Psychological effects of social nudity I have been conducting extensive research over the last few years on the history of nudity in social situations, and I am looking to expand my research base now I have come across a few other interesting facts.  I have found a lot of facts stating that although the wearing of clothes is the social norm in most cultures; some cultures, groups and individuals are more relaxed about nudity (for example Nudists/naturists - WARNING! - Link is NSFW), however, attitudes often depend on context.  It is generally agreed by naturist organisations (for example, British Naturism and International Naturist Federation) that eroticism and blatant sexuality have no place in naturism and are, in fact, directly opposed to its ideals. Reasons that have at times been given include rapport with other humans including equality and respect.

  Being nude in groups makes all feel more accepted – physically, intellectually and emotionally (Veltheim, 2010)

On the other hand, some people feel uncomfortable in the presence of any nudity, and the presence of a nude person in a public place can give rise to controversy, irrespective of the attitude of the person who is nude.  You only have to look at the history of Steven Gough as an example.

Besides meeting social disapproval, in some countries and in some settings within more liberal countries, public nudity may constitute a crime of indecent exposure.  Many people have strong views on nudity, which to them can involve issues and standards of modesty, decency and morality.  Some people have a psychological aversion to nudity, called gymnophobia.

On the flip side, there is a form of psychotherapy I have not long come across called Nude Psychotherapy which is

  the use of non-sexual social nudity as an intentional means to improve the participant's psychological health.

  The field began in the 1930s with psychological studies of the effects of social nudity on the lives of naturists. It developed in the 1960s along with the encounter group movement as a way to challenge preconceptions and promote intimacy and trust, but suffered a decline in the 1980s. It is still used by some organizations that offer participatory workshops on intimacy, sex and love...

  ...Today The Human Awareness Institute (Global Site) (UK Site), an organization that offers participatory workshops on intimacy, sex and love continues to conduct group sessions in which the participants have the option to be naked. (Shewey, 1994)

There are a lot of historical studies on the history of clothing, social nudity, and nudity in art, ancient Greece and ancient Rome; plus there are also anthropological studies on the irony of losing fur when evolving from primates (Horizon: What's The Problem With Nudity, 2008). I am not after biblical references (I have lots of those through my research) and I am not after personal opinions without scientific backing.  What I am wondering is are there any referenced books, articles or scientific studies anyone is aware of, on the psychological effects of nudity - particularly social nudity?

References

Horizon: What's The Problem With Nudity, (2008) [Film] Directed by Paul King. UK: BBC. Available on YouTube

John Veltheim, (2010). Naturism: Naked Beneath Your Clothing

Shewey, Don (1994). Healed With a Kiss

Quoting from one paper, which doesn't say all that much:

  The experience of nakedness under the gaze of others is highly diverse, and
  important background differences will affect the relative comfort with which one
  might strip in front of others.

Cover, R. (2003). The naked subject: Nudity, context and sexualization in contemporary culture. Body & Society, 9(3), 53-72. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X030093004

And from one of the few studies of nudists in the US, back when this was more common over there (that is 1964):

  Among changes reported by nudists were “less concern
  with appearance,” “reduced anxiety,” “more benevolence,” and “less inhibition.”

Casler, L. (2010). Some Sociopsychological Observations in a Nudist Camp: A Preliminary Study, The Journal of Social Psychology, 64:2, 307-323

Fairly similar findings from a nude group therapy "marathon" (24hrs session):

  Nudity apparently facilitates group interaction in a marathon. 17 of 20 participants felt that the factor of nudity increased their ability to open up to each other emotionally and to achieve a greater degree of authenticity and transparency. The group integrated and seemed to become therapeutically functional more rapidly than clothed marathon groups

Bindrim, P. (1968). A report on a nude marathon: The effect of physical nudity upon the practice of interaction in the marathon group. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 5(3), 180-188

And a pretty interesting discussion contrasting the German and UK cultural differences in how sexuality relates to social nudity is found in
Smith, G., & King, M. (2009). Naturism and sexuality: Broadening our approach to sexual wellbeing. Health & place, 15(2), 439-446.


Working Memory Timing Information Storage In most working-memory tasks, a person is given a list and is asked to recall it in various manners. For example, they could recall it forwards, backwards, freely or try to recall a specific item given it's position.

However, has there been any tests where temporal information is emphasized? For example, consider the scenario where there is 1 second between the presentation of the first and second item in the list, but 2 seconds between the second and third items in the list. I could then ask the person which item was temporally closer to the second item in the list.

Has there been any Working Memory research of this temporal nature?

In "Similarity Breeds Proximity: Pattern Similarity within and across Contexts Is Related to Later Mnemonic Judgments of Temporal Proximity" by Youssef Ezzyat and Lila Davachi, timing between stimuli was kept constant, but the context of the stimuli was manipulated.

They found that changing contexts increased the perceived temporal distance between stimuli.

Alternatively, in "Learning and Generalization of Auditory Temporal–Interval Discrimination in Humans" by Wright et al., differentiating temporal distance between tones were learned. Additionally, in "Anticipation of future events improves the ability to estimate elapsed time" by Yoshiaki Tsunoda and Shinji Kakei, the probability distribution of distance between a warning signal and a trigger for a "GO"-like task was learned.

These experiments operate on very different time scales (milliseconds vs seconds) with very differently semantically-loaded stimuli (images vs tones). Although neither of them describe in the exact experiment in the original question, together they show the various ways perception and memory is affected temporal cues.


Can time be slowed in a lucid dream? Lucid dreams allow a person to be conscious while dreaming. It has been reported that it's possible to control various aspects of the dream environment that are not possible during wakefulness, e.g. ability to fly.

Research has shown that the rate of time flow in a dream is same/similar to that of wakefulness. For example, an event that lasts about 5 minutes in a dream, corresponds to about 5 minutes of sleeping. Extending the idea that physically impossible things can be performed during lucid dreams, the question arises whether altering the flow of time, specifically slowing of it, is possible.

Philosopher Alan Watts has stated that it might be possible to alter the flow of time in a dream:

  [...] let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. [...] And after several nights of 75 years [...] each [...]

If such alteration would be possible in a lucid dream, it would suggest the possibility of kind of "mental life extension", where, for example, the person physically lives ~80 years, but mentally, through lucid dreams, experiences the life of hundreds or thousands of years.

Question: Is there anecdotal, or otherwise, evidence or documented past attempts for slowing of perceived passage of time via lucid dreaming?

I'd say yes, in german literature there are some reportings of athelets "training" in slow motion while they are lucid dreaming. I'll try to recap those reportings in english.
Paul Tholey & Kaleb Utecht cite Sadko Günter Solinski, an equestrian, in "Schöpferisch Träumen" (p.257-258):

Als Reiter kann ich somit im Klartraum (A) meine Figuren
zentimetergenau in den Sand (bei der Dressur) bzw. in den Parcours,
z.B. eines Cross-Country hufbreitgenau in die Landschaft zeichnen (bei
der Military). Gelingt mir dies im Zeitlupentempo und verbinde ich (B)
dabei sämtliche (dem Pferd angepassten) ”Hilfen“ im jeweils einzig
richtigen Augenblick einer Bewegungsphase und ”reite ich“ (C) die
Aufgabe so mehrmals (drei- bis neunmal) während eines Klartraums
genau und vollständig durch, so verfügt mein Körper
erfahrungsgemäß am folgenden Tag über genügend ”Körperwissen“, um
den Parcours autonom, d.h. ohne mein bewußtes oder willentliches Zutun
hinter sich zu bringen.

Summary: Solinski claims to able to prepare dressage and eventing very accuratly while lucid dreaming ("im Klartraum"). Sometimes he is able to do this in slow motion ("im Zeitlupentempo").
The citation can also be found in Daniel Erlacher's PhD thesis (p.62).

Daniel Erlacher has another example in his german PhD thesis on motor learning in lucid dreams. It's about himself training high diving in a lucid dream (above PDF, p.125):

Ein typischer Klartraum in dieser Periode sah etwa wie folgt aus: [...]
Ich versuche, möglichst kunstvoll Salti und Schrauben, oder
Auerbachsalti zu machen. Da das ganze langsam abläuft – wie in
Zeitlupe – habe ich die gute Gelegenheit auf alle Bewegungsabläufe
genau zu achten.

Summary: Erlacher describes one of serveral characteristic lucid treams, where he is trying to do backflips and so on. As everything happens really slowly ("Da das ganze langsam abläuft") - like in slow motion ("wie in Zeitlupe") - he is able to focus on every single movement.


How do people with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) experience dreams? For people without DID, dream experiences include having other characters in one's dreams behave in ways one can't predict or control, sometimes there can be a "switch" into lucid dreaming where more control can be exhibited.

Since people with DID already have alters in waking life (ie, identities the host can't directly control and switch amongst), how does this manifest in dream states?  That is, are in-dream characters the same as alters, or different ones?

Bonus questions:

How often do perspective-switches happen for people with DID?
How does communication between alters take place in the dream world?

Unfortunately, I was not able to find empirical literature on this question, as it does not appear to have been studied much - for example:

  References to dreams in the multiple personality literature are rare
  and tend to be brief.

So we are limited to clinical reports.  In 1994, Deirdre Barrett collected 3rd-hand accounts of dreams from 23 DID (MPD) patients.  The study method that she used is not very good quality however, so any conclusions would be premature, but it does provide some possible hypotheses as to the nature of these patients' dreams, as summarized in this table:

In particular, alters appear as characters in dreams (4) of more than half of the patients in this survey.  Item (5) lists a few patients reporting dreams experienced from multiple perspectives (ie, multiple alters) simultaneously:

  ... for these 26% of patients with dreams in category 5, two or more
  personalities reported dreaming at the same time and experiencing each
  other as characters.

Another interesting item (9) lists patients who reported experiencing multiple different dreams by different alters.  Note that some of the dream reports (2) were not actually dreams, but were perceived as such by the alter recounting them.

More case reports are reviewed in another paper, and Barrett has written extensively on this subject.  She summarizes:

  These included memories of childhood traumas and content of recent
  fugue episodes.  A few of the dreams were undisguised recreations of
  actual episodes, especially for recent repressed events.

and:

  No characteristic of the dreams of dissociative disordered patients in
  this survey is so distinctive as to never be found in those of other
  dreamers.

Empirical data (based on mentation) would be more reliable for drawing conclusions.  Barrett and others have hypothesized that rather than alters appearing in dreams, characters in dreams may be used as inspiration (prototypes) for dissociated identities.


Psychopaths' Response to Expected Losses? It has been observed that psychopaths will accept positive expected values past some sort of notion of risk aversion by non-psychopaths.

Are there any observations of psychopaths' responses to negative expected values?  The quoted study's only valid if it shows that psychopaths respond properly to expected losses.

  Shiv, B., Loewenstein, G., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R.
  (2005). Investment behavior and the negative side of emotion.
  Psychological Science, 16(6), 435-439.

I do not normally respond negatively about a cited study. This study you have cited is rather glib and very flawed. It could be a better evaluation of a person's mathematical ability as opposed to:

  Fear seemed to play a large role in risk-avoidance behavior of the
  normal participants.

The other flaw in this study, is to even attempt to correlate giving subjects the money (as it is no personal loss) and using  a rather trivial amount, $20.

Any person with a basic understanding of mathematics, would know that the odds were in favor to betting each time. This cannot be compared to real life risk aversion, where there are unknown risks associated with return, and the financial investment is far greater (as it is coming from the individual's pocket).

My views are supported by the following study In fact the results could be accounted by this study
 Mathematical-Verbal Ability Differentials and Somatic Expressions of Situational Anxiety.

Are there any observations of psychopaths' responses to negative expected values?

The following study would demonstrate that on an emotional level, a person with clinical psychopathy would have no response to negative expected values, but the cognitive  (purely intellectual) awareness of negative expected values would be intact. This could play out in many ways given the circumstances, as life itself is never so clear cut.

Suffice to say, if it involves the fear of harming another of self harm, this would not be consideration for average psychopath.

  CONTEXT: Psychopaths belong to a larger group of persons with
  antisocial personality disorder and are characterized by an inability
  to have emotional involvement and by the repeated violation of the
  rights of others. It was hypothesized that this behavior might be the
  consequence of deficient fear conditioning.

  OBJECTIVE: To study the cerebral, peripheral, and subjective
  correlates of fear conditioning in criminal psychopaths and healthy
  control subjects.

  RESULTS: The healthy controls showed enhanced differential activation
  in the limbic-prefrontal circuit (amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex,
  insula, and anterior cingulate) during the acquisition of fear and
  successful verbal and autonomic conditioning. The psychopaths
  displayed no significant activity in this circuit and failed to show
  conditioned skin conductance and emotional valence ratings, although
  contingency and arousal ratings were normal.

  CONCLUSION: This dissociation of emotional and cognitive processing
  may be the neural basis of the lack of anticipation of aversive events
  in criminal psychopaths.

Deficient fear conditioning in psychopathy: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

I do not see how you have made the following deduction:
The quoted study's only valid if it shows that psychopaths respond properly to expected losses.

Mathematical-Verbal Ability Differentials and Somatic Expressions of Situational Anxiety
Robert L. Milliken and Bernard Spilka
The Journal of Experimental Education
Vol. 31, No. 1 (Sep., 1962), pp. 3-26
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20156598

Deficient fear conditioning in psychopathy: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.
Birbaumer N, Veit R, Lotze M, Erb M, Hermann C, Grodd W, Flor H.
Source
Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology and Section of Experimental Resonance Imaging of the CNS,
 Department of Neuroradiology,
 University of Tübingen,
Tübingen, Germany.


Is 'intuition' related to 'extrasensory perception'? I come from a computer science background and am a big time AI enthusiast. I am trying to think about how can we map 'intuition' to a process in artificial intelligence. As I understand, 'intuition' means generating (correct) knowledge (for ourselves) about something without knowing 'how' we did it. This leads to the following questions:

Is 'intuition' related to 'extrasensory perception' (ESP)? As far as I know, ESP is not accepted by the scientific community but I could not conclude the same about 'intuition'.
If they are related, how does scientific community explain 'intuition'?

I seek pointers to relevant literature which would help me understand intuition from the perspective of cognitive sciences. My thought process has inclined me towards believing that there is nothing like 'intuition' and everything is deterministic which is why an AI can never be intuitive.

No, intuition is not related to ESP in modern cognitive science.
A modern view on intuitive thinking
While ESP certainly retains its pseudoscience status (e.g., Rouder and Morey, 2011), intuition and intuitive thinking has been used in the psychological literature in evolving ways over the years. Outside the heydays of Skinnerian radical behaviorism, the notion of intuition has been consistently present in the cognitive sciences.
An influential modern model of intuitive thinking is called dual process theory (e.g., Evans and Stanovich, 2013). The dual process theory model, which entered the public consciousness with Daniel Kahneman's popular Thinking, Fast and Slow, proposes that reasoning happens by two discrete "paths": the deliberate and reasoned System 2, and the fast and intuitive System 1.
This account explains intuition and intuitive thinking in terms of different heuristics, which should be familiar. Heuristics can have multiple subtly different meanings depending on field and context, but broadly speaking, a heuristic is a decision process which is usually right. You can find a number of references about heuristics in this question.
While ESP is non-deterministic almost by definition, dual process theory does not take a position on determinism. We are simply not consciously aware of the underlying heuristic machinery's workings. (As Artem notes in his comment.)
References

Evans, J. St. B. T. & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8, 223-241, 263-271.
Rouder, J. N., & Morey, R. D. (2011). A Bayes factor meta-analysis of Bem’s ESP claim. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(4), 682-689.


Does a non-knowledge based, or knowledge corrected IQ test exist, and what are its results per race? If you google

  IQ gap race

and open the google images, you will see many diagrams showing the differences.

I went on some IQ test pages, and I noticed that the test includes mathematical questions, that have nothing or less to do, with IQ.

That is:
if your school you went to is bad, you will have less knowledge after leaving it. For example solving a mathematical question formulated in an IQ test. You cannot solve, but others will be able to solve, because they dealt with it in school, and you didn't. But the real IQ is the same.

So what I am asking is:

does a non-knowledge based, or knowledge corrected IQ test exist, and what are its results per race?

No, such a completely knowledge-free test has not been devised. Fluid intelligence (a component of IQ tests) is probably the closest thing to the claim of being "knowledge-free", but it isn't quite so. As typically measured, e.g. using Raven's progressive matrices one still needs to have some clue what the test is talking about in terms patterns etc. And prior exposure to similar test makes a difference (see Hayes et al. 2015) in test results, i.e. there's a learning effect.

In the US, where most such race-intelligence research is conducted, there's still a racial group difference on fluid intelligence tests (e.g. Raven's) in the usual test settings, although some evidence suggests it depends how the test is interpreted by the takers may matter, e.g. Brown & Day (2006):

  This study addresses recent criticisms aimed at the interpretation of stereotype threat research and methodological weaknesses of previous studies that have examined race differences on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM). African American and White undergraduates completed the APM under three conditions. In two threat conditions, participants received either standard APM instructions (standard threat) or were told that the APM was an IQ test (high threat). In a low threat condition, participants were told that the APM was a set of puzzles and that the researchers wanted their opinions of them. Results supported the stereotype threat interpretation of race differences in cognitive ability test scores. Although African American participants underperformed Whites under both standard and high threat instructions, they performed just as well as Whites did under low threat instructions.

A slightly more recent meta-analysis (Nguyen & Ryan 2008) still found an effect though

  For minorities, moderately explicit stereotype threat-activating cues produced the largest effect, followed by blatant and subtle cues: ds = |.64|, |.41|, and |.22|, respectively; explicit removal strategies enhanced stereotype threat effects compared with subtle strategies: ds = |.80| and |.34|, respectively.

Alas most such meta-analytic research does not isolate just one type of IQ testing.

IQ testing under stereotype threats is still a pretty controversial area of research in itself, see Ziegler (2017) and reply by Nguyen & Ryan.


Do dreams repeat/continue? Or is it just a perception that a dream repeated? During lucid dreaming, we sometimes feel that it is a repetition of (or in someway related to) a previous dream, but when we wake up, we can't recollect the first instance of such a dream. Why is this so?

Disclaimer: My answer is about recurrent dreams. I don't have any immediate sources to consult on the continuation part (and there are less references to it in literature), but I'd be very surprised if it is any different.

Theories

Firstly, there are many of theories that support the notion of recurring dreams. I know not of a single one that (explicitly or even reasonably implicitly) rejects such thing.

On cognitive perception

Secondly, you talk about perception, which in cognitive terms equates conscious access (rather than sensing in everyday language). So if you can (consciously) perceive it, it must be a genuine mental process that made it available (with the sole exception below).

Subjective reports = objective measurements

Thirdly, recurring dreams have been reported and studied for decades (in your case I'd probably start with [1]). Most of dream science is natively based on subjective reports. But recently, scientists have shown that monitored brain activity is in agreement with, and can even predict, those subjective reports [2].

So we really have all reasons to believe that what we perceive as a dream is what we actually dream.

Possible exception?

The one exception for this, and it is my own informed suspicion, is that we may still have a Déjà vu (déjâ rêvé, in the question context) while dreaming - so it may be a false sensation after all. It is the same informed suspicion that tells me that if this happens at all, it should be extremely rare.

Sleep's low retention

As for the latter part of your question:

  we can't recollect the first instance of such a dream. Why is this so?

If one is to make gross simplification, during sleep:

Your long-term memory is 'not available' to remember stuff.
Your short-term memory is even more volatile than it is while you're awake (there isn't central-executive process to exercise retention).

For the same reason, we often remember a dream just after waking up, but unless salient we fail to recall it shortly after.

[1] Zadra, Antonio, and D. C. Donderi. Nightmares and bad dreams: their prevalence and relationship to well-being. Journal of abnormal psychology 109.2 (2000): 273.

[2] Horikawa, Tomoyasu, et al. Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science 340.6132 (2013): 639-642.


Minimizing Halo Error I'm working with a dataset wherein participants rate five different attributes of six device variants; the attribute ratings different variants are very tightly correlated, suggesting  that this dataset has a problem with halo error--participants form an overall impression of the quality of the device, and then instead of reassessing the device for each attribute, they answer each attribute with their overall evaluation of the device.

What strategies are used to combat this effect, either before execution in the design of the study or after execution in the analysis? Citations for evidence for any strategies particularly desired.

Murphy & Cleveland (1995) mention, that a good way to reduce rater errors in general is to inform raters of the existence and nature of these errors and then to simply urge to avoid them. While this reduces rater errors, it also decreases the accuracy of ratings, though. These findings come from the literature on performance assessment, where halo is usually thought of as the opposite of accuracy. The unexpected association has been termed the halo-accuracy-paradox.

Some authors have proposed that the paradoxical effect is due to different operational definitions of halo (Fisicaro, 1988). Apparently there is some evidence that the paradoxcal effect vanishes when this problem is taken care of.

An interesting explanation comes from Latham (Woehr & Huffut, 1994). For him it's all in the way that raters are informed about halo. If raters are told that halo is a global tendency across different ratings and that it is a bad thing, then raters are going to avoid exactly that. But that does not make the ratings more accurate. So when training raters one has to be careful not to create this kind if effect.

In contrast, a meta-analysis by Woehr & Huffcut (1994) that investigates the effectiveness of different kinds of rater trainings does not find the paradoxical effect. Instead, rater trainings moderately decreases halo and increases accuracy. The authors also found support for Latham's hypothesis. The mean effect size when rater training was in accordance with his view was bigger compared to the other cases.

Still, Murphy and Cleveland (1995) are quite radical in their proposal. To them, there are serious problems with all operational definitions of halo (and rater errors in general). Therefore measurements of rater errors should be abandoned altogether. Hence, in their view it doesn't make sense to speak of a paradox.

References:

Fisicaro,  S. A. (1988). A reexamination of the relation between halo error and accuracy. Journal of Applied Psychology. 73(2), 239.
Murphy, K. R. & Cleveland, J.N. (1995). Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational, and goal-based perspectives. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Woehr, D. J., & Huffcutt, A. I. (1994). Rater training for performance appraisal: A quantitative review. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 67(3), 189-205.


What positive writing exercises improve happiness? Writing seems like a perfect medium for expressing ones problems but can it also be used to improve happiness somehow? Maybe through some sort of creative writing exercises that focus on positive thinking?

Are there any positive writing exercise that can improve happiness, if even temporarily?

Writing therapy

There is quite a lot of research on writing therapy and expressive writing more generally. As you note, much of this research relates to writing about negative emotional experiences. There is some support for the positive mental health benefits in writing about traumatic events (e.g., see the meta-analysis by Smyth, 1998).
While the interventions are focused on writing about negative events, the intervention

Positive psychology and writing

I have read about a few specific positive psychology writing interventions, such as those mentioned here:

  Keep a gratitude diary: Take the time each day to write down three things that went  well and why. This causes psychological well-being
  levels to increase in a lasting way.
  Thank a mentor: Write a letter of thanks to someone to whom you owe a debt of  gratitude such as a teacher or grandparent. Then visit the
  person and read the letter to  them. People who do this are measurably
  happier for more than a month.
  Learn to forgive: Let go of anger and resentment by writing a letter of forgiveness to a person who has wronged you. Inability to forgive is associated with persistent rumination.

Toepfer and Walker (2009) discuss writing letters of gratitude. They cite several studies showing positive effect, stating that

  Expressive writing studies are plentiful and the once anemic domain of
  letter writing as  a vehicle for improving health has seen a recent
  surge of interest (King, 2001; Sheldon &  Lyubomirsky, 2006a; Seligman
  et al., 2005; Lyubomirsky, Dickerhoof, Boehm, & Sheldon,  2009). For
  example, VandeCreek, Janus, Pennebaker and Binau (2002) asked
  participants to  pray and write letters to God and found that both
  prayer and the letters increased insight  and positive emotion, more
  so than simple written descriptions, where a single letter to God  had
  the most impact. The authors explained that the act of praying or
  explaining to another  (in this case in a letter to God) was more
  conducive to personal insight and greater positive  emotional
  formulations about life events. In other words, writing a letter to
  God was found  to improve participant’s positive feelings about life
  events.

  Watkins, Woodward, Stone and Kolts (2003) conducted a study
  that examined mood  changes as the result of various gratitude
  inductions, one of which was a letter writing  condition. Their
  findings revealed that writing a gratitude based letter produced a
  positive  affect increase compared to the other gratitude inductions
  (Watkins et al., 2003).

Burton and King found positive effects from getting participants to write about positive experiences. They also summarise some of the literature noting that

  research has begun to explore a variety of writing topics that
  might be associated with health beneﬁts that do not focus exclusively
  on negative experience. King and Miner (2000) found that writing only
  about the positive aspects of a traumatic experience was associated
  with the same health beneﬁts as writing about trauma. King (2001)
  found that individuals who wrote about their best possible future
  selves showed physical health beneﬁts as well as enhanced
  psychological well-being after writing.

Burton and King's instructions were:

  Think of the most wonderful experience or experiences in your life,
  happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture, perhaps from
  being in love, or from listening to music, or suddenly ‘‘being hit’’
  by a book or painting or from some great creative moment. Choose one
  such experience or moment. Try to imagine yourself at that moment,
  including all the feelings and emotions associated with the
  experience. Now write about the experience in as much detail as
  possible trying to include the feelings, thoughts, and emotions that
  were present at the time. Please try your best to re-experience the
  emotions involved.

As for a mechanism of operation, Wing et al present the following ideas:

  Writing about nontraumatic events likely shares some effects with
  writing about traumatic events. Writing about any meaningful aspect of
  life may promote cognitive processing, encouraging the examination,
  understanding, and assimilation of emotions that might otherwise be
  left unscrutinized (Pennebaker, 2002; Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis,
  1997; Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). Writing about a meaningful topic may
  result in enhanced emotional regulation, related to perceptions of
  self-efficacy and control over emotional experiences (Greenberg,
  Wortman & Stone, 1996; King, 2001, 2002; Lepore et al., 2002). Writing
  may afford the writer the opportunity to gain a sense of mastery over
  his or her emotions and to clearly identify priorities, preferred
  outcomes, and goals (King, 2001).

References

Burton, C. M., & King, L. A. (2004). The health benefits of writing about intensely positive experiences. Journal of research in personality, 38(2), 150-163. PDF
King, L. A. (2001). The health beneﬁts of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798–807.
King, L. A., & Miner, K. N. (2000). Writing about the perceived beneﬁts of traumatic events: Implications
for physical health. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(2), 220–230.
Wright, J. (2002). Online counselling: Learning from writing therapy. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 30(3), 285-298. PDF
SMYTH, J.M.(1998).Written emotional expression: effect size, outcome types, and moderating variables.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66(1), 174±184. PDF
Toepfer, S., & Walker, K. (2009). Letters of gratitude: Improving well-being through expressive writing. Journal of Writing Research, 1(3), 181-198. PDF
Wing, J. F., Schutte, N. S., & Byrne, B. (2006). The effect of positive writing on emotional intelligence and life satisfaction. Journal of clinical psychology, 62(10), 1291-1302.


During body-scan ('sweeping') meditation, what does brain-imaging (e.g. fMRI) look like? I do not know how extensive body scans have been studied with brain-imaging techniques, e.g. fMRI.

Body scan is a meditation technique developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It was derived from a meditation practice ('sweeping') of the Burmese U Ba Khin tradition.

  "It involves systematically sweeping through the body with the mind,
  bringing an affectionate, openhearted, interested attention to its
  various regions, customarily starting from the toes of the left foot
  and then moving through the entirety of the foot [...] From there, the
  focus moves into, successively, and slowly, the entirety of the pelvic
  region, including the buttocks and the genitals [...] and finally, to
  the face and head."

  "We are systematically and intentionally moving our attention through
  the body, attending to the various sensations in the different
  regions. That we can attend to these body sensations at all is quite
  remarkable. That we can do it at will, either impulsively or in a more
  disciplined systematic way, is even more so."

  "We might describe what we are doing during a body scan as tuning in
  or opening to those sensations, allowing ourselves to become aware of
  what is already unfolding."

I found it quite easy to practice and had interesting and unusual experiences (mostly pleasant).

My question is: Would any brain and brain-imaging expert - given this description - dare to guess roughly how a body scan may look like in a "brain scanner", e.g. recorded with fMRI?

I am not such an expert, nevertheless I dare to guess.

Presumably, a body scan will - mainly but not solely - take place in the areas of the cortical homunculus in the primary motor and sensory cortices.

I would guess that it is here that most of body scan related neural activity will occur. But in which manner: how will activity evolve and literally move around, how will it look like in the "brain scanner"?

Five possibilities come to my mind:

Experts and laymen will see nothing but a generally increased, enigmatically billowing activity of the cortical homunculus.
An expert would see some significant patterns, but only vague and hard to communicate.
Even the layman could see something:

an overall increased activity of the cortical homunculus with somehow changing peaks of activity (highlights, representing the body region the attentional focus is currently on)
a mostly "dark" cortical homunculus with a wandering spotlight of activity
a mostly dark cortical homunculus with a fading-in/fading-out spotlight every now and then

Which of these possibilities do you - as a brain and/or brain-imaging expert - consider the most probable one? Other possibilities are welcome!

And of course hints to studies where this question has been experimentally attacked.

(I found one study but didn't delve deeper into it: there are too few images in it.)

The Mind of the Meditator may be what you are looking for:
https://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v311/n5/full/scientificamerican1114-38.html

The image taken from the article gives some good explanation:


How can you forgive (and not only forget) evildoers without any remorse? Given the mental and physical health benefits of forgiveness, how is it usually approached in psychological treatment? Despite hours of reading, I still don't understand, and can't even pinpoint why not. Please remark the following assumptions which restrict my definition of 'malefactor' to forgive:

1. The malefactor fails to repent or rue in any way, such as Mutsuhiro Watanabe (who tortured Captain Louis Zamperini about whom I write below) or the Holocaust perpetrators.
2. I ask about genuine forgiveness of the malefactor, and not merely forgetfulness.
3. The malefactor recognised his/her actions' turpitude but still wilfully executed them.

This question was motivated by such virtuous paragons as  Ms Eva Kor and Capt Louis Zamperini, the latter of whom advised someone else by citing Mark Twain:

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

I recognise the futility in simply remaining enraged about past injustices, so I'd argue that one should act to resolve this resentment, such as by apprehending and punishing their captors. This is exactly the argument that has bewitched me but that I'd like to surmount; I want to appreciate: How and why could (even) tortured war veterans and concentration camp survivors decide against any revenge?

The prerequisite for forgiveness is actually completely straightforward and easy to comprehend:
Understand and accept the humanity of the perpetrator.
Most people are convinced that there is a fundamental difference between themselves and those that commit heineous crimes. Once you understand that the difference is at best gradual; once you face your own propensity for cruelty and violence; once you understand how an unfortunate combination of hereditary and environmental factors have lead to the deed -- you have laid the foundation upon which you may forgive the individual guilt.
This is really a broad topic, but think how the Milgram experiments showed how almost anyone could be talked into torturing another even without any valid reason. Now add to that everything that can go wrong in a person's life and it becomes quite understandable how someone can break and turn into a "monster". I am often surprised there is actually so little major crime!
For some victims it is helpful to learn what made the person that abused them who they are.
The second part is the wish to forgive. For that you need to understand the futility and destructiveness of revenge. Revenge does not bring back a killed loved one; it does not undo the experience of torture; all it does is turn you into the kind of person you despise: a person that tortures and kills. Successful revenge does not lead to happiness. Where forgiveness can cause a feeling of enlightenment and release, revenge fixes the state of loss and trauma and adds to it your own guilt.
Therapy will grant you a space and time for sorrow and rage and then attempt to help you let go and realize that a good and happy life are still possible if you turn towards it and allow it to happen.
This is usually not something that can be achieved by reading books. If you suffer from trauma you will profit from seeing a qualified therapist.


What is the causal relationship between extreme jealousy and poor mental health? Jealousy can be a powerful and destructive force. It can take over reason.

Can severe to extreme jealousy precipitate or contribute to poor mental health, at the extreme, psychosis.

Or, is it poor mental health that can manifest pathological jealousy?

or both.

I think it can go both ways. According to Tesser's Self Evaluation Maintenance Theory, any two people in a relationship make themselves feel better by comparing themselves to each other. The key idea is that if you are closer to a person then you will tend to feel more jealous. For example, suppose your best friend got a really fancy car. You will naturally feel jealous. However, what if someone told you that Bill Gates got a really fancy car? You wouldn't feel jealous.This is similar to mental construal theory mentioned in this post.

If you tend to be jealous of someone close to you all the time I would think this would lead to depression. Depression is marked by rumination which is what happens if you are constantly jealous. Then again, if you are depressed because of some acute stress (e.g. death in a family) then you could feel jealous of other people without this particular stress.

One of the best ways of overcoming jealousy is to accept that you are jealous and empathize/congratulate the person you are jealous of. Exercises like mindfulness meditation would help promote empathetic behaviors.


Is it possible for certain people to perceive colors differently? What if someone perceives a color as 'red' when it is actually 'green'?

Since different people have preferences for different colors, and colors are perhaps constructed in the mind, is it possible that the entire space of colors can be experienced quite differently for some people?

Yes, this scenario is possible, occurring with certain cases of brain lesions in specific areas of the visual cortex, the fusiform, lingual and posterior parahippocampal gyri.  These areas are analogous to what is referred to in primates as V4, or the 4th visual cortex, and are known to be involved (at least partly) in the perception of color (though see this commentary).

 Courtesy wikipedia

In this study, subjects with brain lesions were asked to identify colors in a blue ambient light (meant to mimic the outdoors) and under a reddish light (meant to mimic indoor lighting).

  ... the three patients...with abnormal matches on the blue, green and red chips made different matches than control subjects for pink, violet, turquoise and green targets... Their matches for these chips were shifted towards orange-red for the pink and violet
  targets and towards green for the turqoise target. One patient displayed a shift toward turquois[e] for the green target.

So, the level at which this "signal" is getting crossed can only be inferred from the level of the lesion, but presumably, the transduction of color by the cones and the processing of the colors in the P and K cells of the Lateral Geniculate is all still intact.

  Clarke, S., Walsh, V.,Schoppig, A.,Assal, G., Cowey, A. (1998) Colour constancy impairments in patients with lesions of the prestriate cortex. Exp Brain Res 123:154-158.


Typical and minimum voxel sizes for various field strength MRI machines? Hoping somebody can give me some real world numbers on the typical capabilities of 3T and 7T MRI machines in terms of there minimum voxel size (specifically in relation to there use in fMRI studies if that makes a difference)? The Wikipedia article on MRI gives a rather non committal range of 1mm to 5mm on a side, but I have been reading the term High-Resolution fMRI in a few places without any qualification being placed on it.

This is a slightly older post, but the Wikipedia article is basically correct.  It is a non-committal range of 1mm - 5mm.  Typically high resolution fMRI will probably be <= 1mm on a side, but is typically going to be higher field scanners (>>= 3T) or using slightly different sequences than the standard fMRI sequence.

Best thing to do would be to do a quick survey of the literature (e.g., https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C9&q=high+resolution+fMRI&btnG=) and get an intuition from there.  I think what you will find is it will depend a lot of sequence, sequence parameters and main magnet field strength.


Long term cocaine use and personality change - Scientific references? I've experienced cocaine addicts first hand and noticed the development of egoistic personality traits such as selfishness or loss of empathy in cocaine addicts. Are there any scientific references which support that observation?

I couldn't find a longitudinal study on this, which would be direct evidence, but it seems plausible due to circumstantial evidence:

Just taking a dose to lowers the perception of facial sadness (expressed by others)

Twenty-four healthy recreational cocaine users participated in this placebo-controlled within-subject study. [...] Findings show that cocaine impaired recognition of negative emotions; this was mediated by the intensity of the presented emotions. When high intensity expressions of Anger and Disgust were shown, performance under influence of cocaine 'normalized' to placebo-like levels while it made identification of Sadness more difficult. The normalization of performance was most notable for participants with the largest cortisol responses in the cocaine condition compared to placebo. It was demonstrated that cocaine impairs recognition of negative emotions, depending on the intensity of emotion expression and cortisol response.

In a cross-sectional study users/addicts did perform worse than controls on game-theoretical selfishness

The performance of healthy controls (n = 68), recreational cocaine users (n = 68) and dependent cocaine users (n = 30) in [...] social interaction paradigms (Distribution Game, Dictator Game) was assessed. [...] Decisions in the social interaction tasks of both cocaine user groups were more self-serving compared with controls as cocaine users preferred higher monetary payoffs for themselves.

In cocaine users

younger age-of-onset of cocaine use was associated with more pronounced empathy impairment [...]

Mean explicit and implicit emotional empathy ratings of the multifaceted empathy test (MET)
in cocaine users with an age of onset (AoO) of cocaine use ≤18 (n=27) and >18 (n=73), and controls
(n=68). Cocaine users with an AoO≤18 showed less explicit and implicit emotional empathy than
controls and less implicit empathy than cocaine user with an AoO >18. Error bars refer to SEM.
*indicates significant difference between groups (p<.05)

With risk of being pedantic, this last study is also not direct evidence, because there could be some other factor (genetic or environmental) that causes someone to both take up cocaine use early in life and also cause them to exhibit lower empathy later in life (which is the only time when empathy was measured in this study design).


Criteria for Something to be Considered a Mental Disorder I know this will probably be closed for being broad, but I think it certainly has an answer.

What are the criteria for something to be considered a mental disorder?

Does a disorder need to be observable physiologically? Or is behavior/perception that is far from the norm enough?

This is not just a broad question, it also differs depending on the specific person holding a specific orientation working at a specific clinical/academic setting. For a DSM-V discussion, see "What is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V" by Stein et al.


Is there a name for the psychology behind lowering your bets? I'm having a hard time phrasing my question into words, so I'll provide an example:

Imagine you ask someone how much it'll take to eat a worm. The person says they would eat a worm for \$20. Instead of offering \$20, you offer 1 dollar less. Reluctantly, they say yes to \$19. You proceed to offer 1 dollar less so on and so forth. Eventually the reward money draws close to \$0 and we're left with a bizarre situation.

Is there a name for this phenomenon or am I totally bananas?

The answer I was searching for is Creeping Normality. It fits better examples and has a clearer definition for what I was attempting to express.

  Creeping normality refers to the way a major change can be accepted as
  the normal situation if it happens slowly, in unnoticed increments,
  when it would be regarded as objectionable if it took place in a
  single step or short period.


Clinical pathology of schlemielism In the 1964 book, Games People Play, by psychiatrist Eric Berne, the author describes a psychopathic phenomena he calls the schlemiel, after the Jewish folk stereotype. According to Berne, the schlemiel does deliberately destructive acts and sabotage and disguises them to look like accidents. The purpose of this is to elicit sympathy and compassion in those he has duped, called schlamazels. In other words, it is a game with a purely psychological payoff, but damaging real world effects. According to Berne schlemiels often end up as criminals, playing their "game" with judges and police officers after they have outgrown parents and teachers.

This psycho-type seems to be unique to Berne's book and I have not been able to find any other clinical discussions of the phenomenon. Was this idea invented by Berne and purely unique to his book, or has the idea been studied by other researchers in the cognitive sciences?

The short answer is that there is no such mental disorder as schlemielism and the characteristics of a schlemiel described in Games People Play (Berne, 1964) are part of Eric Berne's description of Transactional Analysis (TA) and how it comes into play in life and within therapy.

  As an arbitrary categorisation of human behavior lacking in empirical evidence, TA is often considered a pseudoscience and a pop psychology fad. (RationalWiki, 2016)

For more about Pseudoscience within Psychology, see this meta post and Hansson, S. O. (1996)

Schlemiel, as pointed out by both you in your question and within comments by others, is a Yiddish term meaning "unlucky bungler" or "chump", or fool.

For more on these games, there are some videos on ericberne.com (Berne, 1966) from a 1966 National Educational Television broadcast in which Dr. Eric Berne was interviewed.

Background

Developed in the late 1950s by Eric Berne (1958), Transactional Analysis (TA) is mainly humanistic, but is an integrative method of therapy combining psychodynamic and humanistic approaches. On the difference between TA and other theories, Eric Berne said

  I think most other therapies . . . talk about thinking and feeling. Our question to the patient is not what do you think or how do you feel, but what are you going to do about it? (Berne, 1966)

In TA, the concept is that interactions – transactions – between different people in a given situation when communicating with each other, can be different and changing; and using TA you can analyse these transactions to give you and insight into what is happening.  The philosophy behind TA is that

People are ‘OK’ – We may not like or agree with other’s behaviour, but we can accept them as worthy individuals.
People can think for themselves and it is there responsibility to do so.
People make decisions that decide their destiny and these decisions can change.

TA in action

Whilst practicing TA, there are four theoretical foundations to look at individually

Ego States
There are structural and functional ego states (Short & Thomas, 2015).
Structural – Parent/Adult/Child
Functional – Controlling Parent/Nurturing Parent/Adult/Free Child/Adapted Child
Parent is an exteropsyche or exteropsychic state (e.g. identificatory), adult is a neopsyche or neopsychic state (e.g. data-processing), and child is an archaeopsyche or archaeopsychic state (e.g. regressive) (Berne, 2015).
ScriptsOn-going psychological processes, in which meaning is given to life experiences
TransactionsExchanges between two or more people
GamesEmotional and relational patterns learnt in childhood re-enacted as adults without adult awareness, such as ‘See What You Made Me Do’ or ‘Why Don’t You – Yes But…’ (Berne, 1964)

No.4 here is what we are talking about with the question on schlemiel.

Although Berne defined transactions long before he published Games People Play, his description of transactions in Games is the most easily understood:

  The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other… sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response. (Berne, 1964)(Berne Calcaterra, n.d.)

Dr. Thomas Harris stated in I’m OK – You’re OK that in Transactional Analysis,

  we have found a new language of psychology. (Harris, 1995)(Berne Calcaterra, n.d.)

The Game of 'Schlemiel'

This is described in ericberne.com with the following — numbers representing the transaction number and W and B representing each person in the game (White and Black):

  The moves in a typical game of “Schlemiel” are as follows:

  1W. White spills a highball on the hostess’s evening gown.

  1B. Black (the host) responds initially with rage, but he sense (often only vaguely) that if he shows it, White wins. Black therefore pulls himself together, and this gives him the illusion that he wins.

  2W. White says “I’m sorry.”

  2B. Black mutters or cries forgiveness, strengthening his illusion that he wins.

  3W. White then proceeds to inflict other damage on Black’s property. He breaks things, spills things and makes messes of various kinds. After the cigarette burn in the tablecloth, the chair leg through the lace curtain and the gravy on the rug, White’s Child is exhilarated because he has enjoyed himself in carrying out these procedures, for all of which he has been forgiven, while Black has made a gratifying display of suffering self-control. Thus both of them profit from an unfortunate situation, and Black is not necessarily anxious to terminate the friendship.

The breakdown of this game scenario is that All the way through the game, White is in the structural ego state of child and Black initially entered either as child or parent with the rage response, but then quickly adjusted to adult.

Both can be seen to have won the first 2 transactions of the game, as well as the 3rd transaction.  However, depending on your standpoint, with the 3rd transaction, White could be seen to have won whilst Black has lost because he/she hasn't controlled the child within White.

References

Berne Calcaterra, N. (n.d.). Transactional Analysis - ericberne.com. [Online]Available at: http://www.ericberne.com/transactional-analysis

Berne, E. (1958). Transactional analysis: A new and effective method of group therapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 12(4): pp. 735—743.PMID: 13583264

Berne, E. (1964). Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Berne, E. (1966). Games People Play – The Theory Video. [Online]
Available at: http://www.ericberne.com/videos

Berne, E. (2015). Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy: A Systematic Individual and Social Psychiatry. United States: Martino Fine Books.

Harris, T. (1995). I’m OK – You’re OK. London: Arrow Books Ltd.

Hansson, S. O. (1996). Defining Pseudoscience and Science In:Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem Pigliucci & Boudry (Eds.) Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press

RationalWiki (2016) Transactional Analysis [Online]Available at: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Transactional_Analysis

Short, F. & Thomas, P. (2015). Core Approaches in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Hove: Routledge.


Personality at Birth What factors determine the personality of a newborn baby?
Do all newborns exhibit identical behaviour?  If not, are genetics responsible for the differences?
References consulted so far:

Is Personality More Nature or More Nurture? Behavioural and Molecular Genetics

Are Personality Traits Caused by Genes or Environment?

Do Genes Influence Personality?

The nature vs nurture debate is long standing. Nurture presumably plays little or no role for the majority of newborns (see prenatal discussion below), therefore nature (genetics) would be the only influencing factor. Subsequent to birth, nurture presumably plays an increasingly greater role as time progresses.  Some (but not all) twin studies demonstrate some impact of genetics on behaviour (Johnson, 2002; Plomin 1976).
The behaviour of newborns are generally referred to as being instinctive or innate and may include goal-directed behaviours such as suckling, looking, smelling and imprinting. Researchers such as Lorenz and Sluckin are foundational on early life behaviour research.  I also contributed to an article on newborn instinctual behaviours.
The impact of prenatal stressors on the newborn have been considered in relation to maternal mental health (Erickson, 2017), alcohol abuse (Lange, 2017; McLachlan, 2019), substance abuse (Forray, 2016) and gestational diabetes (Schmidt, 2019):

Mother’s mental health: The findings were that there was no support for relationships between prenatal mental health indicators and infant temperament in multiple studies.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder: The reported prevalence is less than 1% of births, however, the implications on the newborn are profound with as many as 30% of adults in correctional facilities suffering Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

Substance abuse: Whilst birth and health problems have been widely investigated, little could be found on the implications on personality of the newborn.

Diabetes: Whilst birth and health problems have been widely investigated, little could be found on the implications on personality of the newborn.

It is likely that I've not identified all relevant studies in relation to prenatal stressors affecting the personality and would welcome the advice of others.
References
Johnson, W., Krueger, R. F., Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (2002). The personalities of twins: Just ordinary folks. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 5(2), 125-131. https://doi.org/10.1375/twin.5.2.125
Plomin, R., Willerman, L. & Loehlin, J.C. Resemblance in appearance and the equal environments assumption in twin studies of personality traits. Behav Genet 6, 43–52 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01065677
Sluckin, W. (2017). Imprinting and early learning. Transaction Publishers.
Sluckin, W., Herbert, M., & Sluckin, A. (1983). Maternal bonding. Blackwell.
Lorenz, K. (2002). King Solomon's ring: new light on animal ways. Psychology Press.
Mobbs, E. J., Mobbs, G. A., & Mobbs, A. E. (2016). Imprinting, latchment and displacement: a mini review of early instinctual behaviour in newborn infants influencing breastfeeding success. Acta Paediatrica, 105(1), 24-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.13034
Erickson, N. L., Gartstein, M. A., & Dotson, J. A. W. (2017). Review of prenatal maternal mental health and the development of infant temperament. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2017.03.008
Forray A. (2016). Substance use during pregnancy. F1000Research, 5, F1000 Faculty Rev-887. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.7645.1
Schmidt, C.B., Voorhorst, I., van de Gaar, V.H.W. et al. Diabetes distress is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes in women with gestational diabetes: a prospective cohort study. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth 19, 223 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2376-6
Lange, S., Probst, C., Gmel, G., Rehm, J., Burd, L., & Popova, S. (2017). Global Prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Among Children and Youth: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA pediatrics, 171(10), 948–956. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.1919
McLachlan, K., McNeil, A., Pei, J. et al. Prevalence and characteristics of adults with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in corrections: a Canadian case ascertainment study. BMC Public Health 19, 43 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6292-x


Procedures behind establishing the IQ scale There are some good answers about testing individual's intelligence, and about mathematics side of the IQ scale, e.g:

  When current IQ tests are developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 and scores each standard deviation (SD) up or down are defined as 15 IQ points greater or less,[2] although this was not always so historically. By this definition, approximately two-thirds of the population scores between IQ 85 and IQ 115, and about 5 percent of the population scores above 125.[3][4]

What I wanted to ask though, is the organizational/"political" side of establishing the parameters of the test, the "calibration" procedure.

Who (organization/person/entity) establishes or updates the coefficients which make the average test score for given age to correspond to IQ of 100, and the standard deviation increments of 15?
Who is the test group: how is the tested population providing the raw data for establishing the above selected? (in particular, how to avoid selection bias: people wanting to take IQ tests, because they are (rightly) expecting getting good result and thus bragging rights of high IQ; people of low IQ avoiding the expected effort, frustration and shame).
How does that look on the international landscape; are the coefficients established "per nation" and computed by national organizations, or are they global, or some other form yet?

Due to fact, that I can´t give a comment, I will post an answer, that is not sufficient. However, I hope this might give you little more insight. Furthermore, my knowledge mainly builds on german IQ Tests.

1.) Usually this is done by the institution/person etc., that has developed the IQ test. However, in some cases the parameters aren´t updated. So, you should always check for this. Especially in regard of very old IQ Tests and the Flynn effect

2.) First, the type of test-sample usually depends on the population, for which the IQ test is being developed (if you want an IQ test for intelligent people in their 20´s, you should go and try it at different universities). In case of Germany: a lot of IQ Tests usually take samples in different parts of Germany, with different demographic attributes. Usually people get paid for participating. Still, in most cases it is hard to sample a representative sample, due to fact that people with higher social status and intelligence tend to agree more easily in participating (“sadly”, you can´t force someone to take part). So, the aspects you have mentioned are indeed a huge problem, with which usually can´t be dealt perfectly. Sometimes people are told, that they won´t get feedback on their performance or only, if they wish to. As you might guess, this barely counters the problem. Furthermore, huge representative samples are expensive to gather. Therefore, the sad truth is, that in most cases it comes down to representative approximations (at least in Germany). These are the reasons why a lot of (german) IQ Tests are biased upwards (f.e. in the IST-2000R more people have been graduated from high School (="Abitur") than the average; this is even worse for the extended version - to counter that, the subsamples are weighted differently). Just as a little note: IQ tests for students are usually better normed, due to the fact, that they can be accessed more easily.
Long story short: Researchers often try to cope with selection bias, but often can´t really avoid it.

3.) to be honest: I have no knowledge on the international landscape

Just as a little note: You will usually find more detailed information in the specific IQ manual. And: When you are using an IQ test, you should always think of whether or not your test-participant can be compared with the test-sample (you shouldn´t have any problems in comparing IQ performance of a 35 year old participant when the test-sample is representative for ages between 20-30, due to the fact, that the decrease in the average (fluid) intelligence from 20 to 35 is not that huge (as compared to the increase in the younger age, see f.e. Baltes (1997) Figure 3). But then of course, you can only make judgments relative to the (unrepresentative) test-sample, not to the whole population itself. This is also the reason, why i don´t really like statments like "my IQ is ...", because such statements always depend on the test-sample and test itself, that was being used.

An article, that is dealing (along with other aspects of the human development) with the development of fluid and crystallized intelligence across the lifespan: Baltes, P. B. (1997). On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny: Selection, optimization, and compensation as foundation of developmental theory. American psychologist, 52(4), 366-380.


How does this illusion - that I just inadvertently created - work? As I was working on a basic chess application for Android, I loaded some chess clip art into my imageviews. Then this happened. Look closely at the top two rows.

At first I was startled. My imageviews had reformatted themselves! But no. All the squares are still identically sized.

Question is this: How does this image fool our minds? What can illusions like this tell us about how the brain is wired?

This is likely related to other illusions of relative size, such as the  Ebbinghaus (A) and Delboeuf (B) illusions.

These illusions show that perception is not a 1:1 representation of retinal input. Instead it is a mental (re-)construction.

As reviewed by Mrucek et al:

  an object's size is not inherently represented in the size of its projected retinal image. Rather, the perceived size of an object is constructed by integrating multiple sources of information including, but not limited to, retinal image size, physical and perceived distance (Berryhill, Fendrich, & Olson, 2009; Boring, 1940; Emmert, 1881; Ponzo, 1911), an object's geometrical and textural properties (Giora & Gori, 2010; Kundt, 1863; Lotze, 1852; Oppel, 1855; Helmholtz, 1867; Westheimer, 2008), knowledge of an object's typical size (Konkle & Oliva, 2012), and the relative size of different objects in a scene (Coren & Girgus, 1978; Roberts, Harris, & Yates, 2005; Robinson, 1972).

A number of factors produce assimilation and contrast effects in size (as in your example), central variables seem to be the distance and the similarity of target and inducing stimuli (Roberts et al. 2005).

This is getting a little bit off topic, but Mruczek et al. (2014) show that dynamic visual aspects can feed into this illusion too. Also check out the StarTrek illusion which also has a relative size component. Isn't that cool? The name alone...

These illusions may seem to be cute effects. However, they have important real world consequences. For example, Wansink and van Ittersum (2012; Ittersum & Wansink, 2013) investigated the effect of plate size on consumption. Imagine that the white circle in picture B is the plate and that the black cirle is your dessert. If you have a big plate you eat more, which is (also) related to the Delboeuf illusion. These illusions seem difficult to counteract:

  Even a 60-min, interactive, multimedia warning on the dangers of using
  large plates had seemingly no impact on 209 health conference attendees, who subsequently served nearly twice as much food when given a large buffet plate 2 hr later.

I could go on..., sorry.

References

Ittersum, K. V., & Wansink, B. (2012). Plate Size and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 215–228. http://doi.org/10.1086/662615

Mruczek, R. E. B., Blair, C. D., & Caplovitz, G. P. (2014). Dynamic illusory size contrast: A relative-size illusion modulated by stimulus motion and eye movements. Journal of Vision, 14(3), 2. http://doi.org/10.1167/14.3.2

Roberts, B., Harris, M. G., & Yates, T. A. (2005). The roles of inducer size and distance in the Ebbinghaus illusion (Titchener circles). Perception, 34(7), 847–856.

Wansink, B., & van Ittersum, K. (2013). Portion size me: Plate-size induced consumption norms and win-win solutions for reducing food intake and waste. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 19(4), 320–332. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0035053


Which is more likely to cause a person to devalue some other person? Scenario:
Mary and John are in a relationship.
Elen is Mary's best friend.

What will make Mary devalue Elen more?
Hearing that Elen likes John (romantically) or hearing that John likes Elen?

Let's assume that Mary and John have been dating for a few months. Mary is a dependent person with low self-esteem who would go to great lengths not to lose her boyfriend. All three of them are around 20 years old.

According with the description of Mary, I think that she would devalue her best friend.

Explanation:
Elen and Mary have been friends for more time than John and Mary have been dating; this means that Mary could feel more betrayed because she trusted a lot in her friend, and respected her boyfriend. She's more likely to think that John does not like her because she's not enough good for him (because of her self-esteem), and that would generate more dependence (she would try to fix this problem because a part of her identity is at stake).
Hope this help you.


How might the "Imposter Syndrome" typology be reconciled with the robustness of the "self-serving bias"? TL;DR
What on Earth is going on in someone's head to invert a cognitive bias that is robustly observed in people who are psychologically healthy (Cohen's d = 1.28) and still present in depression (Cohen's d = 0.21)? I am looking to reconcile the self-serving bias with either the Imposter Syndrome or mental illness.

"Some people", as the familiar trope notes, “are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” While we are all familiar with individuals who are thoroughly unable to accurately attribute the true cause of their achievements, rarely do we ever consider the possibility that we too are guilty of the self-serving bias.

The self-serving bias appears to be both universal and robust. Moreover, an attenuated bias is associated with mental illness:

Mezulis, A. H., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L. (2004). Is
There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic
Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the
Self-Serving Attributional Bias. Psychological Bulletin, 130(5), 711–747.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.5.711

Others, on the other hand, seem to be afflicted with an attribution bias antipodal to the self-serving bias. These people seem to completely unable  to internalise their achievements as truly their own, and appear to dismissively attribute their successes to external factors most people do for everyone but themselves -- the Imposter Syndrome.

Clance and Imes (1978) first characterised the Imposter Syndrome typology among their high-achieving female patients:

Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high
achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy:
Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006

So, how can we reconcile what seem to be two antipodal phenomena?

From a very cursory consideration of things, it seems that for individuals with the Imposter Syndrome, the self-serving bias is either greatly attenuated, or dare I say, inverted. For that to occur, we might presume two things:

They have crushingly low self-efficacy and/or;
They are processing information in an aberrant manner.

So, how does social, cognitive, or abnormal psychology reconcile the self-serving bias with the Imposter Syndrome? Is the Imposter Syndrome even a thing or simply a cognitive style that occurs among people with depression? If so, what are their similarities, and what are their departures? In other words, is the phenomenology of someone with severe depression effectively the same as someone with the Imposter Syndrome?

Where possible, please include references.

You might as well ask how comes there's depression (or low self-esteem in general) if everyone has self-serving bias. The answer is that the self-serving bias is reduced in depressed individuals; see Greenberg et al.(1992) or Alloy & Abramson (1979) for original investigations; the latter paper has some 2000+ citations in Google Scholar. Allan et al. (2007) do note that there have been some successes and some failures replicating the Alloy & Abramson experiments, so it's perhaps not a totally settled question. There's even a 2012 meta-analysis by Moore & Fresco; quoting its abstract:

  The current investigation represents the first meta-analysis of the depressive realism literature. A search of this literature revealed 75 relevant studies representing 7305 participants from across the US and Canada, as well as from England, Spain, and Israel. Results generally indicated a small overall depressive realism effect (Cohen's d=-.07). Overall, however, both dysphoric/depressed individuals (d=.14) and nondysphoric/nondepressed individuals evidenced a substantial positive bias (d=.29), with this bias being larger in nondysphoric/nondepressed individuals. Examination of potential moderator variables indicated that studies lacking an objective standard of reality (d=-.15 versus -.03, for studies possessing such a standard) and that utilize self-report measures to measure symptoms of depression (d=.16 versus -.04, for studies which utilize structured interviews) were more likely to find depressive realism effects. Methodological paradigm was also found to influence whether results consistent with depressive realism were found (d's ranged from -.09 to .14).

When you study self-serving bias in the general population you might not get enough depressed subjects in your sample to notice the heterogeneity of self-serving bias, particularly since the difference doesn't seem big.

While I cannot give you any numbers on the change in self-serving bias in the impostor syndrome group relative to individuals unaffected by it (I could not find research on this specifically), I will point out some correlations between impostor syndrome and other psychometric measures linked to (depressive) psychopathology.

Bernard et al. (2010) looked at how impostor syndrome related to Big Five personality factors and found that Neuroticism correlated fairly well (0.52 or 0.47 depending on the impostor scale used; 0.52 on a combined measure) as did conscientiousness (-0.31 on both scales; -0.38 combined). In a hierarchical regression model:

  In Regression
  1, Neuroticism made a significant contribution accounting for 27% of the variance
  (p < .001), whereas Conscientiousness contributed just 3% (p < .01). When the order
  of entry was reversed in a second regression, Conscientiousness accounted for
  15% in a first step (p < .001), but Neuroticism accounted for another 15% in a second
  step (p < .001). As expected, the other three NEO–PI–R domain scales did not
  contribute to the prediction of IP, accounting for less than 1% of the variance. In
  other words, unconfounded by Conscientiousness, Neuroticism explained 15% of
  the variance of IP scores, whereas Conscientiousness unconfounded by
  Neuroticism explained 3%; the overlapping variance explained by both traits was
  thus 12%. In short, Neuroticism is the best predictor of IP scores, but Conscientiousness
  adds to the model.

Sonnak and Towell (2001) found a strong correlation of impostor syndrome with low self-esteem (on the Rosenberg scale) as well as with poorer mental health on the GHQ-12, which is mainly a measure of depressive symptoms. Correlated with the CIPS imposter scale, these two measures had r = -0.67 (self-esteem) and 0.33 (GHQ) respectively.


How do I score people on the Religious Orientation Scale? Where can I find the scoring and analysis of the intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation scale given by Allport and Ross (1967). I'm unable to find it anywhere.
There is also a religious orientation scale by Gupta and Mishra (2007).
References
Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of personality and social psychology, 5(4), 432. doi: 10.1037/h0021212

I don't know about Gupta & Mishra as I cannot find the paper you are referring to, but Allport & Ross (1967) on page 436 (page 5 of the pdf) points out that the full Religious Orientation scale has been deposited with the American Documentation Institute. You need to:

  Order Document No. 9268 from ADI Auxiliary Publications Project, Photoduplication Service, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540

I couldn't find the document on the Library of Congress catalog, but it doesn't necessarily mean they don't have it.

You can have a web chat with a librarian  or use their general inquiries form by going to https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html


Can adhd and ocd coexist? Is it in the same way mania and depression can coexist (in bipolar disorder)? Is it really possible for someone to have both ADHD and OCD?
I was thinking that ADHD is the opposite of OCD: 1 2
from 1:

alexThePotato:
With ADHD you may be forgetful, distracted, make careless mistakes,
daydream, etc. With OCD, my impression is that you'd be very focused
on details, a bit perfectionist, and generally meticulous. So how do
they coexist, and what kind of behaviors do you attribute to each?
kukienboks:
Seems to me that OCD is about putting a lot of focus and energy into
unimportant things, something which Adhd-ers also can tend to do. The
main difference is probably that OCD-ers are driven by anxiety rather
than suffering from inability to prioritize tasks.

from 2:

There are also those who believe that OCD and ADHD often occur
together. This site on ADHD states, “It is not uncommon for someone to
have both ADHD and OCD.” I find this statement baffling, as the basic
symptoms of ADHD (listed below), in my opinion, seem to be in direct
contrast to those of OCD:
Inattention: Having a short attention span and easily distracted.
(Most people with OCD would love to be able to not pay attention to
their thoughts.)
Impulsivity: Causes a person to do dangerous or
unwise things without thinking about the consequences. (Those with OCD
do the exact opposite. They play it safe and obsess about the
consequences.)
Hyperactivity: Inappropriate or excessive activity.
(Those with OCD often go out of their way to do what they feel is
appropriate. Also, in Dan’s case, he often had very low energy as he
was “wiped out” from struggling with his OCD.)

However I read here that:

Some research has suggested that OCD and Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum
Disorders fall upon a compulsive-impulsive continuum. In other words
there exists a gradient of disorders ranging from behavioral
impulsivity to compulsivity. OCD appears to lie at one end of this
spectrum, while ADHD exists at the other.

That reminds of this picture (taken from here):

Does this then mean that ADHD and OCD together is like mania and depression together? Is there a term for the former just like the latter has bipolar disorder?

There's someone in 1 who says
"ADHD makes my mind wander but then my OCD latches onto things I get so focused that nothing else exists."
and someone else who says
"The OCD part of is killing me on the inside on how messy my room is. I hate messy rooms.",
but there seem to be contesting comments such as
"Actual clinical OCD is so very far from the perfectionism you're describing."
and
"You are confusing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder...I don't know if OCPD and be comorbid with ADHD, but I agree that intuitively they don't seem compatible. OCD on the other hand is sometimes misdiagnosed as ADHD (and vice versa) as they both involve problems with impulse control."
There's another comment which might explain how ADHD and OCD are not opposites, but I'm not quite sure I understand (assuming it is right):

they aren't opposites. OCD is when you have strong anxious compulsions
that you can't resist. ADHD is when you are unable to resist even weak
impulses. They harm the patient in a devilishly sinergistic manner -
let's take someone who already has difficulty resisting impulses, and
give her compulsions to do useless things!

Is it right? What exactly does that mean?

Yes, they can coexist. No, they aren't opposites. How could they be? Both ADHD and OCD affect a variety of different brain regions, and its effects are not consistent in every person. Maybe if OCD and all its symptoms were always caused by an excess of dopamine in one specific pathway in the reward system, whereas ADHD and all its symptoms was always caused by an decrease of dopamine in that same system, then they wouldn't be compatible. But this isn't the case, and it could never be the case, because the brain is more complex than that.

If mental disorders were diagnosed strictly on oppositional behaviors, then we could easily make the assertion that the opposite of being inattentive would be being hyperfocused. Therefore, nobody who has an attention deficit disorder could achieve hyperfocus, right? But we know to attribute both of these behaviors to ADHD. How can this be?

It is important to remember that mental disorders are not behaviors. OCD is marked by obsessions and compulsions, and any behaviors that may arise do so in the context of mental symptoms. It certainly follows that someone with OCD who has an obsessional focus on staying clean and organized will stay clean and organized -- in general, it is hard to not act on things that you are constantly thinking about and uncomfortable by. This is different from the child with ADHD, who may or may not have trouble staying clean and organized, because to someone who doesn't have some sort of incentive (or 'motivation'), staying clean and organized is really hard to force yourself to do on your own terms. And with ADHD, it can be all the more difficult to achieve that motivation, given the lack of dopamine and/or norepinephrine activity in certain parts of the brain.

That being said, ADHD is not a 'messiness' disorder. The behavior of an ADHD sufferer arises from a complex set of symptoms, usually related to executive dysfunction. As the name may reveal, executive functioning is an abstract yet measurable concept that encompasses a variety of higher-level processes, including regulation of focus, self-management (including keeping oneself organized), and one's capacity for paying attention to detail. Any messiness that arises from this is just an effect from the cause-and-effect relationship that is ADHD.

Likewise, OCD is not a 'neatness' disorder. OCD is marked by obsessions and compulsions. A child with ADHD may have OCD and never feel any compulsion to clean a messy room. There are many different ways that obsessions and compulsions can be demonstrated. A person with OCD may perform rituals, engage in lengthy routines, avoid certain foods, or pick at their skin. They may fear or avoid strange things for no reason at all. Many people with OCD have phobias, and these phobias may interfere with normal life, such as a fear of blood leading someone to never step foot in a doctor's office. Perfectionism and OCD are not the same thing, though perfectionism can be a quality in both.


Why is it easier to neglect one's self than others? If I am hungry, I often ignore my hunger because I'm more interested in continuing what I'm currently working on than getting myself food. However, if someone else (my girlfriend, a friend, a sibling, etc) expresses that they are hungry (even unintentionally, perhaps by their stomach growling), I am much more likely to get them something to eat.

In both situations, I need to stop what I am currently doing. In one situation, I receive food. In the other situation, someone else receives food. Why is someone else receiving food (or some other benefit) a stronger motivator than receiving that benefit myself?

It seems that what you are describing is Empathy-Altruism.

Debate over whether other-helping behavior is motivated by self- or other interest has raged over the last 20 or so years. The prime people involved in this debate are Daniel Batson arguing for empathy-altruism, Robert Cialdini arguing for self-interest and the works of John Thibaut, Harold Kelley, Caryl Rusbult, and George Homans on Social Exchange Theory

Social Exchange Theory states that human relationships are formed by the use of a subjective cost-benefit analysis and the comparison of alternatives.  The basis is that that altruism does not exist unless benefits to the helper outweigh the costs.

By contrast, C. Daniel Batson holds that people help others in need out of genuine concern for the well-being of the other person.

  The key ingredient to helping is "empathic concern". According to [Batson's] 'empathy-altruism hypothesis', if someone feels empathy towards another person, they will help them, regardless of what they can gain from it.


Distortion of faces presented serially in peripheral vision I've kind of already answered this question for myself, but I can't resist sharing it anyway. Please feel welcome to add anything you can in another answer.
Stare at the cross in the middle and try to resist moving your eyes.

What the devil is going on here? Is this proof that They Live? I'm not even wearing sunglasses! Are you?

Seems this is a newly discovered phenomenon! Tangen, Murphy, and Thompson (2011) describe this as a result of their method of presentation: alignment of the pupils and fast cycling through faces with different proportions. It is also important that the cycle of new images remain uninterrupted. They say "relative encoding seems to drive the effect," and list several other references for related phenomena.

Dvorsky (2013) offers (slightly) further explanation [emphasis added]:

  The answer may have to do with the lack of information going to our visual cortex. Neuroscientist Mark Changizi explained it to me this way:

    Because the faces are in the periphery, there's not enough information for the brain to realize it's a bunch of different people's faces appended one after another — something that's very non-natural. Instead, the brain presumes the reasonable: that it's a single person's face in the periphery, and then the face-changes are treated as this person's facial expression changes. Basically, each of those photographs has a different resting face expression, relative to the one before it, and these become drastic, cartoon-like, facial expressions on a single dynamic monstrously cartoon-like expressive creature.

I'm not entirely convinced of this explanation (much less satisfied), but it seems plausible enough, I suppose. More research may be necessary to explain this, as the authors themselves don't seem to fully comprehend what's going on here. Maybe more is out there already, but Google Scholar indicates only one citation at the time of this post, and it seems they only cited it for the materials used; no other substantive connection is apparent.

I would warmly welcome any better answers than this. I've taught intro psych classes and collected a pretty decent trove of optical illusions, because these are always popular instructional material. This one is definitely getting filed away with the rest of them, but strikes me as quite unique among them all. (Not to mention mysterious and disturbing!) Compare the Thatcher effect, which reduces distortion when presented abnormally; staring at it right-side-up makes the distortions more obvious!

   Thatcher effect demonstration by Alex Dodge

References
· Dvorsky, G. (2013, September 19). An explanation for why your peripheral vision is completely borked. io9. Retrieved from http://io9.com/an-explanation-for-why-your-peripheral-vision-is-comple-1349170436.
· Tangen, J. M., Murphy, S. C., & Thompson, M. B. (2011). Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces. Perception, 40(5), 628–630. Retrieved from http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~jtangen/TanMurTho2011.pdf.


Do depressed people think that they always thought in such a negative way? I feel like I may have read or heard a finding that depressed people may get the delusion that they always used to think in such a negative way as has begun since getting depression. Is it so?

Not always.

If depression sets in because of repeated failure at a task (i.e. exams) or a sudden life-changing incident, it is possible to perceive the past (before the dark times) as being a lot more flowery and beautiful than it may have been in reality. This has the effect of reinforcing the feeling of having 'fallen' from a happy place in life.

This also happens when someone tries to make their way out of depression and uses the 'happy past' as reference to recreate habits and thoughts as they remember, in a bid to feel better again. Whether or not it works is another story.


The number of things we can focus on at once In terms of computer science, a programming runtime like JavaScript can be assumed to have 1 thread, or one thing to focus on at a time. The processor moves sequentially through instructions, essentially focusing on one instruction at a time.

If you have multiple processors (like a laptop might have 4 or 8), then theoretically you can focus on 4-8 things at one time.

Likewise, I am wondering how many things the brain can "focus" on at one time simultaneously. That is, how many "processors" it has to process information sequentially. I am not sure if the brain even works similar to this, but wanted to ask anyways just in case.

For example, we might have a list of todos in the "back of our mind", a "few current todos" we are "actively" working on. Then at the same time we are minimally aware of the environment so we can hear surprising noises and react quickly to them (for example), so there is a processor available for emergencies (so to speak). So there is at least 2, the active one and the passive polling one. But if there is our "active" task, then what we have lingering in our thoughts might be a secondary focus/processor, so perhaps there a third processor.

You already seem to be making the difference between a point of focus, versus "things in the back of ones mind". I think that's quite apt.

Different authors have come up with different theories about this subject. I think it's a difficult question but I'll just give my hunch, supported by a (very) few papers that supports that view. Note, that there's a large body of literature on the topic, particularly on Working memory (Burmester, 2017). Working memory is:

  [T]he ability to hold and manipulate information in mind, over brief intervals.

In an overview article, Oberauer (2013) claims that working memory is, as you already exemplify, often explained in terms of physical metaphors such as information flow or information containers.

A popular scientific blog gives a nice list of problems with the computer versus brain metaphor, most notably:

  Brains are analogue; computers are digital
  The brain uses content-addressable memory (memories lead to recall of related memories, called association)
  The brain is a parallel machine; computers are modular and serial
  Short-term memory is not like RAM
  Unlike computers, processing and memory are performed by the same components in the brain

Having said that, in general, it is thought that focused attention can hold up to about four independent chunks, or as little as a single chunk, dependent on the theory as well as on the task at hand. You can imagine that more complex tasks 'consume' more 'processing power'. Indeed, a simple 2-digit recall task seems to rely on the two digits being reproduced in parallel (Oberauer, 2013).

In sentence reproduction during active listening, it seems that attention focus switching is necessary, as subjects need to switch their focus of attention momentarily away from ongoing language processing to memory retrieval. In other words, more complex tasks seem to be more serially controlled (Finney et al., 2014).

References
- Oberauer, Front Hum Neurosci (2013); 7: 673
- Burmester, Sci Am, June 2017 issue
- Finney et al., Child Developm Res (2014); 20734


What are the effects of rejection from both parents on a child? How would rejection from both parents affect a child?

How would they act? what would their personality be like? And the most important question of all: What would help them get rid of or at least lessen these effects?

The psychological theory most commonly used to describe these sorts of situations is Parental Acceptance-Rejection Syndrome. Most of this research was pioneered by Ronald P. Rohner at the University of Connecticut.
The best book on the subject is probably New perspectives on family. The warmth dimension: Foundations of parental acceptance-rejection theory by R. Rohner (1986).
Here are some highlights from his research
Rohner & Rohner, 1980

For example evidence shows that the effects of parental rejection and
emotional abuse are not limited simply to individual personality and
behavior disorders, but they reach into such abstract domains as the
religious beliefs of a people, their art, music, and other expressive
behaviors. There now seems to be little doubt that the results of
parental rejection as well as the mechanisms which produce or distort
parental warmth work uniformly throughout our species, regardless of
differences in race, nationality, time or other limiting conditions.

The main difficulty that a child who has experienced total parental rejection will have is an inability to give or receive love. Specifically, because the child has not learned strategies for how to emotionally and socially process unconditional positive regard, they will be at a significant disadvantage should it appear in their life, much like how a child who never learned French will have difficulty learning it as an adult. Children in this scenario tend to hide their emotions. They will, in many cases, cease to try to get affection from people who are important to them. Emotional attachments will inevitably be constrained by emotional constriction, or defensiveness.

Beyond a certain point, the dependency response may be extinguished or
transformed. The seriously rejected child has not learned how to give
love, because he has never known a loving parent after whom he can
model his own behavior, and for reasons described below, even though
he craves affection he has difficulty accepting it. In order to
protect himself from more emotional hurt, the rejected child tends to
wrap his emotions in cotton, to encyst his emotions. Ultimately he may
stop trying to get affection from the people who are important to him.
That is, dependency responses disappear. Thus the rejected child
becomes emotionally insulated, unable to freely and openly form warm,
lasting, intimate relations with others. His attachments tend to be
troubled by emotional constriction or defensiveness, and in extreme
cases the rejected child may become apathetic or emotionally bland or
flat. In addition, as a result of the grave psychological damage
brought about by rejection, the rejected child is inclined to have
less tolerance for stress and he is therefore likely to be less
emotionally stable than those who were accepted as children.

Children who are allowed to express anger without recrimination generally prefer that mode to becoming withdrawn. Totally-rejected children who find violence as an outlet will usually exploit it.

The rejected child is especially likely to become hostile, aggressive,
or passive-aggressive if rejection takes the form of parental
hostility. Under these conditions he is provided with an aggressive
model to emulate, and thus his own aggressive responses may intensify.

Children who experience total rejection generally see the supernatural, if they believe in it, as a hostile, terrifying force. This includes perceptions of religion.
In general, rejection is experienced, and processed, similarly across all races, nationalities, times, or limiting conditions.
In terms of how to overcome such trauma:
Abusive parents tend to live in isolation themselves, cut off from an effective network of friends, family, or other community support. It is sadly quite common for abusive parents to simply be overwhelmed, either with too many children, too little emotional, social, or financial support, or a terrible combination of many of these factors.
Social workers and clinical psychologists are best equipped to handle patients who suffered from such abuses. Providing social services, both physical, tangible benefits (food, shelter, education, healthcare) and intangibles (companionship, romantic love, open and honest communication) do a great deal to help someone who has been abused. The best strategy is unconditional positive regard. That is, to accept and love without judging or feeling a need to dissect, rehash, or understand. This is a sort of ego-less interaction that can be very draining on the provider.
In order for the patterns of behavior that develop from systematic abuse to be ameliorated, the subject must be treated kindly consistently for a long period of time so that the defensive habits can be unlearned.