Is dissociative identity disorder a medical condition or artifact of psychotherapy? The popular media has offered such examples as "Eve" (based on Chris Costner-Sizemore) and "Sybil" (based on Shirley Ardell Mason) as sufferers of dissociative identity disorder (at one point known as multiple personality disorder).  Doctors and psychotherapists have wrestled with how to help patients dealing with this diagnosis, but in reality, there is often doubt cast upon the validity of the symptoms.

Studies such as Boysen (2011) offer a retrospective analysis of the origins of symptoms and treatments presented in the literature in the 80s and 90s in an attempt to categorize the outcomes.  However, there's no comparison with control cases, i.e., those who may have faced persistent, horrible abuse or other similar situations and not developed symptoms of the disorder.

Are there recent case control studies that have been done in this area of research?  Is this careful retrospective analyis as far as we have progressed in determining whether these dissociative identities are a medical condition or artifacts of psychotherapy and popular press exposure?

  Boysen, G.A. (2011) The scientific status of childhood dissociative identity disorder: A review of published research.  Psychother Psychosom 2011;80:329-334. [DOI]

Dissociative identity disorder is a medical condition .

Dissociative Identity Disorder is listed in the DSM-V.

  H 02 Dissociative Identity Disorder
  1.    Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states or an experience of possession. This involves
  marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied
  by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory,
  perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs
  and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual.
  2.    Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with
  ordinary forgetting.
  3.    The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
  4.    The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice. (Note: In children, the symptoms are not
  attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.)
  5.    The symptoms are not attributable to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during
  Alcohol Intoxication) or another medical condition (e.g., complex
  partial seizures).

I have not found any recent case control studies.

I have found this paper reviewing the research from 2004-2006. Here childhood trauma, dissociation and psychosis are discussed and a study on the relationship between Schizophrenia and DID is discussed.

Dissociative identity disorder
Colin A. Ross MD
September 2006, Volume 4, Issue 3, pp 112-116
Current Psychosis and Therapeutics Reports

One issue with diagnosing personality disorders, is that the boundaries between them and other conditions can be blurred.  So a person can have traits of several disorders/illnesses, and will be diagnosed with the one that is the best fit.

  Personality disorders often co-occur with other mental illnesses.
  Harmful alcohol and other drug use often co-occurs with personality
  disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder. This makes
  treatment more complex, and effectively managing alcohol and other
  drug use is important.

Mental Health
 Publications
Department of Health and Ageing
Australian Government

  Although dissociative phenomena have been discussed throughout the
  20th century, the recognition of dissociative disorders as a bona fide
  diagnostic category is relatively recent. Nonetheless, the evidence
  linking attachment in infancy and attachment-related traumas to later
  dissociative symptoms, and the evidence linking concurrent states of
  mind with dissociative symptoms, converge to form a compelling
  picture.

Attachment and psychopathology in adulthood.
Dozier, Mary; Stovall-McClough, K. Chase; Albus, Kathleen E.
Cassidy, Jude (Ed); Shaver, Phillip R. (Ed), (2008). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed.).

The following is my personal ideas and conclusions about this topic; based on much personal research, formalised study and personal experience (of close relationship with a person with DID). see references below

It is an accepted practice that dissociation can occur and that there is a connection between childhood trauma (usually in the form of abuse). A healthy personality has multiple aspects and personas. The aspects are brought out during various life situations. From happy experiences, loss, stress; we see different traits of a personality surface. So it would follow that someone with extreme trauma and disruption to personality development, could have a fragmented personality, that changes under varying conditions.

The perception would be that the person has multiple personalities, which is a misnomer, in so much, that we are dealing with one individual with multiple states of consciousness and persona. Amnesia that results from the  protective nature of the mind to protect the individual from trauma, with the stress and varying attitudes and roles that a child is forced to play to minimise damage in an abusive environment; acting out in response to coping with extreme trauma. This concoction would well produce a personality that would appear to "flip" and change,  one of extremes, and with featured amnesia from one coping state to another.

I think Dissociative States Disorder would be a better name for this condition. As the Hollywood interpretation is one of extremes, and as Autism has a spectrum, (as many illnesses), so do Dissociative  Disorders.

As for treatment, I don't believe it is possible for a person to fully recover from such a condition. There are just not enough years available to the human life to do so. When dealing with such extreme and prolonged trauma, it is most difficult for the patient to acknowledge consciously the source of the dissociation and overcome major trust issues to open up. Combined with the fact that damaged child, become damaged adults, who then make poor choices, that compounds poor mental health; this is a difficult condition to minister help.

Dissociation and childhood trauma in psychologically disturbed adolescents.
Sanders, Barbara; Giolas, Marina H.
The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 148(1), Jan 1991, 50-54

Prim Care Companion J Clin Psychiatry. 2000 April; 2(2): 37–41.
PMCID: PMC181202
Dissociative Spectrum Disorders in the Primary Care Setting
James L. Elmore, M.D.

Interpersonal functioning among women reporting a history of childhood sexual abuse: empirical findings and methodological issues
David DiLilloCorresponding author
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA


Is there a term to describe an inability to express emotion or feelings? I am writing a novel and was wondering if there was a specific term for someone unable to express his own emotions or feelings. The catch here is, this doesn't mean he doesn't know what anger or love is for example, but just can't express it through his own body language.

The main idea is someone like a method actor for example might have so much experience taking on a certain role and become so good at adopting other personalities and portraying them, that he has forgotten how to be himself. While he might be a expert at taking on the role of a scared child for example, when confronted with something fear inducing out of character, he simply can't express it whether verbally or physically.

Another example might be someone unable to express happiness, but when given dolls or sock puppets, he can very easily show happiness and mood through the puppet/doll. The only issue is expressing this through his own body.

If any of you have seen the TV show Hereos, there is a character called Sylar who has the power to steal other peoples abilities. This is all fine and dandy, but once he steals the ability to shape shift, he starts to lose a sense of who he is. While he can transform and impersonate other people flawlessly, each time he does so he seemed to lose a sense of who he was originally. Essentially, he slowly starts to forget how to be himself. This seems to be the best example I can think of that I've seen on TV.

In essence, I'm looking for a better way to describe what I've listed above in a way other than just 'someone who has trouble expressing emotion'.

It is alexithymia if you're looking for a diagnostic term. It is not a case of "you either have it or you don't—alexithymia is a continuum.

There even exists a scale, which is a professional scale so to get it you need to pay for it and be a researcher. It's called Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20).


What defines the easiest time to get out of bed in the morning for humans? I'm interested in sleep research, and sometimes in conversations with people the following idea gets discussed: "A person becomes aware at a certain time in the morning and feel great(while still in bed). But the wake up time is later, so that person keeps sleeping and the feeling is gone. It's much harder to get out of bed". The general pattern is that there's a perceived good time to get out of bed, but people oversleep it.

From my understanding, the second part of this statement is caused by sleep inertia, where a person slips into deeper sleep(slow wave sleep SWS) stages. But what about the perceived "perfect wake up time"?

What sleep stage or sequence of sleep stages, if any is associated with this feeling of energy in the morning(NREM1,2?)?
is this feeling associated with light exposure (ex: 20 minutes after light exposure)
does it happen every day, for all people?
Is there some " deep sleep hormone" (probably not melatonin) that gets released in deeper sleep stages and produces sleep inertia?

There are a couple very successful sleep apps for smartphones that are marketed for this principle (they advertise the ability to find this "best wake up time" for you) and hundreds of imitations ("smart alarm clocks"). But is there really a phenomenon like I'm describing above, or is it a rare glitch of the endocrine system or something?

Human sleep has an (approximate) 90 minute rhythm: about every ninety minutes you are in light REM sleep. When you wake up while in REM, you wake up refreshed. If your alarm clock is set 30 minutes after your last REM phase, then you are in deep sleep again, and, although you slept longer, you will awake groggy and tired. The solution is to get up a bit earlier and feel a lot better.

As the comments suggest, there are some appliances to wake you up during an REM phase. From my experience, all you need is an alarm clock and go to bed early enough to catch enough sleep: after getting up at the same time for a couple of weeks, you'll start waking up in an REM phase before your alarm clock goes off. Just get up and don't go to sleep again, if your clock shows you are within 45 minutes of your alarm time, and keep doing so for as long as you want to keep this rhythm. Keep to the rhythm on weekends, too, for at least a month. If you feel you have fixed it, you can sleep in on free days – or rather, wake up at your usual time but stay in bed and go to sleep again.

Regular sleep (same get-up times each day) are the solution for most sleep related problems. Only when you get up regularly, can your body find and signal the ideal length of nightly total sleep. There is a huge difference between seven days of regular sleep, and six days of too little and one day of too much sleep, even when both add up to the same total length. And yes, I did not write "go to sleep regularly". What you need to do is get up regularly. Your body will tell you when you need to go to sleep, and this will vary, depending on the day you had. All you have to do is listen to it, instead of finishing that movie. Healthy sleep needs discipline, or the absence of electricity.

Sources:

No research on this, just personal experience and lots of similar anecdotes on the web. For the 90 minute sleep pattern, pick up any textbook on biological psychology, e.g. Pinel, J. P. J. (2011). Biopsychology (6th ed.). Pearson, and read the chapter on sleep.


What are some good references for preprocessing and analysis of the P300 response from EEG data in Python? I have just started to work on problems in neuroscience on my own.  I sought to analyze the P300 response from EEG data because I was trying to understand a Kaggle.com challenge that used it.  I found a few available datasets online, a couple of which were from BCI competitions, but have not been able to successfully separate the signals with the P300 response from those without the response.  So far, I have subtracted the average of a channel from the channel and run a bandpass filter on the data. This seems to produce good looking data, but looking for the associated event related potential (ERP) leads to inclusive results.

It appears that the data from the BCI competition may not be easy to analyze, but it is the most documented P300 response with available data that I can find.  That said, some of the techniques used involve mathematical functions such as principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and T-weights to find the signal and classify and analyze it.  I am aware of references available for these mathematical techniques but not in the context of neuroscience.

Furthermore, I am aware that there are some EEG analysis toolboxes for Python, but it is more important for me to understand the data than to feed it through a black box.  Also, I have found these toolboxes rather undocumented.

I don't exactly what it is you are after, but if you are looking for other analyzing techniques, you should try Independent Component Analysis (ICA). I have heard (but I do not have references) that ICA is better than PCA analyses.

A very neat (and free) Matlab toolbox that has this function is FieldTrip (http://www.fieldtriptoolbox.org/). It is a nicely documented toolbox, including an easy to follow walk through and multiple tutorials, starting from reading in the EEG data, all the way to statistical analyses. FieldTrip is probably your best bet in finding the P300 differences, and still understanding what happens with the data (since you have to specify everything yourself).


How do neurons limit their input current? I know that many neurons have an input current-spiking frequency (I-F) relationships, e.g. as seen here.

However, all the I-F curves I've encountered show the input current in a fairly small range (few pA or nA), suggesting that there is no limit to this behavior.

However, if the current is increased indefinitely, there is a point where the membrane voltage does not recover to the resting, or smaller, potential. For example, here are voltage traces of a simulated mitral cell:

At 0.1nA:

0.5nA:

1nA:

10nA:

How do neurons limit the amount of current that enters the cell? If the cell is large, with many incoming synapses, it seems like there would be stimuli that could result in "too many channels" open at the same time. How do cells ensure the input current remains within the acceptable range?

Current is Voltage (driving potential) times conductance.  As the membrane potential approaches the Nernst potential of the conductance, the current approaches 0.  Conductances can be turned on or off through receptor binding, but there is no such thing as voltage-independent current injection (at least under physiologically relevant conditions).

Indeed, it is the case that if you artificially inject large amplitudes of current into neurons, you observe voltage traces similar to your simulations.  This will very quickly lead to cell death.


Is it possible to think in a second language? Those who have learned a second language are guaranteed to consciously think of words and their corresponding meaning in your native language or vice versa.

This is common with more "complex" sentences, like "My favorite color is green.", rather than "Hi" or "Hello, how are you?" (The latter being a common phrase, so it needs no thinking in most languages.).

Is it possible to stop the conscious act of translating your native language to your second language or vice versa?
Is it possible to fully "think" in your second language?

Clarification: When you speak your native language you rarely think about the grammar and structure and it comes right out, I'm asking if that's possible with people who learned multiple languages.. can you think as if that language was native to you?

Further clarification: You know how a beginner of a foreign language usually cannot speak rapid-fire and has to think through every word and it's syntax, instead of making a flow of words automatically, you have to 'think' and fill in each word accordingly.

Example: When a person who natively speaks English  talks, they can talk without having to think of word meanings as it is already implicitly processed by your sub-conscious.. but this flow usually stops when you..

Another example: Person A doesn't use the word "condescending" a lot, and has to return to the definition in her memory. She usually doesn't meet condescending people. She has met a person who has this attribute. In an argument she says "You're so --pause--, umm, hmm..", and in her mind she goes through a list of words (Mean, (I had to pause here to find a word for the example..) Defiant, Rude, etc.) until she reaches condescending.

That is the feeling of "thinking" I'm describing. A new learner of a second language has to "think" through everything, and my question is: Can you "think" in a second language without having to find and link words in your native language? Excluding young people exposed to both, but people who took classes and moved to a country to learn.

It is possible for some people to think in a second language. And given that you are asking about possibility, to some extent anecdotes are evidence.

Many children who change linguistic communities at a young age lose the ability to talk in their first language. This is particularly the case where the first language is different to the language in which parents speak to their children.
In less extreme cases I have friends who came to an English speaking country at a young age, but still retained the ability to speak in their native language. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the time, they speak English. I assume that at a certain point, they switched from primarily thinking in their native language to primarily thinking in English. One friend mentioned the experience of when at around age 14, his dreams began to switch from being in Polish to being in English.

I guess the interesting question is whether there are limits to this, such as when the second language is not learnt until teenage years or adulthood.

In terms of a few hypotheses, I would think that ability to think in a second language would be linked to (a) greater fluency with the second language which in turn would be linked to experience and training and (b) specific primary training in the content of the thoughts in the second language (e.g., if you study a subject at university in the second language and thus you may know the terms better in the second language). Also from my limited experience of learning French, it felt like there was a degree of choice whereby I could actively try to think in French. That said, the cognitive associations between underlying concept, English word, and French word were pretty strong. Thus, the subjective experience of thinking in French and translating from English to French was often subtle.

Note also that I'd still be interested in any research that has specifically studied this phenomena.


What is a science concept that we can teach preschoolers that's purely visual? We are trying to develop a scientific study to test preschoolers (3-5 years old) ability to learn a new science concept. The problem is that children that young can only remember concepts based on how they look but cannot remember any abstract information. So we are trying to find a science concept that can be taught to young children purely visually (feature based), that they can remember and then be tested on. What is a good example of this?

Example of a purely visual concept. (Differentiating species based on features):

Consider showing a visual representation of the Earth-Moon-Sun system: either with videos or with globes.

Show a globe of the Earth, that it's round but looks flat up close, and that it spins.
Show that the Sun is also round, much larger than the Earth, but very far away, and looks like a circle from far away.
Show that the moon is also round, smaller than Earth, but not as far away (people have been there, the landing spots can be pointed to at night, and there are pictures of Earth from the Moon)
Show that the Moon orbits the Earth, that's why there are moon phases (notice how the lit side is always pointing towards the Sun) and the moon disappears every month (the Sun outshines the Moon when they coincide in the sky)
Show that the Earth orbits the Sun (this one is harder to intuitively demonstrate)
Show that the Earth axis has a tilt, and that's why there are seasons (might be stretch).
Then to really challenge them, you could even tell that some people don't believe any of this, and instead they believe that the Earth is flat and argue with each other about various details of how it's flat.


Why do people fear statistically unlikely things? Over 10 times more people die in circulatory diseases than accidents (source). Nevertheless people (in general) fear accidents more than circulatory disease.  There are statistically even more unlikely things that people fear, such as lightning.

What is the reason for this?

One thing that came to my mind is that these unlikely things are reported more in the media, but there must also be something else behind this.

This is a great question.  There isn't a single reason for this phenomenon.

There is a genetic predisposition to certain fears.  Though humans are bad at statistics, evolution is quite good at it.  So if there is a benefit to having a fear response to something, whereby it increases the chances of survival to reproduction, then it is more likely to propagate.  The trouble with evolution however, is that it's slow, and depends on survival to reproduction to work, which is not as relevant as it used to be.  So humans are predisposed to fear snakes, heights, and lightning, because this fear increased the chance of survival in our evolutionary past.  A fear of circulatory disease was not an evolutionary advantage at the time, and arguably still isn't, but in any case, evolution has not had sufficient time to catch up.

Genetics are not the only cause of fears, as learning also plays an important role.  This was clearly demonstrated by the seminal Little Albert Experiment in which a fear of rabbits (very uncommon in practice) was induced in a baby through classical conditioning.  This experiment is no longer ethical to replicate, but it showed that humans can be taught to fear just about anything.  This results in individual differences in fears and phobias that depend on personal experience rather than objective statistical likelihood.  Thus, a fear of something with immediate effects, such as failure or embarrassment, is more likely to develop through learning than a fear of something with long-term effects, such as smoking or junk food.

Classical conditioning is also important in understanding the impact of presentation - as mentioned, the way a fear is presented can influence it as well.  Fears that more closely resemble or are otherwise associated with other things we already fear are more likely to take hold than abstract ones that we can't relate to.  So the key to fears such as radiation, asteroid impact, or aliens, really has to do with framing them in a manner that we can understand.

The role of learning is evident in cultural differences in common fears as well.  As you rightly pointed out, media plays a role in this, but importantly, media emphasizes different fears in different cultures, so it is presumably influenced by what each culture is attuned to.  Additionally, fear is often used in politics and marketing, so cultural differences may be partially driven by needs and goals of government and corporations for example.  This may be why - at least in developed countries - a fear of terrorism is more likely than a fear of ecological disaster for example.  Similarly, an issue with market-driven news is that it tends to focus on particularly rare events, such as child abductions, shark bites, and plane crashes, making them seem more common than they are.

Many other factors, such as memory and cognitive biases, influence the likelihood of developing a particular fear, but hopefully this gives you the sense that objective statistical likelihood is not the only factor.


Is our attention attracted by bright lights? Bright lights are often used to attract human attention. For example, brightly lit signs, despite often being too bright to look at directly are often used for information and/or advertisement.

Why does this attraction to light occur? I don't see a good reason like how our eyes are attracted to movement, so what's the benefit of it?

In general, evidence suggests that we are attracted to contrast rather than brightness (luminance). For example, the onset of a bright light on a dark background is often used as an exogenous cue for visual attention, but a dark cue on a bright background works just as well. So, signs generally aim to be high contrast against their background. Contrast shows where things change, and hence it is picked up by the visual system for determining edges and objects of importance.

A more specific answer to your question is provided by Vincent et al., 2008. This paper, "Do we look at lights?..." includes discussion of the debate about whether visual saliency attracts attention and eye movements. The short answer is that, while saliency does correlate with where we look, on average and in specific circumstances, it depends a lot on our current task demands and the context. You won't look up at the sun if you are looking for your friend in a crowd.


Is it truly necessary to upgrade Tononi's criteria of consciousness in the Integrated Information theory? I am referring specifically to a very recent paper by Max Tegmark.
In this paper he proposes 3 more criteria (independence, dynamics, and utility principle) in addition to Tononi's original criteria (information and integration).

I have seen the paper being discussed in Hacker News, reddit's r/neurophilosophy, and lesswrong, but I think they are mostly light jabs on the actual content of Tegmark's proposal.

Yes in science all things are constantly upgraded. My main concern is that Tegmark's level of specificity has not been validated through peer review so it may be faulty and not suitable to build future theories.

As Rex Kerr points out in examining Tononi's general criteria I'd consider Tegmark's criteria more specific expositions rather than purely novel information. Further specification beyond Tegmark's work seems to be necessary to define consciousness beyond primary like metacognition.

I don't see how a group of conscious individuals like a society having a collective consciousness by sharing information and integrating it into commonality like works of governance, science and art are differentiated from a conscious individual by either Tononi's or Tegmark's current level of specificity.

Edelman, G. M., Tononi, G. (2000). A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books


What are the effects of the "blue eyes/brown eyes" racism exercise? In the "blue eyes/brown eyes" exercise created by Jane Elliott in the 1960s, she divided a group of schoolchildren by eye color and characterized one of them (e.g., the blue eyed group) as an inferior group. The aim of the exercise is to show how racism works and how it feels to be discriminated against.

Is the exercise effective? What are the psychological consequences of it? Does the exercise still "work" today? What are the ethics when this exercise is done with adults or children?

In addition to the descriptions of these particular students, at the site mentioned above by Kate Gladstone and also shown a bit in the documentary (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott)

You might consider what's known from the broader set of studies using this type of manipulation. This rich literature is valuable for your question because the Blue eyes/Brown eyes study was more a demonstration than a study and has not been repeated much (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_group_paradigm)


How does raw IQ change over the lifespan at the group-level? In the classic review of intelligence research (Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns), Neisser et al (1996) write the following

  Stability. Intelligence test scores are fairly stable during
  development. When Jones and Bayley (1941) tested a sample of children
  annually throughout childhood and adolescence, for example, scores
  obtained at age 18 were correlated r = .77 with scores that had been
  obtained at age 6 and r = .89 with scores from age 12. When scores
  were averaged across several successive tests to remove short-term
  fluctuations, the correlations were even higher. The mean for ages 17
  and 18 was correlated r = .86 with the mean for ages 5, 6, and 7, and
  r = .96 with the mean for ages 11, 12, and 13. (For comparable
  findings in a more recent study, see Moffitt, Caspi, Harkness, &
  Silva, 1993.) Nevertheless, IQ scores do change over time. In the same
  study (Jones & Bayley, 1941), the average change between age 12 and
  age 17 was 7.1 IQ points; some individuals changed as much as 18
  points.

Typically, IQ scores are standardised for age and thus remove age related differences.

My question is

What is the  relationship between age and raw intelligence test score at the group-level from around age 5 and into adultyhood?

From what I've read, I understand that at the group-level intelligence increases monotonically with age during childhood and that it levels-off at some point (perhaps around 18?). Also, below a certain age (e.g., in infancy), completely different tests are required to measured intelligence. I also understand that individuals may experience various trajectories (e.g., some might plateau earlier, etc.), but I'm interested in the group-level. Thus, an ideal answer would probably provide a sense of the functional form of the increase in intelligence over childhood and adolescence.

My first thought for an answer was to look at the test manual for a standardised child intelligence test, such as the WISC, but I don't currently have easy access to that.

References

Jones, H. E., and Bayley, N. (1941). The Berkeley Growth Study. Child
Development, 12, 167-173.
Moffitt, T. E., Gabrielli, W. F., Mednick, S. A., & Schulsinger, E (1981).
Socioeconomic status, IQ, and delinquency. Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 90, 152-156.
Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T. J., Boykin, A. W., Brody, N.,
Ceci, S. J., Halpern, D. F., Loehlin, J. C., Perloff, R., Sternberg, R.
J., and Urbina, S. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American
Psychologist, 51:77-101. FREE PDF

In general, the introduction section of McArdle et al (2002) provides a good literature review on the topic (see link to PDF in references).

Early research by Jones and Conrad (1933)

McArdle et al (2002) extract a quote from Jones and Conrad's (1933) summary of the literature based on large cross-sectional studies and also the classic Army alpha tests:

  "The chief characteristic of the curve may be summarized as involving
  a linear growth to about 16 years, and a negative acceleration beyond
  16 to a peak between the ages of 18 and 21. A decline follows,
  which is much more gradual than the curve of growth, but which by
  the age of 55 involves a recession to the 14-year level. (p. 239)"

Cattell on Crystalised and Fluid Intelligence

Also, see Figure 1 in McArdle et al (2002) which extracts a diagram from Cattell (1987) that shows Cattell's theorised relationship between age and two types of intelligence, crystalised and fluid. The theory suggests that fluid intelligence increases at a faster rate and peaks at around 18 and then shows a steady decline, whereas crystalised intelligence increases throughout the life span, with the rate of learning decreasing over time, and arguably approaching a plateau around 50 before commencing a very gradual decline around 60.

References

Cattell, R. B. (1987). Intelligence: Its structure, growth and action. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Jones, H. E., & Conrad, H. S. (1933). The growth and decline of intelli-
gence: A study of a homogeneous group between the ages of ten and
sixty. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 13(1), 223–275
McArdle, J., Ferrer-Caja, E., Hamagami, F., and Woodcock, R. (2002).
Comparative longitudinal structural analyses of the growth and decline
of multiple intellectual abilities over the life span. Developmental
Psychology, 38(1):115.
FREE PDF

NOTE: After posting the question, I did a little research and found the above research. I've self-awarded the answer for sake of closure, but I'm happy to award to someone else with a better answer.


Does the Rubik's Cube increase mental ability? Does becoming efficient in the cube help build your brain to be able to do other tasks better? What tasks and how?

Don't know of any research on the Rubik's Cube specifically. I did find this (https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00750) but it looks like it was a presentation given by a mathematician at a mathematics conference, and it doesn't look like any actual experiment was performed to test the things that are being claimed. So I wouldn't take it seriously.

However, I would be surprised if practicing Rubick's Cubes actually did improve general cognitive function. Improving at specific tasks like brain-training apps usually doesn't improve general cognitive function (although evidence is still somewhat mixed), it makes you better at those tasks. Arguably, the mixed results can be explained by the fact that participants' performance will look look like an improvement in general cognitive function if you measure it in a task similar to the one that was practiced.

So in short, my expectation would be that it would generalize to very similar tasks, if anything at all. However, no one's actually done it, so if you try it and get results it'd be publishable, and if you want to form your own opinion the literature to look at would be cognitive training.


Concept maps. What exactly they are? I would like you to recommend me a definitive book about concept maps. I've been taking a look to a wide variety but none of them seemed clear to me.

From wikipedia :

  A concept map or conceptual diagram is a diagram that depicts
  suggested relationships between concepts. It is a graphical tool that
  designers, engineers, technical writers, and others use to organize
  and structure knowledge.

  A concept map typically represents ideas and information as boxes or
  circles, which it connects with labeled arrows in a downward-branching
  hierarchical structure. The relationship between concepts can be
  articulated in linking phrases such as causes, requires, or
  contributes to.

The technique was first developed in 1970's by Joseph D. Novak. You can try one of his books e.g. Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations


Are there any serious neuroscientific theories of emotional valence? Could anyone tell me if there are any serious neuroscientific mechanisms that have been proposed to explain how feelings of body states take on a positive or negative character (valence)? An example biocomputational approach based on Bayesian inference can be found here. Also related to the Bayesian brain: there is evidence that dopamine communicates prediction error, which has been proposed as a unifying principle for cognition - so I was wondering whether there were any comprehensive theories applying predictive coding to emotion (i.e. valence as prediction error of interoceptive (body) perception). Of course, any theories of valence with similarly broad import would be interesting too.

There is no such universally accepted model.  It seems to me that this a specific instance of the hard problem: how can matter have a subjective experience at all?

Of course we know positive experience is associated with dopaminergic action, and often the mechanism has the evolutionary function of surviving and reproducing... and we can argue the same for noxious stimuli - they signal danger in the environment and lead to aversive behaviors.

But this still ignores the phenomenology step, between stimulus and behavior; the nature of the subjective experience.  Friston's approach is interesting.  I wonder if there is any relationship to be found betweem it and Tononi's model of consciousness (integrated informatiom theory).


What is the learning/memory type which requires active contribution called? I observed I best memorize information when I actively compile it into meaningful hierarchy. That encompasses creating PowerPoint presentations, explaining the topic to someone or writing summaries. I think my active contribution is what matters here.

For a while, I used the term social memory but I've learned it refers rather to obervational learning. So is there a term for it?

Short answer
This type of engaged learning is referred to as active learning.

Background
In contrast to the traditional, mostly passive ways of teaching (one-way lecturing), nowadays there's a trend to active learning.

  Active learning is any approach to instruction in which all students are asked to engage in the learning process. Active learning stands in contrast to "traditional" modes of instruction in which students are passive recipients of knowledge from an expert.

Markant et al (2016) explain in a review article that active learning leads to better outcomes than passive forms of instruction. They summarize that the opportunity to control the information while learning leads to improved memory. Mechanisms involved in this effect include the formation of sensorimotor associations, adaptive selection of material and metacognitive monitoring.

Active control over a learning situation results in large areas of the brain being recruited and interconnected during active exploration (source: Psych Central). For example, active exploratory behavior during the observation of objects enhances memory recall (Voss et al., 2011), resulting in enhanced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum and the hippocampus is higher and more coordinated after active learning (source: Illinois News Bureau).

References
- Markant et al  Mind, Brain, and Education Society (2016); 10(3): 142-52
- Voss et al., Nat Neurosci (2011); 14(1): 115-20


What is the optimal combination of text and background color for EEG experiments? Most studies that I know of use yellow text on blue background (though with different hues).

This choice is mostly motivated by tradition ("We always did it like that. Never touch a running system"). But is this combination really the best one?

I have found a number of studies about color combinations and readability. Some suggest that black text on white background is the best, others say white on blue, etc.

I imagine that there are specific requirements for EEG studies as they are regularly run in dim lit rooms. So a completely bright white screen maybe not the best idea, I think.

It surely does make a difference if the task is dependent on, e.g., quick word recognition or reading a short story.

And what about flat screens vs. CRT screens? Are there different optimal color combinations for these screen types?

Is there any general optimal combination?

Are you trying to measure something specific to the stimulus you are presenting or is it just a matter of displaying text on a screen where what you are measuring is unrelated to the text per se?

For instance, experiments I run depend on the stimulus presentation. We are targeting a certain visual pathway, so for example one stimulus is red/green and high contrast, the other black/white and low contrast, both on a black background. We have also run on a grey background as that can be easier for the eyes. And we also have dim lit rooms, to help amplify the signal or even lights off. Also, the stimuli are flickering at a high rate so we use a LCD monitor with a refresh rate of 120hz. We used to use CRT monitors though as the black color is blacker there then newer monitors.

It just depends on why you need to optimize it. Is it for a true signal you are recording? Or simply comfort and ease for the participant?

If it is simply for comfort, I would recommend no color, but grey background and black letters, and dimmed lights. If the contrast is too high, such as black background and white letters, this could be a strain to read over time. There is no gold standard. It's according to what your needs are.


How far can a signal travel in the neocortex without passing through the white matter? Correct me if I am wrong please, from what I understand horizontal communication spans very short distance in all layers of the neocortex but layers I and II. In these two layers dendrites and axons can travel horizontally a little farther, but how far? Also the question can have different subcases. First one, how far can one single dendrite or axon travel horizontally in the neocortex ? Second one, how far can a signal travel (possibly going through several synapses) horizontally in the neocortex?

The distance of horizontal communication depends on species, cortical region, and cortical layer. Very few combinations of those 3 factors have ever been studied. For the combinations with which I am familiar, most horizontal connections are limited to a few hundred microns, though some are as long as a few millimeters. Most of that distance is axonal because dendrites are generally much shorter than axons. Of all the connections I've read about, none span an entire region. To get across a region, a connected series of signals would have to make several hops through several neurons and across several synapses, as you suggested in your question.

The direct path of an axon connecting two cortical areas (or an axon from a subcortical area to a cortical area) is through the white matter, but sometimes an axon will additionally ascend to layer I of the target area before branching, presumably to save space. This is the main use of layer I, and the lengths of these connections is several millimeters or centimeters.

I have never heard of the longer-distance horizontal connections that you suggest occur in layer II; layers II through VI contain neurons with short horizontal and vertical connections.

References

  Alonso, J.-M. (2002) Neural Connections and Receptive Field Properties in the Primary Visual Cortex. The Neuroscientist. 8(5): 443-456.
  Feldmeyer, D. (2012) Excitatory Neuronal Connectivity in the Barrel Cortex. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy. 6: 1-22.
  Rockland, K.S. and Virga, A. (1989) Terminal Arbors of Individual Feedback Axons Projecting from Area V2 to V1 in the Macaque Monkey: A Study Using Immunohistochemistry of Anterogradely Transported Phaseolus vulgaris-leucoagglutinin. The Journal of Comparative Neurology. 285: 54-72.


Do you ever think self diagnosis is called for? I am in a situation where I can't exactly get help for my mental health issues. There are plenty, don't get me wrong, but there was one particular part of my mental health struggle that I could never...connect with anything else. I know I have trust issues and abandonment issues and so forth, but there was this one set of symptoms that kept bothering me. I like to have a name for something, even if it's not very specific, so I searched and searched to find something that fit me. Finally I stumbled upon DID, and the more research I did about the disorder the more sense everything made. Is it wrong that I did this? I just wanted answers, and I really wish that I could go to a doctor but I can't. I've heard both sides on self diagnosis and I want to see what a group of professionals would think.
By the way, I haven't told anyone but my two closest friends, so no I'm not doing it for attention. I just wanted my symptoms to...make sense.

I think this is a borderline question. As a rule of thumb, we do not answer questions about individual health problems in favor of asking the author to see a professional, for both ethical and practical reasons. And let me be absolutely unequivocal here: you should see a professional. But this is fundamentally a general question about self-diagnosis, so I'm going to answer that.

It's always good to educate yourself. Accurate self diagnosis is necessarily impossible, however―what you can see depends on what you know, and what you know depends on what you have seen, etc. This is uncontroversial. Being educated is therefore very helpful when seeing a professional, which I again strongly encourage you to do, but it is never a substitute for seeing a professional when you have problems.


What is the cause of differences that are too small to see? Consider two identical pieces of paper.

Scenario 1: On both something is drawn in black ink. If the difference between the areas covered in black ink is sufficiently small, I cannot see the difference between the two drawings.

Scenario 2: Now imagine that the same parts are covered with ink, but their color differs. Again, if the difference is sufficiently small, I cannot see the difference.

Firstly: what causes this? I am aware of the terminology of just-noticeable differences/limina, but do not understand precisely what causes them. Is there some discretization of continuous signals going on that causes `nearby signals' to be treated the same way?

Secondly: one person may have better vision than another, but are there physical constraints that are the same for any two persons and that imply that if the difference in scenario 1 or 2 is sufficiently small, no two persons will be able to see a difference?

Addenda: I phrased the question informally by not defining what a `small difference' is, trusting/hoping that this does not lead to confusion. If desired, such statements can be made precise by adopting appropriate distance functions. In scenario 1, one way to measure distance between two areas covered in ink could be to use the Hausdorff distance; likewise, one way to measure the distance between colors in the second scenario could depend on the difference in responsiveness of the three types of cone cells.

The spatial resolving capacity of the visual system is called visual acuity, namely the ability of the eye to see fine detail. There are various ways to measure and specify visual acuity, depending on the type of acuity task used.

Visual acuity is limited by

diffraction,
aberrations and
photoreceptor density in the eye.

The photoreceptor density allows a resolution that by far exceeds the limitations imposed by the other two.

Diffraction of light is an important factor limiting acuity. This is caused by optical limitations of the eye, mainly the light scattering by the cornea and other structures (Fig. 1). Raleigh’s criterion is used to calculate the resolution of the eye for stimuli that are degraded by the optics of the eye: two points or lines are just resolved if the peak of the point spread function lies on the first trough of the other point spread function (Fig. 2).

Aberrations also are an important source of image degradation on the retina. These include the well known spherical aberrations that lead to near- and far sightedness, as the retinal image becomes out of focus. These can be corrected well with glasses and lenses (Berrio et al., 2010).

Other sources that affect acuity are:

The size of the pupil; Large pupils reduce diffraction, but aggravate aberrations of the eye. A small pupil reduces optical aberrations, but resolution will be diffraction limited. Therefore, a mid-size pupil of about 3 - 5 mm is optimal as a compromise between diffraction and aberration limitarions
Illumination: photopic vision allows the cones  to operate and that yields higher acuities than rod-mediated vision (Kallioniatis & Luu (2012).
For the same reasons the area of the retina stimulated affects acuity - the cones are clustered in the center of the retina, called the fovea. Foveal acuity is much higher than peripheral vision (Kallioniatis & Luu (2012).
Time of exposure of the target causes adaptation. If the cones are adapted to the timulus, they may become less responsive and acuity drops (Kallioniatis & Luu (2012)
Eye movements degrade visual acuity as a stable retinal image is needed (Kallioniatis & Luu (2012).

References
- Kallioniatis & Luu, Visual Acuity. In: The Organization of the Retina and Visual System, 2012
- Berrio et al., JOV (2010); 10(14)

Fig. 1. Resolution limit eye. source: Kallioniatis & Luu (2012).

Fig. 2. Reigheigh criterion. source: Kallioniatis & Luu (2012)


How do we imagine? How do images have qualia? After reading a bit about qualia and hard problem of consiousness, I came up to theoretical solution. The reason why we have this problem is because we can imagine. We can imagine an object visible to us as red being green, for example. Green fire. Even if we never saw it in the reality.

But how do we imagine? How do those images have properties named by people as qualia? I can imagine a blue cube or a red cube, or a red sphere, and visual periphery is not involved here, I can do it with closed eyes.

What parts of our brain are responsible for imagination? How does the brain "give" qualia (form, color, smell, etc.) to images? What differs in my brain when I imagine a red cube from when I imagine a blue cube? And are qualia stored in our memory?

This is hardly settled science, but one hypothesis with some empirical support is that

  Visual mental imagery and perception share similar cortical representations (Cichy et al., 2012; Kosslyn, 2005; Pylyshyn, 2003). It has been proposed that, while brain forward connections convey information from the outside world, backward connections might have a dominant role during the forming of mental images in the absence of external bottom-up inputs (Ganis and Schendan, 2008; Ishai et al., 2000; Kalkstein et al., 2011; Kosslyn, 2005).

For more theoretical speculation on the neural basis of qualia you could read Orpwood (2017), although by his own admittance, his ideas (at least in the past) were not terribly clearly presented. He does discuss a theoretical example of olfactory qualia. (I'm mentioning this because you said in the comments that you want to go beyond visual ones.)

Also note that some neuroscientists think the problem of qualia is ill-posed, in that it is intrinsically dualist:

  Typically, qualia are defined by four characteristics. Qualia are private, meaning they cannot be known unless they are experienced through the first-person perspective. Qualia are intrinsic, which indicates that they are self-sufficient and independent of other items in experience. Qualia are also ineffable, signifying that the experience of qualia cannot be sufficiently conveyed through words alone. Finally, qualia are immediately accessible through consciousness, which means that knowledge of qualia is direct and certain, as opposed to knowledge of the physical world, which is indirect and logically deduced.  [...]

  This definition, unfortunately, leads us down a murky path towards dualism, a philosophical position which asserts that there are two kinds of real substances: the physical substance out of which the universe is composed, and the non-physical substance out of which the mind is composed.

Since you asked in the past about the private conceptions of word meanings (as a barrier to common sense), that kinda has the same problem.

If we just stick to qualia as brain processes/representation, regarding pain-related words, for example

  Language is more than a mere medium when it comes to share our pain experiences. In fact, it has been shown that processing pain-related words is associated with enhanced activation of part of the neural circuitry underlying physical pain experiences. [citing four references in support]

  Richter M, Eck J, Straube T, Miltner WH, Weiss T. Do words hurt? Brain activation during the processing of pain-related words. Pain. 2010 Feb;148(2):198–205. pmid:19846255
  Richter M, Schroeter C, Puensch T, Straube T, Hecht H, Ritter A, et al. Pain-related and negative semantic priming enhances perceived pain
  intensity. Pain Res Manag. 2014 Mar-Apr;19(2):69–74. pmid:24716197
  Gu X, Han S. Neural substrates underlying evaluation of pain in actions depicted in words. Behav Brain Res. 2007 Aug 6;181:218–23. pmid:17512615
  Osaka N, Osaka M, Morishita M, Kondo H, Fukuyama H. A word expressing affective pain activates the anterior cingulate cortex in the human brain: an fMRI study. Behav Brain Res. 2004 Aug 12;153:123–127. pmid:15219713

I think this is somewhat analogous to the issue of V1 involvement in visual imagery.


Are human behavior and brain dynamics well described as an optimization? A very general approach to describe the dynamics of the brain is through differential equations. Instead, one could choose a more restrictive approach and describe it as an optimization. Can we assume that observed human behavior can be explained well as an optimization of an unknown cost function? What is the scientific evidence for and against this?

Quirin et al (2020) have developed a dynamic systems approach that uses optimisation consider behaviour and personality.
Quirin, M., Robinson, M. D., Rauthmann, J. F., Kuhl, J., Read, S. J., Tops, M., and DeYoung, C. G. (2020) The Dynamics of Personality Approach (DPA): 20 Tenets for Uncovering the Causal Mechanisms of Personality. Eur. J. Pers., https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2295.


Does suppressing a desire make it more powerful? Based on my minimal knowledge of old Freudian Psychoanalysis, if our drives and urges are not met they become more powerful, even overwhelming, for the individual, perhaps causing them psychological difficulties or even causing them to then project the restriction on others. This sentiment has been echoed many times in different contexts since then and it seems to me that the modern generation operates under the assumption that trying too hard to suppress a desire is unhealthy (sexual liberation, free expression etc). It is often used, for example, as a criticism of religion that attempts to impose rules and boundaries which result in the suppression of urges and even further curiosity simply because it is forbidden. I also see many pop psychology articles about this idea.

My question is: what empirical evidence exists to support the notion that repressed desires will make them stronger? Other relevant question that may be of interest: Is it a result of human's natural curiosity? Is it intrinsic to human drive? Is it a form of obsessive-compulsive behavior? What criticism has been leveled against this theory in the Freudian version or any modern interpretations?

First of all, your question title asks about suppression and your question in the main text asks

  what empirical evidence exists to support the notion that repressed desires will make them stronger?

What you need to be careful about here is that repression is different to suppression.

Repression is unconscious/subconscious, whereas suppression is completely conscious

  repression is the term for unintentional, unconscious forgetting,
  and suppression [is] intentional, conscious removal of a thought from subsequent conscious attention. Suppression is almost never studied, whereas a wide literature has formed around the concept of repression.....

  ....Although repression and suppression processes are by no means mutually exclusive or contradictory, the interest value of repression has tended to exclude suppression from scientific study. It is in this sense that Freud was responsible for what we do not know about suppression. (Wegner, 1992)

Short Answer

Wegner, in the above referenced journal article points out a lot of evidence to back the though that any attempt to suppress thoughts or desires will be in vain as they will rebound.  Whether or not they become stronger is open to interpretation, as it is concluded that

  When the Rolling Stones sang “You can’t always get what you want,” they provided a bit of relief by adding “but if you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need.” Regrettably, their refrain rings a false note in the world of thought suppression. The research to date suggests that you can’t always think what you want, and that even if you need ever so dearly to stop thinking of something, you still may not get what you need.

Long Answer

As I said in my answer to a previous question,

  With Sigmund Freud, lot of people get hung up on the sexual elements of his theories when really, Freud’s theories centres on his motivation and drive theory and they centre on all sorts of pleasure. We are motivated towards whatever brings pleasure and are motivated away from pain, difficulty, destruction, confusion, etc.

When looking for empirical evidence, Freud's work itself is derived from empirical evidence.

  His theories are clinically derived - i.e. based on what his patients told him during therapy. (McLeod, 2007)

Repression is described by Freud by saying

  the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious. This view of repression would be made more complete by assuming that, before the mental organization reaches this stage, the task of fending off instinctual impulses is dealt with by the other vicissitudes which instincts may undergo - e.g. reversal into the opposite or turning round upon the subject’s own self. (Freud, 1915/1957)

There are 2 parts to repression,

Primal Repression

  a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious. With this fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it. (Freud, 1915/1957)

Repression Proper

  second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure [Nachdrängen]. (Freud, 1915/1957)

You Can't Always Think What You Want: Problems in the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts (Wegner, 1992) is an article covering articles etc. from Freud onwards.

What you need to be careful about here is that repression is different to suppression.

Repression is unconscious/subconscious, whereas suppression is completely conscious

  repression is the term for unintentional, unconscious forgetting,
  and suppression [is] intentional, conscious removal of a thought from subsequent conscious attention. Suppression is almost never studied, whereas a wide literature has formed around the concept of repression.....

  ....Although repression and suppression processes are by no means mutually exclusive or contradictory, the interest value of repression has tended to exclude suppression from scientific study. It is in this sense that Freud was responsible for what we do not know about suppression. (Wegner, 1992)

Now think about suppression in a quote provided by Wegner in the above article.

  Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions)

Conscious efforts to suppress unwanted thoughts are reported by normal individuals (Rachman & de Silva, 1978), as well as by those suffering from problems such as

depression (Turner, Beidel, & Nathan, 1985),
anxiety and worry (Borkovec, Robinson, Pruzinsky, & DePree, 1983),
obsessions and compulsions (Rachman & Hodgson, 1980; Reed, 1985),
addiction (Marlatt & Parks, 1982),
obesity (Polivy, 1990), and
posttraumatic stress (Ellis, 1983; Horowitz, 1975; Pennebaker, 1988; Tait & Silver, 1989)

and is employed for the purposes of action inhibition (behavioural self-control), communication inhibition (e.g. keeping secrets), and emotional inhibition (e.g. to remain calm in stressful situations) (Wegner, 1992).

The suppression cycle

The exercise of continuous thought suppression is reminiscent of the task of
Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth who was condemned forever to push a stone up a mountain only to have it roll back down. As a rule, people asked to suppress a thought (e.g., of a white bear) while they deliver verbal reports of their thinking show a cyclic sequence of activities with precisely this up-and-down character (Wegner et al., 1987). Suppression begins with a plan to self-distract (e.g., “Okay, I’ll think of something else”), continues with the choice of a distracter (e.g., “I’ll think about the telephone”) and a period of concentration on distracter-relevant thoughts (e.g., “This phone is a portable, etc.”), and is completed with an intrusive return of the suppressed thought (e.g., “There’s the white bear again”). The cycle then repeats with a return to the plan to self-distract (i.e., “Okay, I’ll think of something else”).

Interestingly, according to Wegner (1992), Knutson (1990) found, that people asked to shut their eyes and report their thinking during suppression indicate more frequent occurrences of the unwanted thought than those allowed to keep their eyes open.

Automatic Target Search

This is the operation of an automatic search for the unwanted thought during suppression.  For example,

  an undergraduate student I asked to think aloud while she tried not to think of the Statue of Liberty began talking about the books on the wall of the room and in a matter of moments mentioned that one was just the greenish tint of the Statue (Wegner, 1992).

All of the above information points to the fact that any attempt to suppress thoughts or desires will be in vain as they will rebound.

  Suppression is a street battle raging in the forefront of the mind, not a few random muggings hidden deep in its alleyways (Wegner, 1992).

References

Borkovec, T. D., Robinson, E., Pruzinsky, T., & DePree, J. A. (1983). Preliminary exploration of worry: Some characteristics and processes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 21: pp. 9—16.PMID: 6830571

Ellis, E. M. (1983). A review of empirical rape research: Victim reactions and response to treatment. Clinical Psychology Review. 3: pp. 473—490.DOI: 10.1016/0272-7358(83)90025-9

Freud, S. (1957). Repression. In: J. Stachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 146—158) London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1915)

Horowitz, M. (1975). Intrusive and repetitive thoughts after experimental stress. Archives of General Psychiatry, 32: pp. 1457—1463.DOI: 10.1001/archpsyc.1975.01760290125015

Knutson, B. (1990). Thought suppression and access to distraction. Unpublished research data, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.Available by emailing: knutson'at'stanford.edu

Marlatt, G. P., & Parks, G. A. (1982). Self-management of addictive behaviors. In: P. Karoly & F. H. Kanfer (Eds.), Self-management and behavior change (pp. 443—488). New York: Pergamon.

McLeod, S. (2007). Psychodynamic Approach. Simply Psychology [Online]Available at: https://www.simplypsychology.org/psychodynamic.html

Pennebaker, J. W. (1988). Confession, inhibition, and disease. In: L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 22). San Diego: Academic Press.

Polivy, J. (1990). Inhibition of internally-cued behavior. In: E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition (Vol. 2, pp. 131—147). New York: Guilford.

Rachman, S., & de Silva, P. (1978). Abnormal and normal obessions. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 16: pp. 233—248DOI: 10.1016/0005-7967(78)90022-0

Rachman, S., & Hodgson, R. J. (1980). Obsessions and compulsions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Reed, G. F. (1985). Obsessional experience and compulsive behavior. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

Tait, R., & Silver, R. C. (1989). Coming to terms with major negative life events. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 351—382). New York: Guilford.

Turner, S . M., Beidel, D. C., & Nathan, R. S . (1985). Biological factors in obsessive-compulsive disorders. Psychological Bulletin, 97: pp. 430—450.DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.97.3.430

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S., 111, & White, L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: pp. 5—13.DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5

Wegner, D. M. (1992). You Can't Always Think What You Want: Problems in the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25: pp. 193—225DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60284-1


Can one learn not to panic? How? It's always impressive to listen to the professionalism of a commercial pilot communicating in a crisis situation, apparently remaining calm and in control in terrifying circumstances, with terrible responsibility. I imagine this occurs because (a) the industry does not promote those who panic to this position and (b) pilots practice a great deal in simulators, learning to cope with crisis calmly.

Am I imagining correctly, here?

To what extent can practice (b) overcome a deficiency in (a) a natural tendency to calmness?

Does practice at staying cool in one field (say, making decisions during play of a fast computer game) transfer to staying cool generally (say, being accosted by an aggressive stranger on the street)?

I read What characterises people who stay calm in crisis situations? and that does relate (a) to calmness in a crisis but I don't think it says anything about (b).

I believe that there is a fundamental flaw in your scenario in that, pilots are not promoted to being a pilot from being something else. Pilots take intensive training courses that may include simulation training and do include many hours of practice in an actual aeroplane, under supervision of a trained instructor.

To more generally answer your question:

  Can one learn not to panic?

Yes, using behavioural training techniques we can train ourselves, or be trained by others, to respond to situations or stimuli in a different way than is our instinctive reaction.

With the situation you noted about pilots, a trained pilot will have all of the knowledge of how to deal with a situation that they may encounter and will have practiced this knowledge in an applied setting (an actual plane) many times, making the training become the pilots first response to a dangerous situation (Exposure Therapy, and  Repetitive Learning are some ways of doing this).

A novel situation can also be trained for. In your scenario, I would suspect that their training would include an emergency checklist type of activity that would then be repeated over and over so that it is ingrained in their memory and behaviours and will also become the pilots first response to a novel dangerous situation.

How to learn not to panic is really all about training your brain to behave in a different way then its instincts tell it to, this may or may not mean that you totally remove the instinctive fear response.


Are there useful applications for three channel consumer EEG? I stumbled upon the consumer EEG Melon (at Kickstarter). It has three electrodes and is advertised as measuring how "focused" you are. In the FAQ it says:

  The Melon headband has three electrodes. Our primary electrode is on the forehead region known as FP1, where Melon can monitor brainwave activity from the prefrontal cortex.

I wonder: What can I measure with such an EEG? What applications would be unlikely?

How can "focus" be quantified?
Would it be possible to identify (different) states of sleep?
Could it be possible to control a cursor/game (left/right movements)?

Point by point:

  The Melon headband has three electrodes. Our primary electrode is on the forehead region known as FP1, where Melon can monitor brainwave activity from the prefrontal cortex.

The problem with this is that electricity doesn't work like that. Current always flows between two points, and our electrodes measure the potential between two locations. After its discovery by Tönnies somewhere in 1938, most EEG amplifiers have been of the differential amplifier design. That means every electrode recording is made up of 3 different sites: the Ground electrode, the Reference, and the target site. What is being reported as activity at FPz is truly ((FPz-Ground) - (Reference-Ground)).
What this entails is that our measurement at the so-called active electrode is not an isolated measure of the activity directly under that electrode alone, but a mix of the activity underlying multiple sites. So what you observe in such a setup is highly dependent on where your Reference is located. I couldn't find where the Melon's Reference sits, but it has to be somewhere on the headband. The headband encircles the skull, and all of the positions allowed by the headband are over cortical areas.
Typical locations for Reference are Cz, Nose or the average, neither of which are possible or meaningful in a 3-electrode headband context. Possibly, the reference is located over the temporal or occipital lobes.

So what the Melon will report as activity at FPz will in truth be a mix between activity at FPz, and activity at some further site also above the cortex. (It is possible they placed their Ground very close to the Reference, which is a very unusual setup ...)

Furthermore, individual electrodes never pick up isolated brain sites. Electrical fields, as those projected by cortical clusters firing in synchrony, are propagated field-like. Every recording site therefore picks up a distinct mix of all of the brain. The activity of sites closer to the electrode will be somewhat stronger since field strength falls off with the square of distance, but the part of the cortex directly under the electrode will still be overwhelmed by the summed activity of everything next to and below it.
All the more so as the strongest activity patterns of the cortex come from the occipital lobes - the so-called alpha rhythm. Alpha usually dominates the cortical activity, as it is a simple synchronized firing.

Moreover, alpha will most likely be artificially reenforced on the Melon by the site of reference, since depending on where the reference is placed, it will necessarily be closer to the occipital lobe than FPz, FPz receives alpha with the inverted polarity of most of the scalp, and subtracting from the residual inverted alpha at FPz the alpha from the reference will lead to substantial alpha effects.

Both of these problems are well known since basically the beginning of the EEG, since Hans Berger himself, discoverer of the EEG, already stumbled on the phenomenon that regardless of where he put his two electrodes (Berger never really got around to appreciating Tönnies' proposal), he'd see very similar activity. Berger's interpretation was that all of the brain partially does basically the same thing, everything in the brain is partially united by one huge common shared oscillatory pattern - alpha.
The activity associated specifically with frontal sites, especially the theta rhythm, is much weaker. Extracting just prefrontal theta activity can be a very hard task, as one can tell from the elaborate methods employed by papers trying to isolate just that, such as this and this.

What especially the second paper will show you however is the most dominant activity at FPz: eye blinks. Here I'm showing you activity from FPz in an experiment of mine.

What you mostly see in the top right image are the red dots. Each of these is a blink by our subject. You see that the dots totally overwhelm the overall activity. The spectrum below gives the same information: it's a simple power-law spectrum with almost all power in very low frequencies, without a specific peak in a frequency range such as theta or alpha.

  I wonder: What can I measure with such an EEG? What applications would be unlikely?
  How can "focus" be quantified?

Interestingly, this might even be possible, since one of the best EEG predictors of focus is alpha amplitude. The distinct prefrontal cortex signals however are not very important here. Rather, the alpha signal is.
Alpha is a very rough indicator of attentiveness, and you'll always get less information out of a single sensor than by simple introspection ("do I feel droopy?"). But you might get a rough correlate of current awareness from looking at alpha power, assuming you position the thing so you get as much alpha out of it as possible (ie., not over FPz). The research in this regard is still in the explorative stage, much before you'd rely on the systems. See for a few examples: a three-channel system like the Melon; a 4-channel system; 14 electrodes.
When I say "it is possible" to do that using a 3-channel system, I do not mean it is possible right now. Nobody has that technology yet. Rather, it might become possible in the future. Although even then I'd rather hope for a larger sensor array.
Note also that these are still very rough guesses - they can tell you if you're drowsy or not, if you are currently falling asleep or not. They won't be able to distinguish more subtle states.

  Would it be possible to identify (different) states of sleep?

I'll have to pass on this one. I'm not a sleep expert. I think the location of the Melon is wrong though.

  Could it be possible to control a cursor/game (left/right movements)?

Possibly - if you place it so that your eye movements reflect as strong positive and negative currents. From brain activity? No. Movement decoding requires much more sensors over very different sites. Motor areas are closer to the middle of the brain, roughly speaking, and that's where you'd need very dense electrode coverage to see anything.

Postscript edit: a few references for decoding movement intentions using (multichannel) EEG. As you see, even with multichannel, high-quality EEG, performance is not especially good.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2014.00222/abstract
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00124/full


Test to evaluate attention in Autism I am looking for the most reliable and widely used tests for attention measurement in autistic persons. Can anybody help me to find such tests? I have read about some IQ tests including DAS, WASI and their sub-tests, however I didn't find any related sub-test to attention.

You don't say what language you want the tests to be in, so I'm assuming English.

In the book Evidence-Based Assessment in ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), author Kenneth J. Aitken "describes and analyses a wide range of available Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) assessment measures". The chapter on "Attention" lists the following tests:

Conners' Continuous Auditory Test of Attention (CATA)
Conners' Continuous Performance Test II - Third Revision (CCPT 3)
d2 Test of Attention (d2)
Sustained Attention to Response Test (SART)
Test of Everyday Attention (TEA)
Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch)
Test for Variables of Attention - 8th Edition 2015 (TOVA-8.2)

The book also explains what kind of attention each test assesses, why the test is useful in relation to Autism, and research findings.

You may want to check your local university or public library to look into a copy of that book.

There are many widely used, valid, and reliable tests of attention that an experienced clinician or researcher can use to assess attention in a patient with Autism. Just open any recent handbook or textbook on either attention or Autism and see what measures they use and describe.


Miscarriage throwing potential shadow on life of next child I came across this description in a biographical sketch of Emmanuel Macron, the currently leading candidate in the coming French presidential election (translation from German courtesy of Google translate.)

  On 21 December 1977, Emmanuel Macron came to the world just under a
  year after a miscarriage, which almost killed his mother. She was in a
  coma and needed a long time to finish the tragedy on the lost child.
  Emmanuel had therefore "almost a mission" at his birth, Fulda quoted
  his mother. It is tempting, Macron's desire to please everyone, to the
  shadow of this sister, who was still dead in the mother's womb, says
  the author.

Does this family situation have a well-defined name among psychologists and if so, is there a study about such cases that can be recommended?

If they knew the gender it was more likely to be a stillbirth than a miscarriage.

As a mother of a stillborn child, and as a psychologist, I've been interested in research on the trauma involved, but have found only a few medical papers and no serious empirical work in psychology. There is some grief literature but a lot of the accent is on 'everyone grieves differently', whereas my impression is that the trauma involved leads to quite a decisive set of commonalities among the bereaved. But I have never seen a professional, empirically informed description of these commonalities in the case of early child loss.

The next child is a big theme in the bereaved parents community (they call them 'rainbow babies', in case you want to Google). One thing I've heard from a neonatologist working with parents in this situation, is that anxiety about the next baby is usually very high, even after birth, even when everything is clearly all right. It seems to take several years to get back to baseline (even in the absence of another child).

Sorry for the anecdotal reply, I wish I had some empirical articles to back my observations. The overarching belief used to be that stillbirth is something a women can get over easily, and that it's best if the baby is not mentioned by anybody. This used to be the medical approach a few decades back, and it is only now that parents (usually mothers) are speaking up, doctors are listening, and the psychological profession yet has to follow in a serious way.

I think your best chance of catching some new research is by following perinatal ptsd research. Perhaps the old school psychoanalysts have had thoughts about this as well, but I haven't come across them.

Hopefully someone will prove me wrong and give you an answer with proper references.


Bounds on skew and kurtosis of IQ The question of whether IQ is Normally distributed, or instead follows e.g. a Pearson type IV distribution, has been debated since at least the 1910s. The quotient- and deviation-based definitions give rise to very different eras in that debate, of course. (However, the distribution of an integer-valued IQ cannot be exactly Normal, even on a deviation-based definition.) A Normal distribution is uniquely characterised by its mean $\mu$ and standard deviation $\sigma$. Its next two moments are the skew $\gamma_1=0$ and excess kurtosis $\kappa_\text{excess}=0$. To disambiguate, I've defined

$$\gamma_1=\mathbb{E}\bigg(\tfrac{X-\mu}{\sigma}\bigg)^3,\,\kappa_\text{excess}:=\mathbb{E}\bigg(\tfrac{X-\mu}{\sigma}\bigg)^4-3.$$

By contrast, a Pearson type IV distribution requires all four moments to be specified.

While we can't literally prove $\gamma_1=\kappa_\text{excess}=0$ empirically, we can constrain such quantities. Have any empirical studies provided either upper or lower bounds on these moments of the IQ distribution (or something analogous such as another quantification estimating psychometric $g$), on either the quotient or deviation definition? In the interests of keeping this question appropriate to the site, I don't care what method of defining or measuring IQ was assumed in a particular study, so there's no need to take a stance on that.

There are studies where higher order moments are analyzed. Just off the top of my head, see (Johnson, Carothers, Deary, 2008). The actual point of this study was to examine the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis (which the data was found to be strongly consistent with), however they also analyzed the distributions of ability more generally. They analyze the Scottish Mental Survey data, which tested essentially all children of Scotland of a given age. They find that the distribution is definitely unsymmetrical with more people below the mode. Here is the relevant part of the abstract:

  ... Clear analysis of the actual distribution of
  general intelligence based on large and appropriately
  population-representative samples is rare, however. Using
  two population-wide surveys of general intelligence in
  11-year-olds in Scotland, we showed that there were substantial
  departures from normality in the distribution,
  with less variability in the higher range than in the lower.
  Despite mean IQ-scale scores of 100, modal scores were
  about 105... This is consistent with a model
  of the population distribution of general intelligence as a
  mixture of two essentially normal distributions, one reflecting
  normal variation in general intelligence and one
  reflecting normal variation in effects of genetic and environmental
  conditions involving mental retardation.

See the study for further discussion around kurtosis and skewness. They also reference other studies you may find valuable.


What Field of Behaviorial Psychology Deals with Technology? How the Application of Pyschology can Improve Something Like Computers My real question is where can I find people to discuss topics in this area of study - the application of behavioral psychology on technology and computers.  For example, can we use what we know about the physiology of the brain and the psychology of humans to make better software?

I know that behavioral psychology is starting to be applied to the areas of economics.  Is it being applied in other areas like technology?  How would I be able to form discussion groups with people interested in this topic?

Thank you for any guidance that you can provide.

What you are looking for is not so much a 'sub-field', as they are cross-disciplinary fields of researchers who borrow from different fields, including computer science and psychology.

Human factors:

  Human factors and ergonomics (commonly referred to as human factors) is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. The goal of human factors is to reduce human error, increase productivity, and enhance safety and comfort with a specific focus on the interaction between the human and the thing of interest.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI):

  Human–computer interaction (HCI) studies the design and use of computer technology, focused on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. Researchers in the field of HCI observe the ways in which humans interact with computers and design technologies that let humans interact with computers in novel ways. As a field of research, human–computer interaction is situated at the intersection of computer science, behavioural sciences, design, media studies, and several other fields of study.

We have a hci tag on this site.

Information science:

  Practitioners within and outside the field study application and usage of knowledge in organizations along with the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding information systems. Historically, information science is associated with computer science, psychology, technology and intelligence agencies.


Are there psychiatric medications that have an anti-tolerance effect? Patients usually develop tolerance to their psychiatric medications when used over a long period of time. This is because of how the brain gets used to the dosage in order to reach equilibrium again. Are there any that have an anti-tolerance effect? Which means over time you would need less and less of the medication to get the same effect?

I don't know of any drug therapy that becomes less with use, especially for treatment of psychological disorders. The only instance I would know of is an individual is attempting to remove a medication to try something new/ different. The basic reasoning is described below.

There is an understanding of the pharmacodynamics of how the drugs or medications are believed to behave when interacting with the brain. Receptor cites can also be a factor, and will depend on if the medication is believed to be an agonistic action, or an antagonistic action (does it block receptors from uptake, or does it increase?). Either way, the neurobiology of the brain at the synapse of the neurotransmitter is believed to change, and the amount of certain chemicals could change as well.

Another few contributing factors would be how the therapeutic range for the medication is thought of by the pharmacological community, or how much dosage an individual needs for the medication to be therapeutic. Anyone that has been on a medication longer-term might experience withdraw effects when reducing the medication because the brain isn't able to take over production of the "needed" neurotransmitters. A half-life discusses how long the drug will remain in the body, and at what point it might stop the therapeutic range, which is why some dosing is over several ingestion cycles verses an extended release.

I highly recommend the book "A Primer of Drug Action" by Julien, Adcokat and Comaty (2011) for further reading. It describes a lot of medications and drugs. There are a variety of understandings of these medications and drugs currently.


Time pressure and learning What are the effects of time pressure (salient vs. non-salient) and learning? Salient time pressure is basically when you have a countdown timer in front of you. Non salient time pressure would be when you have a timer going off after some preordained times (making a beep). Would the salient time pressure induce a person to do something more efficiently? Or would it be a distraction?
Sophie Leroy has shown that switching tasks incurs a cost. In particular, there is attentional residue from the previous task. Time pressure, she shows, may help with this. It provides closure to a task. But what are the effects of time pressure on learning? I guess testing is a type of time pressure activity that is one of the best ways to learn.
References
W Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Vol. 109. pp 168-181.

This is a wide open question - I'm not sure that you can say there is an "effect on learning" due to time pressure. It's going to depend on a lot of factors, including the learning context, the learner, the amount of time they have to complete the task, etc.  Ultimately, all learning is time-limited, so you need to break this down into different lengths of time.

There are several theories that may speak about it. One is cognitive load theory (Paas & Van Merriënboer, 1994).  This theory is based on the limitations of working memory, where the "processing" of learning takes place.  Basically, there is intrinsic load required to learn a certain type of material, and this is a characteristic of the material to be learned.  There is also extraneous load during learning, which occurs when the learner must divert attention to tasks not directly relevant to the learning task (e.g. checking a clock, computing how much time is left, etc).

Based on CLT, one would expect a decrease in performance from having a clock sitting in front of the learner.  But again, I suspect that the amount of time vs. the time required will be a strong mediating factor.

Edit

I just skimmed the article you cited.  It seems like there are a lot more relevant sources there you could track down.  Why don't you do that and come back with what you find?

References

Paas, F. G., & Van Merriënboer, J. J. (1994). Instructional control of cognitive load in the training of complex cognitive tasks. Educational Psychology Review,6(4), 351-371


About the Turing test and a Robot's psychology If an A.I. system ( 'housed' in a Robotic exterior) actually passed the Turing test and was therefore 'functionally similar to the human 'mind-brain' would it also have the potential for information processing instability analogous to 'mental' problems in the mind-brain. ( Where the instabilities are not just because of information or important-definitions mismanagement but are also from info.-processing mismanagement.) Could one A.I system test another with the Turing Test and regard the other as an 'unstable', human , if the responses were sufficiently 'unstable' sounding? Could an A.I. system pretend through the Turing Test to be 'stupid' to another A.I. system?

Mental disorders, which are fundamentally undesirable phenomena, can be both environmentally and innately caused.  There are both neurological components as well as environmental components almost exclusively sourcing from childhood.

In the same way, a "thinking machine" can have the same undesirable problems.  I imagine the "neurological problems" would be tantamount to bugs in the original software and hardware malfunctions.  Much more common would be the environmental causes, similarly in the AI's "childhood".

Human childhood is a very impressionable time.  Love and proper care leads to healthy growth, proper perspectives of safety and danger, proper priorities leading to healthy adult human lives.  Abuse and neglect lead to psychological malformations such as unhealthy concepts of danger, of self, of the meaning of love and family, etc.

Similarly, AI "childhood" will be the beginning period of discovery and learning (which may happen in R&D labs, rather than the real world, depending on the circumstances).  While it's difficult to say what might cause malformations, it's safe to assume that improper training of the AI, just like improper raising of a human child, will result in odd, unpredictable, and undesired behavior.

As a note, this is all technically true for AI less sophisticated than "thinking", but the simpler it is, the easier it is to properly train and prevent hardware and fundamental software errors.  For example, an AI that identifies pictures would show unpredictable and undesirable behavior if, for some reason, it was trained randomly (say, by using crowd-sourced training and being the victim of trolling).  A 'thinking' AI would likewise have undesirable results if it were "abused" or never taught the value of, say, life.  One, in that case, might easily end up with a "sociopathic" AI.


How can a persons good or bad be accurately measured? The majority of people who think certain people are bad people are usually because they have been exposed to the bad things they do or also because they measure how bad they are based on only the bad things they do, and vice versa with good. There's several very ethically and morally good people that would never be able to harm anyone regardless of circumstance but there's also good people (on the same scale as the previous example) that (like me) would not think twice about killing someone if it came to a life or death situation or something similar. How could a persons real good or bad be evaluated in an approach that would be decorrelated of errors, unbiased, and as accurate as possible? Would it be best to weigh their wrongdoings?the good things they do? Both? How would they be weighed to provide the most accurate result?

In a way, I agree with the answer given by AivanF.

But more can be said. One of the greatest biologist of our times, the scientist Edward O. Wilson has something to say about what humanity has been calling good and evil, regardless of any particular world view.

  "What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean
  moral instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences),
  subject to judgment according to their consequences. Such sentiments
  are thus derived from epigenetic rules -- hereditary biases in mental
  development, usually conditioned by emotion, that influence concepts
  and decisions made from them. The primary origin of moral instincts is
  the dynamic relation between cooperation and defection. The
  essential ingredient for the molding of the instincts during genetic
  evolution in any species is intelligence high enough to judge and
  manipulate the tension generated by the dynamism. That level of
  intelligence allows the building of complex mental scenarios well into
  the future. It occurs, so far as is known, only in human beings and
  perhaps their closest relatives among the higher apes."

That dynamism is, in a way, the old issue of good vs. evil:

  "We are determined by the interplay between individual and group
  selection where individual selection is responsible for much of what
  we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part
  of virtue. We're all in constant conflict between self-sacrifice for
  the group on the one hand and egoism and selfishness on the other. I
  go so far as to say that all the subjects of humanities, from law to
  the creative arts are based upon this play of individual versus group
  selection."

So, all the science that studies these issues agreees that a moral development means a greater ability to take into account the wellbeing of something else than me (something like "I care about: me -> my family -> closest people -> my nation -> all human beings -> live on the planet..."). So, we are also talking about empathy.

That been said, there are people unable to take empathy into account: psychopaths. Differences in their brain have been found related to prosocial behaviour: they just don't care about other people's feelings or wellbeing (they can't, just like blinds can't see). So, we could state they are pure evil, from this point of view. But that doesn't mean that they can't do good, just that their motivation to do so is selfish. What differentiates people in terms of moral is not what they do (their wrongdoings or the good things they do), is why they do what they do. Is my main motivation selfish while I don't care if it damages you or not? That's the question.

So, can we state that a "good person" is empathic and a "bad person" is selfish? If we set aside psychopaths (and people with strong narcissistic traits, but explaining this would make this answer too long), we all behave in both ways, given the situation. And that doesn't mean we are bad people, that means we are human!

As the famous old sentence states:  "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto"
"I am a man: I deem nothing pertaining to man foreign to me."

So, in scientific terms and from this point of view, the only way to measure "good or bad" is measuring moral development. And we must take into account age, otherwise a two year old kid would be a demon!! ;) :D

As an example to do so: The Moral Development Scale for Professionals (MDSP), based on Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.


Priming people with self-image/social-image concerns I have a hypothesis that if you prime people with self-image or social-image concerns, they will behave less anti-socially and more prosocially. For example, they litter less, they discriminate less against racial minorities, etc.

Are there any such studies examining this? If not, how can I prime people with self-image or social-image concerns?

Your hypothesis is true, priming can affect human behavior in many different ways. Specifically pro-social behavior can be encouraged by simply displaying an image of a pair of eyes.

  We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions
  to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university
  coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks
  when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding
  provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the
  importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns,
  on human cooperative behaviour.

Also in a similar study the following results are found.

  We also found that
  images of watching eyes reduced littering, although contrary to
  previous findings this was only when there were larger numbers of
  people around. With regard to our central aim, we found no evidence
  that litter on the ground interacted non-additively with images of
  eyes to induce increased littering behaviour. Our data therefore
  support the hypothesis that images of eyes induce more pro-social
  behaviour, independent of local norms. This finding has positive
  implications for the application of eye images in combating
  anti-social behaviour.