What is the most complex artificial neural network created to date? A few years ago I wrote a research paper for college on neural networks.  At the time IBM's Blue Brain was the clear winner. Some rumor went around that they were close to emulating a brain the complexity of a cat; this has since been debunked.

At the time their research was groundbreaking and previously even emulating the brain of a C. Elegans seemed far-fetched.

Describing the complexity of neural networks is complex but I'll define number of synapses or neurons as an easily measurable scale of complexity.

What is the most complex working artificial neural network? What is the relative complexity of this network compared to an animal's brain?

A (probably incomplete) list of ongoing whole brain simulation projects can be found at http://www.artificialbrains.com/. However, based on the information reported on this site, it is sometimes hard do distinguish what already has been achieved and what is still in the planning stage. Nevertheless it gives a good overview to start with.


What is happening when i focus my attention on a particular body part? In an article i saw that "Thinking about an activity can actually activate the parts linking to that activity". So i thought of giving it a try and i started to focus on the digits of my feet (they are the reflex points to head and neck), and strangely my head felt light and the stress in my neck was gone. I tried the same with other reflex points too and the results are the same as if i'm applying pressure with my fingers. So what is actually happening in this process?

Short answer: You are discovering your bodymind.

You might want to look into trigger point therapy and myofascial release as Western complements to the Eastern reflex points that you mention.  I seem to recall "tensegrity" as a bodywork term describing the human tendency to form an identity/integrity from the structure of interconnected tension in various parts of the body.

Trigger point therapy, myofascial release, and other forms of bodywork deconstruct a person's tensegrity. So do solo exercise modalities like yoga and meditation. Your mental exercise may have been discovering tensegrity between your toes and your head and neck.

The reflexes you describe will probably go away if you continue to do the exercise regularly. Think of the analogy of opening a window to let cool air inside so that you stop sweating.

In addition to simply thinking about a body part, you can also tense it and then release it in what yoga people call bandhas. And you can imagine sending breath to a body part.

All these methods redirect blood flow and neural activity to the targeted body part, which triggers whatever reflexes are connected to the body part.  Some of the reflexes are autonomic.

Papers have been written documenting the ability of advanced yoga practitioners to consciously control the behavior of their autonomic nervous system, including slowing down their heart, etc.  Yogi Coudoux introduced a lot of westerners to this with his television demonstrations during the 1970s. You can Google Yogi Coudoux.

The reflexes that you may have triggered may simply be the first step in a progressively greater ability to control your body if you continue bodymind exercise.


How can I design a staircase function that converges on a given hit-rate? I'm in the process of creating a simple contrast staircase function where subjects are initially presented with high-contrast Gabor patches and are subsequently queried as to their orientation in a forced-choice task.

I only understand staircase functions superficially, which is to say that I conceive them as follows:

present a stimulus
query some feature of the stimulus
If correct, reduce the intensity of the stimulus by n, else increase its intensity by m where m < n.

Intuitively, it seems like this should converge on a hit-rate of .5, but I know for a fact that a staircase can be designed to converge on an arbitrary hit-rate.  How would I modify my simplistic algorithm to converge on, say, .8 ?

Thank you!

If n != m then it will not home in on the 50 % threshold. In these simple N-up/N-down staircases, you can modify either the stepsize (as you proposed) or the number of successes/failures to act as a criterion for upgrade/downgrade.

A comprehensive introduction to these staircases and the effect of changing these properties can be found in this paper. The 80 % threshold is simple because it's simply nDown=1 and nUp=3 with the same stepsize in either direction.

Several staircase methods are implemented in the PsychoPy python package/software and it actually has the nDown=1 and nUp=3 as default value if you don't specify anything else.

Note: If you can assume a nice mathematical relationship between stimulus parameter and perception (i.e. linear, logistic, power etc.), then it'll probably be more efficient to use regression because even though your parameter is way off the desired threshold, it's still informative about the mathematical relationship. Thus you can use it to infer where the threshold should be and home in much more efficiently than the "scanning-like" approach of N-up/N-down methods.


Does the brain possess mechanisms to spot a feedback loop of self-induced negative sensation and relief? Imagine a person has random psychosomatic itching and applies an ointment which brings relief. Could their brain wrongly assosiate the process that causes the itching as good as it brought relief?
As Berridge, 2020 recently showed, there's a difference between wanting and liking something and dopamine (which is said to work on the basis of operant conditioning) is rather assosiated with wanting. I wondered whether the brain can decypher when the operant conditioning creates a harmful feedback loop.
I would appreciate any literature recommendations which would bring me closer to the answer.

Professor Sweeney has expressed the hypothesis that counterfactual thoughts that follow a relief are an example of a such mechanism on the Hidden Brain podcast although it's not something she discussed in the paper which finds counterfactual thoughts to be a common aftermath of a relief. The podcast discussed an experience of a guy attacked by lions in a group and how such extreme sitations tend to be followed by euphoria and laughing that later feels chilling to the people who undergo them, making the euphoria feel like not worth the experience.


Prepare for a counseling session I'm a college student, and I utilize the free counseling service on campus. Once a therapist told me to register for a shorter session because he didn't think I needed 1 hour and he wanted to be more available for other students.

How should one prepare for a counseling session? Writing down questions? I always feel like not bring enough things to talk about in my sessions make my therapist "unhappy".

I feel like I've asked two separate questions. Anyway, any specific or broad advice is welcomed.

Proviso: What I write below is simply general advice and does not establish a psychologist-patient or psychologist-client professional relationship.

Here are some general suggestions for individual psychotherapy discussion topics:

Tell your counselor how you are feeling, for example, "I feel nervous before sessions because I'm not sure what to talk about" or "I'm afraid that if I don't bring up enough topics you won't like me, or you will be bored with me."

In my personal experience as a client in psychotherapy, this is both the most difficult and the most helpful of all the suggestions I'm writing in this post.

Ask your therapist for advice on how to prepare for counseling sessions.
If you feel that your counselor is not listening or does not seem to care or is simply not helpful, ask to see another counselor. Depending on the setting (college counseling center, private therapist, mental health agency), you might be asked to explain why you want to see another therapist. If that is the case, write down your reasons, without censoring what you write. You can decide later how blunt (direct) you want to be.
Read self-help books on behavior change; goal-setting; developing good habits; etc.

New Harbinger Publications has a good track record for workbooks and self-help. (I do not have any affiliation with the company.) New Harbinger website |
Most recent New Harbinger catalog

For my own personal growth (and as a psychologist) I really like worksheets because they get me thinking about questions that I would not have considered otherwise. Here are some (all free):

Change Plan Worksheet - created for substance abuse treatment, but they apply to almost any problem or goal.
Personal Values Card Sort - this is one of my favorites. If you download it, get your scissors out as you need to cut up the little rectangles printed on each page. You create three piles for the cards: Not Important to me; Important to me; and Very Important to me. After you cut out all the "cards", go through them one at a time and put them on one of the three piles. Back in the day they called this "values clarification".
The Personal Values Cardsort (and similar cardsorts) have helped me a lot  personally and many of my psychotherapy patients over the years have also find them to be very helpful.
PsychPoint Therapy Worksheets - this site is designed primarily for mental health professionals, but most of the worksheets are not complicated. Look over the worksheets first before downloading them because you can download only three worksheets. (You can download more if you are a licensed mental health professional and want to subscribe for $99 USD per year.) [I am not affiliated with this website or its owner.]
Complete a worksheet before a counseling session, make a copy of your completed worksheet, and give it to your counselor at the beginning of the session.


How does the brain process concurrent visual or sensory data? I tried thinking about an apple and simultaneously an orange. (I was thinking about its appearance and taste). Despite my best efforts I was not able to do parallel processing to think about the apple and orange at the same time. What I was doing was concurrent processing, thinking about Apple and orange in time division multiplexing.

I noticed that my brain (which is also responsible for thinking) was indeed able to manage my two hands simultaneously, and was able to help me understand sounds comings from multiple sources, so it was helping me to see many things at the same time, in parallel, not concurrently.

I have asked a similar question here which compares processing by the brain with parallel processing by computers.

How exactly we explain these differences of operation by brain in dealing with sensory data (for example touch which can be felt in parallel), and thinking or visualization?

The tongue is made up of a surface area of about five different types of taste receptor.  They are:

salt
sour
bitter
sweet
unami

These inputs are handled by your gustatory system which can certainly parallel process them.  You may know or have heard of combinations of them.  Sweet n Sour, Sweet and Salty.

  The facial nerve (VII) carries taste sensations from the anterior two
  thirds of the tongue, the glossopharyngeal nerve (IX) carries taste
  sensations from the posterior one third of the tongue while a branch
  of the vagus nerve (X) carries some taste sensations from the back of
  the oral cavity.

From the wiki on the gustatory system

It's more likely that you've just never taste apple and orange at the same time, so you don't have the experience to remember.

But we do have a semantic memory that's specifically focused towards object identification.  This means we put things in little boxes.  You have a box for oranges and a box for apples.  There are neurons in your temporal lobe that Kristoph Koch could find that fire only when you see an apple or even the word apple[1].  There is no such thing as an orpple, so you've never required a box for it.  I don't think imagining it simultaneously is really beyond your imagination though if you worked at it.

(this article is actually somewhat similar idea, competition between two objects in the temporal lobe: here it's pictures of two people)
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/news/Cerf-et-al-10.pdf


Is there a "foreplay" equivalent, priming activity for thinking or conversation? I've noticed the following phenomenon and am trying to find out if it is indeed true and if there is a scientific term for it:

When I think about ideas, I notice that I can rarely jump straight into "heavy" stuff, like thinking about a cognitive neuroscience article I read. Instead, doing another activity that "primes" my brain first tends to make me more conductive to heavy thinking. This can be watching a talk on TED.com or reading some lighter article.

In conversation, I find that it's fairly hard to have a "heart to heart" talk with a person right off the bat, but a casual conversation can evolve in that direction.

When thinking about the phenomenon, the following supporting evidence comes to mind:

I've read that in some asian cultures, it is traditional to start a business deal with small talk, or over a friendly dinner. The motivation for this tradition was weird to me, until I thought about it light of the phenomenon described above.

Most of my successful job interviews started with small talk, unrelated to skills or position at hand.

When thinking about other human "priming" behaviors, the one I can think of most clearly is  foreplay before sexual encounters, which serves the following role

  Foreplay is important from at least two considerations, one of which
  is purely physiological.[6] On the other hand, foreplay implies a
  certain level of confidence and trust between the partners and creates
  intimacy. Psychologically, foreplay lowers inhibitions and increases
  emotional intimacy between partners. Physically, it stimulates the
  process that produces sexual arousal.

I'm interested if there is indeed some "priming" activity that can put the human brain in a state of mind, where thinking or conversation is easier?  If so, what is the term for such activity? Has any neurotransmitter been implicated in the phenomenon described above?

Yes, there is such an activity and it is called priming.  It is the same technique that involves mental, sexual foreplay. There has been a fair bit of research about the psychological effects of priming. I have limited the discussion, purely to priming, but there are many other interesting, associations with priming that could be discussed within another post.

I find the following points provide a good summary of the various modes of priming.

  Priming is providing a stimulus that influences their near-term future
  thoughts and actions, even though they may not seem to be connected.
  Conceptual priming occurs where related ideas are used to prime the
  response, for example 'hat' may prime for 'head'.
  Semantic priming
  occurs where the meaning created influences later thoughts. Semantic
  and conceptual priming are very similar and the terms may be used
  interchangeably.
  Non-associative semantic priming refers to related
  concepts but where one is less likely to trigger thoughts of the
  other, for example 'Sun' and 'Venus'.
  Perceptual priming, is based
  on the form of the stimulus, for example where a part-picture is
  completed based on a picture seen earlier.
  Associative priming
  happens when a linked idea is primed, for example when 'bread' primes
  the thought of 'butter'. This particularly applies to 'free
  association' word pairs.
  Masked priming occurs where a word or image
  is presented for a very short time but is not consciously recognized.
  Repetitive priming occurs where the repetition of something leads to
  it influencing later thoughts.
  Reverse priming occurs where people
  realize they are being primed and, feeling they have been biased,
  over-respond in their choices which are now biased in the reverse
  direction

Meyer and Schvanveldt (1971), Neely (1977), Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982), Marcel, (1983), Draine and Greenwald (1998), Sherman and Kim (2002)

On the down side:
I have been unable to find studies investigating the neurotransmitters involved in priming (at this stage). One thought occurred to me from when I studied Neuroscience (many years ago). That arousal (as in attention) is required to LTP cells. Although, this specific example may not apply to priming, it is a parallel between the effects of psychological priming and physiological priming. I am sure there are better articles, I, currently, have limited access to journals.

Learning-facilitated long-term depression and long-term potentiation at mossy fiber-CA3 synapses requires activation of β-adrenergic receptors.
Hagena H, Manahan-Vaughan D.
Source
Medical Faculty,
 Department of Neurophysiology,
Ruhr University
Bochum Bochum, Germany.


Can forgetting labor pain be an evolutionary advantage as animals don't know how to avoid labor? I've often heard the claim that women are forgetting, or remembering labour and birth pain as being less severe. Some people say that this mechanism has an evolutionary advantage, as if it didn't exist women would avoid having more babies...

Is this explanation possible? I'm assuming most animals don't know the relation between contraception and labor, so they won't be able to avoid labor even if they wanted...

How long have humans been aware of this relation, and is it possible that evolution has been able to work in that time-span?

I agree.  The connection between having sex and the pain of labor is so distant, it seems unlikely that it could be selected against.  In theory though, there could be enough time in human history for it to have happened, especially early on when child mortality was much higher than now.  If every mother who remembered extreme pain in labor never gave birth again, and a large proportion of those babies died, the attribute could disappear within a generation or two.

However, there is evidence that mothers don't always forget the pain of labor.  Even if they do forget to some extent, I'm not sure how that compares to other kinds of pain.  For example, marathon runners forget the pain of their last race.

Some advantages of remembering the pain of labor could be preparation for subsequent births and arranging support in advance.


Difference between brain and electronic device signals As I understand it, a brain communicates through sending signals via ions and chemical reactions resulting in concentrations of ions, a computer sends signals by electrons.  I'm really trying to do 3 things:

Confirm that understanding
Understand what is the fundamental difference between the two types of signaling.
Is there more to what the brain is doing at least at a relatively macro level that I may be missing.

This is a pretty broad question, however I think it's common enough that I think it's worth trying to answer. I'll break it down into the following:

What signals do the brain send?
How are these signals different than electronic signals?

1. Brain Signals

The brain has a lot of different signaling modalities. Some fast acting, some slow acting. Mostly, neurons communicate with the ions/chemicals you've mentioned above, which are actually called neurotransmitters.

2. Brain Signals vs. Electronic Device Signals

Spikes vs. Pulses

Electronic devices communicate by raising a potential on a wire and wait for the target of the communication to receive that pulse. The pulse can either be on or off. Neurons communicate via spikes, where the information is not "on" or "off", but also the frequency of the spikes and the spacing between the spikes.

Localised vs. Variable scopes

Electronic device pulses have clearly defined destinations. Although neurotransmitters can target a specific neuron, they can also modulate a group of neurons. This is called neuromodulation.

Static vs. adaptive

The wires on an electronic device do no change in strength. However, there are a TON of mechanisms for how the brain learns. The brain's "wires" called synapses, change in their effectiveness of transmission over time. The neurons themselves change in receptivity over time.

The Brain is not a Computer

To summarize, a computer or other electronic device is a really poor metaphor for the brain. I discuss this in my blog post "Understanding the Brain: Where Metaphors Limit You" if you would like a more in depth discussion on the subject.


The "Triune brain" model is obsolete, what is the name of the model that replaces it? The Triune brain model suggests our brains evolved adding more layers, a lizard brain, then a mammal brain, then a new human brain. As that's false, and the same structures have become modified in different ways in different lineages, what is the name of this current model?

There isn’t a new model, exactly, since as the poster stated, the brain doesn’t operate as a model and earlier versions of brain structures simply modify themselves to evolve— it’s one brain. Meaning, one’s “lizard brain” is actually just a mammalian brain now. The new model perhaps is The Human Brain? But given that the Triune model was most popularized by lawyers needing it for defense against emotional (irrational) behavior and psychologists adopted it for explanation of emotional dysregulation, then likely the best replacement is theory about emotion. Emotions are not well understood, and there are several theories about them, but the latest and most provocative development is the Theory of Constructed Emotion. See Barrett-Feldman et al.


Is there a bias where long statements, books, articles, etc. are seen as more truthful? Is there a cognitive biasing effect that makes people believe that long statements / expressions / articles / books are more truthful than short ones (assuming that they are equal semantically)?

Message length is a peripheral cue in the elaboration likelihood model. This means that a message's length affects the likelihood that its recipient will be persuaded when the recipient is not scrutinizing the message's content attentively. When a message is evaluated through peripheral attention instead of central focus, simple heuristics that are easily fooled determine the extent of persuasion that results.

Petty and Cacioppo (1986, part 1) cite their earlier study (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984) as demonstrating that more arguments in favor of a message increases attitude positivity toward the message when the audience is not personally invested in understanding it even if the arguments are weak. This doesn't work when the audience is highly involved – then a greater number of weak arguments only makes attitudes worse.

Petty and Cacioppo (1986, part 2) also cite Wood, Kallgren, and Preisler's (1985) study, which persuaded its relatively inattentive participants more strongly with long messages than short messages. Again, this effect did not vary with message quality, but disappeared among participants who paid closer attention.

@Eoin recommended Heit and Rotello (2012), who replicated the results of Wood and colleagues. In fact, they even found the effect of message length among participants who were told not to judge arguments by length. This also occurred when listening to verbal arguments. Good stuff...

References
- Heit, E., & Rotello, C. M. (2012). The pervasive effects of argument length on inductive reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 18(3), 244-277. Retrieved from http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/sites/default/files/eheit/files/argument%202012.pdf.
- Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1), 69–81. Retrieved from http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc84a.pdf.
- Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. Retrieved from http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part1.pdf (part 1), http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part2.pdf (part 2), and http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/pc86.part3.pdf (part 3).
- Wood, W., Kallgren, C. A., & Preisler, R. M. (1985). Access to attitude-relevant information in memory as a determinant of persuasion: The role of message attributes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21(1), 73–85. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/nZgcNz.


Is it possible to quantify cognitive bias? We know that bias exists, and that it affects our judgment and perception. This effect has to do with user's experience in life. That experience is taken care of by the brain, and if you counter a situation again, you have a predefined pattern of how to react. This can be changed over time, if other experiences is added. Wikipedia defines cognitive bias as:

  a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison with what is normatively expected.

In other disciplines, measurement is a valuable tool. One would wish for a scale of deviation from "what is normally expected".

Is it possible to quantify cognitive bias?

Bias can be quantified in many different ways. In human memory research carried out in the cognitive psychology tradition, there are simple ways to think about it. One basic measure of cognitive bias is merely called bias, and it's a measure of the absolute accuracy of an individual's probability judgments. You average probability judgments across a given subject, then average performance, and subtract one from the other. The magnitude and direction of this discrepancy could be argued to reflect a task-specific cognitive bias.

That's not useful without a concrete example. Say I ask you 10 questions tapping your general knowledge about the world (e.g., "Who invaded Rome by crossing the Alps with elephants?") After you respond, I ask you to rate your confidence on a scale from 0% (not at all confident) to 100% (entirely confident). We do this for nine more questions.

After you've taken this short test, I can easily calculate your bias by averaging your accuracy across the 10 questions (say you get 2 wrong, so 80%) and subtracting your average confidence across those questions (say it's 73%).  It's a 7% difference, and you were more accurate than you were confident, so your bias is said to be 7% -- you were underconfident.

There are lots of other ways you can think about this. Say, for instance, you weren't interested in overconfidence or underconfidence, but rather, just the degree to which your performance differed from your estimations. Here you could just use the squared value of the difference to represent probability accuracy.


Latency between actual neurons firing and muscles response in open and close fist experiment I'm trying to analyze the electrocorticograms (ECoG) of opening and closing the fist. I have the data of a glove to capture when the hand moves. I'm struggling with finding the best epoch or segment that represents the ECoG signals that are mostly related to opening and closing the fist. So, I'm wondering if there are works that already being done to calculate the latency between muscles response and the actual "brain order".

Short answer
Reported motor delays between brain activity and motor response are in the order of 6 - 9 ms.

Background
I found a study where the authors used deep brain stimulation electrodes implanted in the subthalamic nucleus (STN, Fig. 1) in patients with Parkinson's disease to activate motor tracts at a subcortical level. The STN is not part of the pyramidal motor system, but is thought to keep things in check. Stimulation in Parkinson's is used to control involuntary movements. In this study, the authors activated motor tracts at a subcortical level via the STN (Costa et al, 2007)

The authors recorded facial, cervical and upper limb muscle responses bilaterally by means of motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in the trapezius, deltoid, biceps and thenar muscles as well as the orbicularis oculi, orbicularis oris, masseter and sternocleidomastoid muscles. They report mean latencies in the range 6.0 - 9.1 ms. MEP latencies in the orbicularis oculi and orbicularis oris were significantly longer than in the masseter and sternocleidomastoid.

In your experiments, there was direct, voluntary activation of the motor pathway via the pyramidal system in (healthy?) subjects. In contrast, the cited study recorded latencies in Parkinson's sufferers after direct electrical activation of a subcortical structure. Hence, the pathway is different between the two studies and the latencies observed in the cited study may not apply fully to your data set. Nonetheless, it may help you to narrow the time window in which you might search for the brain activity relative to the motor output from the experimental glove.

Fig. 1. Overview of a brain slice showing the position of the STN. source: Wikipedia

Reference
- Costa et al., Brain. (2007); 130(1): 245-55


What type of behaviour is showing, but withholding, a reward? A specific example of what I mean is: when you go shopping at a supermarket with a loyalty card system, and you do not participate, the receipt say something along the lines of

  If you had a loyalty card you would have earned 20 points.

My first impression was that this is some sort of punishment, i.e. because of your behaviour (not having a loyalty card) we're throwing these points that you earned away.

This is based on definition 1, for punishment, from the Penguin dictionary of psychology (2nd ed.):

  The administration of some aversive stimulus contingent upon a particular behaviour.

Then I wondered if it was just negative reinforcement, because the message would go away if I signed up for the card.

This is based on definition 2, for negative reinforcement, from the same book:

  Any event, stimulus or behaviour which, when its removal is made contingent upon a response, will increase the frequency or likelihood of that response.

Do either of these fit the bill? Compare that message with telling someone "You could had have this cake, if only you had been a few minutes earlier. Now I will throw the cake in the bin."

Is it possible to categorise this type of behaviour in behaviourism?

The problem is that this doesn't fall under any of these conditioning definitions in behaviourism because the store isn't really trying to condition a response.  They're just trying to get you to do one thing once.  The behavioural techniques you mention are designed so that you get an organism to make a conditioned response spontaneously whenever the conditioned stimulus occurs (or is anticipated to occur or a second order associate occurs.. ok, it's more complicated than that).

It's also not really considered conditioning when it's done through insight.

That doesn't mean there's no science behind this.  There's lots and it falls more under behavioural economics than psychology, unfortunately.  (Consumer psychology hasn't really moved to be as complementary to behavioural economics as it probably should be.)

That said, these kinds of "nags" would be closest to negative reinforcement.  They're encouraging a behaviour that removes an aversive stimulus... being reminded of a gain you did not receive.  Punishment is typically more to extinguish a behaviour.  They certainly don't want you to stop shopping.  Sometimes it's hard to see what it is until you figure out the goal behaviour.

(As an aside, what they want more than anything is your personal information.  That's what they're trying to get.)


Why do people try to make themselves feel better by treating others poorly? I'm looking for an explanation for why people will try to make themselves feel better by treating others poorly.

For example, imagine a group of girls are sitting in a cafe. Within that group are two girls in particular, Sally and Anne. Sally is beautiful, intelligent, and popular. Sally knows she's blessed, but she doesn't like to highlight that fact. She shies from attention and deflects most compliments. Anne on the other hand, is normal, at least she thinks of herself as normal. Anne doesn't often receive compliments like Sally does. As the group of girls sit in the cafe sipping latte's and chatting, the conversation makes its way to Sally's recent success at school. Sally scored top of the class in the last bout of exams. This angers Anne, she herself didn't do so well on her exams. She feels ashamed. Suddenly she blurts "Oh Sally its great that you did well on your exams, I'm surprised you had so much time to study, I thought you'd be too busy with Jack?". Jack was Sally's fiance, they recently split up when Sally caught Jack with another woman. At this, Sally cowers like a wounded animal. She quickly mumbles something and excuses herself from the table. The conversation falls flat. Everyone at the table knew what happened between Sally and Jack. The other girls stare awkwardly at their mugs, shooting furtive looks at Anne. Anne knows what she did was wrong, evil even. But hurting Sally felt good, real good.

To rephrase the question in the context of the scene: Is there a name for Anne's behaviour at the cafe?

I'm not just looking for a word that would describe Anne's behaviour. Depending on how you interpret the story, Anne's behaviour can be described with many words (bullying, jealousy, spitefulness etc.). What I'm looking for is an explanation of Anne's behaviour in terms of psychoanalytic theory.

What I'm looking for is an explanation of Anne's behaviour in terms of
psychoanalytic theory.

In Freudian psychology this is called Displacement:

  ... an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes
  either a new aim or a new object for goals felt in their original form
  to be dangerous or unacceptable.

For example:

  ... a college student may snap at his or her roommate when upset about
  an exam grade.

Note that psychoanalytic theory is outdated, and for the most part considered pseudoscience.  The concept of defence mechanisms in general has largely been superseded by cognitive dissonance theory.

Not related, but you may also be interested in Schadenfreude.


What causes short-term dysphoria following intense pleasure? I'm interested in the phenomenon of short term Dysphoria:

  Dysphoria is a state of feeling unwell or unhappy; a feeling of emotional and mental discomfort as a symptom of discontentment, restlessness, dissatisfaction, malaise, depression or anxiety.

What interests me is when Dysphoria arises following moments of intense pleasure:

Post-coital tristesse, a feeling of blues following orgasm
Postorgasmic illness syndrome
Dysphoria associated with recreational drug use, where X minutes of euphoria are followed by Y minutes of dysphoria ( I do not know the term for this one).

The phenomenon that I'm describing lasts from 5 minutes to a few hours, then disappears. It is experienced by only a small subset of population.

I tried to look for an explanation, but cannot find the cause - why Dysphoria appears following intense pleasure? Is Dopamine or Dopamine Transporter or D2 receptors involved in some way ? Is this some sort of sensitization/desensitization homeostasis mechanism at play?

Thank you for any search terms or hints that would help me shed light on the subject.

Dysphoria following drug use

Though their acting mechanisms can be vastly different, the general basis of drug addiction is its influence on the reward system, particularly through dopamine pathways[1].  It's thought that the stimulation of the dopamine system leads to dopamine depletion[2] and without dopamine, there's no rewarding behavior and thus no motivation to behave in any particular way (i.e. depression/dysphoria).

Desensitization occurs as a flooded dopamine body tries to reduce its receptor count, thus lowering its sensitivity to dopamine.  But since the dopamine stimulus was artificial (drug-induced) and not environmental, it will require more drugs to achieve a normal level again (i.e. "chase and drag").  And this is the basis for addiction.

Dysphoria following orgasm

I can not find any peer-reviewed information about the neurobiology of post-coital blues.  There are lots of MDs and professional psychologists that weigh in speculatively, but the literature is skimpy.  A speculation I've seen is, given that the coitus was genuinely with romantic partners (and thus not a social response), that its a biological dysfunction in the Amygdala as the amygdala sharply reduces activity after sex, but this response may be exaggerated in some individuals[3].

My own speculation is that it might also be a way to promote promiscuity in the human race, evolutionarily speaking.  In modern day, it may not be as prevalent as infant mortality rates are much lower and monogamous relationships don't threaten human survival rates.

References

[1]Wise RA, Rompre PP, (1989). Brain dopamine and reward.  Annu Rev Psychol. 40:191-225.

[2]Charles A. Dackis, Mark S. Gold (1985).  New concepts in cocaine addiction: The dopamine depletion hypothesis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 9:3, 469–477

[3]Sex and depression: In the brain, if not the mind


Is fear in response to the sight of predators innate or acquired? Children of very small age have less knowledge. They have very limited knowledge about harm, fear, etc.

Can children feel fear with such little knowledge?

Let us assume a child is playing in the house and suddenly a lion comes into the house. Does the child feel fear upon seeing it?

The child does not know that the lion is harmful at all. Does the child's brain indicate that something bad is going to happen just by seeing the lion?

If the child feels fear in situations like that, does the brain have inbuilt knowledge related to such issues?

Note: The lion does not make any noise. It is just approaching the child slowly.

Is fear in response to the sight of predators innate or acquired?

Alright, so my familiarity with this area primarily comes from Vanessa LoBue's work.  And what I get from her research is that we don't really know if certain fears are innate or acquired.
LoBue seems to favor a prepared learning model, which is just as it sounds.  Infants are not born fearful of things like spiders, snakes, and heights (Adolph, Kretch, & LoBue, 2014; LoBue et al., 2012), but they are biased (prepared) to learn to fear them.  She has supported this theory by showing that children are more rapid at attending to snakes than other stimuli (e.g., flowers, frogs, caterpillars), independent of snake knowledge/exposure (LoBue & DeLoache, 2008).  Infants are also biased to associate undulating snakes, but not other stimuli, with negatively valenced sounds (DeLoache & LoBue, 2009).  However, this wasn't true for static images of snakes.
Importantly, these stimuli are (ostensibly) evolutionarily significant (snakes, spiders, but not lions, tigers).  However, the evidence for their threatening presence in human evolution, at least for spiders, is lacking (LoBue & Rakison, 2013).  This has been a major criticism of the prepared learning model: which stimuli are 'prepared'?
LoBue suggests that the bias toward snakes might be mediated by low-level perceptual characteristics that pop out (i.e., curvilinear features) (LoBue, 2014).  However, it's not clear if this visual saliency leads to actual fear learning of snakes (LoBue & Rakison, 2013).  Moreover, this suggests that any predominantly curvilinear stimulus might bias attention.
Aside from her work, there are loads of mixed findings in this area that don't point to a clear answer. For example, there are studies that report a general attention bias for animals in general, threatening or non-threatening (e.g., Lipp, 2006). Plus there are several outstanding methodological problems in much of the past research.
Frankly, there just needs to be a lot more research in order to figure this out. Although I would argue that the "non-associative model" (that infants don't need to learn, in some way, to fear snakes, spiders, etc.) is out of fashion and not well supported. But for the most recent reviews, see LoBue & Rakison (2013) and LoBue (2013).
References
Adolph, K. E., Kretch, K. S., & LoBue, V. (2014). Fear of heights in infants?. Current directions in psychological science, 23(1), 60-66. doi: 10.1177/0963721413498895 PMCID: PMC4175923 PDF: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4175923/pdf/nihms574402.pdf
DeLoache, J. S., & LoBue, V. (2009). The narrow fellow in the grass: Human infants associate snakes and fear. Developmental science, 12(1), 201-207. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00753.x
Lipp, O. V. (2006). Of snakes and flowers: Does preferential detection of pictures of fear-relevant animals in visual search reflect on fear-relevance? Emotion, 6(2), 296-308. doi: 10.1037/1528-3542.6.2.296
LoBue, V., & DeLoache, J. S. (2008). Detecting the snake in the grass: Attention to fear-relevant stimuli by adults and young children. Psychological science, 19(3), 284-289. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02081.x
LoBue, V. (2013). What are we so afraid of? How early attention shapes our most common fears. Child Development Perspectives, 7(1), 38-42. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12012
LoBue, V., Bloom Pickard, M., Sherman, K., Axford, C., & DeLoache, J. S. (2013). Young children's interest in live animals. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31(1), 57-69. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2012.02078.x
LoBue, V., & Rakison, D. H. (2013). What we fear most: A developmental advantage for threat-relevant stimuli. Developmental Review, 33(4), 285-303. doi: 10.1016/j.dr.2013.07.005
LoBue, V. (2014). Deconstructing the snake: The relative roles of perception, cognition, and emotion on threat detection. Emotion, 14(4), 701. doi: 10.1037/a0035898


Do many people have an "Accompanying Voice" - an equal they converse with? A hypnosis professional told me this is true, so I am asking: is it a fact of psychology that many people have a voice that they talk with "in their head" which talks back to them and helps solve problems? I find that this voice often has a perspective I never had and presents ideas I had not thought of. But it does not just tell me what to do. When I really get in a fix, it backs off and lets me solve the problem "by myself". I am about 50 and it has been there as far back as I can recall.

Is it common to have an "Accompanying Voice" and conversations where both voices appear to have equal standing and independence? Is there research which shows this is something other than a hallucination? (After all, an internal monologue is not a hallucination. Why not have two voices in your mind?) The prevailing idea is that voices are hallucinations, but it seems that they could just be parts of the self. This is a cornerstone of Transpersonal Psychology, which uses a dialog method to help people improve self-awareness and solve inner issues.

Addition: Here is some info from a site about this topic, although it does not address my question directly:

  Because of prevailing attitudes psychiatry and within society as a
  whole, it is important to point out, that there are many people who
  hear voices who can cope with their voices and regard them as a
  positive part of their lives. Neither is it the case that voices have
  always been regarded as a negative experience, throughout history and
  even today there are people who hear voices who find their voices
  inspirational and comforting.

  These are facts, that on the face of it are hard to square with the
  negative way that the experience is regarded by psychiatry.

More Addition: Here is a bit about the Voice Dialog technique used in Transpersonal Psychology:

  Voice Dialogue Technique
  The Voice Dialogue technique allows a client
  to gain a deeper sense of inner wisdom and gives them the opportunity
  to identify and examine the voices within. Being armed with this
  powerful knowledge provides a greater resource from which the client
  can draw upon when faced with difficult circumstances. The Voice
  Dialogue guides a client into realizing that there are parts of their
  inner being that propel them, but they are separate from those parts.
  They begin to understand that they are made up of many parts and each
  serves a function and has an energy force that sustains it. With this
  awareness, a client is able to create a balance among all of his
  corresponding and correlating parts and can determine which ones to
  silence and which ones to accentuate.

  The "Aware Ego" in Voice Dialogue
  In Voice Dialogue, this heightened
  sense of awareness is referred to as the "aware ego." An aware ego is
  not a trait that one possesses, rather it is a process by which we
  begin to know all of the layers of our consciousness on an intimate
  level. Because there is an negative for every positive, the aware ego
  assumes that you can experience both the beneficial part of your
  consciousness and its opposite. With enough insight into your own
  identity, you can choose freely which one will serve you better, and
  can adjust, alter, and align the parts within to meet your goals for
  healing.

To me, this is about using a process which gets underneath assumptions, especially unconscious ones. The biggest assumption is that we are one singular thing that is consistent and understandable. Not So. But we can become master of ourselves.

From a quick search online I see no reason why you distantiate what you describe from auditory hallucinations:

  a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without
  auditory stimulus.

Given the article you link to, which arguably does address your question (yes, some people report experiencing this), you mainly seem to be concerned that this would unequivocally be considered a mental illness. Your actual question thus seems to be "Is hearing multiple voices always considered a mental illness?".

Judging from the Wikipedia article (and its subheading 'Non-disease associated causes') this is seemingly not the case.

  However, individuals may hear voices without suffering from
  diagnosable mental illness. (Thompson, 2006)

The article by Thompson mentions a study for which unfortunately no source is provided, thus I would take the following with a grain of salt:

  But studies by Dutch researchers that began in the 1990s found that
  some healthy people also regularly hear voices. ... Many of the people
  who contacted them did not find the voices disruptive and had never
  felt the need to consult mental health services. ... The resulting
  studies found that more people might hear voices than psychologists
  had thought, perhaps around 4 percent of the population.

It might, however, set you on the right path to finding the actual studies, or more recent work in regards to how many people report hearing voices not attributed to the self without considering them a mental illness.

Thompson, Andrea (September 15, 2006). "Hearing Voices: Some People Like It". LiveScience.com.


Are representations of unattended objects "bound"? In our phenomenal experience, different features of an object, like shape and color, seem to be "bound" together into a single percept, even though those features are represented in different parts of the brain. Explaining this phenomenon is known as the "binding problem."

If I look at a red apple, the internal representations of its red-ness and its apple shape are bound together. But what if I am not looking at the red apple -- what if my visual attention is not on the red apple? In that case, are the object's "redness" and "appleness" still bound together? Or does binding require attentional focus? Does it require consciousness?

Assuming that the perception enters consciousness as a gestalt with all attributes bound, then when attention is diverted and the apple no longer present, then the decay of memory sets in. The two models neural-net, and "holographic" suggest different parameters for how to approach a measurement.

Under a "holographic" model, the connection might become more vague, but I think it could still be recalled, perhaps with the assistance of a tertiary related stimulus: viz. recalling a memory from an scent.

In a weighted-feedback neural-net model, you'd be looking for the moment when the physical link between the attributes decays, I think. Literally, the moment it becomes subliminal.

I'm thinking of McCulloch/Pitts nets specifically, as described in Marvin Minsky, Finite and Infinite Machines, a classic, but not recent source.

A cortex would be connected through layers to shape detectors and redness detectors, and these would connect to associative areas. The strength of the association would be dependant upon the weights of the neural connections between the two areas, and would begin to decay after the stimulus is discontinued.

... Or maybe I'm rationalizing with big words to save face after being foiled at a snarky answer?? Does any of this make sense? Does it help? I'm sleepy.


Approaches to life coaching I work on a theological reflection of coaching. I would like to list some basic directions/approaches/ways/schools that differ each other.

My attempt:

Neuroscience based coaching
Systemic coaching
NLP coaching
Narrative coaching.

Coaching is not as well researched and not as well conceptualized as for example psychotherapy. There are no clear and distinct schools and approaches, especially since many certifying institutes require by contract that the coaches they train must not disclose the copyrighted methods to third parties.

Generally, literature on coaching and the reports of coaches show that coaching uses a "toolbox" of methods taken from any and all schools of psychotherapy (from behavioral therapy to humanistic therapy to Gestalt therapy to psychoanalysis to systemic therapy and so on) and sociology as well as other, even New Age methods (see for example Rupert, 1992) of personality development, most prominently NLP. Usually the tools are used in an eclectic, "experimental" (try-what-works) manner. Rarely is there a theoretic "framing" of methodology (one example is Schmidt-Lellek & Schreyögg, 2008, who use a phenomenological frame).

Sources:

(I'm currently enrolled in a psychological seminar on methods in and evaluation of coaching)
Rupert, G. (1992). Employing the New Age: training seminars. In J. R. Lewis & J. G. Melton (Eds.), Perspectives on the New Age. Albany, NY: SUNY Press., 127-35.
Schmidt-Lellek, C. J., & Schreyögg, A. (Eds.) (2008). Praxeologie des Coaching. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften


Is there any scientific evidence that nootropics improve synaptic plasticity / learning ability? I'm attempting to learn a very specific skill (perfect pitch) and I'm considering nootropic supplements.

While I can find plenty of websites offering these supplements and making big claims, I can't find any rigourous scientific experiments backing these claims.

On the other hand I can't find any rigourous scientific experiments debunking them.

I would imagine such an experiment would not be too hard to set up; for example, performance on a simple "pairs" card game could give a measure of short-term memory.

How might I intelligently go about searching for such experimental results?

I'll have to leave it to someone else to provide real expert advice and references on this point but I do offer the following skeptical points.

Brain Training Doesn't Work

To my knowledge, there is no reliable data whatsoever that says domain general brain-training has any effect. Basically, you can spend as long as you like practice pitch recognition, or anagrams, or any other cognitive task, but the transfer to unpracticed tasks will be minimal - you'll simply improve at the task you've practiced. You cannot increase IQ/Working Memory/Cognitive Capacity in this way. See, for example, Owen et al, 2010. The only benefit accrued from these games is in cases of cognitive decline, such as dementia, Alzheimers, and other neurodegenerative conditions, where training can slow decline.

Nootropic Drugs Don't Work

I've seen no evidence, ever, that shows long term benefits of nootropics, beyond the usual, possibly valid claims about fatty acids found in fish. I can't find references for this right now, unfortunately, but really the onus is on those who claim that these supplements do have an effect to point to unbiased evidence.


What structures in the brain are called upon to strengthen coupling between bilateral movements? It is very difficult for the normally-coordinated person to be able to pat his/her head and rub his/her stomach at the same time (or pick a similar activity).  It seems to be possible to maintain the separate hand motions over the short term, but keeping the movements separate is almost impossible to keep up.  One ends up either rubbing the head while rubbing the stomach or patting the head while patting the stomach before long.  Effectively, there seems to be a "locking" between the motor cortices across the hemispheres during bilateral movements of the arms.

Given all of this complex coordination that is possible between the two arms/hands, what are the structures within the brain that are called upon to strengthen the coupling between the two arms during bilateral movements?  Why do the hemispheres try to lock their activity rather than letting both arms act independently?

It's not so much a "locking" between the two hemispheres as it is a combination of an asymmetrical representation of the ipsilateral (same side) limb in cortex, and phase transitions, which bring the limbs into a more energetically favorable state.

Kelso (1984) compares the phase transition to that of a racehorse, which is able to adjust its gait for the optimal use of oxygen in its blood.  In his study, regardless of whether a subject's limb was loaded or unloaded during a trial, there was a phase resetting after the subject reached a certain frequency (constant within subjects).  You can see in the diagram below that the dotted line of one arm's trajectory is 180° out of phase with the other, the solid line, and at a certain point, they fall into lockstep.

Ziemann (2001) study points to another possible reason for the synchronization.  In right handed subjects, there tends to be a dominance of the left motor cortex in the activation of the ipsilateral hand.  Trying to do different motions with both hands may "pull" the activity towards what the left hand is doing.  Presumably, there might be a similar behavior in left-handed subjects, but as in hearing and language, there is not a perfect symmetry of cortical features for left-handers.

In terms of structures that do govern bilateral coordination, Sadato et al (1997) used PET scanning to establish that, at least in right handed subjects, the right dorsal premotor area along with the right posterior supplementary motor area, were significantly more active while making parallel movements.  I found no further evidence of it, but this could be a channel through which some of the phase shifting is taking place.

References

Kelso, J.A.S. (1984).  Phase transitions and critical behavior in human bimanual coordination.  American Journal of Physiology, 246 (Regulatory Integrative Comp. Physiol 15):R1000-1004.
Sadato, N., Yonekura, Y., et al (1997).  Role of the supplementary motor area and the right premotor cortex in the coordination of bimanual finger movements.  Journal of Neuroscience, 17(24): 9667-9674. PDF
Sakurada, T., Gomi, H., Ito, K. (2009). Multiple interactions between hemispheres of the brain modulating coupling of bilateral movements. The 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, September 2-6, 2009: 5922-5925.
Ziemann, U., Hallett, M. (2001).  Hemispheric asymmetry of ipsilateral motor cortex activation during unimanual motor tasks: further evidence for motor dominance.  Clinical Neurophysiology, 112: 107-113.


Age vs. Receptiveness to propaganda/ ideology I am interested in the relation between the age of an individual and their receptiveness towards propaganda or ideology.

I would suspect that children/adolescents are strongly receptive towards propaganda and that as they enter adulthood they become less receptive.

Are there any studies on this that verify my claim/ contradict it?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Welcome to Psychology.SE.

This has the potential to be a very big subject, depending on how deep you want to go into it. You may wish to look at priming along with studies surrounding conformity and peer pressure, looking at how they play a part in early behaviour and belief forming.

You may also want to look at Ron Jones' "Third Wave" Experiment which was portrayed in the movie called The Wave


Study on the learning of programming concepts in pre-university students I want to investigate the ability of a group of students to learn programming concepts in one hour.

The students are grouped by ages: 6 - 17.
The tasks are divided into concept and type. Each concept has example tasks, to correct code, to copy code and to write code without help.
I measure the number of tasks completed and the time elapsed in each one.

What is the best way to analyze this data? And to represent them?

UPDATE

I wanted to compare the performance of students by age and gender.

I draw a simple bar chart with the means of the tasks performed correctly.

But the experiments have different durations and much dispersion. There is some more reliable statistical method than analyzing only the mean.

I am not an expert in the subject and neither in statistics.

If you want to report the dispersion, add some error bars, or better do a box plot, or even violin plot, but the latter require understanding of less introductory concepts (for tuning purposes). For a non-graphical presentation of e.g. age by task (and by gender as well), see contingency table. These can be nested.

If you want to know if there are significant differences between the groups, read about the F-test. If want to test diffrences between individual tasks, you can do that too (e.g. t-test), but you have to worry about adjusting for multiple comparisons.

I will not go into further details because this board is unsuitable for giving you a stats 101 education. And so is Wikipedia, by the way; its articles on such topics are generally too technical for the mere practitioner of statistics. It's best you talk to someone who has had at least that stat 101 level of education, although it would be better with someone who at least [still] practices statistics on some level. All else failing, read an intro textbook of applied statistics; or see coursera for a free class etc.

You should also learn how to use a software package that does all of these, e.g. R or SPSS. Depending how good you are at programming you may find one or the other easier. With software like these, you can also easily do plot arrays that basically iterate over a covariate's (e.g. gender) level (i.e. values). There's no standard name for these, R calls them facets; SPSS calls them panel plots.


Are stress, frustration and existentialism considered cognitive distortions? I was given a list of cognitive distortions and ways to 'untwist' them. However I noticed the 3 big things that I encounter often were not listed. Are these considered cognitive distortions?

When you say cognitive distortions, I assume you are talking about cognitive biases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Stress and frustration could be thought of as experiences. For example, some forms of stress are associated with the experience of negative emotions, fatigue, and so on. They could also influence cognitive biases. For example, fatigue can lead to a narrowing of focus. Anyway, the point is they are not cognitive biases per se.

Existentialism is a philosophy. Perhaps you are talking about experiencing existential dread or something like that. But that also is not a cognitive bias, in that it does not inherently provide a biased cognition about something.


Theoretical limit to the use of mental faculty of the brain A lot of articles stress the importance of having to train the brain (By training the brain, I mean the cognitive faculty of the brain for learning things and not brain's normal functions) since the brain is a muscle and training it would improve its cognitive abilities.

Since using anything beyond a limit is detrimental to it, is there a theoretical limit to the use of brain beyond which it would be detrimental to the brain?

Intensive stimuli may trigger epileptic shocks in some individuals. At least prolonged epileptic shocks may damage neurons, I'm not sure about short epileptic shocks. So the answer is yes, using your brain eg. your extended visual system to process excessively intensive visual stimuli may cause epileptic shocks and thus be detrimental to the brain.

However, as far as I know, visual stimuli are not able to cause epileptic shocks to everyone (susceptibility to epilepsy is a requirement), so I'm not sure if there is any proven way how by you could cause brain damage only by brain function (without aid of any voluntary motoric movements) in any individual.

As intensive visual and auditory stimuli are a part of our natural environment - whereas lack of stimuli (sensory deprivation) is an unnatural state - I think triggering epileptic shocks by intensive stimuli can not be considered only as a self-caused way of damaging the brain.


Is there a list of large-scale, free datasets with psychological variables? Psychologists are not using large, existing, free data to its potential. We don't know what exists, what it contains, or how to use it without a huge investment. Secondary analysis of large, open datasets can improve replicability and reproducibility over small new studies, e.g., through accessibility, high power, generalizability, and validated measures. Between-subjects moderation designs particularly lack power. However, these resources are underused in research and education. Student research often has low inference quality, and educators may lack access to use these tools for pedagogy.

Is there a list of large-scale, free datasets with psychological variables? Additionally, is there a list of other such lists?

Related: Psychological journal that focuses on publishing interesting psychological datasets

Participants at the last meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science developed a list of >100 such datasets with some metadata such as topic, country, total number of participants, etc. The list is currently a collaborative wiki open to editing by anyone.

List of open psychology datasets and aggregators

Outside of psychology, there are a vast amount of aggregators. Here are two major resources:

https://www.quora.com/Data/Where-can-I-find-large-datasets-open-to-the-public

https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch


Is "not going to doctor because of fear of illness" a psychological disorder? Some people don't like to go to the doctor because they are afraid of being diagnosed sick in medical examinations or being diagnosed exacerbated when they have an illness even they know if they don't treat the illness it will get worse.

A really large population of these kind of people exists, especially in Asia.

Is it a subtype of hypochondria? Or it is another psychological abnormality or even is normal?

What you are describing is most likely avoidance, which in itself isn't a disorder.

People are most likely afraid of the illness in itself, and so not going to the doctor means that they don't have to confront the possibility of having that illness. This avoidance is a mechanism that maintains hypochondria or health anxiety (however you wish to call it) by negative reinforcement: 'I don't go to the doctor, I'm not told if I'm sick or not, so I'm less anxious'.

The reduction in fear or anxiety is usually short lived and only makes it worst over time. This coping mechanism is not adaptive, and may aggravate health anxiety, but in itself, is not a disorder.

Sources
- David Veale's website
- Centre for Clinical Interventions
- Psychology Today


Looking for the term for the relationship between "confidence" and "knowledge" I'm looking for the name of an effect that relates confidence in your decisions (dependent variable) against your level of knowledge for a specific domain (independent variable).  I don't remember where I first heard of this.  It could have been more than 20 years ago in college psych classes, or years later in management seminars.  It could have been junk science I heard from a friend.  It's been too long ago to remember.

The gist is this: A graph of decisiveness or confidence in your ability to make decsion (on the y axis) vs. education/experiences/fund of knowledge (on the x axis) is shaped like a U.  When you have little knowledge, you underestimate the complexity of a situation, and you think making decisions is easy.  The nadir of the U happens when you know enough to understand a domain's complexity, and you find it hard to make decisions because you're overwhelmed by all the possibilities.  With experience, at the upper end of the x-axis, you have started to assimilate the information in a more intuitive way, you can better estimate the most likely outcomes, and you're better at accepting uncertainty. So you find it easier to make decisions.

Ideas that are vaguely similar are the Hype Cycle ("valley of expectations"), the Dunning-Kruger effect, and source amnesia.

I may be thinking of the "Four Stages of Competence."  Perhaps the U-shaped graph and the emphasis on confidence in decision making was just a unique way one of my instructors presented the data.  It may have got this idea from a medical internship manual (I no longer have) with a graph very much like the Hype Cycle, but related to experience gained over the course of an intern year.

Does this effect sound familiar to anyone?  I'm looking for a name for the effect. Part of me thinks that over time, I may have conflated the Hype Cycle with the Four Stages of competence.

I cannot know what your friend or teacher ever told you, but you would be talking about cognizance.

Cognizance and Experience of Technology

http://staffweb.ncnu.edu.tw/clhung/MOT/papers/9.pdf

Knowledge base as a set of cognizance objects

http://web.csulb.edu/journals/jecr/issues/20004/paper3.pdf


How is music preference related to personality traits or particular qualities? I'm a big music enthusiast myself, and one thing I noticed about myself, and not exactly about other people, is that I don't have any music genre I prefer listening to. For example, I don't mind it being rock, rap, techno or any music genre for that matter. As long as the beat is catchy, the quality of execution is there, and I can enjoy listening to it, I'll do so.

Hence, I've been wondering if there is any correlation between people liking certain kinds of genres and having certain qualities, skills or personality traits? For example, are people who like certain genres more creative or outgoing?

As your luck would have it, there is a study by Schwartz et al. (2003) that examines just that.

They found that there was a specific personality type associated with music preference in adolescents. The paper is freely available on familywise.ca.

Schwartz, K. D., & Fouts, G. T. (2003). Music preferences, personality style, and developmental issues of adolescents. Journal of youth and adolescence, 32(3), 205-213. (PDF)


In ACT-R difference between declarative and working memory I'm currently studying PRIMs within the context of ACT-R by reading these two papers. In the papers, there are references to both declarative and working memory modules of ACT-R. What is the difference between these memory modules? Is the only difference the allowed operations on this memory and thus their use? Are there also decay effects in working memory?

This article explains the difference :

  Declarative memory takes the form of a semantic net linking
  propositions, images, and sequences by associations.

  The nodes of long-term memory all have some degree of activation and
  working memory is that part of long-term memory that is most highly
  activated.

The declarative memory is all knowledge that can be retrieved in consciousness. Working memory activates only the declarative memory needed for the current task.

When a different task is given, the activation changes to match the needs of the new task. The non-relevant active knowledge is deactivated, and new relevant knowledge is retrieved.


How does one respond to an ADD/ADHD diagnosis of one's self or one's child? I read:

  Is ADHD even a thing?

  This kind of question can be offensive to some. The same kind of thing
  can be applied to other conditions:

  Is depression even a thing? Or are they just lazy? Is gender disphoria
  even a thing? Or have they just sexually confused? Is homosexuality
  even a thing? Or are they just a deviant? Is otherkin even a thing? Or
  are the just a teenager looking for a unique identity?

Apparently, there is much controversy over ADHD, according to Wiki (not enough reputation)

Part 1:

What is a diagnosed person to do? How does one evaluate methods used by a doctor? How does one evaluate if prescribed medicine and dosage is right or at least not severely wrong?

I'm guessing initial prescription, if any, is going to be experimental. From there we see if dosage needs to increase or decrease or if medicine needs to be changed or stopped. How then should one evaluate a doctor's decision?

Part 2:

Why not controversy over depression? Bipolar? Schizophrenia?

Some psychologists seem to believe ADD/ADHD is a myth. Is there any truth to such?

The blog also points out how homosexuality was wrongly considered a disorder. How do we know ADD/ADHD won't turn out like that?

There actually is the same kind of controversy over depression. The French documentary Dépression, une épidémie mondiale nicely summarizes how a well-meant change in diagnostic criteria (from DSM-IV to DSM-5) backfired and the pharmacoceutical industry now use this to diagnose every sadness or exhaustion as depression with the intention to sell drugs and make money.
There has also been controversy over schizophrenia for at least two hundred years. Other mental disorders are equally highly controversial. It is just that ADHD is a "fashion disorder" today and therefore covered by the media, which gives laypeople the impression that only this disorder is controversial.
As for ADHD, we live in a society that favours certain personality traits and disfavours others, and those kids that don't sit still very well, need a higher input speed, or are simply socially maladjusted, are often diagnosed with ADHD, although they are perfectly healthy and normal and would only need a different kind of learning environment or better familial support.
On the other hand, this does not mean that ADHD does not exist. If the diagnosis was given by an expert after careful investigation, then the patient will certainly profit from therapy. But the therapy cannot be deduced from the diagnosis alone. It must take into consideration the etiology (what caused the disorder?) and the circumstances (how does the patient live?), as well as the personality of the patient. Because the same symptoms of the same disorder can have widely varying causes, and you want your therapy to address those causes and not just ease the symptoms.
Therefore a meaningful diagnosis will include an analysis of the cause. ADHD can be genetic, caused by harmful substances, or psycho-social. Therapy will differ in each case.
If you want to evaluate a diagnosis and recommended therapy, I would recommend you go see another expert. Evaluating them yourself would require you study medicine and psychology to an extent probably not feasible. Be extremely careful of reading stuff on the net! Much of what you find there is published by companies who are in search of patients to sell medication to, or by laypeople.
I don't know where you live, and probably don't know how you can find trusted experts in your country. In Germany, where I live, the best path to take would be to approach therapeutic organizations or even your health insurance and ask them for whom you should turn to.
Generally, psychiatrists appear to be more likely to prescribe medication, while psychologists seem to prefer non-medical therapy. The best therapy for many mental disorders is a combination of both, with medication used to alleviate the current symptoms, and psychotherapy working mid- to long-term on changing behavior (and personality) so that medication is no longer necessary or can at least be reduced. I know people with ADHD who live well without medication, simply by creating for themselves the environment that they can flourish in.
All the best.

tl;dr
Find a doctor you can trust, and trust them.


What processes underlies confidence ratings in cognitive decision-making? Many experiments in cognitive psychology and other domains ask for confidence ratings (e.g., on a 0-100 scale, 100 meaning "I'm sure I experienced this stimulus"). What accounts describe how these decisions are made?

Review papers of this issue would be particularly helpful.

Note: There are different kinds of confidence ratings (eg, confidence in skill or ability, confidence in knowledge or expertise, etc).  This answer only addresses the question as asked, regarding confidence in memory or familiarity.

Processing fluency - sometimes referred to as "cognitive fluency", "cognitive ease", or just "fluency" - is a mechanism proposed to underlie confidence ratings about familiarity:

  ... perceptual fluency can contribute to the experience of familiarity
  when fluent processing is attributed to the past. ... Jacoby and
  Dallas in 1981 argued that items from past experience are processed
  more fluently. ... people sometimes take fluency as an indication that
  a stimulus is familiar even though the sense of familiarity is
  false. Perceptual fluency literature has been dominated with
  research that posits that fluency leads to familiarity.

Processing fluency, as investigated by Hertwig et al (2008), refers to latency - ie, the speed with which processing occurs.  They demonstrate that the human mind is able to discriminate retrieval (response) latencies with great accuracy (down to 100ms), and these latencies correlate strongly with recognition confidence ratings.

Related video.


Asking "What's wrong in you life?" → Person sees more problems I think if you ask a person "What's wrong in your life?" several times (for example monthly) the person starts to focus on negative things.
Maybe questions like this can have a negative outcome. The person will focus on (maybe even search) things which are negative. These questions might influence his attention. And finally the person might get depressed or the relationship gets worse.
I am new to psychology. Is there a term for this? Or are there researches on this topic?
Similar questions:

What is causing you stress?
What do you dislike at your workplace?
What annoys you most about your spouse?

This is priming effect. There are some experiments closely related to your observation:
Strack, F., Martin, L.L. and Schwarz, N. (1988), Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments of life satisfaction. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol., 18: 429-442. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420180505
In this paper, the significant change in correlation between happiness and subject of previously asked question was observed, as against to the same question asked after the question about happiness.
Also framing effect can be related to your question: the way which question about person's life is asked can change the expected answer to the question (along with temporal opinion about given subject). When the process is repetitive, it can factor into more permanent change.
Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel (1981). "The Framing of decisions and the psychology of choice". Science. 211 (4481): 453–58. doi:10.1126/science.7455683
Related to this is also confrmation bias - in case of a question about some negative aspects of some subject (in this case life), more negative memories about it is primed, what substancially changes the way we process the subject
Nickerson, Raymond S. (June 1998), "Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises", Review of General Psychology, 2 (2): 175–220, doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175


Does the human visual system implement (adaptive) histogram equalization? The human visual system is very good at 'cancelling out' shadows and other lightning effects, and focusing on the contrast in images. A famous example of this is Adelson's checker shadow illusion:

In the above image, cell A and B are the same exact colour, yet we see cell B as significantly lighter than cell B.
In this case, if I wanted to get a machine to make an observation similar to the human perception, I would use a technique like adaptive histogram equalization to enhance the contrasts and eliminate the shadows and lighting effects.
In computational terms, histogram equalization works by taking the cumulative distribution of the histogram of pixel intensities and stretching it to be a line. This transformation makes the histogram uniform, and thus maximizes the entropy and amount of information conveyed by each bit -- giving an information theoretic justification for why one would want detectors that use this sort of transform. Adaptive histogram equalization works the same way but instead of transforming the global histogram, first divides the image into a large number of tiles and then normalizes each tile. This tends to amplify the signal, while 'cancelling out' the local background due to effects like shadows or lighting gradients.
Laughlin (1981) showed that the large monopolar cells in the insect compound eye -- specifically in Calliphora stygia -- implement histogram equalization through their neural coding to cancel out the ambient contrast of typical natural scenes. Has something similar been shown in vertebrate visual systems? In particular, in the human -- or similar -- visual system?
Further, Laughlin (1981) could not look at adaptation of the eye to a specific scene, and was comparing to a static typical environment, has this research been extended to look at dynamic changes in the coding pattern in response to specific scenes?
References
Laughlin, S. (1981). A simple coding procedure enhances a neuron's information capacity. Zeitschrift für Naturforschung c, 36(9-10), 910-912.

This isn't exactly what you are referring to, but I think provides a similar function and has been shown in vertebrate vision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_model

Divisive normalization as a canonical computation across the brain

While this does not implement histogram equalization, I think it is actually a better-suited explanation of the checker board illusion - because local luminance and contrast normalises the activity of all neurons in the area.

Again, this doesn't quite answer your question but maybe provides an alternative computational step occurring in vertebrates?


Is there psychological research on seduction? I've been reading a lot of books about seduction. Most of them rely on (approximative) psychological basis and presents really interesting insights. Robert Greene - Art of seduction, for example presents a lot of interesting factual happening and present some intuitive psychological interpretation.  The generalization made by Mistery and Greene are not very scientific. But it's possible to try to give an interpretation of the facts described by this books based on cognitive science.

There are really many fields of applied psychology. However, it seems to me that there is no official Seduction psychology.
For example, topics might include stereotypes, concept of beauty, importance of beauty, appearance and so on.

Is there psychological research on seduction?
What field of psychology does research on seduction?

Attraction
Social psychology deals extensively with (sexual, erotic, friendly) human-to-human attraction. If you understand attraction, you know how to seduce.
It is true that social psychology does not provide a manual for seduction, and in my opinion this may have two reasons. Social psychology is not an applied, but a basic science, interested in understanding human behavior, not directing it. And there may be ethical objections to providing scientifically proven methods for maliciously manipulating the most intimate emotions, thus providing "weapons" in the "war of the sexes" and causing further discontent in an area of human interaction that is already rife with accusations of abuse. Economic psychology, an applied psychological field, provides manuals of seduction for human-to-product attraction. This is called "persuasive communication". It seems to me that human dating behavior is dysfunctional enough as it is, and does not need more manipulative methods – and what else is seduction if not manipulating someone who would not be attracted to you as you are into being attracted? –, but rather to be freed from them so that we could approach each other with more honesty and mutual understanding and less fear.
Dating Anxiety
Dysfunctions are the speciality of clinical psychology, and in fact clinical psychology has developed treatments (and manuals) for what is commonly (among psychologists) called "dating anxiety" or "heterosocial anxiety".
A short introduction into dating anxiety is provided by Grover, Esterline and Nangle (2014); a conprehensive description of the concept and research (up to their publication) is provided by Hope and Heimberg (1990). A related concept is "courtship disorder" (Freund, 1983).
The treatment of dating anxiety is similar to that of phobias:

Psychoeducation and modification of (false) cognitive biases: The therapist explains that dating anxiety is a common occurence, why it happens, and how dating works, including the perspective (and fears) of the "other side", thus reducing shame and increasing self- and mutual understanding.
Social skills training: Many people suffering from dating anxiety lack in social skills, so a part of the therapy is training how to more successfully interact with other people in general, outside of dating.
Practice dating: Patients train dating with the therapist or with other patients in a group setting.
Systematic desensibilisation: Confronting the patient with desirable persons and frightening situations will cause his fears to abate with habituation. There is a case study of using surrogate partners for this (Zentner & Knox, 2013), but usually the patient has to do this as a homework.

Much of this is similar to what "Pick-Up Artists" teach to the "Seduction Community".
Pick-Up Artists and the Seduction Community
There are only about a handful (psychological, linguistic and sociological) research publications dealing with the seduction community and pick-up artists. Looking at all publications that came up through a Google Scholar search for the phrase "'pick up artist' OR 'pickup artist'" and similar searches on PsychINFO, I found the following:

Pick-up artists use verbal techniques to establish inequality in social status (the authors of the paper call this "doing inequality"), which they then immediately overcome by showing affiliation and affection and making compliments. In this way pick-up artists avoid the impression of threat and dishonor that many women have when men approach them in an openly positive way (Hambling-Jones & Merrision, 2012).
Pick-up artists "perform on a stage", where they are critically judged by an audience, and in the face of this high social risk many techniques only indirectly serve to "pick up" the woman, or not at all, but rather serve to "save face" (Lee, 2009).
The three phases of human courtship behavior – attraction, building comfort and trust, and seduction – have been confirmed by social, physiological and evolutionary psychology (Oesch & Miklousic, 2011).
The assertive and negative (e.g. devaluing the prospective partner) courting methods propagated in pick-up are being used more by men who show high scores in the dark triad of personality traits (narcissism, machiavellism, psychopathy), an "unrestricted" sociosexual orientation (i.e. they tend to sexual contacts without emotional involvement), and a high need for sex and dominance (Crecelius, 2013). Women with low self-esteem, high interpersonal dependence, a strong desire for affiliation and an "unrestricted" sociosexual orientation are more receptive to these negative courtship methods (ibd.).
Tales of failed pick-ups serve to establish homosocial cohesion among male adolescents (Korobov, 2009).
The sexual conquests serve to prove heterosexuality and masculinity and establish "alpha male status" among pick-up artists (Larsen, Kyselova, Monari & Sørensen, 2012).

There are some more publications, mostly sociological, but they are all essayistic and not based on empirical studies. They deal mostly with defective male self-schemata and male degradation of women. In my eyes they don't provide anything new to an already over-emotional and mostly destructive discussion, so I don't list or summarize them here.

Sources:

Crecelius, E. (2013). Dispositional factors that predict the use and success of negative short-term mating tactics (Dissertation). California State University, Fullerton.
Freund, K., Scher, H., & Hucker, S. (1983). The courtship disorders. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 12(5), 369-379.
Grover, R. L., Esterline, K. M., & Nangle, D. W. (2014). Dating anxiety in adolescents. In L. Grossman & S. Walfish (Eds.), Translating Psychological Research into Practice (pp. 405-407). New York: Springer.
Hambling-Jones, O., & Merrison, A. J. (2012). Inequity in the pursuit of intimacy: An analysis of British pick-up artist interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1115-1127.
Hope, D. A., & Heimberg, R. G. (1990). Dating anxiety. In H. Leitenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Social and Evaluation Anxiety (S. 217–246). New York: Plenum.
Korobov, N. (2009). ‘He's got no game’: young men's stories about failed romantic and sexual experiences. Journal of Gender Studies, 18(2), 99-114.
Larsen, V., Kyselova, M., Monari, K., & Sørensen, S. (2012). Beyond ›The Game‹:
Performing masculinity (Dissertation). Roskilde University, Dänemark.
Lee, J. (2009). Escaping embarrassment: Face-work in the rap cipher. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72(4), 306-324.
Oesch, N., & Miklousic, I. (2011). The dating mind: Evolutionary psychology and the emerging science of human courtship. Evolutionary Psychology, 10(5), 899-909.
Zentner, M., & Knox, D. (2013). Surrogates in relationship therapy: A case study in learning how to talk, touch, and kiss. Psychology Journal, 10(2), 63-68.


Research groups in Computer Science which study Computational Neuroscience I am currently applying to graduate programs in Computer Science in the United States for admission next fall. I am particularly interested in the convergence of Computer Science and Computational Neuroscience, particularly in biologically-realistic neural computation and the analysis of human brain circuits and algorithms.

The faculty of most Computer Science departments I'm looking at, however, do not seem to be directly involved with Computational Neuroscience, and Neuroscience as a whole is dealt with as a separate department with faculty mostly from biology and psychology.

I would like to know whether there exist particular universities with Computer Science departments where there is an active research group working on Neuroscience and brain circuitry. Also, if I were to apply to universities where the Computer Science and Neuroscience departments are completely disparate, how could I possibly go about convincing the admissions department about the interdisciplinary research that I'd like to undertake, without undermining my entire application?

I apologize if this isn't the right place to post this question. I considered posting it on academia, but it seemed a bit too specific a subject for it to belong there.

My general advice would be to start by tracking down the faculty that are doing the kind of research you want to do. A good way to do this is to identify journal articles that appeal to you, and then figure out what lab they originated from. The labs might be in a computer science department, a neuroscience department, or even a computational neuroscience department. If the lab seems interesting, then evaluate the program to see if it seems like a good fit. For most graduate programs, individual faculty members have a lot of input into admissions. If there is someone who does the kind of work you want to do, then they are more likely to support your application.

This article has some really helpful advice about how to pursue computational neuroscience in programs that are not specifically 'computational neuroscience' programs.

Of course, there are some computational neuroscience programs, where interdisciplinary research will be the norm. A small sample of the ones that I am aware of:

Boston University
UC San Diego
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU/Pitt


What do id, ego and super-ego exactly mean? I don't know much about psychology, but I've heard about Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche, with the three part of the psychic apparatus. However, I couldn't really understand the parts.

As far as I could understand it: the ego is the "everyday part" of self: our behaviour, personality and style we use in everyday events and interaction between other people.
With this logic, the super-ego is just an "ideal"; a human model that we follow either if we want it or don't - and it often, since it depends on our wants, experiences, aims and fears.
But id is something constant, that never changes, and contains our deepest feelings: fear, love, and instincts. Maybe even some hidden knowledges.

So overall: ego is what we are, id is what we ACTUALLY are, and super ego is that what we want to be.

Am I right? Or is it more complex?
What exactly is meant by id, ego, and super-ego?

You are pretty much on the money with your description, but here is some further information to help understand the definitions:

Paraphrased from "Freud's Structural and Topographical Models of Personality" (allpsych.com):

The id is what we are born with, it is the mechanism that allows our basic needs to be met, and is with us from birth. Essentially, the part of the brain that 'cares' only about it's own satisfaction and needs.

The ego meets the needs of the id, while taking into consideration the reality of the situation (e.g. needs of others).  According to Freud, this is the strongest part, meeting the needs of the id, while not upsetting the superego.

The superego is the moral part of our psyche, that deals with the ethical and moral constraints, i.e. belief in what is right and wrong.

Edited to add: Further and more detailed information can be found included from page 5 in this article from the University of Notre Dame "Id, Ego, and Superego" (Lapsley and Stey).


Why do we not remember things from the first couple of years of childhood? As parents of a soon-to-be three-year-old, my wife and I spend a lot of time planning activities and trips for our son.  However, my wife wanted to hold off on some of the big ones (i.e. Disney World), until he was "old enough to remember".

She explained that she was taught (she has a background in Psychology, but has been working in more administrative roles than clinical for quite some time) that people cannot remember things that occur before they are somewhere around 3-4 years old.

What is the mechanism behind this?   Is it safe to assume that some developmental cognitive milestone(s) that must be reached before memories persist?

Well, I have some few memories of my very early childhood, but it is undisputable (and the articles quoted by PEEJWEJ don't dispute it either) that most children don't remember most things from their earliest years. The number of events that adults remember from their childhood, and the memory span of a child, clearly increases with the age of the child:

Maximum memory span in weeks (on y-axis) by age in months (x-axis) for operant conditioned tasks. From chapter 5.2 in the German edition of Berk, L. (2010). Development through the Lifespan (5th ed.), Pearson.

As for why, the reason is very probably four-fold:

(1) At birth, the brain is not yet fully developed. Areas which play a role in memory (like the frontal lobe), are still growing.

(2) Memory needs understanding. We don't just memorize sensory input, but the results of the processing of these inputs. If we don't yet understand the world and cannot process the sensory input, it cannot be "elaborated" and memorized. Another similar opinion is that we need a sense of self that we can relate our experiences to, and small children lack this sense of self.

(3) Because small children cannot yet speak, their memory is purely non-verbal. Adult memory is in large parts verbal. This discrepancy might make it difficult for the adult brain to access those non-verbal childhood memories that are in fact still there. [I don't believe this, because much of my mental processes today are non-verbal. Maybe I am different than the average person in this, but verbal thought does not play such an overwhelming part in my brain.]

(4) During later childhood and adolescence large parts of the neural structure are being degenerated (around age 6) and restructured (adolescence). During these processes, information that is not used, gets lost. [Anecdotally: I clearly remember a childhood memory I still had during my teens. I could "see" the scene in my mind's eye. Today, that memory is either lost or unaccessible to me. I only have a memory of the memory.]

This is what I remember from and looked up in some text books on developmental psychology. All of them are a few years old and not completely up to date with recent research, so there might be more and different information in journal articles. Anyway, I guess this can serve as a starting point for other answers.

If you have the English edition of the book by Berk, feel free to replace that image. Wanted to post another graphic that shows the development of different functions of the brain, but there is too much German text in it to make it useful for an international audience. Again, feel free to supply images of your own and edit them in, if you have any.


Meaning of a phrase '... reciprocal of neutral density value required arranged on an inverted scale' The article paramount for my research seems cryptic. It is for visual perception (psychology) and was written 45 years ago. There are a number of sentences hard to 'decypher'.

'reciprocal of neutral density value required arranged on an inverted scale' [p. 1391]; what does it mean at all? is it about neutral density of optical filters for the stroboscope or something?
Figure 1 (and others) contains strange mathematical notation (a bar above floating point numbers); is it the old-fashioned way to typeset negative values? are these log relative luminance values? if yes, why isn't it explicitly stated in text and why lower negative values mean 'darker background'? if not, how can it be that higher values mean less contrast?

From earlier in the paper:

The intensity of the flash was controlled by Kodak neutral density filters in the path of the projection beam.

Neutral density filters are those that are intended to filter equally across the visible light spectrum. They're using them to control the light intensity (a lot more common back in the day when it wasn't as easy to control brightness electrically due to the light sources used, though I believe still commonly used in psychophysics experiments and certainly still used in microscopy where we still use some older types of light source). The "reciprocal of neutral density value required" is an effective luminance value, because "more neutral density (filter)" means "less light", so 1/(neutral density filter) is increasing as light is increasing. It's a unit of convenience since the experimenter knows the strength of their filters.
As far as the bars above the numbers, these are clearly to indicate negative numbers though I agree the notation is unusual, it may be a relic of an earlier day in typesetting. There is a more standard notation to indicate the first digit of a logarithm as negative with a bar (see Wikipedia; see also here where it is referred to as a "vinculum" but again only for some of the digits in a number rather than the whole thing) but that doesn't quite match the usage here.

are these log relative luminance values?

In the figure posted, these are log absolute luminance values, measured in units of log(foot-Lamberts). Negative logarithms indicate luminance values less than 1 foot-Lambert.

how can it be that higher values mean less contrast?

If the background is brighter, and the stimulus to be detected is a flash of light, then the brighter the background the less the flash will stand out: less contrast between the flash and the background.


How can we eliminate the effect of psychiatric medication on neuropsychological research with schizophrenic patients? It is delicate to conduct studies with schizophrenic patients, considering that the results may be altered by the medication factor. What strategies should be used to counteract this effect?

As far as I know, this effect cannot be eliminated by any practical means, other than stratifying the subjects into groups according to type of drug, dosage, duration of use etc. and use statistical testing to look for any differences between the groups with, e.g., linear mixed modeling.

However, a cursory search on Google Scholar yields multiple studies where unmedicated folks were successfully recruited into the study, e.g. Kraguljac et al. (2016).

Reference
- Kraguljac et al., Schizophrenia Bull (2016); 42(4): 1046–55