Determining the position of the calcium ion in the three dimensional space Is it possible to determine the position of a single calcium ion or its population in the context of a three dimensional space with relatively good time frequency, say 1 Hz, taking into account possible dense presence of the other types of ions in the neighborhood?

The qeustion is asked in the strong relation to the nervous system, but any pure-theory or computer-simulation driven concepts are also welcome.

It is generally not possible to measure where a single calcium ion is in three dimensional space. However, it is possible to measure relative calcium ion concentration across a population of neurons using Two-Photon-Microscopy.

I stress relative because it does not give you an exact concentration of Calcium in terms of micro-molar concentration. However it is good enough to extract relative spike times of a individual neurons within the population.

The way "Calcium Imaging" works is the experimenter loads a neuron or population of neurons with a fluorescing dye that "lights up"  in the presence of calcium. There are many such chemicals which are listed in this article here. The one I personally see being used in articles a lot is FURA-2.

As for frequency it depends on the experiment typically range from 60Hz to 490 Hz.Be aware however the faster the sample rate is the more noise in the measurements.

Do note that these methods are highly invasive, and require brain slices in vitro or opening the skull in vivo. As far as I am aware no study has been done on live humans. Typically rats are used.


What is the neurobiological difference between Jungian Judging and Perceiving individual? Jungian or Myers Briggs type indicator reserves the last letter of a 4 letter archetype to stand for Judging or Perceiving.

Part of being a Judging type is punctuality - being on time, keeping appointments, taking commitments seriously.

At the same time, for a Perceiving type time has a lot less meaning, and such people are not as punctual and can be late, miss appointments or just drop commitments.

From personal experience, it appears that the same individual can alternate between these two archetypes. I'm interested if there's a distinct neurobiological process or a brain region that is responsible for punctuality - being on time, keeping commitments, etc.

As the Myers Briggs is not particularly valued among personality researchers (see here, for example), it is unlikely that you will find research explicitly focusing on this question.

However, the MBTI types Judging (and its counterpart Perceiving) have been shown to overlap with the Big Five personality dimension conscientiousness (Judging = more conscientious, Perceiving = less conscientious, see this earlier answer). Therefore, you can look for research on the relationship of conscientiousness and brain structures. A limited amount of research as explicitly investigated this question.

Quoting from a review by DeYoung (2010, p. 1173-1174):

  Conscientiousness appears to reflect variation in the capacity for self-discipline and organization that is necessary for this form of top-down
  control. Conscientiousness predicts academic and occupational success, as well as behavior that promote health and longevity (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). It is likely to be associated with functions of the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for much of the human ability to plan and follow complex rules (Bunge & Zelazo, 2006; Miller & Cohen, 2001). A structural MRI study found that Conscientiousness was associated with
  greater volume of the middle frontal gyrus in lateral prefrontal cortex (DeYoung et al., 2010), a region involved in maintaining goal-relevant information in working memory and in the execution of planned action based on abstract rules (Bunge & Zelazo, 2006).

There are some other studies on related constructs that may be interpreted as reflecting reflecting low conscientiousness (e.g., impulsivity, novelty seeking, and sensation seeking)

Again from DeYoung (2010, p. 1174):

  Functional neuroimaging studies have found that individual differences in self-reported impulsivity are associated with neural activity in both dorsal and ventral regions of lateral prefrontal cortex (Asahi, Okamato, Akado, Yamawaki, & Yokota, 2004; Brown, Manuck, Flory, & Hariri, 2006).
  Caution is required in interpreting studies of impulsivity, novelty seeking, and sensation seeking because these traits are heterogeneous in their associations with the Big Five, usually associated with Extraversion and sometimes with Neuroticism, as well as with Conscientiousness (Depue & Collins, 1999; Markon et al., 2005; Whiteside & Lynam, 2001). They seem to be compound traits, influenced by multiple more basic traits. Their
  compound nature appears to reflect the fact that problems of impulse control may be exacerbated both by weakness of the top-down control systems that override impulses (the presumed substrate of Conscientiousness) or by potentiation of the impulses themselves, which may be responses to cues of reward (Extraversion) or punishment (Neuroticism).

Note that this is correlational research that can't answer your causal question.

For a critique of this line of research ("oversimplification") see here, for example.

Also note that the review I cited (DeYoung, 2010) is quite old considering how fast paced the neuroscience literature is. The review should get you started for digging deeper. I couldn't find a more recent review, but there are some additional studies.

For example, Forbes et al. (2014) compared people with brain lesions and found that

  focal damage to the left [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] (Brodmann’s area 9) was associated with high neuroticism and low conscientious factor and facet scores (anxiety and self-discipline, respectively). Compared with lesioned and normal controls, veterans with damage in left DLPFC also reported higher neuroticism and lower conscientiousness facet scores, slower reaction times on the California Computerized Assessment Package assessment, and lower scores on the Delis–Kaplan executive function battery. Findings suggest that while neuroticism and conscientiousness remain psychometrically independent personality dimensions, their component facets may rely on a common neurocognitive infrastructure and executive function resources in general.

References

DeYoung, C. G. (2010). Personality Neuroscience and the Biology of Traits: Personality Neuroscience. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 1165–1180. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00327.x

Forbes, C. E., Poore, J. C., Krueger, F., Barbey, A. K., Solomon, J., & Grafman, J. (2014). The role of executive function and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the expression of neuroticism and conscientiousness. Social Neuroscience, 9, 139–151. doi:10.1080/17470919.2013.871333


Slices and aquisition of fMRI Is a slice obtained with functional MRI (fMRI) always 3-dimensional, i.e., x-y-z? I thought that a typical fMRI scan's total imaged volume would be 4D, i.e., made up of 3D slices plus time.

I will focus on question #1:

Analysis of MRI scans is typically done using voxels (Fig. 1). Voxels have a volume defined by three dimensions (length, width and depth).

Voxel analysis. Source: Philips

The slice thickness plus the 2D in-plane resolution (pixel size) yields the voxel size. The time to scan a slice can be regarded to be negligible. Making a scan consisting of multiple slices takes time. Hence, the time dimension is not directly relevant for voxel size. Practically, voxel size depends mostly on slice size, as well as the capacity of the scanner. More Tesla's makes smaller voxels possible.


What kind of Psychometric test is this I’ve taken this exam as a requirement for a job.  Unfortunately, I forgot what the exam was called. All I can remember is that the exam has 100 items grouped into five or four. Each group of five or four questions contains numerical, logical, and vocabulary questions. The questions look something like this:

Something that you use when raining
U,  S,  G,  C,  M   (Umbrella)

A small explosive thrown by hand
G,  C,  W,  J,  Z    (Grenade)

An apple costs $2.50.
If you have 10,how many can you buy?

4,  5,  6,  4.5,  5.5

Complete the series: 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 16, ?
22,  21,  20,  23,  24

It an Intelligence test which was not well designed based off Spearmen's work. Performance evaluations like this can lead to promotion if you score well. If you find a correlation exists in the organization I suggest you take multiple intelligence tests multiple times to learn the testing methods of questions to score better.


How common is alien hand syndrome? The impression that I got from looking at a couple of articles on alien hand syndrome was that it was an extremely common or basically guaranteed result of getting a callosotomy to treat severe epilepsy. However, I just ran into a study that showed essentially no effect from being born without a corpus callosum:

The pattern of anatomical features of the brain revealed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is described in six patients incidentally identified as having acallosal brains... Conventional clinical testing revealed no abnormalities except a slight impairment of walking heel-to-toe in two patients. None of the patients had subjective restrictions of activities of daily life, which shows the efficacy of unknown compensatory processes.

Questions

How common is alien hand syndrome?
How frequently do callosotomies result in alien hand syndrome?
How often is there severe damage to the corpus callosum unaccompanied by alien hand syndrome?
How many cases of alien hand syndrome are there with no visible damage to the corpus callosum?

Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is an extremely rare disorder. It is so rare, there appears to be no available prevalence studies. In the AHS literature, case studies are therefore nearly universal. For all intents and purposes, it is reasonable to say that AHS appears to be a disease so rare that the empirical prevalence rates are in every listed case statistically indistinguishable from zero.

One recent paper by Sarva, Deik and Severt (2014) reviewed 109 studies on AHS patients. Their first and foremost result was the finding that there appears to be three overlapping types:

Frontal: Associated with involuntary groping, grasping and tool use.
Callosal: Associated with intentional opposing movements.
Posterior: Associated with avoidance responses and uncoordinated movements.

Interestingly, they also briefly report an even rarer alien limb phenomena involving the leg!

Based on their review, Sarva, Deik and Severt (2014) suggested that different types of AHS may be caused by different kinds of disruptions to an executive system which is partly responsible for resolving between-task conflicts and prioritizing actions, causing disconnects and impaired coordination between hemispheres. They conclude:

  Our understanding of underlying mechanisms remains incomplete, but evidence from pathological and functional neuroimaging studies suggests a role for network disruption causing bihemispheric disinhibition and/or interhemispheric disconnection. Depending on the variant and the underlying pathology, apraxia, neglect, cortical sensory deficits, and other neurologic abnormalities may also be present in varying degrees, likely explaining the considerable phenotypic variability among patients. Functional imaging studies likely will continue to expand our knowledge of the pathophysiology of AHS, but the limited number of patients in these studies and the diverse underlying pathologies should raise caution when attempting to generalize their results.

References

Sarva, H., Deik, A., & Severt, W. L. (2014). Pathophysiology and treatment of alien hand syndrome. Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements, 4.


How does one study the effect of a dietary supplement on cognition? I've really enjoyed this talk by Molly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunk. The speaker outlines the limitations of modern neuroscience when accessing the effectiveness of dietary supplements intended to enhance cognition. I believe the speaker mentioned that 68% of (americans?) take dietary supplements for a variety of reasons.

I've done some research, and these compounds typically go into "neuro enhancing" products:

DMAE
GABA
N-Acetyl-L-Tyrosine
Vinpoceitine
5-HTP
Vitamin B complex

This got me thinking: How does one assess the effectiveness of dietary supplements on cognition? These are low- dose compounds that may be taken at random times of a day, combined with assorted other supplements. How does one study the effects of something like that? Is there a "gold standard" study that I can take a look at to understand how this is done?

What I'm interested in is how do they account for the time of day, and other supplements/drugs/activity that happened and followed the study.

When thinking about "real psychoactive drugs", their effect is much more profound, and thus easier to study, with a fairly well defined  onset times, intensity curves. For example, I can go to erowid.org and see curves like the one below for

With a graph like that, one can with a reasonable certainty estimate the duration and intensity of effects. But what about dietary supplements? Is it just big placebo?

To the general question of how to test the claims , there's a couple things you want to show:

1) that the body absorbs the supplement (measure the absorption rate)
2) that the supplement crosses the blood brain barrier
3) that the
supplement actually plays the role of agonist, antagonist, or
allosteric modulator (or possibly even has a toxic effect).  These
are biochemical roles that depend on molecular properties like shape
and charge distribution, as well as kinetic interactions (chemistry).
4) that the interaction of the ligand or effector (or toxin) with the
receptor (or system) that's being affected by the supplement produces
a cognitive benefit.

The first three are feats of biochemistry, the fourth of behavioral/psychological biology.  So this is a complicated interdisciplinary task in the first place.  Now if we want to consider all the control situations (especially 4) it becomes even more complicated.

Known cognitive benefits are come from substances like caffeine, nicotine, chocolate (it has theobromine), amphetamines, and other stimulant-like drugs.

GABA, on the other hand, exists naturally in the brain.  It's part of an integrated molecular system and is tightly controlled by the citrus cycle (aka Krebs Cycle) and the GABA shunt.  If you have more of it, but you don't need it, your body will just break it down or convert it (it's part of a very dexterous set of metabolic molecules).

The best cognitive benefit you can get is simply from eating right, not having nutrient deficiencies, omega 3's are good for long-term brain health.  Circulatory health is good for long-term brain health (so exercise and less cholesterol).  Pretty much all your typical healthy habits.  Most of the evidence for the nutrititional/exercise claims I provided in this thread


Reason for Inter-stimulus-Interval in psychology studies In many of the studies that I have read or participated in, I have seen that they show a blank screen between two stimuli. For example, in a study by Cohen et al. (2017), a training paradigm was used where a flanker task was shown, followed by a blank screen for (1000 - Reaction Time) ms, followed by an emotional or neutral image. I've cited this study just as an example, but I've seen similar blank screens in many other studies. My question is:

What is the reason for showing the blank screen? What would have happened if they showed the emotional/neutral image right after the flanker task?

One reason I can think of is that it is shown to keep the starting point of different stimulus constant between different participants. Is there any other reason?

If you've ever tried doing an experiment with no inter-stimulus interval (ISI), you know from first-hand experience that it makes a difference in several ways:

If the task is about reaction times, you don't really have time to prepare. I.e. there is an attention-based interference effect. For Flanker tasks, Stroop tasks, go-nogo tasks, etc., you want to measure the optimal performance and hence you add ISI to reduce the interference. In other tasks, you set a short ISI exactly because of the interference effect, e.g. in some conditions of Conner's Continuous Performance Test, on Vigilance tasks to keep challenging attention (see e.g.McCormack, 1958), etc. Low ISIs are also quite useful for Task-Induced Stress.
There are other carry-over effects than a reduced/biased attention. For example, repetition priming is substantially reduced for longer ISI's (e.g., Ferrand, 1996). If you are not studying repetition priming, such effects constitute noise or a confounder, so you want to reduce it by having reasonable ISIs.
With ISI=0, the next stimulus appears to be caused by your response, so it feels like your key stroke "belongs" to the new stimulus rather than the previous. This can be confusing.


If I think of a checkerboard, is there a similar structure to see in my visual cortex? When I´m imagining a checkerboard in my mind, can one find, with all kinds of fancy equipment, a corresponding figure in the area of my visual cortex? For example, the neurons firing in such a way as they do when actually seeing a board, in which case the firing neurons obvious have the shape of a chessboard.

When I've seen a lot of chessboards I can imagine one by the same pattern of firing neurons (which have for this particular case all different, or more or less the same connection strengths) as in the actual case of seeing one.

Probably. What you mentioned in your question is called retinotopy. There is a mapping between locations on your retina and areas on your cortex. As you go further up the visual processing streams, the mapping gets more complex and the patterns would be less obvious.

Here's an image of from a 1988 paper in the Journal of Neuroscience (Tootell, et al.). It shows a visual pattern on the left, and the corresponding neurons that were activated by that pattern in a monkey's primary visual cortex. The pattern was created using a technique called Deoxyglucose Labeling, where active neurons absorb a radioactive substance which can later be detected during dissection.

Also, Here's something similar in a mouse brain using a different technique.

Your question is about imagining a visual image, though. That is more complicated and research is currently underway to answer that question. Evidence points towards similar cortical patterns between imagined and perceived stimuli. Here is a study, not as detailed as the mouse or monkey ones, that found some evidence for retinotopy during imagining visual stimuli. Here is another where researchers could decode an imagined visual stimulus through fMRI. And here is yet another using fMRI to detect the direction of imagined motion.

There is a huge difference between the precise results from the animal perception studies and the human imagining studies. One big difference is that it is very difficult or impossible to do invasive studies with humans where you can get such high precision. Another difficulty with this research is knowing exactly when and what someone is imagining. It's easy to correlate brain activity with an external stimulus, because you know exactly what is occurring. All you have for the imagining case is self-report, which can be flawed.

Anyway, the research is progressing and there will be a good answer to this question soon enough.


Why did Karl Popper criticize Freud's theories? Why didn't  Karl Popper accept Freud's psychological theories and believed that they are not scientific in essence?

I will go about this by answering two questions. First, what is Popper's general approach when attempting to distinguish science from pseudo-science? Second, what specifically did he dislike about Freudian psychoanalysis? (Historically, Popper actually developed his general theory in response to his particular dislike of contemporary marxism and Adlerian and Freudian Psychoanalysis.)
Falsificationism
Popper proposes that in the empirical domain, nothing can ever be proved true. No swans are black because you've never seen a black swan, and you've seen thousands of swans? Well, maybe the next swan you'll see is black. This may be unlikely, but not impossible, and thus, there is no proof. (The general problem is the problem of induction, as discussed by Hume, which leads into an infinite regress.)
Thus, science is not what is proved true. Science is also not what can explain a lot of observed phenomena, because telling stories about the past is easy and always open. Instead, Popper proposes science is that which contains the means of its own refutation. Everything may be wrong, and a quality of the good ways of exploring the world is that they make clear how to see if they could be wrong. Thus, good science

makes bold conjectures about how the world is like, that is, claims the world is in a state which would be surprising unless the theory were true

derives from this predictions of what should never be the outcome of experiments

would appears as false - falsified - if those outcomes were in fact to turn up

Thus, something that is never false is unscientific, and if it claims to be science, it is pseudo-science. That which could easily be shown false, but has so far withstood many genuine attempts at falsifying it can be scientific.
A few notes: Popper did not claim that anything that is not falsifiable is bad, or false. Something may be true and unfalsifiable, and it may be good and unfalsifiable. But to claim the status of being scientific, it needs to be falsifiable.
Psychoanalysis
Popper used to be a fan of psychoanalysis, especially of the Adlerian brand influential in Vienna in that time. His friends, he observed, were especially impressed by the ability of Adlerians to explain any and all phenomena. A man is honest? It's this kind of early-childhood event that caused this. A man is dishonest? It's that kind of early-childhood event. The Adlerians were never wrong. And it was not clear how they could ever be wrong, as they could post-hoc tell a story about how any given phenomenon fit their theories perfectly. Everything in the world was to them evidence for their theory.
This eventually came to appear to Popper as deeply misguided. Adler himself, with whom Popper worked, was exclusively telling stories about how the past proved or confirmed his theory, never claiming how a possible future state of events could disprove it. He had no predictions, and thus, no truly scientific experiments.
This made Popper not only give up on psychoanalysis, but led him to use it as one primary example of what he considered pseudo-science.
The same story also applies to Freudian psychoanalysis; between all the different complexes and drives, every possible human action or mindset could be explained as originating from childhood experiences and conflicting unconscious mental agents. But Freudians did not make bold conjectures, and did not attempt to falsify their theory with truly scientific experiments.
Sources
Popper lays this out in SCIENCE: CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS, in the 1st chapter. It is a great read and accessibly written.
Although Popper's own words are probably the best explanation on this (as they are so clear here), it probably won't hurt to skim by the Stanford Encyclopedia for a secondary source.


Is there a conventional use of the term "empirical grounding"? Background

The notion of grounding theory in empirical data, originates from the work by Glaser & Strauss (1967). At present, while reputable scholars, for instance Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007), make use of the term "empirical grounding", it doesn't seem to be used quite frequently in (English-language) psychological literature. For instance, today, the database "PsycINFO" returns not more than 66 journal articles where the mentioned term is used.

Question

Does the term "empirical grounding" designate a distinct methodological procedure (or result) that exists independently from the grounded theory methodology?

References

Eisenhardt, K. M., & Graebner, M. E. (2007). Theory Building from Cases: Opportunities and Challenges. Academy of Management Journal, 50(1), 25–32. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2007.24160888

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research (4. paperback printing). New Brunswick: Aldine.

A search of "empirical grounding" in my small personal article database showed more results in test validation than in qualitative (though this could be a personal bias: I'd be curious what kinds of articles your search brought up). Searching this term in the university database brings up a large variety of results, really highlighting the diversity of the use of the term (from policy to measurement).

Additionally, a reading of the Eisenhardt and Graebner article makes it clear to me that their definition of "empirical grounding" is primarily focused on the thought that the theory is grounded in the data, and not as its own distinct methodology. In their sense, this could be viewed as an aspect of grounded theory (when done correctly, it is grounded in data).

Based on this, I would say that empirical grounding is not its own method (or, if it is, certainly not a standard/well-known method). To address the second part, I do think that the term has meaning independent of grounded theory: specifically, as its name implies, it is the practice of grounding theory/methods/conclusions within data (and this has a range of applications). In my understanding, "empirical grounding" is almost an epistemology in terms of its practice and scope. Thus it could, in the larger sense, be considered a broad methodology, under which traditional grounded theory (and perhaps all of quantitative) could fall.

I did find the below article that discussed the broadening of grounded theory from "empirical grounding". They, however, seem to come to this term merely by similar processes as Eisenhardt and Graebner (simply trying to communicate that the method is grounded in data) and do not seem to view it as its own proper method or name.

Goldkuhl, G., & Stefan, C. (2010). Adding Theoretical Grounding to Grounded Theory: Toward Multi-Grounded Theory. International Journal Of Qualitative Methods, 9(2), 187-205.

In example of the multiple uses, below is an article where Messick uses "empirical grounding" to mean "trustworthiness" regarding score interpretation (a pretty well known article and author in the measurement sphere).

Messick, S. (1980). Test validity and the ethics of assessment. American Psychologist, 35(11), 1012–1027. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.11.1012

All in all, for the purposes of your question: no, it doesn't appear that this is a well known or accepted methodology distinct from grounded theory. It seems to have many definitions in many contexts. Based on the Eisenhardt and Graebner article, it seems to a desirable outcome of a grounded theory. Based on definitions in the Goldkuhl and Stefan article, it is a piece of multi-grounded theory (and appears to capture the goals of traditional grounded theory).


What is the name of the effect whereby socialising in a group reinforces group beliefs? Background:
There's this effect when you have some idea, i.e. that eating other people is (probably) cool, you join the group of like minded people, you talk about how tasty people are, everyone agrees with you, which reinforces the idea, and you all share literature and articles and youtube videos and whatnot on how cool it is, and the longer you all participate in the people eating community the more sure you are that it's cool because of all the friend confirmation and the info you see and share and so on reinforces the belief stronger and stronger, and you don't meet people with opposite ideas that often, don't read criticism on eating people that often, etc. And the people eating idea is no longer just probably cool to you, you become sure about it with all your heart and defend it fanatically.

I am pretty sure I've read about this in some Peter L. Berger's book, however I cannot find it.

What is the name of this effect? (i.e., whereby being part of a group strengthens your belief in the beliefs held by the group)

There is also the related phenomenon of 'Group Polarisation' (see Myers and Lamm, 1976; Isenberg, 1986), where groups are found to make more extreme decisions and hold more extreme opinions than its constituent members. Not sure if that's specifically related to what you're looking for but I think it's important to keep in mind.

References

Isenberg, D.J. (1986). Group polarization: A critical review and meta-analysis.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 1141. PDF
Myers, D.G. & Lamm, H. (1976). The group polarization phenomenon.. Psychological Bulletin, 83, 602.


Why am I more "musically" creative in the last 30 seconds before falling asleep? I am a music producer and often my "best" pieces always came to my mind shortly before I fell asleep. Sometimes I actually grab a recorder, hum the melody and finish the idea on the very next day.

My question is now: how can this be possible? In a state where my brain is supposed to shut down (and pretty much does) it is literally exploding out of ideas. I also feel a huge increase in euphoria in these very moments but I can't really tell whether this happens before or after I get the idea for a certain sound/melody.

Might it be that my creativity is "blocked" all day until my brain finally drops all obstacles which then makes way for my creative flow? Or is it that no new input needs to be processed as I lay in total darkness and silence and therefore new "material" to process isn't coming in which leads my brain to "invent" something?

This doesn't happen every time but most often when I am very tired and don't need longer than 15 minutes to fall asleep - usually this is a matter of hours for me, hours in which I am not productive at all.

This is quite a well documented phenomenon - stereotypically these moments of creative insight occur in the shower. A google for 'psychology aha moment' or 'neuroscience creative aha' will give you some articles, in Psychology Today for instance, talking about this.

One characterisation of thought is that links between neurons are created and by travelling down the intricate pathway, you have the thought. A lot of conscious thought is driven by "picking" the "quickest" path and travelling down that, as it is economical in terms of energy use.
One understanding of creativity is that it is combining of existing ideas in novel patterns. When you enter a more relaxed state, or even just a more distracted state such as showering or exercising, your brain is free to try novel combinations as you are not consciously driving it down specific well-worn pathways (the "easy" paths).

Mark Beeman has done research on this, which he calls it insight. For more information, see the article he co-wrote "The Aha! Moment: the Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight".

For another explanation, Alice Flaherty has done research linking these moments to dopamine release, which is more abundant in our brains when we relax. For more information see the publication "Frontotemporal and dopaminergic control of idea generation and creative drive".


How do I find the right psychologist for myself? Many psychologists resist disclosing their opinions on school prior to making an appointment.  I want to talk about my problems with being bullied in school, and I don't think that a therapist could help me unless they hated schools in general.  I have had a bad experience with a liberal psychologist who had a regular set of opinions surrounding schools.  How could I determine if a psychologist distrusts academia?

If you are lucky, you might be able to find a psychologist or a group practice who blogs specifically about bullying? That might a good way to find out the opinions and direction of how they would approach therapy with you. Unfortunately, there are no simple or easy ways to predict or decipher bias or the direction of the therapy. Usually it is worth visiting a couple of psychologists and decide after a couple of sessions?


Does everyone make big mistakes? It is sometimes said that we all make big mistakes.  Is this true?
As a starting point, 'big mistake' could be defined as a mistake which we do unconsciously for months, and for which the implications endure for more than a few months.
What is the best approach to recover from 'big mistakes'?

I think the simple and obvious answer to this question is "Yes".  That is, everyone at some point in their life is likely to make a 'big mistake'.
Regret is the likely emotion felt subsequent to making a 'big mistake' and is a well researched topic as per the references below.
There are countless situations in which an individual is likely to feel the emotion of regret, including: divorce, bankruptcy, loss of a close friend, self-inflicted injury, resigning from employment in a rage, being sentenced to jail etc. (The examples chosen here are likely to reflect instances where the big mistake endures for more than a few months.
Clinical psychology is the profession with specific training for helping individuals move on from their mistakes and overcoming a deep-set emotion of regret.
References

Connolly T, Zeelenberg M. Regret in Decision Making. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2002;11(6):212-216. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00203

Sweis BM, Thomas MJ, Redish AD (2018) Mice learn to avoid regret. PLoS Biol 16(6): e2005853. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005853


What is the psychological function of nostalgically reenacting activities from before we were born? I'm asking specifically about nostalgia for a time before you were born, e.g. the Blitz parties / 40s tea dances that have big in the UK for the past decade, or the popularity of Speakeasy-themed bars in the US. I'm thinking of nights that require you to dress in theme specifically and celebrate that time.

I was discussing it with a friend today, and I said it seems like it's a way to participate in something your grandparents did that strengthens your bonds to your own family, but she (rightly) replied that her own grandma had never been to a dance – she'd been too poor. It seems to me like when we're at the tea dance or in the speakeasy or whatever, we're doing something more than faithfully reenacting the things our forebears did, but I'm not sure what that is or why. Are we celebrating the best bits and leaving the rest behind? Are we thoughtlessly celebrating a time of awful gender and racial inequality? Does anyone have any insight into this kind of nostalgia, the nostalgia for things you've never experienced yourself, and the act of participating in themed events, and what functions that has socially/psychologically?

Historic reenactment and historically themed social events may serve a variety of functions for the different people that participate in different events:

Some people in virtually all societies value traditionalism (Schwartz, 1992).

Traditionalism relates to religiosity (among Judeo-Christian faiths; Schwartz & Huismans, 1995).

Some hold romantic ideals of the past (e.g., the notion of "simpler times"). Personality traits related to these attitudes may (I'm speculating here) include the past-positive type of time perspective (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999) and low openness to experience, which also relates to traditionalism.
Some may desire an escape from the ordinary environments they're used to in daily life.
Some enjoy dated fashions that don't seem quite right to wear in ordinary, modern contexts.
Some events involve celebration of history, which is valuable in its own right.
Some attendees probably enjoy any opportunity to dress up, act a part, or socialize in general.

Extraversion and self-monitoring may be relevant traits for understanding these motives.
The motive itself may be the need for affiliation, which is stronger in some individuals.
Social contact serves many psychological functions, including the enhancement of well-being.

Surely some celebrants are ignorant of the social issues of those times, but some aren't. Either way, many choose to celebrate the times for their good aspects, and at least a few probably feel the good aspects include the less modern social views of those times. It's conceivable that some people would even feel more comfortable in situations where attitudes such as misogyny or racism could be expressed more freely by excusing them as part of an act. However, my mere intuition and very limited personal experience suggest that most celebrations of the past aren't celebrations of the more controversial aspects such as these.

References

Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25(1), 1–65. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.220.3674&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

Schwartz, S. H., & Huismans, S. (1995). Value priorities and religiosity in four Western religions. Social Psychology Quarterly, 58(2), 88–107.

Zimbardo, P., & Boyd, J. (1999). Putting time in perspective: A valid, reliable individual-difference metric. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1271–1288.


Can processing effort for sub-tasks in neural networks be measured? I often heard statements like:

80% of your brain processing is computing the effect of gravity

or, similarily:

You only use 20% of your brain power

My question isn't about the truth of these statements but if they are well-formed: can we measure 'processing' in the brain (or a sufficiently complicated artificial neural net) to quantify how much of the processing resources are allocated towards specific sub-routines?
As an example of when this is doable in another domain: consider a computer with a standard von Neumann architecture. In this case we can tell how much processing goes into sub-routine by simple counting the number of steps each subroutine holds the processor. However, this simple counting is only possible because of two features:

There is a clear central processor, and data is not transformed by anything except it.
There is a clear duality between software and hardware allowing us to identify when a specific sub-routine (software) is being allowed access to the processor (hardware).

Both features are missing in a computer with a neural architecture. How can we measure the resources that a computer with neural architecture (example: the brain) devotes to subtasks?

Notes
I am interested in settings where there isn't an obvious localization of sub-tasks. So an answer like:

we can measure the amount of resources that go towards recognizing faces by looking at the metabolic uptake of the fusiform face area.

Is not that interesting to me, since it is only valid for sub-tasks that happen to have specially-devoted areas. Of course, if there is an argument that any reasonable (or more restricted: human-like) neural-architecture has to compartmentalize its computations then I would like to hear that. However, the answerer would be left with the task of explaining how to identify the group of neurons that should be associated with a specific sub-task.

Well firstly, what are those statements really saying?  How do you measure "processing" or "power" as it relates to the brain?  For an electrical engineer working in communicatons, it's easy: you just take the square of the amplitude of the signal (signal power) or count the number of instructions per second (processing power).  But that's the discipline where processing power is defined; making an analogy to a brain brings a lot of caveats.  What's an instruction? How many little instructions can you break one instruction down into?  Where do you want to draw the line in a color spectrum that divided orange from yellow?  Or do you want to draw more lines and have dark and light yellow?  Or yet more lines...?

Hans Moravec, a machine intelligence researcher, is famous for his comparisons of technology to organismal processing power.  Here he explains a little bit about how he comes up with his numbers, but they're really not satisfactory to me.  He seems to take one example (the retina) and judge it by what it can do empirically with an image, then extrapolate from there to the rest of the brain.  So this only considers a single network topology in a system that has millions more variations in topology.

The major problem that is a typical complaint by biologists when people use the computer science analogy for brains is that metabolism and functions are too closely coupled to easily separate.  Functional mechanisms can occur as negotiations between molecular networks (including genetic transcription) in addition to the electrical signals that electrical engineers and computer scientists generally think of as "processing".

This is especially outlined in the glutamine, gaba, and adenosine molecular networks (i.e. the transmitters are closely coupled to metabolism through ATP and the Krebb cycle).  A lot of recent evidence has also put a larger emphasis on astrocytes.  This paper is about epilepsy, but takes some time in the introduction to develop ideas about astrocytes and brain metabolism complete with references.  The brain-metabolism material is typical in any neurobiology text book; astrocyte participation is a more recent line of research.  There's also still a lot of research coming up in molecular mechanisms for memory.

There have been all kinds of measurements on processing power, including at the genetic level, but all these measurements make an assumption about what a bit is by breaking biological subsystems into two states (this, 1 and 0).  But then later down the line, somebody will find that there was actually a third significant functional state.  So it's all about where people want to draw lines.

Another problem (more at the macro level now) is that the same task will have different processing requirements depending on how robustly the organisms internal model is approximating and predicting the external world.  So a task that you know what to expect for will take considerably less "processing power" than one where your expectations are not met.  Karl Friston wrote an interesting review suggesting a modeling framework that might help to explain this.


How does psychiatry judge suicide by military and political leaders? Peru's ex-president Garcia's suicide to avoid arrest reminded me of general officers and politicians who, although wicked, were foxy but rational. They ought've been punished, but they cunningly escaped punishment through suicide.
I'm assuming that some of the jumpers in the Sep 11 2001 attacks on the WTC weren't judged irrational for dying by suicide.

Society in 2019 disapproves and sigmatizes suicide, but what of  such leaders' suicide? How does psychiatry regard their suicides?
See List of suicides, List of suicides in Nazi Germany, Mass suicides in 1945 Nazi Germany. Generalfeldmarschalls Robert Ritter von Greim and Walter Model. 2003-2008 South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun - Wikipedia, 1970-183 Chilean President Salvador Allende.

Any similar lists for Japan?  This one one refers just to a handful of Japanese WW2 top brass.
I can think of only: Field Marshals Hajime Sugiyama,  Hideki Tojo (who missed his heart when he shot himself, but  was executed), General Shizuichi Tanaka,  Admiral Chūichi Nagumo.

Suicide is not a psychiatric disorder. Suicidal ideation or attempts are considered a symptom of certain psychiatric disorders (e.g. depression), and these disorders are treated by psychiatrists, but in and of itself suicide can be a rational choice and is in some legislations even legally facilitated by physicians (e.g. for the terminally ill).

Within their professional capacity, psychiatrists have nothing to say about people killing themselves to avoid shame or punishment or as a sacrifice for their country.


Do graphemes relate to communication and thought disorders? The question Does language and/or culture affect an individual's cognitive capacity? explores the possibility of  differences in cognition based on language and cultural variations.

In this question I am focusing on certain aspects of language only:
the orthography, in particular, the types of graphemes.

Syllabary graphemes are shallow orthographies, where each kana represents and maintains a consistent sound throughout that language (with some exceptions).
The well recognised scripts of some Asian cultures (Chinese, Japanese, Korean,...) use syllabary systems.

Alphabetic graphemes are more complex.
English, and a good deal of European languages use alphabetic graphemes, where each letter and its usage represents a sound. The great variation in how one symbol (letter) can sound, depending on the context of the letter within a word or sentence, is referred to as a deep orthography.

Given the level of complication with alphabetical languages;   I am interested if they
can  lead to increased incidence of faulty cognition, for instance, thought disorders, dyslexia, circumstantiality, clang association, phonemic paraphasia, blocking, neologisms,.. to name a few.

Have there been any studies on this, and if so, what are there findings?

We have this tendency to explore, in detail, language abilities and label them "disorders". Some are disorders, like those stemming from autism, but, in any traditional sense, none of the listed qualify. They are simply biases in what people are good and not good at or classifications of errors. There's a title of a talk by Raymond Klein I've always liked.

Klein, R. M. (2002, November) Dyslexia, dysdrivia and dystennisia: Is it reasonable to expect everyone to read well? Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience chapter presentations. Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

Imagine if we considered weak tennis playing a social problem. We would carefully examine these poor souls and work out very carefully the defects in their minds that cause them to be outcasts of society. We'd label said defects and work diligently to rehabilitate who we could...etc...you can see where it's going. What we've done with dyslexia is similar.

Of course there will be people who are good and bad readers and writers, and there will be characteristics that some of those bad (and good) readers have in common. And we can categorize them. This does not, in itself, a disorder make.

In any field of endeavour, if you change the requirements of something that's an acquired skill, which reading and writing are, then you change the set of cognitive abilities that facilitate that skill. Different people have different cognitive aptitudes therefore their abilities in different kinds of writing systems, and the translation of those to phonemes, will differ. Furthermore, some systems will be easier than others and in different ways. There may be systematic variations in how those errors work out.

If you had asked whether clay tennis players have differences from grass players would it really be a question worth considering? It's only one because there's some belief that the common errors in reading are named and the people who aren't good at it are labelled.

But, in spite of the fact that some people do it, I think it's pretty difficult to call any of those differences disorders.

(As an aside, several of the listed "thought" disorders are pretty independent of orthography. Most would be considered thought errors.)


The relationship between narcissism and self-esteem Given that personality disorders are rooted in abnormal experience and development. There has been much discussion about the aetiology of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Having a concept of the causes of such an illness is helpful in establishing the answer to my question. The common belief was that beneath the arrogance of a narcissist, is an incredibly low self-esteem, hence the need to protect the fragile ego.

  Those with narcissistic personality disorder believe that they're
  superior to others and have little regard for other people's feelings.
  But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem,
  vulnerable to the slightest criticism.

Mayo Clinic

I can see that there is some discussion refuting this, and postulating the opposite.

  It was once thought that narcissists have high self-esteem on the
  surface, but deep down they are insecure. However, the latest evidence
  indicates that narcissists are actually secure or grandiose at both
  levels.

Psychology Today

I have wondered, how do we really know how the narcissist self-esteem is?
Is there an inverse relationship between narcissism and self-esteem or is the converse true?

Please provide a well researched answer.

First off, your second link there hasn't been reviewed since 2010.  I got a case study from 2013, an attempt to change the DSM for narcissism due to it's actual granularity and subtypes from 2008, and a letter to the journal of Indian Pscy med from 2012.

  Seishin Shinkeigaku Zasshi. 2013;115(4):363-71.

  [A case of major depressive disorder barely distinguishable from
  narcissistic personality disorder].

  [Article in Japanese]

  Saito S, Kobayashi T, Kato S.

  Department of Psychiatry, Jichi Medical University.

  The recent increase in cases of depression with a narcissistic
  tendency, especially among young individuals, has been pointed out.
  When the narcissistic tendency is conspicuous, patients may be treated
  for a personality disorder or pervasive developmental disorder, and
  not for a mood disorder. A case is described of a man in his late
  twenties who developed depression due to his failure in research work
  and job hunting, and, after a time, due to the break off of his
  engagement with his fiancée, manifested with narcissistic symptoms
  including an exaggerated opinion of himself, a sense of entitlement,
  interpersonal exploitation, lack of empathy, strong feelings of envy,
  and an extrapunitive tendency. He was regarded at the start of
  treatment as having narcissistic personality disorder. However,
  persevering treatment, mainly with supportive psychotherapy and
  pharmacotherapy including antidepressants (high dose of maprotiline
  combined with low dose of mirtazapine), sodium valprote and
  aripiprazole, finally improved not only his depressive symptoms, but
  also the symptoms regarded as a deriving from a personality disorder.
  He presented fierce  anger and aggression regarded as a mixed state,
  and showed the rapid improvement  in his depressive state after
  hospitalization, which we considered to show potential bipolarity. We
  diagnosed the patient with narcissistic depression, emphasizing the
  aspect which suggested a mood disorder, such as the episodic presence
  of narcissistic symptoms as long as a depressive state resided, his
  circular, recursive discourse, and his potential bipolarity. To
  accurately evaluate the aspect of mood disorders which patients
  appearing to show personality disorders have, it is considered useful
  to grasp a patient's condition from the viewpoint of a personality
  structure and viable dynamics. From a therapeutic standpoint, we
  suggest the importance of simple but persevering psychotherapy and a
  sufficient quantity of antidepressant medication for patients with
  depression, even if they are thought to have a personality disorder.

  PMID: 23789317  [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Hmm well they seem to note initially that the converse is true in the first sentence.  We'll investigate why this is true soon too and the reasons for it.

Before even reading this, I hypothesized someone with bipolar disorder could have this type of problem...and sure enough...they mention the patient as potentially having it.

This one is back from 2008.  It seems like they were having some trouble with the DSM labeling of the disorder back then.  Apparently there are several different subtypes of narcissistic disorder, which could definatly seem viable.  So, so far your answer is 'sometimes'.

  Am J Psychiatry. 2008 Nov;165(11):1473-81. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07030376. Epub 2008 Aug 15.

  Refining the construct of narcissistic personality disorder:
  diagnostic criteria  and subtypes.

  Russ E, Shedler J, Bradley R, Westen D.

  Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
  jonathan@shedler.com

  Comment in
      Am J Psychiatry. 2008 Nov;165(11):1379-82.

  OBJECTIVE: Narcissistic personality disorder has received relatively
  little empirical attention. This study was designed to provide an
  empirically valid and  clinically rich portrait of narcissistic
  personality disorder and to identify subtypes of the disorder. METHOD:
  A random national sample of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists
  (N=1,201) described a randomly selected current patient with
  personality pathology. Clinicians provided detailed psychological
  descriptions of the patients using the Shedler-Westen Assessment
  Procedure-II (SWAP-II), completed a  checklist of axis II diagnostic
  criteria, and provided construct ratings for each axis II personality
  disorder. Descriptions of narcissistic patients based on both raw and
  standardized SWAP-II item scores were aggregated to identify,
  respectively, the most characteristic and the most distinctive
  features of narcissistic personality disorder. RESULTS: A total of 255
  patients met DSM-IV criteria for narcissistic personality disorder
  based on the checklist and 122 based on the construct ratings; 101
  patients met criteria by both methods. Q-factor analysis identified
  three subtypes of narcissistic personality disorder, which the authors
  labeled grandiose/malignant, fragile, and
  high-functioning/exhibitionistic. *Core features of the disorder
  included interpersonal vulnerability and underlying emotional
  distress, along with anger, difficulty in regulating affect, and
  interpersonal competitiveness, features that are absent from the
  DSM-IV description of narcissistic personality disorder.* CONCLUSIONS:
  These findings suggest that DSM-IV criteria for narcissistic
  personality disorder are too narrow, underemphasizing aspects of
  personality and  inner experience that are empirically central to the
  disorder. The richer and more differentiated view of narcissistic
  personality disorder suggested by this study may have treatment
  implications and may help bridge the gap between empirically and
  clinically derived concepts of the disorder.

  PMID: 18708489  [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

And the story gets more complicated...to the point where there seem like many different types of treatment and just problems with therapists dealing with narcissists.

Q-Type Analysis:

grandiose/malignant
fragile
high-functioning/exhibitionistic

Core features of the disorder

included interpersonal vulnerability and underlying emotional
distress, along with anger
difficulty in regulating affect
interpersonal competitiveness

Looks like your question's answer is getting split up in many different ways.

I found this interesting letter that was sent to the Indian Journal of Psych Med.  It looks like there are specific type of strategies for dealing with specific types of issues....like for relationship issues there's one way, for other types...there's another.

I'll bold the interesting parts.

  Indian J Psychol Med. 2012 Oct-Dec; 34(4): 403–404. doi:
  10.4103/0253-7176.108236  PMCID: PMC3662146  Demystifying Paradoxical Characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder  Matthew
  Gildersleeve Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
  Queensland, Australia Address for correspondence: Dr. Matthew
  Gildersleeve, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
  Queensland, Australia.

  Sir,

  This letter is aimed for psychotherapy clinicians and researchers who
  should acknowledge the relationship linking Kohut's self-psychology
  and Glasser's Choice theory that can demystify relationship
  difficulties and mental health problems in narcissistic personality
  disorder (NPD). NPD is commonly experienced interpersonally by others
  as insufferable, pompous, and un-empathic.[1] NPD persons have been
  identified to possess giant self-centeredness, a certainty that they
  own supreme personality, and their humiliation of others makes them
  intolerable for interpersonal relations.[1] Importantly, Heinz Kohut's
  legacy to psychology is known as self-psychology and was centered
  principally on narcissistic personality development and treatment.[2]
  Suboptimal psychological development is thought to arise when maternal
  compassion is discriminately substandard.[3] As a result, the
  narcissistic self constructs a defense against the helplessness of a
  hurtful world.[3] Kohut[2] cited in Banai et al.[3] called the
  compassion required from maternal figures as “self-object needs”
  because these needs develop the self-image and are provided by
  external objects.     (Oh wow, it seems like they're talking about entitled rich kid's attitudes, that's kinda funny, interesting).

  By not receiving necessary self-object transferences through decisive
  epochs in development, the young individual cannot build the
  competence to control self-respect or construct a positive
  self-image.[3] *Consequently, the child, now an adult, depends on other
  humans to construct their self-image. The self-object transferences
  received as an adult provide a feeling of significance, which was not
  established during child development.[3] However, NPD persons are
  apprehensive of meeting self-object absence as an adult.[4] In order
  to feel the control of their fate, NPD persons present a mindset of
  dominance in the interpersonal sphere. As a result of this
  authoritarian manner, persons with NPD typically have a record of
  numerous unsuccessful relationships.[4]*

  Go to: PARADOXICAL CHARACTERISTICS IN NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY
  DISORDER Thus far, this letter has acknowledged that NPD persons rely
  heavily on self-object transferences to develop a positive self-image.
  The behavioral characteristics of NPD persons reflect this need and
  are well documented.[5] However, what is paradoxical about these
  behavioral characteristics is that instead of behaving in a way to
  increase the chance of receiving self-object transferences in
  relationships, NPD individuals act in a way to reduce that possibility
  by destroying interpersonal relations.
   (So not only have we seen narcissists become depressed...they also have the propentencity to do things in relationships that sabotage them....which may then lead to this depression.)

  Glasser[6] has specified relationship building and destroying behavior
  in a grand detail in his Choice theory. “Seven Caring Habits” and
  “Seven Deadly Habits” offer superb rules for how psychotherapists
  should interact with clients to enhance the likelihood that these
  individuals use caring interpersonal habits to attain optimal mental
  health. It is evident from the literature that NPD behavioral
  characteristics reflect the “Seven Deadly Habits.”[1] Glasser's Seven
  Caring Habits are Supporting, Encouraging, Listening, Accepting,
  Trusting, Respecting, Negotiating differences and the Deadly Habits
  are Criticizing, Blaming, Complaining, Nagging, Threatening,
  Punishing, Bribing, or Rewarding to Control.

  Go to: CHOICE THEORY The writing of Kohut and advocates of
  self-psychology argue that the feeling of love, belonging, closeness,
  and connectedness with other humans are essential for individuals with
  NPD who requires self-object transferences.[7] Unfortunately, the
  pushing, demanding actions (Seven Deadly Habits or External Control
  Psychology) being used by NPD persons destroy relationships and
  therefore prevents self-object needs being met. When external control
  is used by NPD persons, it will destruct the capacity of one or both
  individuals to locate contentment, eventually resulting in severed
  relationships.[8] This interpersonal disengagement is argued to be the
  foundation for the majority of human mental illness.[6] Choice Theory
  and the Seven Caring Habits are offered to replace external control
  psychology and the Seven Deadly Habits[6] to preserve relationships
  and optimal mental health.

  External Control Psychology is an attempt to control others to act in
  a way they do not want to.[6] This ideology of a person who uses
  external control does not permit individuals outside the self to
  formulate preference about individual freedom, and advocates that
  other individuals should be punished to modify their behavior to
  attain the controllers' needs.[6] The “Deadly Habits” demolishes
  individual freedom of the oppressed individual and therefore acts to
  disconnect relationships, as freedom has been identified as one of the
  basic human needs.[6]

  Consequently, a central thesis of Choice theory is that the only
  individual one can be in command of is themselves.[6] If the
  individual believes they can command other humans, then they will
  encounter anger and irritation leading to mental illness.[6] Anger,
  irritation, and mental illness will also arise if the individual
  believes that other humans can command them and then externalizes
  blame to the perceived controller for undesirable events.[6] For that
  reason, it is vital for the NPD individual to focus on internal
  control of their own choices and to value the rights of other people
  who have their own needs.[6]

  In conclusion, it is important that the caring habits be taught to the
  NPD client, once a therapist has identified an individual with strong
  self-object needs and who meets the criteria for NPD. Using Choice
  theory, the psychotherapist directs an individual toward fulfilling
  interpersonal relationships and educates the person to relate in more
  helpful modes using internal control psychology.[6] The better NPD
  persons are proficient at bonding and comprehending other individual
  needs, the better prospect they possess to receive positive
  self-object transferences and happiness.

  Go to: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to Amy-lee Weisse for constructive
  discussion and invaluable guidance.

  Go to: REFERENCES
  1. Millon T, Millon CM, Meagher S. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons; 2012. The Narcissistic Personality. Personality Disorders in
  Modern Life; p. 330.
  2. Kohut H. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2011. Introductory Considerations. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the
  Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders; p. 1.
  3. Banai E, Mikulincer M, Shaver PR. “Selfobject” needs in kohut's self psychology: Links with attachment, self-cohesion, affect
  regulation, and adjustment. Psychoanal Psychol. 2005;22:224–60.
  4. McLean J. Psychotherapy with a Narcissistic Patient Using Kohut's Self Psychology Model. Psychiatry. 2007;4:40–47. [PMC free article]
  [PubMed]
  5. Silverstein ML. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; 2007. Narcissitic Personality Disorder, Disorders of the Self: A Personality-Guided Approach; p. 27.
  6. Glasser Bloomington: IUniverse; 2011. Replacing External Control With The New Choice Theory Psychology. Take Charge of Your Life: How
  to Get What You Need with Choice-Theory Psychology; p. 8.
  7. Strack Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons; 2005. Self Psychological Foundations of Personality Disorders. Handbook of
  Personology and Psychopathology; p. 181.
  8. Glasser , Glasser New York: Harper Collins; 2007. External Control Can Kill a Marriage. Eight Lessons for a Happier Marriage; p. 11.
  Linkback here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662146/

So, it looks like there's alot of stuff going on with Narcissists.  Or what they call "NPD."

As for my conclusions:

NPD or (Perceived NPD) or actually scientists are still trying to figure it out I'm going to put into three categories that even have subcategories.

1)  Being the center of attention and always getting what you wanted
while growing up...only to realize when it times come to get a job
that doesn't exist anymore - which can admittedly be a difficult
shift for someone to have to make.  This could also stem from
derivatives of this.  Obviously would say psychopathology here and environmental    influencers are important players.**
The affects of this seem to appear as relationship issues mostly - as
they have developed a certain "expectation for this or that" which
puts stress on their mate....whom then eventually leaves
them....which then causes them to be a depressed narcissist.  This
cycle also seems to repeat itself although methods are suggested to
help treat a patient with this disorder in the last piece of
literature.

2)  Genuinely having some subtype of NPD that is more than just psychopathologically based.
This goes back to that 2nd study where they were trying to identify the subtypes for the DSM definition.  These adjectives don't seem to describe someone who would necessarily fit into category #1, although they partially seem to discribe someone who would fit into my 3rd category - someone who is simply bipolar and has a "narcissistic mania."  And yes, I just made that medical diagnosis up.

Q-Type Analysis (the authors labeled these as the three subtypes):

grandiose/malignant
fragile
high-functioning/exhibitionistic

Core features of the disorder (NPD)

included interpersonal vulnerability and underlying emotional
distress, along with anger
difficulty in regulating affect
interpersonal competitiveness

So I actually don't really believe many #1's would fit into this #2 category I have set up due to the lack of focus on problems in certain types of relationships (they mention interpersonal failures...but not as directly).

I'd say these are most likely people with a true "NPD" pathology - with  a couple bipolar's mixed in depending upon if their methodologies were very affective at weeding them out and since it's a Q-type analysis...I'd feel somewhat unconfident about that.

3)  Someone who is bipolar and when they have their manic episode, they become narcissistic.  Obviously they'd go up and down and have all sorts of fun problems.

Answer to your question:

They can be both, either/or, have it depend upon things like interpersonal issues because they feel like the world owes them something. Apparently the pathology of narcissism is a very complex thing to figure out or put any sort of hard and fast label on.  It could be caused by one's psychology from how they were raised or a genuine mental disorder of a physiological kind. There's also problems with distinguishing it from bipolar disorder (although I'd say if someone had bipolar disorder then they'd probably know it).


What is the name of the concept in psychology that makes requirements hard to articulate? One of my teachers in Computer Science explained this idea about requirements:

  Product owners don't know what they want, they need a feedback loop of requirements gathering to push them to say precisely what the requirements should be.

I know there are plenty of exceptions to this, but in my experience this has been generally true.

He explained that it was related to an idea in psychology.

My question is: What is the name of the concept in psychology that makes requirements hard to articulate?

I think the concept you are looking for is Tacit Knowledge (aslo known as implicit knowledge).

The main reason that users cannot articulate what they want, is that they do not have any conscious access to the knowledge they have acquired over the many years of practice. That’s why an iterative process is needed to bring the tacit knowledge on users awareness, so that they can articulate it.

Definition from wikipedia :

  Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge)
  is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another
  person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example,
  stating to someone that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of
  explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and
  understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language,
  knead dough, use algebra, or design and use complex equipment
  requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly,
  even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to
  explicitly transfer to other users.


Are there any pragmatic uses of hallucinogens? Hallucinogens (psilocybin, LSD and others) are often regarded as risky substances, therefore they are banned in most places.

Are there ways of using these substances that can be beneficial?
Or in other words can a hallucination, or a set of hallucinations, have a positive value?

Hallucinogens play an important psycho-social role in many societies. Their positive impact seem to be primarily religious (see Tripping the Way to God: Hallucinogens and Religion).
However they do play an important role in the lab inducing a state similar to psychosis. They also play a limited role in psychiatry.
Psychedelic psychotherapy as the name suggested is the combination of hallucinogens with a form of psychotherapy. It is not widely practiced.
Research into cannabidiol], a cannabis constituent with anti-psychotic properties instead of the typical high anxiety and psychosis symptoms, has been published; see  "Cannabidiol, a Cannabis sativa constituent, as an antipsychotic drug" by Zuardi et al, 2006.
Eli Lilly tried to make a drug based on these glutamate receptors interactions called LY2140023. It was shown to be ineffective by itself.
Many hallucinogens are used for alternative primary purpose like benadryl and nitrous oxide (laughing gas).


Can scientific evidence support concepts of the soul? In some spiritual premises, the soul is said to belong to the Almighty.

Religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism) all talk about cleansing our inner being because only when it's pure, its actual purpose is served.

But modern science gives evidence that most of the sentiments have a neurological or psychological or physical basis.

Then does this narrow down the concept of the soul (if science opines that it exists at all) to just the element within us that binds all life together?

There are some beliefs that stem out of the concept of soul:

Soul decides who we love (our soul mates)
Soul guides us when we are stuck in deciding whether something is moral or immoral
Soul is essentially linked to how we live our life

E.g., goodness cleanses our soul, and hatred sullies the soul, and so on.

Do such beliefs have any relevance in the scientific world where everything good or bad is more or less a hormone or environmental adaptation or some other scientific phenomenon?

Do any scientific theories support the existence of a higher form of sacred energy, i.e. soul within us that guides us to a more meaningful existence?

[Edit]: Parts of this answer respond to removed content in older versions of the OP, and to comments. The current version of the OP deserves some elaboration of this answer. (And, IMHO, other answers too!)
There are other spiritual "worlds" than those that are dualistic. By common psychological definitions of spirituality, the existence of an "ethereal soul" is not a definitional belief. That is not to say the "spiritual world[s]" to which you're referring are invalid—only that spirituality does not necessarily require belief in anything supernatural or unobservable. Psychological theory on spirituality is quite diffuse itself; in my own study of it (it's among my top five research interests!), I've found it hard to really limit what kinds of belief systems qualify as spiritual, except in as much as they entail some sense of self-transcendence, interconnectedness among identities of discrete beings, or at least an opposition to reductionistic or nihilistic systems that ascribe mundanity or emptiness to phenomena in general.
This is not to say that spirituality itself (i.e., spiritual beliefs) can't be studied scientifically either; in fact, some admirable progress has been made in defining a measurable set of dimensions by which spiritual beliefs can be assessed and compared at the individual level. Ralph Piedmont, with whom one of my former labmates has worked directly, has made a lot of this progress himself, so I'd recommend checking out some of his work to get a sense of what research on spirituality is like in the professional psychological community. He's even proposed spirituality as a "sixth major dimension of personality" that belongs in the same general domain of individual differences in personality traits as the Big Five Factor Model, and he's reported success in generalizing his operationalization of spirituality cross-culturally (Piedmont, 1999, 2007; Piedmont & Leach, 2002).
As I responded to your comment, "The oneness that we all share on accord of having the same Godly element within us" is also not a definitional belief in all forms of spirituality. You'll see this if you consider Piedmont's definition of spirituality (and don't find it too vague to be valid). Here's a brief quote from Piedmont (2007) that I think sums it up about as succinctly as any other quote from him that I've seen:

To capture a broad-based aspect of spirituality that would be nondenominational in nature, Piedmont (1999)...Working from a trait perspective for construing spirituality...operationalized spirituality as a motivational drive directed towards creating personal meaning for one’s life. Three correlated subscales were identified: Universality, a belief in the unitive nature of life; Prayer Fulfillment, a feeling of joy and contentment that results from personal encounters with a transcendent reality; and Connectedness, a belief that one is part of a larger human reality that cuts across generations and groups.

If you look further into his work, you may note that the "unitive nature of life" is not required of all forms of spirituality. Universality is measured as one of three dimensional aspects, any one of which may be sufficient alone to qualify a belief system as spiritual (or at least, not completely non-spiritual) wherever present. Nor does Universality necessarily involve the existence of any "Godly element" anywhere. Even to whatever extent people believe we share oneness through having any of the same elements we have within us, Connectedness does not necessarily involve anything supernatural; definitionally (as in the above quote), it does not involve much more than "a larger human reality."
For reasons such as these, it is necessary that you narrow down the concept of a soul before it can find any scientific support. Consider your statement, "Everything that we feel or do or think is attributed to our soul." This conflicts with most folk and religious concepts of a soul with which I am familiar, at least when taken literally (your intended meaning may be necessary to specify here as well, if you didn't mean this literally). Most concepts of a soul do entail some amount of dualistic belief, whereby some feelings/thoughts are attributed not to the soul, but to the brain, mind, or body. (Even these three entities are not necessarily the same thing either, depending on whom you're talking to!) This lack of consensus on basic, crucial definitions is partly what makes the issue so difficult to separate the scientific issue from philosophical or religious issues.
If you can narrow it down, we might get somewhere, if only (I'd bet) to conclude that your definition of an ethereal soul is fundamentally inaccessible to empirical science for lack of measurability or falsifiability. Without narrowing down the concept of what would qualify as a soul more specifically than you have in your question, I suspect someone could come up with an equivalently strong counterargument to any scientific support one could give for an ethereal soul, so long as ethereal means unobservable and unknowable in some sense.
[Edit]:
One complication that remains in the updated OP so far is that biological, cognitive, or social explanations of sentiments don't necessarily preclude a loosely defined "soul" from adding explanatory power. These three kinds of scientific explanations often work together (and may not even be distinct from one another, ultimately) in our models of behavior, emotion, and cognition; I'd say there's still plenty of room for more explanatory factors. The hard part is finding others that actually provide falsifiable explanatory power in ways that existing scientific theories haven't covered already. I'm unaware of any way of measuring unique, useful information about the soul, so I'd say the prospect of doing so is pretty dismal, even though I can't rule it out entirely (and I don't see how others could either).
In your examples of soul-relevant beliefs, I think this becomes even clearer. Each may deserve its own separate question and answers, but I'll respond very briefly to each here to help you decide whether you want to pursue them.
First, the soul mate concept is very loosely defined itself, and most plausible folk concepts don't seem universally applicable. Lots of research has examined romantic attraction and long-term commitment, and some very mundane factors (e.g., proximity, children) have a lot more influence than one might expect if people were routinely finding their soul mates in an idealized sense. Somewhat mundane factors like communication skills, shared values, and physical attraction seem to play predominant roles even in a more limited, rare sense of "true love". There's surely more to it, but good luck improving any statistical models with a soul concept.
Second and third, the soul may ultimately be little more than a popular metaphor and folk concept of a person's ethical systems, impulse regulation, and psychological well-being. It certainly may not too, because it refers to something supernatural and apparently unfalsifiable; i.e., there may be much more to the soul than we'll ever know in this life (regardless of whether there are other lives). In either case, the challenge remains to distinguish the soul's role in moral behavior from the roles of factors that fall within the scope of scientific research, such as attitudes, values, and other cognitive processes for decision-making, impulse regulation, and internal conflict resolution. Similarly, consequences for the soul that people might be able to detect seem very hard to distinguish from purely secular consequences for well-being.
However, again, the idea of souls is useful to study scientifically as a belief and social construct regardless of whether souls exist independently of culture. Plenty of research examines the relationship between religiousness and well-being in general, and some even considers the specific relationship between religiousness and the experience of meaning in life. Thanks in part to my own research efforts as an undergraduate, there's even one published study out there that reports the specific relationship between self-reported meaning in life and belief in an afterlife ($r=.32, p<.01$; Steger et al., 2010). That's the best empirical evidence of which I'm aware so far that belief in a dualistic soul relates to the subjective meaningfulness of existence.
References
Piedmont, R. L. (1999). Does Spirituality Represent the Sixth Factor of Personality? Spiritual Transcendence and the Five‐Factor Model. Journal of Personality, 67(6), 985–1013. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-6494.00080/abstract.
Piedmont, R. L. (2007). Cross-cultural generalizability of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale to the Philippines: Spirituality as a human universal. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 10(2), 89–107. Available online, URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232602191_Spirituality_and_religiosity_as_cross-cultural_aspects_of_human_experience/file/32bfe50d10210133de.pdf.
Piedmont, R. L., & Leach, M. M. (2002). Cross-cultural generalizability of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale in India: Spirituality as a universal aspect of human experience. American Behavioral Scientist, 45(12), 1888–1901. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/45/12/1888.short.
Steger, M. F., Pickering, N. K., Adams, E., Burnett, J., Shin, J. Y., Dik, B. J., & Stauner, N. (2010). The quest for meaning: Religious affiliation differences in the correlates of religious quest and search for meaning in life. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2(4), 206–226.


How is the Stanford Prison Experiment connected to Conformity? I am still not very clear with what the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Zimbardo was trying to conclude about from the experiment.

From Wikipedia, it says the conclusion was to:

  demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when
  provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional
  support. The experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive
  dissonance theory and the power of authority.

How does this have any relation or impact on the Conformity theory?

I know that the experiments by Sherif and Asch have concluded the theory of Conformity quite clearly. The Zimbardo's one however seems somewhat implicit. The notes that I read seem to put the Stanford Prison experiment right after the ones by Sherif and Asch. So I believe it should have some relation with the Conformity theory. But I cannot see clearly how is it related to the Conformity theory, particularly in the context of Communications.

Zimbardo himself states that both informative and normative conformity played an important role in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

  Source: http://www.lucifereffect.com/guide_conform.htm

  [...] Informative conformity often occurs in situations in which there is high uncertainty and ambiguity. In an unfamiliar situation, we are likely to shape our behavior to match that of others. The actions of others inform us of the customs and accepted practices in a situation. Others inform us of what is right to do, how to behave in new situations.

  In addition to conforming to the group norms due to lack of knowledge, we also conform when we want to be liked by the group. This type of conformity, called normative conformity, is the dominant form of social conformity when we are concerned about making a good impression in front of a group. Though we may disagree secretly with the group opinion, we may verbally adopt the group stance so that we seem like a team player rather than a deviant.

  Both of these pressures impact us everyday, for good or for worse. [...]
  Similarly, in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the subjects who were randomly assigned as guards gradually adopted the behavior of cruel and demanding prison guards because that became the behavioral norm in an alien situation.


What evidence is there for a correlation between being tightly focused on a problem and only using one part of your brain? I've seen people tightly focused on a problem, in a state of 'flow' and when you break out of it there seems to be a couple of seconds of confusion when they adjust to the circumstances at hand. It is almost as if there is only blood flow, or electrical activity to one part of the brain, and other parts of the brain are dormant.

Sometimes I see this with people who are doing computer programming and drinking coffee.

My question is: What evidence is there for a correlation between being tightly focused on a problem and only using one part of your brain?

You may find some explanation from the research done for attention. In the most famous experiment done by Simon and Chabris 1999 (see video), participants inhibited irrelevant information that was not related to the task of counting passes.

When you are performing a task, you pay attention to what is relevant to the task, and inhibit irrelevant internal and external distractions. The more focused you are the more inhibitions occurs. The degree of focus you devote to a task depends from the difficulty of the task and the engagement you have for it.

Programming is a very highly demanding task and usually programmers are very passionate about it. So programming is a very focused task, thus everything unrelated to the task of programming is inhibited. When you do programming, you inhibit information like where you are, who else is in the room, hunger signals (I know programmer who forget to go to lunch) etc. When you are interrupted you need some time to re-activate all those things that have been inhibited.


Any research on right-hand/left-hand based preferences when interacting with an interface? My original question is "Left or right placement of interactive elements on a web page", but only now did I find a place where I think I can find the right people to understand it.

The gist is: is there any natural inclination in right-handed people, when reading a web page, for example, to prefer those interface elements which lead to actions (e.g. "print", "save", "get a link", etc.) to be placed on the right side of the screen and then, to prefer navigational elements (e.g. menus, especially tree-structured category menus) to be placed on the left side, while the preference for content for reading would be in the middle?

That is: navigation (reference stuff) on the left, content (passive perception stuff) in the middle, action elements on the right, all in this manner because of a potential instinct to reach for anything action related with one's right hand.

Is there any research or at least speculation on the subject?

And a follow-up question: if there is such an inclination does it appear to be reverse in left-handed people?

update:
- similar question asked here: http://www.quora.com/Are-right-handers-more-likely-to-rest-their-cursor-pointer-on-the-right-hand-side-of-the-screen

There is indeed some research on handedness and user interfaces but not exactly at the level you seem to be after. Handedness matters for tablet interfaces, hand occlusion is a particular concern there.

Some references: http://hal.inria.fr/hal-00670516/en and http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.89.4546

Speculating myself a little bit, I would however be careful when drawing practical conclusions from any putative “natural” handedness-related inclination. Maybe there is such a thing and it could conceivably be measured but you need much more than that to justify any UI decision.

In particular, cultural factors (in a broad sense, including web and platform conventions) could just as well play a big role. The usability literature has always emphasized consistency and the fact that your interface is just going to be one of many interfaces with which users are regularly interacting so when in doubt always try to follow common practice, not necessarily because it is better as such but simply to avoid confusing your users. In any case, there is no reason to worry specifically about “natural” inclinations (as opposed to learned ones).


The psychology of humility. Why do we not value our efforts? This question has crossed my mind a few times, and quite recently on reflection it came up again.

Why is it that we rarely value the worth of our efforts?

By this I mean, why do people often have difficulty in valuing their own work, contributions, sacrifices and in many cases, themselves. Yet, many are quick to praise similar work, contributions and sacrifices of others.

An example is that I don't see my work as a teacher as being of any value, I am not really fussed about my PhD and the published papers,  don't accept compliments well, and even (as some may have noticed) don't feel that I am a particularly good contributor here or on my other SE sites, and as for my own self-value, I literally don't think about it.  But will seek to praise others on their good work etc (note, this is strictly an example)

According to this article, jealousy may cause a person to view themselves more as the person he is jealous of. So if you work hard, write great papers, etc. you may be jealous of another person who has similar attributes. Thus you would view yourself more like him.

Also in social comparison theory there is the idea of upward and downward social comparisons. If you compare yourself to someone who similar to yourself or more "fortunate" than yourself, you will feel bad. On the other hand, if you compare yourself to someone who is less fortunate than yourself you will feel good. This is why facebook often makes people feel bad about themselves. They see people with trip photos and smiling photos and compare that to their "boring" lives.

Source

Changing Me to Keep You
State Jealousy Promotes Perceiving Similarity Between the Self and a Romantic Rival


Is cognitive science a concentration of psychology? Is cognitive science apart of psychology? If I major in psychology, will it be easy for me to be a cognitive scientist?

It's the other way around: Psychology is a discipline within Cognitive Science, which includes Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, and possibly Philosophy of Mind.  Research work in Psychology presumably makes you a Cognitive Scientist.


Mismatch negativity vs. mismatch response MMN x MMR - mismatch negativity versus mismatch response:

How are the concepts related and what is the difference between them?

MMN/MMR refer to responses during an oddball paradigm. The typical arrangement of this sort of paradigm is to have a sequence of stimuli, for example, a sequence of tones of one frequency, followed by either the same tone (standard) or a different tone (oddball).

For EEG, they are the same thing. Mismatch negativity is a particular response in the EEG observed as the difference in response to an "oddball" compared to the same stimulus when it is a standard.

"Mismatch response" is a more general term that would include, for example, an increase (or simply a change) in neuronal firing in response to the oddball vs. standard, or a change in functional connectivity, etc.


Is satisficing conceptualised as being unconscious/automatic, or conscious/volitional? I haven't found anything that speaks directly to this question, but here is the account Simon (1990) p9 provides of satisficing

  If the task domain has little structure or the structure is unknown to
  us, we apply so-called "weak methods," which experience has shown to
  be useful in many domains, but which may still require us to search a
  good deal. One weak method is satisficing--using experience to
  construct an expectation of how good a solution we might reasonably
  achieve, and halting search as soon as a solution is reached that
  meets the expectation.

Simon, H. A. (1990). Invariants of human behavior. Annual review of psychology, 41(1), 1-20.

Satisficing is goal directed and satisficers intend to achieve satisfactory results. Therefore, satisficing seems to involve conscious choices being made.

However, in Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), unconscious thought produces superior decisions compared to conscious thought when decision making is complex and there are paragraphs of Nelson and Winter (1982) that indicate that satisficing can be achieved from a sequence of mechanical, automatic steps of rule following.

Therefore looking at both H.A. Simon's conception and the findings from Nelson and Winter, satisficing can be either conscious or unconscious.