Which experiment design is this? Between and within combined The basis of my experiment are 4 neutral text snippets. For each text snippet, I create an uncertain and a certain version so that I have a total of 8 text snippets (2 versions for each text snippet, 1 certain and 1 uncertain version). The "version" of the text is the IV.
Now, the participants are randomly shown 4 text snippets at the same time (always 2 uncertain and 2 certain text snippets). The participants are asked to indicate if they perceive the text snippet as uncertain or not (DV).
On the one hand, I have a within-subject design because each participant sees uncertain and certain versions of text snippets. On the other hand, I have a between-subject design because a participant only sees either the certain or the uncertain version of a text snippet.
In my analysis, I will first examine the difference between the uncertain and certain versions in general (I sum up the results of the certain and the uncertain versions and compare the results). Then, I will examine the difference between the uncertain and certain versions of each text snippet.
My question is: What is the name of that setting? Is that setting a crossover-design?

If I understand your description correctly, you have one within-subject factor with two levels (certain/uncertain) and one between-subject factor (based on how you assign the different text snippets to different group, but I'm not sure I understand what exactly you are doing there). So, this would be a repeated-measures design with different groups (based on the assignment of different text snippets) which I would refer to as is a mixed design (https://www.discoveringstatistics.com/statistics-hell-p/porus-comparing-means/mixed-designs/), and you could analyse it, e.g., with a mixed ANOVA (https://statistics.laerd.com/spss-tutorials/mixed-anova-using-spss-statistics.php). I think crossover-design refers to something similar.


What makes some things more fun than others universally? Recently I have been presented with the question, "What makes something addictive, and why are some activities more addicting than others?" This question intrigues me, as logically, the answer would be along the lines of, "The mind has a constant desire / falsified need to go through the experience of the activity." And if you think about it, that's just a definition of what causes addiction.

My question is: what makes some fun things addictive and some things not, and overall, "What is fun?" For example, your average adolescent would find playing video games, watching television and communicating through social media "fun", while also finding recreational activities like drawing, playing sports, and, say, board games "fun". Why then is the former list addicting and the latter non-addictive?

If any activity the mind desires, once achieved, can be described as "fun", then why aren't some things addictive? And since some people find, say, studying or even work "fun", then if some routine is made out of it, isn't it possible to become addicted to these activities?

Is it possible to channel our desires, define what we find fun, and choose our addictions?

This is a primary subject of study in game studies and ludology, which are domains of theory and research unto themselves. Moreover, the question as it pertains to games might be interesting to ask over on Arqade, though I can't guarantee it would be "on topic" enough for their community. You might find the following questions from Arqade interesting, as they hint at some general principles:

Techniques to deal with game 'addiction'
How do I limit my gaming?

Problems I've seen mentioned in answers to these (to which I relate personally as a gamer) include:

The ability to continue playing for a longer time than one can engage in other activities
Costs of quitting freely and abruptly, such as loss of progress or satisfaction from proximal goals
Proximity of goals in general, and immediacy of gratification
Social involvement and its time sensitivity: teamwork requires coordination with friends' schedules
Availability of games on a PC: even when I go to work, I inadvertently bring games with me!

Finally, the existence of consequent problems in general is an important part of what motivates the use of the negatively connoting word, "addiction". Practically anything can be done to excess of course, but drawing and playing sports may have higher thresholds of activity before they become counterproductive overall. At high levels of activity and skill, drawing and sports become marketable trade skills, and athletic activity generally promotes health. Gaming has less obvious benefits too (see for review Johnson, Jones, Scholes, & Carras, 2013), but popular culture and research literature are both still catching up with this, as well as to the revelation that many of the supposed problems with gaming aren't so bad after all (e.g., aggression; Ferguson, Garza, Jerabeck, Ramos, & Galindo, 2013). Therefore, I wouldn't read too much into popular (mis-)usage of "addiction" in this case. That's also not to say that true gaming addiction doesn't exist; I don't honestly know, but I've heard of cases that seemingly ought to justify application of addiction models to game obsessions, so it may just be a matter of time before the DSM takes note. (If it hasn't already; again, I don't know, and wish I had more time to look into it!)

Anyway, considering what makes games fun might lead to some insights as to why they produce fanatics. Whether video games really produce more than these other hobbies is an empirical question that I haven't seen answered yet, but my intuition suggests you're probably right to think they do, because video games appeal to people on very many levels. Again, you might have a hard time finding articles on game studies that don't address ways to appeal to people and reinforce participation. By virtue of being designed expressly to entertain us and reinforce participation, video games represent a culmination of creative efforts and marketing experiences that probably should supersede less modern forms of entertainment and hobbies with other focal purposes, at least to the extent that game designers are good at what they do. They've been getting better with the advent of affordable, portable, high-powered computers designed to optimize the user interface; the advent of education in programming and game design; and the economic prosperity of game designing and publishing companies. Drawing, sports, and board games are more often (but not always) tied to simpler mechanisms and traditional designs, so it may make sense if these pastimes haven't been keeping up with those that capitalize directly on modern trends in technological and educational progress.

Since there's enough literature out there on game studies to keep anyone busy, I'll only list a subset of specific ways that video games appeal to players that relate to psychological theories of motivation:

Enjoyment is what intrinsic motivation is made of. Producing enjoyment is a primary purpose.

Extrinsic motivation also arises from the structure of requirements games impose upon players seeking their more intrinsically desirable rewards (e.g., you have to beat a boss before you get to watch a FMV, or "grind" to a higher level before you can use a spectacular new ability or exciting game mechanism)

Scalable difficulty improves users' ability to optimize challenge, which leads to the flow experience in gaming when challenge is tuned just so to an individual's "Goldilocks zone": not too high or low.
Social interaction is facilitated by multiplayer games in a variety of ways.

Cooperation satisfies the need for affiliation or relatedness, and promotes self-transcendence. Game objectives that require teamwork also play upon introjected motivation when a person plays to avoid the guilt of letting down a teammate. Social support has widely documented ramifications for well-being.
Competition satisfies the need for power or competence when it goes well for a player or promotes skill acquisition and refinement.
Both kinds may satisfy the need for achievement, especially when one can show off to others! The promise of approval or respect from others is another form of extrinsic motivation.

Variety in general is the "spice of life" (Barrett, 2009; Kahn & Isen, 1993), and is readily available across the broad range of games.
Investment in goals with long time frames may promote well-being and intrinsic motivation.

My own research (Stauner, 2013) demonstrates a weak, predictive relationship between the average time frame of students' goals (longer-term goals being rated higher) and change in well-being over an academic quarter $(\beta=.09, t_{(267)}=2.61,p=.009)$, though this isn't necessarily a causal relationship.
Manderlink and Harackiewicz (1984) also claim that setting long-term goals can "enhance subsequent intrinsic motivation relative to conditions involving proximal goals or no goals."
Video games have surely been extending the time frames of their players' goals. In my own adolescence, I recall finding an RPG that required 60 hours to complete exceptional. Newer games—especially MMORPGs—have increasingly adopted an expand-and-patch strategy to keep new content flowing for years of (potentially endless!) goal pursuit. Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft is a prime example of a game universe that's taken on a life of its own since its release in late 2004; I've "met" some players who have been around since then myself.
Long-term involvement in any goal or activity increases its relevance to a person's sense of identity, and may thereby affect the sense that the goal or activity is meaningful and important (identified motivation).
Behavioral economic principles like sunk costs and escalation of commitment also explain why people have a harder time stopping a longer-term habit.
Neurological bases of habituation are also an ongoing area of research that longer-term involvement and routinization would naturally make increasingly relevant regardless of initial motives.

References

Barrett, L. F. (2009). Variety is the spice of life: A psychological construction approach to understanding variability in emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 23(7), 1284–1306. Available online, URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835153/. Retrieved February 5, 2014.

Ferguson, C. J., Garza, A., Jerabeck, J., Ramos, R., & Galindo, M. (2013). Not worth the fuss after all? Cross-sectional and prospective data on violent video game influences on aggression, visuospatial cognition and mathematics ability in a sample of youth. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 42(1), 109–122. Available online, URL: http://www.christopherjferguson.com/Not%20Worth%20the%20Fuss.pdf. Retrieved February 5, 2014.

Johnson, D., Jones, C., Scholes, L., & Colder Carras, M. (2013). Video games and wellbeing: A comprehensive review. Sydney: Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre. Available online, URL: http://www.youngandwellcrc.org.au/document/ea0e9511fce02b8be23990_07ef7fc4c7/Videogames_and_Wellbeing.pdf. Retrieved February 4, 2014.

Kahn, B. E., & Isen, A. M. (1993). The influence of positive affect on variety seeking among safe, enjoyable products. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(2), 257–270.

Manderlink, G., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (1984). Proximal versus distal goal setting and intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(4), 918–928.

Stauner, N. (2013). Personal goal attainment, psychological well-being change, and meaning in life. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Riverside). Available online, URL: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3t34c68w.


Why do I often feel that someone's eyes are at me from a far off distance? Often when I'm in a public place, I get the intuition that someone is looking at me even when I don't turn or look in that direction or move my eyes. I just have a strong feeling in my heart that someone is gazing at me. I immediately want to turn into that direction and many a times when I do , I do find a person gazing. Sometimes , I don't. Is it me overthinking or some kind of extra vigilant behavior?

There's a history of being amazed at similar ability that has led to some extra-scientific theories about it (see for example "psychic staring effect" on Wikipedia).
A better explanation is that gaze is very important to survival in the environment, and even more so for social species like humans. Even infants show sophisticated gaze detection behaviors (see Farroni et al 2002). Humans and other animals that are looking at you might be interested in eating you, fighting with you, or mating with you (see Emery, 2000). It's important to detect gaze from the entire visual field (including the edges of vision in the periphery) because you don't necessarily know where threats or opportunities may come from. You don't need to be seeking out gaze to notice it, just like you don't have to look for a brightly flashing light or an object moving towards your face.
Gaze detection is pretty ubiquitous among animal species with sophisticated visual systems. A previous asker at Biology.SE asked this question: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/95366/ after noticing birds who were quite tolerant of others in their environment until they were looked at, at which point they flew off.

Emery, N. J. (2000). The eyes have it: the neuroethology, function and evolution of social gaze. Neuroscience & biobehavioral reviews, 24(6), 581-604.
Farroni, T., Csibra, G., Simion, F., & Johnson, M. H. (2002). Eye contact detection in humans from birth. Proceedings of the National academy of sciences, 99(14), 9602-9605.


Inducing long term low latent inhibition From what I have gathered of low latent inhibition, it is an extreme increased level of dopamine in the brain.. dopamine is a neurotransmitter and hormone.

Increasing it has many advantages and a few nasty disadvantages.

While improving concentration, mood, energy, and libido for starters,
too much can cause side effects such as addiction and a host of mental disorders. (schizophrenia and bipolar to name two)

I'm looking for those who might have more knowledge of the subject than I do: there is a lot of controversy over the internet and half of it can't be believed.
So, for the question part:

1. Is increased dopamine levels the source (or at least main source) of LLI?

2.Is Dopamine increased more through direct supplements such as DHA which supposedly affect Dopamine levels directly, or supplements such as L-Dopa which claim to affect the precursors?

I've done my own research and am still looking for answers to the benefits, risks, and induction of such to lower latentcy... just looking for others' knowledge and/or experiences.

Low latent inhibition is not an ideal state...Wikipedia lists several potential problems including attentional and emotional dysregulation, psychosis, and negative emotionality. Wikipedia also suggests that intelligence may moderate effects on well-being, such that more highly intelligent people could cope with stronger stimulation more effectively, and possibly enhance creativity (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2003).

As for dopamine, there's a lot to read and thoroughly reconsider before going ahead with any attempt to alter it. The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia is one particularly noteworthy concern with heightened dopamine levels; nausea is another risk, and addiction to the means of alteration is another. I don't know that this last risk is any less serious with legal drugs, or even naturally rewarding behaviors.

That being said, some regulated drugs are prescribed for disorders of low dopaminergic activity, including Parkinson's and (to some extent) attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, including $_\mathbf L$-DOPA and methylphenidate. I link here to the overdose sections to emphasize that using them is not a good idea without a strong recommendation from a doctor in support and supervision of medicinal use. Even those with severe disorders who basically need these medications may suffer complications, so the likelihood of normally functioning individuals benefitting safely from (ab)use of these drugs is rather low at best.

BTW, @ChuckSherrington's comment is wisely made, and I want to emphasize also that I'm only mentioning these drugs because they exist and are sometimes prescribed for disorders that sometimes result from harmfully low dopamine levels. These medications should NOT be used by normally functioning individuals. They have several undesirable side effects, and could be particularly dangerous if used to deliberately elevate dopamine receptor activity above normal. Beside that, many if not most are regulated substances, and illegal to use without a prescription.

This is not a place to look for people who have experimented with dopaminergic drugs on normally functioning individuals: such experimentation is dangerous and unethical, especially if conducted in an uncontrolled manner without professional medical support on hand. Personal use of a drug like $_\rm L$-DOPA or methylphenidate without a prescription is not experimentation in a scientific sense, but is abuse in a legal sense.

Some properly ethical and cautious research has investigated the effects of various dopaminergic drugs on normal populations, and results seem mixed at best, and quite scary at worst. As a near-worst case, consider cocaine: it acts on much more than dopamine, and tends to dysregulate it, not just temporarily block its reuptake. These aspects make it a very messy way of manipulating dopamine, and leads to some of its well-known dangers. This may be an extreme example, but one shouldn't assume so; any psychoactive drug has some potential to upset homeostasis in a lasting way and in more ways than one intends.

Methylphenidate might be a near-best case pharmacodynamically, but it too affects more than just dopamine, and has its share of dangers, as I mentioned above. What makes it noteworthy is the debate surrounding it as a potential nootropic vs. drug of abuse. Here's an interesting excerpt from Wikipedia:

  Methylphenidate is sometimes used by students to enhance their mental abilities, improving their concentration and helping them to study. Professor John Harris, an expert in bioethics, has said that it would be unethical to stop healthy people taking the drug. He also argues that it would be "not rational" and against human enhancement to not use the drug to improve people's cognitive abilities.[97] Professor Anjan Chatterjee however has warned that there is a high potential for abuse and may cause serious adverse effects on the heart, meaning that only people with an illness should take the drug. In the British Medical Journal he wrote that it was premature to endorse the use of Ritalin in this way as the effects of the drug on healthy people have not been studied.[98][99] Professor Barbara Sahakian has argued that the use of Ritalin in this way may give students an unfair advantage in examinations and that as a result universities may want to discuss making students give urine samples to be tested for the drug.[100][Emphasis added.]

Evidently there are cases to be made for both perspectives on methylphenidate, and a variety of ramifications to consider. More research would be helpful, especially for the sake of isolating important mechanisms of action and reducing undesirable side effects. Until that much is done successfully, methylphenidate seems too controversial to recommend at best, and downright dangerous to recommend at worst. Furthermore, being a Schedule II drug in USA, it is illegal to possess or distribute without prescription.

Another notable prospect of sorts (though still Schedule II) is buproprion. From Wikipedia:

  The primary pharmacological action of the drug is as a mild dopamine reuptake inhibitor and also a much weaker norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor as well as a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist...

  According to the US government classification of psychiatric medications, bupropion is "non-abusable".[93] In animal studies, squirrel monkeys and rats could be induced to self-administer bupropion, which is often taken as a sign of addiction potential; however, there are significant interspecies differences in bupropion metabolism.[54] There have been a number of anecdotal and case-study reports of bupropion abuse, but the bulk of evidence indicates that the subjective effects of bupropion are markedly different from those of addictive stimulants such as cocaine or amphetamine.[94] However bupropion is reported to be abused in Canada.[95]

One look at Tryon and Logan (2013) is more than enough to tell that the US government is wrong yet again on drug abuse; this one can definitely be abused in a really unsettling way (seriously, view at your own risk; it's got some gruesome imagery). However, to be fair, I can't verify that the cited source for the US government [93] says "non-abusable"; the link only leads to a table where bupropion is listed under Low Abuse Potential...but this seems pretty outdated in light of the news from Canada, unfortunately. Granted, this is primarily a problem with intravenous administration, which is not intended...but clearly the potential exists, and is bad enough to outweigh any merits of deregulation I could imagine. Again, further demonstration of how hazardous this psychopharmacological minefield of dopaminergic drugs really is...The only safe advice is to steer clear – barring any exigent need and prescription for personal medical use, of course – but that doesn't apply here.

References
- Carson, S. H., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2003). Decreased latent inhibition is associated with increased creative achievement in high-functioning individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(3), 499–506. Retrieved from ResearchGate.

54. Dwoskin, L. P., Rauhut, A. S., King‐Pospisil, K. A., & Bardo, M. T. (2006). Review of the pharmacology and clinical profile of bupropion, an antidepressant and tobacco use cessation agent. CNS Drug Reviews, 12(3–4), 178–207.
93. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. (2000). Abuse potential of common psychiatric medications. In Substance abuse treatment for persons with HIV/AIDS (Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 37, pp. 83–84). Rockville, USA: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64916/table/A67504/.
94. Lile, J. A., & Nader, M. A. (2003). The abuse liability and therapeutic potential of drugs evaluated for cocaine addiction as predicted by animal models. Current Neuropharmacology, 1(1), 21–46.
95. Tryon, J., & Logan, N. (2013, September 18). Antidepressant Wellbutrin becomes ‘poor man’s cocaine’ on Toronto streets. Global News: Health. Retrieved from http://globalnews.ca/news/846576/antidepressant-wellbutrin-becomes-poor-mans-cocaine-on-toronto-streets/.
97. Harris, J. (2009). Is it acceptable for people to take methylphenidate to enhance performance? Yes. British Medical Journal, 28(8), b1955. Retrieved from http://livingtomorrow.livejournal.com/59100.html.
98. Chatterjee, A. (2009). Is it acceptable for people to take methylphenidate to enhance performance? No. British Medical Journal, 338, b1956. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=neuroethics_pubs&sei-redir=1.
99. BBC News. (2009, June 19). Ritalin backed as brain-booster. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8106957.stm.
100. Davies, C. (2010, February 21). Universities told to consider dope tests as student use of 'smart drugs' soars. The Observer: Education: Student Health. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/feb/21/smart-drugs-students-universities.


Do women have fetishes? As in title; is it possible/common for women to have fetishes?

It always seemed to me that fetishes are related to men only. Is it true?

For a non-clinical sample in a study on paraphilic sexual interests, Dawson et al. (2016) report that

  Fisher’s exact test of proportions revealed that a significantly greater proportion of men reported arousal to activities related to voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, biastophilia, and urophilia compared with women (all ps < .05). A greater proportion of men were also more likely to endorse items related to frotteurism, hebephilia, and pedophilia compared with women (all ps > .05 and < .10). Similar proportions of men and women reported being aroused by activities involving exhibitionism, scatologia, transvestic fetishism, masochism, scatophilia, and zoophilia (all ps > .10). [Absolute numbers are reported in table 4 on page 13 of the PDF.]

A fortiori the answer is yes, women do »have fetishes«.

• Samantha J. Dawson/Brittany A. Bannerman/Martin L. Lalumière. 2016. Paraphilic Interests: An Examination of Sex Differences in a Nonclinical Sample. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of
Research and Treatment 28(1), pp. 20–45.


How action potential is generated while dreaming I would like to know what generates the action potential in the brain areas that is relevant to dreaming, since our sensory nervous systems don't work (or do they?). What else can generate the action potential needed for dreaming?
Thanks

There's a lot to unpack here, but maybe a good place to start is looking at the difference between an action potential and a brainwave. An action potential is the abrupt change in voltage of a single neuron in response to a pre-synaptic stimulus. Brainwaves are measured by EEG. They represent the sum of many neurons' activity.
If I understand the gist of your question, you want to know where the brain activity "comes from" during sleep/dreaming since there are no sensory stimuli. It's a good question, and a topic of research. Check out this article or any of Gyorgy Buzsaki's work. Also, you may be interested in the Default mode network.


Any other studied psychological phenomena like reactance? Consider the following situations

You are walking along a narrow ledge overlooking a void.  You know you should not look down but .. you do
You have an annoying little morsel of food stuck between your teeth.  You know very well that trying to prise it loose with your tongue is a futile effort.  But you still do it...

I am in the process of putting the finishing touches to a game where the natural tendency of the player to perform actions that will result in scoring points will in fact result in a smaller win.  Everything in the game play push the player to force an early win with a low score.

I would like to review any studies of such phenomena in psychology so I can leverage a more value into the overall player experience.  Reactance comes close to describing what the player is naturally pushed to do but not quite... .  Are there any other effects of the same ilk that might come closer?  If so, are there any good studies of what drives/amplifies these effects?

You may wish to look at Steindl, et al. (2015).
This paper presents an overview of research into Reactance that has been done since Miron and Brehm's 40 years review (2006) of all research since Brehm first proposed reactance theory (1966).
References
Brehm J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Miron A. M. & Brehm J. W. (2006). Reactance theory – 40 years later. Zeitschrift Für Sozialpsychologie/Journal of Social Psychology, 37(1), 9-18. https://doi.org/10.1024/0044-3514.37.1.9
Steindl, C., Jonas, E., Sittenthaler, S., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Greenberg, J. L. (2015). Understanding psychological reactance: New developments and findings. Zeitschrift fur Psychologie/Journal of Psychology, 223(4), 205-214.
https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000222


Kelly Criterion Observed to Be Adhered by Psychopaths? As this study shows, psychopaths are much more willing to take advantage of expected gains despite recent losses as opposed to normal people who frequently stop after a series of losses.

Has there been any follow up to this to observe whether psychopaths also take the Kelly Criterion into account?  The participation rate was still only 84% for the psychopath group.  I didn't see any data that shows whether those that stopped participating were ones whose amount of money in immediate control declined to nothing or near-nothing.  If those who lost stopped at some point relative to the amount of money in their immediate control instead of a bad run regardless of money in immediate control, it might indicate that psychopaths are acting more rational than normal because they quit when the Kelly Criterion is being violated, that they quit positive expected values when their "risk of ruin" is greater than ~0%.

Do psychopaths care about the so-called "risk of ruin"?

Kelly Criterion

The math behind the Kelly Criterion was actually originally developed by John L. Kelly, Jr. to maximize data transfer rates relative to risk of data loss due to noisy (error prone) lines.  Taking into account those two factors, the amount of data to transfer, the possible loss, and the possible success, choices of which lines to use at which times and amounts of data relative to noise can be quantitatively made to more or less maximize the total expected data transfer rate with an almost certain chance of no loss over time.

Later, Edward O. Thorpe, the first to prove that blackjack can be beat by counting cards, discovered that the Kelly Criterion can be employed to maximize returns from card counting with an almost certain chance of no loss over time (now called the "risk of ruin") when "bankroll" (total amount available for gambling), risk of a single or series of gambles, cost of the single/series of gambles, and payoff of the single/series of gambles are all taken into account.

A formula was also derived to give a risk of total loss, "risk of ruin", from a collection of potential investment choices.  When the Kelly Criterion can be strictly adhered to, the risk of ruin is always ~0%.

I do not know about psychopaths adhering to the Kelly criterion or not. Technically, for a perfectly informed agent seeking to take advantage reccuringly from an objectified winning yet risky position, the Kelly criterion sets the maximum bet amount over which betting would be irrational. In the sense that betting more than the Kelly criterion would deplete your finances by exposing yourself to too much risk.

Imagine that you know that a tossed coin ends up 49% of the time on heads and 51% of the time on tails. For 1 buck you bet, you earn 0 or 2 bucks depending on the outcome of the coin toss.

Betting on heads is irrational. So you bet on tails. The question is "what proportion of your total assets" are you willing to bet? If you bet 0% of your assets, you never earn anything. If you bet 100% of your assets, you've got 49% chances of being broke the next round and having nothing left to bet again, which is kind of stupid since you've got a rational structural advantage on the bookmaker.

The question therefore becomes "what fraction of my assets should I bet to maximise the gain with respect to the risk"? The answer depends on your so called "utility function". In the case where each buck gained increases your utility linearly, (i.e. you're as eager to gain a buck whether you're broke or a bilionaire, to put it simply... a buck is a buck no matter what), the Kelly criterion applies:

You bet the the fraction that maximises the probabilistic expectation of the logarithm of the ratio of assets after the bet to assets before the bet. If I recall things well off the top of my head.

Betting less than Kelly is not greedy enough. Betting more than Kelly is self-destructive. That's the theory.

In the financial stock broking business, the Kelly criterion has been used in the past... almost. They divided the Kelly criterion by 2 to be on the safe side. The reason is simple: no matter how rational Kelly is, draw up a chart of the typical fluctuation of your assets using the Kelly criterion under perfect circumstances (even correcting for your utility function). Take a close look at it. Then you'll realise that you'll be in for such a bumpy ride for your assets that russian mountains on cocaine will feel like zen meditation. Technically, betting using Kelly is exactly being on the verge of self-destructiveness...

No one, ever ever ever ever would "reasonably" bet their assets using Kelly. Unless you have the self-denegation of a number theorist on ketamine. Not joking.

Not even a psychopath.

The closer you can get to the question would be: (1) are psychopaths inherently rational machines (2) are psychopaths greedy to the extreme that a buck is a buck whether they're broke or a billionaire, and (3) are they able to endure the cognitive dissonance by reconciling (1) and (2) assertively and agressively without fear of any sort.

I doubt this to be the case. They may well score higher than neurotypics, but it's quite a stretch to imagine a psychopath would spontaneously follow Kelly criterion when the greediest stock brokers would not dare to. According to your study, they may well score higher on points (2) and (3).

In this study, Kelly does not apply and does not determine a stop loss criterion. It simply shows psychopaths are either less emotional or have a more linear utility function than neurotypics. A fearful neurotypic may stop playing if he has had repeated bad luck. A rational and fearful neurotypic would have laid out beforehand his stop losses depending on which turn he's in and would have played all turns up to the point where he would have stopped playing definitely: he knows there's no point in postponing his luck. And he must be rather fearful to decide to stop playing, meaning that his utility function must be very concave near ruin to trigger a stop loss and very insensitive to wealth if he decides to trigger a stop loss early in the game. In a nutshell, rationality in the game is defined by playing all turns in the game up to a point where you stop playing. If the player plays, then stops, then resumes playing, he's irrational. But the more he plays, the less he's anxious. From what I've read of the article, psychopaths are not more rational, they are less fearful. Kelly has little to do here.

Another question you may ask is whether or not neurotypics and psychopaths end up behaving the same way as cohorts the longer they play at the betting game. How desensitised to the irrationality of the human conditioning to the game do neurotypics and psychopaths become the more they're exposed to it, and at what pace. To me that's perhaps the real question.

Moreover ruin theory such as developped in actuarial science is NOT Kelly criterion. It's standard stochastic calculus with ruin constraints. Kelly criterion is the poor man's naive implementation of stochastic calculus. Very much the same way that mysticism is the poor man's naive first attempt at science.

By the way, Kelly strategy cannot go to ruin, not because it's Kelly, but because it's a self-funded strategy, which in itself is a broad class of strategies, that includes very very stupid ones.

I hope that clarifies the scope of the question.


Is there a term for people who hate (or don't prefer ) things that are mainstream? There are people who hate (or don't prefer ) things that are mainstream, is there a term for them ?

Any references to cognitive reasons for some people being odd in that way would be helpful.

This is more an anthropology question than psychology. Counter cultures and cults definitely are against mainstream society.

In America during the 60s there was a counter culture revolution. People found ideas from other cultures or invented cultural ideas and tried to bring them into mainstream. We called them all hippies at that time but now they are just ordinary people because their cultural revolution was largely popularized. People primarily associate hippies with a leftist movement but the Jesus freaks or Jesus movement was the equivalent in the religious conservative realm. Jesus freaks moved outside the realms of ordinary church. They were fundamentalist but spawned a diverse set of beliefs. The Jesus movement was also absorbed into mainstream culture and these two polar groups are a large reason why American belief systems are polarized between left and right in certain demographics at the moment.

Cults aggrandize a certain person, group of people or idea above family, government and the typical place of religion. I lived in Texas for a while so the first example that comes to my mind is Waco's Koresh who formed the group that was destroyed at their compound by the Clinton administration. He had a messiah complex mixed with some kind of hypersexualism. He was very charismatic and drew many people into his group with his pazazz. The of course the oft rumoured but very oft not found fundamental mormons which allow their people to be polygamist but god forbid any of those women ask to do polyandry. Putting a leader of a mormon church breakaway in jail became a national priority because in addition to the the polygamy there was incest in his groups.

Subcultures tend to be inside the realms of mainstream but hold to specific values that set the distinct. This might include the cowboy subculture, city dweller, yankee and southerner, various sexuality types, religious in various degrees and types. Freud had an interesting view that I've chosen to cherish his idea was like don't let yourself be defined by your sexuality (or other characteristic) instead embrace being human and all that it means.

Indeed people are drawn into counter-cultures outside of mainstream sometimes for positive and negative reasons. In general disenfranchisement by mainstream policies or values tends to lead people into depressive states which allows them to make atypical decisions to escape the pain of sadness. Oft people are drawn into cults by the charisma and happiness offered by the cult head or central idea. People tend to be born into subcultures and then choose to remain or seek out another group.


What are the neural substrates of retrieval induced forgetting? Retrieval-induced effects
It is well known that practicing retrieval of remembered items increases the probability of correctly recalling that item in future tests: the testing effect. Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIFo) and retrieval-induced facilitation (RIFa) are less known, but related phenomena with, in my view, large theoretical and practical implications for cognitive memory research and educational theory.
In RIFo, learned items associated with a remembered item subjected to retrieval practice appear to suffer from increased forgetting in future tests (Anderson, Bjork and Bjork, 1994). Some papers report that the inverse also appears to occur: in RIFa, the probability of recalling associated remembered items also increases (Chan, 2009). RIFo appears to be a reasonably robust phenomenon with many replications, while RIFa is not as well established an effect.
The cognitive neuroscience of RIF
Where the classical view might have attributed the effect to relative strengthening of associations and decay, modern theories revolve around variations on an automatic inhibition process associated with recall attempts (Anderson, Bjork and Bjork, 2000). This might suggest that the PFC and frontal cortex more generally should be doing most of the legwork here, but is that empirically the case?
What are the known neural substrates of RIFo (and RIFa) effects?
References

Anderson, M. C., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2000). Retrieval-induced forgetting: Evidence for a recall-specific mechanism. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7(3), 522-530.
Anderson, M. C., Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (1994). Remembering can cause forgetting: retrieval dynamics in long-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(5), 1063.
Chan, J. C. (2009). When does retrieval induce forgetting and when does it induce facilitation? Implications for retrieval inhibition, testing effect, and text processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(2), 153-170.

The neural substrates most involved in retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) appear to be the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex (DLPFC) and the ventrolateral pre-frontal cortex (VLPFC) (Bäuml, Pastötter and Hanslmayr, 2010). I will not pretend to one-up their concise summation of the evidence.

  The results are consistent with the view that the ACC detects interference from unpracticed material and the DLPFC and VLPFC resolve the conflict by strengthening the practiced memories and inhibiting the unpracticed memories.

Evidence for ACC-DLPFC-VLPFC involvement in RIF

Bäuml, Pastötter and Hanslmayr draw on a number of fMRI and EEG studies in order to support their narrative. Generally speaking, a study of electrophysiological correlates of RIF found that frontal activity was predictive of RIF effects (Johansson et al, 2007); this broadly concurs with my original intuition that the frontal regions are of primary importance in RIF.

More specifically, Wimber et al. (2009) reported fMRI evidence for ACC and DLPFC involvement during RIF, while fMRI evidence for VLPFC involvement was reported in Kuhl et al. (2007). These are only highlights of the main supports; a more complete basis is presented in the Bäuml, Pastötter and Hanslmayr (2010) paper.

References

Bäuml, K. H., Pastötter, B., & Hanslmayr, S. (2010). Binding and inhibition in episodic memory—Cognitive, emotional, and neural processes. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 34(7), 1047-1054.
Johansson, M., Aslan, A., Bäuml, K. H., Gäbel, A., & Mecklinger, A. (2007). When remembering causes forgetting: Electrophysiological correlates of retrieval-induced forgetting. Cerebral Cortex, 17(6), 1335-1341.
Kuhl, B. A., Dudukovic, N. M., Kahn, I., & Wagner, A. D. (2007). Decreased demands on cognitive control reveal the neural processing benefits of forgetting. Nature neuroscience, 10(7), 908-914.
Wimber, M., Rutschmann, R. M., Greenlee, M. W., & Bäuml, K. H. (2009). Retrieval from episodic memory: Neural mechanisms of interference resolution. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(3), 538-549.


Country records about criminal recidivism rates I find myself doing a work on criminal psychology, I understood that recidivism rates were registered by government agencies although it seems not to be that way (some projects were famous in the past but I do not think they developed). If any of those projects were developed, I would be grateful for information on the subject.

On the other hand, if someone on the site knows the most famous articles or works developed on the subject, I would be grateful if you could indicate references to me, since I may not be handling those documents due to the publication dates.

Seena Fazel and Achim Wolf published an article titled A Systematic Review of Criminal Recidivism Rates Worldwide: Current Difficulties and Recommendations for Best Practice (Fazel & Wolf, 2015) and the article concluded that

  Recidivism data are currently not valid for international comparisons. Justice Departments should consider using the reporting guidelines developed in this paper to report their data.

The references section of this article also lists articles, reports and statistics available including an article on "the prediction of criminal and violent recidivism among mentally disordered offenders".

UK Statistics

The Ministry of Justice (part of the UK Government), produces regular statistical reports on reoffending rates within the UK.  The Government Collection of Proven Reoffending Statistics contains quarterly reports for periods covering January 2009 through to March 2016 — the last report covering January 2016 to March 2016 is dated 25th January 2018.  Without comparing reports from that date with older reports against this article, I cannot say whether the recommendations were followed by the UK Government.

US Statistics

  The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) collects criminal history data from the FBI and state record repositories to study recidivism patterns of various offenders, including persons on probation or discharged from prison.

  The latest study of state prisoners estimated the recidivism patterns of about 400,000 persons released from state prisons in 30 states in 2005. The findings from the 2005 study cannot be directly compared to those from BJS's previous prisoner recidivism studies due to changes in the demographic characteristics and criminal histories of the U.S. prison population, an increase in the number of states in the study, and improvements made to the quality and completeness of the nation’s criminal history records since the mid-1990s. BJS has also used criminal history records to examine the recidivism of persons placed on federal community supervision in 2005.

  In addition to recidivism statistics based on criminal history records, BJS collects administrative data through the Annual Surveys of Probation and Parole to examine the rate at which offenders are at risk of being incarcerated for a new offense or for violating the conditions of their supervision.(Source)

References

Fazel, S., & Wolf, A. (2015). A Systematic Review of Criminal Recidivism Rates Worldwide: Current Difficulties and Recommendations for Best Practice. PLoS ONE, 10(6):e0130390.DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130390 PMCID: PMC4472929


What exactly is Emotional Reasoning? Emotional Reasoning, a cognitive distortion discovered by Aaron T. Beck, as stated on Wikipedia:

  Emotional reasoning is a cognitive process by which a person concludes that his/her emotional reaction proves something is true, regardless of the observed evidence. For example, even though a spouse has shown only devotion, a person using emotional reasoning might conclude, "I know my spouse is being unfaithful because I feel jealous."

If I go to an haunted place, and I become really anxious there, so my emotions are representing my thoughts about that place. So it's simple: you feel the way you think. How does Emotional Reasoning fit in this scene, or is it something else?

The quote you gave was from the beginning of Wikipedia article on Emotional Reasoning and if you read further down in that article it tells you that

  Beck believed that emotional reasoning stemmed from negative thoughts that were uncontrollable and happened without effort.

Emotional Reasoning is a cognitive distortion which amplifies the effects of other cognitive distortions and it is a style of unhelpful thinking whereby you base your view of situations, yourself, or others, on the way you are thinking.  What you are thinking and feeling could be rational but with this situation you are thinking irrationally as there is no hard factual evidence to support the thoughts.

You might think "I feel like an idiot, therefore I am an idiot"; "I feel guilty, therefore I must have done something bad";  "I feel inadequate, therefore I must be a worthless person"; "I'm furious with you, therefore you must have been acting badly and trying to take advantage of me"

Or just as in the question but phrased in this way, "I feel jealous, therefore it must be true that my spouse is being unfaithful".

With Emotional Reasoning you are reacting to what you alone are witnessing.  The proposed situation regarding a haunted house making you feel anxious is not Emotional Reasoning.  You are feeling anxious because you are apprehensive of what might happen if you encounter a ghost/spirit some other people have said they have witnessed.


Do the deaf read faster? Assuming that a person is born deaf and has never heard spoken language, as they learn to read, do they on average read faster than people with healthy hearing who learn to read the usual way?

The reason I'm wondering this is that the first step most speed reading teachers mention is eliminating "sub-vocalization" that is not to imagine the sound of the word as you read since it will limit your reading speed to the speed at which you can comprehend spoken language.

Deaf people presumably never have to deal with this subvocalization issue as they are taught to read in different ways (most likely through associating words to images and/or sign language which in a way is also an image) so I'm wondering if there is a major difference between the reading speed of deaf people and people who are not deaf, or if they are relatively similar, and of course I am wondering how this is without either the deaf or the not deaf having been trained for speedreading beforehand.

There doesn't seem to be much research on this, but based on my review of the research it appears that deaf people are generally slower readers than non-deaf readers - but that this may be affected by age. Essentially they may start as slower readers but become faster readers when they are older. See the evidence I found below:

Conrad, Richard. "The reading ability of deaf school‐leavers." British Journal of Educational Psychology 47.2 (1977): 138-148.

“4.5% of young deaf people were able to read at the level commensurate with their age”

Shroyer, Edgar H., and Jack Birch. "Captions and reading rates of hearing-impaired students." American Annals of the Deaf 125.7 (1980): 916-922.

The mean of the median scores for Hams and Sipay(s (1975) fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade students (intermediate) is 145 words per minute compared with a mean of 142 for the intermediate deaf students. For the hearing students on a junior high school level, the mean of the median reading rates was 188 words per minute and the mean for the deaf students 181 words per minute.

Hearing high school students had a mean of 216 words per minute compared with a mean of 275 words per minute for deaf students

Kelly L, Barac-Cikoja D. The comprehension of skilled deaf readers: The roles of word recognition and other potentially critical aspects of competence. In: Cain K, Oakhill J, editors. Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective. Guilford Press; 2007. pp. 244–279.

The median reading level of young deaf adults graduating from high school is 8 years below the average of their hearing peers

Bélanger, N. N., Slattery, T. J., Mayberry, R. I., & Rayner, K. (2012). Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading. Psychological Science, 23(7), 816-823.

Reading rate (words per minute) as a function of window size for skilled hearing readers (SKH), skilled deaf readers (SKD) and less skilled deaf readers (LSKD)


Is there any evolutionary theory for self-destructive behavior? Self-destructive behavior is usually related to the stress response.

Given that the world is a big source of stress and stress usually is also a source of evolution (since we must adapt to survive), is there any evolutionary theory that explains (or try to explain) the self destructive behavior under stress?

I mean, if the idea is to survive, wouldn't make more sense if, under stress, we could just try harder instead of giving up?

There are many different uses for the word "stress" that should not be confused with one another.  For example, Self-destructive behaviour may be used to cope with psychological stress.  Other examples are stress response, and biological stress, both of which have very different meanings.  An important driving force of natural selection - a key process in evolution - is called selection pressure, which is yet another entirely different kind of stress.

Evolution certainly has great explanatory power, but it doesn't explain all behaviour - especially not the kind that is learned rather than inherited.

I am not aware of any evidence that self-destructive behaviour is inherited, but there is some evidence that it may be learned.  As such, there is no impetus to explain this behaviour in an evolutionary context.  Having said that, self-harm is found in animals besides humans, suggesting that perhaps something may be inherited (eg, the basic "learning mechanism" in humans has many similarities to other animals) that has this side-effect.

A lot of human behaviour does not "make sense" in the immediate context.  Much human behaviour relies on heuristic rules that work most of the time, but fail some of the time.  So for example, if self-harm results from learning, then well, most of the time our built-in learning mechanism serves us well, but sometimes it fails us.


Composer Thomas Schoenberger's Sophia Musik effect on the brain? Thomas Schoenberger claims his 'Sophia Musik' (the Ultimate Baby CDs) hav many beneficial effects on the brain.  Are you aware of this prolific composer and have any advice regarding his musical claims?

Ok.  After some additional information has come to light in the comments - initially from @StevenJeuris and through further assistance from @Eff - things look a little different.
Although there was an accepted phenomenon called the Mozart Effect (Rauscher, et al. 1993), the term Schoenberger Effect was coined by Thomas Schoenberger himself and there are no studies I can find to back his claims.  The Mozart Effect was debunked through a 16 year meta-analysis by Pietschnig, et al. (2010) and so the chances of the Schoenberger Effect being valid are slim in my view.
Thomas Schoenberger's blog article titled Music for Infants states that he

was inspired to write music for infants with the birth of his son, Wolfgang. Schoenberger’s work for infants is composed in the style of musical compositions shown to stimulate the portion of the child’s brain associated with special skills such as music, mathematics, and chess.

The CD cover image provided in the article describes the effect as the Schoenberger Effect and claims to be endorsed by Stevanne Auerbach, also known as Dr. Toy

Looking at the Schoenberger Effect, there is a Cision PRWeb article (Shaw, 2002) which links this term to the Mozart Effect

Back in 1993, U.C. Irvine professor Gordan Shaw started the trend when both He and Dr. Helen Raucher coined the term "Mozart Effect" to describe the powerful effect [certain] classical music has in neural development of infants and babies. Since then, "Mozart Effect" products have glutted the baby market, with most of these products having no connection with the actual research done by Raucher and Shaw.

See Rauscher, et al. (1993) for details on their study.
Further into Shaw (2002), he states that the Ultimate Baby CD became an underground best seller largely through word of mouth

which lends credibility to the "Schoenberger Effect" phenomenon.  After all, if mother's swear by it's effects on their own children, there must be some type of reaction present. I listened to the Cd several times and was impressed with the "Bach meets Mozart" quality of the pieces. It's obvious that Schoenberger has tremendous talent as a melodic composer. It' also clear that something is going on with this music that separates it from the rest of the Mozart Effect products. This Cd appears to have some effect on babies. What exactly that effect is remains to be diagnosed by further scientific studies.

When you couple this with, Pietschnig, et al. (2010) who said

[F]ormal tests yielded evidence for confounding publication bias, requiring downward correction of effects. The central finding of the present paper however, is certainly the noticeably higher overall effect in studies performed by Rauscher and colleagues than in studies performed by other researchers, indicating systematically moderating effects of lab affiliation. On the whole, there is little evidence left for a specific, performance-enhancing Mozart effect.

it seems that although there maybe anecdotal evidence for it's effects, the idea that music can have positive effects on infant neural development does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
References
Pietschnig, J., Voracek, M., & Formann, A. K. (2010). Mozart effect–Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 38(3), 314-323. doi: 10.1016/j.intell.2010.03.001
Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, C. N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365(6447), 611. doi: 10.1038/365611a0 pmid: 8413624
Shaw, F. (2002). The mysterious "Schoenberger effect" Fact or fiction? Retrieved from: https://www.prweb.com/releases/2002/12/prweb52834.htm


Is psychology a science or magic? What makes a person to be ever smiling to an extent that they just can't be angry or actually show they are angry even if they are?

From David Myer's Psychology, 10th edition, Page 6,

  Psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes.

To answer your actual question, here is what David has said in general that there are 3 levels on which Psychology can be viewed at differently. Following image lists them.

Each level forms an independent yet dependent abstraction with other two. So, to answer your question, the person's current external environment(Socio-Cultural environment which could include his friends, family, lover, stranger, native or foreign society, etc.), internal environment (current biological state which includes hormones,health, other physiological processes, maybe some disease) and Psychological influences(Learned behavior and knowledge shapes the understanding and interpretation of context ) might have created a triad to give the resultant situation.

So, the person might have scored a perfect score in SATs but might have had a emotional breakup the same time which might lead to the situation mentioned by you. Of course, there are infinite possibilities.
I just listed one of the possible Socio-cultural factor. Use your imagination to figure out the rest of the infinite possibilities.

Good Luck.

P.S: It is not magic BTW!
From Wikipedia,

  Magic or sorcery is the use of rituals, symbols, actions, gestures and
  language that are believed to exploit supernatural forces.


Is there a neutral term for people who tend to avoid face-to-face or video/audio communication? Imagine a person who:

Mostly prefers written communication (email, instant messaging) to making phone/video calls or seeing face-to-face
Hardly ever watches videos on the internet. Prefers reading
At college/uni, instead of attending lectures/seminars, would successfully study things on their own using the recommended materials, and would always pass the exams
Would rather sort things out themselves instead of asking for help/directions
Are great at working from home
Generally does not socialise and are very happy to stay on their own / keep to themselves
Avoids living in cities and prefers rural low-to-zero populated areas
Does not hate people but just finds most of them rather boring or being nuisance
Despite all the above, are very positive and friendly when communicating face-to-face and are very valued within their professional circle

I have been trying to find a term to describe such a person but so far all terms that I found seem to bear a negative connotation or identify a disorder. There is no negativity or disorder here as the person does not feel stress or disability and are very happy with what they are.

Examples of terms that are close but do not match for reasons explained:

Autism spectrum and Asperger syndrome are both defined as "disorders" with "difficulties". The person does not have any difficulties: they do appear socialising and communicating just fine — when they need it for some purpose other than socialising/communicating itself;
Misanthrope actually hates people (which makes the term regarded as rather negative). The subject person does not. They simply avoid seeing people unnecessarily;
Recluse is a very close call, but it describes a person who does live that way without conveying anything of whether they want to live that way. A very social party goer may hide away and be a recluse if a gang is after them. Conversely, the subject person who, despite their preference, lives in a big city and participates in social drinks at work just because it secures their career cannot be called "recluse";
Loner is another good word but it is not sufficiently neutral. As the linked article says, "the modern term "loner" can be used with a negative connotation in the belief that human beings are social creatures and those that do not participate are deviant."

I agree with @AlwaysConfused that this sounds very like someone with Asperger's.

However, if you want a more "neutral" term, would Introvert help?

Such a person - an Ixxx on the Myers-Briggs scale - typically finds their "energy levels" drain when in groups of people, and recharge when they are on their own.


How to improve working memory in adults? Think Better on Your Feet: How to Improve Your Working Memory
in: A Man's Life, Money & Career

Brett and Kate McKay • September 20, 2016, Last updated: October 17, 2018
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/think-better-feet-improve-working-memory/

Training Working Memory: Why and how
Make your working memory work for you.
William R. Klemm Ph.D.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-medic/201203/training-working-memory-why-and-how

Klemm makes the claim IQ is not fixed. He claims IQ improves dramatically in the early school years in all children. Moreover, a recent study shows that both verbal and non-verbal IQ can change (for better or worse) in teenagers. The recent study is cited in the above psychology today web link.

Is it a fact or a neuromyth to claim IQ is not fixed for adults? Processing speeds slow down as we get older, and working memory steadily deteriorates/declines as we get older, too. Are we doomed to get slower and have poorer working memories as we get much older (50, 60s, 70s, 80s)?

Or can we maintain our intelligence, working memory, and processing speeds for a longer period of time if we do physical exercise, keep physically fit, and live healthy lives?

IQ is not the same as working memory (either visual or non-visual). IQ is deprecated in favor of the term general intelligence (g).

Education improves g, but not by much; only about one point per year of education (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445388/), where about 15 points are a standard deviation.

Many things affect general intelligence negatively, such as lead exposure or inadequate nutrition. However, once basic good conditions are experienced, cognitive decline is not avoidable. The good news is that while g decreases in older adults, semantic memory (knowledge) can continue increasing, such that real-world performance on many tasks need not suffer.

Beware a huge range of companies and hucksters promoting activities to slow cognitive decline: to my knowledge, none of them have much validation nor a consensus of scientists without conflicts of interest (e.g., financial).


Is there difference between a memory of a dream and memory of waking experience? I'm very interested in dreaming and have pretty good dream recall. This makes me able to recall and distinguish hundreds of experience within my memory and label them as "dreams". I'm trying to understand if there's indeed some feature of a dream memory that makes it different from an ordinary waking memory?

Upon reflection on my personal experiences, it appears to me that when I recall a waking life memory, typically the process is two fold and sequential - first recall the scene then recall the action and combine the two. For example: I was sitting in a room at a local hackerspace + I was talking to fellow hackers there. I can then proceed to try to recall pieces of that conversation. This process seems sequential to me.

However, when I recall the dream memory, it seems that I recall both place and action at the same time, together, with a typically longer sequence of events all recalled much quicker. For example: I was locked in a room with no exit and has created a portal in the wall to escape from the room, flying out of a portal in some other location.  These events are recalled all together, in less than a second, and are clearly identified as a dream along with the recall. The content of that dream, although clearly non-real is similar to a video game called "Portal" that I played on a computer in the waking life. I can recall the waking life expeirence of playing that game, although in a linear fashion.

Has there been any brain imaging studies or other evidence that supports the idea that the recall of dreams is different from the recall of waking life experiences?

Daytime conscious experiences come from our sensory organs. At any given moment, these organs split the incoming information between millions of neurons which then transport the info back to the brain. The info is processed in the sensory cortices, and then REASSEMBLED. This explains your "divided" experiences during the day. At night the conscious dream experiences come from memory where most of the information is already reassembled (consolidated). THAT is, I believe the difference.The other difference is in the attention we pay to the experiences. During the day whatever we pay the most attention to- is remembered best. At night, we are not making conscious attentional choices.


Is it established that personal success or happiness is primarily determined by personality and is largely independent of social identities? In a discussion about choices about occupation, I shared the image of this tweet. The following was one of the replies:

  Of course you can sit and complain about it, but it tells you about your own shortcomings be it laziness, cowardice, fears of all kinds lack of initiative etc.

Further the commenter pointed out that

  Personal success or happiness after (everything else being equal) is determined by your personality.

He claims this using the theory of delayed gratification. His point being [from the wiki link]:

  In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were
  able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better
  life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational
  attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures.

Actually he might be right. I have no idea of modern cognitive science results. So I want to know the following:

Are there results in cognitive sciences that show personal success or happiness is determined by one's personality? And that any occupation failure is determined mostly by personal shortcomings and is largely independent of social identities?

This seems to me the old nature versus nurture debate and there is no real answer to this. However, I highly doubt that it is personality (as an inherent trait of you - nature) that's the most important factor for personal success. The question is what shapes your personality.

Family matters a lot, so building your personality over the right type of Childhood experiences seems to have strong effects on personal performance.

Yet, even such mundane things like names can have a huge impact on personal success regarding job oppurtunities.


Result of local stimulation in brain What happens when we stimulate a brain in local regions? Some possibilities:

We may trigger an action without the subject's awareness of the action;
We can trigger an action in a subject, but we cannot trigger a subject's will to perform this action;
We can't trigger an action without awareness of subject;
We cannot trigger an action without awareness of subject to his own action;

What are the results??

What I felt is 2, 4 are correct options because when some BMI devices are used subject is forcefully made to make a move. Here we are not changing his will to move but he is aware that he is moving.

You should check out the article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Other_related_phenomena

Though there is still some controversy surrounding some of the experiments, the overall evidence suggests that it's possible to trigger action without awareness, it's possible to manipulate the perception of intention (will) to action, and it's also possible to do both.

  In one study, directly stimulating the pre-SMA caused volunteers to
  report a feeling of intention, and sufficient stimulation of that same
  area caused physical movement.[35] In a similar study, it was found
  that people with no visual awareness of their body can have their
  limbs be made to move without having any awareness of this movement,
  by stimulating premotor brain regions.[60] When their parietal
  cortices were stimulated, they reported an urge (intention) to move a
  specific limb (that they wanted to do so). Furthermore, stronger
  stimulation of the parietal cortex resulted in the illusion of having
  moved without having done so.


Does stopping hard tasks midway through negatively affect your chances of success? When a person has embarked on an undertaking that is both unpleasant and important (a good example could be a 12 step drug treatment program), lets say they make progress, and then stall before completion.

Is the the person significantly less likely to be successful as a result of the break in their momentum?

Here are some thoughts on potentially important moderating factors for any such basic effect:

Whether stalling is voluntary
Whether there are social or environmental reasons for stalling
How long one stalls
Whether one has made a complete break from the undertaking

Whether one turns in the meantime to related matters that might facilitate or conflict with it

I'm not implying you have to narrow your question down to get a general answer, but the general answer might not be a noticeably influential factor in specific subsets of the general question. For instance, going to sleep before trying to finish something one has been working on all day might replenish momentum the next day; this is a short, voluntary stall that probably addresses a particular reason for stalling (e.g., fatigue, or maybe needing daylight or businesses to be open to make progress), and people consolidate experiences and replenish energy resources during sleep, so sleep is a facilitating matter to turn to in the meantime.

In contrast, stalling for months because of setbacks in one's personal life might better represent the kind of scenario you have in mind that would more likely prove detrimental. For example, say you're working on a research project, but happen to be living in an apartment you share with a crazy roommate. If your roommate suddenly becomes so disruptive that you have to find new housing, negotiate a breach of your lease, move out, and settle in to your new spot before you can get back to work a couple months later, your new rate of progress might be slower at first than when you left off. This stall is essentially involuntary, due to disruptive social influences in one's environment, long enough to potentially result in forgetting some aspects of how you were doing your work (which could require refamiliarizing with even your own organizational structure! My former advisor warned me about keeping detailed notes for this reason), and it's a complex enough reason to stall in the meantime that you might stop thinking about your research entirely, and have to focus on something completely unrelated...Then again, the result still might facilitate your rate of progress if your research was being hampered by living with that crazy roommate, and your new roommates aren't equally crazy.  (Based on a true story! :)

I suppose the implications for your question are that moderating factors like these may overwhelm any basic, duration-independent effect of stalling. Again, this is not to say the basic effect hasn't been studied, much less that it can't be...but my recent dissertation was on goal progress, and I haven't yet come across any sufficiently sophisticated research to address your basic issue, whereas there's plenty of research out there on relationships between progress and goal characteristics like environmental support and goal conflict, including a little bit of my own research. That being said, I'd love to see any research others might be able to contribute to this discussion, as I do find the basic issue interesting!


Predicting the individual effects of psychotropic drugs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23796468/

I have searched the national library of medicine but I could not find any papers about predicting both the therapeutic and adverse effects on the specific patient (individual) in front of us.

People work on/ have an extremely similar chemistry (all cells do that was the phenomenon that the theory of evolution explained) but it is not identical (absolutely) across individuals otherwise we should predict drugs would have absolutely the same effects on all individuals.

As drugs do have different effects across individuals the expectation of the effects should be different too. Because we now know that they have a similar but slightly non-homogeneous chemistry.

How can we earnestly predict the effects, both therapeutic and adverse, of psychotropic drugs on the specific patient in front of us?

Predicting individual side effects is generally not feasible in current clinical practice, although in the purview of "personalized medicine", mostly as a research goal/topic. For psychotropic medications, this is largely envisaged to work through pharmacogenomics:

In pharmacogenomics, genomic information is used to study individual responses to drugs. When a gene variant is associated with a particular drug response in a patient, there is the potential for making clinical decisions based on genetics by adjusting the dosage or choosing a different drug, for example. Scientists assess gene variants affecting an individual's drug response the same way they assess gene variants associated with diseases: by identifying genetic loci associated with known drug responses, and then testing individuals whose response is unknown. [...]
Scientists believe many idiosyncratic effects result from individual variation that is encoded in the genome. Thus, genetic variation in genes for drug-metabolizing enzymes, drug receptors, and drug transporters have been associated with individual variability in the efficacy and toxicity of drugs. Genetics also underlies hypersensitivity reactions in patients who are allergic to certain drugs, such as penicillin, wherein the body mounts a rapid, aggressive immune response that can cause not only a rash, but can also hinder breathing and cause edema to the point of cardiovascular collapse.
Predicting serious ADRs [adverse drug reactions] is a priority for pharmacogenomic research. For example, the enzyme CYP2D6, one of a class of drug-metabolizing enzymes found in the liver, breaks down and terminates the action of certain antidepressant, antiarrhythmic, and antipsychotic drugs. Molecular cloning and characterization studies of the gene that codes for this enzyme have described more than 70 variant alleles (Meyer, 2000). These alleles contain one or more point mutations, only some of which affect enzyme activity; however, some of these alleles involve gene deletions and duplications that can lead to increased enzyme activity. Individuals who are homozygous or heterozygous for the wild-type or normal activity enzymes (75%–85% of the population) are called extensive metabolizers; intermediate (10%–15%) or poor (5%–10%) metabolizers are carriers of two alleles that decrease enzyme activity (Ingelman-Sundberg, 1999); and ultrarapid metabolizers (1%–10%) are carriers of duplicated genes. The most common alleles can be detected by DNA chip microarrays, allowing most patients to be assigned to a particular phenotype group. [...]
With the completion of the Human Genome Project, anticipation was high that genetic information would radically improve medicine, that side effects would be more predictable, and that patients could be screened for likely drug responses. But thus far, progress has been much slower than what the initial excitement suggested.
A great deal of this delay relates to the fact that an individual's response to drugs is multifactorial, resulting from multiple gene and environmental interactions (Haga & Burke, 2004). Scientists also recognize that even as the knowledge base continues to expand, the clinical translation of that knowledge still requires empirical evidence, generated for a particular disease and drug combination, before treatment can be customized to a patient's genotype. Thus, much work remains to be done before personalized medicine can reach its fullest potential.

Last year the FDA has issued a warning against improper/premature use of pharmacogenomics to select antidepressants. An excerpt...

For example, the FDA is aware of genetic tests that claim results can be used to help physicians identify which antidepressant medication would have increased effectiveness or side effects compared to other antidepressant medications. However, the relationship between DNA variations and the effectiveness of antidepressant medication has never been established. The FDA is aware that health care providers may have made inappropriate changes to a patient's medication based on the results from genetic tests that claim to provide information on the personalized dosage or treatment regimens for some antidepressants. [...]
There are a limited number of cases for which at least some evidence does exist to support a correlation between a genetic variant and drug levels within the body, and this is described in the labeling of FDA cleared or approved genetic tests and FDA approved medications.

As noted in a review of last year there are now several guidelines trying to put together the available knowledge:

There are multiple guidelines in various stages of development during the past 5 years including those by the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC), a registered service mark of the US Department of Health and Human Services and other authoritative scientific consortia [(e.g., Dutch Pharmacogenetic Working Group (DPWG)] for cytochrome P450 and drug therapy including for psychiatry.

CPIC has a database page roughly ordered by the drug in question, e.g. "CYP2D6, CYP2C19 and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors". The DPWG guidelines currently seem to be one large (book-sized) pdf document, not restricted to psychotropic drugs. Various papers, e.g. Lunenburg et al. describe how their methodology (and thus sometimes conclusions) differs from CPIC etc. The latter consortium also publishes journal papers on their individual drug guidelines, e.g. they have one on "Genotypes and Dosing of Tricyclic Antidepressants".


Are there personality tests out there with questions based on scenarios? Most personality tests I've done online leave a lot to be desired.  For starters, personality is not set in stone, people act differently at different times and under different circumstances, and asking people to objectively assess themselves is really asking too much.  What I mean by the last statement is this: Some tests ask you point blank if you like order, get angry easily, are responsible, fear the worst, want to be in control, if you keep your promises, etc.  To answer these fairly abstract and decontextualized question, you're supposed to objectively go over many situations (at home, at work, with friends vs strangers, when in good mood vs bad mood, little promises vs big ones, different kinds of promises, past and present, etc) and then draw a conclusion and decide whether that's somewhat/moderately/very true.  That's asking a lot.

So I wonder if there are tests where you're given a scenario which is more specific (e.g. you're out with a close friend and she tells you a secret about another close friend of yours, something that is about to happen that won't harm but will very much embarrass the second friend.  Will you keep your promise and not share that secret?).  I just made this up, and I don't know what it measures, so just see it as an example of what I meant by "scenario".

I think this will be easier to answer and will reflect your personality, better than you having to evaluate whether "I keep my promises".  Of course I'm also aware than depending on the situation given, it might introduce elements that will reduce validity of the answer, so I imagine the scenarios have to be fairly short and as neutral as possible.  But I am interested in such tests, if they do exist.

The Kolbe tests have questions like "If I believed something important could be made to help humanity I would:" with a set of 4 responses where you choose one as most likely and one as least likely. These responses might be "Investigate it; Design it; Sell or promote it; Build it"

The purpose of the test is to find your action style and their internal research indicates a high degree of reliability over time.

I will need to do more research to find it, but there is a test used to help pair up college dorm mates that relies just on a series of groups of photos where the individual just chooses one from each group.


Is the belief that a consultant knows more than the team a form of cognitive bias? I've noticed that many people assume that consultants know more than they themselves do and/or more than their team does.  That is, when a team is stuck on a problem, some people believe that a consultant can figure it out even without knowing that consultant. True, more heads might help, but I've also seen teams who believe everything a consultant says, especially at the beginning of the relationship yet scrutinize the people they work with.  Why?

I've read about the halo effect in Wikipedia, which contains the statement, "The halo effect is a type of immediate judgement discrepancy, or cognitive bias, where a person making an initial assessment of another person, place, or thing will assume ambiguous information based upon concrete information."

This would suggest to me that any concrete information can bias someone when filling in the ambiguous information.  However, reading more about the halo effect, it seems mainly focused on how people look.

So my questions are, what goes on in people's minds to create the belief that a consultant knows best when they don't have evidence to believe so?  Is it a bias?  If so, which one?  Or just human behaviour?  Something else?  Does it depend on the situation?

Yes, this could be a cognitive bias. Quite clearly, a consultant is expected to be more knowledgeable about the specific topic they were hired to consult on.

  A consultant (from Latin: consultare "to deliberate") is a
  professional who provides expert advice.

Consultants are supposed to be experts in their field, and as a result they carry some authority. Therefore, authority bias comes to mind:

  Authority bias is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the
  opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more
  influenced by that opinion.

The bolded addendum in between parentheses is important. As long as based on the content the consultant brings to the table you respect their opinion, there is no cognitive bias (no irrationality); they are simply doing a good job.

But, not all 'consultants' are experts per se. In software development specifically, I have the impression 'consultancy' has almost become synonymous with 'temporary hire'. Newly grads often get hired straight out of school in consultancy firms. In such cases, there might be a cognitive bias at play, when it is not the contributed content which is evaluated (as you outline in your answer), but merely the title the consultant carries.


Brain Waves and Psilocybin Mushroom Is there any research on brain waves when on Psilocybin Mushrooms or LSD?

Best start here: The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs (2014). And then here is some more current literature worth exploring:
Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin (2012).  Additionally:

Broadband Cortical Desynchronization Underlies the Human Psychedelic State (2013):

  Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50
  Hz in posterior association cortices, and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal
  association cortices. Large decreases in oscillatory power were seen
  in areas of the default-mode network. Independent component analysis
  was used to identify a number of resting-state networks, and activity
  in these was similarly decreased after psilocybin. Psilocybin had no
  effect on low-level visually induced and motor-induced gamma-band
  oscillations, suggesting that some basic elements of oscillatory brain
  activity are relatively preserved during the psychedelic experience.

Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD (2017):

  ... Fig. 2h demonstrating the energy difference between LSD and PCB
  conditions ... For both effects, increased energy of high frequencies
  and decreased energy of low frequencies, the differences between each
  pair of conditions were found to be significant (p < 0.01 ...). ...
  Taken together, our results reveal that LSD increases the total energy
  of brain activity and expands the repertoire of active brain states
  by significantly increasing the activity of high frequency brain
  states.


"Dyslexia" in reasoning? I was trying to use logical argument with a friend of mine recently, and found that she was missing my point and completely misunderstanding my position. So I wonder if there is something like dyslexia of reasoning/logic, a brain condition that makes people unable to understand and follow logical arguments.

Cognitive dissonance is often a problem when trying to convince someone of your position.  Depending on the subject matter and how closely the position is held for the opposing party it can be very difficult to follow even logical well reasoned arguments.  The opposing party often has a framework of reality in which they make sense of various situations or concepts.  If a new concept doesn't fit within that framework there is often underlying reasons as to why the argument is unable to land. So until the deeper views are addressed you are arguing in vein.

For example in order for something you postulate to be true, it may require the opposite party to reconcile other beliefs that are deeply held in a way that they are potentially unwilling to address, or see no reason to address due to unwanted stress or emotional distress in addressing the beliefs.

Alternatively there are neurological deficits or disabilities that could make getting your point across more difficult, but at least from my experience it is often a case of Cognitive Dissonance.


"High-conflict people" While having a look at a recent question here, I ran into some (non-peer reviewed) articles with a description like

  High-conflict people (HCPs) have high-conflict personalities. This means they have an ongoing pattern of all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behavior or threats, and a preoccupation with blaming others. They have a Target of Blame, whom they regularly bully, harass, blame, humiliate, annoy, spread rumors about, and subject to many other adversarial behaviors. This pattern increases and maintains interpersonal conflicts, rather than reducing or resolving them — which is what most people try to do.

If you google the HCP term, you'll find several articles with a similar definition, most from the same author. One was even published in the mainstream mass media,

Eventually this HCP is cast a sort of cross-sectional aspect of several personality disorders (at least in one article)

  Narcissistic HCPs are characterized by an underlying fear of being inferior or powerless, so they are constantly putting themselves above other people — which alienates them in the process and tends to make people look down on them. Borderline HCPs have a deep fear of being abandoned, so they are constantly clinging and demanding reassurance, but alternating that with occasional rages when they feel abandoned — which often pushes people to abandon them. Antisocial HCPs really don’t want to be dominated by others, so they try hard to dominate others, but often end up in prison, where they are dominated. Paranoid HCPs have a fear of being betrayed by those around them, so they may overreact and attack those they fear — which tends to drive people to turn on them. Histrionic HCPs are preoccupied with being the center of attention and will often publicly criticize other people’s behavior (their Targets of Blame) in an effort to get sympathy and more attention. Knowing these patterns makes it easier to spot them, especially when this is combined with observing the four characteristics of HCPs at the top of this article.

This has some similarities with the alternative (research) abnormal personality model from DSM-5 in the sense that the latter is also using some traits which possibly span several conventional personality disorders:

  In the alternative model, the essential criteria to define any personality disorder are: a) moderate or greater impairment in personality functioning, and b) the presence of pathological personality traits. A “level of functioning” scale is provided, and sensitivity and specificity data supported the designation of “moderate impairment” as the appropriate threshold to indicate the presence of a personality disorder. As defined in the alternative model, personality functioning consists of the degree to which there is an intact sense of self (involving a clear, coherent identity and effective self-directedness) and interpersonal functioning (reflecting a good capacity for empathy and for mature, mutually rewarding intimacy with others). Pathological personality traits are organized into five trait domains (negative affectivity, detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism), each of which is further explicated by a set of trait facets reflecting aspects of the domain itself. This trait system has been shown to correlate well with the Five Factor Model.

"High-conflict people" don't quite seem to match any of those 5 traits specifically, but I suppose they would score high on antagonism, disinhibition, negative affectivity, and possibly even psychoticism. (On the FFM they'd probably score low on Agreeableness, high on Extraversion and on Neuroticism.)

Is there peer-reviewed research on "High-conflict people", perhaps under different terminology? Or is this more of a fringe-scientific grouping?

I had a look on scopus and there were no hits for "High conflict people".

So I imagine you'd want to turn to other literature; a few thoughts:

Dark Triad
Agreeableness from the Big 5
Conflict styles literature
Personality disorders literture
Literature on aggression


What is the difference between confidence and overconfidence? People say there is a very small difference between confidence and overconfidence.

How can knowledge of psychology help someone know whether they are are confident or overconfident?
What is the state of mind when someone is overconfident?

Usually, confidence is based on experience; proven results with regards to a task or ability increase one's belief that the task can be completed a second time.  Notice that this has nothing to do with what others believe you can do - it's about what you believe you can do.

Overconfidence is bravado - false posturing to fool or mislead others; most often used to hide an actual lack of confidence.  This is all about getting others to believe that one is capable of a task.

There are a lot of non-scientific articles related to the difference between the two concepts:
Here is a "10 characteristics of" page from Hindustan Times
while here is an article from National Geographic talking about narcissism and overconfidence.

These were found with a Google Search for 'overconfidence vs confidence'.  I'm sure you would get more scientific results if you dig some digging, or tried Google Scholar.


Research on time-saving/ preferences? So, I work at a library and one of my responsibilities is to man a self-service print desk (filling paper, answering questions, clearing jams, etc.).  Now, I've noticed some interesting behaviors manifest themselves.  We have two printers that are exactly alike.  When someone has released a print job and is standing there waiting for it to finish it seems that people are more likely to stand in line rather than walk two yards to the other printer.  Is there any reasoning behind this?  I'd be interested to read research dealing with a similar question.  Thanks!

Your title suggests that you might be interested in individual preferences/differences in who chooses which printer, but the rest of the question made me think of research into "queue joining". There are some classic social psychology papers on this subject. For example, this paper confirmed that people are more likely to join the (wrong) queue if there are more people waiting, presumably because they conform and assume that other people know something that they don't. There is also interesting related research in an applied setting about the balance between preferring a restaurant because it is busy (therefore must be good) and preferring one because it is less busy (therefore you might get served quicker). I'm sure there is recent research along these lines too.

So maybe people stand in line because at least they can be sure that that printer is working!


Does synesthesia lack symmetry? Some synesthetes report seeing bright flashes when hearing a loud noise.  However, in the same person, bright flashes of light are not reported as being loud.  I've read of other examples like this; for instance, the number 1 may always be yellow, but yellow is not the number 1.

Has there been any research as to the neurological reasons why synesthesia is asymmetric?  Alternately, is my anecdotal assumption that it is asymmetric incorrect and there are actually frequent symmetric presentations of the condition?

Generally spoken, synesthesia is unidirectional. For example, grapheme–color synesthesia (i.e., letter–color and digit–color synesthesia) is the most prevalent type of synesthesia. The presentation of a
grapheme leads to an additional synesthetic color percept. Although
grapheme–color synesthetes are strongly influenced by the synesthetic color perception triggered by a specific grapheme, they usually do not report that a color triggers the perception of a specific grapheme.

However, while explicit synesthesia is unidirectional, there is evidence that it can be implicitly bidirectional. To show this phenomenon, clever experiments need to be devised. For example, the left-hand responses of digit-color synesthetes were faster for colors representing a small number,
whereas their right-hand responses were faster to colors representing large numbers. Hence, apparently there was an implicit association of the color with numbers.

Reference
Weiss et al., J Cognitive Neurosci (2008); 21(10): 2019–26