the teacher is influenced by halo effect then the overall mark is not influenced, but the rating for each section will be less differentiated than it should be. So from a quality of student feedback perspective, this is worse, but from a grading perspective, it makes no difference. That said, we might hypothesise that raters that exhibit halo effect may also exhibit other rating problems.

Second guessing your question, perhaps you are interested in some other biases such as first impression bias, central tendency bias, or generally inaccurate ratings. Or perhaps you are, rightly or wrongly, assuming that the overall impression would involve an inaccurate implicit weighting of facets.


How to create an online test of bias using preference judgements on pairs of pictures? I am looking to input pictures into a system to successful measure potential biases.
For example let's say I have a set of pictures and I would like the user to press either left or right once they are in the system to signify picture preference.

Is there a system available that already does this?

To answer your general question, many psychology experiment delivery systems, and even general programming languages could be used to present a set of trials where participants provide responses regarding pairs of visual stimuli.
In particular, I've found Inquisit to be a good option if you want to deliver the experiment online.

If you examine the task library you can find examples of IAT and GNAT studies which involve pairs of stimuli in order to estimate implicit bias. If you look around you should be able to find some examples involving visual stimuli.


Is art therapy really effective? I read the whole Wikipedia article. But I still have doubts. Is art therapy effective? If so, in which ways has it been studied?

Slayton, D'Archer, and Kaplan (2010) review 35 studies conducted from 1999-2007 about the efficacy of Art Therapy. Their review covers a variety of quantitative designs, as well as a few qualitative approaches.

There are some serious limitations to the research that they reviewed. There is little consensus about appropriate control groups, some studies rely heavily on anecdotal data (taking the form of a case-study more than an empirical investigation), and different studies use very different ways of measuring outcomes. The authors acknowledge these limitations in their discussion.

They do, however, find that "a small body of studies now exists in which art therapy as a treatment modality has been isolated, measured, and shown to be statistically significant in improving a variety of symptoms for a variety of
people with different ages. The range of participants represented in our survey of studies was broad; it included young children, elders, and all ages in between. A range of treatment settings also was represented, including schools,
outpatient clinics, day treatment centers, residential homes and treatment centers, hospitals, correctional facilities, and nonclinical settings." (pg. 115).

These studies typically focus on a very narrow set of behaviors or symptoms, and thus it's not clear if there is a general pattern indicating in what situations art therapy is effective.


How to assess a comorbidity? By what criteria can a comorbidity be determined in a diagnosis? Is it pretty much educated guess-work?

I'm casually studying the DSM-5... by what standards can one be confident that a disorder is accompanied by a comorbidity? Is it common to misdiagnose a disorder due to a concurrent comorbidity?

If we consider the field of psychiatry, usually a comorbidity is understood as the simultaneous occurrence of two or more mental disorders in the same person. But attention can also treat physical comorbidity, when there is coexistence of physical and mental pathologies for example. But that does not clarify your question. Sometimes DSM can help and sometimes cause confusion. What needs to be highlighted is the crucial role of clinical evaluation. It is through the evaluation process that we can understand the course of the disease development, its predisposing factors, current difficulties and the symptomatological evolution. A good assessment can see if and when there is a major disease and which diseases can act secondarily. Some symptoms may work together, some clinical conditions of comorbidity have a temporally defined course of action. Although the experience of the clinician counts a lot, we cannot ignore the remarkable role played by exams, tests and other diagnostic instruments. In the case of psychological assessment, which is my background, we can often see from the evidence that new insights are made into each case and from there, build a more effective intervention plan. Hope this helps. Good luck.Here you can find some more.


How much additional sleep is required to recover from a given number of hours of sleep deprivation? A previous question dealt with whether it is possible to catch up on lost sleep.
This question is a little different.

Assume that a healthy adult has been deprived of sleep for "x" hours.
How much sleep is required to restore healthy brain function, compared to sleep lost?

I wouldn't think the hours needed could be predicted by a linear scale.
Is there some predictable relationship between the two and what type of relationship is it?

It is funny that you ask this question. The answer is you can't. When you dont get enough sleep and you feel tired and your brain activity is lower (for example, trouble remembering what you were doing or where you left your keys) you cant catch up to it. You might take a powernap (not longer than 90 minutes) to give you a sensation of feeling awake, but the brain doesnt become more active. I dont know exactly why you cant catch up to lost hours of sleep, but you just cant. That also the reason, besides a messed up biogical clock according to light, why people working night shift experience more mental and health issues.


Equivalent Circuit of cell membrane potential From chapter $7$ of Kandel et all's Principles of Neural Science:, Go to page 12, Box 7-2 (particular image attached below)

The author claims that $$V_m = E_{Na} + I_{Na} / g_{Na}$$ on one side of the equation and then says $$V_m = E_{K} + I_{K} / g_{K}$$ by looking at the other side of the circuit.

But how can this be?  Since the battery is showing a negative side facing $V_{in}$ doesn't it have to be

$$V_m = -E_{K} + I_{K} / g_{K}$$

Am I misunderstanding something or did the author make a mistake in calculation?

The author has just chosen to draw the battery "backward" in the diagram to go along with the negative sign. In the equations, the direction of the battery should just be oriented by convention according to outward vs. inward.

Note that $E_{K} = -75 mV$. If you were to use instead your equation:

$$V_m = -E_{K} + I_{K} / g_{K}$$

you would need to take $E_{K} = 75 mV$ and you'd arrive at the same answer.

I'd say there is a bit of a physics vs. biology clash here; in physics, it's more typical to go with certain explicit/literal conventions which then fit nicely into particular equations, and that's how you're thinking about it. In biology, we tend to take some shortcuts.


Why is it more acceptable to get rich doing sports than business? I live in Finland where it is not acceptable to emphasize of being rich, eg. buying expensive sportcars/houses/apartments and introduce them on "yellow press".

But there is one exception. If you have earned your money doing sports (eg. playing ice hockey, driving Formula One) it seems to be totally acceptable.

What is the psychology behind this?

It's all about what people think are your motives for what you do, how hard people think you work for your money, and how nice people think you are.

If people think you earn money just because you love money, you can easily come off as cold and less pro-social. That makes people skeptical of you.

A bias makes people tend to think that whatever work they don't see you do, you never did (personal experience). This makes people value you less and admire you less if they can't actually see your contributions to society. Most office-work is prone to this bias.

People tend to see social people as more nice than less social people, and like them more. This is likely due to the advantage our race gains from social cooperation, which we would not have survived without. We prefer people who we think we can cooperate with and get well along with.

Talking about getting well along, we also prefer people with whom we share any interest, hobby, attitude, history etc because it increases the chance we get well along with them. Birds of a feather flock together.
This means that 1) We prefer people we know are social and 2) we prefer people who share some of our interests.

Business people will go well along with their kind. They might not be very fond of athletes.
Athletes go well along with their kind. They might not be very fond of business people.

Fact is, that which of these "professions" is more popular depends entirely on who you ask and the circumstances.
So I take it you wonder why the general attitude is that business people are less popular than athletes. Well, that's because most people feel they have more in common with athletes (who share their passion for sports) than business people.


Does the brain use the minimax algorithm? The minimax algorithm is the basic way an AI can decide which move to make in a game.

The idea is that might be paraphrased as "prepare for the worst".

It seems such a fundamental way to decide what action to make in the world that it seems like the brain should implement such an algorithm in order to decide what to do next.

i.e. think of a possible action, and the worst thing that could happen in each case, then go for the least-worst option.

I expect the brain also takes probabilities into account. So that it might choose an action if the worst possible option is also extremely unlikely.

How would we test if the brain was using this algorithm?

I work in data science, I reach many of the conclusions that a psychologist might, by means of aggregating a lot of data and backtracking on it. I have no formal training and all my opinions are based on conclusions we tested & drew from our work that translated into nearly no bad business decisions and constant growth.

Machine learning is not general intelligence. As such, although I believe that the comparison is not ill-willed, it's as far from the truth as it can be. ML is really a bunch of optimization problems that, when put together, form a coherent system that draws conclusions such as "is this a picture of an elephant?". Just as the brain does, there's a multitude of inputs and a central system that decides, mostly based on past experience what to do with said inputs.

  I expect the brain also takes probabilities into account. So that it might choose an action if the worst possible option is also extremely unlikely.

In popular culture, it's called "least resistance path", it's also a trait that I see nearly all intelligent life forms exhibit.

What I find through my work is that, although bias is frowned upon, it's also a beautiful thing. Personally, I'm a contrarian and I like to believe the good ol' "people are stupid", but in reality, they really aren't. All the experiences you go throguh train your brain in exactly the same manner you speak of. The problem occurs when the multitude of paths isn't known at the start, that is to say, you're unexperienced.

Bias is not necessarily helpful min-maxing that happens in the background.

By the way, don't confuse this with what learning is. Min-maxing as you call it is a higher-level process that is what we can observe from the brain forming connections.


What is different between children and adults that cause children to forgive so quickly? Today I observed three children at a birthday party become involved in an extremely serious altercation including the use of (toy) weapons.

Tears were dropping, threats issued, punches and kicks thrown and yet in the space of a few minutes the children had formed a new bond of friendship and were playing contendedly.

It made me consider the wider social impact; what is it that causes teenage/adult human beings to hold personal grievances and grudges for longer periods of time when children seem so willing to forget past transgressions?

I am sure there must be a biological mechanism at work from both the child and adult perspective so if any sociologists, child psychologists or behavioural researchers read this forum it would be great to get a detailed answer.

I suspect similar patterns of behaviour exist in other cub/child/young mammals in social groupings.

The short answer, kids live in the now.  They tend to forget everything quickly.  A child can be crying about their milk being spilled one moment, and playing the next.  They don't think as much about past or future, just what is happening now, and NOW is a big deal.  This can cause problems in some ways, but the plus side is they are quickly side tracked from whatever was bothering them before.

They don't hold grudges for the same reason you can make them forget how fun banging on the trashcan or drawing on the wall was.  The moment something is out of sight it's quickly forgotten.  The offense of 30 seconds ago don't matter, because that was back an eternity ago, and is not NOW.

That 'eternity ago' thing was only half a joke also.  It's been argued that children actually experience time different, because of their length of life and perspective.  A 2 year old has been alive for a tiny fraction as long as it's parent's have, it has less then a tenth the life experience.  However, since they measure time relative to the length of time they have been alive that means that 30 minutes feels like it's 10 times longer to them, because that 30 minutes actually makes up more then 10 times the amount of their life that it does for an adult.  If this is true it explains why a 15 minute wait is an eternity to a young child.  However, it also means that something that happened a day ago feels like it was weeks ago to a young child.  It's easier to forget pass offenses if it feels like they happened in some distant past of time.


Verbal reasoning development How would one go about improving their verbal reasoning ability?
Are there any specific exercises a person can practise to develop their verbal reasoning skillset?

Here is an example of a verbal reasoning problem:

"When will Joe Bloggs retire?"

"Joe Bloggs currently works as a civil servant"

"Those in the civil service generally retire at 65"

How does one figure out that Joe Bloggs will retire at approximately 65? You connect civil servant to civil service then use association to get an output.

The LSAT is a Law School test for verbal reasoning, and the sections it tests you on are the components of verbal reasoning.

Reading Comprehension - ability to understand complex language material like paragraphs or passages and able to answer questions regarding them.
Analytical reasoning - ability to understand relationships in language material like statements or passages and being able to draw reasonable conclusions from them.
Logical reasoning - Using critical thinking to assess and complete an argument given on the test.

So how do you build up these skills? Well reading comprehension is easy, you read and then think about what you just read. For analytical reasoning, do research and practice on annotating. For logical reasoning, look into Deductive Reasoning and any other forms of reasoning in the "See Also" section.

It is very possible that you already have a good amount of practice in one or more of these skills. In that case, you want to practice what you have the least amount of experience in.


Are there any studies that examine the phenomenon of songs stuck in the head? Frequently I hear people say (and myself included) "darn it, I can't get that song out of my head!".

Are there any studies that examine this phenomenon of songs getting stuck in people's heads?

I.e., what factors are involved in some people to get a certain song stuck in their head and not others:

When is it more likely to occur?
Why does the same song gets stuck for one person and not for others?
What methods can stop it?
Is there any relation to other issues like OCD?
When it is considered not normal?

Here is a study that creates and manipulates the "song stuck in your head" phenomenon. In particular, it is a myth that only "bad" songs are stuck in your head. These songs can be categorized as intrusive thoughts. Also the obvious finding was that recently heard music was more likely to be stuck in your head.

The authors comes up with a term called the "Goldilocks Effect." In particular, songs are more likely to be stuck in your head if you are doing a really easy or a really hard task. If you are doing a really easy task it is easy for your mind to think about other things (e.g. think about driving on a highway and being in a "highway hypnosis"). When you are doing a hard task sometimes a moment of relaxation and insight is needed. This is where songs often come up. Thus to control this, you should do an activity that is not too easy or too hard (or not too little or too much arousal following the Yerkes Dodson Law).

Source

Going Gaga: Investigating, Creating, and Manipulating the Song Stuck in My Head

Ira E. Hyman Jr.*, Naomi K. Burland, Hollyann M. Duskin, Megan C. Cook, Christina M. Roy, Jessie C. McGrath, Rebecca F. Roundhill

Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2009). The Aha! Moment The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(4), 210-216.


What type of learning mechanism produces a consistent typo? There is a typographical error that I make and do so every time I try to type a certain word. Whenever I try to type remember, I type remeber. I do this every time. This is different to a regular typo because most typos happen at random, whereas this mistake is guaranteed to occur. It's not a spelling mistake, because I know how to spell remember, I just don't press all the required keys.

Could it be related to touch-typing? I don't make the typo when I peck out the keys.

I wonder whether it is related to muscle memory, because there are many words with the pattern 'e_e', such as here, there, gene, theme, scene, etc. So where I reach the second e my motor system is primed not to push the key that came before, i.e. m.

It seems that knowledge of spelling and knowledge of typing are not strongly linked in this case.

Is there a mechanism by which I have learnt this mistake?

There is a scientific literature on typing. It's been a while since I've read the articles.
You might start by reading this excellent review of research and findings on transcription typing.

Salthouse, 1986: Perceptual, cognitive, and motoric aspects of transcription typing. PDF

General model of typing

Salthouse (1986) presents a model of the typing process

1. INPUT: Convert text into chunks
2. PARSING: Decompose chunks into ordinal strings of characters
3. TRANSLATION: Convert characters into movement specifications
4. EXECUTION: Implement movement in balistic fashion

A few other relevant points that Salthouse supports with multiple references:

"The rate of typing is nearly the same for random words as it is for
meaningful text."
"Successive keystrokes from fingers on alternate hands are faster than
successive keystrokes from fingers on the same hand."
"Letter pairs that occur more frequently in normal language
are typed faster than less frequent pairs."
Interkey interval varies with the context of the letters in a word.

These points basically state that typing involves various forms of motor chunking, that the word is a central chunk but that there are also many other lower level chunks (e.g., typing "ion" and "ier" is quite  common in English).

Errors

There's also a discussion of typing errors in the paper.

Salthouse mentions the taxonomy of typing errors proposed by  Wells (1916) of "substitutions, intrusions, ommissions, and transpositions", and also cites empirical estimates of prevalence of different types of errors.
"Many substitution errors involve adjacent keys."
"Most transposition errors are cross-hand rather than within-hand"

I suggest you have a read of the paper to get a deeper understanding of the types and proposed causes of typing errors.

Specific thoughts regarding your question

Perhaps in contrast to what you say, typos are not random. Rather, there is structure to the errors. For example, "Teh" is a common typo.
Obviously, having an incorrect belief about the spelling of a word could result in repeated errors, but I understand you are not talking about them.
So, with regards to a specific word that you frequently mistype, you might want to think whether there are characteristics of the word that make it difficult to type. Also, as you say, if you learn the wrong chunking at some point, you may need to unlearn this pattern.

References:

Wells, F. L. (1916). On the psychomotor mechanisms of typewriting. The American Journal of Psychology, 27(1), 47-70.


Length of questionnaire for long-string analysis I have a dataset that I am trying to screen for careless responding. I am having a little trouble finding research on what is the minimum length that a questionnaire needs to be in order to do long string analysis. Huang et al. (2012) suggest using a cut-off of people who answer the same on equal or greater than half the length of the scale. This seems problematic for shorter scales, for example, if someone answers 3 answer the same on a 6 item scale, they would be flagged. Particularly if there are no reversed items in the scale. Curran (2016) mentions that a 20 item scale might be problematic because it is too short, but the paper they cite doesn't explain this or what would determine a scale that is too short.
I was wondering if someone might have some insight on this or some papers I should refer to. Thank you for reading!

Here are a few general principles that I would apply:
Does the scale have a mix of positively and negatively worded items? If so, you'd need fewer items to identify strange cases. If it is all positively worded, then it's possible that someone could for example agree to a fairly large number of items.
Does it measure multiple constructs or does it measure a single dimension? If it measures more than one dimension (e.g., like a five factor personality test), then you'd expect to see more diversity in responses.
From first principles, it can be helpful to consider whether there is any conceivable reason to provide such a sequence of responses that would reflect conscientious survey completion.
You may also want to think about your survey design and the incentive structure to consider what incentives there are to respond in given way. Some survey designs make that mode of responding more efficient.
Another general strategy is to calculate an index and plot the distribution of cases on that index. If you see a break in the histogram, this can suggest that a discrete process (i.e., non-conscientious responding) has caused the data on the other side of the break. This can be helpful when looking at things like survey completion times. In the case of providing only one response option to a set of items, you can obtain a count of the number of response options and tabulate and look to see whether the vast majority provide all the responses. Alternatively, if it looks like a common response type, then you'd be less likely to conclude that it is problematic.
Here is one way to get this in R assuming data is your dataset and items is a vector item names.
data$unique_responses <- apply(data[,items], 1, function(X) length(unique(X))
table(data$unique_responses)


Why is Internet Addiction Disorder not listed in the DSM-5 manual? Disclaimer - I am not a student of psychology.

I'm currently researching Internet Addiction Disorder and online games for a paper I'm writing. Is there an actual reason why it's not included? Is it because it's such a new area of study?

There's debate over whether Internet addiction is it's own disorder or a symptom of an underlying psychosis. See this essay by the first man to publish the term: https://theconversation.com/is-internet-addiction-a-misnomer-55727


The comfort and appeal of vintage objects? The vintage culture has grown very large in the last 10 years, with all sorts of collectables from furniture, to homes, to old signs and toys. Just watch the show "American Pickers" to get an idea of this subculture.

The nostalgia and style of the vintage subculture seems to create some sort of feeling that is very pleasant/euphoric.

Especially during times of increased stress, high levels of psychological pressure and/or life struggle - the vintage objects seem to provide some sort of comfort for the individual (as I have also witnessed this in myself and observed in others).

Are there any studies that look into this phenomenon and what are some of it predominant findings?

A long time ago nostalgia was a medical diagnosis. Longing for that which was comforting is perhaps a natural response to no longer being comforted (e.g the current economic crisis). Furthermore, behavioural economics and psychology both do work on people's tendency to remember the past better than today. You could look at the ego-centric memory bias. (you might note the false consensus effect which is related and the cause of many a belief in an erroneous "common sense").

If you combine these you might just see why the vintage is appealing. In fact, even beyond one's own experience there is the lore of the past being better passed down from generation through generation by way of the ego-centric bias, perhaps making older vintage even more appealing. I remember Twain and others writing on this but cannot recall a quote.

Finally, I'm sure that some vintage things are often just lovely on their own and have an appeal of artistry different from modern for a variety of reasons.


Are there known cases where people can write upside down? From the time I was able to write I have been writing upside down, as in literally turning the page 180 degrees and writing. The funny thing is, I can't write the right way up! I am left handed which would probably make this more clear but to this day I find it really weird! I can easily read upside-down mainly because I've always had to write upside down!

I've never been trained to write in this way nor do I know anyone who can write like me! I've always been comfortable writing this way. I know nothing is wrong with me, but I am curious to know if there are other cases like me or maybe even explainations?

Leonardo da Vinci wrote both upside down, and in a mirror image.  He did the latter partly to make it harder for others to read his journals and copy his ideas (he was doing his research in a time when it was forbidden by the church), but also to avoid smudging his writing.  He was also left-handed.

Here is someone who also writes upside down and backwards.  And here is a case of a mother asking if she should be concerned because her 2 1/2 year old daughter writes upside down.


Does completing a thesis make you a better practicing psychologist? I am a strong believer in the importance of the scientist-practitioner model for psychology. I think that training in the scientific method is a major component of what makes a person trained in psychology more employable.

In many jurisdictions, a student wanting to be registered as a psychologists is required to complete one more research theses. For example, in Australia, a student will typically complete an undergraduate fourth year thesis and a thesis as part of a larger masters or doctoral program.
While it is obvious that training in research will make a student a better researcher, I have heard some people question whether completing a research thesis will make the student a better practising psychologist.

Thus, my questions are:

What empirical research exists that has tested whether completing a research thesis in psychology makes you a better practising psychologist?
What theoretical frameworks justify or challenge the value of completing a research thesis in terms of improving practical skills required by a psychologist?

You might want to study differences in PsyD and PhD clinical psychologists.  The thesis per se doesn't seem to be the question but the focus on research.  A PsyD dissertation generally does not involve the conducting of an original line of research while the PhD does.  I can't think of a better way to equate your groups at the moment.

As a comment I'd like to mention that the benefits of a scientist-practitioner model reach beyond the immediate and are best seen long term, as the practice of psychology evolves.  Someone trained only in therapeutic techniques is trained in a stagnant psychology and is ill equipped to understand new research that motivates changes in the field.  They may change but the decision to won't be as well grounded in science and will be more based on their clinical judgment.

If you've ever been to a clinical conference where the budding field of clinical neuroscience was endorsed by a speaker through a careful presentation of (astoundingly powerful) research and logical argument you'd see an embarrassing number of practitioners making serious scientific errors dismissing the idea.  And it's not just a bias against new but an inability to make sound scientific judgments.  The ridiculous case of Autism and vaccines and how many psychologists actually endorsed that research highlights how we need better scientific training.  A training that many an experienced scientist can tell you really only comes through practice.

If you come up with a better way to produce a clinician on the day after they graduate then you haven't necessarily come up with a better way to train a psychologist.


Psychology: Grafitti/Grafitti Vandal(s) What's the psychology behind grafittit?

What mentality do graffiti vandals have?

Teens who get involved in graffiti 'tagging' may be showing early
symptoms of a personality disorder, an Australian psychiatrist says.
He says the study, presented at an international child and adolescent mental health conference in Melbourne this week, found that teens who graffiti "are significantly different to those who do not graffiti".
"These young people ... were very antisocial on a range of other factors. They weren't just mildly conduct disordered, they were scoring to the extreme range of antisocial behaviour."
He says the study found adolescent graffitists had done around six to eight other acts, such as setting fires, beating people up and stealing.
"You can pick many of these young people somewhere around the age of three," he says.
"The average kindergarten teacher will tell you, I don't like that child, I can't work with them, they spit at me, they spit at the other kids, they hit people, they won't learn.
"You can certainly predict which ones will go on to antisocial behaviour, and within that graffiti is going to be one of the things that stands out."
Martin says tagging conveys a number of messages, from saying "hello, I'm here" to being a territorial marker and an expression of rage against authority.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/09/13/1737822.htm


What's the difference between Confirmation Bias and the Affect Heuristic? I've been reading "Thinking Fast & Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. At the end of Chapter 9, he introduces the "Affect Heuristic," a concept introduced by Paul Slovic that effectively states that people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

Isn't this just an extension of confirmation bias - e.g. that people look for confirming evidence when evaluating ideas? It seems obvious that if you like something or dislike a concept, you'll search for evidence to affirm your preexisting position. For example - if I was a conservative and I learned of a bill introduced by a liberal politician, I'd naturally make the assumption that the bill is misguided and search for evidence to confirm that assumption (and vice-versa).

What's the difference between them? I'm having trouble defining the "Affect Heuristic" clearly in my mind.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses (WikiPedia; Plous, 1993)

The affect heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions, and solve problems quickly and efficiently, in which current emotion - fear, pleasure, surprise, etc. - influences decisions.

  In other words, it is a type of heuristic in which emotional response, or "affect" in psychological terms, plays a lead role. (WikiPedia)

Or in the words of Slovic,

  As used here, ‘‘affect’’ means the specific quality of ‘‘goodness’’ or ‘‘badness’’ (Slovic, et al. 2007)

They can sound similar, and in a way they can be; but generally they are different.  With confirmation bias, I would be looking for something to back up a belief I “know” is correct, while I may or may not like this belief,

  it is the only correct answer!

This is different to the affect heuristic, where I don’t like the proposition put forward by others and so I am going to look for evidence to back the ideas I like.

--Edit for further clarification after comment--

You could say

  You can search for evidence to confirm something is right if you believe it's right, and you can search for evidence to confirm something is wrong if you believe it's wrong

and that is true.  That would be Confirmation Bias if you are searching purely for evidence to prove your belief based on what is known.  Let's look at the difference in another way.

Scenario where there are two opposing points of view ($X$ and $Y$).

$X$ has a conclusion based on plenty of evidence which is corroborated by many unbiased studies.$Y$ has a conclusion which is also based on plenty of studies which corroborates each other.However, there were flaws in some studies and others were biased due to undeclared financial interests with some participants.

When there is no bias, you are completely open minded and you would be taking an unbiased viewpoint on the evidence presented, therefore it would be fair to assume that $X$ is true and $Y$ is false.  When looking for more evidence, you are looking for evidence for and against both $X$ and $Y$.

When there is Pure Confirmation Bias, you totally accept $X$ being true, and it fits with your beliefs and way of life, and when looking for more evidence, you are looking to strengthen that truth with more evidence to back $X$ and more evidence to refute $Y$.

When there is Confirmation Bias with Affect Heuristics, this can be where you don't like viewpoint $X$ because it doesn't fit with your beliefs.  You can accept $X$ being true, but there is the counteracting wish for $Y$ to be true.

There can be affect heuristics involved when looking for any strong counteracting evidence, yet you are still accepting that $X$ is true, so whilst looking for counteracting evidence, you are also looking for evidence confirming $X$.  You could be forgiven for thinking that this is unbiased research, but it is not unbiased, because you wish for $Y$ to be true as you have a vested interest in $Y$ but you also accept $X$.

When there are pure Affect Heuristics, you cannot accept $X$ as true because of your beliefs, or because it adversely affects your way of life, and when looking for more evidence, you are looking for evidence to back $Y$ and plenty of evidence to refute $X$.

References

Plous, S. (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. New York: McGraw-Hill p.233

Slovic, P., Finucane, M. L., Peters, E., MacGregor, D. G. (2007). The affect heuristic. European Journal of Operational Research 177(3),1333–1352DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2005.04.006


How are the outputs of neurons encoded, if at all? The way I learned it, a neuron fires with a fixed amplitude, and the only information encoded in the output is the frequency at which it fires. 10 spikes per second is in some sense a 'stronger' signal than 5 spikes per second.

But from a computational point of view this seems absurd. It makes the output of a neuron little more than the encoding of an analog voltage level. What a waste of a channel!

What I am looking for is research work done on analysing neuronal spike trains for the kind of information that might be found on a digital channel. There might be a pattern of spikes to represent a particular sensation or action, with certain patterns repeated at intervals. Or some such.

Does any such work exist, either confirming or refuting this idea?

The concept of digital channels of information flow is a serial-processing biased view of information: it applies a lot to serial systems like computers (which are still serial even with multiple "cores" since each operates independently of the other), but does not apply in the same way to massively parallel systems like the nervous system except perhaps to some very of the very low-level sensory information.

However, temporal coding has been a very active area of research. There are many different time scales on which neurons can potentially carry timing information. However, a digital bit stream is probably the least efficient one so you won't find much from neuroscience suggesting that type of pattern.

External timing is very important

Even given a very simple "analog-ish" neural code, where firing rates indicate some intensity of signal (for example, the tension on a tendon), there is also key temporal information to carry: the tension is happening now. It is not on a stack to be processed and conveyed in the most efficient encoding possible, it is happening presently, and the neuronal signal has to encode not just how much but also that it is occurring now: rate codes can do this to a fairly high precision.

Neuronal firing is a bit like a Geiger counter: the intensity is indicated by the rate of clicks, but there is a ton of additional information based on when those clicks occur. For example, as you move a Geiger counter nearer to a radiation source, the click rate increases dramatically. Any code that is more complex would introduce delays, and those delays necessarily result in a loss of temporal information.

Phase coding

Within the brain, there are definitely cases where temporal information is important to neural codes. The brain handles more complex information that changes over longer time scales than in the periphery, so it is possible to degrade temporal information to allow for deeper encoding schemes that combine generative models of the outside world with abstracted sensory information.

In particular, one can look at phase coding where neurons fire at a particular phase of an ongoing oscillation (Montemurro et al, 2008; Kayser et al, 2009). You could perhaps think of the ongoing oscillation as a "timing bit" because it provides a synchronizing point for relative timing of spikes.

In the hippocampus, phase coding is important for reconstruction of position information from neural spiking activity (O'Keefe et al, 1993; Jensen and Lisman, 2000).

Ensemble coding

Imagine a cortical neuron fires up to 100 Hz. You could digitize a signal by looking at spike/no spike within 10 ms bins, so every 10 ms you have 1 bit of information per neuron. Take an ensemble of 100 independent neurons, and you have 100 bits per 10 ms or 10,000 bits per second.

However, if you instead of 100 members of an ensemble, each 10 ms encodes not 1 * 100 bits, but 2^100 which is on the order of 1030 patterns every 10 ms. And this is without assuming a more complex temporal code where the order of firing within a brief window matters (Abeles et al, 1993).

There is good evidence that overlapping cell assemblies/ensembles exist (see for example Harris, 2005 for review) such that at any moment in time, the high-dimensional activity over the space of many neurons carries information, for example about the current sensory state.

Given that there are billions of neurons in a brain, ensemble coding makes bit rate not itself a limiting factor, though other constraints seem to make phase coding and other types of temporal info

Abeles, M., Bergman, H., Margalit, E., & Vaadia, E. (1993). Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. Journal of neurophysiology, 70(4), 1629-1638.

Harris, K. D. (2005). Neural signatures of cell assembly organization. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(5), 399.

Jensen, O., & Lisman, J. E. (2000). Position reconstruction from an ensemble of hippocampal place cells: contribution of theta phase coding. Journal of neurophysiology, 83(5), 2602-2609.

Kayser, C., Montemurro, M. A., Logothetis, N. K., & Panzeri, S. (2009). Spike-phase coding boosts and stabilizes information carried by spatial and temporal spike patterns. Neuron, 61(4), 597-608.

Montemurro, M. A., Rasch, M. J., Murayama, Y., Logothetis, N. K., & Panzeri, S. (2008). Phase-of-firing coding of natural visual stimuli in primary visual cortex. Current biology, 18(5), 375-380.

O'Keefe, J., & Recce, M. L. (1993). Phase relationship between hippocampal place units and the EEG theta rhythm. Hippocampus, 3(3), 317-330.


Why do people walk in a circle when they are blindfolded and intend to walk in a straight line? Why does someone with eyes tied follow a circular path if left to walk in a huge yard(kilometers), that occurs even if he thinks that he is walking in a straight line?

In my opinion once you drawn a well enough curve your balance shift towards inner side of circle and you fullfill to spiralate inwards. But what shifts the balance inward?

It has nothing to do with perception.

It's simply because there are infinitely many ways to go in circles, while only one way to go straight. Even a slightest bias towards one side will produce a circle. When other cues are given to correct the bias, one is able to track straight lines.

Even robots (or toy cars) that are designed to go straight lines will go in circles without sensory feedback!


What is the study that identified that kids growing up without fathers were angrier and more depressed? I read in an article recently:

  This study identified that kids growing up without fathers had a higher proportion of people developing depression, increased tendency towards anger and a higher probability of committing criminal acts.

I'm doing some research on the effects of divorce on children and I'm interested in getting this paper as a footnote.

My question is: What is the study that identified that kids growing up without fathers were angrier and more depressed?

A report in the Daily Mail in 2013 had the headline:

  Growing up without a father can permanently alter the BRAIN: Fatherless children are more likely to grow up angry and turn to drugs

  Dr Gabriella Gobbi, who carried out the research with colleagues at the medical faculty at McGill University in Canada, said: ‘This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring.’ (Spencer, 2013)

After some searching, I believe the source article is:

Bambico, F. R., Lacoste, B., Hattan, P. R., & Gobbi, G. (2013). Father absence in the monogamous California mouse impairs social behavior and modifies dopamine and glutamate synapses in the medial prefrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 25(5), 1163-1175.DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bht310

and the research was carried out on California mice.

  Abstract:

  The role of the father in psycho-affective development is indispensable. Yet, the neurobehavioral effects of paternal deprivation (PD) are poorly understood. Here, we examined the behavioral consequences of PD in the California mouse, a species displaying monogamous bonding and biparental care, and assessed its impact on dopamine (DA), serotonin (5-HT), and glutamate (GLU) transmission in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In adult males, deficits in social interaction were observed, when a father-deprived (PD) mouse was matched with a PD partner. In adult females, deficits were observed when matching a PD animal with a non-PD control, and when matching 2 PD animals. PD also increased aggression in females. Behavioral abnormalities in PD females were associated with a sensitized response to the locomotor-activating effect of amphetamine. Following immunocytochemical demonstration of DA, 5-HT, and GLU innervations in the mPFC, we employed in vivo electrophysiology and microiontophoresis, and found that PD attenuated the basal activity of low-spiking pyramidal neurons in females. PD decreased pyramidal responses to DA in females, while enhancing responses to NMDA in both sexes. We thus demonstrate that, during critical neurodevelopmental periods, PD leads to sex-dependent abnormalities in social and reward-related behaviors that are associated with disturbances in cortical DA and GLU neurotransmission.

References

Spencer, B. (2013) Growing up without a father can permanently alter the BRAIN: Fatherless children are more likely to grow up angry and turn to drugs. In: Daily Mail [Online]
Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2518247/Growing-father-permanently-alter-BRAIN-Fatherless-children-likely-grow-angry-turn-drugs.html


Does masturbation affect brain in long term? I am interested in knowing.

Does masturbation (once daily) affect the brain negatively in terms of: Memory and concentration skills during the long term ?
Does it affect it in the short term?
After masturbation I feel some change in my brain, although hard to describe but something like a dopamine rush. Any negative impacts of this on brain?

As the Wikipedia article on Masturbation summarizes, the current consensus among scientists is that masturbation has no negative effects whatsoever, and that all known positive effects are physiological (e.g. reduction of the probability to have prostrate cancer in men over 50) or on the level of general well-being (e.g. it relieves depression and leads to higher self-esteem).

A quick Google Scholar search turned up no results for studies into the relation between masturbation and cognitive functions such as memory, attention etc. This does not mean that masturbation does not affect these functions, positively or negatively, only that apparently this has not been studied.

Sexual stimulation and orgasm activate the parasympathetic nervous system, leading to a production of sex specific sex hormones as well as neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin, which in turn affect the relevant neurotransmitter systems.

Too much masturbation may lead to loss of libido (psychological) and loss of sensitivity (physiological), though what is too much will differ between idividuals. Certainly during adolescence most teenagers indulge in extensive sexual self-exploration with no apparent negative consequences.

As Archimedix pointed out, one study found that frequent masturbation in male teenagers correlated with higher probability of prostrate cancer. But the researchers surmised that it is not the masturbation that causes the hormones that cause the cancer, but rather the hormones cause both the higher sex drive and the cancer. So again masturbation appears not to have a negative effect, and not masturbating would not have prevented cancer, but the causation is all speculation either way. (http://www.webmd.com/prostate-cancer/news/20090127/masturbation-and-prostate-cancer-risk).

Rather, the common consensus among sexologists is to encourage teens and even children to actively exlore this area. For example, the European Regional Bureau of the WHO suggests that masturbation can help an individual better understand their sexual needs and boundaries, communicate more clearly in a sexual situation, and avoid being abused (http://www.bzga.de/infomaterialien/einzelpublikationen/?idx=2042, in German).

Like any activity, for example excessive working, masturbation can become problematic. But like work, masturbation is not problematic in and of itself.


Can you really have "excessive empathy"? This question arose out of the question Excessive empathy, social cues and adaptive behavior evaluation whereby excessive empathy was considered to impair interpersonal relationships.  My question is asking if you can actually have too much empathy.

Empathy, not to be confused with sympathy is

  the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position (Bellet & Maloney, 1991).

When empathising, you can actually feel the emotions the client is feeling, and you need to be able to compartmentalise these feelings by recognising that they are not yours to own.  They are not your feelings, they are the client's feelings. In the psychological fields, they are there to help you to recognise congruency within the client (is the feeling the client expresses, the feeling the client should have?).

As I pointed out in my comment in Excessive empathy, social cues and adaptive behavior evaluation,

  the need to break away at times is self-care

The moment you take on the feelings your client has, this is the moment where you are not exercising self-care.

Empathy is a necessity when working within the therapeutic environment and as Bellet & Maloney (1991) points out, it is important within the field of medicine. Therefore, self-care is paramount to practitioner wellbeing within the relevant fields, as I highlighted in my answer to Named conditions that are the result of exposure to psychopathic behavior of another person? to protect against instances of vicarious trauma caused by environmental psychological conditions.

When looking online, there is a PsychologyToday article (Reynolds, 2017) which proposes that you can have too much empathy but I have a problem following her train of thought on her hypothesis.

  With empathy, you will feel their stress, anxiety, and anger in your body. You might feel their pain emotionally and physically. If you let these emotions sit in your body, your body and mind can be emotionally hijacked.

  Unbridled empathy can lead to concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol, making it difficult to release the emotions. Taking on other people’s feelings so that you live their experience can make you susceptible to feelings of depression or hopelessness.

With this passage, there was a citation for:

  Blaszczak-Boxe, A. (2017) Too much emotional intelligence is a bad thing. Scientific American Mind [Online] Retreived from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/too-much-emotional-intelligence-is-a-bad-thing

My argument to Reynolds (2017) is that she is describing lack of self-care (lack of compartmentalisation), not excessive empathy, leading to mental health problems within the therapist.

Am I missing something or can there be such a problem as "excessive empathy"?  If so, how much empathy is excessive and how would you be able to recognise this excess?

References

Bellet, P. S., & Maloney, M. J. (1991). The importance of empathy as an interviewing skill in medicine. Jama, 266(13), 1831-1832. doi: 10.1001/jama.1991.03470130111039

Reynolds, M. (2017). Too Much Empathy?: When empathy breaks instead of builds trust. PsychologyToday [Online] Retreived from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/wander-woman/201704/can-you-have-too-much-empathy

The risks of excessive empathy is sometimes conceptualized as "compassion fatigue" or "vicarious traumatization". The problem is not necessarily considered an excess in empathy, it can also be described as an excess in work load.

What could be considered excessive is most likely individual, not unlike our capacity for handling other types of work, like lifting heavy loads or work long hours at the office, for instance.

The most reliable measurement i can think of is how much time a day we spend working as a therapist, for lack of better constructs. Another example for conceptualizing excessive empathy would be the prevalence of fatigue/secondary ptsd symptoms.

Also i'd be curious to see how therapists ambitions/expectations on therapy outcome factors into the risk of compassion fatigue. I don't believe such research has been made.

More research is needed for sure.

https://proqol.org/CS_and_CF.html


How to randomise order of survey items in Qualtrics where some items have to appear together? I have a quick question regarding survey construction that I'm hoping to get some clarification on.

Here's my current survey set-up:

Question 1
Question 1a (i.e., a question that relates to information provided in Q1)
Question 2
Question 2a
Question 3
Question 3a

...and so on and so forth.

Here's what I'm looking to do: I'd like to present these questions in a random order, however, Question X and Question Xa have to stay together. Is there a way to "glue" related questions together, and randomize presentation of those "glued" pairs within the Qualtrics platform?

There is probably a better way of doing this, but you could probably do this using the block feature in Qualtrics. For example, I often do this when I have several multi-item scales. Each scale is a block. You might randomise item order within a block, but you can also randomise the order of blocks.

So you could group questions (e.g., 1 and 1a) into their own block and then randomise blocks.

See here for info: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-flow/standard-elements/randomizer/


Does mental satisfaction lead to physical satisfaction? Does mental satisfaction lead to physical satisfaction?
Does physical satisfaction lead to mental satisfaction?

The Canadian Mental Health Association of Ontario is pretty unambiguous about the bidirectionally causal relationships between physical and mental well-being:

  Mental and physical health is fundamentally linked. There are multiple associations between mental health and chronic physical conditions that significantly impact people’s quality of life, demands on health care and other publicly funded services, and generate consequences to society.  The World Health Organization (WHO) defines: health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.   The WHO states that “there is no health without mental health.”

  Nowhere is the relationship between mental and physical health more evident than in the area of chronic conditions. The associations between mental and physical health are:

  Poor mental health is a risk factor for chronic physical conditions.
  People with serious mental health conditions are at high risk of experiencing chronic physical conditions.
  People with chronic physical conditions are at risk of developing poor mental health.

  The social determinants of health impact both chronic physical conditions and mental health. Key aspects of prevention include increasing physical activity, access to nutritious foods, ensuring adequate income and fostering social inclusion and social support. This creates opportunities to enhance protective factors and reduce risk factors related to aspects of mental and physical health.

The Mental Health Foundation's report, "Let's get physical: The impact of physical activity on wellbeing" offers a good review of several connections between exercise and well-being of both kinds. It's very broad, yet accessible, so I'll let it speak for itself. A peer-reviewed research literature review on the same topic is also available (Penedo & Dahn, 2005), as well as some original correlational research that linked physical and psychological health subjectively (Edwards, Ngcobo, Edwards, & Palavar, 2005). These are just some quick results from a Google search for "physical mental well-being correlation"; plenty more out there.

References

- Edwards, S. D., Ngcobo, H. S., Edwards, D. J., & Palavar, K. (2005). Exploring the relationship between physical activity, psychological well-being and physical self-perception in different exercise groups. South African Journal for Research in Sport, Physical Education and Recreation, 27(1), 75–90. Retrieved from http://www.sirc.ca/newsletters/mid-jan10/documents/S-996370.pdf.
- Penedo, F. J., & Dahn, J. R. (2005). Exercise and well-being: A review of mental and physical health benefits associated with physical activity. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 18(2), 189–193.


MRI images upside-down in FSLVIEW I'm visualizing structural data in FSLVIEW, but the sagittal and coronal planes are both upside-down / not in the conventional orientation, i.e. rotated by 90º and 180º. I understand that this upside-down view is due to the images being displayed in the order that they are stored on disk, but as I need to anatomically define ROIs on my structural, it would be more convenient if the brain were correctly oriented.

Any ideas on how to rotate these two views? The actual orientation labels themselves (S/I, A/P) are correct. Thanks!

Totally out of my league here, but judging from a quick Google search, this seems to be a common problem in FSL. You've said this YouTube video helps, so that's good...but since it uses an applescript, I suppose it requires the Mac OS.

You say Freesurfer's mri_convert works in Linux using this code:

mri_convert
--in_orientation [file's current storage order, e.g. LAS]
--out_orientation [desired storage order]
<in volume>
<out volume>


Quantifying the Dunning-Kruger Effect The Dunning-Kruger effect states that people unexperienced in a certain field or subject generally perceive themselves as having greater aptitude than in reality they do. Dunning and Kruger were able to quantify this using test-scores in their original paper, but popular expositions typically generalize this in a way consistent with the following plot:

As a layman, this form is more interesting to me because it is more generally applicable, but it also suffers from some drawbacks:

How should experience/confidence be gauged or measured? Is there a general way to do this which doesn't rely on test scores?
Suppose experience is measured in hours spent on the subject. Is there an approximate number of hours at which the peak is reached? The minimum? If so what are these numbers?

If an answer to either (but especially 2) is possible or available, it will help conscientious newcomers to any subject estimate the amount of time needed before trusting a self-evaluation of their competency.

Premise: I understand that the question is how to gauge (that is, to create a measure) or to assess expertise in something.

Answer 1.

Some criteria (very loosely translated from Hacker, 2005, pp. 381):

issue-specific knowledge;
general knowledge about the topic of expertise combined with problem-solving heuristics ranging across specific issues of this very topic;
knowledge of ideal courses of action;
conscious reflectiveness on the adequacy of task execution;
metacognitive ability (e.g. internalized, automated execution involving also motivation, emotional intelligence etc.);
ability to solve new kinds of problems related to the topic of expertise.

Answer 2.

No, there aren't any general numbers since it is not possible to define them without referring to both a specific topic of expertise and the predisposition of the person aiming to become an expert.

While I am not aware of any research to support this claim empirically, I maintain that a logical argument can suffice: How long will it take the same individual to acquire expertise as a surgeon compared to acquiring expertise at peeling potatoes?

Moreover, the development of confidence over time is closely tied to both the frequency and the quality of feedbacks about ones' success at doing something in the real world (Hacker, 2005).

Note: Unfortunately the cited work is written in German. A not as extensive English language replacement for it is Hacker (2003).

References

Hacker, W. (2003). Action Regulation Theory: A practical tool for the design of modern work processes? European Journal of Work & Organizational Psychology, 12(2), 105. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320344000075

Hacker, W. (2005). Allgemeine Arbeitspsychologie: psychische Regulation von Wissens-, Denk- und körperlicher Arbeit. Bern: Huber.


Why do people get syllables mixed up when trying to recall words? This question is related to this question. It could be a dupe, but I am more interested in whether this is a form of "dyslexic" thinking (for want of a better expression)?

I posted this question on SE English:

Antonym for ameliorate

Where I could not recall the word deleterious and was remembering it as: detiliorate (a non-existent word). I was miss remembering the order of the syllables. plus some other confusion.

I was confusing the de-le-terious with de-ti-liorate, that is, I had inverted the "L" and "T" sounds in the syllables.

Why do people tend to get sounds mixed up in this way?
What is the process behind this?

One way of thinking about speech production is using a spreading activation architecture. Say I want to produce the word "rooster." I have a meaning to be expressed (feathery avian animal loud...etc). These semantic representations send activation down to various matching words (bird, rooster, chicken...etc). As these words collect evidence for themselves, they send activation down to their corresponding sounds (bird sends activation to the sounds /b/, /r/, and /d/; rooster sends activation to /r/, /u/, /s/, /t/ ..etc). Once any node (word, sound..etc) receives enough evidence for itself, it is selected. There are nuances about how and when nodes become selected and how activation is passed, but this is the gist. In addition, there is noise in the system based on words that were previously said, upcoming words, words that are semantically related and so on.  This noise introduces the possibility for speech errors. Some errors are more likely than others depending on the amount of evidence they have collected. For example, in the example I presented here, the /r/ sound got more activation than the other sounds because it is collecting activation because it appears once in the word 'bird' and twice in the word 'rooster.' This sound might be more or less likely to be produced erroneously compared to sounds like /s/. These error probabilities explain why we are more likely to make real word errors, and why tongue twisters are so tricky. See the following article for more information.

Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological review, 93(3), 283.


How to measure visual salience quantitatively Salience makes objects pop-up from their surrounding and immediately attract our attention. A salient object in the visual domain would, e.g., be a red dot among white ones. We can sometimes intuitively say an object is more salient than the other, e.g., a moving red dot might be more salient than a static one.

Is there a way to quantify how salient an object is?

UPDATE

To narrow down the question a little, suppose you have a set of different output devices that can provide either visual or auditory cues (LEDs, loudspeakers, lamps, screens...) and they are near a target object you which to attract attention to. Ideally one would choose the output device that is closest to the target object to attract attention, but depending on the distance, the output device may not be as conspicuous. So at a given distance, I would like to know, which device will attract attention the most. The environment would be mostly static and well lit.

The duration of eye fixation has been used in  both infants and adults to measure locus of attention. This can be achieved using an eye-tracker. A more primitive and less exact way is to manually count the frames of a video recording of subjects. The frames per second (FPS) would be a limiting factor. In addition, the item that was first observed is the more salient one, provided that there is no secondary bias in the task (i.e. the objects should be an equal distance apart or the distance could be randomized).

For visual search and serial search tasks, responses are gathered and individual response curves (reciever operator characteristics, ROC) for participants and conditions can be computed using signal detection theory (SDT). The discrimination index d prime (d') can then be calculated only if two explicit responses are required exist.

Another option is to vary the presentation time systematically in order to quantify processing speed, but this requires a more computational approach.


How does language change the understanding of a complex concept? For example, does breaking down a complex concept, initially described with scientific and uncommon terms, into less complex language degrade the understanding of the concept or can it maintain all it's relations and objects? How does using simple language change the understanding or perception of a complex concept?

Another way to look at the question is can certain thoughts exist without specific words to wrap them in, or are some thoughts dependent on the vocabulary/language?

If so, does this imply that new words can lead to new concepts that have never been produced and shared by others? For example, in George Orwell's novel "1984" the government introduces a new language called "Newspeak" that must be spoken by all citizens. This new language does not have any words for the concept of freedom, liberty, etc - so that these ideas would be very difficult to expand into reliaty (keeping the government in control of course).

The complete Wikipedia article on language and specifically "Semantics" has a lot of insight but did not lead to any answers.

Thank You.

This question is pretty broad, but perhaps these studies address your question.

In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer won an Ig Nobel prize for his paper Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly, which demonstrated that using overly-complex words when a simpler word would suffice resulted in lower intelligence ratings of the author. Additionally, this may lead readers to rate the content as less true (Reber & Schwarz, 1999). So to answer one of your questions, yes, the language one chooses to use can change a reader's perception of it.

More to the point, your question is related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines thought (or the weaker hypothesis, that language influences thought). The strong version of this hypothesis (language determines thought) has been pretty thoroughly debunked. However, there is some credence to the idea that language influences thought. Many studies have examined this hypothesis, but one example is that of Frank et al. (2008). In this article, Frank tests an Amazonian tribe (the Pirahã) who have no number words-- purportedly, not even a word for 'one' or 'two'. Frank tested them on a variety of counting tasks and found that overall, their performance suffered in comparison to nearby tribes who did have number words. His claim is that number words serve as a cognitive tool to perform basic counting and arithmetic, but the lack of those words does not affect their ability to perceive quantity.

So overall, there is very little evidence to support the strong hypothesis that not having a word for a particular set of semantic features affects our ability to conceive of those concepts. However, not having those words may have subsequent affects on other areas of our cognition, such as (in the case of the Pirahã) our ability to count.

  Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized
  irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly.
  Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 139-156. PDF

  Reber, R., & Schwarz, N. (1999). Effects of perceptual ﬂuency on
  judgments of truth. Consciousness and Cognition, 8, 338–342. PDF

  Frank, M. C., Everett, D. L., Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E. (2008).
  Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and
  cognition. Cognition, 108(3), 819-824. PDF


Emotional detachment as a reaction can be considered an aggressive behavior? Social Rejection from Wikipedia

  rejection can be passive, by ignoring a person, or giving the "silent
  treatment".

Is it possible to say that the victim of a verbal aggression who hide or repress (negate) the negative emotions like fear, anger, sadness through the emotional detouchment showing himself as secure, not hurted can lead the other to feel impotent and thus become even more aggressive to get an emotional reaction?

Can emotional detachment be considered as a dysfunctional behavior for the victim of a verbal aggression? Opposed to demanding empathy.

Emotional detachment can be considered a kind of hostile / aggressive behavior?

EDIT

Is there any evidence that most of people would suffer from these kind of other's behaviours so that they can be considered a way to hurt people?

It is not clear the context in which you expect an answer. For example, should it be considered from a legal, ethical, survival, or psychological standpoint? I would expect the answers aimed at different philosophies to differ quite a bit. Let me address a few of your questions, at least as I understood them in your posting.

Can the person being "ignored" feel impotent as a result of this "silent treatment"? Of course this can happen. However, this reaction is not something that should be blamed on the person doing the ignoring. After all, if you look at someone funny and they throw a tantrum, is it your fault they cannot control themselves?

"Can emotional detachment be considered as a dysfunctional behavior for the victim of a verbal aggression?" Dysfunctional is not a term that can be legitimately applied here without context. There are many cases where ignoring a verbally abusive person can be extremely useful or even necessary to carry on with daily activities. For example, if people talking on forums got caught up responding to trolls, they would not be able to have reasonable discussions with non-trolls. A troll is a perfect example of a verbally abusive person for which silent treatment is clearly not "dysfunctional". The key thing you have to understand here is the intent of the verbal abuse. If the abuser is simply trying to reason or convey a message, with no hidden agenda, then reasoning in response may be fine. However, if the verbal abuser is socially sadistic, such as a troll, then the worst thing you can do is to get emotional in response to his or her provocation. After all, that would be accepting the damage they are trying to inflict for their sadistic pleasure.

Should a person "demand empathy" instead of ignoring the abuser? Successfully demanding and receiving empathy requires two things: (1) You must be deserving of empathy, which is highly subjective, and (2) the abuser must be able to feel empathy. The former requirement could necessitate skills in persuasion, which not everyone has. Furthermore, if you are being verbally abused because you legitimately did something wrong, you would need to show that you understand your wrongdoing and truly intend to make things right. The latter requirement depends on the personality and mental state of the abuser. A psychopath, for example, would not be able to feel empathy, so there would be essentially no point in trying to demand empathy from them. In fact, it would be dysfunctional to demand empathy from a psychopath. Such would be like demanding a shower head to dry you.

"[Can] emotional detachment can be considered hostile / aggressive?" Hostile perhaps, but I cannot see it being "aggressive" since it is in the very definition of the word that force be involved, which clearly is not the case in reactionary abstinence. Sure, there is such as thing as "passive aggressive", but the term itself is practically oxymoron. A more correct term would be "passive hostility".


Is psychology a science? I've read some books from behavioral economy to emotional intelligence, and it kind of makes sense, but when it comes to psychology it feels to me a bit like astrology, where there are some things that can work, but mostly because of auto-suggestion, or any other kind of suggestions, and things like the placebo (or even the nocebo) effect. So, I wonder if psychology is a science and why so many people rely on it.

"Science" refers to a methodology for obtaining knowledge, and often to the knowledge itself as well.  Science is often confused with another term "technology", that refers to the application of such knowledge for practical uses.  Some people might incorrectly refer to "computers" and "cars" as examples of "science", when in fact they are examples of "technology".

Psychology is similarly divided.  The science part is called "research psychology", or just "psychology".  The technology part is called "applied psychology", that includes psychotherapy, and I think that's what this question is really about.

Clinical psychology is not technically a science, but an applied science, or in other words, a technology.  If you are wondering how science-based different schools of psychotherapy are, then check out this related question: Which schools of psychotherapy are most credible to a hard scientist?.  If you've seen a psychoanalyst recently for example, and you think it's kinda hoaky, well then, you're probably right - psychoanalysis is not generally considered to be science-based, and is comparable to astrology (pseudoscience) in that sense.

On the other hand, other schools of psychotherapy have a more scientific basis: Cognitive-behavioural therapy has been shown to be efficacious (above placebo) for a wide variety of common disorders, and behavioural therapy bases all its techniques directly on scientific findings.


Is Carl Jung synchronicity scientific theory? Do you know about synchronicity theory (Carl Jung) and what scientific work has been done and is it proven? (what common references)

Is it possible that it could be related to the collective subconscious if it is real? (Scientific  common references)

Thanks.

Synchronicity is an interesting philosophical idea; unfortunately there is no evidence that it actually exists.  Therefore, there are some people who consider Jung's theory to be pseudoscientific.

Robert Todd Carroll, in his book "The Skeptics Dictionary," notes that "even if there were a synchronicity between the mind and the world such that certain coincidences resonate with transcendental truth, there would still be the problem of figuring out those truths. What guide could one possibly use to determine the correctness of an interpretation?" There is no scientific or objective way to determine whether synchronicity is valid or not; it's all subjective personal opinion and experience and flexible definitions.

You can read more on this on this LiveScience webpage
I also commented on synchronicity within an article I wrote in May

Many of Jung’s theories are considered to be pseudoscience. One example is synchronicity, his idea that meaningful connections in the world manifest through coincidence with no apparent causal link. This is what Jung referred to as the acausal connecting principle (Nickell, 2002). This is because these ideas culminated from his ideas about the paranormal. Despite his own experiments failing to confirm the phenomenon (Shermer & Linse, 2002) he held on to the idea as an explanation for apparent ESP (Jung, 2013).

References
Jung, C. G. (2013). Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. London: Routledge.
Nickell, J. (2002). “Visitations”: After-Death Contacts. Skeptical Inquirer 12(3) Retrieved from https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/visitations_after-death_contacts/?/sb/show/visitations_after-death_contacts
Shermer, M. & Linse, P. (2002). The skeptic encyclopedia of pseudoscience (Vol. 1). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.


Why do we find high pitched voices funny? I believe it's understood what type of voice I'm refering to, but for context I'm linking this youtube video where that type of voice is clearly heard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfms-v6G7n8

Why do people in general find such type of voice funny?

Two things come to mind for me.. First, at a very basic level, things that are perceptually salient capture our attention (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002), and this is obviously important for understanding our environment and assessing changes for threats (e.g.). In the video you linked, you have that perceptual salience and it's also in an animated and clearly exaggerated fashion.

The second thing that comes to mind is the voices that older children and adults make when communicating with infants. This sort of speech seems to serve an attentional/affective function (Gauthier & Shi, 2011), and research suggests that this sort of speech is actually a reflection of the infant's own communication styles (Smith & Trainor, 2008). Obviously, we might use such a voice because it sounds funny to them and we might get the infant to laugh. Who knows whether we intrinsically find it funny (if so, why?), or whether we learn to laugh at it as infants. It could well be that we simply come hardwired to interpret a perceptually salient and non-threatening social stimulus like that to be amusing.

References

Corbetta, M., & Shulman, G. L. (2002). Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nature reviews neuroscience, 3(3), 201.DOI: 10.1038/nrn755 PMID: 11994752

Gauthier, B., & Shi, R. (2011). A connectionist study on the role of pitch in infant-directed speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(6), EL380-EL386.DOI: 10.1121/1.3653546 PMID: 22225130

Smith, N. A., & Trainor, L. J. (2008). Infant-directed speech is modulated by infant feedback. Infancy, 13(4), 410-420.DOI: 10.1080/15250000802188719