Is the price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviours more mental illness? "Our work shows that the price of higher intelligence and more complex
  behaviours is more mental illness."

-Professor Seth Grant Professor of Molecular Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh

Is this finding from this professor's work agreed upon in the scientific community?

Are there more dynamics, contexts or other aspects to this conclusion...or is this just a 1-to-1 correlation?

Any other evidence about these types of studies published, and what are their conclusions?

Thank You.

http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2012/intelligence-031212

Kazimierz Dabrowski had a great theory (the Theory of Positive Disintegration) about the relationship between psychoneuroses, the most common symptoms of mental illness, and the  developmental trajectories of gifted people. In brief, gifted people are more likely to live out-of-sync with their social environments (too smart, too intense, too righteous, too sensitive). This causes conflict with individuals and the world at large. Because they live in a state of inner and outer conflict due to their essential differences, they develop psychoneuroses (anxiety, obsessions, existential depression etc). These neuroses are evidence for positive disintegration in the gifted, as the process of becoming one's own person in a world that isn't made for the 'Scary smart' is psychologically painful. Many never pass the disintegrative phase, and live with these symptoms perpetually.
So I imagine that the correlation between smarts/creativity and mental illness arises from their characteristic unwillingness to abandon the parts of themselves that set them up to be at odds with 'normal' life. Those are the same intensities that make them exceptional. The upside is that unwanted symptoms of positive disintegration can be worked through and a 'personality ideal' - roughly analogous to a self-actualizing personality a la Maslow - can be achieved.
I hope that gives some insight into the context and dynamics behind that common observation in folk psychology. It's not "smart people are all crazy" but more like "smart people face challenges that most others don't" and that can make them seem crazy while on their hard path of personality development.


What software to use for psychology questionnaire? I'm doing a schoolwork about Spiral Dynamics and last part is doing practical research and everything is completed except we yet didnt found any digital platform with which we can conduct our research..,

I would love to hear your recommendations because we are little bit lost with this part of project (still noobies).

One that I used at my university is Qualtrics. It was under the university's license, so I don't know what the costs are for single users. Qualtrics allows you to ask many different types of questions (open ended, likert, option select and more) and can easily export the data to excel files for further processing.

Survey Monkey is another tool that is often used. Basic functions can be used for free, but for more powerful tools you'll need to pay.

Finally, I know of Google Form. Afaik it can be used for free, but I am unaware of their privacy policies (Google tends to collect a lot of data).


Is there evidence that "people in Eastern societies are more in touch with their communities while Western societies value uniqueness more"? In a lecture, a prof claimed that in Western societies, people tend to value independence and uniqueness, whereas Eastern cultures tend to value helping each other and living harmoniously. In a nutshell, people in Eastern cultures think of the community more than themselves, whereas in Western cultures people tend to think about what makes themselves unique.

Are there any studies that relate to these claims?

While I can't, and won't make any comment on the accusations of racism (I think the comments below your question answer that quite well), the Western/Analytic vs. Eastern/Holistic dichotomy is pretty well established and supported by studies in cognitive and social psychological literatures.
This may be a little different to what you had in mind, as your question is more about social notions like 'valuing independence' versus 'coexisting in harmony', which are harder to empirically demonstrate (I'm not a social psychologist).  What I'm referring to here is more like 'logic, rules, and working details out step by step' versus 'taking everything into account, and seeing the bigger picture'.
However, the idea is a bit more complicated than what I'm able to explain in a few sentences.  Nisbett et al's (2001) review (free preprint copy here) is the Rolls-Royce of reviews when it comes to this, and that paper will address most of the questions you might have (note the racial diversity of the authors).
You can also find more work by the same authors here.
References
(just the one)
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological review, 108(2), 291.


What causes an inability to recall a melody, beat, or music? Background:
I have never been able to recall melodies to songs. I can play a song over and over again but the moment it stops, I cannot remember what it sounds like. I am referring to the music/beat/melody and not the lyrics. Even when I memorize the lyrics and try to sing a song out loud or even in my head, I simply cannot recall the music.

I like Adele but as I type this, I have no idea what her songs sound like. If I play one of her songs, I will recognize it. So it is not as if I have lost all memory of the song.

Over the years I have come up with certain tricks to remember some very rudimentary melodies. I know what Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the happy birthday song, Jingle Bells sound like but it took work. For Jingle Bells, I would knock on a table as it played. And I was able to get the rhythm. The lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle and the birthday song flow like a poem and so the melody strives from that  (at least that's how it seems to me).

Even though I have no idea what my favorite songs sound like, I do know what emotions they evoke. When songs move me, it is as if something flows in me. I have heard stories from my mom about how I used to close my eyes and sway when listening to music. I learned not to do that in public after the teasing at school :)

I have tried to research this on my own and have come up with nothing. Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Question

What causes an inability (or difficulty) to recall a melody, music, or beat?

The following answer is based on my own experience learning music combined with general principles of cognitive psychology related to skill acquisition.

I think that learning music would help a person recall a melody, a beat, and music in general. Formal training would be particularly helpful, but informal training would also often have a similar result.

In particular, learning music teaches you how music is structured. This training teaches you a whole range of skills. You learn to isolate instruments. You learn about the structure of songs (e.g., bars, beats, sections, repetition). You learn about melody (e.g., scales, intervals, chords, progressions, etc.). You learn about rhythm.
There is a theoretical aspect to this knowledge whereby you conceptually understand the ideas. However, there is also a large procedural component whereby you train your ear to identify different sequences, and you also learn to produce such sequences with a suitable instrument.

Learning to sing can be particularly helpful in training your ability to reproduce melody without the song present. Singing trains you to be able to reproduce intervals, scales, and so on without an external source.

All this declarative and procedural knowledge of music simplifies and enables the mental recall of music. For example, instead of seeing a pop-song as a 3 minute stream of sound, You start to see the simplicity of for example, 3 chords, and 2 major melodic elements. You see the similarities with other songs in terms of the chord progressions, scales, and rhythm. It's similar to the way that language becomes simpler once you appreciate the basic principles of vocabulary and grammar.

Beyond musical skill, actual repetition and spending time seriously thinking about the song should also help in the recall a that specific song.


Does society swing back and forth from one extreme to the other? Consider 2 groups of any number of persons. Assume that the "dominant" group acts without any regard for the other group.
Assume that there seem to be no consequences in the short time for the dominant part.
In a generalized experiment over a very long time, I think the feelings of the oppressed group will create motivation to react.

Let's consider an example:

Women's rights had been limited for centuries. More recently the situation has been changing, and nowadays the opposite is being argued:

A bias in the laws in Italy seems to favor women
Official documents delivered in Italian's Senato describe many cases of women making false accusations to win divorce processes in a range of 16 years
See also Wikipedia on false accusations of rape.

There was also an interesting study on the prevalence of sexual dependency among men and women: the number of male patients was 5 times greater than the number of female patients.

Consider the hypothesis: "History goes from one extreme to the other."
Oppression & exploitation of one group leads to discomfort, which leads to  motivation to react and fight, which leads to reaction (from the oppressed side) and maybe guilty feelings (on the oppressor's side), which leads to an egoistic solution, which is not always the more ethical.  (In this case, a partial oppression of the previously dominant group).

Short answer: This question does not have a sociological or other scientific answer because it cannot be studied empirically as currently conceived, but it is a valid question all the same. It may still be possible for a humanistic field of study, such as History, to provide a satisfying answer.

Long answer: There is currently no way to define what or how any observable variables might map on to "society," "oppression" or "exploitation" in a sufficiently specific sense. Because we cannot operationalize what exactly change in society over time means, or whether society's current state is an "extreme" in a way we can systematically observe and record, we cannot give scientific evidence (sociological or otherwise) one way or the other.

Therefore, depending on which and how many variables we choose as our measure of society's change over time, and how long we choose to study them for, we may find that society does oscillate between extremes, or that it doesn't, or that it goes through periods of oscillating and not oscillating, or that some parts of society do oscillate while other don't, or a virtually infinite set of other conceivable models.

With no way to distinguish the relative likelihood of different models using empirical evidence, we have no credible scientific reason to believe any of them are more likely than any other, and hence no ground on which to base potential scientific theories on. Colloquially speaking, we cannot theorize about evidence we don't know how to collect.

Concluding remarks

I am providing a negative answer to this question because it is the top result on Google for its title, because it has survived my close vote, because I answered the author's directly related question, "How can we realize when a sociological question is impossible to answer?" and, last but not least, because I like bounties.


Sense of time: Evaluation and correlation with psychological traits and states Some of us are often in hurry and always late. Some make mistakes while evaluating time-needs for tasks. How is our sense of time connected with our personality? Is it more correlated with the process we are involved in? How we can develop this sense so to make more of our time?

People who are entitled tend to have a slower perception of time. In any given situation, a person can feel some level of entitlement. If a person is waiting in line for 10 minutes to check out groceries, he would experience that 10 minutes as passing by very slowly. On the other hand, if that same person was waiting 10 minutes to meet the President, he would experience the 10 minutes as passing by quickly.

So time perception can be manipulated in any given situation. It depends on the level of entitlement you are feeling in that environment. Perhaps entitlement could artificially be manipulated to create different perceptions of time (e.g. by thinking quickly and variably).

Source

Time Crawls When You're Not Having Fun: Feeling Entitled Makes Dull Tasks Drag On. Edward H. O'Brien, Phyllis A. Anastasio and Brad J. Bushman, Pers Soc Psychol Bull published online 12 May 2011, DOI: 10.1177/0146167211408922


Research on Distribution of Enneagram Types in a Given Profession I was in a conversation with an Enneagram scholar who claimed that certain Enneagram types are more likely to hold certain specific positions or have certain professions.

Is there any data or has there been any research published that has studied the Enneagram type distribution of fields or titles thought to be Enneagram-type-personality-specific?

Examples:

If we were to give the Enneagram test to ten-thousand nurses, would we find that a statistically significant number of them are Twos?

If we were to give the Enneagram test to ten-thousand career scientists, would we find that a statistically significant number of them are Fives?

I myself have a long-standing fascination with the Enneagram system and believe it to be the most incisive and encyclopedic theories of human patterns I know.  So, yes, I would say there are correlations with career-choice (as with essentially all behavior).  I have one more specific comment about job-choice.  But first, I'd like to enumerate two important caveats that apply here:

Career choices (like many other important human choices - marriage, politics, etc.) are highly conditioned on background, education, opportunities perceived to be available, etc. - therefore, it is naive to expect overwhelming simplistic correlations.  Type Five scientists?  Type Eight policemen?  Maybe - if one really investigated I suspect there would be evidence that the relative frequencies of these Type-job pairings exceed those expected based on frequencies of the Types in the population under study.  But they might not be that much higher - there's just too much variability in our various life paths....

Formal research on the Enneagram is hamstrung in general terms by the lack of a simple, easy objective measure of Enneagram type.  Yes, there are various (relatively) cheap-and-easy tests, available on-line and in book-form - but I don't think they are particularly accurate.  There's too much at stake psychologically when people are being asked self-report questions, and many of use "game the system" in favor of how we'd like to be seen (even if tend we claim otherwise).  This is based on 10+ years experience with hundreds of people coming through a public discussion-group I've run on the Enneagram.

Maybe someday there'll be an Enneagram test based on brainawaves (or whatever).  Until then, I'd say, in our time, the better way to get into this system is to read a good book (any of the Risa and Hudson books are good places to start), and look and soberly deeply into yourself if you are so inclined.  Then, if you take an abiding interest in the topic, and want to get more involved, try and find an Enneagarm-educted community with sincere people who can help validate (or challenge) your self-assessment.  Once securely typed, you can really know how deeply and uncannily this system works in our lives - and curiosities like how the system relates to career-choices may not actually seem as important.

As mentioned above, I do have one more comment specifically on job-choice, however.  Based on my own typing skills I once did a survey of a group of 100+ individuals many of whom I know well (my high school class) and attempted to correlate career-choice with Enneagram type.  Interestingly, I found that the TYPE-WING actually seemed as strongly typed with career-fields chosen as the MAIN TYPE.  Possibly, as individuals who express their main type in so many aspects of our lives, we unconsciously choose career-fields that help express our less-fully-expressed aspects as described by our type-wing.  (Just a speculation.)  More caveats: (1) TYPE-WINGS may be harder to diagnose properly than the main type itself; (2) I have somewhat different beliefs about what these TYPE-WINGS are than the ones described in the literature.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, that's just the territory as I see it.  Please post any replies, and I will attempt to monitor this thread.


Is there another word for 'affective control'? In this paper, the authors use the term 'affective control' or the slightly longer form 'affective cognitive control capacity' to mean 'the ability to regulate emotions or manipulate emotional material in the service of task goals'. However wherever I Google 'affective control' I get results that seem to pertain to either Affective Control Theory (which is a much broader theory and seems to be unrelated) or the study in question.

Is there another expression for the ability to manipulate or regulate emotions and emotional material? Are there any domains I can research to learn more? I've heard Emotional Intelligence before (full disclosure though, I haven't read the Daniel Goleman book), but that seems to relate more to learned knowledge - whereas it seems affective control is more related to working memory and capacity to process and manipulate material.

There is a huge body of literature on emotion regulation.  The main person to look up is James Gross.  He's recently published a second edition of the Handbook of Emotion Regulation if you'd like a comprehensive review of the field.  He also just published a target article in Psychological Inquiry about the present status of emotion regulation research and theory (a good starting place, in my opinion).  His name will be on the majority of papers published in this area (he collaborates with a lot of people).


How to prime gammatone filters? A set of gammatone band-pass filters are often used to model the filtering performed by the human inner ear. For example, "BatSLAM: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Using Biomimetic Sonar" Jan Steckel and Herbert Peremans, as well as "Biologically inspired methods in speech recognition and synthesis: closing the loop" by Trevor Bekolay both use them. However, like all filters, if you start the input signal with silence, the gammatone filter responds differently than if you started the input signal with some sort of noise. Similarly, mammals are very rarely submerged in absolute silence. The environment and internal organs generate what I would imagine to be some sort of low frequency noise. Maybe it's a low-pass filtered white-noise?

If you are trying to use gammatone filter in a model, what do you prepend the start of your signal with? In other words, how are gammatone filters typically "primed"?

Mostly it depends on the kind of experiment you're doing. If you're interested in speech (as I was), most of the important information is in the 300-3000 Hz range, where low-frequency noise will have little effect unless it's extremely loud. If the experiment you're doing deals with static or other sounds with broad power spectra, then low frequency noise could have a significant effect.

As with most questions of perception, what matters most isn't really the signal itself but how the signal is changing. It's a big change to go from from silence to loud static. It's a lesser change to go from quiet static to loud static. That difference is more significant than the difference between going from silence to speech and going from quiet static to human speech, because speech is similar to neither silence nor static.


Criteria for evaluating cognitive systems In the first chapter of the book "How to Build a Brain", Chris Eliasmith quickly establishes some criteria which he will use to evaluate Spaun, the cognitive system described in the book. He describes them in great detail in Chapter 8, but below is my attempt at summarizing them.

1. Representational Structure

Systematicity

The system should connect concepts in an inter-connected way and understand there are classes of concepts, since human thought is systematic. For example, given blue ball and red square, it should be possible for the system to reason about the concept of blue square.

Compositionality

Concepts should be created off of the combination of concepts to the degree supported by real cognitive systems. For example, given the concepts of pet and fish, it should be possible to reason about the novel concept pet fish.

Productivity

The system should be able to create many representation based off of a few basic representations to the degree supported by real cognitive systems.

The Massive Binding Problem

The system should identify a binding operation that scales well.

2. Performance Concerns

Syntactic generalization

Ability to exploit the structure of language regardless of content.

Robustness

Losing a few neurons or being exposed to noise shouldn't break the system.

Adaptability

You should be able to use a single system for multiple task.

Memory

The system should be able to show the relation to the various types of memory (working, long-term).

Scalability

Large portions of the brain should be modeled and able to complete a wide variety of tasks.

3. Scientific merit

Triangulation

Contact with the most sources of experimental data as possible.

Compactness

Good theories can be stated compactly and without ad-hoc additions.

He explains in the chapter that this is actually a synthesis of various other criteria proposed by various authors. Although the scientific merit seems rather straightforward to me and has been elaborated upon on great length, the other criteria I am less certain about in terms of completeness and acceptance. Have attempts at unified criteria been made before? Are there more complete criteria? Are these criteria at odds with any other ideas about what a cognitive system should embody?

Hofstadter provides a detailed set of criteria in Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.  Some of his criteria that I do not see mentioned above concern the flow of information-processing:  whether or not the model evaluated flows through possibility space in a psychologically plausible way, and how to measure that.

For instance...  Suppose the following: "A bat and a ball cost usd110. The bat costs usd100 more than the ball. How much is the ball?"

Now, cognitive psychology has shown that people are primed to say "the ball costs usd10." Which is wrong! A good cognitive model should also "think" usd10, before considering usd5. Otherwise, it doesn't respect information-processing flow.

He also mentions, metaphorically, the idea of including "lesions" in the model, such that, if some component of the model is "lesioned", the expected outcome from that component should drastically change.


How many different synapses can an axon form? How do they differ? It is estimated that the in the human brain there are about 100 billion neurons.

With thousands of synapses for each of them, the total number of synapses is over 100 trillion.

Yet each neuron has one axon with which it can output signal. Obviously each axon forms more than one synapse (else the number wouldn't add up), but how many? It should be thousands per axon, with several different neurons. Is that so?

You're right - from the simple math in the numbers you've given, you can deduce that each average neuron makes thousands of connections (sending and receiving).

Of course, this varies a bit by cell type:

There is one special synapse called the Calyx of
Held which is a nearly
one-to-one connection between certain types of cells in the auditory
brainstem: one globular bushy cell makes only 1 or 2 calyx synapses with MNTB
neurons (though they also have collaterals to other targets) which themselves
receive 1 or at most 2 calyx synapses (though they also receive a small
fraction of input from other sources) (Smith et al 1991, Smith et al 1998,
Rodríguez‐Contreras et al 2006)
Napper and Harvey 1988 estimate about 175,000 synapses arrive at each Purkinje
cell in the cerebellum.
The ballpark number of "thousands of synapses per neuron" is
reasonable for most cells, however.

Neurons can and do make multiple synaptic connections with the same post-synaptic cell - that's one of the ways to regulate the strength of connection between two neurons - but most synapses will be from different neurons.

Synapses on different compartments of a cell can have different effects, because they tend to sum more with other local connections and less from far ones, and because synapses closer to the cell body are more likely to directly control firing than synapses far away.

Axons from many cell types in neocortex have a complex branching pattern, where axons often branch both locally as well as sending various collaterals to other areas of neocortex and even to subcortical structures (see some examples in Ojima et al. 1991 & 1992). They make synapses all along these branches except for the longest projection stretches.

Hawkins, J., & Ahmad, S. (2016). Why neurons have thousands of synapses, a theory of sequence memory in neocortex. Frontiers in neural circuits, 10, 23.

Napper, R. M. A., & Harvey, R. J. (1988). Number of parallel fiber synapses on an individual Purkinje cell in the cerebellum of the rat. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 274(2), 168-177.

Ojima, H., Honda, C. N., & Jones, E. (1991). Patterns of axon collateralization of identified supragranular pyramidal neurons in the cat auditory cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 1(1), 80-94.

Ojima, H., Honda, C. N., & Jones, E. G. (1992). Characteristics of intracellularly injected infragranular pyramidal neurons in cat primary auditory cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 2(3), 197-216.

Rodríguez‐Contreras, A., de Lange, R. P., Lucassen, P. J., & Borst, J. G. G. (2006). Branching of calyceal afferents during postnatal development in the rat auditory brainstem. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 496(2), 214-228.

Smith, P. H., Joris, P. X., Carney, L. H., & Yin, T. C. (1991). Projections of physiologically characterized globular bushy cell axons from the cochlear nucleus of the cat. Journal of comparative neurology, 304(3), 387-407.

Smith, P. H., Joris, P. X., & Yin, T. C. (1998). Anatomy and physiology of principal cells of the medial nucleus of the trapezoid body (MNTB) of the cat. Journal of neurophysiology, 79(6), 3127-3142.


How exactly are socionics and MBTI different? Socionics superficially looks exactly as MBTI. 8 functions, 16 personality types. There's even a table, perfectly corresponding socionics types with MBTI types. Then what makes socionics and MBTI importantly differ?

Both socionics and MBTI are a try to dig deeper on the path of Carl Gustav Jung, who observed empirically (both from his work as a psychiatrist and from his travels across the globe) that all human brains displayed common cognitive descriptions, which Jung described by two energy-attitudes, two perception functions and two judgment functions.

  About Jung (about 100 years ago - his milestone book about cognitive types
  was published in 1921)

  The energy attitudes are introverted - the energy flows outward from the
  inside stimulation; and extraverted - the energy flows inward from the
  outside stimulation.

  The perception functions are intuition - a misnomer, with intuition you
  take information from a 3,000 ft view and make connections from this - and
  sensation - you take information from your senses and like to get into
  details, like with a magnifier glass.

  The judging functions are thinking - you make your decisions based on
  logic - and feeling - a slight misnomer, you make your decisions based on
  your subjective set of values (N.B. objective and subjective are commonly-used
  words in C G Jung's books).

  Following Jung, we all have a piece of everything in us, but we also have a
  preference for each dimension - energy management, taking information,
  making a decision.

  Jung described a set of 2x2+2x2=8 cognitive functions: introverted thinking,
  introverted feeling, extraverted thinking, extraverted feeling, introverted
  intuition, introverted sensation, extraverted intuition and extraverted
  sensation - also known as Ti, Fi, Te, Fe, Ni, Si, Ne and Se. Yes, N stands
  for iNtuition, as i stands for Introverted.

As mentioned in the comments, the MBTI was developed in the US - Katharine Briggs met Jung in Switzerland and her daughter Isabel Myers-Briggs was raised in a family/friends/colleagues environment that talked about cognitive types and she followed her own path, about 35-to-50 years after Jung.

  About Briggs and Myers (about 50 years ago)

  They described the structure of the preferences of the cognitive functions:
  sixteen combinations rephrase Jung's preferences, with the three axis from
  Jung (energy orientation of the dominant function, perception function,
  judgment function) and with a fourth axis, describing whether the
  extraverted function among the main two functions used by a profile
  is either a perception function or a judgment function.

  This descriptions fits into four letters (E or I, S or N, T or F, J or P)
  that describes the preference of a cognitive profile for two Jungian functions.

  Every profile has an inward function and an outward function, every profile
  has a perception function and a judgment function. With a main (dominant) and
  an auxiliary (auxiliary) function, this makes 16 combinations of letters,
  and 16 archetypes to describe common traits of a profile.

  The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (or MBTI) is a questionnaire that tries to
  figure out whether your preference is E or I, S or N, T or F, J or P. Its
  main weakness is that this way of typing is not accurate at all - though it
  had a huge success in business. This was a weakness from the science viewpoint,
  as the MBTI never improved upon itself, by trying to describe with better
  accuracy the nature of our cognitive functions (which was Jung's goal).

Now, we turn to the former USSR, where other people followed the path of Jung,
too. They founded socionics, which is an extrapolation of Jung's work to describe
how the 16 profiles communicate and interact with one another.

  About socionics (about 50 years ago - USSR)

  Socionics also developed a fourth axis beyond Jung's three axis, but do not
  be misunderstood about it, as it is not the same fourth axis as in MBTI.
  In socionics, the fourth letter describes whether the dominant function of
  a profile is a perception function (p) or a judgment function (j).

  However, while MBTI focused on typing with four letters, socionics kept
  working both on the four-letter code and on the description of the Jungian
  functions. For the four-letter code, socionics described one-letter
  archetypes like in MBTI, but also two-letter and three-letter archetypes.

  About the Jungian functions, socionics described how a given Jungian function
  (e.g. Introverted Thinking) could be described by a slightly different archetype
  depending on its rank within the eight functions - while MBTI described
  mostly the first two or the first four functions of a profile, socionics
  tried to describe the eight functions of a profile, by decreasing order of preference.

Trying to describe a cognitive profile by an order of functions leads us to
figuring out how stress states may alter our use of our preferred functions.

This topic was mentioned by Jung (through the concept of Shadow), it is hardly
described in MBTI (not much developed either is the topic of mastering our
functions as we grow older - there are a few life stages when we care
differently for our preferred cognitive functions), while socionics described
a stress model called Model-A (this is a first step on our journey).

  Wrapping things up - until you ask for more?

  When MBTI and Socionics speak (about) the same with a different vocabulary:
  MBTI  -  Socionics  -  Jungian functions (descending order)
  INTP  -  INTj       -  Ti Ne Si Fe Te Ni Se Fi
  ENTP  -  ENTp       -  Ne Ti Fe Si Ni Te Fi Se
  INFP  -  INFj       -  Fi Ne Si Te Fe Ni Se Ti
  ENFP  -  ENFp       -  Ne Fi Te Si Ni Fe Ti Se
  ISTP  -  ISTj       -  Ti Se Ni Fe Te Si Ne Fi
  ESTP  -  ESTp       -  Se Ti Fe Ni Si Te Fi Ne
  ISFP  -  ISFj       -  Fi Se Ni Te Fe Si Ne Ti
  ESFP  -  ESFp       -  Se Fi Te Ni Si Fe Ti Ne
  ENTJ  -  ENTj       -  Te Ni Se Fi Ti Ne Si Fe
  INTJ  -  INTp       -  Ni Te Fi Se Ne Ti Fe Si
  ENFJ  -  ENFj       -  Fe Ni Se Ti Fi Ne Si Te
  INFJ  -  INFp       -  Ni Fe Ti Se Ne Fi Te Si
  ESTJ  -  ESTj       -  Te Si Ne Fi Ti Se Ni Fe
  ISTJ  -  ISTp       -  Si Te Fi Ne Se Ti Fe Ni
  ESFJ  -  ESFj       -  Fe Si Ne Ti Fi Se Ni Te
  ISFJ  -  ISFp       -  Si Fe Ti Ne Se Fi Te Ni

I hope this helps!


How does cognitive science explain distant intentionality and brain function in recipients? Achterberg and colleagues' (2005) study,

  Concluded that instructions to a healer to make an intentional
  connection with a sensory isolated person can be correlated to changes
  in brain function of that individual.

Personally, I have also experienced (many) similar things. For example, if I get a "feeling" something is wrong with a close family member, I shortly receive a call about that person.

How does cognitive science explain these changes in brain activity and cognitive state, based on others thoughts and cognitive states—all in the context of physical distance or isolation?

Reference:

Achterberg, J., Cooke, K., Richards, T., Standish, L. J., Kozak, L., & Lake, J. (2005). Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: a functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis. Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine: Research on Paradigm, Practice, and Policy, 11(6), 965–971.

Pseudoscience based on false premises and misuse of statistics, I'd say at first glance...but let's take a closer look at this article. First, I'm seeing among the references a lot of articles from journals with "alternative" in their titles, and other sources that strike me as either vaguely fishy or otherwise somewhat tangential. Not what I'd hope to get from an article claiming evidence of "distant intentionality".

Next, the one, lonely paragraph in which Achterberg and colleagues (2005) offer their own half-hearted explanation:

  Given that there are no known biological processes that can account for the significant effect of the DI protocol, the results of this study may be interpreted as consistent with
  the idea of entanglement in quantum mechanics theory [(Einstein, Podolsky, & Rosen, 1935)]. Entanglement has been confirmed to occur between photons, and many have speculated that certain highly organized macroscopic systems, including the brain, exhibit the property of entanglement with other complex systems [citation needed]. In a recent study evidence was found for nonlocal connections between separated preparations of human neurons [(Pizzi, Fantasia, Gelain, Rossetti, & Vescovi, 2004; wrong title listed in reference section)]. These findings, plus the current study correlating brain activity in two sensory-isolated humans do not fit the classic model of physics and can be interpreted as consistent with entanglement at the macroscopic level. [Emphasis added.]

Some pseudoscientific warning signs to note here:

The direct acknowledgement that biological science can't explain their results
One incredibly outdated reference from a physics journal about quantum entanglement

Einstein and colleagues' 1935 article! Hardly the modern authority on quantum mechanics.

"Many have speculated," with no citation as to who these "many" are or why anyone should care
One other reference to proceedings from a society for optical engineering...In their reference section (not visible in the version I've linked in my own references here), Achterberg and colleagues (2005) omit the last two authors' names and replace the word "separate" with "human" in the title for this article's entry. I've referenced it below properly, and provided a link; see what you think of it.

It mentions the Penrose–Hameroff model of quantum computation in neuron microtubules... Please see @ArtemKaznatcheev's take on that whole mess of quantum quackery.

Hardly any other attempts at explanation to be found throughout the very brief article.

Wouldn't you expect more effort and enthusiasm on their part if they really, honestly believed in this themselves, and actually knew what they were talking about? I sure would...

As for that significant effect that just can't be explained no matter how hard the authors (don't) try, why not scrutinize their entire results section and see what's to be made of it, since it's so comically short:

  RESULTS

  The FSL software produces a quantitative table of cluster results that includes: cluster size, probability for each cluster, $z$ scores, $x\ y\ z$ coordinates of the cluster in Talaraich space and contrast of parameter estimates (see Table 1). If a cluster is significant in a group analysis it means that there were specific brain regions in which the combined subjects had enough activation to raise the $z$ score above the noise level threshold.

  In other words, if all of the subjects had random activation at different places in the brain, then there would be no group activation. One of the two clusters was highly statistically significant $(p = 0.000127)$. Significant areas of apparent activation in the group analysis and total number of pixels activated for the group are reported in Table 2. A scan representing the group activation as a whole appears in Figure 2.

That's seriously the entire results section. There's actually a lot more work in the methods section to set up the analyses...but evidently this is all that came of it and is fit to report? I don't understand that decision, because Table 2 (also not visible in the version I've linked) seems to list two very small $p$ values, and a lot of other inscrutable statistical information. Then again, it's not clear to me that the authors even paid that much attention to what they were writing here, because the $p$ value from the table that they seem to refer to in the results section is actually one order of magnitude higher than they say in the results (i.e., the table lists $p = 0.00127$: three zeros, not four).

Setting all these qualms aside, consider one more—maybe the most important: the authors seem to be claiming evidence of a process they don't understand (we might as well call it "quantum magic") based on a single $p$ value. I'd bet that's only good enough to convince people who really don't understand what it means in the first place. If you want to give these statistics some serious thought, I'd recommend starting with Wagenmakers (2007) and colleagues (2011). The first of these explains a wide variety of problems with $p$ values as they are commonly (mis)used and (mis)interpreted. The second takes a particularly close look at some much higher-profile quackery that made it into one of the biggest journals in my field (Bem, 2011). Bem's pseudoscientific article caused quite a stir, because it claimed even better evidence of precognition, and because Bem actually had a decent reputation as a social psychologist going into this fiasco...but now his Wikipedia page has this sad blemish of a section, and it's all quite unsympathetic, as you can see for yourself. Maybe this is the price of bringing bad work into the spotlight; there but for the grace of obscurity and mediocrity go Achterberg and colleagues (2005).

Still, Bem's (2011) a much better story in pseudoscience, as far as they go. If you're looking for the light reading version, you can find it in my article for WhatTheFreud.com, a website for psychology articles that a colleague / friend / former bandmate of mine made. That reminds me, I owe him another article...Maybe I'll try to dig up and synthesize some theories that could explain why so many of us are so desperate to believe in magic that we'll believe the first person who can throw a sufficiently confusing set of numbers at us and claim that they support just the right kind of magic we want to believe in (e.g., for your anecdotal reasons; not that I blame you for wanting to believe). Maybe I'll try to find a study of the harm journals do by having such shoddy standards for the work they accept...or maybe I'll just try to keep it light and write one about the Sokal affair. Now there was a guy who knew what it really means to get published in some random journal somewhere: it means you can successfully convince some small group of people that you know more than they do, and not necessarily anything more.

References
- Achterberg, J., Cooke, K., Richards, T., Standish, L. J., Kozak, L., & Lake, J. (2005). Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: A functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis. Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine: Research on Paradigm, Practice, and Policy, 11(6), 965–971. Retrieved without figures, tables, or references from http://stpresskit.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/evidence-for-correlations.pdf.
- Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425. Retrieved from http://caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf.
- Einstein, A., Podolsky, B., & Rosen, N. (1935). Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete? Physical Review, 47(10), 777.
- Pizzi, R., Fantasia, A., Gelain, F., Rossetti, D., & Vescovi, A. (2004). Non-local correlation between separated neural networks. In E. Donkor, A. R. Pirick, & H. E. Brandt (Eds.), Quantum Information and Computation II. Proceedings of SPIE, 5436, 107–117. Retrieved from http://air.unimi.it/bitstream/2434/30203/2/spie2004.pdf.
- Wagenmakers, E. J. (2007). A practical solution to the pervasive problems of $p$ values. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(5), 779–804. Retrieved from http://www.brainlife.org/reprint/2007/Wagenmakers_EJ071000.pdf.
- Wagenmakers, E. J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., & Van der Maas, H. (2011). Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 426–432. Retrieved from http://mpdc.mae.cornell.edu/Courses/MAE714/Papers/Bem6.pdf.


What is the effect of Daylight Saving Time on attentiveness and productivity? This weekend the clocks were set an our later (in some countries), such that the daylight lasts an hour longer in the evening. This has several reasons, among which a reduction in energy consumption and it is preferred by people who's work depends on daylight (wiki). Moreover, the clock will be more in sync with the natural sleep cycle which ought to improve well being (see figure).

However, because of Daylight Saving Time (DST), you do not only lose 1 hour of sleep that night, the entire day has shifted an hour. Subsequent nights, you'll thus likely experience that you go to bed an hour early.

Does this hour of missed sleep and shift in day affect your wakefulness and attentiveness (and overall productivity at work)?

Short answer

The amount of sleep that people get affects people attentiveness and their productivity to a large extent, as discussed by Rosekind et al. (2015). When switching to DST, many people experience a loss of sleep
(Barnes and Wagner, 2009) which can last up to a week and potentially longer (Harrison, 2013). This lack of sleep may explain the fact that more occupational accidents occur and productivity on the work floor drops (Barnes and Wagner, 2009; Coren, 1996).

Long answer

Sleep and attention

Rosekind et al. (2010) did a research on the effect of sleep and productivity in a general sense. In their introduction, they described the following:

  The prefrontal cortex is an especially important part of the brain for
  such functions as temporal memory and divergent thinking tasks
  (Harrison & Horne, 2000b), as well as control of emotional responses
  and attention (Johnson & Proctor, 2004). Consistent with this
  contention, empirical research indicates that sleep is an important
  determinant of alertness and attention deployment and control (Dijk,
  Duffy, & Czeisler, 1992; Flower et al., 2003; Jewett & Kronauer, 1999;
  Smith, McEvoy, & Gevins, 2002).

Following, in their study, they compared alertness and task performance of people (1) with good sleep, (2) who are at risk of losing sleep, (3) with insufficient sleep syndrome (ISS) and (4) who suffer insomnia. The results indicated that the people who sleep well always significantly outperformed the insomniacs. Effects of different sizes were found between the insomniac, at-risk and ISS group, depending on the measure.

DST

With sleep loss, attention and productivity is thus negatively effected. But do people lose sleep because of DST? Harrison (2013) researched the effect of DST on sleep and related behaviors and, in his abstract, states that:

  Relative ease in adjustment of sleep patterns is assumed by the general population but this review suggests that the scientific data challenge a popular understanding of the clock change periods. The start of daylight saving time in the spring is thought to lead to the relatively inconsequential loss of 1 h of sleep on the night of the transition, but data suggests that increased sleep fragmentation and sleep latency present a cumulative effect of sleep loss, at least across the following week, perhaps longer.

The negative effect is not limited to the shift of the clock in the spring:

  The cumulative effect of five consecutive days of earlier rise times following the autumn change again suggests a net loss of sleep across the week. Indirect evidence of an increase in traffic accident rates, and change in health and regulatory behaviours which may be related to sleep disruption suggest that adjustment to daylight saving time is neither immediate nor without consequence.

Another study by Barnes and Wagner (2009) also showed that people slept shorter after DST and that there was an increased amount of accidents in the immediate Monday after, compared to before the switch to DST. No significant differences in amount of sleep or accidents were found after the autumn switch from DST to normal time.

The loss of sleep is not only a problem for productivity on the job. In a Canadian study (Coren, 1996), the amount of traffic incidents were investigated over several years around the switch to DST. Three Mondays were compared: 1 week before DST, Monday immediately after DST and the Monday 1 week later. Results shows that the amount of accidents significantly increased directly after the switch to DST, and a week later (although the effect size is smaller).
.

References

Barnes, C. M., & Wagner, D. T. (2009). Changing to daylight saving time cuts into sleep and increases workplace injuries. Journal of applied psychology, 94(5), 1305.

Coren, S. (1996). Daylight savings time and traffic accidents. New England Journal of Medicine, 334(14), 924-925.

Harrison, Y. (2013). The impact of daylight saving time on sleep and related behaviours. Sleep medicine reviews, 17(4), 285-292.

Rosekind, M. R., Gregory, K. B., Mallis, M. M., Brandt, S. L., Seal, B., & Lerner, D. (2010). The cost of poor sleep: workplace productivity loss and associated costs. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 52(1), 91-98.


Is staying with an abusive partner actually indicative of Stockholm syndrome? For the longest time, I've wondered why it is that people who are physically or mentally abused by their partners stay in these relationships. Further, it seems, admittedly from personal experience, that many people overwhelmingly tend to remain in these unhealthy relationships, characterized by abuse and dependence. While reading an article about Stockholm syndrome, it occurred to me that this fairly obscure condition may in fact be far more common than previously thought.

What if, as a model to explain this behavior, a small portion of the population struggles to bond with people sufficiently to remain in relationships in the classical sense. In other words, prolonged periods of shared experience with exchange of emotion and vulnerability, the typical process by which bonds between people form, just isn't enough for this subset of the population. In such a population, it's not ridiculous to posit that bonds formed through Stockholm syndrome, which aren't dependent on the same shared experiences, could essentially be the only bonds left.

This model would suggest that a small portion of the population that struggles to open up to and connect with potential partners tends to form bonds with abusers, which is exactly what given evidence would suggest. Would someone a bit better educated in this subject agree or disagree?

Stockholm syndrome has been discussed in relation to domestic abuse, but not all that much. In the Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence (Routledge, 2007, NA Jackson ed.) I found criteria given that mirror those for kidnapping victims:

  The victim perceives a person threatening her
  survival. The threats may be physical or psychological.
  It is not important whether others
  view her survival as threatened, but rather
  whether she does.
  The victim perceives the abuser showing her
  some kindness, however small. For example,
  the kindness may be that for one day out of
  the month he does not abuse her.
  The victim is isolated from outsiders. This isolation
  may be physical—she is not permitted to
  have contact with family or friends—and/or
  ideological—she is permitted exposure to
  only the abuser’s perspective.
  The victim does not perceive a way to escape
  the abuser. Batterers use violence to help ensure
  that their partners do not leave them.

These are pretty strong criteria to fulfill, particularly number 3 and 4. The  Encyclopedia doesn't have any systematic evidence how often all these are fulfilled, in other words we don't know what the prevalence in the population would be. There has been one scale proposed by Graham et al. (1995) for measuring a more gradual version of the syndrome, but I haven't found other papers using it.

As for the usual reasons why the victims remains in an abusive relationship, they usually see (or hope for) some redeeming quality in their abuser:

  a considerable number of women felt their abusive male partners still possessed some good qualities: More than half (54 percent) saw their partners as highly dependable, while one in five (21 percent) felt the men in their lives possessed significant positive traits (i.e., being affectionate).

What you are proposing is a bit different than Stockholm syndrome. When you say that

  a small portion of the population that struggles to open up to and connect with potential partners tends to form bonds with abusers

you're basically proposing is that some victims have a propensity (perhaps a personality trait) for abusive partners. I'm not sure if that's the case; surely some women have submissive or masochistic BDSM fantasies, even rape fantasies, but to argue that they could only bond with abusive partners seems extreme to me, even a form of blaming the victim. I haven't seen this trait-lie preference for abusive partners discussed in literature. As cited in the Encyclopedia Graham in a 1994 book (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Psychology) did propose that victims may develop "borderline-like" personality characteristics and behaviors... but again he says develop, not have them beforehand.

There is however one recent (2008) paper that does discuss the personality of the victims:

  Women victims of IPV [Intimate Partner Violence] had higher scores than controls in schizoid, avoidant, self-defeating personality scales, as well as in the three pathological personality scales (schizotypal, borderline and paranoid). Both physical and psychological IPV were strongly associated with personality disorder symptomatology, regardless of the effects of childhood abuse.

This is after the fact though. A longitudinal study would be able to establish correlates before the IPV, but I'm not aware of such a study.


What makes the difficulty of an arithmetic item? The operation or its length? When presenting someone with an arithmetic item, let's say 2+2, what makes it difficult? Is the item 2+2+2 only longer, or also more difficult?

Does the mental operation of addition make the difficulty, or also the amount of mental operations? Or should the amount only be seen something influencing the length it takes to solve the item, but not it's difficulty?

Are there any publications that address the idea of difficulty for psychometric items which address this question?

Difficulty of an item could be operationalised in a variety of ways: probability of getting the item correct, amount of time required to complete, amount of resources required to complete, etc.

Item response theory perspective

That said, in the item response theory literature item difficulty is typically synonymous with a parameter related to probability of getting an item correct. For example, in a basic three parameter logistic model, you might have a an equation like follows:

$$
p_i(\theta) = c_i + \frac{1 - c_i}{1 + \exp(-a_i(\theta - b_i))}
$$

where $\theta$ indexes individual ability, $c_i$ is a guessing parameter for item $i$, particularly relevant for multiple choice items, $a_i$ is the degree to which the item discriminates between individuals, and $b_i$ indexes item difficulty.

Of relevance to your question, this model asserts that the probability of getting an item correct is related to a number of factors including the ability of the individual and the difficulty of the item.

More complex models would permit individual by item interactions, where for example some individuals are better at math problems where as other are better at language problems.

Cognitive psychology perspective

Another perspective on item difficulty comes from cognitive psychology. We might alternatively call this feature of an item, its complexity. From such a perspective we could analyse the component processes of the task to develop a model of its complexity. From this perspective, 2 + 2 + 2 is more complex than 2 + 2 because it generally requires more operations to solve. E.g., an individual needs to first solve 2 + 2 as a subtask, store that value in working memory, and then add 2 to the stored value.

However, I think a cognitive strategy learning perspective provides further insight. Ultimately, it may be the strategy that has a particular complexity rather than the item per se. And strategies are acquired with practice and training. For example, when a young child solves the problem 2 + 2, they may have to apply the somewhat complex strategy of recognising this as an addition problem, counting fingers 1 and 2, then counting two more fingers 1 and 2 and then counting all the finger 1,2,3,4. Alternatively, when most adults see 2 + 2, they are able to immediately and reliably retrieve the correct answer from memory. Or for example, if you are able to use a calculator, the difficulty of multiplication of large numbers is dramatically reduced.

There is a large literature on what is sometimes called algorithm-retrieval shift. I summarise some of this literature in my thesis (Anglim, 2011). To read more, you could check out Delaney et al (1988) or perhaps some of Robert Siegler's work (e.g., Lemaire and Siegler, 1995; he has a huge amount of research on strategies used in mathematical problems). I'd also encourage you to check out some of the many articles using the ACT-R framework (see below). The main point is that over time, complex tasks become simplified as individuals optimise knowledge, strategies, and task representations to the task domain.

From such a perspective, 2 + 2 is easier from 2 + 2 + 2 for a number of reasons. It is simpler in terms of the typical strategies that are used, but also the structure of typical task environments means that 2 + 2 + 2 will be less frequently encountered than 2 + 2. Thus, individuals are more likely to switch to a retrieval process on 2 + 2.

Summary

complexity and difficulty are strategy specific
the environment influences task and strategy learning
and thus, the environment can influence experienced complexity and difficulty

References

Anglim, J. (2011). Strategies in skill acquisition: reconciling continuous models of the learning curve with abrupt strategy shifts. PDF
Delaney, P. F., Reder, L. M., Staszewski, J. J., & Ritter, F. E. (1998).
The strategy-specic nature of improvement: The power law ap-
plies by strategy within task. Psychological Science, 9(1) 1-7.
Lemaire, P., & Siegler, R. S. (1995). Four aspects of strategic change:
Contributions to children's learning of multiplication. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 124 , 83-{97.
Robert Sigler: See website for many publications with free PDFs http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/
ACT-R Literature on Mathematical Problem Solving: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/publications/index.php?subtopic=22


How does belief in souls or the afterlife influence emotions related to the death of others? Background: Once when I heard of a death in my locality, I was happy rather than feeling grief because I was thinking that the soul of that dead person has achieved the truth.

How does belief in souls or the afterlife influence emotions related to the death of others?

Religion and spirituality provide coping strategies and relief for those who experience bereavement to help negate or provide incentive for surviving the trauma. Soul based beliefs tend to encourage the idea of an eventual reunification with the loved one.

Since this person was not a dear loved one your purely religious coping strategy is fine and perfectly normal. However I would be concerned and advise you to seek a doctor's help if you had the same absence of grief during the bereavement of a loved one.

The role of religion in dealing with bereavement is not well researched because its difficult to draw empirical data from unempirical relief. Especially with it being such a universally private and very tender time in a persons life. I did find one chapter from a book which provided a solid set of guidelines and so cite bellow.

  People often report that their religion or spirituality was helpful or even essential
  for getting through and recovering from their grief (see Wortmann & Park, 2008,
  for a review) in spite of the lack of solid empirical evidence that this is so. indeed, there are strong theoretical rationales for positing that religion and spirituality can strongly impact the process of grieving.for many individuals, religion or spirituality underlies their general approach to life and forms the system of meaning through which they experience and understand the world and operate on a daily basis, making the universe seem benign, safe, just, coherent, and, ultimately, controllable (Park et al., in press). Clearly, when facing highly stressful experiences such as the death of a loved one, this meaning system will influence their responses to it.

  Religious and spiritual perspectives provide many resources for understanding and coping with loss. Many traditions provide perspectives on death, such as viewing loss as illusory rather than real or as a necessary step toward a more glorious future. Several predominant religious belief systems hold out possibilities for everlasting life and for reunification with the lost loved one after one’s own death (Greeley & hout, 1999). Beliefs in a soul that is separate from and persists after the death of the physical body also allows for the possibility of remaining in contact with the deceased (Benore & Park, 2004), a commonly reported experience in the United States (klugman, 2006). in addition, religious and spiritual traditions offer a panoply of coping resources for dealing with death.

  these resources include social support from pastors and fellow congregants, and many rites and rituals to assist mourners through the process of grieving. for example, all religious traditions prescribe specific prayers, behaviors, and funeral ceremonies to deal with death, which comfort mourners and give them a sense of structure and a sense of belonging to a broader community (Wuthnow et al.,1980).

  through these resources, individuals may find solace and comfort and, over
  time, work through their grief in ways that allow them to find peace and acceptance
  and to return to their normal daily lives (halifax, 2008). of course, normal life is forever changed with the loss of a loved one, and people often carry a lingering sense of sadness and longing for the lost person (Stroebe, Abakoumkin, & Stroebe, 2010).

  importantly, mitigating negative outcomes is not the only possibility represented
  by religious and spiritual approaches to bereavement. in fact, many religious and spiritual traditions hold that the suffering experienced through bereavement can be an impetus for transformative spiritual experience. Such a perspective holds that to deny grief is to rob one of the heavy stones that will eventually be the ballast for the two great accumulations of wisdom and compassion. indeed, grief is a vital part of our very human life, an experience that can open compassion, and an important phase of maturation giving depth and humility to life; it can be regarded as a gift. Grief can ruin or mature us.

  like the mother who bathed her dead baby in her breast milk, grief can remind us not to hold on too tightly as it teaches us tenderness and patience with our own suffering. Many bereaved individuals report extensive personal growth following bereavement, including increased appreciation for life, enhanced spirituality, and closer interpersonal relationships, and religious and spiritual pathways are a common pathway to this transformative growth (Park, 2005).

-Religion and Spirituality in Adjusting to Bereavement


Preconditioning before asking a favor Suppose I want to borrow an item, such as a phone charger from someone.

Instead of directly asking them, "Could I borrow a charger?"

I first ask this question: "Do you have a charger?"

The act of asking a question of fact (whether they have the item or not) will make them more willing to lend you the item.

Is there a term or explanation for this?

Is this related or similar to the Ben Franklin effect and Anchoring effect?

The effect you ask about could very well be seen as an example of the Ben Franklin effect, also known as the foot-in-the-door phenomenon.
In your example, replying to the question "Do you have a charger?" would be interpreted as a small favor which is then followed by the bigger favor of lending the item.

Reference:

Beaman, A. L., Cole, C. M., Preston, M., Klentz, B., & Steblay, N. M. (1983). Fifteen Years of Foot-in-the Door Research. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 9(2), 181-196.DOI: 10.1177/0146167283092002


Update list of the most used and reliable quantitative tests in Psychology I studied Psychology some years ago, and well, I ended up as a programmer. Now, I'm working on a personal side project to build an API to serve correction for different psychology tests.
Since I moved out of the field for so many years, I'm having a hard time trying to look for some quantitative instruments to evaluate different aspects of the human psychology: personality, resilience, control locus etc...
All the test must be reliable (they are precise and achieve to measure what they want to, backed up by studies) and up-to-date and frequently use among professionals.
Thanks in advance.

The International Personality Item Pool would be a great place to start.


How to interpret a BBC news article on the effect of race on intelligence? In spring 1998, Robert Plomin claimed to have discovered a gene linked with intelligence. More recently, the Human Genome Project was cautious when approaching areas implying racial differences since research actually shows greater genetic differences within races than between races. However, not all individuals are endowed with the same intelligence and many believe this must have something to do with our genes and the way they interact with the environment. Identical twins are more likely to obtain the same score in an IQ test than twins from two separate eggs that have a different genetic make- up.

  It is important to remember that genes work by interacting with the environment, so social factors will also infl uence intelligence. Intelligence tests may be more of an assessment of social factors, such as your educational background. Black children adopted into white middle-class families score signifi cantly higher on average than those in working-class families – implying a cultural slant to tests.

My classmate thinks that this article suggests that race is suggested as determining intelligence, because race is mentioned several times in the article as being linked to intelligence, whether genetically or through social factors.
 I want to check this before confronting her, but I think not. Who's right?

In my view, the first bolded sentence dismisses race as a determinant, because there are 'greater  genetic differences within' each race than between different races.

The second bolded sentence also rejects race, because it only shows a cultural slant to tests and the first sentence of the last para states 'social factors will also infl uence intelligence.'

Source: ‘Are you born brainy?’, 17 November 2004, from BBC News at www.bbcnews.com

The relationships between race and IQ is a sensitive topic for many good reasons. It also raises a lot of deep questions about how to assess the role of genetics and environment.

A good summary of the literature on Intelligence with a discussion of racial differences can be found in the article "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" (FREE PDF).

Within-group versus between-group variance

You write:

  In my view, the first bolded sentence dismisses race as a determinant, because there are > 'greater genetic differences within' each race than between different races.

Group differences can be quantified. They are often quantified in psychology in terms of cohen's d (i.e., the size of group differences in terms of the standard deviation). You sometimes hear the claim that within group differences are larger than between group differences. This point is often highlights that just because a group on average is higher on a variable, there is a large proportion of people in the lower group than are higher than people in the higher group. The claim is often made to remind people not to stereotype. However, from a scientific perspective, we are often quite interested in the size of the difference between group means and the causes of such differences.

Importantly, group differences need to be very large before between-group variance is larger than within group variance. A grouping variable can have an effect of an outcome variable without needing to achieve this degree of group difference.

The size of the group differences says very little about whether the effect is causal.

Race as cultural slant

  The second bolded sentence also rejects race, because it only shows a cultural slant to
  tests and the first sentence of the last para states 'social factors will also influence intelligence.'

I don't think the second bolded sentence entirely rejects race. However, the wording "cultural slant" does go some way towards this argument.

However, I'd challenge the "cultural slant" argument. In particular, if some environments lead to higher IQ, I would be more inclined to interpret that as an effect of environment on IQ rather than saying that IQ tests have a cultural bias. You might argue that the kind of intellectual functioning represented by IQ tests is more valued by some cultures, but that's quite different. Once you operationalise IQ in terms of a general factor that emerges from a wide range of cognitive ability measures, then it makes sense to proceed with this. This is the variable that has been validated (i.e., predicts educational attainment; entry into prestigious professions; job performance particularly in cognitively demanding job; future income; etc.)

Also, to show that environment influences IQ is interesting, but it does not refute the role of genetics. Researchers in this space (e.g., looking at twin studies) often aim to estimate the proportion of variance in IQ due to environment and genetics. To show an effect of $A$ does not mean that there is not an effect of $B$.


What is the scientific definition of Introversion/Extroversion? Personally I believe introvert and extrovert are one of the most thrown around and misused words. I would go as far to say as what they mean in common everyday English is not the same as what they mean in psychology.

What exactly is the definition of introversion and extroversion? I've seen lots of psychology surveys, such as this one, where the possibles answers are too limited. I mean, I know a lot of people who would be considered extroverts but are still tired after a music festival or concert.

I totally agree. These words have become colloquial and have lost much of their meaning - and are therefore increasingly less helpful. Introversion is confused with shyness and sensitivity, while Extroversion is confused with social skills. This is partly because there is no agreed upon definition, insofar that they are operationally defined by each psychometric test/framework differently. That is to say, the same theoretical construct/concept is measured differently in each test, and therefore are operationally defined by a different set of responses.

Its is generally agreed that is is a continuum and that individuals do not reside exclusively on the same part of the continuum all the time, across contexts (which is where your festival example comes from). That is, an individual may have a strong/weak tendency but may behave differently dependent upon the situation they find themselves in. Anecdotally, for what it's worth, I find an individual's tendency is best revealed when they are under pressure or are experiencing anxiety.

For the original interpretation, look no further than Carl Jung's definition. The most widely accepted operational definition according to most Psychology research is possibly The Three Factor Model, while the most popular operational definition, where most lay people hang their hat is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I'd say people warm to this the most, and is the definition most people are likely referring to when they speak of
Introversion/Extroversion.

Looking to these three sources, you should get the original theoretical definition for the construct.


Why don't people read instructions? Some people are very careless when reading instruction on a work task they've been given or in reading any other kind of text. They would skip some of the sentences, not get deep into other and generally care very little if they understood the text right.

What is the common reason behind such behaviour - too little "cognitive capacity" or general disrespect towards other people/ egocentrism or too much dependence on emotional stimuli vs reasoning challenges or attention deficit disorder or simply low intelligence, etc?

Multiple causes of not reading instructions

As @crash notes, there are likely many explanations for not reading instructions.
It may be motivated by not caring about task performance. And such dispositions may be specific to the particular task or setting, or they might be partially related to some general disposition of the individual in terms of conscientiousness or skill.

The skill of not reading instructions

However, more generally, the concept of information reduction is related to skill acquisition. Haider and Frensch (1996) discuss the idea of how gradually over time participants start to ignore elements of a task that appear to be unrelated to task performance. So on one level, learning to ignore irrelevant information is a skill.

With regards to instructions, it is not always the case that reading an instruction manual is the most efficient means of achieving your goals. Trial and error, exploration, and so on are other strategies which often work quite well. In particular, many devices and software these days are designed to encourage people to explore. Likewise, it can often be a waste in learning information that may or may not be relevant, and so in some cases it makes sense to access instructions on an as needed basis.

It is also one thing to sit in the position of all knowing observer where you can know that in a particular case it would make sense to read the instructions over using an alternative strategy. However, from the actors perspective, they are in a sense operating without that knowledge. So they are in a sense averaging over their experience to form a decision about whether or not and in what detail to read the instructions. In some cases this will work out for the best, in others it wont.

General problem of task design

If you know that reading the instructions is particularly important in a given domain then you may want to alter the system or the task to encourage reading the instructions. Many organisations have compulsory training with a test in order to force users to learn certain information. Alternatively, you could make clear why reading the instructions is particularly important for this task. Similarly providing strong negative feedback when task instructions are not followed may help the individual to learn that in this domain reading instructions carefully is important.
That said, it's often even better if you can incorporate human factors principles to design a system which is user friendly.

References

Haider, H., & Frensch, P. A. (1996). The role of information reduction in skill acquisition. Cognitive Psychology, 30(3), 304-337.


Why do we need to know why something is needed or relevant? I have been doing some research for my thesis and one of the subjects I am researching is motivation. Something that I've generally noticed is that if we do not find something relevant or needed for us, we tend to lose motivation.
For example:
In middle school we learn math. Lots of students question the need for math for their own reasons. When they hear an answer that not does not completely answer the question we lose motivation. An answer like: "you need it for your future" or "you just have to".
Other example:
Most people learn how to drive a car, because we understand that usually you need a car to get to work. Other people that work from home or live in walking distance from their work, could for that reason, not learn how to drive. If you would make the latter group learn how to drive, most would question the need and therefore lose motivation.
I would like to know if there is a principle or theory about this. A name or a source would be of great help! Or if my presupposition is wrong, please share your thoughts!
Thanks!

The term I think of that is most associated with this concept is salience.
There is a massively informative world out there. If you were to spend all your time focusing your attention on arbitrary objects or sensations from the environment you would never get anywhere. You might die of starvation or some other unmet physiological need or get eaten by a tiger while focused on something that isn't dangerous and doesn't help you reproduce - this circumstance is not evolutionarily favorable.
Though salience is often focused on more immediate threats and benefits, more complex organisms including humans are able to plan ahead a bit and put effort into things now that have benefits in the future. Some things seem to be innately salient, others become salient with learning.


How does the physical brain know about qualia? Qualia are phenomenological (the subjective experience of the physical activity of the brain).  But how does phenomenology feed back into the activity of the brain?  That is, how can the physical brain detect that qualia are occurring inside of it and be able to report on it?

To clear up confusion:

Suppose that all things are physical and all behaviors can be explained physically through neurons.
Suppose that qualia exist and are phenomenological.

The question is, how do physical neurons "know" about qualia. This is similar to a mind-affecting-brain question, but subtly different:

There is no assumption about a "mind" existing
The causal relationship between qualia and physical brain is restricted to the physical brain's detection of qualia.

Keep in mind that "qualia" is a philosophical construct whose purpose is largely to stimulate thought and discussion about subjective experience, definitions, and potential empirical implications.  The construct may well turn out to be untenable, but either way, it ought to be useful for elucidating issues relating to "the hard problem".

Your question is a very good one, and has spurred much debate over the nature and meaning of qualia.  Qualia are often regarded as somehow independent of physical properties, but yet as you point out, they clearly affect behaviour somehow.  Here are some points to consider:

One way out of the conundrum is to deny qualia as a useful construct.  Critics of qualia address the issue of subjective experience without qualia in a variety of atlernative ways.
Duality is another approach to qualia, but is not a commonly held view in science.  A more subtle approach is epiphenomenalism, which is a type of dualism that denies qualia any causal role.  However, as you've rightly pointed out, the mere fact that we are discussing qualia suggests that it does have a causal role.
It has been suggested that qualia actually have 2 distinct aspects: An experience that is "ineffable" - cannot be described and does not have a causal role - and a knowledge of the experience that does have a causal role.  While this approach minimizes (or at least constrains) the causal role of qualia, it does not entirely deny it.
Functionalism is a common alternative to dualism that comes in many varieties, and several related approaches with similar postulates (eg, behaviorism, physicalism, and computationalism), suggest that qualia (if they are meaningful at all) supervene on physical systems - that is, they are a natural and direct property of them.  In some interpretations, this makes qualia "independent" of phsyical systems only in the sense that they describe different properties than the cause and effect that we normally focus on, but not in the sense that they can possibly be separated from them as some other interpretations of qualia suggest.  However, many thought experiments about qualia suggest a stronger independence, so therefore, not all varieties of functionalism are compatible with all interpretations of qualia.
Another approach worth mentioning is representationalism, a view that sort of side-steps the cause-and-effect issue by defining qualia as indirect internal representations of external stimulus (objects).  As there are so many varieties of representationalism, it is difficult to pin down what exactly this means for qualia's effect on the brain, but the general gist of it is that qualia are viewed as constructs of the mind that are representational (meaningful) rather than real (causal).
Of course, another common response is that we just don't know, and may never know, as we simply don't have the intellectual capacity to understand - formally, cognitive closure.

There are lots of other approaches that attempt to address the question in yet other ways, but hopefully that's a good summary of the major categories anyway.


What are the correlations between HEXACO and NEO-PI factors? My background is more strongly grounded in the Big 5 model of personality. I'm gradually getting familiar with the HEXACO model of personality. I realise that HEXACO is not just the Big 5 plus honesty-humility. But given that the Big 5 will be many people's frame of reference when learning about the HEXACO, what is a quick summary of how HEXACO and the Big 5 differ.

In particular, what are the correlations between measures of HEXACO and NEO-FFI or NEO-PI (i.e., arguably the most popular big 5 measure)?

Based on n = 290, I found this correlation matrix in Gaughan et al (2012) (I think the adjusted R-squareds are for regression models predicting domain scores from the domains of the other measure; e.g., 50% of variance in honesty-humility was predicted by the five NEO domain scores).

Summarising these correlations, focusing on the HEXACO:

Honesty-humility is most closely related to agreeableness but is not the same
Emotionality is related to neuroticism, but also quite distinct the correlation is much weaker than would be required to argue it is a similar construct.
Extraversion is mostly the same in both models, but hexaco extraversion seems to be more related to neuroticism (-) than NEO neuroticism.
Agreeableness (HEXACO) is moderately related to NEO agreeableness, but there are clearly differences. HEXACO  agreeableness also has a notable correlation with neuroticism (-).
Conscientiousness is mostly the same in both models.
Openness is similar in both models, but not massive.

Focusing on the NEO

Neuroticism is distributed across hexaco emotioanlity, extraversion, and agreeableness

So in summary

HEXACO Extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness can probably be related to a similar interpretative framework as the NEO/Big 5 literature.
Relating HEXACO to NEO agreeableness and neuroticism is difficult. Using emotionality as a proxy for neuroticism is definitely problematic.

Another empirical study

Here was another study I found in Ashton et al (2014) using Big 5 markers.

Correlations between honesty-humility and agreeableness were not as strong as above. Also, the negative correlation between neuroticism and extraversion was much smaller.

How it is discussed in a paper

I found this paragraph from Dunlop et al (2016) to be a good quick summary of the differences:

  Within the HEXACO model, the Openness, Extraversion, and
  Conscientiousness factors generally correspond to their Big Five
  counterparts. The Emotionality and Agreeableness factors of the HEXACO
  represent rotational variants of Neuroticism and Agreeableness in the
  Big Five. However, the most prominent difference between the HEXACO
  and Five Factor model is the addition of the HEXACO Honesty-Humility
  factor ... (Ashton & Lee, 2007; Ashton, Lee, & de Vries, 2014).

References

Gaughan, E. T., Miller, J. D., & Lynam, D. R. (2012). Examining the utility of general models of personality in the study of psychopathy: A comparison of the HEXACO-PI-R and NEO PI-R. Journal of personality disorders, 26(4), 513.
Dunlop, P. D., Bourdage, J. S., de Vries, R. E., Hilbig, B. E., Zettler, I., & Ludeke, S. G. (2016). Openness to (reporting) experiences that we never had: Overclaiming as an outcome of the knowledge accumulated through a proclivity for cognitive and aesthetic exploration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & de Vries, R. E. (2014). The HEXACO honesty-humility, agreeableness, and emotionality factors a review of research and theory. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18(2), 139-152.


What is a scientifically plausible method by which people might in the future be able to read minds? I am writing a book. It will be post-apocalyptic, and the apocalypse I'm thinking of will involve people being able to read each other's mind. Can any of you give me a slightly plausible reason that this would happen / be possible?

If you don't need the mind readers to actually know the exact "words" of the person's thoughts, you could have people who are extremely well versed in "reading" another person's facial expressions, body posture, tone of voice etc. It is a fact that those outward behaviors reflect your internal state, and in fact we all read these signs with more or less accuracy, but there are a few people (and maybe you can train that) who are better than others to deduce how you feel and what you might be thinking from these. (see "cold reading")

If you need actual mind readers, we are currently arriving at a point where we begin to be able to interpret fMRI images. There are some experiments where researchers were able to tell which images a test subject was looking at or which body parts they were moving from looking at their brain activity alone. I'm sure that our understanding of what goes on in the brain will progress and the technology to measure brain activity will get smaller and more exact, so you could have people use a device that reads minds. It is quite likely that such a device will exist in the not too far future.

If, finally, you want real telepathy (which, just to cause no misunderstanding, cognitive scientists believe does not exist) you might base it on:

an organ in human beings sensitive to magnetic or electric fields, sensing (like EEG) the brain states of another human being; there are animals who can sense electricity or magnetism, but the problem with this is that magnetism surrounding us is stronger than that coming out of the brain and will make it impossible to "feel" a brain from farther than a few centimetres away
this organ might be in the skin (actually not one organ but many receptors) so the reader could cover the head of the person to be read with his hands, much like an EEG cap
the reader would need to be trained with people telling them what they think while he "feels" their brain, so that he can learn which "sensations" in his hands correspond to which thoughts and cognitions
maybe its possible to clone human beings with specific animal genes so that humans grow electrically or magnetically sensitive receptors, e.g. in their hands (research animals with electric and magnetic senses and how their receptors work)

I'm just trying to extrapolate (my understanding of) current research, here. I cannot foresee future discoveries either technological or psychological, so I'm keeping this within the realm of the possible as much as seems plausible to me. Again: We don't think telepathy in the traditional sense (concentrating your mental powers and knowing what someone thinks) exists. If you want that, I don't see how it could be possible.

There seems to be some evidence of magnetoperception in humans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoception#In_humans
http://www2.pe.tu-clausthal.de/agbalck/biosensor/magnetsinn.htm

It is easy to imagine that this sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field might develop to discern even the much weaker magnetic fields of the brain. After all, the other senses show a huge variety between species, too. For example, the silk moth can detect single molecules of a female's pheromones. The current sensory ability of humans is not a fixed limit for how sensitive a sense can be. If the magnetism of the brain can be measured by an artificial detector, then it can potentially be measured by a biological detector.


Death from sleep deprivation, what physical mechanism is failing that makes one not to be alive anymore? I have been reading on wiki about sleep deprivation it would appear that one can die without sleep... I have heard that it was used as torture method by quite a few agencies, but didn't know that one could die from it....

As far as I know REM is just brain running a simulation to improve long term memory by re-firing the neuron paths to make them 'stick' better...

When death from sleep derivation occurs, what mechanism is failing that makes one not to be alive anymore. I mean there has to be some physical thing that breaks down, otherwise one would just loose consciousness and wake up in 40 hours or so...

As far as I know REM is just brain running a simulation

During sleep hormones and neurotransmitters shift in their quantities available along the phases of sleep: slow wave sleep, intermediate stages and REM ( this happens several times during a typical sleeping session) and each phase brings corresponding highs and lows of the aforementioned chemicals.

There is not a definitive and agreed function of sleep, but currently it is heavily tied to memory consolidation and metabolic regulation as well as a supporting role in the immune system.1

  When death from sleep derivation occurs, what mechanism is failing that makes one not to be alive anymore.

Well, we don't really know,at least in humans it is not something we can really experiment, so most of the accounts are just that, anecdotes.

In order to try to answer the question, we unfortunately have to turn to the animal world, studies of Total Sleep Deprivation (TSD) in rats are perhaps the best researched ones, and yet there is still coinsiderable doubt about what ends up being the cause of death. 2 and it's relationship to sleep.

  I mean there has to be some physical thing that breaks down

To summarize a review/update of the original sleep deprivation study3 :

The effects of total sleep deprivation seem to have interfered with thermoregulation,caused a deterioration in the appearance of the rats, skin lesions, and changes in brain activity; infection, hypothermia and malnutrition are the leading suspects then and the thing that broke down in a roundabout way is the supporting mix of chemicals ( neurotransmitters, hormones) & brain activity that normally keep these deadly effects at bay.

Reference/Sources:

A great and accessible introduction to the science of sleep is The Secret World of Sleep (Lewis). - Sleep and Metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929498/ -Sleep and the immune system: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12701994/ - Neuroscience (Purves) has a more technical overview.

Sleep deprivation in the rat: III. Total sleep deprivation. In this 1989 study rats were deprived of sleep and died, no direct cause was found.

Sleep Deprivation in the Rat: An Update of the 1989 Paper Does a great job in presenting the difficulties of a definitive answer, but does give a general one.


Are there any open task sets available to assess workload using secondary task measures? Performance on secondary tasks next to a primary task is sometimes used to assess mental workload (Ogden, Levine and Eisner, 1979). For example, the Stroop test as a secondary task has been evaluated by Gwizdka (2010).

However, a lot of effort goes into setting up these tasks, so I was wondering whether there are any open, ready-made task sets available which would be suitable for this purpose.

Some desirable characteristics I am looking for:

One task shouldn't be considerably harder than another.
Performing one task shouldn't take considerably longer than another.
Overall, one task shouldn't take too long, so the amount of tasks done can also be used as a measurement of mental workload.

Ogden, G. D., Levine, J. M., & Eisner, E. J. (1979). Measurement of workload by secondary tasks. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 21(5), 529-548.
Gwizdka, J. (2010, August). Using stroop task to assess cognitive load. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (pp. 219-222). ACM.

Since you mentioned the Stroop specifically, several versions of the Stroop task are available for Inquisit here.

Randall Engle's lab also maintains a set of validated working memory tasks, which are available on request to researchers. They include full and shortened versions of operation-, symmetry-, reading- and rotation-span for E-Prime 2.0.

Assuming I read the question correctly, any of these should satisfy the requirements.


How to obtain Fritz Perls' Eye Witness to Therapy film? I am reading Fritz Perls' book called "Eye Witness to Therapy" which contains film transcipts that Perls thought would be useful to learn Gestalt therapy.

For me it is a very deep and interesting reading, but I'm wondering whether seeing the actual films would benefit me.

I was searching around but I couldn't find any reference on how to get those films. If anyone could help that would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

This youtube channel has videos labeled "Fritz Perl ClipN" where N = 1,2,3, 4.0 and 5:

Clip1
Clip2
Clip3
Clip4
Clip5


Early STEM Education Impact I'm looking to find studies that examine when STEM education is most critical (e.g. what years of early STEM education have a significant impact on college/uni-level students, as measured by their IQs/GPAs/SATs or any combination thereof), and what demographics (age and/or sex) of students become disengaged from STEM education.

Results of STEM education at the pre-K and kindergarten level are of acute interest. Preferably the latest peer-reviewed studies, from North American universities of good repute.

A jumping-off point perhaps: STEM Starts Early: Grounding Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education in Early Childhood, and
More Than a Foundation: Young Children Are Capable STEM Learners

Unfortunately, answers to these questions are not yet available.  As Morgan et al (2016) put it:

  ... whether and to what extent science achievement gaps display
  stable, cumulative, or compensatory growth trajectories are unknown.
  This has been due to the lack of large-scale, multivariate, and
  longitudinal studies, particularly those following diverse samples
  across the elementary and middle school grades.

Available data (eg. the ECLS) typically follows children only as far as middle school, so effects on post-secondary level students are hard to come by.

That said, as the Elisabeth McClure reports listed in the question assert, the available data suggests that early STEM education has significant impact on academic achievement and cognitive skills later in life.  The earlier the intervention, the greater the impact down the road, particularly for pre-kindergarten (eg, Duncan et al, 2007; Sackes et al, 2010; Tippett & Milford, 2017), and early kindergarten (eg, Sarama et al, 2012) exposure.  That is, even where achievement gaps may be compensated for with later remedial programs, the sooner children are exposed to STEM education, the more favourable the future effects.

Correspondingly, interest in STEM education and careers is already set well before high school - from Sadler et al (2012):

  The key factor predicting STEM career interest at the end of high
  school was interest at the start of high school. ... During the high
  school years, the percentage of males interested in a STEM career
  remained stable (from 39.5 to 39.7), whereas for females it declined
  from 15.7 to 12.7.