Is the split-brain, dual consciousness experiment from Rhawn Joseph valid? I have been reading about the problem of possible dual consciousness in split brain patients and  I came across this wikipedia page.

In the "other experiments" section, the two last paragraphs about Joseph's experiments seemed extremely simplistic, too obvious to be true. The way they are described and how groundbreaking it would be if true: two consciousness living in one brain and fighting with each other.
So I decided to google the name of this Jospeh Rhawn. You should judge by yourself:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Rhawn_Joseph
is the first link showing up. It is clearly a crackpot. Although he managed to get published how can you trust this guy about the split brain experiments? After reading a lot about the subject I thought they were extremely weird.
Any expert who could give an advice about the experiments and the guy?

Short answer
On the basis of a cursory literature review, I conclude that Jospeh's observations were correct, but his conclusions that a callosotomy can result in a dual consciousness were far stretched.

Background
First off, I'm not an expert on this topic, but I will give my referenced opinion anyway, as there is no answer yet to this question; Below are quoted the two sections from the wiki Dual consciousness (neuroscience), as linked in the question:

  Rhawn Joseph observed two patients who had both undergone a complete corpus callosotomy. Joseph observed that one of the patient’s right hemisphere is able to gather, comprehend, and express information. The right hemisphere was able to direct activity to the patient’s left arm and leg. The execution of the left arm and leg's action as was inhibited by the left hemisphere. Joseph found that the patient’s left leg would attempt to move forward as if to walk straight but the right leg would either refuse move or begin to walk in the opposite direction. After observing the struggles of the execution of activities involving the left and right arms and legs, led Joseph to believe that the two hemispheres possessed their own consciousness.[16]

  Joseph also noted that the patient had other specific instances of
  conflict between the right and left hemispheres including, the left
  hand (right hemisphere) carrying out actions contrary to the left
  hemisphere's motives such as the left hand turning off the television
  immediately after the right hand turned it on. Joseph found that the
  patient’s left leg would only allow the patient to return home when
  the patient was going for a walk and would reject continuing to go for
  that walk.

First thing to note - he describes two patients and only one of them is highlighted on the wiki; hence, this is a case report (Joseph, 1988). Case reports can't control for any other personal characteristics of that one patient. Such anecdotal reports are important, but they may not be a reflection of the population as a whole (i.e., people with a transected corpus callosum).

Secondly, the term 'consciousness' is a loosely defined and debated one. Similarly, the 'mind' is a broad and ill-defined term.

Then you proceed to scrutinize his work as based on his unconventional beliefs on the origin of life as based on a rational wiki page. Although his ideas on this may be unconventional, that doesn't mean he has reported flawed observations during his professional career as a neuropsychologist.

However, and I quote a part of the Discussion section of Joseph (1988) where he describes anecdotal behaviors of 2-C:

  [He] became angry with his left hand, swore and expressed "hate" for it, struck his left hand/arm with his right hand, and engaged in physical struggles with his left extremity, the right attempting to force the left to comply with some particular activity or to cease to act in a manner that the left hemisphere found objectionable or annoying. [...] In general, these findings indicate that the isolated right cerebral hemisphere of 2-C was able to understand and follow certain simple verbal commands, obtain and maintain knowledge [...], as well as respond, make decisions and act purposefully- even when his left hemisphere had no idea as to what information the right possessed and why it was behaving in a particular manner. Given the differential behavioral observations with regard to the activity and responsiveness of the left half of their bodies, it appears that 2-C (unlike 1-C) is possessed of two minds, one of which resides within the right, the other within the left cerebral hemisphere. Nevertheless, it appears that 2-C's left hemisphere remains predominant in regard to most expressive activities.

The bold text is probably what fueled the wiki article. To me, personally, the 'hatred' and frustration of C-2 is easily explained by the loss of body control. Who wouldn't feel frustration and resentment to that side of the body?

Indeed, a paper by Andrew & Akelaitis (1945) explains a similar behavior by their (partial-)split-brain patients with diagnostic dyspraxia. These authors explain the phenomenon not by a dualistic consciousness, but 'simply' by an unbalanced inhibitory influence of the dominant hemisphere over the non-dominant side. This decreased inhibitory control was hypothesized to lead to the uncoordinated behavior on the non-dominant side. These symptoms generally diminish over time, as the brain deploys alternative inter-hemispheric routing of communications. This sounds more plausible to me.

Lastly, there is a a publication that coins it "alien hand syndrome" (Feinberg et al., 1992). They too, ascribe the phenomenon by a disturbed inhibitory interhemispheric control, and I quote:

  Callosal AHS [alien hand syndrome] is best explained by hemispheric disconnection manifested during behaviors requiring dominant-hemisphere control.

So I conclude form this quick literature review that Joseph ascribes the presence of two minds based on something that can be explained at a more basic level, and hence by a more simple model, namely disinhibited motor control. Given the principle of parsimony, I conclude his observations were right, but that his conclusions were not.

References
- Andrew & Akelaitis (1945) Am J Psychiatr; 101(5): 594-9
- Feinberg et al., Neurology (1992); 42: 19-24
- Joseph, J Clin Psychol (1988); 44(5): 770-9


What is the current state of SAD treatment according to research? Seasonal Affective disorder SAD affects many people moods during seasons when the sun is less prevalent, myself no included. What is the current state of SAD treatment options according to published research?

Coming from the North, I'm most familiar with light treatments, where patients get on a regular schedule exposing themselves to a bright light every day.  Folklore in the North is that it needs to have high reds and blues like the spectrum of the sun;  I haven't read the papers in detail, so I don't know if that's true, but light therapy has been effective in small trials:

Preliminary studies in 11 patients suggest that extending the photoperiod with bright artificial light has an antidepressant effect.

Both morning and evening light therapy improved depressive symptoms in patients (of 30) with SAD independent of their circadian phase or sleep timing.

Several patients (of 13) were able to maintain the antidepressant response throughout the winter months by continuing daily light treatments.


Why does sensory deprivation cause hallucinations? John C. Lilly performed the seminal experiment about sensory deprivation. The author isolated people in a sensory deprivation tank and they reported having experienced hallucinations.

Richard Feyman reported about his own experiences with isolation tanks in the collection of essays Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

I am curious about the reason of this effect. If we are deprived of our senses (being perfectly sane and without drugs), why do we start to hallucinate? What happens inside our brains?

According to the article The Brain’s Voices: Comparing Nonclinical Auditory Hallucinations and Imagery (Linden et al. 2011):

  Spontaneous activation of sensory areas (Hunter et al. 2006) has been described in cases of sensory deprivation or during epileptic seizures. Local spontaneous activity may underlie certain types of hallucinations, for example, visual hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome (Ffytche 2005) and possibly imagery of music without lyrics (Kraemer et al. 2005).

An example, from Neural activity in speech-sensitive auditory cortex during silence (Hunter et al. 2006) states that the auditory cortex has a propensity to spontaneously “activate” during silence.  Specifically, from their study

  suggest that, within auditory regions, endogenous activity is modulated by anterior cingulate cortex, resulting in spontaneous activation during silence. Hence, an aspect of the brain's “default mode” resembles a (preprepared) substrate for the development of auditory hallucinations. These observations may help explain why such hallucinations are ubiquitous.

In the article Visual hallucinations in psychologically normal people: Charles Bonnet syndrome (Teunisse et al. 1996), states that this syndrome, where healthy people can experience visual hallucinations undergoing sensor deprivation, is more common than first realised, their study suggests that under conditions of sensory-deprivation, the slightest amount of arousal triggered the hallucinations.

This is discussed further in Spontaneous and driven cortical activity: implications for computation (Ringach, 2009), where their study suggests

  the lack of a stimulus generates a weak feedforward drive and the cortical state is determined largely by its own intrinsic dynamics and top-down expectations. This explains why spontaneous activity is not noise. Further, if the attractor has been shaped (via evolution or developmental rules) to represent the manifold of natural signals, it is easy to see how sensory deprivation or weak input can lead to “hallucinations” during deprivation

Additional references:

Ffytche D, Visual hallucinations and the Charles Bonnet syndrome. Curr Psychiatry Rep 2005;7:168-179.

Kraemer D,
Macrae C,
Green A,
Kelley W
. Musical imagery: sound of silence activates auditory cortex. Nature 2005;434:158.


Why do larger animals need bigger brains? For example, we can assume that the average house cat is equally intelligent as the average tiger. The average tiger is about 100 times heavier than the average house cat. But its brain is also bigger than the house cat's brain. Since the tiger isn't any more intelligent than the average house cat, why does it need a bigger brain?

Brain size isn't necessarily a determinant of intelligence. That notion was a  assumption of neuroscientists of the past, a speculation that lead to many problematic socio-psychological projections.
The size difference of brains might simply match the morphology of the species, but sometimes it doesn't scale so evenly, as with crocodiles, whose brains remain roughly the same size their whole lives even as their bodies grow. I personally wonder if this relates to the hypothesis that brains evolved to meet the need for movement (the "moving hypothesis").
Often larger animals have larger brains to fit their morphology, but they don't necessarily have more neurons. Having more neurons might be the reason for the greater intelligence (or, perhaps a better phrasing, greater cognitive flexibility) of species like Homo sapiens. This hypothesis is explained in detail in Suzana Herculano-Houzel's paper "Brains matter, bodies maybe not: The case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/herculano-houzel-2011-anyas/


Does denying climate change work similar to believing the earth is flat? I have a vague idea how believing in a flat earth may work. (Not enough to write it down)

But it still irritates me that an appreciable fraction of the general population in the US deny that climate change is caused mainly by human influences. Even more so as it seems to be a fraction large enough to be politically relevant.

I see that this question has a strong political connotation, which is opinion based. But that is not part of the question.

It is somehow culture-related, as it's different in Europe, at least in Germany.

I would expect it is a fringe group like people assuming a flat earth.
There is a related, but different kind of group. People denying that the Holocaust happened. This has a strong political association to extreme right groups.

Is assuming flat earth and denying climate change the same kind of phenomenon?

There is serious work on this, despite it being a political minefield. You're probably looking for Lewandowsky, et al. (2015).
If you want to get some distance from the issues of the day (and associated name calling) and into the mechanisms that drive this sort of phenomenon in general you might get more joy out of something like Cook & Lewandowsky (2016).
That will bring you into stuff like Hahn, et al. (2018). That's not directly political at all, but I think the relevance to your question is pretty strong. This is one of those fields that is exploding thanks to ever-better desktop computing, there's a ton of stuff that hasn't been tried yet! Hope you have some fun with it.
References
Cook, J., & Lewandowsky, S. (2016). Rational irrationality: Modeling climate change belief polarization using Bayesian networks. Topics in cognitive science, 8(1), 160-179. doi: 10.1111/tops.12186
Hahn, U., Hansen, J. U., & Olsson, E. J. (2018). Truth tracking performance of social networks: how connectivity and clustering can make groups less competent. Synthese, 1-31. doi: 10.1007/s11229-018-01936-6
Lewandowsky, S., Gignac, G. E., & Oberauer, K. (2015). The robust relationship between conspiracism and denial of (climate) science. Psychological Science, 26(5), 667-670. doi: 10.1177/0956797614568432


Is there evidence that listening to music can aid/hinder concentration or performance? I, like many computer programmers, love to listen to music while I work. I have always believed that music helps me stay focused and motivated, and improves my performance on many types of tasks, espescially "busywork". However my company's CEO disagrees with me, and believes that music is a distraction and leads to reduced productivity. Have any studies been done on whether listening to music while performing a task improves or hinders one's ability to perform that task? Is there a consensus in the cognitive science community regarding this?

It basically depends on how the particular musical performance is perceived by the listener. Cognitive process of listening seems to be comprise several layers, which follows a bottom-up direction.

First step is to decode relevant signal(s), among a complex package of sound. This is where the irrelevant noise is eliminated. Can music be eliminated in this level? Highly unlikely, but still possible. I do not know of a particular experiment but when the music is being played in a far destination, or with a low volume, or if the participant is highly concentrated to the task; then it may be eliminated in this step. But the key point in this step is that the term "noise" refers to aperiodic background sounds. Therefore, my first impression is that music, being periodical, must decrease the task performance. Cutler and Clifton (1999)
gives an overview on the entire listening process. Second step is the grouping of different sound sources. There is also modelling studies that aims to explain this phenomenon (Bregman, 1990). Steps in listening continues further, but those steps are beyond the scope of this question.

But there are other studies also. Ylias and Heaven (2003) showed that the background noise negatively effects reading comprehension. So far so good. Cassidy and MacDonald (2007) showed that task performance on silence is greater than in low arousal music, and that is greater than noise, and that is even greater than high arousal music conditions. This is interesting, because it now introduces the affective state of the listener into the equation, which makes it a lot more difficult to handle. Another result is that the effect of the noise here is comparable to the effect of background music. But we have to note that the details of the noise in this experiment is not given in detail, only commented as "the everyday noise". It would be more conclusive if we just know whether it is the background sound of a television (periodic) or a traffic noise (aperiodic).

Combining these references, I cannot easily conclude that music is taken as a "noise". It seems that music reduces the task performance, by negatively affecting a later step in the listening process.

Ending note: There are several semiformal-informal studies on the web also. They study directly the "work/office performance", therefore I must say that they lack a little bit of a controlled environment. In such environments we can even confidently say that music improves our performance in particular situations. But what we miss is that office environments comprise several unhandled parameters that makes it hard for scientific experimental setup (i.e. listening music may improve the performance if your office mates chit chat next to you).

Ending note 2: I was interested in this topic a time ago. So I welcome more recent references or comments.

Cutler, A., & Clifton, C. (1999). Comprehending spoken language: A blueprint of the listener. The neurocognition of language, 123-166.
Bregman, A. S. (1984, July). Auditory scene analysis. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 168-175).
Ylias, G., & Heaven, P. C. (2003). The influence of distraction on reading comprehension: a Big Five analysis. Personality and individual differences, 34(6), 1069-1079.
Cassidy, G., & MacDonald, R. A. (2007). The effect of background music and background noise on the task performance of introverts and extraverts. Psychology of Music, 35(3), 517-537.


Studies modelling learning curves of an overall task and subtasks Background

Lee and Anderson (2001) published an article in which they argued  that learning a complex skill can be understood in terms of learning various component skills. They did this by performing a hierarchical task analysis on the Kanfer-Ackerman Air Traffic Control Task.
They then re-analysed a dataset where participants performed the task over repeated trials. By examining key logs, they were able to extract out the speed with which overall goals were achieved (e.g., landing planes) as well as subtasks (e.g., moving planes through the hold patterns, etc.). They then analysed the relationship between practice and performance (i.e., the learning curve) for both the overall task and the subtasks. Specifically, they fit three parameter power functions.

I'm currently doing some research exploring similarities and differences between overall and subtask learning curves, and I'm keen to identify other papers that have modelled subtask and overall task performance. However, the learning and performance literature is pretty broad and crosses multiple disciplines, and thus, somewhat challenging to search. I've also tried the cited by link for the article on Google Scholar.

Question:

What, if any, other studies have been published that have modelled the relationship between both practice and subtask performance, and practice and overall task performance?

My preference is for studies where the dependent variable is task/subtask completion time, but any dependent variable representing performance would be interesting.

References

Lee, F. J. and Anderson, J. R. (2001). Does learning a complex task have
to be complex?: A study in learning decomposition. Cognitive Psychology,
42(3):267-316. FREE PDF

I've been interested in this issue from another direction, namely, in how to model the acquisition of hierarchically decomposeable behaviors of the type you describe; and how these behaviors, once acquired, can be used as 'high order primitives' to bootstrap other learning.  This is an important issue for artificial intelligence and machine learning, in particular, as a way to address the combinatorial explosion involved with learning complex tasks in realistic domains.

Barto et al. (2004) provide a nice overview that amends the standard reinforcement learning paradigm to take these hierarchical ideas into account, and includes an algorithmic implementation for a simple but non-trivial domain.  Oudeyer et al. (2007) expand on how hierarchicality can make behavior acquisition more efficient, and implement their algorithm in a robot in a developmental setting.  Botvinick et al. (2009) provide a more recent review of the state of this work, as well as an overview of possible neural correlates of some of the processes.

Taken together, these references may possibly be useful to you as dispatches from domains other than the one you're exactly interested in.  I've found such disparate formulations to be fertile sources of inspiration and synthesis.


Are there empirical studies showing that one sex is more sexually selective than the other? Initial research: I've found papers by Clark and Hatfield (1989) and Buss and Schmidt (1993) that seem to lend support to the idea of heterosexual females being more selective than heterosexual males.

Motivation: I have constructed a game theoretic model of romantic advances. Within this model, it is possible to show that certain Nash equilibria are Pareto improvements upon others depending on which sex is more selective. Thus, I'm looking for empirical evidence as to which (if any) sex is more selective

Does anyone know of any other empirical studies that support or go against the idea that heterosexual women are more selective in who they date, have sex with or have relationships than heterosexual men?

References

Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: an evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100(2), 204.

Clark, R. D., & Hatfield, E. (1989). Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 2(1), 39-55.

As noted above, evolutionary theories suggest that (heterosexual) females should be more choosy than males, because they typically invest far more resources in raising offspring (men have enough time and sperm that their genes are going to be more successful if they adopt a scattergun approach!).

A disclaimer here is that, in humans, research on sex preferences is difficult because it is mostly based on self-reported preferences, and because these are likely coloured by cultural and historical norms. However, there is significant empirical evidence that females are more choosy. Searching on google scholar for "sex differences" and "mate preference" or similar will give you lots of options. Here are a few.

Here is a study which summarises, across many cultures, some sex differences in self-reported mating preferences. As predicted by Buss and others, the authors find that across all cultures men report that they desire more sexual partners than women. This is not a small effect. They also find that men are more likely to consent to sex after a brief period of time, and that men everywhere are more likely to be seeking short-term partners.

Here is a more experimental paper where they changed the attractiveness and implied wealth of potential partners and found that men were more likely to go for short term, multi-partner strategies than women who were more likely to go for long term, committed relationships.

Of course, there are also many studies from other species, some of which show the conditions in which men become more choosy. This paper even includes a video of a female beetle trying to reject a male!

This paper proposes a mathematical model which might also be helpful. Modern models are much more nuanced about how male and female choice interact.


Difference between thoughts and sensations I am interested to know how to distinguish sensations from thoughts, according to the techniques and concepts of neuroscience and psychology. Is there an explicit distinction between them, or are there cases where the instrumental techniques and theoretical concepts fail?

Short answer
Sensations are different from thoughts and are separated in the spatial and temporal domain. The distinction between thoughts and perceptions, however, is less well defined, but can still be dealt with experimentally.

Background
A description of sensation is as follows:

  The physical process during which our sensory organs [...] respond to
  external stimuli. [...] During sensation, our sense organs are
  engaging in transduction, the conversion of one form of energy into
  another. Physical energy such as light or a sound wave is converted
  into a form of energy the brain can understand: electrical
  [impulses generated in neurons].

Sensation precedes perception, which includes the process of processing stages higher up in the brain, during which we become aware of the sensations and make sense of it all (integration).

More concisely, sensation is the detection of physical stimuli by low-level, peripheral neural processes. Perception is the processing of sensations that lead to becoming aware of the sensation, the latter mediated by higher cortical processes.

Thoughts are generated centrally in the brain, without the need for external input. So to answer your question - thoughts are generated in the central nervous system in the brain, while sensation occurs peripherally, e.g., in the eye (detection of light by the retina), skin (detection of touch by mechanoreceptors), the ear (setection of vibrations by the mechanoreceptors in the cochlea), etc. Electrophysiologically, a sensation hence will occur at an anatomically different place and will precede the activity in the brain in time. These two processes are separated both in the spatial and temporal domain. Note that thoughts can not activate peripheral sensory systems.

Perhaps you were more after the distinction between perception and thoughts? Here, the distinction becomes less well-defined, as imagery of sensory input may activate sensory brain areas in much the same way as the factual perception of a physical stimulus (e.g., Aleman et al., (2001)). For example, brain imaging studies in late-blind folks (people that lost their eye sight later in life) and even in the congenitally blind, can be complicated because of this. When brain activation is tested in a blind person using a vision aid (e.g. BrainPort) when looking at visual stimuli, the activation pattern can be dictated or compromised, because they can imagine the stimulus to be there based on early memories when they still had functional vision. Hence, the distinction between thoughts and perceptual phenomena is less distinct. Nonetheless, perceptual phenomena are preceded by sensation, while imagery is not. Hence, this causality of the former can distinguish it from the latter.

Reference
- Aleman et al., Neuroreport (2001); 12(11): 2601-4)


Has there been research on the impact of gay parents on the sexual orientation of adopted children? Disclamer: I am not interested in personal views on whether gay parenting is a good or bad thing. I would like to understand whether there has been serious research on the upbringing consequences for such children. I am a physicist so I know nothing about psychology, but I am good with numbers and their statistical interpretation so anything substantiated is very much welcome. Thank you
Gay parenting, whether official or not, is in place for now more than a generation and among the fierce debates about that topic (I am French), I tried to look for research that would bring some actual data on the comparative measurable effects of gay vs straight parenting (on the children). The point I am interested in is specifically the sexual orientation of the children (now grown-ups).
I did not find anything substantial, probably because I do not know the right literature in that field.
Is there such research?

Farr, R. H., Forssell, S. L., & Patterson, C. J. (2010). Parenting and child development in adoptive families: Does parental sexual orientation matter?. Applied Developmental Science, 14(3), 164-178. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2010.500958
Free PDF from escholarship.org

This study investigated child development and parenting in 106 families headed by 27 lesbian, 29 gay, and 50 heterosexual couples (80% White, M = 42 years) with young adopted children (41% White, M = 3 years). Parents and teachers reported that, on average, children were developing in typical ways. Measures of children's adjustment, parenting approaches, parenting stress, and couple relationship adjustment were not significantly associated with parental sexual orientation. However, several family process variables—parenting stress, parenting approaches, and couple relationship adjustment—were found to be significantly associated with children's adjustment, regardless of parental sexual orientation.

Herek, G. M. (2014). Evaluating the methodology of social science research on sexual orientation and parenting: A tale of three studies. UCDL Rev., 48, 583. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/davlr48&div=18&id=&page=
Free PDF from law.ucdavis.edu

For at least four decades, questions about the well-being of children raised by sexual minority individuals or same-sex couples have figured prominently in public debates about adoption, foster parenting, child custody and visitation, and marriage equality. Those debates have often focused on questions of law, personal values, and morality, but many have also included empirically testable assertions about the relationship (or lack thereof) between parents' sexual orientation and their children's developmental outcomes. The social science research that has empirically assessed the validity of those assertions is the focus of the present paper.

Patterson, C. J. (2017). Parents' sexual orientation and children's development. Child Development Perspectives, 11(1), 45-49.  https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12207

What if any influence does parents' sexual orientation have on children's development? Research suggests that, contrary to concerns voiced by many observers, parents' sexual orientation has little if any direct impact on children's development. Even so, some distinctive qualities of experiences in families of lesbian and gay parents have been noted, and their implications are not fully understood. Moreover, research on individual differences among families headed by lesbian mothers and gay fathers, and their possible impact on children, is still in its early phases. In this article, I provide an overview of research in this area and offer suggestions for further studies.

Stacey, J., & Biblarz, T. J. (2001). (How) does the sexual orientation of parents matter?. American Sociological Review, 159-183. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657413

Opponents of lesbian and gay parental rights claim that children with lesbigay parents are at higher risk for a variety of negative outcomes. Yet most research in psychology concludes that there are no differences in developmental outcomes between children raised by lesbigay parents and those raised by heterosexual parents. The analysis here challenges this defensive conceptual framework and analyzes how heterosexism has hampered intellectual progress in the field.


Why do views make you happy? Why does having a nice view from your window make you happy? (As in people ask for a hotel room with a nice view).

Could this be replicated by simply having a large TV screen showing a view?

What views make people the happiest/saddest?

"Nice" window views do improve well-being, but with "nice" meaning "nature" mostly:

  The most consistent finding in the literature is that people prefer natural rather than built or
  urban views from windows. Windows with views of nature were found to enhance work and well-being
  in a number of ways including increasing job satisfaction, interest value of the job, perceptions of selfproductivity,
  perceptions of physical working conditions, life satisfaction, and decreasing intention to quit
  and the recovery time of surgical patients. However, the access to a view did not improve the
  performance of students or actual productivity of office workers.

and later

  The preference of people for natural over built or urban views is one of the earliest and most consistent findings in the window literature [numerous citations].

From Kelly M. J. Farley and Jennifer A. Veitch (2001) "A Room With A View: A Review of The Effects of Windows on Work and Well-being".

And apparently art works of nature do have some effect as well, but I don't know the exact level of substitutability (beyond "real is better"):

  But perhaps the quickest and cheapest way to reap the benefits of biophilia – albeit not the most effective – is to install artworks showing natural scenes. Browning cites a 2008 study in which office workers were put in a room with closed curtains, with a garden view or with a flat-screen TV with the same dimensions and view as the window. After they received a stressor, the blood pressure and heart rate of those volunteers with the real view dropped the fastest and lowest, followed by those with the simulated view. “Both real nature and representations of nature suffice,” Browning explains, but “real is better.”

From https://www.ioshmagazine.com/article/office-wellbeing-desk-view which unfortunaltely doesn't have a references list, so I couldn't locate that study right away.

As for why people like nature better, an evolutionary theory (quoting again from Farley and Veitch) is that

  In summary, Ulrich’s (1983) psychoevolutionary theory suggests that acquiring a capacity for
  restorative responding to certain unthreatening natural contents and configurations had important
  advantages for humans during evolution. These included rapid attenuation of stress responses following
  threatening encounters, and fostering recharge of physical energy. In fact, Ulrich (1983), argued that
  modern humans are biologically prepared to quickly and readily acquire restorative responses with
  respect to unthreatening natural settings, but have no such preparedness for most urban or built contents
  and configurations.

It was criticized by others though (for incompleteness etc.), and as with many such evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, it's hard to test. And the critics propose instead:

  In contrast to Ulrich (1983) and Ulrich et al., (1991), R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan (1989) proposed
  the Attention Restoration Theory (ART) arguing that recovery from directed attention fatigue (restoration
  of effectiveness) could be accomplished by using modes of attending that required no effort. For these
  authors, James’ (1892) concept of involuntary attention partially explained the preference of many people
  for natural rather than urban views. Natural environments, they argued, are restorative because the
  involuntary attention (or fascination) they engender requires no effort on the part of the perceiver. In this way, natural scenes are advantageous to human health because they provide an opportunity for recovery
  from mental fatigue.

In fact ART proposes four factors that affect the restorative properties of a view:

  Fascination, as the ability of an environment to generate awe in people; the amount of awe can give the directed attention a rest as it appears the involuntary attention in its place. Being away, a feeling that can be in objective or subjective form, as a person can be far away from a location or let his or her mind let go from everyday life and worries. Extension [aka extent], referring to the connection between each element found in an environment; the feeling of being able to travel through the environment in order to look for information it provides to the observer. Compatibility, characteristics found in an environment that meet the preferences and goals of a person.

There is some empirical evidence that the Kaplans may be mostly correct, except for "being away" being two things actually:

  Laumann et al. (2001) found a five factor structure in their data
  gathered with the RCS, largely in line with the four factor structure as
  proposed by Kaplan and Kaplan (1989). However, the being away
  factor split into two factors: a physical component (referred to as
  novelty), and a psychological component (referred to as escape). This
  finding seems plausible, because Kaplan and Kaplan’s definition of
  being away also has two components: a physical component (being in
  different setting than usual), and a psychological component (being
  able to escape from unwanted distractions and reminders of your
  daily obligations). So, the distinction between the two being away
  components is plausible both theoretically and empirically.

This five factor model has been mostly confirmed in subsequent research, e.g. by Pals et al. (2009) but not all factors seem to come up in some contrasts; most doubt being about compatibility. And there has been further investigation from that group on how fascination actually works.


How to run "inhibition of return" experiments online? Are there online platforms for running inhibition of return experiments? I want to analyze different cultural groups and an online platform would be the only way to do so.

Yes your experiment is possible. If all you need is the cued and uncued times its easy. Users can run an online applet demo provided by psytoolkit. You can embed the applet in a survey where users can record their times. For more in detail data analysis I recommend that you roll your own based on psytoolkits model. Given how simple the experiment is even starting from scratch should be easy for a computer science undergrad with some experience in .net or another web language.


Is it possible to create artificial thoughts in a childs mind What I mean is, is it possible to create memories in a childs mind, memories which a child grows up to remember as real events, when infact those events never happened in real life?

For example:

If a child has a fear of bugs, and has never been bitten by bugs, if I keep telling the child that "bugs will never bite your arm".  If I say this phrase every single day to a child, 5 to 10 times a day for a year, what are the chances of that child having a dream that a bug comes up to the child and bites him/her on the arm?  Then when the child grows up, s/he remembers a vague memory of a bug bitting him/her which s/he thinks was a real event which happened in the passed.

Is this sort of this possible?

It's possible to instill a false memory, even a traumatic one, in an adult. Children have been known to be more susceptible to suggestion since the 19th century (Binet, 1900, 1905).

Here are some example references of memory implantation:

Porter, S., Yuille, J. C., & Lehman, D. R. (1999). The nature of real, implanted, and fabricated memories for emotional childhood events: Implications for the recovered memory debate. Law and Human Behavior, 23(5), 517-537.

Zaragoza, M. S., & Mitchell, K. J. (1996).Repeated exposure to suggestion and the creation of false memories. PsychologicalScience, 7, 294-300.

(specifically memory implantation in kids)

Loftus, E. F., Coan, J. A., & Pickrell, J. E. (1996).Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In L. Reder (Ed.), Implicit memory and metacognition (pp. 195-220). Mahwah, NJ:Erlbaum


What skills are required to build simulations of the human brain? I want to build a system that has the ability to gather data from the internet in order to build a cognitive model of the human brain. The model should be able to answer the questions required by a robot. Also, I would like to apply an AI inference engine to get more important information to the robot.

If I want to do build such a model, what "skill list" do I need? What skills would be most important? What "opensource project" might be helpful?

added:

Thank everyone who encourage me. You let me have more brave to build a human brain mind model(not brain structure).

Let me introduce myself.
I have some CS and EE background and now research on robotics area. I love cognitive science so much so I want to figure out how to let robot really have the mind like human to achieve goal more clever. Thank the hint of @Jeromy Anglim, I give a video youtube example:James and Rosie Preparing Popcorn and Sandwiches

That video shows two robot cooperate together to make a sandwich with cognitive architecture(CRAM or Cogito) based on ROS(Robot OS,ROS map,ROS Navigation Video) system. After reading their papers I found that they just using database or downloading web page instructions or using very well structured pages which are for human (ex.CYC,OpenMind Indoor Common Sense database,Semantic web,ORO,SUMO,Wikipedia,google images,germandeli).

Also I found that many free resources,any article on WWW should be most important database. The most important thing is how to build a system that can read natural language and have a model (maybe based on CRAM cognitive architecture) to understand it,because CRAM has a very good knowledge processor(KNOWROB,M. Tenorth and M. Beetz, “KnowRob — Knowledge Processing for Autonomous Personal Robots,” in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems., 2009.). If perhaps, I want to collect all linux opencourse libraries to make it more fast and robust. I also begin to take online machine learning course on stanford.

My goal is to build a human mind model can learn,have some innovation,and find intelligent solutions to dedicate itself to human society.But my first step is to find a way that robot can try to understand all kinds of data on the WWW (any data that it can't understand just warn the first 10,and ignore others), and structure them as an intelligent interaction system which can answer knowledge or skill questions which can be search on google. The most important of that system is try to use all information on the web clever with robust libraries( I don't want to reinvent wheels).

I know it is a long term project, but I loving and willing to achieve in my whole life.
Because this is an integration project and any success in that will make a big change in the world just as ROS in robotics also an integration project and very active on most top robotics research centers and in the beginning on industry now. I know My own energy is not enough for this purpose, but I can gather all the power of opensource and volunteers in the world to do it together~^^ (Now is the day which techs are really enough for this project like computer speed,WWW,advanced research papers,opensourse libraries,free opencourseware lessons,..., what a lack is a group of excellent people volunteer to make it become true to help anyone who use this project.)

Schroedingers Cat nailed a couple of important points and I need to expand it further.

I believe the important roadblock in the creation of an absolutely intelligent machine is the fact that human brain is still not decrypted. There isn't a holistic cognitive model that describes how the brain functions, reacts or take decisions. Even in case such a model is inferred, it still cannot be put into real use since human decision is based on knowledge and the environment (popularly called culture). So a machine being rational is hard to prove since human themselves cannot prove their rationality.

Technically, there are three problems

Language - Almost all programs use one or the other form of Context Free Grammar. Humans always use context while speaking.
Computationally it isn't feasible to do a simulation model similar to brain. Just assume a choice of 2 items among a set of 10 items. You have a possible 2^10 combinations. Think of 100 conditions and your computer would go into limbo.
Most of the AI engines built today are a far cry from those proposed by their forefathers. You must have read the AI: A modern approach. They are mostly built for a particular domain and aren't absolutely intelligent

And regarding your robot searching Google for the answers, its already possible by using the Google API's to search for answers but it won't fulfill your requirement. Google uses the PageRank technology for its results, which is more of a machine learning technique and is still far from true semantic search.

There's hope though. I am just in the same situation (coincidentally I have subscribed for both machine learning and natural language processing, though all courses are indefinitely postponed). I could suggest learning the following

Artificial Neural Networks
Natural Language Processing
Probabilistic Models
Unsupervised machine learning techniques
Advanced pattern discovery

I also suggest a change in your original model. Instead of searching Google to find the answers, it would be better you download the stack exchange data dump and start analyzing the patterns since those answers are given by true humans.

Feel free to ask more questions. There are more things to be questioned than to be answered in this field.


How can the aversion response be explained neurologically? If Dopamine and Dopamine D2 receptor is involved in craving, wanting and clinging towards something or incentive salience

  Dopamine is closely associated with reward-seeking behaviors, such as
  approach, consumption, and addiction.[38] Recent researches suggest
  that the firing of dopaminergic neurons is a motivational substance as
  a consequence of reward-anticipation. This hypothesis is based on the
  evidence that, when a reward is greater than expected, the firing of
  certain dopaminergic neurons increases, which consequently increases
  desire or motivation towards the reward (from dopamine on Wikipedia )

What is the opposite mechanism in humans - by which we are experiencing aversion from something?

For example, someone finds something rotten, stinky and covered in white fuzzy mold in a plastic bag. Eww! Gross! Get it away! don't touch it! Keep distance. What is neurologically responsible for the person's feeling of aversion towards an object like that?

Are there different pathways to aversion?

For example, would seeing a person who looks like a witch from fairy tales (old, ugly, rotten teeth, lots of warts, body odor) cause the same aversion response as moldy food?

I remembered that Disgust is one of the 6 major emotions and there is quite a lot written about it:

  The neural basis of disgust

  The scientific attempts to map specific emotions onto underlying
  neural substrates dates back to the first half of the 20th century.
  However, it was not until the mid-1990s when it was recognized that
  six basic emotions, including disgust, were each related to a specific
  neural structure and therefore considered to be a part of the clinical
  neurosciences.[23] Functional MRI experiments have revealed that the
  anterior insula in the brain is particularly active when experiencing
  disgust, when being exposed to offensive tastes, and when viewing
  facial expressions of disgust.[24] The research has supported that
  there are independent neural systems in the brain, each handling a
  specific basic emotion.[4] Specifically, f-MRI studies have provided
  evidence for the activation of the insula in disgust recognition, as
  well as visceral changes in disgust reactions such as the feeling of
  nausea.[4] The importance of disgust recognition and the visceral
  reaction of "feeling disgusted" is evident when considering the
  survival of organisms, and the evolutionary benefit of avoiding
  contamination.[4] [edit]


What is Attention Deficit Disorder on adults and how is it treated? Attention deficit disorder often corrupt other people's thought on the person that has ADD. The person with ADD is very forgetful, and often get agitated easily. Moreover, people with ADD can to be thought of stupid and weird, also they tend to have unstable relationship among family, colleagues, etc.

I would like to know what makes a person have an ADD, and if it is curable of how it is treated.

It doesn't sound like your just looking for some general info about the psychological disorder of ADHD. The thing you should maybe start out with is understanding that there are two different sub-types which will have different effects.

Rather than explain everything, I would point you to a couple links that should answer your questions:

For a basic definition you can look at the CDC page on ADHD.

Here is some basic info that should get you started on understanding the disorder.

wikipedia should fill in anything else that you want to know, if you have a more specific questions, feel free to ask.


Is there a "base set" of feelings used to classify images? In an app I am creating I am profiling user behavior in a multitude of different ways.  One of the techniques I would like to use is track the imagery they interact with to get a handle on their current mood.  The imagery uses an internal tagging nomenclature that indicates various aspects of the image one of which is the key feeling it is intended to trigger.  The feelings I am using are something along the lines of

Health, Desire, Hunger, Comfort, Indulgence, Relief, Peace, Relaxation, Nurture, Creativity, Excitement

To provide a context here is a clutch of images (not the actual ones I am using)

My intent here is to attempt to build up a corpus of knowledge regarding the moods of the user and the way they vary over time and space based on what types of imagery they interact - in the sense of tap on to engage with the asssociated content - with.

I use a large range of profiling techniques most of which have a firm basis in published research.  And then every once in a while I think of an idea such as this one "all on my own".  Which brings me to my question - is there any scientific literature on the subject that reduces feelings triggered by images to a core list?  Having such a list would assist me in tagging the imagery I use in the app.

I have researched the subject on Google, ResearchGate and Elsevier but come up with nothing useful.  This could be in part because I am searching for the wrong terms - I am afterall, a mere IT guy who is blundering into psychology.

I have found useful information in resources such as this one.  Whilst I appreciate the insights and sense that they are talking sense there is very little by way of referenced research to back up what is claimed.

I am pleased to see the interest that this question has aroused.  I have eventually managed to find one scientific article on the subject - http://www.imageemotion.org/machajdik_hanbury_affective_image_classification.pdf.
which provides me with a decent starting point.  I would be most grateful to pointers to any other research in the field.


What forms of the travelling salesman problem are difficult for humans to solve? In the traveling salesman problem (TSP) we are given a set of nodes, where one node is the starting node. The task is to find the shortest tour starting at the start node visiting every node exactly once. A variant of the more general TSP is the Euclidean TSP, where the distance between two cities is the usual Euclidean distance. Different metrics can also be considered, suck as the city-block metric.

Based on experimental data in [1], the authors claim that Euclidean TSP instances are easy for humans. They also gathered data on case where the metric used is the city-block metric. They note that "... people are near-optimal for these problems in both metrics."

What variants of the travelling salesman problem are hard for humans?
Has any research been done on this?

[1] Walwyn, A. L., & Navarro, D. J. (2010). Minimal Paths in the City Block: Human Performance on Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Traveling Salesperson Problems. The Journal of Problem Solving, 3(1), 5.

I just quickly looked this up on Google Scholar and found the following interesting reference :

JN Macgregor, T Ormerod. "Human performance on the traveling salesman problem." Perception & Psychophysics Volume 58, Issue 4, pp 527-539 (June 1996)

This paper claims that "complexity of TSPs is a function of number of nonboundary points, not total number of points." They define a nonboundary point as a point inside the convex hull that encompasses all points in the problem. This paper also makes some interesting observations about perceptual space for humans in this task, claiming that the problem appears to be solved by humans in a 2D problem space that matches the 2D perceptual space. Finally, the references cited by this paper indicate that at least some research has gone into the question of human performance on the TSP as far back as the late 1960s.

It looks like you might also get some useful pointers by following the citation graph from this paper forward in time : http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9195299723226128892


What is the name of the phenomenon where a person abandons simplifying a complex system upon understanding the system? What is the name of the phenomenon where a person abandons simplifying a complex system upon understanding the system?

I provide examples of complex systems, so as not to get hung up on a specific domain.

Example 1

A new member of a software development team has to work with legacy, seemingly complicated code. Said person feels the need to simplify the code, and upon doing so, familiarises him/herself with the code. This is usually the point at which the new team member abandons the refactoring/rewrite. She thinks "OK, I understand it now. I can carry on with the actual task I set out to do".

Future new members of the software development team will now lose the benefit of this simplification, and will go through the same (arguably wasteful) learning process themselves.

The reason for the simplification could still be entirely valid (e.g. in a software context again: using domain types instead of primitive types;  to communicate intent more clearly).

Example 2

An electrician who has never been to a particular house is tasked with installing a three-way switch on the staircase. Said electrician sees the wiring and feels the need to rip it all out and start again. He/she starts making mental notes of the wires, their colours, which trip switches the wires are connected to, etc. After a while, the electrician understands the wiring, abandons the plan to rewire the entire house, and now simply installs the three-way switch.

Future electricians who visit the house will lose the benefit of the rewire (simplification) and will go through the same familiarisation process themselves.

The phenomenon may be explained like this :

The programmer was given the task to fix a bug on a complicated legacy code he does not understand.
The programmer forms a subgoal "Refactor the code", in order to achieve the above goal.
In the process of achieveing the subgoal "Refactor the code", he understands what needs to be done to fix the bug. So the refactoring is not a useful goal any more and it is abandoned.

So we have a primary goal of fixing the bug and a secondary goal, formed to serve the primary goal, to refactor the code. When the primary goal is achieved the secondary is no longer relevant.

To promote refactoring you must take actions so that the secondary goal of refactoring becomes also a primary goal, concurrently with other tasks like fixing a bug. For example you may give rewards to programmers that successfully refactor the code or you may change the culture of your team, so that refactoring is considered a social norm, etc.


How effective is court imposed therapy compared to self-initiated therapy? People are frequently court ordered to some form of therapy, whether it be in the form of a course, group therapy or individual therapy.

Some examples being; road rage, anger management, drunk driving, parenting.

As one would consider, much of the success of the therapeutic process lies within the individuals motivation. However, it is also balanced by the fact that the consequence of being under a court order, may provide enough impetus to motivate an individual to change a behaviour.  It leads me to ask:

What is the effectiveness of court imposed therapy, as compared to self initialised therapy options?

I found a few papers published on the topic of therapy by court order and while incarcerated. Psychotherapy doesn't seem to work most of the time without the full and willing cooperation of the patient.

  Over the past decade, the use of court-ordered psychotherapeutic treatments as a pretrial diversion or dispositional alternative has increased dramatically. Currently, little published research has documented the effectiveness of these court-ordered treatments. The studies reviewed here cast doubt on the assumption that mandatory psychotherapeutic treatments are effective in reducing future incidents of violence between spouses. The incremental benefit of court-ordered treatment over the deterrent effects of traditional criminal justice system remedies is unclear. Differences in abuse recidivism between subjects court-ordered into treatment and subjects arrested and untreated have been small. In addition, subjects withdraw from treatment despite a court order to attend, indicating that legal system involvement does not motivate many unwilling subjects. Furthermore, subjects who discontinue treatment prematurely remain violence-free almost as often as subjects who complete treatment programs, thus drawing into question the, specific impact of clinical treatment for men who abuse their spouses. Future research is necessary to elucidate the precise benefits and appropriate focus of court-ordered treatment programs.

-Court-ordered treatment of spouse abuse

  Interestingly, those who were mandated demonstrated less motivation at treatment entry, yet were more likely to complete treatment compared to those who were not court-ordered to treatment. While controlling for covariates known to be related to treatment completion, the logistic regression analyses demonstrated that court-ordered offenders were over 10 times more likely to complete treatment compared to those who entered treatment voluntarily (OR=10.9, CI=2.0-59.1, p=.006). These findings demonstrate that stipulated treatment for offenders may be an effective way to increase treatment compliance.

-Does mandating offenders to treatment improve completion rates?

  Patients who require court-ordered medication over objection constitute a group that is high risk for nonadherence after discharge and being refractive to treatment.

-Outcomes Associated With Court-Ordered Treatment Over Objection in an Acute Psychiatric Hospital

  A significant decrease in the dynamic scale scores of the J-SOAP-II [Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol II] was found only for the moderate treatment group (9 to 23 months).

-Treatment Impact of an Integrated Sex Offender Program as Measured by J-SOAP-II


Does introducing an element of play, hunt, or competition make feeding more rewarding? I have limited experience feeding wildlife, and while it's fun to watch and I'm sure fun for the wildlife too, I'm interested in just how much fun.  Is there's any noticeable difference in the following scenarios?

Scenario A: a bird is given a "pile" of food, and can eat it at any pace.
Scenario B: an element of play or competition is introduced. The bird
has to seek out seeds that are scattered on the ground, or has to compete with other birds. Alternatively, a challenging bird feeder is used.

The end result is that there's enough food to satiate the bird in either case. It seems that in scenario B, it would take longer for the bird to get full. In scenario B, the bird has to hop from one cluster of seeds to the next, picking out the ones that the bird wants. There may be additional birds, also competing for the tastiest seeds. Alternatively, the bird has to balance on the birdfeeder, and coordinate precise movements to retrieve a seed from the feeder.

If the bird is observed over the next X minutes or hours following the feeding, is there any noticeable difference in the overall demeanor, activity pattern, etc., between the two scenarios?

UPDATE: I originally thought that this question does not apply to humans - we all sit at a table and eat meals from dishes, etc. I couldn't ask a question about kids throwing pie, which is what I thought of when I think "play with food". But this evening, as I was deseeding a pomegranate, I realized that humans may like "Playing" with difficult fruit too

Pomegranate
Citrus (oranges/grapefruit)
Pineapple

Getting to the best parts of these fruit can be turned into a game too. For example, deseeding pomegranate can be done with the minimum amount of juice splashing, while an orange peel can be removed in many ways as well.

The scenarios above can be modified to be easily applicable to humans too:

Scenario A: Given unlimited supply of whole pomegranates to deseed
Scenario B: Given an unlimited supply of pomegranate seeds on a plate

Which person will leave the table feeling better?

To get a sense of how people may play with the fruits above, search google for "Peel an orange", and you will find very varying screenshots.

Yes. See contra-freeloading or (for humans) ikea effect.

  Contrafreeloading: (verb) The behavior in which animals offered the choice between eating food provided to them for free or working to get that food would eat the most food from the source that required effort. This term was created in 1963 by animal psychologist Glen Jensen. Jensen ran a study on 200 male albino rats where the end result was the rats ate more from the food source where the rats had to press on a bar to get the pellet rather than the dish of pellets where they didn’t have to do anything at all. Jensen then studied the behaviors of gerbils, mice, birds, fish, monkeys and chimpanzees. In fact many have studied contrafreeloading since then with similar results, except for the domestic cat – which likes to be served. This 1963 study’s results were surprising because it would be more logical, from an evolutionary point of view, to not expand energy to get food when food is freely available. Why do pet bird people care about this? Birds seem to want to work for food, which is a wild instinctual behavior. Avian behaviorists recommend that pet bird owners encourage contrafreeloading behavior with foraging setups and bird toys within the pet birds’ cages and that pet bird owners engage their parrots by training commands like Step up or tricks such as the eagle, and then use a treat reward system. This keeps pet birds busy, active and healthy.

From http://www.birdchannel.com/bird-words/contrafreeloading.aspx


How to denoise and get rid of 1/f trend of a PSD in an EEG synchronization experiment I'd appreciate some help from you guys.

I'm currently analyzing an experiment where I've entrained participants to these frequencies:

Condition 1: 4.16Hz-8.33Hz
Condition 2: 2.77Hz-8.33Hz
Condition 3: 2.4Hz

For each condition I passed 8 trials of 26 seconds at Fs = 500Hz.
I'm analysing the data using FieldTrip and some toolboxes in Matlab.
I calculated the Power and PSD using pwelch function after processing the data in Fieldtrip.

I want my data in dB units and get rid of the $1/f^\gamma$ trend where $0< \gamma<2$  (Demanuele et al., 2007)

I have 2 problems:

1) I don't know how to remove the 1/f trend correctly since I don't understand how the article that I mention does it (see below) in the frequency domain (I have tried fitting $1/f^\gamma$ with best $\gamma$, using the lsqcurvefit function. Using the medfilt1 with order 15 gives me the best results. Though I think there should be a better way, also that can be defended on an article).

  "the spectrogram of one EEG channel was calculated. The median across all time windows was then found for every frequency point. Thus, a graph of the median PSD value for every frequency was obtained. The same procedure was repeated for all the EEG channels. Then, the overall median of the median PSD curves of all the channels was calculated. The same was done for each of the 'task' and 'rest' condition. The average was then calculated across all conditions and this was used as our normalisation curve."

EDIT
I thought it might be helpful to provide the code I made. Sorry for the inefficiencies you may find since I am no developer:

% Choose subject

load matfiles/Subject05
% loading subject5 where (channel,samples,trial,condition) is a 4D matrix

samples = numel(subject5(1,:,1,1)); % number of samples

% Number of samples per window, the less windows the better frequency resolution and worst time resolution. I tried different windows.
nsc = floor(samples/4.5);

nov = floor(nsc*0.75); % overlap of 75%

fr = 0.5:0.05:15; % foi

fs = 500; % sampling freq

%initialize variable
medps = zeros(291,28,21,3);

% loop conditions
for cond = 1 : length(subject5(1,1,1,:))

    %loop trials
    for trial = 1 : length(subject5(1,1,:,cond))

        % loop channels
        for chan = 1 : length(subject5(:,1,trial,cond))

            % calculate spectrogram for each channel, trial and condition
            %gives t(time) and ps (PSD estimate for each freq and time in Amplitude^2/Hz units)
            [~,~,t,ps] = spectrogram(subject5(chan,:,trial,cond),hamming(nsc),nov,fr,fs);

            % calculate median over time points per channel, trial and condition
            medps(:,chan,trial,cond) = median(ps,2);
        end
    end
end

%Calculate median over channels per trial and condition
medchan = median(medps,2); %this produces matrix freqx1channelxtrialsxcond
medchan = permute(medchan,[1 3 4 2]); %get 4D into 3D

%Calculate median over trials per condition
medtrial = median(medchan,2);
medtrial = permute(medtrial,[1 3 2]); %Get a 2D matrix freqxcond

%Mean over conditions is our Normalization Curve
normalizationCurve = mean(medtrial,2);

2) Once I transform the data to dB units (i.e. $10*log10$) it gets really noisy, making the peaks at the foi (frequencies of interest) as big as the background or almost. I've looked into SNR but really don't know how to apply it here. The only thing I've done and still doesn't remove all the noise is the medfilt1 mentioned in 1).

I hope any of you with experience in this can help me solve this issue!

Apparently the paper you mention is simply evaluating the median in the EEG spetrum. Say that for all your channels you get a 3D matrix PSD, with dimension 1 the number of channel, dimension 2 the time windows, and dimension 3 the frequencies. In pseudocode the article computes M = median(median(PSD,2),1), then removes the trend with CorrectedPSD = PSD - M. Which is actually fairly simple.


Does identifying a student's sensory learning style and exploiting it result in significantly better performance? Do people tend to have one pronounced sense (i.e., there is high variability in how strong the auditory, visual, olfactory etc. perception is among people)  and can
this sense, once identified, be exploited in both beneficial (e.g., targeted/adaptive learning/teaching) and manipulative (e.g., sales negotiations) ways?

My intuition doubts the effectiveness, but perhaps there is empirical evidence.

I think your intuition might be correct. According to Hal Pashler, there is no real evidence for learning styles. The authors do not state that one particular learning style is applicable to everyone. Instead, they conclude that a particular subject may have a preferred learning style. For example, essay writing would have a preferred "verbal" learning style.

Source

Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence by Pashler et al.Psychlogical Science in the Public Interest. Volume 9.3 (2008).


How to offer support to an American acquaintance with depression? So, an online acquaintance of mine has mentioned that they're suffering from severe depression recently, and my natural response is to want to offer them support and encouragement - maybe suggest that they should see a psychologist and get some medication for the condition. However, I'm uncertain of how to do so, since I remember reading that depression can cause you to interpret things that people say to you in a negative light, and it's my understanding that the American health system is not the greatest, and thus they might not be able to afford medication.
How should I approach this? Naturally, I don't want to do more harm than good, and cause them to start thinking things like "he's being smug about how his country's medical system is better than mine" or "I can't afford medication; I'm worthless because I'm poor". Are there any general guidelines on how non-medically trained people should approach interactions with depressed people?

How untrained people should approach interactions with depressed people or any other mental health problem?
The main point to make is that you must not try to counsel them.
I believe you may have worked this out for yourself, and I don't want to sound patronising and "tell you how to suck eggs", but to be clear being untrained, you can cause more harm than good if you try to counsel them.
The only thing you can do is be a good listener and listen without judgement.
The moment you start to judge that person on what they say, you start to be harmful to them.
If faced with talk of suicide
If you are faced with talk of suicide, while Rebecca's answer in meta.stackexchange.com mentioned in the comments by @BryanKrause suggests not to repeat "canned comments about suicide hotlines", you do need to bear in mind your own position in all this.
Remember — trained or untrained, you cannot be there for that person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It will not be healthy for you or them.
In a slightly different way to what is suggested in MTL's answer to the same question in meta.stackexchange.com you can tell them:

I am here to listen right now, but please bear in mind that I may not be here all the time. Any time I'm not around to talk to and you feel suicidal, there are helplines available for you to call too and a full list is available at http://suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html

When dealing with talk of suicide, Rebecca's answer is very good for pointers regarding worries you may have, so it may be beneficial for you to take some time to read through what she says.


Why do psychologists often not use mathematical models to express their theories? I come from an economics background where people often written explicit mathematical models for their theories. To be clear, the vast majority of economic models are not useful quantitatively — the functional forms, etc, tend to be way off. However, the models are useful in disciplining the qualitative predictions from the theory. Human intuition is faulty. If we just rely on intuition in building theories, we almost always miss something until we write them out using models.
When I read psychological theories, I find that most of them are not expressed in explicit models. This makes me worried that my understanding of the theories can be incomplete and different from what the original authors intended.
Why is this the common practice? Would we gain anything to make psychological theories mathematically explicit, or will that be a waste of time?

Come read some cognition! It's a wide open field with angles on all kinds of psychology stuff, and we're having a great time throwing greek letters around like confetti. I think you might like it!
One of my favorite recent pro-model rants is this one psyarxiv.com/rybh9/ Although, to be fair they do argue for 'computational' rather than 'mathematical'. I would argue these both mean 'explicit formalism', which is what you're after here?
There's a whole journal of mathematical psychology
www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-mathematical-psychology
or Computational Brain and Behavior www.springer.com/journal/42113
is full of cool stuff on a surprisingly wide range of psych topics united by a common theme of awesome mathy-ness
Psych is very broad, but whatever corner of it you're interested in, there's almost certainly a math-y cognitive/computational version of it (as well). Those mathpsych folks definitely get around. Probably the most math-resistant corner of psych is social psych, emergent behavior of groups type stuff is absolutely vicious to model, as you would know, coming from econ... but see eg. cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2019/papers/0172/0172.pdf
Explicit formalism is the future of psych, and quite a lot of the future is here already


Is there an explanation of why some colors seem to move forward/backward on a 2D plane? I am a painter and digital artist working with color and colorimetry.
Recently I noticed HUGE "illusions" (impressions of depths) in a print
composed of very saturated colors, that I programmed to have the highest
chroma my printer could achieve.

Unfortunately this is undisplayable on screen (out of gamut), but the picture
can give you an idea...

In the transition between Black and light Grey-ish that passes from
Red to Green to Blue-Greyish, one can see on the print very abrupt "3D effects" or in other words "impressions of several groups of different depth", like a "staircase" with 3 or 4 steps.
We sometimes see similar so-called "optical illusions" occuring between fields of colours. If I remember well, dark-blue often seems "further away" than yellow for example.

I have searched on internet for an explanation but I can only find some quite old non-quantitative theories that explain poorly the phenomenon with a theory of "warm" and "cold" colors...
That's far from being a satisfactory explanation...

I am wondering if:

the impression of depth has anything to do with the eye's optics (like the different colors are not diffracted equally)
what is the cause of the illusion from the viewpoint of the retina's structure?
can it be described in mathematical terms with the help of colorimetry?
has it been completely described, can it be simulated, can we actually predict for which colors it's gonna happen?

Thanks

Lenses, both in glasses and in the eye, refract light of different wavelengths by different amounts. This is the well known prism effect. Opticians do their best to correct for it but it is inevitable to some degree. The technical term for this phenomenon is chromatic aberration.

In optics, chromatic aberration (CA, also called achromatism, chromatic distortion, and spherochromatism) is a type of distortion in which there is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point.[1] It occurs because lenses have different refractive indices for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens). The refractive index of transparent materials decreases with increasing wavelength in degrees unique to each.
Chromatic aberration manifests itself as "fringes" of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image, because each color in the optical spectrum cannot be focused at a single common point. Since the focal length f of a lens is dependent on the refractive index n, different wavelengths of light will be focused on different positions.
Wikipedia

This effect alone can, I believe, give rise to depth perception anomalies.
Note: The above explanation refers primarily to a single lens.  I'll hazard a guess that our binocular vision combined with chromatic aberration makes even more of a difference in depth perception.


Do different meta-cognitive measurements depend on the same mechanism? There are different meta-cognitive judgments: feeling of knowing, ratings of warmth, confidence, judgments of learning, tip-of-the-tongue or not, insight or not, etc.

Are these judgments based on the same mechanism or there is a different mechanism in each case?

This is a topic of research currently. The short answer is no (there's quite a clear distinction between e.g. visual and memory metacognition), the long answer is that in some cases, some metacognitive mechanisms might be shared.

Some examples for the short 'no' answer:

Patients with frontal lesions have lower visual (but not memory) metacognition than healthy controls. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25100039)
Different areas within prefrontal cortex seem to underly visual and memory metacognition see http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/42/16657.full.pdf
There are also quite a few (older and more recent) papers within the metamemory literature, argueing that even within metamemory (i.e., in different subtypes of judgements or in semantic vs episodic memory) different mechanisms are recruited. One example here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393211000182.

Some examples showing that there actually is some degree of domain-generality:

Participants in have similar metacognitive ability in two similar visual tasks, despite different first order performance. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3203218/ and  http://www.pnas.org/content/108/11/4506.full
Memory (but not visual) metacognition improved after meditation training -also another form of metacognition, perhaps of the focus of attention. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24820248


What is 'n-dynamics' mentioned by Poli? In a seminar abstract titled "THE UNREASONABLE INEFFECTIVENESS OF MATHEMATICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES" by Roberto Poli, he mentions

  I will consider some conceptual issues that might prove important for
  framing the problem of cognitive mathematics (= mathematics for the
  cognitive sciences), namely the problem of n-dynamics, of identity, of
  timing, and of the specious present.

What is n-dynamics?

I contacted the author. He's now in University of Trento.

He says it refers to the theory of multiple levels of reality, the dynamics of each level, and the interaction among them.


How to measure the correlation between "spirituality" and the susceptibility to false memories? Is there a measurement to correlate "spirituality" (how religious one is) to susceptibility to false memories? What papers or keywords should we look for?

Maybe what you are looking for is the field cognitive science of religion:

  Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including: cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, neurotheology, developmental psychology, and archaeology. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

Follow up resources:

International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR)
Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion


For binary (spike train) signals, take FFT of signal or autocorrelation of signal? I want to characterize a binary time-series signal x (derived from neuron action potential data) in the frequency domain.

Should I use the FFT of the original signal x, or the power spectrum (FFT of the autocorrelation of x, which is defined as $k(n)=E[x(t)\cdot x(t-n)]$ )?

Also, does anyone know any literature which explicitly talks about this, or at least took sides?

For binary data (spike-trains), people use a spike-train autocovariance function (same as autocorrelation but subtracting the mean firing rate). It's commonly used to study brain oscillations (e.g. Engel & Konig, 1991). There is a good description of the math in the Dayan & Abbott (page 27).

Dayan, P., & Abbott, L. F. (2001). Theoretical neuroscience (Vol. 806). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Engel, A. K., & Konig, P. (1991). Interhemispheric synchronization of oscillatory neuronal responses in cat visual cortex. Science, 252(5009), 1177.


Nociceptor (possible threat signal) I've read this on Wikipedia:

  A nociceptor is a sensory neuron that responds to damaging or
  potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to
  the spinal cord and the brain.

What is a "possible threat" signal? And, how is it different from a "real threat" signal in terms of the way they are transmitted?

This statement on Wikipedia is merely intending to separate the agency of determining "What is pain?" from the nociceptors. Nociceptors can be activated by a number of stimuli that reflect possible damage (i.e., a possible threat): this could include signals released by cells that are actually damaged, it could include hot temperature, it could include certain types of pressure or touch.

The decision about whether a particular stimulus is sufficiently threatening to warrant a response (which could include things like reflexes all the way up to the perceptual and emotional experience that we refer to as pain) is made in the spinal cord and brain. At the level of the nociceptor, "possible threat" and "real threat" aren't any different: the nociceptor is just reporting the possibility of the threat. The CNS makes a 'decision' about how to respond.

This system is really no different than the other sensory systems, they all carry some information to the CNS which then interprets that information.


Does adult neurogenesis occur only in the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus? The scholarpedia article on this subject says:

  Adult neurogenesis is the process of generating new neurons which
  integrate into existing circuits after fetal and early postnatal
  development has ceased. In most mammalian species, adult neurogenesis
  only appears to occur in the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus.

The Scholarpedia entry is dated 2007. Has there any more recent evidence been uncovered showing adult neurogenesis in other parts of the brain? If it is linked to brain plasticity, surely it would be useful to many more areas?

You are right that active adult neurogenesis is generally considered to be restricted to the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, and the subventricular zone of the lateral ventricles. The latter generates neurons that subsequently migrate through the rostral migratory stream to the olfactory bulb to become interneurons (Ming & Song, 2011).

Although the hippocampus is critical for the formation of memory, hippocampal neurogenesis does not simply 'add memory' (Kemperman, 2002). Instead,  hippocampal neurogenesis is believed to mediate the continuing modulation of cortical functions in response to exposure to novelty (Aimone et al., 2014). Specific examples are spatial-navigation learning and long-term spatial memory retention, spatial pattern discrimination and contextual fear conditioning. Adult olfactory bulb neurogenesis is associated with maintaining long-term structural integrity of the olfactory bulb, short-term olfactory memory, olfactory fear conditioning, and long-term associative olfactory memory involving active learning (Ming & Song, 2011).

Neurogenesis in other regions in the adult brain are generally believed to be limited under normal physiological conditions, but can be reproducibly induced after inflicting injury to the grain (Gould, 2007). These regions include the neocortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, substantia nigra and the brainstem, among other regions (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Regions of neurogenesis in mammals, shown in a rat's brain. The red regions (hippocampus & subventricular zone of the lateral ventricles) are considered to be neurogenic. The other regions may also be neurogenic, but only reproducibly so in experiments after damage to these regions. Source: Gould (2007).

References
- Aimone et al., Physiol Rev (2014); 94: 991–1026
- Gould, Nature Rev Neurosci (2007); 8 481-8
- Kemperman, J Neurosci (2002); 22(3): 635-8
- Ming & Song, Neuron (2011); 70(4): 687–702

Related question
- What evidence is there that the adult brain can produce new neurons?


What is the difference between naive cynicism and naive realism? I understand Naive realism as: I am objective and whoever disagrees with me is biased.
I don't get Naive cynicism though. Does is stand for: I am objective and others are more selfish than me?
What is the difference between Naive realism and cynicism? Is one a subset or consequence of the other?

The lexical approach may assist. The lexical hypothesis states that, ‘All aspects of human personality, which are or have been of importance, interest or utility, have already become recorded in the substance of language’(Cattell, 1943) and, ‘When an idea is important, people are likely to have a word for it … the more important something is, … the more words there are likely to be’(Miller, 1996). The atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour uses a lexical approach to visualise words using the axes of affiliation and dominance (Mobbs, 2020).
Unsure what is implied by naive, however, the synonyms are:

Cynicism: disbelief, disenchantment, disillusion, distrust, doubt, doubtfulness, dubiety, incredulity, irony, mistrust, negative_thinking, negativity, nihilism, pessimism, sardonicism, scepticism, scoffing, suspicion, and unbelief.

Realism: accuracy, authenticity, clear-sightedness, common_sense, faithfulness, fidelity, level-headedness, naturalism, opportunism, pragmatism, telling_it_like_it_is, truthfulness, and veracity.

The visualisation of cynicism and realism according to the atlas approach are shown below. Optimism, pessimism, altruism and sadism are also included for the purpose of comparison:

In answer to your question, cynicism is both submissive and anti-social.  It is associated with the emotions of anxiety and fear. Realism is neither dominant or submissive and is more associated with the emotions of stability and harmony.  Optimism is both dominant and affiliative and is associated with the emotions of confidence and courage.
References
Cattell RB. The description of personality: basic traits resolved into clusters. J Abnorm Soc Psychol. 1943; 38: 476–506. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054116
Miller GA. The science of words. New York: Scientific American Library; 1996.
Mobbs AED (2020) An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227877
Declared interest: I am the author of the atlas paper.


Would administering oxytocin in games of deception improve performance? As well as facilitating parturition, the hormone oxytocin is thought to mediate "prosocial behaviour" in mammals. It’s been a while since I have read the literature, but I am aware there is robust evidence that oxytocin mediates social bonding and pair bond formation. Acute administration of oxytocin can also increase social cognition such as facial recognition and trustfulness in games of cooperation between strangers

Games of deception could be an interesting paradigm under which to study the effects of oxytocin. in poker, one's ability to bluff is a core skill. I am always amused by the percentage of pro-poker players i see on late night TV wearing sunglasses-- either photophobia is greatly over-represented in this cohort, or more likely, facial expressions and in particular, the eyes, are important cues for the detection of deception.

This has got me wondering: Would acute administration of intranasal oxytocin have beneficial or deleterious effects upon performance in games of deception such as poker?

Moreover, might one expect differential effects of oxytocin among poker players with Asperger’s syndrome, such as the irreverent Tony G?

On one hand, oxytocin could improve one's ability to recognise facial expressions, particularly eye expressions indicative of deception. Conversely, oxytocin might evoke some sort of "miscalibration of social meta-cognition", leading a misplaced sense of trust in the intentions of opponents.

Alternatively, I think that oxytocin's role in social cognition is far more nuanced than how I understand it to be. actually, I have no doubt about that.

For instance, aside from inconsistencies in the literature, the papers I’ve read tend to highlight a "pro-affiliative" skew towards oxytocin maintaining cohesion amongst those with whom we're already familiar, the in-group. With regards to the out-group, I have this impression that it's geared towards "not throwing the first punch."

Any thoughts on the possible effect of oxytocin upon poker and other games of deception, or more broadly, how to more accurately frame my understanding of the social milieu within which oxytocin functions?

REFERENCES

Oxytocin improves specific recognition of positive facial expressions
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-010-1780-4
Oxytocin increases trust in humans
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7042/abs/nature03701.html
Oxytocin Improves “Mind-Reading” in Humans
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322306009395
Oxytocin Decreases Accuracy in the Perception of Social Deception
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/1/293.short

One of the very recently published studies linked to in the question, on the relationship between exogenous oxytocin administration and ability to accurately detect deception, instructed participants to self-administer oxytocin by nasal injection before evaluating contestants' decisions in videos of the Friend or Foe game show (Israel, Hart and Winter 2014). They reported that:

  Rather than improving subjects’ inferences about others’ mental states, oxytocin impeded accurate assessments of trustworthiness in risky social exchanges. Oxytocin decreased prediction accuracy but did not increase predictions of cooperative behavior in general.

The evidence reported in Israel, Hart and Winter (2014) clearly implies that exogenous oxytocin would have deleterious effects in games of deception such as poker. However, it may not be as simple as that.

Another study proposed that oxytocin may exert its apparent effects by increasing the attentional salience of social information, and that the effect may thus be mediated by interpersonal factors like perceived group membership (Ten Velden et al., 2014). They reported a complex set of results broadly consistent with this hypothesis based on a simplified poker game task:

  Results permit three conclusions. First, intranasal oxytocin does not increase indiscriminate benevolence in humans. This conclusion follows from the observation that in competitive interactions, humans given oxytocin reduce competitive approach only when their protagonist is an in-group member, and do not show an increased preference for settlement when protagonists are from a rivaling out-group. Second, and relatedly, intranasal oxytocin promotes cooperative conflict resolution in within but not between group competitions. This conclusion follows from the observation that, compared to placebo, oxytocin increased a preference for settlement with in-group protagonists, but not with out-group protagonists. Third, and finally, in competitive interactions, intranasal oxytocin does not influence preferences for withdrawal. This conclusion follows from the observation that regardless of competitive strength, and regardless of the protagonist's group membership, oxytocin exerted no influence whatsoever on the tendency to “fold” in the competitive poker-game studied here.

Note that while the Ten Velden (2014) study used a poker-like task, it did not report on differences in ability to detect deception.

References

Israel, S., Hart, E., & Winter, E. (2014). Oxytocin Decreases Accuracy in the Perception of Social Deception. Psychological science, 25(1), 293-295.
Ten Velden, F. S., Baas, M., Shalvi, S., Kret, M. E., & De Dreu, C. K. (2014). Oxytocin differentially modulates compromise and competitive approach but not withdrawal to antagonists from own vs. rivaling other groups. Brain research, 1580, 172-179.


Are there any EEG procedures currently available/in development that can formulate letters/words from deliberate, internal monologue? I am thinking of the combination of an EEG-like device and software to monitor and analyze (very) deliberate thoughts of letters/words.

The input would be in the form of raw electrical brain activity from the EEG and the output from the software analysis would be in the form of text (the pattern-matched words/letters).

The software would be trained to recognize specific patterns of electrical impulses and form conclusions on what letter/word matches the best.

I have been interested in the idea of an input-less and effort-less HID such as this for a while now, mainly for personal enjoyment--I've entertained thoughts of working on documents with vim on the bed with a projector aimed at the ceiling--but realize that something like this would be of immense help to the disabled too.

I'm confident that teams are working right now on such problems, but my searches have yielded no results.

Here are some of my questions.

Can anyone direct me to some relevant articles and papers?
What is the current state of progress regarding the formulation of useful information from neural firing patterns and raw brain activity?
Are current EEG and other-brain scanning devices available right now capable enough to detect and form distinctions between impulses such as the internalization of, say, letters "K" vs "F"?.

Can something like the OpenBCI do this?
Can something like the Emotiv system do this? They have two models, the "EPOC / EPOC+" and "Insight". The former offers 14 EEG channels while the latter offers only 5. Is 5 sufficient for such purposes?

Is it a problem of insufficient hardware sensing resolution or the inability to pattern match such noisy data?

I looked at this post too but it did not answer my questions: Can we draw conclusions about content of thoughts from neural firing patterns?

Found some interesting links

OpenEEG, but it looks dead now
Very promising and exactly what I was looking for: OpenBCI, An Open Source Brain-Computer Interface For Makers
More EEG info: Selecting an EEG Device
Emotiv EEGs, also looks promising: Are recent affordable EEG devices any good?
More discussion in a reddit thread here

What you are looking for is Imagined / Silent Speech Classification (my best guess). I'm interested in this for a few years (exactly to work with Vim) now and  worked with some of the cheap EEG headsets like Emotiv EPOC and Neurosky MindWave Mobile.

A paper on it:
http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ABSE/papers/1021

Patent applications:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/
To the above link, add these at the end:
WO2014066855A1.html
WO2014130571A1.html

(Due to a lack of reputation, I cannot post more than 2 links.)

The commercial and inexpensive headsets are good enough to detect what their APIs support:
Neurosky: Attention, Meditation and Eye blink.
EPOC: Please refer to their Cognitive Suit documentation. You can get 1-2 sets of detections done quickly. Good luck with detecting 4 states.

Search around for Silent Speech Classification. You should be able to find more details. There was a Japanese demo somewhere that uses classification on EEG or EMG to speak. I will post it if I can find it.


How to statistically test whether parents and children share similar humor styles? I have data from children and their parents on their humor styles (using the Humor Styles Questionnaire by Martin (2003)).

For the adult version: It's a 32-item measure, with 4 subscales for each humor style (Affiliative, Aggressive, Self-Defeating, and Self-Enhancing) so there's 8 items for each subscale.

For the children's version: There are 24 items, with 4 subscales so 6 items per humor style. The items for the children are on a 4-point scale and the parents are on a 7-point scale.

Research Question: I want to assess whether children share humor styles with their parents.

What kind of test would help me find out if children have the same humor styles as their parents?

References

Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal Of Research In Personality, 37(1), 48-75. doi:10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00534-2

Assuming the data are dyadic (i.e., one child per parent), you would probably focus on correlating child scores with parent scores.

Hopefully, you have a sense of how the child and parent scales align. Hopefully, they are designed to measure equivalent constructs albeit with different items.

The fact that you've used different scales is a potential confound. Presumably, the are good reasons for this given that the humour of children and adults is expressed quite differently. But that's something, you'll have to reason through in terms of measurement and theory.

The fact that the scales have different numbers of items and response options is mostly irrelevant. As soon as you start using different items, then you've essentially got different variables.

Although not relevant to you, more commonly, data involving dyads involves using the same instruments. e.g., husbands and wive both completing the same measure of big 5 personality. In that case, you can do lots of things, like comparing descriptive statistics, ICCs, and other values. David Kenny has lots of resources in that case on dyadic data analysis: http://www.davidakenny.net/dyad.htm


What's the difference between stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination? I'm especially interested in the difference between the first two. Some people have said prejudice is when a stereotype about a group is applied to an individual, but a lot of places (even within psychology) talk about prejudice as though it can also apply to a group. Allport described prejudice as an "antipathy" towards another group, but that doesn't seem to describe implicit prejudice. How exactly are these terms defined?

The terms are sometimes used a little differently. Nevertheless, in psychological research, there is quite some consensus about their use. For example, reflecting the most prevalent view, the Resolution on Prejudice, Stereotypes, and, Discrimination of the American Psychological Association (2006), defines them in the following way:

  prejudices are unfavorable affective reactions to or evaluations of groups and their members, stereotypes are generalized beliefs about groups and their members, interpersonal discrimination is differential treatment by individuals toward some groups and their members relative to other groups and their members, and institutional discrimination involves policies and contexts that create, enact, reify, and maintain inequality (Dovidio, Brigham, Johnson, & Gaertner, 1996; Eagly & Diekman, 2005; Fiske, 1998; Lott & Maluso, 1995; Mio, Barker-Hackett, & Tumambing, 2006; Myers, 2005; Nelson, 2005; Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady,1999)

In other words, if Person A does not like (has a negative emotional reaction toward) the Lokai in general, or Person B (whether explicitly or implicitly) in particular because this person is a Lokai, that's prejudice.

If Person A believes that being a Lokai makes Person B a treacherous, lazy, and dumb guy, but a great cook and guitar player (you have to grant them that!) that's a stereotype.

If Person A doesn't invite Person B to his/her party because he/she is a Lokai, that's discrimination.