Benefits of Preserving Dopamine I recently came across a short piece on Twitter advocating for the preservation of dopamine release. The writer stated that a list of things should be avoided to preserve dopamine.

  Preserve your dopamine:

  Turn off all social media notifications
  Get to a commercial free place on TV and Internet
  Zero real porn and limit controllable passive porn
  Build in reflective time (I use a devotional)
  Limit addictive substances (especially passive ones)

When I asked why, he stated that preserving dopamine by avoiding these activities would mean I'd have more dopamine for other activities:

  No, the more places you spend dopamine, the less you have for the
  things you need and the less you get from the things that are good for
  you.

  Ex. Watching hardcore porn decreases your pleasure from healthy sex

Is there truth to that statement? Is dopamine a truly finite resource that I won't produce more of each day if I spend it on these activities? Thus making me less motivated for important work.

I'm looking for information on dopamine production and benefits of preservation in the answer.

There is some truth to dopamine correlating with heightened motivation (but dopamine can also be too much of a good thing, such in the case of behavioral addictions, like pathological gambling, especially the presumed iatrogenic kind) However, tiredness or more prceisely sleep depravation affects dopamine receptors so it will impair many brain functions besides motivation. So the advice is probably far more straightforward to formulate as "don't waste your good hours with distractions only to get to work when you're tired".

Furthermore, if the hypodopaminergia hypothesis for ADHD is true, then "preserve your dopamine by not getting distracted" is cart-before-the horse advice since under this etiological assumption, the low-dopamine condition is the cause of distractibility rather than its effect.

There's somehting to be said aobut the kinds of distractions you list:

  Today's society is pleasure seeking. We expect to obtain pleasurable experiences fast and easily. We are used to hyper-palatable foods and drinks, and we can get pornography, games and gadgets whenever we want them. The problem: with this type of pleasure-maximizing choice behaviour we may be turning ourselves into mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot. Pleasure-only activities are fun. In excess, however, such activities might have negative effects on our biopsychological health: they provoke a change in the neural mechanisms underlying choice behaviour. Choice behaviour becomes biased towards short-term pleasure-maximizing goals, just as in the addicted brain (modulated by the amygdala, posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex' (VMPFC), striatum, nucleus accumbens; ‘A-system’) and away from long-term prosperity and general well-being maximizing objectives (normally ensured by the insula, anterior VMPFC, hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC); ‘I-system‘).

This is not something revolutionary. It's well known that a temporal discounting function is encoded in brains as adaptation/response to the schedule of rewards over time. This almost certainly involves more complex processes (such as long term potentiation and other forms of plasticity) than a simple reservoir-of-dopamine model.

There are certainly researchers looking into behavioral addictions in general, and in particular internet pornography addiction, interet gaming disorder and social-media addiction, but insofar these haven't received the wider acceptance that comes with blessing of being included in the DSM, ICD and so forth (except for gamblig addiction).


Does IQ affect learning speed? Supposedly, people of higher levels of intelligence do learn faster than people of lower levels of it. But this is an awfully coarse observation, and different people can learn at drastically different speeds in different environments.

A few quick points:

There is a massive empirical literature that shows that fairly strong correlations are obtained between IQ and important real world outcomes, perhaps most notably educational and job performance, often in the r = .5 range (see here for a summary).

Correlations with learning are complicated by what we mean by learning. In particular, if we define learning as the improvement in performance between two time points, then we have what is sometimes called a difference score or gain score. While this is an intuitive way to think about learning, gain scores often have slightly counter-intuitive properties. For example, on some tasks, gain may be negatively correlated with initial performance levels. This makes sense when you think that those who perform poorly initially often have more to learn. However, initial performance typically correlates well with final performance after a period of learning.
As such, correlations of gain scores with ability can be a little strange also.

You might want to read some of Philip Ackerman's work on ability-performance correlations over practice.

There's some further discussion of the change score issue in learning here:

Ackerman, P. L. (1987). Individual differences in skill learning: An
integration of psychometric and information processing perspectives.
Psychological Bulletin, 102:3-27.


Why do people press elevator call buttons repeatedly? Many people, particularly those in a rush, keep on pressing the elevator call button despite the light clearly indicating that it was previously pressed, and the knowledge that such action will have no effect.

What theory explains such a behaviour?

I could put forth two hypotheses. When people are desperate they:

Prefer action over inaction - If an action does not carry a high price or penalty, by taking action people feel that at least they are doing something.
Are more likely to change their beliefs. Complete atheists, for instance, may pray to God, or try a supernatural/spiritual healer, if the life of a dear one is on stake.

But I can't find a theory for neither of these.

It's an interesting phenomenon, and I think it can be seen in many other domains beyond lifts. At least where I live, pedestrian crossings have buttons, which I've seen people repeatedly press. You can see it often on computers and other digital devices when the system does not immediately respond to user input.

Basic Bayesian Rational Actor

My starting point for analysing the behaviour would be that of a bayesian rational actor. While you state that the individual "knows that such action will have no effect." This is not actually true. Many states of the world are possible about the consequence of second and subsequent button presses:

Beneficial:

The first button press may not have been recorded (perhaps you didn't press the button correctly, perhaps the system malfunctioned)
Repeatedly pressing the button might increase the system's awareness of the importance of the request
The first button press may have timed-out and a second button press may resend the request

Makes no difference:

The first button press has been recorded and the second button press makes no difference.

Detrimental:

The first button press was recorded. Any subsequent button press resets the time required.

So from the perspective of a Bayesian rational actor, the individual does not know the state of the world. Instead, each state has a certain probability of being true. And each state of the world has a certain cost/benefit. Thus, if the individual assigns very low probability to the detrimental option and minimal cost to the physical movement involved in pressing the button, and some small probability of any of the beneficial scenarios being true, then the beneficial scenarios have the greatest expected utility. This is despite the fact that the "makes no difference scenario" having very high probability of being true.

The important point is that it is the subjective beliefs and subjective utility which drives action and not the objective state of the world. Most models of human action would also incorporate a random component. So even if people generally preferred not to do the repeated press, they might occasionally. Such randomness can be seen as rational behaviour in the broader sense, in that it allows the actor to sample the utilities associated with actions even if they aren't currently deemed to maximise utility.

Presumably many factors would influence the beliefs about truth and utility in this situation:

The clearer the indicator that the button has been pressed, the more likely the individual will believe that the button has been pressed. So for example, on some pedestrian crossings there is no indicator light, or sometimes the indicator light on a lift button stops working. In such cases, people would presumably be much more likely to repeatedly press.
The more experience someone has with the specific lift or even lifts in general, the less likely they are to draw on general experience with other lifts or with other button-based systems.
The longer the time passes between pressing the button and the lift not arriving, the more likely the individual is to believe that something has failed. Now in some cases this is a lift malfunction, but presumably often another button press would also seem like a more reasonable strategy than if little time has passed.
The cost is assigned to the physical press might vary between people and situations. Some might experience  minor social embarrassment of repeatedly pressing a lift button when others are present. Other people who are less energetic or active, may not wish to expend energy repeatedly pressing the lift button.

Further reading

If you're interested more about these ideas, you could check out some of the ACT-R research on strategy selection.


Hebbian theory and synaptogenesis - how to identify the subsequently actioned neuron? Given Hebbian theory stating that two neuron cells wich fire subsequently tend to wire together, what is the underlying mechanism by which they do so? How does the cell identify the subsequently actioned neurons? How do the two find their ways to connect with each other?

Do they already need to be very close to each other, or even have already some synapses formed? In this case, do synaptogenesis forms randomly and spontaneously between adjacent cells?

Hebb's actual statement is:

  Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. ... When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

So, in Hebb's case we are talking about neurons that are already connected that then increase their strength of connection when firing of Cell B follows after excitation by Cell A.

Biologically, the plasticity mechanism best associated with Hebbian plasticity is called spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). STDP utilizes a calcium signal mediated by NMDA receptors.

NMDA receptors are glutamate receptors but depend on simultaneous depolarization of the membrane to displace a magnesium block that is ordinarily present. NMDA receptors are best activated when they are already bound to glutamate (released from Cell A) when Cell B fires an action potential; the action potential propagates back into the dendritic tree as well as down the axon, and this displaces the magnesium block, allowing calcium to enter the cell.

The subsequent signaling cascade results in increases in post-synaptic AMPA receptors, which causes long term potentiation.

If cell B fires but cell A did not fire before it, then the action potential still propagates back into the dendrites but there is no glutamate present at synapses between cell A and cell B so those synapses are not potentiated.

Hebb, D.O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley & Sons.


Why this guilt discrepancy in human beings? I believe no person is born a criminal.

Then why do some people have compunctious guilt after a wrongdoing even when they were raised in an unhealthy family and some people have no guilt at all even when they were raised in a healthy family?

Why this guilt discrepancy in human beings?

Lack of guilt is related to psychopathy, although there could be other reasons for it, e.g. ideological self-justifications, like breaking a law you don't agree with. Psychopathy is partially inheritable, which means the genetically-unexplained variance is usually attributed to enivronmetal differences.

The propensity for guiltlessness is part of a narrower trait (of psychopathy) called "callous-unemotional traits", and these can be identified around the age of 7, according to one (fairly cited) study of Viding
 et al. (2005). Although the abstract of this paper is a bit... abstract, its intro is a bit more insightful what it is talking about:

  ‘Mark does not feel guilty if he has done something
  wrong, he does not show feelings or emotions, and he
  is rarely helpful if someone is hurt.’ This description
  of one of the 7-year-old children (name changed) in
  our twin study captures the core emotional impairment
  of individuals with psychopathy. Psychopathy
  in both childhood (psychopathic tendencies) and
  adulthood involves both affective-interpersonal
  impairment (callous-unemotional traits; e.g., lack of
  empathy, lack of guilt, shallow emotions) and overt
  antisocial behaviour.


Do major historic events have a lasting impact on humankind's objective happiness? In his book "Sapiens - a Brief History of Humankind", Harari argues that the biochemistry of "happiness" in any person can only move within bounds, dictated by genetics.

He also argues that happiness only improves momentarily when objective circumstances improve, and only e.g. a degenerative disease or permanent physical pain can result in lasting change. This seems to be widely accepted and is backed by numerous studies.

I could not, however, find any studies supporting his statement that events such as the agricultural revolution had no lasting impact on humankind's objective happiness.

Are there any scientific studies on the biochemistry of happiness of generations that lived before and after major historic events like the cure of a disease that affected large parts of the studied community?

Whats psychology's take on human happiness throughout history?

Please suggest edits, as I am no expert on any of this.

Depends what you mean by "objective happiness". If we use the term in the way that it's used by Kahneman etc., meaning that

  In the special conditions of the clinic or laboratory it is sometimes possible to
  obtain continuous or almost continuous reports of experienced utility from patients or
  experimental subjects. Continuous measures are of course impractical for the
  measurement of objective happiness over a period of time. Sampling techniques must be
  used to obtain a set of values of moment-utility that adequately represents the intended
  population of individuals, times and occasions. For example, a study of the objective
  happiness of Californians should use a sample of observations that reflects the relative
  amounts of time spent on the freeway and in hot tubs. Techniques for sampling times
  and occasions have been developed in the context of Experience Sampling Methodology
  (ESM) (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Stone, Shiffman and DeVries, 1999).

It's hard to imagine getting such data retrospectively from ancient or even just past populations.

Ref quoted: Kahneman, D. (2000). Experienced utility and objective happiness: A moment-based approach. In D. Kahneman & A. Tversky (Eds.), Choices, values and frames (pp. 673-692). New York: Cambridge. University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Generally, diet and/or physical trauma leave a bone recod for archeologists to study. Alas I'm not aware of neurochemistry of past populations being ammenable to study (other than comparative studies across current species, e.g. humans vs apes).


Why are some people attracted to people of other races? Is it true that we were evolved to dislike people of other races genetically?
If so, why are some people attracted to people of races other than their own?

This is in reply to your first question.

Taste – in food, music, and sex – is in part a result of imprinting. You find women or men attractive that are like your parents or the community you grew up in because of sexual imprinting (e.g. Aronsson, 2011).

Aronsson writes of a sensitive period where this imprinting happens, but I am not so sure that the development of aesthetic taste is actually limited to certain phases in a child's development. Caton et al. (2014) showed that children can acquire the taste for "greens" if they are repeatedly exposed to the food (e.g. having to eat one spoon every time spinach is served). And tobacco, beer, and coffee are prime examples for voluntarily "acquired tastes" later in life. Nevertheless, even an acquired taste is a result of exposure and habituation. Coffee, beer and tobacco are not "exotic" in our culture.

Bem (1996) posited the theory that adults find erotic what was exotic in their early childhood. Thus, a girl that felt different from other girls in childhood would become a lesbian, being attracted to what she was not. This theory has been refuted (e.g. Peplau et al., 1998) on the grounds that it was not supported by empirical evidence.

I could not find anything more substantial in psychological research during a cursory search. What I found are books and articles in cultural theory that look at the popularity of exotic women in the media (e.g. Mendible, 2010). Scanning the contents of those books, I thought that maybe men who are attracted to exotic women are not only attracted to their physical appearance, but also to what these women represent. Thus, Latin women may signify lust for life, African men might stand for physical prowess, Asian women might signify servility, or Oriental women might siginify sophistication and mystery. I'm just quoting some common stereotpyes here as examples for how attraction happens not only on the visual level but also in what we project into the person we desire. Men who like women with glasses might not find them visually beautiful, but might be attracted to the idea of an intelligent or "bookish" and shy person, and this fantasy and eroticsim will even hold despite a contradicting personality.

What I want to suggest with this is that reasons for some kinds of attractions might not be systematic (i.e. the same for a large enought group of persons to discover this connection through empirical studies) but widely different between individuals: one white man loving black women might love them for reasons completely unlike those of any other white man loving black women.

But maybe someone else has the time for a more thorough search and will find a study on this subject.

Sources:

Aronsson, H. (2011). On Sexual Imprinting in Humans. Available online at http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:415143/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Bem, D. J. (1996). Exotic becomes erotic: A developmental theory of sexual orientation. Psychological Review, 103(2), 320. Available online at https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/roney/james/other%20pdf%20readings/Bem%25201996%2520Exotic%2520becomes%2520erotic.pdf
Caton, S. J., Blundell, P., Ahern, S. M., Nekitsing, C., Olsen, A., Møller, P., ... & Hetherington, M. M. (2014). Learning to Eat Vegetables in Early Life: The Role of Timing, Age and Individual Eating Traits. PloS one, 9(5), e97609. Available online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0097609
Mendible, M. (Ed.). (2010). From bananas to buttocks: The Latina body in popular film and culture. University of texas Press.
Peplau, L. A., Garnets, L. D., Spalding, L. R., Conley, T. D., & Veniegas, R. C. (1998). A critique of Bem's" Exotic Becomes Erotic" theory of sexual orientation. Available online at http://folk.uio.no/thomas/gnd/critique-of-ebe-theory.pdf


How common are visual hallucinations in Schizophrenics? The typical "Hollywood" representation of Schizophrenia involves vivid visual hallucinations.

However, in practice, the dozen or so people with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia I have worked with have only had auditory hallucinations. I can't tell if visual hallucinations are very uncommon, or if my selection size isn't large enough.

Are there any statistics showing what percentage of patients diagnosed with Schizophrenia have visual hallucinations, compared to aural hallucinations, or even no hallucinations at all?

Mueser and colleagues (1990) examined 117 DSM-III-R schizophrenic or schizoaffective disorder patients and reported a prevalence of 16% for visual hallucinations. Interestingly, they found that the global severity of illness was higher in patients with schizophrenia and visual hallucinations. Teeple and colleagues (2009) observe that this finding makes sense of the widely varying estimates of prevalence of visual hallucinations in schizophrenic patients, since patients with more severe illness might be expected to experience more visual hallucinations than those with less severe illness.


Are the "scientific" points made in the James Damore document factually accurate? There has recently been some uproar over a document authored by a google engineer arguing that differences in outcomes between men and women are in part due to biological differences. Are his claims in this area scientifically supported?

His two broad claims seem to be

(1). Women on average prefer working with people rather than things as compared to men

(2). Women are more neurotic and prone to anxiety

A few thoughts on those two pieces...

Do women prefer working with people?

Results on this are certainly debated. This article summarizes a study (linked in the article) that concludes women prefer collaborative work more than men (though the reasons for this are not necessarily clear). Obviously, standard contextual warnings of interpretation apply. For me, the interesting thing discussed in the article is the potential reasons for these differences (such as male overconfidence). In any case, the answer seems to be "yes, women (on average) prefer collaborative work". Also, at the risk of being mis-interpreted, I should add that individuals do not necessarily follow statistical patterns employed by research to make these claims, and thus, this information should not be used to predict the behavior of a specific individual. It merely discusses certain people's behavior in a certain setting.

Are women are more prone to anxiety?

I don't know much about this, but the first hits on my search (from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America and a The Conversation article from a PhD candidate at Cambridge) both seem to support that women are about twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder. Theories on the reasons for this seem to vary (and not yet be proven), but the first one in both places was difference in brain chemistry. As with the previous disclaimer, this information shouldn't be used to judge individuals. Also, relating to your question, note that this is not necessarily related to job tasks. For instance, the presence of an anxiety disorder does not mean that women are less fit than men to handle the anxiety and pressure of a particular position.

Ultimately, it seems that there may be some scientific support on these claims on average, though: 1) they are not generally "proven" (and may not be able to be proven for the general population), and 2) the results cannot be used to make claims on an individual (this is true of almost all research). Final note is that, in my brief review, the reasons for these phenomenon (if they exist) are primary theorized and not fully studied, casting further doubt upon conclusions for action based upon this research (e.g., women shouldn't be programmers).


Visual acuity and offset stimuli I'm currently setting up and experiment that utilises a visual search task that contains a circular array of target letters and a distractor that falls outside the circle.

Obviously the further away from the fovea the distractor moves the more difficult it is to see.

Can anyone point me to some literature as to how one would go about scaling the size of the distractor relative to the target letters to maintain comparable levels of acuity.

Most of the literature I've read doing similar experiments make the distractor bigger for this very reason. |But I'm having a hard time figuring how how one goes about deciding how much bigger the distractor should be.

Visual acuity is highest in the foveal region, namely around 1/60 of a degree, or 1 minute of arc (1 MAR). At about 30 degrees of eccentricity, visual acuity is reduced to anywhere between 1.5 and 10 MAR when determined by a shape recognition task, as shown in Fig. 1 taken from Lie, 1980:

A later study (Anderson et al., 1991) shows the following picture:

This figure shows that chromatic (color) visual acuity is about 60 cycles/degree in the fovea (i.e., 1 MAR) and approximately 0.4 cycles/degree at 30 degrees eccentricity temporally, which means a reduction in acuity of 150x.  At 30 degrees eccentricity to the nasal side acuity drops to 1 cycle per degree, which means a 60x reduction. Under achromatic (black-and-white) conditions it drops about 60x temporally and 30x nasally at 50 degrees eccentricity. These tests were done using colored (red/green) and black-white grating-visual acuity tasks.

The Lie, 1980 study mentions several references and the Anderson, 1991 study is definitely worth checking out as well.

To get back to your scaling question: it is difficult to directly translate these findings into scaling factors for your stimuli as you make no mention of their approximate size, or their eccentricities. What the figures do show, however, is that people may not be able to see much detail in their periphery and that acuity may drop as much as 150x at an eccentricity of 30 degrees. It also shows that black-and-white stimuli may be better visible in the far periphery and also, quite interestingly, that acuities deteriorate at a faster rate with eccentricity in the temporal retina.


Source of data for US suicides (by month or quarter) 2019 vs. 2020 In attempt to answer the question: " Have US suicides increased in March/April 2020 compared to 2019 ?". I've been unable to find any published US data for either 2019 or 2020.

Does anyone know of any published data?

Update: Resources already checked:
United Health Foundation
CDC
Suicide Facts & Figures
American Soc for Suicide Prevention
World Population Review-US
NVDRS (cdc)
and of course, Wikipedia
Common to all of these is that the most recent data is 2018

At the time of writing this answer, suicide data is not publically available post 2018.

CDC’s WISQARS™ (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) is an interactive, publically accessible, online database that provides fatal and nonfatal injury, violent death, and cost of injury data from a variety of trusted sources.

The CDC states:

  Mortality data come from the National Center for Heath Statistics (NCHS), CDC annual mortality data files. NCHS mortality data are derived from the Multiple Cause of Death data. For more information, contact NCHS at (301)436-8500 or nchsquery@cdc.gov — or visit the NCHS website.

The National Death Index (NDI) service has death records added annually, approximately 10-12 months after the end of a particular calendar year. This information is available to investigators solely for statistical purposes in medical and health research. The service is not accessible to organizations or the general public for legal, administrative, or genealogy purposes. To access the NDI service, you need to complete an NCHS application form.

The final 2018 NDI file is available for both NDI Routine searches and NDI Plus searches.

The Early Release File for 2019 is now available for searching. See completion percentages by state

The Early Release File is now updated quarterly. The current searchable version will always be the most recent version.

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) in an agreement with the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) implemented a restrictive rule for publically reporting National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) state- and county-level death data for years 2008 and later, in order to avoid inadvertent disclosure of cases.


A good place to start learning Behaviorism for a Newbie? I've developed an interest in Behavioral Psychology. I don't have any background and I'm not taking any Psychology course or anything. I just want to learn. I was wondering if there's a good "Beginners" book on this topic, or a good place to start. Googling returned varied results, which confused me.

Summing up what I'm looking for:

An ordered series of Book titles (ordered by beginner level to expert level)
A website/blog/forum to follow

Thank you.

It would be better to follow a series of instructional courses provided on the internet. MIT in their Opencourseware has provided an Introduction to Psychology class lectures through iTunesU. They also provide a structured study guide for the rest of their Psychology courses (some have videos). Each course has a syllabus and assigned book reading.


Neural correlates of pleasantness and unpleasantness There are some basic cases of stimuli that are typically experienced either as pleasant or unpleasant, e.g. the major third as opposed to the tritone.

Assuming that there are different processes going on in my brain while listening to these two intervals, I'd like to know: What are the qualitative differences between these processes that would allow to understand that the first is experienced as pleasant and the other is experienced as unpleasant.

Just by thinking about it, there seem to be three possibilities:

The same regions/areals/neuron groups are active but in different characteristic modes, exhibiting different spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity.
Different regions are active in different modes.
Different regions are active but in somehow similar modes.

Assuming that the difference is mainly due to different activity modes (cases 1 and 2), I would like to know which characteristics might correlate with the pleasantness and unpleasantness of the expericence, e.g. some kind of "harmony".

Simply put, pleasant/unpleasant sensations are associated with the activation of certain brain regions:

  Many affective stimuli are hedonically complex mixtures containing
  both pleasant and unpleasant components. To investigate whether the
  brain represents the overall affective value of such complex stimuli,
  or the affective value of the different components simultaneously, we
  used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain
  activations to a pleasant odor (jasmine), an unpleasant odor (indole),
  and a mixture of the two that was pleasant. In brain regions that
  represented the pleasantness of the odors such as the medial
  orbitofrontal cortex (as shown by activations that correlated with the
  pleasantness ratings), the mixture produced activations of similar
  magnitude to the pleasant jasmine, but very different from the
  unpleasant indole. These regions thus emphasize the pleasant aspects
  of the mixture. In contrast, in regions representing the
  unpleasantness of odors such as the dorsal anterior cingulate and
  midorbitofrontal cortex the mixture produced activations that were
  relatively further from the pleasant component jasmine and closer to
  the indole. (The Journal of Neuro Science)


The effects of pain on cognitive function and incidence of depression There have been studies about  the link between depression and cognitive function..

There have been studies between pain and cognitive function. This has, also, been discussed in this question here.

There have been studies linking pain and depression.

From a biochemical viewpoint:
Are pain, depression and cognitive function intrinsically linked?
Is it possible for chronic pain not to have an effect on cognitive function and the likelihood of depression?

This may be more of a non-answer than an answer, but here it goes.

When you're talking about the effect of something like pain, it's valuable to first understand some of the complexity. While it's easy to put things in boxes in practice, (physical pain, emotional pain, etc.) it's very difficult to put those things in boxes when you're talking about a neuropsychological response like pain. While there are breakthroughs being made in understanding specific parts and functions of the chemical soup that is the human brain, it's still largely a mystery as to how those parts interact, not to mention how our psychological state affects/is affected by our brains.

Can pain affect mood and general ability to function? I think it's safe to say it can. When we feel pain all kind of stress hormones with significant amounts of adrenaline, (such as Corticosteroid) are release that ideally will only be there for a short amount of time and then fade away. When you have chronic pain, your body doesn't get a chance to recover from the heightened state of arousal. This is known to affect many parts of general function negatively and probably is somewhat similar to the affect of long term chronic pain.

As far whether there is an intrinsic biochemical link between an actual depressive disorder and the brain's ability to function, I think there just isn't enough understanding about what happens in the brain to answer that properly. Depression itself is still a hot topic of debate as to how it develops, and since plenty of evidence supports it being both a psychological and neurological disorder, it would also depend on the individual's psyche as to whether they would develop depression. Pain, even chronic pain, has been dealt with successfully by people without much change in their life. Chronic pain has also destroyed people's lives. Any response is probably possible. At this point there are simply too many variables (many of of which are not yet understood) in order to make any statement as to what is normal.

The brain has really only began to be explored and understood, and while theories abound, with many questions like this the only honest answer at this point is that we don't know. At least not yet.


What is the mechanism explaining the effect of a positive attitude on immune system functioning? It seems likely that a positive attitude can speed up the healing process. but I can't decide by what mechanism it would operate by.

Questions

Does having a positive attitude improve immune system functioning?
If so, what is the mechanism by which this occurs?

Initial thoughts: Is it the inhibition of some sort of stress cortisol?
The answer seems like it would have to do with how the placebo effect or hypnosis suggestion functions.

As far as I know, it has not been shown that a positive attitude has any effect on the immune system (ignoring the less significant placebo effect).  What has been shown is that long-term stress has a negative effect on the immune system.  Short-term stress actually has a positive effect on the immune system, but long-term stress has been correlated with several affecting mechanisms: lower white blood cell count, too much cytokine production.

The following study found lots of mixed results.  A typical sign that there's really no clear answer to the question.  When there are so many confounding results, it's easy for people to only take the half they agree with, so we should be wary of our propensity to do so when we want to hear a particular answer.

  The failure of optimism to consistently predict better physical health indicators and outcomes is consistent with this pessimistic view of optimism: “The best doesn't always occur. When things go wrong in a big way, the optimist may be particularly vulnerable.”

...

  I have suggested an alternative hypothesis to explain negative effects of optimism on the immune system (see Fig. 1; Segerstrom, 2001; Segerstrom et al., 2003; Solberg Nes et al., in press). This hypothesis specifies that under difficult circumstances, more optimistic people remain engaged with those circumstances whereas more pessimistic people disengage, avoid, or give up. Giving up can be a physiologically protective response because stressor exposure is minimized in the short term by giving up rather than remaining engaged...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948078/


Elaboration likelihood model: would attractiveness be a peripheral or central route? In the elaboration likelihood model, if an advertisement contains an attractive person, would this be using the central route or peripheral route? I would guess it would be peripheral route, since people don't tend to think about if a person is attractive or not, but on the other hand, if the person does think about the person's appearance and finds them attractive, then it could be considered central.

Unless the advertisement is actually advertising the person's attractiveness directly, this should be a peripheral issue. Consider Wikipedia's description of the central route:

  Central-route processes involve scrutiny of persuasive communication (e.g., a speech or an advertisement) to determine the arguments' merits. Under these conditions, a person's cognitive response to the message determines its persuasive outcome. If they evaluate a message as reliable, well-constructed and convincing, it may be received favorably even if it contrasts with the receiver’s original position on the message.

Thus the only circumstance in which a person's attractiveness should be a central route is one in which the advertisement's argument is about the person's attractiveness per se...I'm not sure I can even think of a good example of such an advertisement. Even beauty product advertisements (which are about the product, not the person) routinely appeal through peripheral routes by using supermodels with immaculately styled hair, wearing much more makeup than the object of the advertisement – not to mention expensive clothes and other fashion accessories – in idealized, studio-lighted environments. If anything, factors like these obscure the real efficacy of the given beauty product, because most observers will just be overwhelmed by the model's beauty and by the desire to emulate it, regardless of how little the product in question has to do with it. Again, see Wikipedia on the peripheral route:

  Peripheral-route processes do not involve elaboration of the message through cognitive processing of an argument's merits. They rely on a message's environmental characteristics: the perceived credibility of the source, message presentation quality, the source's attractiveness or a catchy slogan, and is frequently used when the argument is weak or lacks evidence. The peripheral route is a mental shortcut which accepts (or rejects) a message based on external cues, rather than thought. It is used when the audience is unable to process the message due to the message's complexity or the audience's immaturity. The commonest influences are rewards such as food, sex or money, which create rapid changes in mind and action. Celebrity status, likability, humor and expertise are other factors governing the peripheral process. Appearance can gain an individual's attention; while it can create interest in a topic, it will not effect strong change. The goal of the peripheral process is to create change which can be weak (or temporary) compared with the strong, lasting change of the central route.


Any studies that assess effects of treatment to individual depression symptoms As an study/research idea, I have been going through articles about treatment response (mostly SSRI and other antidepressants) related to treating depression, but many studies seem to be mostly reporting changes in total scores (eg BDI or PHQ) whereas I haven't really seen much research analyzing the effect of treatment on symptom level (say on individual questions of those scales), with the exception of specific field of suicidality. Especially given many of the treatments are considered "equally" effective (esp antidepressant mono therapy) it would be of scientific interest to look into more detailed level and see if there's any difference.
Is there any realiable studies/meta-analysis which would report such values, or if not, is there a reason, such as methodological issues, for this?

To my mind, there are several reasons why this isn't the standard procedure. One reason is that Likert-type items are ordinal data, which means that standard statistical methods such as linear regression and t-tests shouldn't be used. Instead, non-parametric tests need to be used, and those generally confer lower statistical power. In contrast, a scale score (the sum of several Likert-type items) is per convention handled as interval data, which means that those standard methods can be used.
Another reason is that this might increase the probability of false positives. If a scale used to measure depression has 17 items and the significance level is set to p < 0.05, there is a 1 - 0.95^17 = 58 percent chance of at least one false "significant" association between the test group (treatment vs. no treatment) and an item from the scale.
Furthermore, the idea (which is questionable) is that there exists an underlying pathological "depression process" in the brain, which is expressed through different symptoms such as depressed mood, sleep disturbances, loss of interest etc. This is the medical model, and it is analogous to, for instance, pneumonia, in which there is a pathological infectious/inflammatory process in the body caused by bacteria, and giving rise to symptoms such as coughing, fever, etc. From this theoretical point of view, it makes more sense to assess the total score of the depression scales, which is thought to represent the "latent variable" that is the "depression process", rather than just one of the isolated symptoms.
However, there are examples in the literature of the approach you suggest. Below is one example of a meta-analysis of some trials of SSRI for depression. The study is not without flaws in my opinion, so the results should be interpreted with care, but it is an example of the idea you had.
Influence of baseline severity on the effects of SSRIs in depression: an item-based, patient-level post-hoc analysis


Study of recollection of drawings based on labels I remember stumbling across a very interesting study/experiment a few months ago. Now I want to try to find it again. Unfortunately I cannot for the life of me recall the name of the experiment nor the names of the experimenters. I was hoping somebody here could help me.

The study went something like this:

Two groups of subjects are shown the same set of images, but with different labels on them.
Later they are asked to draw the same images from memory.
The results showed that they tended to draw a picture that more closely represented the label that was on it than the original.

I am not sure if this was meant to show perceptual sets, priming, context effects or what have you.

Does anybody know which study this was?

Based on your description I was able to find the following:

-Klatzky, R.L. & Rafnel, K. (1976).Labeling effects on memory for nonsense pictures. Memory & Cognition, 4(6), 717-720. (there is a pdf version on researchgate.net, I couldn't upload it here)

-Bower, G.H., Karlin, M.B., & Dueck, A. (1975). Comprehension and memory for pictures. Memory and Cognition, 3(2), 216-220. (pdf here)

However, the design and results of those studies are a bit different from what you describe. Labeling facilitated free recall (reproduction) better than no labeling when someone was presented with droodles (images with no meaning). Also, in the Klatzky and Rafnel study, it was shown that meaningful labels contributed to significantly better free recall of images than meaningless labels. So I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but you can take a look.


Do you know the name of this psychological phenomenon? I’ve seen this pattern play out a few times, and I have to believe there is some formal terminology for it.

Imagine two friends (or coworkers or husband and wife):  one person volunteers to do an undesirable task. Once complete, if the task is done imperfectly (potentially due to parameters beyond control of the first person), the second person is critical and claims this wouldn’t have happened had he/she been in charge.

Example:  A couple decide to install new wood floors, which requires finding contractors, negotiating, scheduling, etc.  The wife volunteers, and as the project gets close to finishing, there is an unexpected supply shortage, and the project will be delayed a week while they await new supplies. The husband gets upset because now their house looks a mess when visiting family is in town, and blames his wife for mismanaging the project, and claims this wouldn’t have happened if he were managing the project.

This sort of behavior seems to reflect some narcissism and a lack of empathy, but I’m curious about terminology for this “Monday morning quarterbacking” time behavior.

Thanks.

I think this phenomenon can be explained by the hindsight bias :

  Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping
  determinism, is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see
  the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little
  or no objective basis for predicting it. ... Hindsight bias may cause
  memory distortion, where the recollection and reconstruction of
  content can lead to false theoretical outcomes.

.

  A basic example of the hindsight bias is when, after viewing the
  outcome of a potentially unforeseeable event, a person believes he or
  she "knew it all along". Such examples are present in the writings of
  historians describing outcomes of battles, physicians recalling
  clinical trials, and in judicial systems trying to attribute
  responsibility and predictability of accidents.

.

  Hindsight bias has similarities to other memory distortions, such as
  misinformation effect and false autobiographical memory.
  Misinformation effect occurs after an event is witnessed; new
  information received after the fact influences how the person
  remembers the event, and can be called post-event misinformation.

.

  There is no solution to eliminate hindsight bias in its totality, but
  only ways to reduce it. Some of which include considering
  alternative explanations or opening one's mind to different
  perspectives. In terms of auditory communication, the speaker would
  try to provide more clarity in his or her delivery and the listener
  may seek greater clarification


How does task difficulty schedule affect the rate and efficiency of perceptual learning? In perceptual learning (line length/orientation discrimination, visual target detection, tone frequency discrimination, etc), when training people or animals to perform a task better, is there an optimal schedule for controlling task difficulty, to acheive maximal improvement?

At least 3 reasonable schedules come to (my) mind:

Easy to difficult - In education it is the custom to begin with easy examples or problems, and gradually progress to more difficult ones. Maybe this should work in perceptual learning as well.
Interleave different difficulties
Always the most difficult possible

Has there been a rigorous comparison of such schedules and their effect on the rate of learning, and the maximal performance level achieved at the end of training?

General pedagogical ideas around optimal difficulty

Many theories of instruction suggest that learning is optimal when an appropriate level of challenge is maintained. If a task is too easy, there's little to learn. If a task is too difficult, the learner can be overwhelmed. The implication for practice is that task difficulty should increase in conjunction with the increased skill of the learner. Of course, we can think of exceptions to these ideas, such as the value of over-learning, and the general idea of exposing people to challenging problems to motivate further learning. This also still leaves open the question of precisely how fast difficulty should increase for a given learner.

Academically, I've seen these ideas expressed in several places:

Deliberate practice: This is a concept drawn from the expertise literature. It is posited that amount of deliberate practice (rather than amount of simple experience) is one of the key factors that discriminates experts from non-experts (see Ericsson et al 2006).
A key aspect of task difficulty relates to the sequencing of task difficulty with practice.
Ericsson et al (2006) writes that

  The core assumption of deliberate practice ... is that expert
  performance is acquired gradually and that effective improvement of
  performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks
  that the performer can master sequentially... Deliberate practice
  presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their
  current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within
  hours of practice by concentrating on critical aspects and by
  gradually refining performance through repetitions after feedback.

Challenge point in motor learning:
Guadagnoli and Lee present a framework for thinking about optimal difficulty in motor learning. Their framework suggests that optimal learning is achieved by maintaining task difficulty at the point where it provides optimal information (where learning is possible, but it is not too difficult as to be overwhelming).

Research on task difficulty and perceptual learning

In a review article Ahissar and Hochstein (2004) also suggest easy to difficult is the most effective regime for perceptual learning:

  As found in our studies, training is more effective if subjects start
  with easy conditions and gradually move to more difficult con-
  ditions. The importance of beginning training with easy conditions was
  first found by Pavlov. When Pavlov reinforced a dog’s salivation
  following its seeing an ellipse but not following its seeing a circle
  (Figure I, rightmost pair of stimuli), the dog could not avoid
  generalization and salivated at sight of the circle, as well. Only by
  using very elongated ellipses, and training along the continuum, from
  left to right, was it able to achieve good performance for small
  circle/ellipse differences. This phenomenon was subsequently termed
  ‘transfer along a continuum’ (of different degrees of difficulty).

References

Ahissar, M. and Hochstein, S. (2004). The reverse hierarchy theory of
visual perceptual learning. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(10):457-464. FREE PDF
Ericsson, K. et al. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate
practice on the development of superior expert performance. The
Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 10(3):683-703.
FREE PDF
Guadagnoli, M. and Lee, T. (2004). Challenge point: a framework for
conceptualizing the effects of various practice conditions in motor
learning. Journal of Motor Behavior, 36(2):212-224. FREE PDF


Do we learn to improve our working memory capacity without sitting WM tests? Do we learn to improve our working memory capacity without sitting WM tests?

Working memory capacity can be measured, but I wondered whether the only way to improve it is learning techniques for working memory tests (such as the digit span test)? I think I remember that working memory capacity is relatively stable in adulthood and reaches that level at a relatively young age in childhood. So I'm asking whether general education improves our WMC, not for supposed brain training techniques.

I'm not a psychologist so be cautious about drawing conclusions from what I say.
Education can teach us to use our working memory more effectively by:

Learning how to do better chunking (which sometimes comes at a cost of time and effort spent on recall and on creating the chunk, but this can be improved with practice).

Using our strongest domain(s) when appropriate, taking into account our capacity and "chunking skills" in each domain.

According to this answer:

The evidence for domain-specific modalities is largely based on the (lack of otherwise expected) interference between them.

This means that maybe you could spread your items-to-remember across different domains to use otherwise untapped capacity, and (based on information from the linked answer) the usage order of domains matters.
However, since some (if not all) of these methods come at a cost and require conscious effort, the advantages of remembering more this way are limited and not equivalent to increasing your actual working memory capacity.
Examples:
Remembering a number by the pattern it draws on a phone's unlock screen.
Remembering a shopping list by imagining a set of (memorable, ridiculous) images where each image includes 2 items, one of which is also included in the next image (1st image: items 1 and 2, 2nd image: items 2 and 3, and so on). Then you can recall the first image, and recall each next image by asking what other image included an item from the current image. This is a good example of how verbal/auditory memory isn't always the best choice for remembering a list, unless your visual memory is much worse.
Remembering a number by recognizing (mathematical or other) patterns in it, so you can reconstruct the number (or part of it) from these patterns.

While you didn't ask for "brain training techniques", training is part of learning, if you want to become educated on how to use your working memory more effectively, you will need to practice the methods and see them in action, and they involve using skills that will improve with more practice.
For more information, read about methods of memory champions - people who manage to quickly memorize many things, such as card decks, long numbers and speeches. Their methods can be used by anyone, you don't have to be an exceptional person to be able to do impressive things with your memory, I tried it myself and was surprized at how well and how easily it worked for me.


What are some explanations for the relationship between social and spatial mapping? Background: A study published last summer in the journal Neuron found that when participants were tasked with finding a new home and job by interacting with characters in a virtual roleplaying game, activation in the hippocampus revealed tracking of social relationships through two dimensional vectors based on power and affiliation. In essence, they navigated through social space just as they would a physical environment: by using a cognitive map. Original article:

Tavares, R. M., Mendelsohn, A., Grossman, Y., Williams, C. H., Shapiro, M., Trope, Y., & Schiller, D. (2015). A map for social navigation in the human brain. Neuron 87: 231-243. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.06.011.

Question: What are some hypotheses as to why this relationship exists?

Side note: If anyone is interested in participating, I am completing a research study to investigate the relationship between social and spatial skills. Here's the link for that: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2620527/Social-and-Spatial-Skills-Assessment

I understand you are asking why there would be a relationship between social space and physical, spatial environment, via a cognitive map.

That would be owing to humans naturally mapping environments as well as experience (Tolman made his name on a natural phenomenon). Lakoff claimed that mapping for temporal orientation was a biologically determined process.

Radden (2013) agrees that humans operate a spatio-physical “image content” in order to “objectify” experience.

As I cannot agree that suffering or danger bring heightened awareness and high information processing, whereas routine activities would be “situations of low information processing” (Radden), dimensionality stirs my further opposition. :)

Time encourages Radden to terms as "zero-dimension". Your quote emphasizes two-dimensional Euclidean spaces.

"Zero dimension" would not be perceivable, therefore unfit for human natural mapping. Two-dimensional correlates would have resulted from the framework of a computer game talking bubbles (as the authors admit), rather than natural hippocampal function, evolved in three-dimensional space.

Obviously, brainstem and neocortical performance should not be omitted from a picture for real social interaction.


What is an explaination for the light-headed and slow-motion feeling after a long hard mental exam? Question
After taking a long final exam, people often report feeling like the world is moving in slow motion. I've heard this exam effect jokingly called "zombie feeling" or "brain-fog". I describe the effect as strong desire to stare with a blank mind.
Background
Based on answers from this question: https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/839/238 the amount of energy the brain uses doesn't really change when awake. So what could this effect be caused by?
Could it be caused by an exhaustion of certain nutrients, like Vitamin B12 or D?

The brain fuel is glucose, the long hard mental exam consumes most glucose available, and the result is poor cognitive function.

  Glucose, a form of sugar, is the primary source of energy for every
  cell in the body. Because the brain is so rich in nerve cells, or
  neurons, it is the most energy-demanding organ, using one-half of all
  the sugar energy in the body.

  Brain functions such as thinking, memory, and learning are closely
  linked to glucose levels and how efficiently the brain uses this fuel
  source. If there isn’t enough glucose in the brain, for example,
  neurotransmitters, the brain’s chemical messengers, are not produced
  and communication between neurons breaks down. In addition,
  hypoglycemia, a common complication of diabetes caused by low glucose
  levels in the blood, can lead to loss of energy for brain function and
  is linked to poor attention and cognitive function.

Mental effort drops glucose levels as reported by the study Mental effort, blood glucose and performance, below an extract :

  Work from our group and elsewhere has explored the link between blood
  glucose and cognitive performance.Here data are presented showing that
  a high level of mental effort is associated with a measurable drop in
  blood glucose levels. ‘Mental effort’ describes situations where energy
  is mobilised to meet cognitive goals. Reduced blood glucose has been
  reported in a number of such circumstances, including where
  computational demands of a task are relatively high (e.g. Serial
  Subtractions), during high processing loads (e.g. the Bakan task) and
  during response inhibition (e.g. the Stroop word-colour task).


How do you know if it's psychosomatic or not? "It's in your head" is often true and often offensive. But as your head can invent any number of psychological and physiological symptoms how can you distinguish whether something is or isn't psychosomatic?

My naive stance (which I'm looking to correct) so far is that if the symptoms are too vague or too arbitrary it's psychosomatic. This probably has some indirect legitimacy but is entirely anecdotal. For example something too arbitrary would be: experiencing pain in your feet after standing in water in a shower, but standing in a bathtub, pool, lake, or ocean doesn't cause it.

I believe 'psychosomatic' describes a way the mind has effects on the your body which might result in somatic symptoms. Often psychosomatic disorders are diagnosed as such when:

no somatic correlate to the experienced symptoms can be found
somatic correlates do not sufficiently explain the experienced symptoms

This often results in patients who visit different doctors over a longer period of time, desperately looking for a reason for their symptoms.

Also psychosomatic can refer to diseases which have a clear somatic correlate (e.g. Hashimoto-Thyreoiditis) but the cause of the disease is unknown and the symptoms are influenced by your state of mind (e.g. symptoms worsen under stress).

However as medical diagnostic tools are limited, it cannot be excluded that there is really no somatic cause for psychosomatic disorders.

ICD-10 diagnostic criteria for psychosomatic disorders are available online, e.g. for somatization disorder:
http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F45.0


How is information stored in the brain I believe information in computer is physically stored as a lattice of "boxes". Each box is either magnetized or de-magnetized. The computer reads this to retrieve and consolidate useful information.

My question is at the cellular level, how is information stored. I have tried looking the topic up and read about the strengthening of synapses. However, what is the low level mechanism for storing information? There has to be some "state" of the cell that can be processed.

By the way, so what is the physical mechanism behind each type of memory.

One hypothesis about the molecular basis of memory is CaMKII
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, 169-182 (March 2012) | doi:10.1038/nrn3192
Mechanisms of CaMKII action in long-term potentiation
http://www.silvalab.com/LMcourse/Lisman2012.pdf


Denial of evidence and reason Some people form a belief and become absolutely resistant to any contrary evidence or reasoning. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, these people stick to their beliefs. I'm pretty sure this is something that has been investigated by cognitive sciences, and I'd like to know what this phenomenon is called as I'd like to learn more about it.

So, what is the mechanism of this denial-of-evidence called?

I recently came to the conclusion that a lot of people who hold onto conspiracies and the like show similar behaviors to religious fanatics. The way these conspiracy-believers argue and the way they react when confronted with critique or even evidence seems to be similar, no matter what conspiracy-topic it's about (with varying degrees of fanaticism, of course; some can still be reached with reason while others are so deep into their belief-system that they cannot be reached any longer). I find this strangely fascinating and would like to understand the "mechanics" of this phenomenon.

Confirmation bias:

  Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is
  the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information
  in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses, while giving
  disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.

A feature of this bias is belief perseverance:

  ... when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false ...

Confirmation bias is an umbrella term for a variety of strategies and effects that may be applicable in different situations, including self-justification, self-verification, attitude polarization, escalation of commitment, cherry picking, etc, etc.  See the duplicate questions I listed in the comments above for more varieties of these.  You may find that some sub-category of confirmation bias is more apt to your question.

Note: Cognitive dissonance refers to the cause of a number of possible inconsistency reduction strategies, of which belief perseverance is one.

Note: Denial refers to an ego-defence mechanism - ie, it applies only if the person feels personally threatened by the inconsistency.


Are psychiatric disorders merely statistical deviations? When we suppose that a segment X of the population is at high-risk for disorder Y, don't we assume that anyone carries the same psychophenotype, yet not in a statistically-significant degree?

When diagnosing Psychological/Psychiatric Disorders, psychologists would consider the extent of the patient's:

Deviation from the norm;
Distress;
Danger to themselves and others;
Dsyfunction, i.e. ability for the person to carry out tasks important for everyday functioning in an independent fashion.

The current paradigm uses a continuum model for disorders; how severe a psychologist would judge your disorder to be depends on the extent of the 4 D's. However, they're aren't weighted equally.

Deviation from the norm is, in fact, the factor with the least weight given when considering if someone has a mental disorder. What is abnormal for one society may be completely acceptable for another.

Instead, what is given more attention to is the extent of the distress and dsyfunction a person exhibits. The greater the distress or dsyfunction, the more serious your disorder will be placed within the continuum.

Danger is the iffy component, since usually the person with the mental disorder who will become the victim of exploitation, violence, and general hostility and fear. Because of this, it's usually only brought up when there is a clear and present danger to themselves or others.


Is it possible for someone to have anorexia without body image issues? I've been reading about anorexia and as I understand it, it's an eating disorder where someone severely restricts their intake of food because of an intense fear of gaining weight, a distorted perception of weight, equating weight with self-worth, and things like that.

I was wondering, is it possible for someone to have anorexia without weight and body esteem issues? In other words, they severely restrict their food intake but not because of a fear of gaining weight or body esteem issues. I came across this Quora question, but the only answer there is an anecdotal one.

Or perhaps is there some eating disorder other than anorexia that matches this description? I came across this article, Does Everyone With an ED Have Body Dysmorphia?, but it didn't really help.

It is possible for someone to have an eating disorder without weight and body esteem issues (Sarkar, et al. 2013), but not Anorexia.
Fear of becoming fat or gaining weight and having a distorted view of themselves and of their condition are criteria required in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual which is used for diagnosing mental health problems. Therefore, Anorexia would not be diagnosed without these criteria being present.
An eating disorder without body image issues would be diagnosed as EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified) under the 4th Edition, but as the 5th edition merged the former categories of Eating Disorders and Feeding Disorder in Infancy or Early Childhood and formed the new category, Feeding and Eating Disorders, the diagnosis under the 5th edition would be OSFED (Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder).

OSFED is every bit as serious as anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder, and people suffering from OSFED are every bit as deserving and in need of treatment – their eating disorder is just presenting in a different way. It is common for symptoms to not fit with the exact diagnostic criteria for anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder – OSFED accounts for a large percentage of eating disorders (Beat Eating Disorders, 2017).

References
Beat Eating Disorders (2017). Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder (OSFED). Retrieved from: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/types/osfed
Sarkar, S., Padhy, S. K., Rao, P., & Gupta, S. (2013). Transient eating problems in an adolescent without body image disturbances: a diagnostic quandary. Indian journal of psychological medicine, 35(4), 410. doi: 10.4103/0253-7176.122244 PubMed Central: PMC3868099


Can a person with multiple personality disorder have one of their personality based on a real person? Can a person with multiple personality disorder have one of their personality based on a real person encountered during their lifetime? For example, in a family with multiple children, can one of the children with multiple presonality disorder have one of their personas be a "clone" of sibling? If so, how close are the two, and more interestingly, what happens when the two meet?

This question is related to this one about isolated internal representation of people, and potentially to the phenomenon of imprinting

The article you link to is fairly comprehensive, and probably already answers your questions.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is no longer referred to as multiple personality disorder.  This is a highly misunderstood disorder, and involves many possible symptoms besides the appearance of "alters".  "The diagnosis itself remains controversial among mental health professionals."
"It is now acknowledged that these dissociated states are not fully mature personalities, but rather they represent a disjointed sense of identity."  This answers your question about how close a "clone" personality would be to the real thing - ie, only in a limited sense.
Similarly, note that in most cases this disorder manifests in childhood "(usually before age 9)".  While I don't doubt that "alters" are modelled on people (fictional and real) that the patient has observed in their past, any actor will tell you that creating a "clone" personality takes a lot of work, and is likely far too much to expect of a child, let alone one suffering from the extreme level of abuse or neglect that typically initiates this disorder.
"Sometimes the alters are imaginary people; sometimes they are animals."  So while I can't say for sure if it's possible for an "alter" to be an imitation of a real person, it's certainly not common.
Moreover, it is believed that "The distinct personalities may serve diverse roles in helping the individual cope with life's dilemmas."  In other words, "alters" are formed to avoid stress, not increase it, so it wouldn't be in the patient's interest to imitate a real person.
Finally, "Environmental triggers or life events cause a sudden shift from one alter or personality to another," so this is the likely outcome should a "clone" alter meet its inspiration.


Is Clare W. Graves a credible author? I stumbled upon the book "The never ending quest" by Clare W. Graves. It looks interesting to me, but I suspect that he is not as scientific as he pretends to be. Is this author's theory of hierarchy considered credible?

Yes.  Clare W. Graves was a contemporary of Maslow.  He and Maslow used to go back and forth – as Graves thought Maslow's theory was incomplete (too closed).  At the end, Maslow agreed with Graves.  Graves died before much of his work was really accepted.  Cowan and Beck carried on his work.

It is, in my humble opinion, the most brilliant explanation for human development ever created.  It covers humanity as individuals and as collections (cultures), and Graves also created a system of change theory that matched.

You'll find the most ardent advocate is Don Beck, who was largely responsible (using the theories developed by Graves) to assist Mandela in South Africa.  It's called Spiral Dynamics Integral now by Don Beck.  There are many who continue studying this work.

Research confirms it.  There is ongoing research (Online PeopleScan) that is used by cutting-edge consultants in business and organizations.


Difference between Instinct and Intuition Sometimes I've heard people using the term gut feeling rather than their 'intuition or instinct' and I'm not sure which one do they mean. So, can both the terms be used interchangeably and simply referred to as a 'gut feeling'? Is there a real difference between Instinct and Intuition?

Intuition, as defined by Wikipedia:

  Intuition may be defined as understanding or knowing without conscious
  recourse to thought, observation or reason.

Intuition is currently understood to be the subliminal processing of information that is too complex for rational thought, e.g. mate choice. The processes that make up intuition are learned, not innate.

Instinct is not a feeling, but an innate, "hardwired" tendency toward a particular behavior. Instincts are automatic reactions to environmental stimuli that cannot be repressed and occur in every individual of a species. The current opinion in psychology (since Maslow) is that human beings have no instincts.

A Gut Feeling, according to the reference, arises from intuition.


How to analyze auditory steady state responses? How does one usually go about analyzing the auditory steady state response (ASSR)? I have data where speech was amplitude modulated to a 40 Hz sine tone. There's 3.5 minutes of data; should I just take the FFT or do some averaging first? What is the usual process? The data has been already preprocessed.

ASSR analysis is based on the fact that the electrophysiological responses are time locked with the stimulus repetition rate.

There is not one possible method of analysis. Generally spoken, ASSR analysis occurs in the spectral domain, and specifically the frequency of the stimulus repetition rate is analyzed, as well as its harmonics. For example, if the stimulus repetition rate is 100 Hz, the ASSR will occur at 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 300 Hz etc (Fig. 1). The base frequency (in this case, 100 Hz) will have the largest amplitude, and the harmonics decrease in amplitude. Detecting the presence of ASSR in the spectral domain means relying on amplitude and/or phase values (sometimes combined into a vector).

Fig. 1. ASSR base frequency and harmonics. Stimulus rate was 90 Hz. source: The Hearing Review

Sources
- The Hearing Review, November 2007
- Audiology Book (in Dutch)


Is it possible to memorize the sound of a certain pitch? Those how have an absolute pitch can name the note when they hear it. For those who don't have this ability is it possible to remember a pitch of at least one note?

Yes, it seems like this ability can be acquired with practice.
In Identifying Notes without Perfect Pitch, the author picked twelve familiar songs, each of which started on one of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. Once he memorized the song-pitch association, he was able to recognize 10 out of of 12 pitches.
Some users of Music Stack Exchange mention similar results. For example, one person says they can remember the pitch of their tuning fork, and another suggests the song approach: "If hearing a note instantly reminds you of a song, then I think you are identifying that note, just by the song name, not the note name (that you may or may not happen to know)."


Is it a good idea to play an instrument while studying? If so, what are the benefits? We've all heard that listening to classical music and such while studying can be beneficial, but I was wondering about actually playing an instrument? If I were to absentmindedly play my accordion while reading a textbook, would it have any benefit to either my absorption of the material or ability to play music without having to focus on it? Or is this just a bad idea?

Specifically, have there been any studies relevant to this, or is there any other data on the subject?

Multitasking research suggests that people can't really multitask. I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I suspect that it's much better for your instrument skills than your studying. The accordion detracts from your focus and attention while you work, perhaps even if it doesn't feel like it. At the same time, though, that exercise may improve your ability to, say, sing and play at the same time.


Why do we prefer visually aligned objects? We all know visual alignment is one of the foundations of design. Everything must be aligned with everything else.
We also know that when things are aligned it is easier to process information.
My question is why?

Nothing in nature is "aligned". What's the anthropological/biology reason why humans prefer aligned information?

One of the main reasons related to the 'Gestalt principles'

Law of Proximity Objects near each other tend to be grouped together.
Law of Similarity Similar items tend to be grouped together.
Law of Closure Objects grouped together are seen as a whole.
Law of Continuity Lines are seen as following the smoothest path.
Law of Common Region Items in similar areas tend to be grouped
together.
Law of Connectedness Items that are connected are seen as groups.

This is a nice summary from the article referenced below:

  Coupling emotional and behavioral triggers in some form of cognitive grouping — whether by proximity, similarity or something else — strengthens the motivation to act on the behavioral cue.

I'd add to this: We feel more comfortable when perceiving something expected. When something breaks this (such as misalignment), it causes stress because there is a gap between our expectations (as the principles outline) and our experience.

References

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/08/strengthening-behavioral-cues-in-ux-web-design-with-gestalt-principles/
http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm


Evidence for gender-based math ability differences? What evidence and counter-evidence is there for mathematical ability for being correlated with gender? If there is a difference, how significant is it (mean vs. variance) and when does it start to become visible? Actual causes for this difference are secondary and outside the scope of this question (although still very valid paths of research and investigation). Also, to further narrow the scope of the question, let's focus on evidence based on Western cultures (Europe, USA, Canada).

The evidence I have so far is this blog post, which finds a correlation between gender and math scores on the GRE and SATs. I also seem to recall finding somewhere evidence that gender-based math differences start as early as first grade, but I can't find the link at this point.

I'm not expecting a conclusive answer, more of a quick summary of the state of the field.

It is generally understood that girls develop a small to moderate deficit in math abilities, compared to boys, over the course of schooling, as measured by mean school grades or test scores (Hyde & Linn, 2006 give a number of .08 standard deviations in favor of men for mathematical problem solving on average, a larger effect favoring elementary school girls, and no difference for high school math; on the maths section of the SAT, girls score ~.3 SD below boys). Similarly, particularly math-heavy academic disciplines (such as physics, maths, computer science) feature a smaller proportion of women than other disciplines, although this effect is attenuated for some surprising cases, such as statistics, and present for some math-light degrees, such as philosophy. This effect is the stronger, the further advanced the position is (e.g., the ratio of female maths BAs is much higher than the ratio of female math PhDs).
All in all, across these various measures, women tend to score slightly worse than men, although not across the board, and extreme differences are only observable in comparatively rare and extreme contexts (e.g., math PhDs).

The variance ratio (that is, how much more men vary compared to women) is somewhere around 1.1 as given by Hyde, indicating that men show a bit, but not much more variance.

These findings concern data from the United States. Janet Hyde has published multiple cross-national meta-analyses on this topic, including:

Cross-National Patterns of Gender Differences in Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis

Gender, culture, and mathematics performance

Gender Similarities in Mathematics and Science

Her primary finding is the culture dependence of this gender gap. For example, she observes the gap not only varies with countries, but also interacts with, for example, gender equality (although see Fryer & Levitt, 2009). It is different for various ethnic groups within countries (e.g., amongst US Asians, women are somewhat more frequently top scorers). Furthermore, the effects are highly variable in time; for example, the ratio of female math PhDs hit an all-time low of 5% in the 1950s, was higher in the pre-war time, and has been on a steady upwards trend ever since.

Combining all of this evidence, it seems to me fair to say that there is currently, in Western countries in this time, somewhat stronger math performance by boys, but that there is no convincing evidence that this pattern is necessarily generalizable.


Are there any circumstances where schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are not lifelong? It is known that psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar I, and bipolar II are for life, and require long term treatment (lifelong).

Is this always the case?

The answer could include reference to any disorder, even those not listed in the DSM, say bipolar III, bipolar IV, bipolar V, etc. This refers to what is known as bipolar spectrum disorder.

The current understanding, I believe, is that symptomatic psychiatric disorders may or may not be lifelong according to many factors, but that the susceptibility to them probably is lifelong. Some examples. . .

Substance-induced psychosis (which is pretty much what it sounds like) is often though not always temporary.
Certain types and locations of brain tumors may cause psychotic symptoms, which may or may not reverse on treatment.
Afr Health Sci. Dec 2004; 4(3): 190–194.
Major depressive disorder has a highly variable course, and may reoccur or may not.
N Engl J Med 2008; 358:55-68. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMra073096


Can the Philosophy thought game "The experience machine" be answered by Positive Psychology? In Philosophy, a thought game exists called "The experience machine" {1}. In summary, it's a machine you plug into that enables you to always experience positive events, and never negative ones.

One of the common arguments not to plug into this machine is that if you never experience lows, you can't appreciate heights, since they would become the norm. This line of reasoning is known as the Hedonic treadmill.

In Positive Psychology the concept of a Baseline level of happiness {2} exists. It has been shown {3} this baseline can be raised, or lowered, but the research I know of does not discuss the effect of removing negative experiences to increase the baseline. It focuses on other factors, like intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, and so on.

Knowing about baseline happiness, and the trend to fall/rise back to it; what would happen if you never had negative experiences? The argument against using the experience machine basically assumes the baseline would plummet if there are no negative experiences, or at least become quite low.

My line of thinking, and hypothesis is that there is no need for negative experiences in order to appreciate positive ones. Since, if you don't experience anything negative for a week, you can still experience joy that week, a month... a year... a life? If you are never unpleasantly hungry, you can still appreciate a good meal.

Now to the actual question(s):

Is there any research that shows the effect of "lack of negative experiences" on the baseline level of happiness?
Are you better able to enjoy nice experiences in the light of negative ones?
Is there research on the relation between the two?
Has this research ever been applied in Philosophy to try and answer the Experience machine puzzle?

{1} Nozick, R. (1977). Anarchy, state, and utopia (Vol. 5038). Basic Books.
{2} Brickman & Campbell (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. New York: Academic Press. pp. 287–302.
{3} Diener; Lucas, Scollon (2006). "Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being". American Psychologist 61 (4): 305–314. doi:10.1037/0003-066X61.4.305.

The experience machine is meant to be an argument against hedonism in that it's supposed to show that humans value other things than happiness and therefore wouldn't/shouldn't hook themselves up to the machine (whether it succeeds in doing this is another matter; Nozick simply points out that it would be "absurd" for anyone to connect oneself to the machine, an in my opinion extremely weak argument).

As such, the machine in the thought experiment is meant to supply you with whatever experiences that will create the largest amount of happiness for you (however, it's never explicitly stated that the experiences would have to be happy experiences; it's simply stated that the machine would be able to supply you with whatever experiences you desired, and when addressing a hedonist, those experiences would be happy experiences). If this means that you need a big chunk of sad, soul crushing experiences from time to time just to be happy the rest of the time, then so be it; as long as there is some pattern of experiences that in the end would generate more happiness for you than what you would experience in real life (a.k.a your real life isn't perfect), the thought experiment applies.

So, regarding your last question, the thought experiment really is immune to the kind of objections that you bring up, which means that we can't be informed about the solution to it by empirical research.

With that said, the question of how much and what type of negative experiences, if any, we need to be able to experiences happiness is interesting, but I don't have the answer to that one.

(Random speculations mode commencing: However, in my view, this seems to be more of an assumption that people make rather than something that is firmly based in science. Do we have the same intuition when it comes to pain? Would we say that a person who was raped and tortured since birth wouldn't be worth rescuing since she because of the lack of positive experiences didn't experience any negative experiences? Is there a reason to believe that this alleged relationship between positive and negative experiences isn't symmetrical?)


How good are people at guessing the ages of their respective ethnic group? I have a Chinese friend and she says that she has a much harder time guessing Western people's ages than Eastern people's ages. No particular surprise here. For me it's the opposite. I have the feeling that Eastern people look younger longer and then "suddenly" look older.

To have a comparison, I wonder if there is a study on "Western people guessing Western people's ages" vs. "Eastern people guessing Eastern people's ages".

Cross-race effect in facial processing

As @analystic has noted, there is substantial research documenting what is sometimes called the "cross-race effect":

  Cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias
  or own-race bias) is the tendency for people of one race to have
  difficulty recognizing and processing faces and facial expressions of
  members of a race or ethnic group other than their own.

For an overview of research see the meta-analysis by Meissner and Brigham (2001). To quote parts of the abstract:

  Data were analyzed from 39 research articles, involving
  91 independent samples and nearly 5,000 participants. Measures of hit
  and false alarm rates, and aggregate measures of discrimination
  accuracy and response criterion were examined, including an analysis
  of 8 study moderators. ... Overall, results indicated a "mirror effect" pattern in which own-race faces yielded a higher proportion of hits and a lower
  proportion of false alarms compared with other-race faces.

Note that the effect is probably related to degree of interaction with the  racial group. Thus, it is not so much a fixed genetic difference, but rather that in many societies we tend to interact more with our own racial group.

It would not be surprising if part of the cross-race effect would be reflected in poorer performance in rating the age of people from a different race relative to one's own race.

General skill in estimating ages

You can find a nice review of the age estimation literature in Rhodes (2009).
The author suggests that a general in group bias may exist in skill in age estimation. I.e., that prediction is not just better for the same race but also for people of similar age.

  Taken together, data on group biases in age estimation must be
  regarded as suggestive that in-group age estimation is superior to
  that of out-group age estimation. This may include more accurate age
  estimates for individuals of one’s own ethnicity or age group (but see
  Burt & Perrett, 1995). However, given the dearth of data, the full
  range and impact of group biases on age estimation has yet to be
  explored.

Estimating ages of own versus other race

I also found a specific study by Dehon and Bredart (2001) which specifically looked at accuracy in cross-racial age estimation.

Citing the abstract:

  In the present study, we investigated whether this finding extends to
  age perception. Caucasian and African participants were asked to
  estimate the age of Caucasian and African faces. The main result of
  this experiment was a significant race of 'subject $\times$ race of face'
  interaction showing that Caucasian participants performed better at
  evaluating Caucasian faces than African faces. However, African
  participants performed equally with both type of faces. This result is
  explained by the Africans' time of residence in Belgium

They used  72 Caucasian and 72 African photographs as stimuli. Actual ages of faces ranged between 20 and 45 years. In terms of absolute deviation in years between actual age and estimated age, thy found that:

  Caucasian participants were better at estimating the age of
  Caucasian faces (mean = 6.35 years, SD=3.13 years) than African
  faces (mean= 7.79 years, SD= 2.96 years) whereas the performance of
  African participants did not differ with the kind of face (mean =6.98
  years, SD =3.25 years and mean =  6.79 years, SD= 2.86 years for
  Caucasian and African faces, respectively).

Note of course that these differences in age accuracy are not that large.

References

Dehon, H. & Bredart, S. (2001). An 'other-race' effect in age estimation from faces. Perception, 30, 1107-1114.
Meissner, C.A. & Brigham, J.C. (2001). Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: A meta-analytic review.. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7, 3. PDF
Rhodes, M.G. (2009). Age estimation of faces: A review. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23, 1-12.


Which personality traits cause "non-cruelty"? Human behavior towards other living beings can be classified into three categories:

altruistic: actively caring for the well-being of others
cruel: deliberately inflicting pain and suffering
neutral: not affecting the life and well-being of others

You cannot always care for the well-being of everyone around you. Therefore active altruism cannot be a general guiding principle of behavior. But you can always chose not to be actively cruel. Lacking a better name, I will call this type of behavior, which includes both altruistic and neutral behavor, "non-cruel", as suggested by Nick Stauner.

What I would like to know is if there are predictors that differentiate between habitually cruel persons and those that are usually either actively altruistic or at least show a passive lack of deliberate cruelty and knowing acquiescence of suffering?

Which personality traits are responsible for habitually non-cruel behavior?

Notes:

I am interested in traits in the traditional sense (patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion) as well as neural correlates of non-cruelty.

I've been commenting a lot and not answering for quite some time now! My hesitation was largely due to the terms "unfailingly", the mixture of "altruism" and "non-cruelty", and having forgotten my intention to answer. My answer certainly won't be foolproof (haven't yet heard of a trait model that is), and I may not cover both altruism and non-cruelty, but here are some pointers anyway...

To start this answer off "Big", I'll begin with agreeableness (and its Wikipedia page, which has a lot to offer on the topic), one of the Big Five personality traits [emphasis added throughout]:

  Agreeableness is a personality trait manifesting itself in individual behavioral characteristics that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate [(Thompson, 2008)].

All of these aspects (traits unto themselves, really) will relate somewhat to non-cruelty or altruism; even cooperation entails not harming one's teammates and sometimes putting them first.

  People scoring low on agreeableness are generally less concerned with others' well-being and report having less empathy. Therefore, these individuals are less likely to go out of their way to help others. Low agreeableness is often characterized by skepticism about other people's motives, resulting in suspicion and unfriendliness. People very low on agreeableness have a tendency to be manipulative in their social relationships. They are also more likely to compete than to cooperate.

Less concern for others' well-being and emotions in general means greater freedom to disregard or willfully harm them, as are often useful to do for personal gain via manipulation or competition. Here we also have a direct connection to altruism, and a few indirect connections, including disinterest and mistrust of others' concerns. Yet the most direct connection to altruism appears in the facets of agreeableness (lower-order factors in a second-order model of agreeableness as a multidimensional construct; see Figure 1 for a similar model):

  Agreeableness is considered to be a superordinate trait, meaning that it is a grouping of personality sub-traits that cluster together statistically. The lower-level traits, or facets, grouped under agreeableness are: trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness [(Matsumoto & Juang, 2012)].

I've emphasized trust and straightforwardness above because the Big Five model of personality isn't the only one that relates trust to altruism—see also:

Figure 1. Second-order model of trust linking altruism to honesty (Perepelkin & Di Zhang, 2011).

Again, logically, a lack of trust would likely reduce motivation to help others altruistically. As for straightforwardness, Wikipedia notes, "Low scorers...are generally deceitful or manipulative." Again, these behaviors are likely to relate to some form of cruelty more often than not (i.e., "white lies" are the exception, I assume).

Also, from the same section, "Straightforwardness is similar to the honesty aspect of honesty-humility in the HEXACO model" (Ashton & Lee, 2005). So, speaking of HEXACO...

  The factors of Agreeableness, Honesty-Humility and Emotionality are distinctly different from their counterparts on the Five Factor Model (FFM). Honesty-Humility, Emotionality and Agreeableness are proposed to be measures of Altruistic versus Antagonistic behaviour. Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness both measure two different aspects of Reciprocal altruism, high levels of which indicate a propensity for helping behaviour and cooperation as opposed to the exploitation of others. The Honesty-Humility factor represents a person's tendency for pro-social altruistic behaviours [(Thalmayer, Saucier, & Eigenhuis, 2011)], while Agreeableness indicates an individual's tendency to forgive and to show tolerance. Emotionality is a measure of kin altruism, that is, the tendency to show empathy and attachment to one’s kin.

This implies a little complexity in altruism itself, but brings agreeableness, honesty-humility, and emotionality directly into the equation within the HEXACO model. It may also claim that emotionality is "distinctly different" from neuroticism, but I'm not sure I'd go so far. Consider that neuroticism relates negatively to happiness in the context of the Wikipedia page on altruism itself:

  While research supports the idea that altruistic acts bring about happiness, it has also been found to work in the opposite direction—that happier people are also kinder. The relationship between altruistic behavior and happiness is bidirectional. Studies have found that generosity increases linearly from sad to happy affective states [(Underwood, Froming, & Moore, 1977)]...While generous acts make people feel good about themselves, it is also important for people to appreciate the kindness they receive from others. Studies suggest that gratitude goes hand-in-hand with kindness and is also very important for our well-being. A study on the relationship happiness to various character strengths showed that "a conscious focus on gratitude led to reductions in negative affect and increases in optimistic appraisals, positive affect, offering emotional support, sleep quality, and well-being" [(Shimai, Otake, Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2006).]

This adds happiness and gratitude to the equation as well, which can be measured at the trait level.

BTW, since empathy has come up a fair amount, you may be interested in the "empathy-altruism hypothesis". This also implicates empathy as a trait of sorts that relates to altruism, but I'm not sure this adds anything to what I've said above. Also, while I'm disclaiming, I may not have addressed cruelty sufficiently yet, much less neural correlates. Both are likely to make the necessary answer much bigger, so I'm at least going to take a break on this one for now. I'd encourage someone else to step up and cover those bases in the meantime.

References

- Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2005). Honesty-Humility, the Big Five, and the Five-Factor Model. Journal of Personality, 73(5), 1321–1354.
- Matsumoto, D., & Juang, L. (2012). Culture and psychology (5th ed.), pp. 271. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth-Cengage Learning.
- Perepelkin, J., & Di Zhang, D. (2011). Brand personality and customer trust in community pharmacies. International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, 5(3), 175–193.
-Post, S. G. (2005). Altruism, happiness, and health: It's good to be good. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 12(2), 66–77.
-Schwartz, C., Meisenhelder, J., Ma, Y., & Reed, G. (2003). Altruistic social interest behaviors are associated with better mental health. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65(5), 778–785.
-Shimai, S., Otake, K., Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. P. (2006). Convergence of character strengths in American and Japanese young adults. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7(3), 311–322.
-Thalmayer, A. G., Saucier, G., & Eigenhuis, A. (2011). Comparative validity of brief to medium-length Big Five and Big Six Personality Questionnaires. Psychological Assessment, 23(4), 995–1009. Retrieved from http://pages.uoregon.edu/gsaucier/comp_val.pdf.
-Thompson, E. R. (2008). Development and validation of an international English big-five mini-markers. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(6), 542–548.
-Underwood, B., Froming, W. J., & Moore, B. S. (1977). Mood, attention, and altruism: A search for mediating variables. Developmental Psychology, 13(5), 541–542.