How to report a quasi-experiment in APA? As one reads the psychology literature (e.g. social psychology), it seems to me, and I hope I'm not wrong, that such a discipline is highly dependent on quasi experiments (correct me if I'm wrong please).

Yet, one is most likely to read "we carried out the experiment/study with N participants... etc.", and never "we carried out the quasi-experiment with N participants... etc.".

The idea is, there seems to be systematic avoidance of declaring the name of the design. One has to use a kind of induction from experience to discover the design procedure.

My questions:

1 - Why?... I'm a naive undergraduate and I need to know what is the design in a clear and declarative manner that doesn't confuse me.

2 - What is the official reporting procedure for reporting quasi experiments in APA (if such a procedure exists)?... Do I need to report the details of the design? and if so, how much details?

The distinction between experiment and quasi-experiment is often made in undergraduate psychology courses.

In general, the term quasi-experiment is used to identify studies that fall short of a controlled experiment in some respect:
e.g., pre-existing groups;  allocation of participants to groups in a non-random way. In some cases, repeated measures experiments are labelled as quasi-experimental especially if they confound order with condition, especially simple pre-post designs.

The purpose of the term "quasi-experimental" is to highlight that there are potential confounds to causal inference that would not be present in a controlled experiment (e.g., time effects, pre-existing group differences, etc.).

However, more generally, an experiment typically refers to doing something in the world and observing the effect. In this sense, experiments are also sometimes distinguished from purely observational studies.

So in general, researchers should generally not use term "experiment" to describe an observational study. However, "quasi-experiments" can be labelled experiments.

So to come back to your question: how do you know whether a study is an experiment or a quasi-experiment? You have to read about the design and see whether the conditions for a controlled experiment are satisfied.

In general, as you progress in your psychology education, you may find that you use more nuanced descriptions of studies than simply "quasi-experimental". For example, you might describe a study as a simple pre-post repeated measures design. Or you might say that it compared a treatment and control group using pre-existing groups. The point is that these descriptions are more informative than simply saying "quasi-experimental".

In terms of reporting procedures for quasi-experiments in APA style, I think as above, this question does not entirely make sense. There are a variety of different types of quasi-experiments. For each type, there would be common things to report. For example, in simply describing your design, you will say what are between and within subjects factors and how participants were allocated or not allocated to groups.

You might find these APA reporting standards useful: "Reporting Standards for Research in Psychology" https://www.apa.org/pubs/authors/jars.pdf

This APA Task Force article also describes many of these issues quite clearly around how to report methods:
Wilkinson (1999) https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-54-8-594.pdf


Binaural Beats Meditation EEG versus Non-aided mediation EEG Can anybody point me to a recent scientific publication(s) that show the changes in a person's EEG using binaural beat meditation is similar to the EEG changes observed using traditional non-aided meditation.

Theta and Alpha are the waves associated with meditation (KaKasamatsu & Hirai, 1966; Khare & Nigam, 2000).

Owen and Atwater found that:

  binaural auditory beats in the EEG alpha frequency range may increase
  alpha EEG production and subjective relaxation

Furthermore On et al (2013) found that binaural beats could increase Theta activity:

  Binaural beat is the rhythmic stimulus which is generated to produce
  the desired audio frequency with the intention to make brainwave to
  follow that frequency. In the end of our research, the result shows
  that Theta brainwave increases after listening to binaural beat.
  Although the Delta brainwave is not really affected in this
  experiment, there is still an increment of delta brainwave after
  listening to binaural beat. The result shows that binaural beat
  affected on delta and theta brainwaves.

I also found one from Lavallee (2011) that found the experienced meditators couldn't be hindered by binaural beats:

  Based on the results of this study, novice meditators were not able
  to maintain certain levels of θ power in the occipital regions when
  hindering binaural beats were presented, whereas when the facilitative
  binaural beats were presented, the experienced meditators displayed
  increased θ power in the left temporal lobe

Suggesting that the effect of binaural beats may not be as strong as long term meditative practise.

Lavallee, C. F., Koren, S. A., & Persinger, M. A. (2011). A quantitative electroencephalographic study of meditation and binaural beat entrainment. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 17(4), 351-355.

On, F. R., Jailani, R., Norhazman, H., & Zaini, N. M. (2013, March). Binaural beat effect on brainwaves based on EEG. In Signal Processing and its Applications (CSPA), 2013 IEEE 9th International Colloquium on (pp. 339-343). IEEE.

Kasamatsu, A., & Hirai, T. (1966). An electroencephalographic study on the Zen meditation (Zazen). Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 20(4), 315-336.

Khare, K. C., & Nigam, S. K. (2000). A Study of Electroencephalogram in Mediators. Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, 44(2), 173-178.

Owens, J. E., & Atwater, F. H. (1995). EEG correleates of an induced altered state of consciousness: mind awake/body asleep. Submitted for publication.


What comes first? Thought or electric activity? Our thoughts are basically the result of the electro chemical activity which are happening in our neurons. The signals sent by different neurons to each other back and forth create a pattern which we register as thought/memory. The start of the electrochemical signal is generated by a potential gradient which is present outside the neuron cell membrane and is regulated by different voltage gates via the mechanism of action potential. My doubt is basically asking what comes first? Looking into it, it seems like thoughts result from these activities inside our brain but then how does this activity is brought about? For me, this question is like asking what comes first, the chicken or the egg. Do the electrical synapse somehow form and then we perceive them as thoughts? Then in this way, we shouldn't have control over what we think because the synapses are not voluntary. But we know this is not the case. Our thinking is under our control
Is there an answer?

There is ongoing electrical activity in the brain, there's even a lot of it when we are asleep when we are not 'thinking' at all, and also when we are unconscious and even when in coma. When brain activity does cease, i.e., its electrical activity becomes unmeasurable, there's a definite medical emergency.
Thus, there is unceasing activity in the brain. This activity includes both random 'noise' like neuronal jitter (Freeman, 1996) or constitutively active neuronal populations like those in the auditory (Wang & Bergles, 2015) or optic nerves (Sernagor & Grzywacz, 1996), as well as voluntary activity. In turn, the occurrence of random or controlled 'thoughts' is not so strange, as there is ongoing activation of neuronal pathways and activation in one neuron will trigger activity in others.
As a side note, and alluded to in the comments, thoughts are hardly voluntary; think psychotic patients who can experience their thoughts as intrusive or instructing them to do nasty things, people with OCD who have oppressing thoughts they have to do stuff, or folks suffering from PTSD who repeatedly experience flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.
As you say, all brain activity eventually boils down to ion gradients in the brain. Every cell in our body needs ion gradients to function properly for that matter.
What comes first? Activity or thoughts? Activity, because even random thoughts need a trigger to occur. How do these impulses come into being? Pre-existing activity.
References
- Freeman, Int J Neural Syst (1996); 7(4): 473-80
- Sernagor & Grzywacz, Current Biology (1996); 6(11): 1503-8
- Wang & Bergles, Cell Tissue Res (2015); 361(1): 65–75


Apart from sleep, does the brain needs rest? I am a graduate student in CS, and naturally, I take several breaks a day from studying, but I feel that most of those breaks are habit-influenced and that I do not absolutely need to get off my seat and meditate, exercise, etc. For instance, I love reading/learning philosophy, but because I am aware that such a practice requires non-trivial brain effort, I only do that on vacations and I find myself disinclined to attempt such a thing on those breaks. However, I think that this disinclination stems from my awareness of the non-triviality of the undertaking and essentially my laziness or mental fatigue, not from natural brain-related issues.

  Is there documented evidence that the brain needs regular periods of rest in certain individual-dependent amounts, apart and in addition to the normal ~8 hours of sleep?

Margarita Tartakovski on PsychCentral says,

  Information is merely a click — or, more accurately, a Google search — away. Depending on your query, there’s likely at least a dozen, if not hundreds, of blogs on the topic, a similar number of books and many more articles.

  This is a good thing, but it also can overburden our brains.

  According to Lucy Jo Palladino, Ph.D, a psychologist and author of Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload, “Information overload occurs when a person is exposed to more information than the brain can process at one time.”

  Alvin Toffler actually coined the term in 1970 in his book Future Shock. As more and more people started using the Web, “information overload” became a popular phrase to describe how we felt about going online, Palladino said.

  According to neuroscientists, the more accurate term is “cognitive overload,” she said. That’s “because the brain can process vast amounts of information depending on the form in which it’s presented,”

According to Professor Torkel Klingberg, MD, PhD (2009), the brain can suffer from information overload, and he gives some examples of what he is talking about.

  Our brains have limited capacity for processing information.  This book is an attempt to understand why this is so, what effect it has on our everyday lives, and how we can stretch these limits with mental exercise......In his article "Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform," psychiatrist Edward Hallowell coins the term "attention deficit trait" to characterize the situation.

From these articles, and articles linked within these articles, I would say that there are times that the brain needs rest at times in-between mental activities, in order to process things learnt, but the periods of rest needed can vary depending on how the activity taxes the brain, and how much it is used to dealing with the information.


Reference request in Circuit and Signals for Computational Neuroscience In the area of computational neuroscience, there are basic theories from electric circuits and signal processing to be applied. For background study, which reference will be more suitable ?

Personally, I don't have any background knowledge in circuit, or signals.

(Cited by Dayan's book in Theoretical Neuroscience)

"Circuits, Signals and Systems" , William M. Siebert

This book seems contains both electric circuits and signal processing, but maybe not from the ground.

Or combination or following two books

"Signals and System", Oppenheim

"Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits", Agarwal

These two are much heavier than Siebert's, they are good ones, but is it necessary to thoroughly read these two complete detailed books for computational neuroscience ?

Signals and System by Oppenheim (and others) was developed while he was teaching 6.003 at MIT. Similarly Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits by Agarwal (and others) was developed while he was teaching 6.002 at MIT. Circuits, Signals and Systems by Siebert was written while he was teaching at MIT. Siebert was before my time, but I believe 6.002 and 6.003 where separate even when he was teaching and that despite the name, there is not much circuits in the book. I would suggest the Oppenheim book over the Siebert book, purely because it is newer, but unless you have an EE background, there are probably better references.


Revenge attitude: is it innate or acquired in human I am trying to understand what is the root cause for revenge? I understand anger is caused by the gap between expectation/anticipation and the reality. But as to revenge, I am not satisfied just with identity related or social order maintenance or reciprocity. While resources pointing to the direction of getting started, any valuable input, views, opinions and research outcomes would be very much helpful.

Open access sources from Google Scholar:

Jackson, J. C., Choi, V. K., & Gelfand, M. J. (2019). Revenge: A multilevel review and synthesis. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 319-345. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103305

Lambert, A. J., Eadeh, F. R., & Hanson, E. J. (2019). Anger and its consequences for judgment and behavior: Recent developments in social and political psychology. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 60, 103-173.  https://psyarxiv.com/svcux/download?format=pdf


How does the intravenous administration of cholecystokinin provoke panic attacks? Background

I recently read a paper (The James-Lange theory of emotions: a critical examination and an alternative theory), in which the James-Lange Theory was challenged by Walter Bradford Cannon.

Hence it was stated that:

  {Emotional responses can be distinguished by on the basis of autonomic activity., emotions were less intense when the brain was disconnected from the viscera} ... Some artificial manipulations of organ activity can induce emotions such as intravenous administration of of cholecystokinin (a gastric peptide) which can provoke panic attacks.

Question

What is the physiological process of intravenously inducing an emotion?

Emotions are often linked to chemical activity in the brain. Neurotransmitters such as serotonin , dopamine, norepinephrine etc are linked to inducing emotional states, therefore if you can take a drug which will increase the amount of a transmitter then you will respond accordingly e.g. MDMA > serotonin > feeling of escstacy/happiness (Meyer & Quenzer, 2013).

In the case of Cholecystokinin (CCK), Singh et al found evidence suggesting that activation of the brain CCK-B receptor induces anxiety and that selective antagonists of this receptor represent a separate class of anxiolytic (relaxing) agents.

Simply:

Inject drug
drug reaches blood brain barrier
drug crosses or is turned into drug that can cross (e.g. codiene > morphine)
drug turns into neurotransmitter/ or precursor to (e.g. 5HTP > serotonin)
binds to/ activates receptor this activation causes an emotional/physical
response

This process varies depending on the drug but that is loosely it as I understand it. Much of this taken from the Meyers textbook, which I read a long time ago so feel free to correct me.

Singh, L., Lewis, A. S., Field, M. J., Hughes, J., & Woodruff, G. N. (1991). Evidence for an involvement of the brain cholecystokinin B receptor in anxiety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 88(4), 1130-1133.

Meyer, J. S., & Quenzer, L. F. (2013). Psychopharmacology: Drugs, the brain, and behavior.


What is the difference between Cognitive Bias and Cognitive distortion? I was asked by my professor to give a presentation on the topic "Cognitive biases and distortions" and during my prep I had this question. Could anyone please shed some light?
I tried finding more regarding the difference but I am yet to find "cognitive biases vs distortions" I have only found "cognitive biases and distortions".
Going by definitions it seems to me that distortions might be a subset of biases but i'm not at all sure. The counter argument to this for me is maybe biases are more about what we see and distortions about how we interpret it .
Thanks

Wikipedia has articles on both of these terms, so that would be one place to start. Although you may not be able to cite Wikipedia as a source, both of these articles have good References sections.
Here are the Wikipedia definitions (emphasis added):

Cognitive bias: "a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment."
Cognitive distortion: "an exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset or perpetuation of psychopathological states, such as depression and anxiety."

So both of these terms apply to thought patterns that deviate from a theoretical rational standard. But cognitive distortions apply specifically to states considered psychologically abnormal, while cognitive biases refer to properties of human thinking that tend to affect everyone. The examples given in the articles seem to support this distinction.
As you mentioned, cognitive distortions could be seen as a subset of cognitive biases, specifically the subset that leads to psychopathological conditions.


Psychology literature on present bias Does anyone know some good psychology papers on present bias that discusses the psychological mechanisms underlying this bias?

I can only seem to find papers by economist and they tend to give a quite formal and mathematical explanation of the subject. I'm looking for an in depth explanation of the psychology behind present bias.

I think the present bias is a result of the immediate gratification tendency that we as humans have. The following extracts are from the book Smart Change: Break the habits that hold you back and form the habits of success by Art Markman

  One of the most difficult things for people (and other animals for
  that matter) is to pass up something desirable right now in favor of
  something else in the future. A piece of cake now has a stronger pull
  on our actions than having a beach-ready body by next summer. An
  afternoon playing video games feels like a better way to spend an
  afternoon than studying for an exam that won’t happen for another
  week. Checking a few emails at work feels more productive than putting
  in effort on a big long-term project that won’t be finished for
  months. You’re wired to want to do what feels good in the short term.

  A beautiful experimental method for looking at the difficulty of
  overcoming temptations was developed by Walter Mischel in the late
  1950s to study how children deal with temptation. In his studies, an
  experimenter asked four-year-old children to sit in a room and showed
  them a small tempting object like a marshmallow or a cookie. Then the
  experimenter placed the object in front of the child next to a bell
  and said that he had to leave the room for a while. If the child was
  able to wait until the experimenter got back, then the child would get
  a larger reward (like two marshmallows or cookies). However, the child
  could ring the bell at any time and just take what was on the plate.
  If the child was able to wait fifteen minutes, then the experimenter
  would come back in the room and give the child the bigger reward.

  In a typical experiment, the average child was able to go only about
  ten minutes before ringing the bell. Factored into that average are
  the many children who rang the bell soon after the experimenter left
  the room and others who were able to wait the full fifteen minutes.
  Even for those children who are successful at waiting, it can be a
  difficult experience. In fact, there are a number of popular videos on
  YouTube of children in these experiments agonizing over the
  marshmallows in front of them. It is funny to see the children
  struggle to wait for the bigger reward. But the videos also illustrate
  how hard it can be to overcome temptation.

In the above experiment although the future benefits are clearly better (two instead of one marshmallow), the now is weighted more.


What predicts the severity of rejection pain? A number of studies show that social rejection causes actual pain. Is there a study that focuses on finding the personality dimensions that predict the amount of such pain? For example, is there a correlation between extroversion and the severity of rejection pain?

An answer nearby suggests that there is some kind of "sensitivity" to a person, but I am so far unable to determine what exactly this "sensitivity" means.

References:
K. D. Williams and allies — "Ostracism: Consequences and Coping"
Naomi I. Eisenberger and allies — "Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion"

I have found 2 papers that may be relevant to your question -

This paper probably answers your question the most - I have only schemed  through it, and it seems that the results were insignificant.  You can check out the paper in more detail, hopefully it will get you to more resources that can help with your research.

I have also found this paper which does not entirely answer your question, but I think will help with your insight.

Also keep in mind that some neuroimaging research on social exclusion in causing activation in regions (e.g. dACC) associated with physical pain employs reverse inference method.  This does not mean the results are entirely unworthy of considering - just something to keep in mind when looking at neuroimaging result interpretations.

References

McDonald, Melissa & Donnellan, M.. (2012). Is ostracism a strong situation? The influence of personality in reactions to rejection. Journal of Research in Personality. 46. 614–618. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.05.008.

Park, M., Lee, K.H., Sohn, S., Eom, J., & Sohn, J. (2014). Degree of extraversion and physiological responses to physical pain and sadness. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 55(5), 483-8. doi: 10.1111/sjop.12144

Poldrack R. A. (2011). Inferring mental states from neuroimaging data: from reverse inference to large-scale decoding. Neuron, 72(5), 692–697. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.11.001


How did Ebbinghaus decide on his number of words in a series? Herman Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve, by memorizing series of non-sensical syllables like "zod", "byh", "tef", etc., and than seeing how long it took to forget them.  The results are interesting, but I'm curious as to how he came up with the number of words to remember (the number of words in a series).   Because clearly the more words, the more difficult it would be to remember, which he did mention in his study.

In the study though he mainly used series of 8, 12 or 16 words, and took multiple tests which often came up to be about 104 syllables, but was quite varied. I couldn't find how he came up with those specific numbers of syllables to test, and furthermore it seems that his entire study and curve would be compromised by the amount of words.  For instance a 1 word series may never be forgotten while 10,000 may be unmemorizable.

Is his curve a simply an average of testable results?  Or is there some other reason for the certain number of words that constituted a series that I didn't quite catch?

If you read Ebbinghaus' article carefully, you will note that in Chapter III. The Method of Investigation, Section 13. Establishment of the Most Constant Experimental Conditions Possible, Ebbinghaus gives the following third of seven rules "for the process of memorising":

  3 . Since it is practically impossible to speak continuously without variation of accent, the following method was adopted to avoid irregular variations: either three or four syllables were united into a measure, and thus either the 1st, 4th, 7th, or the 1st, 5th, 9th ... syllables were pronounced with a slight accent. Stressing of the voice was otherwise, as far as possible, avoided.

This rule results in 3- or 4-syllable substrings. Of course the whole string of syllables to be memorized must be a multiple of either 3 or 4, if it is to follow this rule.

Your answer is: Ebbinghaus chose 8, 12 or 16 syllables, to keep the experimental conditions constant.


Is there a proper name of learning by experience (i.e. feeling something subconsciously)? We all know about these two ways of learning:

Rote learning (by mechanically repeating something to remember it).
Learning by understanding (by understanding the logic behind something).

But I strongly believe, that one more way of learning exists - learning by feeling. But do we have a term or some explanation for this type of learning?

Some examples:

you can learn the formula for least-count of device by:

repeating it to remember it whenever required;
understanding it to derive it whenever required;
by feeling it, i.e. using the device for some time, to enable us to put that formula in our subconscious mind;

(better example) in chemistry, we can learn the effect of $NO_2$ on benzene, the following ways:

repeating it;
understanding its chemical nature, its structure and then concluding the results;
by seeing examples of its reactions and feeling that that is its behavior, to happen like this.

Maybe what you are looking for is tacit knowledge:

  Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example, that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language, ride a bicycle, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other people.

  With tacit knowledge, people are not often aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact, regular interaction and trust. This kind of knowledge can only be revealed through practice in a particular context and transmitted through social networks. To some extent it is "captured" when the knowledge holder joins a network or a community of practice.

Another word that may suit your description is intuition:

  Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. Different writers give the word "intuition" a great variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.

  Instinct is often misinterpreted as intuition and its reliability considered to be dependent on past knowledge and occurrences in a specific area. For example, someone who has had more experiences with children will tend to have a better instinct about what they should do in certain situations with them. This is not to say that one with a great amount of experience is always going to have an accurate intuition.


What leaps in technology would be needed to scan the total state of the human brain? What technological leaps would be necessary to capture the absolute state of the brain? This would need to include:

a representation of each neuron
a representation of each neural connection
the chemical balances of the dendral connections between each neuron

And maybe we would also need to capture:

the current synaptic activity of each neuron

I'm not sure if we need that, perhaps if you lose the flow of synapses, you break the mind, or perhaps the state of the neurons will continue to work properly the next time synaptic input is introduced and the mind will "wake up".

Either way, that's an incredible amount of detail, especially chemical information, that would have to be captured so we could convert it into a virtual simulation of the functional aspects of each neuron making up that brain.

What are the major technological gaps that we would need to overcome in order to scan the brain with that level of detail? I'm interested in the specific aspects of scanning technology that would have to be invented beyond our current brain scanning technology.

Your question can be reduced to "What level of detail do we need to know about a brain to be able to simulate it?"

The answer to this question is we have no idea. The Blue Brain project has bet on the synaptic level, but they haven't been able to scale up to behaviour yet. But why stop at the synaptic level? Why not go down to molecules or atoms? Sure the computational power required goes up, but then we get a better model! And computers are getting faster and lower power all the time, right?

Actually, traditional processors have hit a wall in terms of power efficiency [1]. So you do end up needing to choose a reasonable level of detail for what you're choosing to model, since detail for detail's sake isn't going to get you anywhere [2]. Once we can understand the basic functions the brain is computing and how it's computing them, we can start looking for that level of detail in the human brain for simulation.

In conclusion, rather than a simple technological advancement, we need a theoretical advancement in understanding what the brain is even doing in the first place before we can use the data meaningfully.

[1] "Finding a roadmap to achieve large neuromorphic hardware systems" by  Jennifer Hasler and Bo Marr. Specifically, Figure 17 shows the "power efficiency wall".

[2] "The use and abuse of large-scale brain models" by Chris Eliasmith and Oliver Trujillo


What are biological primary mathematical skills? In doing a bit of background reading for this question I came across a section in the book Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind on page 602 stating:

  There are no sex-related differences in biological primary mathematical skills, even in nonhuman primates

And later defines secondary mathematical skills as

  the kinds of math taught in schools in the industrialized world

But it doesn't define what primary mathematical skills are.

Can anyone explain what is meant by the term?

Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of The Mind, 2nd ed. M. S. Gazzaniga, R. B. Ivry, G. R. Mangun.

The term seems to come from David C. Geary's 1995 article. Here's the abstract with full-text link below:

  An evolution-based framework for understanding biological and cultural
  influences on children's cognitive and academic development is
  presented. The utility of this framework is illustrated within the
  mathematical domain and serves as a foundation for examining current
  approaches to educational reform in the United States. Within this
  framework, there are two general classes of cognitive ability,
  biologically primary and biologically secondary. Biologically primary
  cognitive abilities appear to have evolved largely by means of natural
  or sexual selection. Biologically secondary cognitive abilities
  reflect the co-optation of primary abilities for purposes other than
  the original evolution-based function and appear to develop only in
  specific cultural contexts. A distinction between these classes of
  ability has important implications for understanding children's
  cognitive development and achievement.

You can read more about David C. Geary's articles on mathematics on his website.

References

Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children's cognition: Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24-37. FULL TEXT


NEO-FFI vs. NEO-FFI-3: What's the difference? I just ran out of a large shipment of NEO-FFI booklets, so I went to order more from PARinc. This shipment has lasted since 2014.

It seems that the original version of the NEO-FFI that I was using (from 2003) is now out of print and has been updated with the NEO-FFI-3.

Is anyone aware of the differences between the two versions? I can't really find much information on the change between the two, so I assume they're not significantly different?

First a bit of background for those who may not know what NEO-FFI is...

NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) is a shortened version of the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) now in its 3rd edition (NEO-PI-3). Both inventories were first published in 1985 and now the NEO-FFI is also in its 3rd edition as of 2005 (NEO-FFI-3).

NEO-FFI-3 measures the "Big 5" personality traits (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness), comprises 60 items and is designed to take 10 to 15 minutes to complete; by contrast, the NEO-PI-3  takes 45 to 60 minutes to complete.

Both NEO-PI and NEO-FFI were originally developed for use with adult men and women without overt psychopathy.

Now onto the question of difference between the 2nd and 3rd editions

The latest revision of the NEO-FFI involved the replacement of 15 of the 60 items to improve readability and psychometric properties.  The revised edition is now thought to be more suitable for younger individuals and is also thought to have a stronger factor structure and increased reliability (McCrae & Costa, 2010).

For further reading, see the NEO research bibliography

References

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr., (2010). NEO Inventories: Professional manual. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc.


Are words and ideas written in a distinctive font easier to remember? I read that serif fonts have more distinctive characters, and I was wondering if, at the brain level, the fact that something is written with more distinctive characters would be more easily remembered?

I saw a study telling that less legible fonts were easily remembered, but actually, I'm wondering if they are more easily remembered because they are less legible or more because they have more distinctive characters (even Comic Sans MS that is considered by many, including me, as a very bad font, have some characters that are pretty distinctive)?

I can't think of any information relating directly to distiction of letters in the english Alphabet, so instead I pulled out some stuff on our corrolations between shapes and long/short term memory:

Abstract
In four experiments, we examined the effect of pairing colors with either homogeneous or heterogeneous shapes on a short-term memory task. In Experiment 1, we found no differences in color memory for displays in which colors were each associated with different shapes, paired with individual homogeneous shapes, or paired with heterogeneous shapes. In contrast, in Experiment 2, we found that when participants were asked to remember the specific pairings of colors, memory was improved for heterogeneous-shape displays. The benefit for heterogeneous shapes appears to be memorial, rather than one that occurs at the time of encoding (Experiment 3) or retrieval (Experiment 4). The present study suggests that distinctive shapes can be used to help bind color associations in visual short-term memory.

However focusing more on shape I think this article by Ray Vellest, and particularly its section "Shapes", goes into a nice discussion of how logo's are designed to engage long term memory, and how by differntiating the type font, new meaning can be given to the letter.
This substantially answers your question by giving examples of how differentiating shapes, such as the type font, can make letters easier to remember.
For example:

(source: img03.mar.cx)
Clearly, just a small change to the shape of the letter makes it have a completley different meaning. In this case, the sort of letter you would find in your text book, and the one you immeadiately associate with McDonalds
Apllying this to fonts would involve similar logic, but I'm hoping someone can pull in some information more directly related to the Alphabet then shapes.
Besides that, I hoped this helped you out.
Mona

References
Delvenne JF1, Dent K. (2008). Distinctive Shapes Benefit Short-Term Memory for colour association, but not for colour. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18717388
Ray Vellest (2012). THe pychology of logo Design. http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/08/the-psychology-of-logo-design/


Time passing faster now as compared to 50 years (or 1000yrs) back ? I asked 200 people (who include my friends and family members in age group of 15 to 70 years living in cities) how they feel about time ? Do they feel that the time is passing faster as compared to when they were child?
95% of those people say that now a days time is passing much faster than lets say 50 years back when they were younger.

Is this an established fact and can be explained using theory of relativity or any other law that time (may be on average) is passing faster now  as compared to lets say 50 yrs or may be 1000 yrs back?
Or is it only a subjective experience?

This is really not physics at all, but I think it can most readily be explained by the fact that people generally experience time as moving faster as they get older.

This is because as we age, things that happened a year ago don't seem so distance, because we can also remember things that happened 10 years ago. If you were only 5 years old, something that happened a year ago happened a 5th of your life ago - a huge amount of time compared with your current lifespan.

As far as I know, there is no law that says time passes any slower or faster depending on the age of the (universe) earth.

Edit: I have just seen this, a much better answer to the question than mine. Perception of time as a function of age (thanks jinawee)


Which area of psychology studies false beliefs? Imagine a person has some false beliefs, which are also reflected then in his actions:

I  don't want to interact with people because I don't trust them and 90% of time they will betray me
If I form close relationship with people then I will not be able to move to different country because I will miss them
....

We can bring similar beliefs. I am interested which direction in psychology studies this situation when person has such beliefs? And tries to correct them

These are typically called cognitive distortions and are a mainstay of CBT, but are equally likely to be addressed by any cognitive psychotherapist.  This is usually done by building skills to identify and challenge such thoughts.
In the much older (and largely outdated) school of psychoanalysis, these are typically referred to as a defense mechanism called rationalizations.
In contrast, behavioral therapies are less likely to directly address such thoughts.  With this paradigm, distortions typically subside once the underlying behavior pattern is addressed (eg, by improving social skills, and actually making friends).


Which type of stimulus results in an optimal learning curve for rats and mice? When using operant conditioning to train mice or rats, what type of stimulus is most effective? For example, does a negative reinforcement of a loud noise have a more profound effect than a negative reinforcement of pain? What about for positive reinforcement? Is pleasure more powerful than food? Which type of stimulus is considered optimal for learning?

First, the concept of optimality of a learning curve is not well defined. You can measure at least 3 different aspects of learning:

Speed of learning
Time before extinction
Performance at peak

Of course, there may be other measures as well, and any combination of such measure may also be a legitimate measure for certain uses.

Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA) is a form of learning in which animals (and humans) learn to avoid a type of food after consuming it and suffering symptoms resembling food poisoning shortly after. In certain cases, the learning can take a single trial, cause the animal to completely avoid the food, and last for a lifetime [1], making this an optimal learning in all of the above 3 measures.

However, CTA is a very special and specific type of learning, and won't help you in teaching your rat to walk in a maze... I haven't found a methodological comparison of different types of reinforcements, and I suspect such a comparison might be very difficult or even impossible, because the efficacy of a (positive) reinforcement is greatly affected by the animal's "appetite" for it: for example, to use food as a reinforcement, rats are usually starved (the technical term is "maintained on a food deprivation schedule") for a few days. To use water as a reinforcement, rats are kept on a water deprivation schedule. How would you equate the subjective level of starvation and thirst?

Other aspects of the learning schedule have been studied more thoroughly. For example, to produce a long lasting learning (increase measure #2) at the expanse of speed of learning (measure #1) and peak performance (#3), you can provide partial reinforcement: reinforce the animal only on some of the trials [2].

[1]  Conditioned taste aversion: Memory of a special kind. Bures, Jan; Bermúdez-Rattoni, Federico; Yamamoto, Takashi; Oxford University Press, 1998  doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198523475.001.0001

[2]  Partial reinforcement: a review and critique. Jenkins, William O.; Stanley Jr., Julian C; Psychological Bulletin, Vol 47(3), May 1950  doi: 10.1037/h0060772


Where can i find old archived patient records from 19th century psychiatric hospitals? I do not have university access and do not want to spend money on protected documents. I am looking for free access. (Possibly I would spend money for original documents which should then be sent to me. ;) )

A Google search for patient records from 19th century psychiatric hospitals (no quotes) turns up relevant results, though not for free access.
For example, here's a service from The National Archives (UK) that looks like exactly what you're talking about. And another one from New Zealand. I'm sure there are more.


Confidence rating in cognitive experiments Does a confidence rating included in a post task measure the likelihood of correctness to the answer or likelihood of occurrence of an event.

To give an example: participants are given a picture of clouds and they are provided with the binary question if they think it might start raining; the answer is thus either a 'yes' or a 'no'. Then they have to give an estimate of how confident they are of their decisions on a rating scale that indicates how confident they were; for example they might say '70%'.

Does the confidence rating reflect their estimate of likelihood of rain, or rather the likelihood that the choice is correct?

If the question is 'Will it start to rain based on this cloud cover?' and the answer is a binary 'yes' or 'no' and the subsequent question is 'How sure are you about that?', then the answer to your question

  Does the confidence rating reflect their estimate of likelihood of
  rain, or rather the likelihood that the choice is correct?

is the latter: it reflects the likelihood that the choice is correct, because when they say 'no it will not rain', with a confidence of 60%, then the chance it will rain is 40% and not 60%. Hence, it reflects the confidence they have in their answer.


What factors influence a person's perceived expertise? For example, some people believe they are excellent human lie detectors. But, research shows that the average person is only able to detect deception about 54% of the time. What techniques could be used to influence perceived expertise?

Expertise – defined by Hovland, Janis and Kelley (1953) as "the extent to which a communicator is percieved to be the source of valid assertions" – is the second dimension of source credibility besides trustworthiness and attractiveness in their source-credibility model. The perceived expertise is, of course, not independent of these other dimensions: attractive people are considered more knowledgeable, and trustworthiness has a similar effect.

Leaving aside obvious objective cues for expertise (e.g. proven success with identical problems, the university degree of a medical doctor, or years of practical experience in a relevant field) I want to focus on irrelevant and subjective cues.

What constitutes expertise would most certainly depend on the field and the expertise of the person judging the expertise of another. For example, Golbeck and Fleischmann (2010) found that in online Q&A sites such as cogsci.stackexchange.com, photo cues such as smiles or showing the person egaged in a relevant activity only improve trust in a poster's knowledgeability among non-experts. And while the expertise of a person producing tangible goods can be easily discerned even by a layman user ("Do these shoes fit?"), intangible services such as child care or a physician's diagnosis and the relevant expertise are very difficult to measure, sometimes even for experts. (Zeithaml, 1981)

In a study on the social communication of political expertise, Huckfeldt (2001) found the most important factors to influence perceived political knowledge to be interest (influencing perceived expertise with a probability of .74), objectively defined knowledge (.36), agreement of discussion partner (.31), agreement between discussion partners (.29), partisan extremity (.14) and education (.11).

As you can see, apart from objective knowledge, perceived expertise is in part influenced by wether other people agree with a speaker, how strongly he favors one standpoint (neutrality and scepticism, both signs of healthy scientific reasoning, seem to substract from apparent expertise), and how educated he appears in general (i.e. a well-groomed person with a PhD will appear more of an expert, no matter if he indeed has any knowledge of the field he expands about or not).

Following a dual processing model such as the elaboration likelihood model, source factors such as expertise, likability, attractiveness and consensus serve as heuristic cues when recipients lack the ability or motivation to scrutinize a message effortfully. But not all recipients use the same cues. Low self-monitors (whose attitudes are based on values) elaborate an expert source's message more effortfully than the same message delivered by an attractive source, while high self-monitors (whose attitudes are based on sochial adjustment concerns) process messages from an attractive source more effortfully. (Ziegler, von Schwichow & Diehl, 2005)

In other words: When a message is unambiguous, strong arguments lead to more agreement than weak arguments (not source characteristics such as expertise). But when the message is ambiguous, it leads to more favorable reactions (aggreement, attitude change) when it is delivered by a source whose characteristics match the personality of the message's recipient.

I am sure there is more, but this is what I can come up with at the moment. If you want to find more, look at research on persuasion.

References:

Goldbeck, J., & Fleischmann, K. R. (2010). Trust in social Q&A: The impact of text and photo cues of expertise. In Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Stream in an Information Ecosystem (vol. 47). Silver Springs, MD: American Society for Information Science. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1930000/1920442/a77-golbeck.pdf
Hovland, C. I., Irving, K. J., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and Persuasion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/24018828/1542385145/name/4188769.pdf
Huckfeldt, R. (2001). The social communication of political experts. Amercian Journal of Political Science, 45, 425-438. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2669350
Zeithaml, V. A. (1981). How consumer evaluation processes differ between goods and services. In J. Donnelly & W. George (eds.), Marketing of Services (pp. 186-190). Chicago: American Marketing.
Ziegler, R., von Schwichow, A., & Diehl, M. (2005). Matching the message source to attitude functions: Implications for biased processing. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 645–653. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2004.12.002

A note on lie detectors:

In a study on "Police officers' ability to detect suspects' lies" (Mann, Vrij & Bull, 2004), the ability to detect lies strongly correlated with (self-)percieved experience in interviewing suspects. Participants where UK police officers of differing ages (22 to 52), length of service (1 to 30 years) and work areas (e.g. criminal investigation, trainers, traffic officers etc.) Average self-reported experience in interviewing suspects was 3.75 (on a scale from 1 = totally inexperienced to 5 = highly experienced).

For the whole sample accuracy in detecting lies was 66%, which is significantly higher than the level of chance. Experience was somewhat correlated (around .20), while length of service was uncorrelated (-.07) to accuracy.

Mann, S., Vrij, A., & Bull, R. (2004). Detecting true lies: Police officers' ability to detect suspects' lies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 137-149.


Are there any studies that were able to localize Fusiform Face Area (FFA) for face processing using EEG source localization algorithms? I am looking for references where people were able to collect 128-256 channel EEG data during face perception task and the map it onto FFA or OFA using source localization algorithms?

The N170 (the face selective component of the brain) is commonly mapped indeed to OFA or FFA. It's trivial to find examples for this, e.g.: this, this, this, this, this. Many more studies can be found by searching the relevant data bases, e.g. like this.
Some of these include co-registered EEG/fMRI or MEG. There is some uncertainty of where exactly it originates from - OFA, FFA, both.

Note that dipole fits can be seen as leading to oversparse solutions - they might locate the N170 to one out of OFA or FFA, when it is actually projected by a larger are including OFA, FFA, and possibly even more of the cortex.


What are the benefits of using all 30 personality facets in multiple regressions compared to just including hypothesised facets? What are the advantages/disadvantages of using all 30 facets (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) in a multiple regression versus only using the facets that you have a hypothesis for?

I see that the vast majority of research always includes all 30 facets, but I don't quite understand the added value of this.

References

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO personality inventory (NEO PI-R™) and NEO five-factor inventory (NEO-FFI): Professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

I wrote a paper that focuses on this question (Anglim & Grant, 2014; pre-print is https://osf.io/g8kbj/download).

In short, if you're interested in estimating how well facets predict an outcome, then you should include all facets as predictors. Likewise, if you want to estimate the incremental prediction of facets over domains (e.g., 30 facets over the Big 5), then you should include all domains in the domain regression model and all facets in the facet regression model.

If you're doing research, then presumably, you don't know which facets predict the outcome. Therefore, it's an empirical question which do predict.

An important point is that you use an estimator that corrects for biases when including many predictors. A reasonable approach is to use adjusted r-squared, although when you have 30 facets, large samples help a lot.

I also have more recent primer that is designed to be fairly accessible (Anglim & O'Connor, 2018, see preprint https://psyarxiv.com/a78g2/download )

If you want more detail, post further questions in the comments.

References

Anglim, J., & Grant, S. L. (2014). Incremental criterion prediction of personality facets over factors: Obtaining unbiased estimates and confidence intervals. Journal of Research in Personality, 53, 148-157. https://osf.io/g8kbj/download
Anglim, J., & O'Connor, P. (2018). Measurement and Research Using the Big Five, HEXACO, and Narrow Traits: A Primer for Researchers and Practitioners. Australian Journal of Psychology. https://psyarxiv.com/a78g2/download


Research correlating stress/boredom with eating/comfort-seeking? Imagine a few common stressful situations that we all go through:

Being struck in traffic
Having to wait for a bus, train...
Going through security/immigration control at an airport

Purely an anecdotal observation: People tend to seek comfort in some form to handle such encounters - typically immediately afterwards.  Quite often it takes the form of snacking, drinking, dining, binging...

My question is this: Anecdotal observations aside, are there any studies that have attempted to correlate the magnitude of the stress with the likelihood of the comfort-seeking behavior?

Droid here are a couple of relevant studies:

Experiments with rodents done by Kent Berridge found that:

Stressed rats will expend more energy on obtaining pleasurable relief (in the form of food) than non-stressed rats. But only to familiar foods

Peciña, S., Schulkin, J., & Berridge, K.C. (2006). Nucleus accumbens corticotropin-releasing factor increases cue-triggered motivation for sucrose reward: Paradoxical positive incentive effects in stress

Experiments with stressed exam students done by Wendy Wood et al found that stress amplified the hedonic habitual approaches already used by students (so basically it made them seek out more of the HABIT though not the reward, to relieve stress and regain comfort.

Neal, D.T., Wood, W., & Drolet, A. (2013). How do people adhere to goals when willpower is low? The profits (and pitfalls) of strong habits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

In short it seems that our default response to stress (and subsequent comfort seeking) is to seek out a FAMILIAR rewarding habit (E.g. having a coffee at Starbucks, if that’s a habit) than a non-habitual reward. (So comfort seeking is Pavlovian not strictly hedonic)


Does typical duration of Short Term Memory differ between tasks? The duration of Short Term Memory is a fuzzy thing; Wikipedia notes several disputes over it's length and I recently alluded to this fuzziness myself.

However, I wonder if part of the apparently unpredictable duration is to do with the different types of details we remember. For instance I find it very likely that context-rich information such as where I left my car keys (many related cues exist in the relevant location to make it recognizable) likely persists longer than fairly arbitrary data (no relevant cues typically exist, except perhaps area code).

Experiments typically only focus on a single task or related tasks to measure short term memory. Is there any evidence that indicates different short term memory tasks have different "forgetting functions" or time until a specific percentage of the information is lost?

Tasks I'm thinking of are basic memory tests like remembering lists of words/numbers/letters, remembering parts of a story, answers to a quiz; ideally things with different sorts of modality or potential for Chunking.

As you pointed out, the duration of short term memory(STM) varies and there are different theories.   However, in mainstream opinion, ideas or thoughts classified as "short term" are said to decay after a short amount of time (minutes at most). If an idea is recallable after a few minutes (or even a minute) then it would be classified under "long term memory" (LTM). Your example of leaving your keys and then later remembering would be the following process: You leave your keys and the act is stored in your working memory and through special attention is encoded into LTM which you later recall while looking for your keys. Further, if you are using "retrieval cues" then you are attempting to "retrieve" it from your encoded LTM. So if a cue reminds you of something then that "thing" was already encoded in LTM. So this "keys" example and examples involving "remembering lists of words/numbers/letters, remembering parts of a story, answers to a quiz" are not short term memory issues at all but rather encoding and LTM issues.

So if your question is "Does the chance of encoding from STM to LTM differ between tasks?" the answer is yes.

You do have a greater likelihood of encoding certain short term memories over others. This is generally because you have a vested interest in an idea or it has an attribute that is distinct from the others. For example: if I listed "apple, banana, orange, house, kiwi, mango" then you may pay special attention to "house" because it is not a fruit and thus different. Because you pay more attention to this it has a greater chance of being remembered. Interest also plays a part. If you obsessed over something (let's say ponies) and that word or an associated word (e.g. pony) appeared in a random list then you are more likely to remember that word than the other, less significant, words. It has also been shown that on average people remember the first word in a list (primacy) and the last word in a list (proximity) than any given word in the middle. Lastly, of course, there is a greater liklihood of remembering something if you try through mnemonics such as you mentioned (rehearsal and chunking). I hope this answered your question. I also hope I didn't misunderstand your question.


Effectiveness of aversion therapy for procrastination Pavlok is a product which is essentially a shock bracelet for Aversion Therapy. It markets itself as an intervention for a range of habits, including procrastination and nail-biting.

Is there any evidence that giving yourself a shock, when you catch yourself procrastinating or when someone else catches you procrastinating, will give you an aversion to the activities used for procrastination? Is it possible the person who receives the feedback would just find new activities?

From a 2014 review article on procrastination that doesn't mention aversive therapy at all, but has this to say about treatment(s) of procrastination in general:

  Even though procrastination can contribute to many adversities among those afflicted, research concerning treatment interventions is currently scarce. (Pychyl & Flett, 2012) In terms of clinical trials investigating different
  treatment interventions, there is insufficient knowledge regarding their usefulness (Rozental & Carlbring,
  2013). The research also lacks validated outcome measures, randomization, and long-term follow-ups, complicating
  the results. Treatment interventions stemming from cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) are often considered
  suitable for addressing problems of procrastination—interventions such as stimulus cues, time management,
  goal-setting techniques, learned industriousness, automaticity, stimulus control, modeling, performance
  accomplishments, implementation intentions, success spirals, and fusing (Steel, 2007)—but the evidence for
  their efficacy is still unclear (Pychyl & Flett, 2012).


How do we learn to count syllables? When I was young, I was told that to count syllables in a word, you could clap them. One clap for each syllable.

You would say it aloud like this: cu-shion.

I was not taught rules about how to pick out each syllable from a word. I just figured it out.

The funky thing with this is that syllables have no defined length, and some words are only one syllable while others are a few.

Learning how to count syllables is unlike math because in math, one can't do something until they have learned all the rules for how it should be done properly. I was never taught rules like this for counting syllables, I just figured it out.

My question: how do humans learn this skill without being taught? Is it like learning to walk?

Like most of language, we have an innate ability to learn by exposure, with the rules remaining subconscious until someone forces us to explain them.

Syllables are based on phonemes, so we need to know the rules of spelling if we don't already know the word by sound.  Each syllable consists of an onset and a rime.
The onset is a cluster of consonants (or it is null, at the beginning of some words).
The rime is a cluster of vowels {or diphthongs...}, plus an optional cluster of consonants {typically at the end of a word}.

Thus: cushion: [c] (u) + [sh] (io[n]) = 2 syllables


Narcissistic personality recent studies I have recently read the Nancy McWilliams' book "Psychoanalytic Diagnosis" and learned that serious studies on narcissistic personality were done mostly in the end of the XXth century. However her book does not contain any reference dating in recent 28 years. I doubt the research in this direction has just abruptly stopped.

Could you please point me to some particular references or more generally authors who are thought to have made some significant contributions to this field in relatively recent years?

I think, I have found an answer, more or less. There is a person called Sam Vaknin, who published a book called "Malignant self-love". Even though Vaknin is not an academic himself, the book does contain references to more recent studies.


How can tacit knowledge be measured? Question 1: If tacit knowledge is that which can't be written as declarative facts or communicated easily, then how can scientists measure how much of it someone has in a lab?

Question 2: Is it true that tacit knowledge can never be declarative or written down?

Example: Knowledge like "never tell your immediate boss in this organization what you feel about TPS reports, or you won't be able to get your complaint past upper management" seems like tacit knowledge. But yet it's written down as a declarative fact.

Short answer
Because tacit knowledge is defined as knowledge we cannot describe, researchers apparently adopt a strategy of just interviewing and listening for signs of tacit knowledge, as far as I understand it.

Background
Tacit knowledge can be curtly defined as ‘that which we know but cannot tell’.

For example, a person may be very aware of being able to ride a bicycle and able to describe how they learned to do it. However, the person may not be able to describe critical aspects of biking, such as swift, reflex-driven adjustments due to imbalance, and subjects like the steadying effect of the gyroscopic motion of the wheels, may not be consciously realized either.

Still tacit knowledge can be made explicit by either making the knower to learn to tell, or by the researcher telling and seeking respondent. In other words, one has to facilitate the ‘telling’ of the untold. Both methods require the researcher to construct an account.

Eraut (2000) claims that tacit knowledge can be examined through regular interactions, encouraging persons to freely describe what they know. This can be facilitated by an informal relationship, where one can freely interact with the person about their knowledge.

Reference
- Eraut, Brit J Edu Psychol (2000); 70: 113–36


Are cortisol measures more reliable than self-reported fear measures for looking at difference scores? I was sent an email by a researcher with the following question:

  You wrote that difference scores are okay to use if measurement error
  is
  minimised.

  Does that imply that biological data are more reliable for statistically analysing change than say a self-report personality
  scale?
  For example, I've measured fear via cortisol and also self-report scale, does this mean that I can look at hormone measurements in a
  difference score but not on the self-report scales?

I think the relevant reliability would be the expected test-retest reliability of the measure at the two time points which are otherwise being used to examine difference scores. Thus, if you were looking at difference scores derived from an experiment where measures are taken one day apart where an intervention is applied on one of those days, then you would want to know the correlation between those two days in the absence of any intervention.

In general, I would question your assumption that hormone measures are more reliable than self-report personality measures. I'm not experienced with hormone reliability data, but a good personality scale should have test-retest reliability around .80 or 90. My intuition is that hormone measures have much lower reliability than this, but I'd be very interested in anyone who can cite test-retest reliability measures for various hormone measures.

I found this discussion of cortisol test-retest reliability (Nicolson):

  Test-retest reliability of acute stress response measures appears to
  be low, probably because of both the underestimated noise introduced
  by spontaneous pulsatile activity (Young, Abelson, & Lightman, 2004)
  and the tendency of the cortisol response to habituate following
  repeated exposures. Low reliability of cortisol outcome measures means
  that laboratory stress experiments are particularly vulnerable to Type
  2 error. This issue is important in all studies, but especially needs
  to be taken into account in intervention studies, where stress
  reactivity is compared pre- and postintervention. More analyses are
  needed to determine how many cortisol measures per session and how
  many repeated sessions are necessary to obtain reliable measures of
  stress reactivity for different subject populations and stressors
  (Gunnar & Talge, 2007; Hruschka et al., 2005).

References

Nicolson, N. A. Measurement of Cortisol. http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/17430_Chapter_3.pdf


Low crystalized intelligence- failure to transfer skill from Hippocampus to cortex? We know that when we process some information or solve some problem, we need to pull information from long term memory to working memory. There are few factors known to me that can cause a failure during retrival:

Working memory shortage
poor temporal context
The memory was never transferred to long term memory to begin with

Low working memory is something that can be easily diagnosed with Dual n-back tests.

A study on anterograde amnesic patients have shown that they do not appear to have poor temporal order (5), which indicates that maybe temporal context is not to blame when people forget things. However, it is possible that this does not apply on all cases.

This leaves the third possibility: that short term memories do not always get transferred to long term memories. Is this a possibility? If yes, then why does it happen?

Sources:

Types of memory
Role of working memory
Temporal context
How is information transferred into long-term memory?
Anterograde amnesia and temporal order
Dual n-back test

First we need to establish the link between crystallized intelligence and the types of memory. Long term memory can be divided in two parts: Procedural and declarative.

Episodic memory is recollection of events, semantic memory is recollection of learned facts, and procedural memory includes priming, classical conditioning, skill based learning etc and does not require intentional or conscious recollection of an experience (1).

Among these types, Howard and Kahana's model of temporal context theory is only applicable to the declarative branch (2).

The answer to the question depends on which type of problem solving we are talking about. All three types of memories get used during learning. Problem solving requires skill based learning. But we must also remember a lot of facts in order to solve certain real world problems. Practical experiences also come in handy. However, if we can recall all the related facts but still fail to solve a problem, that indicates poor skill-building. According to Cattell‘s (1971, 1987) Gf-Gc theory, fluid intelligence causes crystallized intelligence (5). therefore, low fluid intelligence might be a reason behind poor skill based learning.

"failure to transfer skill from Hippocampus to cortex" is not likely to happen because skills do not seem to have any short-term and long-term phases. Excerpts from a recent study (6):

  We have shown that when people adapt to successive and opposing sensorimotor transformations, they fail to consolidate learning of the first even when the two transformations or tasks are separated by 24 hr.

From a meta-analysis (4):

  This implies that a procedural memory may never become fully stable and instead remains vulnerable to interference. When exposed to task B, participants may have retrieved the procedural memory associated with task A and modified it, ‘overwriting’ the memory for task A with information relevant to task B............ It implies that learning a new skill leads to the automatic destruction of another skill. It would never be possible to have skill in more than one task! Our ability to acquire multiple skills may depend upon having contextual cues available to signal the switch from one task to another.

This theory proposes that our procedural memory has a completely different type of contextual cue system, one that cannot differentiate between multiple skills as efficiently as episodic memory can. This theory also explains why ADHD is such a barrier in learning.

Now we can guess what type of memory is involved in skill learning: When a new skill is being formed by Gf, it is likely utilizing the info available in short term memory to do so. When a skill is being recalled, It goes to working memory for utilization.

In conclusion: Forgetfulness indicates inefficiency in declarative memory, while poor skills might indicate low Gf and/or poor attention span.

Questions remaining:

What causes inefficiency in declarative memory?
How to strengthen our procedural memory? Can practice help?
Why do people who find it easier to learn through practical and struggle to grasp abstract concepts?

But these questions deserve new topics.

Sources:

Green REA, Kopelman MD. Neural organization of memory andmemory impairments. In: Trimble MR and Cummings JL, eds. Contemporary behavioural neurology. Boston: ButterworthHeinenman, 1997; 139–152.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5b83/58754a92cf648f3c5ccea7f34df62bba1e74.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-neuropsychological-society/article/interdependence-of-episodic-and-semantic-memory-evidence-from-neuropsychology/1A97EFA24F2CDED16D12964AD5EE67F9
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(04)00937-6.pdf
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2639&context=etd
http://www.cns.atr.jp/~kawato/Ppdf/CaithJNS04.pdf


How long does physical attraction typically last in a permanent relationship? How long, on average (and with as much other statistical data, e.g. standard deviation, as possible) does physical attraction between male and female in a permanent relationship last?

I believe this is a well-founded question based on the assumption that elderly couples are almost never physically attracted to one another, so almost always there is a point of earliest physical attraction loss. If you think that assumption is false, please let me know.

I'm not sure I can give you the data purely for physical attractiveness, but what has been intensively researched is passionate love, which includes physical attraction. Passionate love is usually assumed to include sexual desire, and correlates quite well with rated attraction. As Hatfield writes:

  Generally, passionate love is associated with the terms “arousal,” “desire,” “lust,” “passion,” and “infatuation".

I hope that's what you're asking for.
Elaine Hatfield (of the "would you go to bed with me?" study fame) has developed the Passionate Love Scale; Tennov has researched Limerence. Other famous names in this regard are Liebowitz and (Helen) Fisher. The counterpart to passionate love is often called companionate love, attachment, or affection.

Qualitatively speaking, on average, passionate love goes down with relation length. As Hatfield says, time has a "corrosive effect". Past researchers conceptualize this in a multi-stage model of relationships, where relationships naturally transition from passionate love into compassionate attachment. A well-known correlate of this is the "7-year itch", corresponding to a globally consistent mode around 4 years after marriage for divorces. However, some people report passionate love after decades of being together.

In all attempts to quantify any of this, there are a number of critical cofounds. @what has already brought up that some objective component of attractiveness might naturally decline with age. I'm not so sure this is that dramatic though, because there are well-known compensatory mechanisms for attraction within relationships that might be more important than e.g. decline of outsider-rated attractiveness with age. After all, what correlates with how attractive you rate someone is not the same as how attractive your partner is to you.
Moreover, there is a reliable difference between studies on younger and on older couples; the correlation between relationship length and passionate love/attraction is very reliable in young couples, but much weaker in older couples, and while younger couples often break up seemingly because passion has waned (as passion and satisfaction are correlated), there are older couples who're passionately in love (here and here). As Hatfield speculates, this might be because couples were passion is stable have a much higher chance to last, but those where it wanes quicker, end quicker. So that's for cofounds. I did not find any clear solution to this problem, and I can't really think of a good way of dealing with the self-selection problem (where longer relationships will inherently qualitatively differ from younger ones because they must have certain qualities to have come that far).
However, the relationship within relationships seems to hold, with a negative correlation within both older and younger relationships.

Quantitatively speaking, a much-quoted figure is Tennov's "18 months to three years". Exceptions are assumed to be comparatively rare, but also known to exist.
I can't give you the standard deviation on this, but I can give you something better: a regression model. One is by Sprecher & Regan, page 172, one by Hatfield, page 404.
Of course, this will not give you the single point in time where passionate love suddenly ends; but this is not realistic either. In relationships, attraction usually doesn't suddenly stop, it wanes. Graphically speaking:

However, I also found a much more optimistic picture for physical attractiveness over time in a large (almost 2000 people) sample:

What is clear even here however is the "7th-year itch".


Are there professional cognitive science test subjects? I'm interested in how cognitive science experiments are designed and executed. Up until now, all of the papers I've seen dealing with cognition use availability of test subjects as one of the major factors of recruitment for experiments. For example, students are recruited for an experiment, and because the group is so diverse, they are tested on general skills that the entire group would possess, like reading or math.

For example, consider this experiment: "Happiness economics" in reverse: Does happiness affect productivity? There were 276 university students and faculty involved. The students are tested with a math task.

Math and reading comprehension are general skills, and I can think of few people who earn their living with those skills, aside from SAT tutors.

I'm interested if there have been other types of cognitive experiments tried, where the skills used to evaluate experiment are at a "professional" level. For example professional athletes, soldiers or pilots come to mind.

Experiments that use scoring percentage as a metric for basketball players
Experiments that use marksmanship grouping as a metric
Professional video game players

Are there any groups of people, whose professional skills are consistently tested as metric of cognitive performance?

Thank you for your input!

There are a few people who have been very extensively experimented on because they have unusual brain lesions (which is kind of like the opposite of a skill). The most famous is Henry Molaison (HM), who developed a rare case of episodic anterograde amnesia following surgery for severe epilepsy. He spent the entire latter part of his life in a care institute and was a continuous subject of various learning experiments and imaging studies. Another patient with very specific memory-related lesions is KC, who has been the subject of at least 20 case studies.

A couple of other studies that might be of interest are West et al. (2008), who recruited experienced video game players in order to find people with strong skills at rapid visual scanning, and research by Eleanor Maguire and colleagues that examined structural changes in the brains of new London taxi drivers as they acquired their fantastically detailed spatial map of the city's streets.

  West, G. L., Stevens, S. A., Pun, C., & Pratt, J. (2008). Visuospatial
  experience modulates attentional capture: Evidence from action video
  game players. Journal of Vision, 8(16).

  Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D.,
  Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., & Frith, C. D. (2000).
  Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi
  drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8),
  4398-4403.


Does the taste of sugar replenish willpower? In a post titled Willpower Depletion vs Willpower Distraction the claim is made that:

  Basically, for a while some researchers believed that willpower
  depletion "is" glucose depletion in the prefrontal cortex, but some
  more recent experiments have failed to replicate this, e.g. by finding
  that the mere taste of sugar is enough to "replenish" willpower faster
  than the time it takes blood to move from the mouth to the brain:

Is that claim representative of the knowledge we have from studies?

I'm not sure what you mean to ask here, but there is a recent (2016) meta-analysis by Vadillio, Gold and Osman just on the topic of glucose and willpower. Abstract:

  The idea behind ego depletion is that willpower draws on a limited mental resource, so that engaging in an act of self-control impairs self-control in subsequent tasks. To present ego depletion as more than a convenient metaphor, some researchers have proposed that glucose is the limited resource that becomes depleted with self-control. However, there have been theoretical challenges to the proposed glucose mechanism, and the experiments that have tested it have found mixed results. We used a new meta-analytic tool, p-curve analysis, to examine the reliability of the evidence from these experiments. We found that the effect sizes reported in this literature are possibly influenced by publication or reporting bias and that, even within studies yielding significant results, the evidential value of this research is weak. In light of these results, and pending further evidence, researchers and policymakers should refrain from drawing any conclusions about the role of glucose in self-control.

It's not too far in its conclusions from a 2014 meta-analysis on the mere existence of ego/willpower depletion.

As Vadillo et al. use p-curves, the interpretation of their result is somewhat subjective.

Here is their interpretation:

  The results of our analyses suggest that the relationship
  between glucose levels and self-control behaviors might
  be unreliable. Figure 1 shows that the key p values of the
  19 studies included in the present analyses follow a surprisingly
  flat distribution. This is exactly the pattern of
  results that one would expect to find if those results were
  false positives. These results remain unchanged regardless
  of whether glucose-rinsing studies are included or
  excluded from the sample.
  These results may not come as a complete surprise
  given the empirical challenges to the glucose hypothesis
  suggested by failed replications (Job et al., 2013; Kelly
  et al., 2015; Lange & Eggert, 2014; Lange et al., 2014) and
  theoretical critiques regarding its biological plausibility
  (Kurzban, 2010; Osman, 2014). Furthermore, a detailed
  analysis of the seminal article suggesting the glucose
  hypothesis showed that the number of significant findings
  reported in that article was too large, given the low
  power of each study (Schimmack, 2012). In other words,
  the results were too good to be true (Francis, 2012).
  Nevertheless, the findings from the present study are a
  surprise in the context of the wide acceptance of the
  glucose hypothesis in general scientific research and its
  popularity, as evidenced by the number of citations of
  Gailliot et al. (2007) in the literature and the continued
  influence of this hypothesis in recent reviews on ego
  depletion (e.g., Baumeister, 2014; Baumeister & Alghamdi,
  2015).

  [...]

  It is worth noting that, as with any other statistical test,
  p-curve analysis is not a flawless indicator of bias (Bishop
  & Thompson, 2016; Bruns & Ioannidis, 2016; Lakens,
  2015). Our results suggest that, on average, these studies
  have little or no evidential value, but they do not allow
  us to determine whether the significant results are due to
  publication bias, selective reporting of outcomes or analyses,
  p-hacking, or all of these. It is not impossible that
  some of these studies are exploring small but true effects
  and that their evidential value may be diluted by the
  biases that pervade the rest of the studies. Perhaps future
  research will show that glucose does play a role in egodepletion
  effects, but our conclusions are based on the
  analysis of the extant literature in this area. Thus, our
  contribution must be seen as an additional piece of information
  in the wider context of attempts to verify the reliability
  of the glucose model of ego depletion. Note that
  the kind of biases explored in the present study are prevalent
  in other (but not all) areas of psychological research
  (e.g., Bakker, van Dijk, & Wicherts, 2012) and that low
  reproducibility is not exclusively a problem of psychological
  research (Camerer et al., 2016; Errington et al.,
  2014).

The meta-analysis had a special category for glucose-rinsing studies:

  Glucose-rinsing studies examine the impact of simply
  rinsing one’s mouth with a glucose solution
  before exerting self-control (Hagger & Chatzisarantis,
  2013; Lange & Eggert, 2014; Molden et al., 2012;
  Sanders, Shirk, Burgin, & Martin, 2012). Results
  from these studies suggest that the signal of glucose
  from the mouth to the brain is sufficient to
  neutralize the ego-depletion effect. This mechanism
  is consistent with the results of the ingestion
  manipulations but suggests that the effect does not
  depend on a metabolic explanation.

Here's the full table of studies included, which included an indicator column for whether the study was rinsing-only:

But there's no separate p-curve just for the rinsing studies. You can probably make one yourself though...

Actually I just did that with the 8 studies in the "yes" column:

Note that they've changed the test somewhat since that meta-analysis was published.

The meta-analysis did note that whether the rinsing studies were added or removed made no difference on the p-curve testing of the rest. And from my graph you can kinda see why: ignoring the 0% bins, the rinse group has roughly the same shape as the whole group.


Does a loser prefer the winner to subsequently lose or win? Most major league sports have some form of tournament bracket where there are several rounds of elimination before a winner is determined.  In most of them, the winning team is undefeated over the course of the whole tournament.

This question considers the losers and their fans.  Specifically, do fans of a losing team prefer that the team which beat them go on to be the overall winners (the "We lost to the best" scenario) or that the winning team lose in the next round (the "Revenge" scenario)?

Have there been any studies of this?  Is there a difference between the attitude of the losing team's players and the losing team's fans?

First, it is worth addressing what kind of tournament this is. If this is something like the Super Bowl, where the teams are generally widely-known year after year, then the answer will surely vary depending on the context.

Most long-time sports fans have a subjective preference for the other teams, ranging from 'second-favorite' to 'most hated', and these preferences are built up over time and are determined by the individual as well as the team. After having lost the Super Bowl XLV, a Seahawks fan may hold resentment towards the Steelers for years to come, and thus may root against them on all accounts.

On a more individual basis, fans may view another team favorably for a variety of personal reasons (e.g. a parent or close friend rooting for that team), and thus choose to root for them even if it came down to them beating their team. One writer even analyzed this idea in a FiveThirtyEight blog post.

However, if we were to remove these factors entirely -- say, we have a tournament where there is no prior opinion towards the teams that had advanced -- then the answer may shed light on both individual differences and group dynamics.

Studies have shown that the more a fan identifies with their team, the more loyalty they show to their team in the face of a loss:

  When presented with any sort of negative information regarding the group,
  highly identified group members react differently than those with lower levels of
  identification (Cohen & Garcia, 2005; Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje, 2002). Highly
  identified members typically reaffirm their group membership, while those with
  lower levels of identification tend to distance themselves (Cohen & Garcia, 2005).
  Such behaviors are apparent in sport fans. Wann and Branscombe (1990) found
  that highly identified fans are less likely to distance themselves from the team
  when the team lost than those who were less identified. Further, highly identified
  fans exhibit biased attribution processing favoring their team (Wann & Dolan,
  1994). That is, facing a win, highly identified fans ascribe the victory to internal
  factors such as the skill of the team, or the coaching, and sometimes even fan support.
  However, upon a loss, rather than conceding another team’s superiority, they
  blame the loss on more external factors such as fate or poor refereeing. Thus,
  highly identified sports fans seem to undergo some sort of biased attributional
  processes when dealing with a loss.

And another study showed that the stronger the allegiance to the team, the more likely the fan was to perceive the win as a personal victory, thereby influencing their own self-efficacy. By contrast, the likelihood increased that a loss would be perceived as a personal offense.

  Ss watched a live basketball game; then, in the context of a 2nd, unrelated experiment, Ss estimated their own performance at several tasks. Results indicated that fans' mood and self-esteem were affected by game outcome. More important, fans' estimates of both the team's and their own future performance were significantly better in the win than in the loss condition.

Whereas on the other hand, fans who identify less with their team tend to distance themselves from the team in the face of a loss.

So it could be the case that personal allegiance to a team determines how a fan responds to a loss. If the fan identifies strongly with the losing team, they may be less likely to view the winning team (opponent) positively, and thus they may demonstrate a greater tendency to root against that team in the next round. On the other hand, less team allegiance may implicate a desire to identify with the winning team, in which case the "we lost to the best" mindset may occur.


Kinetic synesthesia evoked by abstract thoughts? Can the experience of movement when mentally visualizing the network/structure of the code of a complex application, and the information that flows through the network as a programmer be a kind of synesthesia experience, or is there something else at play? Movement akin to being drawn in different directions or tilting forward, as a result of experiencing the structure.

Short answer
No.

Background
The definition of synesthesia is generally as follows:

  ... a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality (e.g. vision). Likewise, perception of a form (e.g., a letter) may induce an unusual perception in the same modality (e.g. a color).

The most common form of synesthesia is thought to be colored hearing: sounds, music or voices seen as colors. Most synesthetes report that they see such sounds internally, in "the mind's eye." Only a minority see visions as if projected outside the body, usually within arm's reach (source: APA).

Most of the discussions I've had with peers in that field reported to work with people that see letters and numbers to have a particular color. Indeed WebMD reports that

  One of the most common responses [of synesthetes] is to see letters, numbers, or sounds as colors.

Hence, I think that synesthesia often (but see the APA site) manifests itself through relatively 'simple' visuals brought about by relatively 'simple' stimuli. The number '4' appears to be green etc. In contrast, the highly cognitive complex associations you are envisioning seem unlikely to occur. Further, synesthesia is mostly coupled to the senses of vision and hearing, and not to motor functions. So, to answer your question, no I don't think so.


Consistency Theory - Why do we go back on promises I'm fairly new to the field of social psychology so forgive me if this sounds like a naive question.

I just read about the consistency principle - "Once we make a choice or take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."

I have the question - exactly what kind of decision/commitment are we talking about? As in, how do we reliably identify a situation in which a person has made a decision/commitment such that he will now behave as per the consistency principle?

If the consistency principle is really so pervasive, then why do people often back out of promises? There are tons of situations when people don't honor their "commitment" towards other people (for example not showing up for some social event, or not showing up for a date, etc.)

There's no reason that consistency and promise-breaking can't both be pervasive.  In the first place, if 20% of the population always broke promises and another 20% always obeyed the consistency principle then we would still call it pervasive and we still have 60% of the population.

But an additional complication is that no person always breaks promises or always obeys consistency and most people do both at some point. We can imagine a scenario in which a politician could simultaneously break a promise (to a rival political force) and obey consistency principle (keeping the promise would have betrayed his base).  So the two aren't really contradictory since consistency principle doesn't require one to be consistent about everything always.


How to test for malingering in criminals trying to deny capacity for criminal responsibility? Psychiatrists and psychologists are often tasked with assessing a criminal defendant's competency to stand trial or his capacity for criminal responsibility. What objective tests are useful for assessing whether the person is malingering or faking symptoms to appear not competent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity?

I am a prosecutor in the US. We are getting more cases where the defendant's competency to stand trial is called into question by defense counsel. Many of the forensic examiners are concluding that defendants are not competent without seeming to use objective measures to rule out malingering.

More comprehensive ones than the abovementioned memory test include the Miller Forensic Assessement of Symptoms and the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms. These assess a wide variety of psychiatric symptoms and are supposedly very hard to fake.


What makes people like other people? Humans have this strange behavior:
Some people like other people which are disliked by a third party of people.
But there are also people that are generally disliked by most ofthe others.

Let me make an example:

Person A, B and C like Person D
Person B, C and D like Person F, but A hates F
Person A, C and D like Person G, but B hates G
Person F and G get along well with C
...

How can you explane this strange behavior?

Some people can't get along with each other, but both have common friends, that get along with both of them. So it can't be like that they are so different from a cultural standpoint, because they have common friends that get along with both.

Do you get the point?

However there are people that are liked by most of the People and there are also people, that are commonly disliked by the majority of people.

What are they doing right/wrong?

If you say, "people like those who are similar to them", how can it be, that A and D don't get along, if both are similar to B, which can get along with both?

What are A and D doing wrong, so that they can't get along. Due to the fact, that B get's along with both, which means, that both aren't bad persons and people you can get along with.

Can you generally say what makes the difference in these groups of people?
Where do these preferences come from and why do some not get along?
The question is not, what makes someone likable (that is asked here What makes you like someone?), it's more on how to determine wheter two people like eachother or not, on what is this based and can you influence it.

Is maby, the way people get introduced, a factor? What are the big factors

Edit:

As mentioned below, the question might be rephrased to:
"How can you describe this behaviour"?
(I don't wan't to boil it down to one factor (and it's probably impossible to list all of them), but I would like to get a general Idea, on how this works.

is the question: What makes people like other people? or: how can you explain the phenomenon described above?

If it's the former, it has an answer already and this should be marked a duplicate.

I will try to answer the latter, if it can be considered on topic here.

Just because you have a mutual friend, doesn't mean you are going to be friends with someone. Humans are not this simple. The factors involved in deciding whether you like someone is very complicated. As you mentioned, the way you get introduced can definitely affect whether someone likes another person.

Humans have evolved as social creatures and our social interactions have evolved deeply like our intelligence. When you try to logically predict a phenomenon based on ONE factor when there exists a LOT more, you will not get a good prediction. It is not a strange phenomenon, it is quite natural if you consider the personalities that each person and the desires that they have in a friend. A and B might have a completely different type of friendship than B and D, by the way. To me, this question is misguided.


Do children inherit intelligence from their mothers and not their fathers? This article, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/children-intelligence-iq-mother-inherit-inheritance-genetics-genes-a7345596.html?cmpid=facebook-post, suggests that children inherit intelligence from mothers, and that fathers have basically no role in that (except emotional and intuitional "intelligence" as they call it).

Since often journalists can misinterpret scientific studies, I am interested, if there are researchers in this field on this site, who can say to what extent is the statement in this article:

"Children inherit intelligence only from their mothers and not their fathers" -  true?

The psychology-spot article mostly links to researches done on mice. Only three links are about human genetics. One is philosophical in nature, other two deal with mental retardation. This study says that:

  "X chromosome contains a significantly higher number of genes that, when mutated, cause mental impairment".

We know that boys get their X chromosome from their mothers. Therefore, they inherit mental retardation from their mothers. But look at the terminology used in the research paper. They have not found some IQ value stored somewhere in the X chromosome. Therefore, we cannot say that mutations in the X chromosome is responsible for high intelligence as well (the study proposes such a link, but has no data to support it). There is a mystery here: if mothers carry key to mental retardation in sons, it must be a hidden trait in women because they do not exhibit that deviation as much as men.

This study takes mother's IQ into account, but it does not make any attempt to establish a direct link between the IQ of mother and son.

Conclusion: We can assume that boys inherit mental retardation from mothers (because boys get mother's X chromosome). We can not assume anything else yet, not from this study.

The following is pure speculation: Men have higher deviation in their intelligence Bell curve on both sides. If one side of it is linked to their mothers, the other side might as well be, but it probably has nothing to do with the intelligence of the mother. In my personal opinion, that article is just wishful feminist thinking. If such link was present, it would have been highlighted long ago.