Is there psychoactive music? Listen to this music for X minutes to observe Y result. Is there something like that that has been demonstrated to work for general public?

The only example of an experiment that is similar that attempted to find out that I could find is: http://www.zlab.mcgill.ca/home.html

  Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and
  craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal
  dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of
  [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, combined
  with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system
  activity, we provide direct evidence for endogenous dopamine release
  in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening.

  (Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music)

I know that there's a field of psychology called music therapy that attempts to help people with music. But from what I hear, people's responses to music are hard to quantify and are very subjective. I'm interested if there's a music track out there that has been demonstrated to "entrain" brain activity (shift it from one state to another.) That is, psychoactive music that has been developed not to express an emotion of the artist, but to change cognition and consciousness.

Also see Brainwave audio recordings and beta waves: how do they affect positivity and Is there evidence to suggest that music can trigger release of a particular kind of neurotransmitter??

In short, yes. All forms of stimulation result perceptions based on psychology and culture. It is, however, difficult to predict the way in which even the most simple tones like binaural beats will affect emotions and behaviour, because of past associations and cultural biases.

A recent study not posted on Wikipedia (sorry for lack of citation) shows that binaural beats have no effects on the tested traits of visual attention and task switching by the Color Trails Tests or an ADHD test called "test of variables of attention" when compared with placebo.

  Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to analyze pre- and postintervention scores on the Color Trails Tests, Homework Problem Checklist, and the TOVA. The effect of time was significant on the Color Trails Test. However, there were no significant group differences on the Color Trails Test or the TOVA scores postintervention. Parents reported that the study participants had fewer homework problems postintervention.

-Pilot Feasibility Study of Binaural Auditory Beats for Reducing Symptoms of Inattention in Children and Adolescents with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

This does not exactly answer your question, as binaural beats may have an effect on the brain which does not have to do with attention or task switching. In that case, further study would need to be done under controls of placebo, multinational and multiculturalism.


What is the meaning of semantics to cognition? I am new to the field of semantic knowledge representation and all I get information about the term semantics = meaning. Can somebody please explain to me what is semantics and how it is important in cognition.

Logical semantics is one of the three sections of logical semiotics (in addition to syntax and pragmatics) dealing with the relations between signs (in particular the expressions) and reality, to which they refer. In addition to basic semantic functions, we can include, e.g. semantic connotation, determination and denotation, where the basic terms of semantics are meaning and truth.
For example, I recommend Benthem (1986) and maybe Wikipedia's definition at the beginning of your journey. For further reading I can also recommend Friedenberg & Silverman (2012).

How can the relation between signs, expressions, symbols, and reality, in which semantics works so hard, be referred to in cognitive science? One very simple (at the beginning) answer - representations. It is one of the fundamental processes in cognitive science; a representation is something that stands for something else. Single words can be good examples here, e.g., apple. When we say it, then in the mind of someone who knows English, the concept of a particular type of fruit will pop up. One will see it, taste it, and maybe touch it in his/her imagination.

There are other types of representations. For example there are propositions, which are statements about the world and which can be illustrated with sentences. The sentence, e.g John is eating a red apple is a proposition, that is itself made up of a few concepts. There are also rules, which are another type of representation, and they can specify relationships between prepositions. Let's say the rule, If it is raining, I will not go with you to ZOO makes the second proposition contingent on the first one. Also, there are analog representations, which help us make comparisons between two similar situations, objects, etc.

References:

Benthem, J.V. (1986). Essays in Logical Semantics.
Wikipedia
Friedenberg, J., & Silverman, G. (2012). Cognitive Science. An Introduction to the Study of Mind.


Current theories of the psychology of ambivalence This question querying the authenticity of people's words and actions and the resulting commentary after this answer, has led me to ask this question.
Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous, conflicting feelings toward a person or thing.1 Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having thoughts and/or emotions of both positive and negative valence toward someone or something. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness concerning something. The expressions "cold feet" and "sitting on the fence" are often used to describe the feeling of ambivalence.

Ambivalence is experienced as psychologically unpleasant when the positive and negative aspects of a subject are both present in a person's mind at the same time. This state can lead to avoidance or procrastination, or to deliberate attempts to resolve the ambivalence. When the situation does not require a decision to be made, people experience less discomfort even when feeling ambivalent.
It is normal to have ambivalence from time to time about how we feel about another individual, whether we can trust the authenticity of a person. As human beings are multidimensional creatures. Trials and triumphs both bring out different aspects that are part of the one person. A person's mood, can change the way that person relates to others. Combined with the modulation of the observer's own internal processes, there can be a varying perception between two people.

If my ideas are correct, and a degree of ambivalence can be quite normal, almost expected within human interactions (or relationships);
How can  reasonable ambivalence be differentiated from  pathological ambivalence?
What are the current theories regarding the psychology of  ambivalence?

Many studies have examined ambivalence,

  Interest in attitudes and ambivalence has highlighted problems with the adequacy of conceptualizing attitudes as unitary, unidimensional, evaluations...//..
   the hypothesis that ambivalence will attenuate observed attitude-intention relationships (since the evaluations influencing the expression of attitudes are more likely to differ from the evaluations influencing the expression of intentions for people who are more ambivalent. 1

  Negative interactions may occur with ambivalent social partners (i.e., partners involved in both positive and negative exchanges) or exclusively problematic social partners (i.e., partners involved in negative exchanges only), but conflicting views exist in the literature regarding which type of social partner is likely to be more detrimental to older adults' physical and emotional health. 2

Pathological ambivalence appears to be rooted in infancy 3 and/or childhood, and is categorised as an attachment disorder, known as Ambivalent Attachment Disorder or Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment Disorder or a type of Reactive Attachment Disorder 4 under the umbrella of Insecure Attachment Disorders.

It is theorised to be causal, or at least linked to psychopathy 5 and personality disorders, in particular, Borderline Personality Disorder 6. It is theorised to begin in infancy and/or childhood. When a child's needs are met inconsistently.

  The first type of insecure attachment is called ambivalent attachment. This occurs when caregivers are inconsistent – sometimes answering infants’ needs quickly and responsively, and sometimes letting the infant ‘cry it out’. This may also occur if caregivers respond only to the physical needs – feeding, changing, etc, but ignore the infant’s need for human interaction and connection.

  Looking at baby, touching, singing, talking about what we are doing, etc is very important for infants’ emotional development. Without this, babies do not ‘feel felt’, an expression coined by Dan Siegel in his book ‘Parenting From the Inside Out’. It can become very difficult for these babies to develop the qualities of compassion and empathy.

  With insecure ambivalent attachment characterized by ‘only sometimes’ type of caregiving, babies learn that the world and their ability to have an impact on it is basically inconsistent – sometimes things happen, sometimes they don’t – sometimes all their needs are met, and sometimes only some of them are. Infants learn that others are not dependable or consistent. They often also do not learn or understand emotions – their own or others. 3

Being deprived of basic care, the child manifests an ideation that there is not enough to provide for everyone in this world, and so will grab to get their needs and/or wants met.

  AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENT DISORDER (AmAD) children see scarcity everywhere, and therefore what is wanted should be taken as it is not going to be given by anyone. Having to hurt someone to get what is wanted is viewed simply as “the cost of doing business”, and the other person is seen as deserving being hurt for having been in the way.

Attachment, Parental Bonding and Borderline Personality Disorder Features in Young Adults

  Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that parental bonding and attachment scores (especially insecure attachment, anxious or ambivalent attachment, and a perception of a relative lack of caring from one's mother) were uniquely associated with borderline features beyond what could be accounted for by gender, childhood adversity experiences, Axis I disorder, and nonborderline Axis II symptoms. Although relatively modest, these relations suggest that bonding and attachment constructs might be considered in comprehensive etiological models of borderline personality disorder.

Symptoms of Ambivalent Reactive Attachment Disorder are:

  Passion to intimate contact and declarations of love at all times from their partners;
  Show inveterate care giving nature;
  Tend to idealize others;
  Feel themself uncomfortable with anger;
  Show too extreme emotions;
  Very jealous;
  Frequent mood swings;
  Imbalanced relationships with others;
  Never have prolonged relationships;
  Too possessive;
  Feel that their partner is unpredictable;
  Tend to be concerned or have dependence on relationship;
  May show suicide attempts;
  Have a tendency of frequent depression;
  Often feel themself unlovable or undesired by others.

 1.
Br J Health Psychol. 2001 Feb;6(Pt 1):53-68.
Ambivalence about health-related behaviours: an exploration in the domain of food choice.
Sparks P, Conner M, James R, Shepherd R, Povey R.
Source
School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK. P.Sparks@sussex.ac.uk
Psychol Aging. 2012 Dec;27(4):912-23. doi: 10.1037/a0029246. Epub 2012 Jul 9.
2.
Ambivalent versus problematic social ties: implications for psychological health, functional health, and interpersonal coping.
Rook KS, Luong G, Sorkin DH, Newsom JT, Krause N.
Source
Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7085, USA. ksrook@uci.edu
Attachment, Parental Bonding and Borderline Personality Disorder Features in Young Adults
Angela D. Nickell, Carol J. Waudby, Timothy J. Trull, (2002). Attachment, Parental Bonding and Borderline Personality Disorder Features in Young Adults. Journal of Personality Disorders: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 148-159.
doi: 10.1521/pedi.16.2.148.22544
Maryland's Source for
Attachment Disorder Related Information
Reactive attachment disorder
Insecure Attachment


How is averaging used in calculating the Bereitschaftspotential? I have a question about the averaging involved in the Bereitschaftspotential. On the wiki page you can read that, because it is so small, the Bereitschaftspotential only becomes apparent after averaging.

My question: do they mean averaging over different electrodes, but in a single trial?

Or do they mean averaging over electrodes AND over trials?

Thanks in advance

Generally, EEG potentials are primarily averaged over trials, not electrodes. Averaging over electrodes is often done in addition to trial averaging, but this by itself does not make the potentials visible on a single-trial basis since the "noise" overshadowing the potentials is largely shared by all adjacent electrodes.

The Bereitschaftspotential is also averaged over trials, especially since it is usually specified to be observed over specific electrodes.

As you note in a comment, single-trial identification of EEG phenomena, such as the Bereitschaftspotential (or the P300), is being attempted using machine learning techniques. However, these work far from reliably, and the original work on the Bereitschaftspotential was done far before these powerful machine learning techniques became available. So in the original BP work, averaging was done over trials (and often, over subjects, too). This is apparent in for example the Methods section of Libet's famous paper from 1983 (p. 624):

  For present purposes, analysis of RPs is made for those recorded at the vertex, where they were all maximal. ... 40 trials were performed and averaged by a computer of average transients

The vertex = electrode Cz.


Are studies included in most meta-analyses based on a narrow range of participants? This question is mostly quoted from A New Psychology of Women (2017) by Lips, page 63:

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the studies included in most meta-analyses are based on a narrow range of participants (usually young, North American students) and are not reflective of the populations at large--although this limitation tends to be obscured by the combination of many studies into a single analysis (Halpern, 1995).

I mean, this claim is more than 20 years old. Is it true today? Is there a study that examines the demographics of meta-studies at large or something related?
If it is true, is this the case for most psychology research, male-female differences or all studies in the social sciences?

Hunter and Schmidt offer a a set of procedures to correct range restriction, these are included in many packages based on their meta-analytic methodology, here are some relevant references:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75e8/97a797dc876b785042dfd8ac4023a5fc85df.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/peps.12122/abstract
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6644262_Correcting_for_indirect_range_restriction_in_meta-analysis_Testing_a_new_meta-analytic_procedure
mypages.iit.edu/~morriss/siop2009/Le09.ppt
mypages.iit.edu/~morriss/siop2005/Oswald05.doc
https://www.corwin.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/5063_Hunter_Chapter_3.pdf
https://utsa.influuent.utsystem.edu/en/publications/implications-of-direct-and-indirect-range-restriction-for-meta-an

hth,

larry


Does fluency on a psychomotor task result from practice and a focus on accuracy? I know this formula, and I don't know where did I read it (or maybe heard about):

  Conscious accuracy + continuous practice = spontaneous fluency

It's an educational technique for long-term learning processes which require the learner to develop motor-skills, like playing piano, touch-typing, martial arts, etc.

This formula in brief says that:

You don't have direct control over your brain, and it's a black box to you
Your only duty is to provide content for you brain
Every action you do during learning process should be consciously accurate
You should practice more and more (PMP)
You should not care about becoming fluent, as it's not under your direct control
After a while, you brain reaches fluency
The more you provide accuracy for your conscious mind, and the more you practice, the more fluency you'll get from it

I Googled this formula and to my surprise I found almost nothing related. So, I have this question:

Is this a subject of cognitive sciences? And if so, is it valid? Do we have a theory regarding these arguments for developing motor-skills?

I have never heard of this formula, but from a cognitive psychology point of view you might look the theory of expert performance (Ericsson et al., 1993). In this theory it is argued that an important factor in the aquisition of expert performance is what the authors call deliberate practice. What is meant by this is an activity, wherein someone actively tries to improve his skills in some domain. Deliberate practice is not neccessarily an enjoyable activity, as it requires effort, concentration and persistence. It is definitely conscious.

There is quite a bit of evidence from different domains. Ericcson and Charness (1994) report findings from chess, mental multiplicaiton and music. There even is a handbook of expertise and expert performance that sums up the field, if you are interested to go deeper (Ericcson et al., 2006).

The formula that you mentioned very much reminds me of the concept of deliberate practice. I would argue that the two things basically refer to the same processes.

References:

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363 PDF
Ericsson, K. A., & Charness, N. (1994). Expert performance: Its structure and acquisition. American psychologist, 49(8), 725. PDF
Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Hoffman, R. R., & Feltovich, P. J. (Eds.).(2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Does pessimism lead to greater happiness because low expectations lead to less disappointment? One might think that optimists would be obviously happier.
However being a pessimist means that your expectations will  usually be worse than the reality. Presumably when reality exceeds your expectations, you will be happier. On the other hand if you always expect something good to occur you will be disappointed when reality does not live up to your expectations.

So in summary:
Does pessimism lead to greater happiness because low expectations lead to less disappointment?

I do believe these concepts should not be applied as in boolean logic, with either ALL PESSIMISTIC or ALL OPTIMISTIC, but in a rather spectral fashion.
Happiness is closely linked to having lower expectations:

(...) Robb Rutledge says, “Happiness depends not on how well things are going but whether things are going better or worse than expected.”

Pessimism also leads to being more careful:

"Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade," said lead author Frieder R. Lang, PhD, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. "Pessimism about the future may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions."
(...) "Unexpectedly, we also found that stable and good health and income were associated with expecting a greater decline compared with those in poor health or with low incomes," Lang said. "Moreover, we found that higher income was related to a greater risk of disability."

There are pros and cons in each of them:

Being optimistic allows people to pursue their goals in a positive way: to dream a bigger and better dream, which they can work their way towards. Optimists also seem to respond better to positive feedback, and part of being optimistic may be generating this feedback for themselves, i.e. thinking positive thoughts.
On the other hand being pessimistic may help people reduce their natural anxiety and to perform better. Also, pessimists seem to respond better to negative feedback. They like to hear what the problems were, so they can correct them. Again, part of why pessimists generate these sorts of negative thoughts is that it helps them perform better.

Keeping up a mood tending to pessimistic while giving your best in the tasks might be a recipe for greater happiness due to lower expectancies.


Effectiveness of recalling information in the same location it was learned In an interview with Robert A. Bjork this article claims that it is easier to recall information where it occurred:

  Similarly, studying in only one location is great as long as you’ll only be required to recall the information in the same location. If you want information to be accessible outside your dorm room, or office, or nook on the second floor of the library, Bjork recommends varying your study location. And again, these tips generalize.

How much of an effect does this have with:

Memorizing random facts
Recalling the details of an event that occurred at the location

According to the tradition expressed in a well documented (references at the end) popular science book about memory, Moonwalking with Einstein in which the author trains himself from zero to become the American memory champion, the memory palace technique (also known as the method of loci where loci is place in latin) is the one used by most competitive memory practitioners. It consists in recalling random facts (your question 1) by staging them into an imaginary location. Other aspects of the technique involve imagining an actor or agent in these places, but this element is used as a reminder for the type of information involved: the place itself is the key to memorising. Therefore the answer to question 2 is that details of an event are much easier to remember at the location where they occurred, when recalling this location.


Can a shorter IQ test be devised that provides a more approximate measure of IQ? Disclaimer: I am not a student of psychology, just an interested guy - but here goes anyway...

IQ tests usually contain dozens of questions and take considerable time. I think this is because such tests have to differentiate between a great diversity of intelligence levels.

Now, I wonder if a test could be devised such that you answer a fraction of a number of questions associated with the usual IQ test, and the test result is yes, your IQ is between 100 and 120, or no, your IQ is outside of this range.

This could be useful, if someone is intelligent, but has problems with attention, or in some kind of survey setting, where people don't have a lot of time.

Yes, what you say is entirely possible. If precision is not as much of an issue, it is possible to devise a test (of anything, not just a test of IQ) which would return a score of, say, 115 plus or minus 10 points. It could also return a yes/no answer to a question such as "is the score inside the range 100..120.

One person who explore such question is Laurencelle, 2015, Le différentiel de sélection multiple [in french] The Quantitative Methods for Psychology, 11(3), 174-188. doi http://dx.doi.org/10.20982/tqmp.11.3.p174


Can PTSD be mild? Do the traumas have to be of a certain kind? As far as I know, PTSD was first used as a broader label for symptoms associated with so-called shell-shock, and has been diagnosed for symptoms of a milder nature.

But is there a lower limit to the point at which PTSD can be diagnosed? For example, is it possible to have such a mild form of PTSD that it does not interfere with normal functioning, but exhibits the same features?

The reason I ask, is I live in the UK where the National Health System (NHS) is increasingly struggling with funding. Their website on PTSD seems to only state the most extreme of traumatic events as possible causes. In short, I think it is to get out of giving help to all but the absolute worst cases. Hospitals and many mental health services have large burdens and turn many seeking help away.

If someone where to suggest they have PTSD, I feel that with literature such as the above, it belittles anyone experiencing "mild" events such as domestic abuse, which barely fits into their categories. Not only might they not get treated, but experience or perceive scorn.

If one were to seek help for PTSD and have to justify the help needed, regardless of the cause, how might it be done? Could the symptoms be misdiagnosed as, for example, regular stress, or anxiety, and would treatment for those be different to that required to help with PTSD?

In order for something to be diagnosed as a disorder by a mental health professional, the client typically experiences distress and impairment in activities of daily functioning.

If the time frame is under 3 to 6 months, please consider "Acute Stress Disorder" as a possibility. I agree that the DSM V is going to be a useful resource for diagnostics.

Trauma, in any form, does pose very specific challenges for diagnostics and a treatment plan. For further reading on trauma therapy, I highly suggest "Life After Trauma: A Workbook for Healing" by Rosenbloom and Williams (2010). Treatment will be dependent on the practitioner's training, and the formulated diagnosis. You are welcome to research efficacies of therapeutic interventions.

Therapy is very useful for any and all of the items you have mentioned. If you are attempting to get insurance coverage, usually a diagnosis from a qualified professional will qualify you for therapy (at least here in the United States). A good diagnosis could take a few sessions to formulate. It's sometimes a longer process if someone suspects trauma.


Name of the bias towards not seeing small harm of many as important? I observe this kind of thinking especially in politics, for instance when someone brings up that "It is fine to take a few dollars from a lot of people if it helps the country". I think the reason we see things like this is that we can better imagine the value of one thing with awesome qualities than million things of a small quality because we are more used to compare the quality, not the amount, in our daily lives.
Is there a name for a similar cognitive bias/fallacy?

Yes. This is a special case of the identifiable victim effect: the cognitive bias implicated in the quote, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

The identifiable victim effect might be paraphrased as the tendency to view harm of many as unimportant. A direct corollary is the tendency to view small harm of many as unimportant. Going off AliceD's example, we might expect taking \$1 from a million to sound preferable even to taking just \$100k from 1 person.

A potential objection might be, "sure, but in this case, 'one person' isn't really an identifiable victim. It's really about the small amount of harm since both victims are just 'statistics'." Fair point, but even if you wanted to classify this as a bias distinct from the identifiable victim effect, they both result from the same cognitive heuristic: experiential thinking.

Experiential thinking, in this context, is evaluating a scenario by imagining yourself in it and judging what that experience would be like. For example, when I imagine losing \$10, it is far preferable to losing \$100k, but the fact that it is taken from a million people has little emotional relevance. You can't imagine experiencing the loss of $10 as more than one person at a time. Similarly, an identifiable victim makes my experiential thinking more vivid because I have a concrete situation in which to imagine myself. I can imagine what it's like being mugged at 11pm in an alley near 130th Street, but "1,000 muggings in the past month" is not something I can relate to experientially.


How to design psychology tests for concept formation? I've read many papers on concepts, but their tests are sparsely described or abstractly mentioned. I want to test for classic, prototype and exemplar theories. How do you approach the problem?

Some publications I've read:

===========

 A Generalization of Hebbian Learning in Perceptual and Conceptual
 Categorization
 Family resemblance : Internal structure of categaries
 Categorization of Natural Objects
 Reclaiming Concepts
 Categories, Concepts, Fuzzy Sets, and Logical Deduction
 Principals of Categorization
 Basic objects in natural categories
 Concept and conceptual structure
 http://www.foundalis.com/res/poc/PrinciplesOfCognition.htm
 https://www.iep.utm.edu/concepts/#H3
 .... and many more.

most of them are from Eleanor Rosch, ..

Reading also the big book on concepts

this seem to be informative :

Category norms: An updated and expanded version of the
Battig and Montague (1969) norms
http://www.lcs.pomona.edu/HewlettCognitiveScience/resources/assets/CategoryNorms2004.pdf

There's no one good answer to this unfortunately, the question is too broad. Seems like you have made a decent start, here are two more quite different methods-focused references to add to your reading that might help:

Divjak, Dagmar, and Antti Arppe. "Extracting prototypes from exemplars What can corpus data tell us about concept representation?." (2013): 221-274.

Lee, Michael D., and Wolf Vanpaemel. "Exemplars, prototypes, similarities, and rules in category representation: An example of hierarchical Bayesian analysis." Cognitive Science 32.8 (2008): 1403-1424.


Are there any cognitive tests, or test suites, available on the Android? Are there any cognitive tests, or test suites, available on the Android? I'm thinking something like quantified-mind.com but for android. The closest I've been able to find is Brainturk Brain Training, but there doesn't appear to be a way to export results.

It's similar to this question, but for the android: Are there any cognitive test (or test suites) available on the iPad?

My 4 main criteria are (like here):

app should simply measure cognitive or mental skills/abilities, as
opposed to training or improving them measurement methods used in the
app should be as close to scientific as possible (a lot of game apps
failed this requirement)
the tests should take as little time as possible (preferably under 5 min)
have a way to export data (e.g. into csv)

The N-back task is a typical test for cognitive capabilities. There are many version of it in the Google play store. You could try a few of them and see which suits your needs best.


Can training on neural networks be selectively undone? Say that you've trained a network with a set of training data comprising of data points A,B,C, and D.

Can the effect of, say, point B on the network be undone without also losing the training from points C and D? In other words, can we perform some operation on the ABCD-trained network and end up with a network identical to one that has been trained only on A,C, and D?

So lets be clear. (I think) we are talking about back propagation here.

Yes, you probably could get from the ABCD-trained network to an ACD-trained network.

The network adapts with each data point it is trained on. As such, the relationship between how an individual data point effects the net, changes with training. What really matters to the net is the average of all of these interactions, and this is were a lot of specific information related to individual data points is lost.

So in reality, achieving this would require you to know how the net (trained only on A) changed in response B. So we would need to be saving previous changes to weights and biases (for each data point if we wanted it to be more general/flexible).

I don't see this as particularly practical. But you could do it if you wanted.


What is the term for human beings' tendency to obey without thinking? I'm wanting to read more about a certain human behavior, but I am not sure what the proper term for it is, so some of the things I am finding aren't what I am looking for. I'm interested in how Humans will often "follow the leader" and act as sheep, believing what they're told without applying much critical thinking. I thought this was called Herd Mentality, but Wikipedia describes that as:

  Herd mentality implies a fear-based reaction to peer pressure which makes individuals act in order to avoid feeling "left behind" from the group

That is close to what I am thinking about. However Wikipedia relates Herd Mentality to Group intelligence and Wisdom of the crowd... which is ironic as those are the exact opposite of what I am looking for.

Examples of the behavior I am thinking of:

Sometimes high-rep users on Stack Exchange sites post poor questions or answers. Often these get upvotes even though they're incorrect, because people "follow the leader" and don't think about the actual answer.
Religious leaders often influence their congregations on how to vote, and many members will vote that way even though what they're voting for may not really be what they believe it because they don't think about what they're voting for so they don't realize it.
As an extreme example: Many good, moral people somehow shut off their ability to think logically and supported Hitler and the Holocaust.

What is the name for Human's tendency to follow a leader blindly, without thinking? Is this an actual psychological phenomenon and if so, what papers could I read to learn more about it?

Obedience

The most famous paper dealing with this issue is Milgram's paper, called Behavioral study of obedience[1]. From the abstract:

  This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive subject to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment.

[1] Behavioral Study of obedience, Milgram, S. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963. doi: 10.1037/h0040525 PDF link


Can eye tracking be used as a form of biofeedback? I'm an occasional meditator and I've noticed that conceptual thought often produces eye movements, and I'm curious if anyone has tried using eye movements as a form of biofeedback. The Muse headset for example tracks EEG data and plays it back to the user as sound. I'm curious if it would be possible to set something like that up with eye-tracking using consumer-grade technology, and if any research has been done on eye tracking as a form of biofeedback.

There is a well known relationship between pupil dilation and multiple cognitive processes such as attention, surprise, task difficulty etc. It remains unclear which specific process modulates pupil dilation, but it is a fairly large (but slow) effect that can easily be picked up by consumer-grade eye-trackers. See below an example of a paper using pupil dilation to decode which letter a patient is attending in a human-computer interface system.

Similar effects have been reported with microsaccades (the tiny movements your eyes make even when you are fixating, see comprehensive review below). However microsaccades are hard to detect and most likely beyond the capabilities of a consumer-grade eye-tracker.

There are studies trying to link larger eye-movements to cognitive processes. This idea goes as far back as Yarbus' work, who was the first to record eye-movements in freely-looking observers. See a famous image from his work below. Similar techniques are being used by advertising companies today to try to predict consumers preferences. It is hard to tell how valid these techniques are in the industry. But there is also some very good work looking at these questions in academia, see for example a paper from Laurent Itti's lab below.

Finally preferential-looking is a classical technique in developmental studies (with children). For example you display 2 stimuli, one containing depth the other one not, and if the children are looking more often at one or the other then you know they perceive a difference, even at an age where they are too young to explicitely report their percepts.

References:

Mathôt, S., Melmi, J. B., van der Linden, L., & Van der Stigchel, S. (2016). The Mind-Writing Pupil: A Human-Computer Interface Based on Decoding of Covert Attention through Pupillometry. PloS one, 11(2), e0148805.

Rolfs, M. (2009). Microsaccades: small steps on a long way. Vision research, 49(20), 2415-2441.

Borji, A., & Itti, L. (2014). Defending Yarbus: Eye movements reveal observers' task. Journal of vision, 14(3), 29-29.

Yarbus, A. L. (2013). Eye movements and vision. Springer.

Kowler, E. (1990). The role of visual and cognitive processes in the control of eye movement. Reviews of oculomotor research, 4, 1-70.

Hayhoe, M. M. (2004). Advances in relating eye movements and cognition. Infancy, 6(2), 267-274.

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


Which part of the brain is not working optimally if an individual is unable to understand scientific concepts and mathematics? I have often observed that while I can understand concepts related to Finance and Literature very easily I find it extremely difficult to understand scientific topics related to Physics, Maths or Chemistry.

If it is due to a certain part of my brain not working optimally, then which part of the brain is it?

Almost every area of your brain would be involved in learning and understanding such high-level topics, so any perceived inability to learn a specific topic is very unlikely to be due to a particular area of your brain not working optimally.

Learning new things can take a lot of time and practice. A lot of times people don't see as much improvement as they would like and this discourages them from continuing to practice. If you can easily understand Finance and Literature, then I believe that you have the ability to catch on with Physics and Math. Just keep reading and trying and eventually you will see improvement.


How can we overcome positional bias when selecting an option on a screen/document? I think the question is best described by an example:

You are at a doctors office and are about to have a conversation about you birth control prescription.
Before you can enter you have to decide if you want the female doctor or the male doctor with you in the room. The decision is made on either a sheet of paper or screen listing the female and male doctors name with a checkbox attached.

Depending on which option is listed first or on top the decision is biased towards that option. If for example the male doctor is listed first the patient might feel that selecting the female doctor is out of the ordinary or 'extra work' just for her. The patient might be inclined to choose the first option to avoid any confrontation.
This might be especially true if the patient feels uncomfortable with the topic of the appointment.
In what form could we present the options as to not give any bias as to what the "normal" or expected answer is?

You could randomise the order of response options.
This wouldn't prevent bias in the individual case, but it would probably remove most bias in aggregate.
I also wonder whether in the case that you present, positional bias has much of an effect.
Equally, you could make "no preference" or something similar, the first option.


Is there any scientific basis to different learning styles? People often identify themselves are visual, audio or kinesthetic learners. This at first sounds plausible, but when I reflect on myself, I find that I am unable to define exactly what it means to be either type of learner.

Can someone provide some scientific article discussing actual scientific evidence for different learning styles and perhaps some example to exactly what different learning styles means?

In response to a related question about learning styles, I provided this answer.

In that answer, I quote Pashler et al (2009) which is generally critical of the learning styles literature.
I quote Pashler et al where they state:

  Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children
  and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer
  information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence
  arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some
  fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for
  processing different types of information.

However they find minimal experimental evidence to indicate that students assigned to educational conditions that are adjusted to their stated learning style preferences do any better.

References:

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., Bjork, R. (2009). Learning Styles
Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 105. ARTICLE.


Is an avoidance of incest/inbreeding learned or instinctive? Is the natural avoidance of incest something that is learned or is the human brain programmed by instinct to have a negative response to incest? This of course would have an evolutionary advantage and would hence make perfect sense.

This is not my field, but I gave it a quick search. This article seems to speak directly to this question, summarizing and comparing multiple theories to each other. In light of these theories, the article also seems to propose a synthesized theory of the avoidance. Formal citation below. Hope this helps!

APA Citation

Paul, R. A. (2011). Incest Avoidance: Oedipal and Preoedipal, Natural and Cultural. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 58(6), 1087–1112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065110395759


What models/mechanisms exist for the brain to chain movements together? Motor Sequence Learning is the study of the cognitive ability to chain various motor sequences together. The most intuitive example of this is learning to play a sequence of notes on a piano. Initially, each note will be played hesitantly while consulting the sheet music for guidance. However, with practice, more and more of the sequence becomes memorised and can be played smoothly. Additionally, sequences that are learned can be transferred to other contexts.

What is the most comprehensive model or description of neurophysiological mechanisms of this cognitive ability?

In the paper "Control of automated behavior: insights from the discrete sequence production task" a task similar to piano playing is discussed. The task, shown in the figure below, involves a user pressing a key corresponding to visual input.

One of the most interesting results from the paper is, as shown below, after learning, the response times of certain series of movements have lower reaction times. They also seem to be organised in specifically sized chunks.

The model of how this works is called the Dual Processor Model (DMP), which claims that two processors, one cognitive and one motor, race each other to execute a task. It is only described at a high level and never built into a model.


Type of Cognitive Bias where someone continues to justify their suffering It seems to me that there is a type of Cognitive Bias where someone continues to justify their suffering by claiming it was "meaningful" or "necessary" even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. What is the name of this type of cognitive dissonance?
Examples could be:

Working long unpaid over time on a project that was completely miss spec'd and useless but insisting it was useful in spite of strong evidence to the contrary.
Justification of participation war in spite of evidence that the war was built on false pretences and had a net, very negative outcome.
Maybe also being a victim of abuse and maintaining that "you deserved it", when quite clearly you didn't.
Donating to a charity that has been shown to embezzle funds and flatly denying that the funds are used for the good cause you intended.

The closest I can get to explaining this is the sunk costs fallacy, but instead of investing more time or money, it is the continued investment of "mental energy" to maintain the incorrect position. The function of this is to prevent someone having to accept the truth, and process the trauma of the event.

What you're talking about I believe is psychological rationalization.

In psychology and logic, rationalization or rationalization is a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable—or even admirable and superior—by plausible means.[1] It is also an informal fallacy of reasoning.[2]
Rationalization happens in two steps:
A decision, action, judgement is made for a given reason, or no (known) >reason at all.
A rationalization is performed, constructing a seemingly good or logical >reason, as an attempt to justify the act after the fact (for oneself or others).
Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly unconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt or shame). People rationalize for various reasons—sometimes when we think we know ourselves better than we do. Rationalization may differentiate the original deterministic explanation of the behavior or feeling in question.[3][4]
It is important to put emphasis on the notion that rationalization is >exclusively a defense mechanism; as such, it must be a denial of an >idea.[citation needed] Many conclusions individuals come to do not fall under the >definition of rationalization as the term is denoted above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)


When should a percentage be written as a percentage and when should it be written x out of n? People perceive numbers, percentages and values in different ways depending on what it is and how it is presented.

I'm looking for research on when to communicate with an actual percentage and when it is perceived better to say n out of x.

For example in commercials we hear,

  9 out of 10 dentists recommend

We do not hear

  90% of dentists recommend

I'm currently working on some marketing materials and a study has found 4 out of 5 in one instance and 12 out of 19 in the other. I believe 4 out of 5 works better than 80% but Over 65% sounds better than 12 out of 19.

Does anyone have information about the way humans perceive percentages and how to determine the most favorable format?

Two comments. First: the "frequentist" format appears to be easier to understand than the normed percentages, at least if information needs to be chained as in Bayesian reasoning. On the other hand, probably normed percentages are easier to understand if two fractions are to be compared.
Second, I'd say that you should only use percentages if your sample is large enough. For example, "4 out of 5 respondents" amounts to 80% but the latter figure would probably suggests higher confidence than is warranted, given that it is really only a single respondent away from 3 out of 5 (60%)…


What speech synthesis software is suitable for research? I'm looking for recommendations for speech synthesis software that can be used to generate audio stimuli. The audio stimuli that I'm trying to generate will be long sequences of isolated syllables. Thus, the best case would be something that can easily read a text file like: pa/da/ba/ki/tu. I realize that programs like TextEdit on OSX can do this, but they don't offer much control over the output. I would like to be able to control the duration of each syllable, the spacing between syllables, and so on.

Ideally, the software would be free and have a history of use for generating research-quality stimuli.

I'd also prefer software that can run on an Intel-based Mac, but suggestions for other operating systems are welcome.

You are looking for Mbrola! It's an open-source, text-based diphone synthesizer. While it doesn't allow you to control subtle information like formant frequency, it's perfect for controlling pitch and duration. The one caveat is that I have yet to get it to work on an Intel-based Mac, but that is primarily because the Windows GUI works so well that I could never be bothered to try to get the OS X version working.

Each line is a sound, composed of four or more text commands separated by blank spaces. The first part is the segment, composed in X-SAMPA. The second element is the duration of the segment. In the above example, all the consonants are 100 ms long, and all the vowels are 200 ms. The fourth element is the pitch in Hertz. The third element is the percentage of the duration at which this pitch is supposed to start. An Mbrola file for what you want would look like this:

 _ 100 10 200
 p 100 10 200
 A 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 d 100 10 200
 A 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 b 100 10 200
 A 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 k 100 10 200
 i 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 t 100 10 200
 u 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200

The underscore is a silence, and we set the baseline pitch to 200 Hz. Each syllable starts at 200 Hz. At 10% of vowel duration (20ms), the pitch is 200Hz, then this is linearly interpolated down to 160 Hz at 99% of the duration, giving it a nice falling contour.


Why is the occipital lobe behind instead of in front? These are regions of our brain:

Our eyes are in front below our forehead, however, the visual area Occipital Lobe is behind. Are there any biological reasons for this? why shouldn't Occipital Lobe be in forehead instead?
I'm thinking of one thing but I don't know whether it's correct: The signals to run from the eyes thru' other regions for linking knowledge.

From the retina, visual signals next travel through the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus. This nucleus is quite centrally located, about as much in the middle of the brain as possible, and much much more ancient (evolutionarily, and developmentally) than the folded outer part of the brain that is highly recognizable in humans.
This entire folded brain region including frontal/parietal/temporal/occipital lobes is called the neocortex, and it is quite recent in evolution, only appearing in mammals.
In other vertebrates, the next step in visual processing is the optic tectum, also found in the center of the brain. In mammals we typically call this the superior colliculus, and it still functions in eye movements and visual target localization.
The position of visual cortex in humans is determined simply by the part of neocortex that gets direct inputs from the visual part of thalamus, so it is likely that it inherits somewhat from the organization of the thalamus, where you can notice that the LGN is located towards the back part of the thalamus, but note that LGN isn't simply the structure furthest back (MGN, the auditory thalamus, is further back, for example). Otherwise, there is no need or reason for the visual cortex to be in any particular part of the brain, only that it needs some space for itself apart from other regions. Input isn't coming directly from the retina in the eyes, so there is no improvement to path length to have the visual cortex anywhere else.
Vision isn't even forward-focusing in many mammals, this is a trait that you really only see in carnivores and primates that use binocular vision to make an improved 3D map of the world in front. Prey animals like rodents and many herbivores have vision that is more concerned with what is above or on any side rather than what is in front.
See also, to some extent, https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/35532/why-do-some-bad-traits-evolve-and-good-ones-dont


Is ignoring messages a learned behavior? As someone that works troubleshooting stuff, I've seen a surprising amount of people that, when confronted with messages, warnings and errors, tend to seek help fast (or early in the process) in the hope someone will understand what their problem is, rather than reading the error and searching directly for a solution, or solving what they did wrong independently. To illustrate this, consider an example (I'm not sure if this captures the qi of the problem, but here it goes):

  User $A$ performs a certain action that leads to the current error/warning/message:

    Error: your input was greater than two, please use $X$ tool when input is greater than two.

When the user is presented with an error message, there are 4 things that could happen:

User comes back and uses the correct tool.
User tries again until frustrated.
User tries again until frustrated and seeks help.
User tries again until frustrated, seeks help and doesn't get it. The user either figures out the message or just leaves things as they are.

My question: why do endings 2, 3, and 4 happen? Is the message too difficult for some people to understand, or do they believe they are not wrong and the tool should do what they want or the message should be more calling (IN CAPS or bold)? Do people ignore seemingly perfectly crafted messages? Or have we learned to ignore them, given all the media with which we are bombarded?

Several explanations could apply crossing psychology and linguistics:

Cognitive: It is perhaps bold to suggest that there could be a perfectly constructed error message. Reading comprehension and interpretation is impacted by a diverse array of cognitive processes, including literal, inferential and evaluative cognitive processes(Basaraba et al., 2013). Despite having comprehensive vocabulary and general knowledge, individuals may still encounter difficulties with text comprehension due to metacognitive deficits with memory and reading strategies(Oakhill et al., 2015), diversity of cultural background(Yousef et al., 2014), and developmental opportunity(Paris & Hamilton, 2009). Given the extensive array of cognitive processes required to comprehend text, it is not surprising that a range of interpretations will exist, no matter how well constructed the response is.

Opportunity cost: The amount of time an individual will devote to solving the conundrum of the error message is dependent on their other priorities(Kurzban et al., 2013). The individual is unlikely to know in advance how much time it will take to comply with the error message, so they are likely to make assumptions.  If the opportunity cost associated with the estimated time is less than the value the individual estimates is associated with other opportunities, then they are unlikely to respond in the manner expected.

Learned behaviours will also be involved.  If the user has learned from prior interactions that the same result can be achieved through non-compliance, then they are likely to repeat this learned behavior in the future.

In addition to the above, self-efficacy(Bandura & Locke, 2003) and embarrassment avoidance(Jiang et al., 2018) may have a role to play.

Bandura, A., & Locke, E. A. (2003). Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited [Review of Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited]. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(1), 87–99. psycnet.apa.org. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.1.87

Basaraba, D., Yovanoff, P., Alonzo, J., & Tindal, G. (2013). Examining the structure of reading comprehension: do literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension truly exist? Reading and Writing, 26(3), 349–379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-012-9372-9

Jiang, L., Drolet, A., & Scott, C. A. (2018). Countering embarrassment-avoidance by taking an observer’s perspective. Motivation and Emotion, 42(5), 748–762. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9673-7

Kurzban, R., Duckworth, A., Kable, J. W., & Myers, J. (2013). An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(6), 661–679. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12003196

Oakhill, J. V., Berenhaus, M. S., & Cain, K. (2015). Children’s reading comprehension and comprehension difficulties. In A. Pollatsek & R. Treiman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Reading (pp. 344–360). Oxford.

Paris, S. G., & Hamilton, E. E. (2009). The Development of Children’s Reading Comprehension. In S. E. Israel & G. G. Duffy (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Reading Comprehension (pp. 32–53). Routledge.

Yousef, H., Karimi, L., & Janfeshan, K. (2014). The Relationship between Cultural Background and Reading Comprehension. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4(4). https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.4.4.707-714


How to measure precision in classical test theory framework? What methods or approaches exist or might be developed to measure precision of measurement in a classical test theory framework? Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (American Psychological Association, 2014) talks about precision of measurement in several places, but does not seem to provide any references.

Also, to what extent is precision of measurement in IRT theory similar to or different from absolute agreement in score (as opposed to inter-rater reliability or test reliability as measured by alpha) in CTT?

'Precision' in classical test theory
Most accounts of classical test theory do not have a notion of precision as such, but occasionally, reliability may be called precision instead. The relationship is probably most concisely illustrated with the standard dartboards. This is also explained on the Wikipedia Item Response Theory page, but as you can see, in CTT, precision is to reliability what accuracy is to validity.

(Wikipedia Reliability article juxtaposed with a Tufts University guide.
Origin of 'precision' in classical test theory
Cronbach (1951) suggested Coombs (1950) as the origin of the reliability/precision confusion.

Coombs (6) offers the somewhat more satisfactory name "coefficient of precision" for this index which reports the absolute minimum error to be found if the same instrument is applied twice independently to the same subject. A coefficient of stability can be obtained by making the two observations with any desired interval between. A rigorous definition of the coefficient of precision, then, is that it is the limit of the coefficient of stability, as the time between testings becomes infinitesimal.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm interpreting the secondary question right, but IRT precision is a measure of precision under IRT, and ICC is a measure of reliability under CTT. The main difference is that CTT expresses reliability as a single value, while IRT expresses precision for different values of the underlying trait. This isn't specific to absolute agreement, though, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.
References

Coombs, C. H. (1950). The Concepts of Reliability and Homogeneity. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 10(1), 43-56.
Cronbach, L. J. (1951). Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. psychometrika, 16(3), 297-334.


What article looked at the relationship between bedtime stories and national productivity? I've been told of an article about the effects of bedtime stories. The findings of this article are that countries in which the more popular bedtime stories are active were more productive than the ones in which the popular bedtime stories were passive (Passive means someone came and rescued the princess, Active means the princess fought and got her happy ending)

I've never actually read the article, and I don't even know it's name or authors. I'm hoping someone here can help me find it (or anything similar). I've tried google/scholar.google with no success. I'm pretty sure the article predates the world wide web...

(I'm not sure if the article in question calls the bedtime stories "active" or "passive". I just used these words because they seemed appropriate)

Thank you

I believe this is referring to David McClelland's 1961 book "The Achieving Society."* McClelland proposed that an achievement motivation (desire for achievement) could predict economic growth and success. He examined this from a range of social and individual psychological factors, including the achievement content of "cultural products" such as children's stories and folk tales. He developed a value coding system for children's stories that centered on the impact of different story characteristics on the ego (this is your passive vs active term). Examples include whether the protagonist was of high or low social standing (ego status), influences on the ego (fate or man), how the ego responds (brains vs brawn), and whether the ego (protagonist) engages in work in order to achieve a goal. These in turn were coded into achievement motivation.

Among his findings, McClelland noted that cultural products high in achievement motivation were associated with how many full-time entrepreneurs were found in pre-literature cultures, the economic success of different historical empires, and the rate of growth in national consumption of electric power (and presumably industry) in the early twentieth century.

McClelland continued to publish on the topic (1975), though the theory received criticism and some subsequent studies failed to replicate his results (Gilleard, 1989; Mazur & Rosa, 1977). However, a more recent study suggested that an expansion of the theory would more readily capture the impact of motivation on economics in Eastern cultures, and might strengthen the predictive power of this method (Doyle & Doyle, 2001). Additionally, a 2009 study (Engeser, Rheinberg, & Moller) comparing achievement imagery in school textbooks in different German states found that the more economically successful regions had books with more achievement images. The introduction to the Engeser & colleagues paper also provides some links to related studies, for your reference.

Doyle, K. O., & Doyle, M. R. (2001). Meanings of wealth in European and Chinese fairy tales. American Behavioral Scientist, 45(2), 191-204.

Engeser, S., Rheinberg, F., & Moller, M. (2009). Achievement motive imagery in German schoolbooks: A pilot study testing McClelland's hypothesis. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 110-113.

Gilleard, C. J. (1989). The achieving society revisited: A further analysis of the relation between national economic growth and need achievement. Journal of Economic Psychology, 10(1), 21-34.

Mazur, A. & Rosa, E. (1977). An empirical test of McClelland's "Achieving Society" Theory. Social Forces, 55(3), 769-774.

*McClelland's book was originally published by D. Van Nostrand Co., Princeton, NJ, but seems to have been republished in 2010 by Martino Fine Books (ISBN:  978-1891396397).


What drives civilization? Fossil record indicates humanity arose on the African Continent - in/around Gauteng. Yet the oldest civilizations on record are far afield - Ebla, Mesopotamia

What drives civilization? Why is the cradle of civilization not nearer the cradle of humanity?

In my opinion civilization is that state of intellect when beings of a community recognize that collaboration rather than competition for resources is feasible, and actively work in that direction (granted we humans still have competition at the level of village, town, company, & nation). Unlike other contemporary civilizations (ants and bees for instance) humans are not segregated into castes such as the warrior, worker - intellect drives human civilization.

Not a real explanation of why writing or cities appeared where they appeared but by that time humans had already spread to many parts of the world so I am not sure there is any particular need to explain why they did not appear in southern Africa, specifically.

Also, the “cradle of humankind” in Gauteng is a large source of hominin fossils (possibly for reasons that have more to do with their preservation than anything else), not of homo sapiens sapiens or anatomically modern humans. We are not talking about the same periods at all (millions of years before present vs. 200 000 years for homo sapiens sapiens and 6000 years for writing).


Is praying the Catholic rosary a meditation and does it enhance brain plasticity? Futurism.com says that meditation can shape brains and increase brain plasticity and fit. Can we say that praying the Catholic rosary is a kind of meditation and does this prayer have all the benefits of meditation?

The common practice of the rosary is to say five decades a day each containing an Our Father and ten Hail Marys keeping one's place with a looped string of beads. All Catholics know these prayers by heart and can repeat them almost automatically, so thoughts are directed towards some inner prayer and talk with God during its recital.

Is this a kind of meditation and does it enhance brain plasticity?

The accepted method of praying the Rosary is to actually complete five (5) decades, each containing the Hail Mary (Ave Maria) repeated 10 times (hence the term "decade"). Each decade is followed by an Our Father (Pater Noster), Gloria, and a Hail Holy Queen, and the announcement of the "mystery" to be meditated upon during the next decade. Each day has its own theme for meditations to be contemplated (there are three traditional sets of mysteries: The Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries, with Saint Pope John Paul II adding a fourth set, the Luminus Mysteries). The Rosary has a set of introductory prayers, and a closing prayer. A "Full" rosary, though not often completed by the lay, is a full set including all of the Mysteries, and one can purchase a "complete" Rosary consisting of 15 groups of 10 beads, versus the standard 5 found on most Rosaries.

According to a study published in the British Medical Journal (2001;323:1446-1449), researcher Dr. Luciano Bernardi, associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Pavia in Italy and his team tested whether rhythmic chanting, in this case reciting the rosary or using Yoga mantras, could have a favorable effect on the heart’s rhythms. What the team knew at the beginning of the study was that slow regular breathing was beneficial in preventing heart disease by synchronizing inherent cardiovascular rhythms.

Using 23 healthy adults whose heart rate and blood pressure were measured prior to the start of the study, the researchers measured their breathing rates while some participants prayed the rosary in the original Latin (Ave Maria), and others recited a given Yoga mantra. For comparison, the study participants’ breathing rates were measured during free talking and during slow breathing exercises also. What they noted is that the participants rate of breathing slowed down from fourteen breaths a minute (spontaneously) to 8 breaths per minute when they engaged in regular conversation, but breathing slowed down even more to six breaths per minute while reciting the rosary or the yoga mantra. Breathing at a slow six breaths per minute “has generally favorable effects on cardiovascular and respiratory function,’’ the researchers note. What’s more, the researchers found reciting the rosary or the yoga mantra both similarly synchronized all the hearts rhythms.

It ends up that despite the cultural differences between the two spiritual practices, rosary chants and yoga mantras, Dr. Bernardi suggests that the two may have similar origins and both evolved as a simple way to slow respiration, improve concentration, and induce calm. The rosary while known to be related to the Catholic religion, was initially introduced by the Crusaders “who learnt a similar technique from the Arabs who in turn learned it from the Indian and Tibetan masters of yoga”, Dr. Bernardi states.


if IQ is inherited, is it from father or mother? I think there is some research that IQ is inherited, but is it inherited more from the father, or mother, or both?

Both.  The Independent article used a blog post as its main source.  The blog post (which is no longer online) claimed to rely on a doc (scientific document) that actually hardly supports its main assertion.  What that doc actually found was that there are 41 genes on the X chromosome associated with mental retardation, and none on the Y chromosome, and many (but well under 41) such genes on each of the other 22 chromosomes.  These autosomes had a total of 180 such genes.  (My source for the doc)  The doc then goes on to make a bunch of conclusions based on "assuming that these [41] genes are responsible for the development of general intelligence or cognitive abilities (‘g’ according to Plomin)", but this is a totally unwarranted assumption in my view.  Oh, and the doc is in the Opinion section, so it's probably NOT peer-reviewed, which is why I call it a doc rather than a paper.


Do men have a higher sex drive than women? It's a common cultural meme that men think about/are driven by sex more than women.

Is there any objective truth to this?

How do you define and measure 'sex drive'?
How different are men and women in this respect?

The most straight forward ways to quantify people's sex drive, and hence determine if there's any empirical /objective truth to this disparity, are to measure their self-reported interest in sex (usually by asking "how much do you think about sex?") and also the behavior element (e.g. asking about pursuing sex). Though both of these rely on participants self report, the results are very clear: on average, men think about sex more frequently than women and pursue sex more actively than women.

Here's a WebMD article that summarizes some of these findings and links to various sources:

http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/sex-drive-how-do-men-women-compare

Sex Drive: How Do Men and Women Compare?
Study after study shows that men's sex drives are not only stronger than women's, but much more straightforward. The sources of women's libidos, by contrast, are much harder to pin down.

It's common wisdom that women place more value on emotional connection as a spark of sexual desire. But women also appear to be heavily influenced by social and cultural factors as well.

"Sexual desire in women is extremely sensitive to environment and context," says Edward O. Laumann, PhD. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and lead author of a major survey of sexual practices, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States.

[...]

Men think more about sex.
The majority of adult men under 60 think about sex at least once a day, reports Laumann. Only about one-quarter of women say they think about it that frequently. As men and women age, each fantasize less, but men still fantasize about twice as often.

In a survey of studies comparing male and female sex drives, Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University, found that men reported more spontaneous sexual arousal and had more frequent and varied fantasies.

[...]

Men seek sex more avidly.
"Men want sex more often than women at the start of a relationship, in the middle of it, and after many years of it," Baumeister concludes after reviewing several surveys of men and women. This isn't just true of heterosexuals, he says; gay men also have sex more often than lesbians at all stages of the relationship. Men also say they want more sex partners in their lifetime, and are more interested in casual sex.

Men are more likely to seek sex even when it's frowned upon or even outlawed:

About two-thirds say they masturbate, even though about half also say they feel guilty about it, Laumann says. By contrast, about 40% of women say they masturbate, and the frequency of masturbation is smaller among women.
Prostitution is still mostly a phenomenon of men seeking sex with women, rather than the other way around.
Nuns do a better job of fulfilling their vows of chastity than priests. Baumeister cites a survey of several hundred clergy in which 62% of priests admitted to sexual activity, compared to 49% of nuns. The men reported more partners on average than the women.


Is there a case of multiple personalities that is not a disorder? Is there a case of multiple personalities that is not a disorder? For some reason everything I found about "multiple personality" comes in a "disorder" form. Or is it a given that one mind can only have one personality?

Is there any information on cases where multiple personalities coexist in the mind of a single individual, without the adverse effects such as disassociation, memory loss or self harm, that is not the product of a trauma?

Note that I do not ask in the context of "social context" personality, but two distinct personalities that persist throughout different social settings. Also it might be worthy to note that even though they are vastly different in the way they perceive and react, there is no pronounced conflict or any adverse side effects as far as I can tell, if anything it appears to have a wide array of benefits.

Well, this is mostly a technicality (but then so is the DSM definition of any mental disorder). The DSM allows for a DDNOS; actually in DSM-5 that would be OSDD "Other Specified Dissociative Disorder" diagnosis:

  This category applies to presentations in which symptoms characteristic of a dissociative
  disorder that cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or
  other important areas of functioning predominate but do not meet the full criteria for any of
  the disorders in the dissociative disorders diagnostic class. The other specified dissociative
  disorder category is used in situations in which the clinician chooses to communicate
  the specific reason that the presentation does not meet the criteria for any specific dissociative
  disorder. This is done by recording “other specified dissociative disorder” followed
  by the specific reason (e.g., “dissociative trance”).
  Examples of presentations that can be specified using the “other specified” designation
  include the following:

  Chronic and recurrent syndromes of mixed dissociative symptoms: This category
  includes identity disturbance associated with less-than-marked discontinuities in
  sense of self and agency, or alterations of identity or episodes of possession in an individual
  who reports no dissociative amnesia.

  [more types follow but are not relevant here]

So OSDD type 1 would include any cases of multiple personalities/identities without dissociative amnesia, so in this (DSM) sense you can't have your cake and eat it, i.e. multiple personalities/identities would always be a disorder, albeit with not-so-obvious name, assuming the extent of these personalities/identities is sufficient to be deemed clinically relevant (by the diagnostician). For reference, the brief DID definition (without all the usual caveats of the full def such as not being caused by drugs or other medical conditions, but being clinically relevant in terms of distress/impairment etc.) is

  Dissociative identity disorder is characterized by a) the presence of two or more distinct personality states or an experience of possession and b) recurrent episodes of amnesia.

So clearly if (b) is dropped from DID resulting in OSDD type 1, we're left with what you're asking for (again as long as it's clinically relevant distress/impairment, not caused by drugs or other medical issues etc. These are common verbiage caveats added to most definitions of disordes in the DSM.) So then this is pretty much an issue what is clinically relevant distress/impairment so that a cluster of symptoims is a disorder. There is only one additional, unusual caveat added to DID in DSM-5 (and this would apply to OSDD as well):

  Note: In children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.

On the topic of prevalence and presentation, a 2014 review notes

  Chronic complex DD [dissociative disorders] include dissociative identity disorder (DID) and the most common form of dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS, type 1), now known as Other Specified Dissociative Disorders (OSDD, type 1).

  [...]

  The most common type of DDNOS, which has been replaced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5, called other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD), is typically found to be the most prevalent DD in general population and clinical studies with a prevalence rates up to 8.3% in the community reviewed in [...]. Across general population studies, the most severe DD, dissociative identity disorder (DID) has a prevalence of approximately 1% and has been found in .4 – 14% of psychiatric inpatients and outpatients, depending on the sample [...]. Most DDNOS/OSDD patients are similar in presenting symptoms, history, clinical course, and treatment response to DID patients, so DDNOS/OSDD is combined with DID here [...].

  Many clinicians and lay people believe that DID presents with dramatic, florid personality states with obvious state transitions (switching). These florid presentations are likely based on media stereotypes, but actually occur in only about 5% of DID patients [...]. The vast majority of DID patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, personality disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors [...]. A classic presentation includes a history of multiple treatment providers, numerous serious suicide attempts resulting in repeated hospitalizations, and good medication trials typically with limited or no benefit [...].

  Although the media and public are often overly fascinated with DID dissociated self-states, the complex symptomatic presentation of DID receives more clinical attention from trained clinicians [...]. Under-recognition of DID is common because the most obvious and pressing aspect of a patient’s clinical presentation may be one of the many comorbid disorders (e.g., severe mood disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], eating disorder, substance abuse, BPD), or the pseudopsychotic symptoms related to the overlap and intrusions of self-states into consciousness. This overlapping influence of self-states causes “passive influence” phenomena or Schneiderian first rank symptoms, which are more common in DID than overt, obvious “switching” of states. DID patients experience more first rank symptoms than do individuals with schizophrenia, with the exception of thought broadcasting or audible thoughts [...]. Intrusions into consciousness may be partially excluded from consciousness (e.g., hearing voices of states, thought insertion/withdrawal, “made” actions/impulses) or fully excluded from consciousness (e.g., time loss, fugues, disremembered behaviors; [...].

So yeah, weirdly, the otherwise specified DDs are much more common than the "flagship" DID... and (thus) the transitions between personalities/identities are mostly non-abrupt.

And finally whether DDs can occur without trauma, the DSM-5 says yes, but also acknowledges that DDs commonly occur after trauma:

  The dissociative disorders are frequently found in the aftermath of trauma, and many
  of the symptoms, including embarrassment and confusion about the symptoms or a desire
  to hide them, are influenced by the proximity to trauma. In DSM-5, the dissociative disorders
  are placed next to, but are not part of, the trauma- and stressor-related disorders, reflecting
  the close relationship between these diagnostic classes.

And going back to the review for some empirical quantification:

  Epidemiological studies have found that mood, somatoform, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse are commonly associated with antecedent trauma, as well as PTSD [...]. These disorders are also common co-morbidities of patients with chronic complex DD [...]. For example, in a prospective treatment study of DID and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) patients, 89% also had PTSD (n = 242), 83% had a mood disorder (n = 226), 50% had an anxiety disorder other than PTSD (n = 136), 30% had an eating disorder (n = 81), 22% had a substance abuse/dependence disorder (n = 61), and 22% had a somatoform disorder (n = 59).

But you have to keep in mind that a study like the last one is restricted to subjects who are seeking treatment, so they experience one or more distressing symptoms.

On the other hand, I'm guessing your question might have been motivated by a Vice article that has a similar title to your question, but which is mainly talking about the "multiplicity community" whose members are appanretly not distessed by their experiences. Likewise there's a "Plural Activism" movement, the mission statement of which is apparently

  Plural Activism will bring public awareness to
  the fact that multiples, no matter their origin,
  are able to live healthy, successful lives
  without integration.

So that goes back to what I was saying about psychiatrists (and their studies) mostly seeing people who are distressed. Quoting from Vice:

  The multiplicity community insists on being seen as healthy—even normal. This is our reality, they argue. Why are you imposing your reality onto us? Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—and its controversial precursor, Multiple Personality Disorder—are terms roundly rejected by the community, and most of them don't feel that they belong in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) at all. It's not that they don't believe people can suffer from DID (or, more broadly, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified [DDNOS]). They just don't accept that they suffer from it. To them, all those with DID/DDNOS are multiple, but not all multiples are DID/DDNOS. Contrary to what a DID/DDNOS diagnosis implies, multiples want everyone in their system to be seen as people. Not fragments, alters, or personalities, but distinct individuals who happen to be inhabiting the same physical body.

  [...]

  "The multiplicity community's history with the MPD/DID/DDNOS labels is complicated, and full of contention," says Falah Liang [an exponent of this community]. "There's a lot of resentment towards psychiatry for pathologizing what is seen as simply a neurological difference like being left-handed, for painting multiplicity as freaks and invalids, and for pushing integration as a necessary 'cure' that all multiplicity must undergo." On the flip side, the anonymous psychologist I spoke to expressed mild resentment at the idea of healthy/empowered multiplicity distracting from people who actually need a DID diagnosis. "People with DID need to be recognized, as it's a genuine disorder," she said.

  [...]

  Dr. Max Krucoff, a neurosurgery resident at Duke University Medical Center, would be the first to acknowledge the potential slipperiness of DSM diagnoses. "Most medical diagnoses are defined by a pathophysiology—something identifiable, anatomic," he says. "Psychiatric diagnoses have no known underlying cause. I can't take a biopsy of somebody's brain and look at it under a microscope and say, 'You have Multiple Personality Disorder.'"

  Still, the controversial term "disorder," he says, is a means to an end: effective treatment for those who want and/or need it. "If people aren't hurting anybody or dangerous to anybody or asking for help, there's no reason to go looking for them and treating them," he says. "Everybody's on a spectrum, and what's considered a psychiatric illness is often evolving. If you feel like you're sick, if you feel like you need help, then doctors may be able to label you with a disorder only so they can figure out a good way to treat and help you."

And I was going to say that no academic publications have looked at this multiplicity community, but I'm glad to be proven wrong, there's a 2017 paper: "Multiplicity: An Explorative Interview Study on Personal Experiences of People with Multiple Selves" mostly exploring the on-line communities:

  Results: Multiplicity is discussed on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and several other personal websites, blogs, and forums maintained by multiples. According to the study's estimates, there are 200–300 individuals who participate in these forums and believe they are multiple. Based on the six interviews, it appears that multiples have several selves who are relatively independent of each other and constitute the personality's system. Each “resident person” or self, has their own unique behavioral pattern, which is triggered by different situations. However, multiples are a heterogeneous group in terms of their system organization, memory functions, and control over switching between selves.

  Conclusions: Multiplicity can be placed along a continuum between identity disturbance and dissociative identity disorder (DID), although most systems function relatively well in everyday life. Further research is needed to explore this phenomenon, especially in terms of the extent to which multiplicity can be regarded as a healthy way of coping.

And a few more details relating to antecedent trauma (or lack thereof),

  Typically, multiples use their unique terminology to refer to common experiences, for example, “system” (which is the term used to refer to themselves, i.e., a system of persons), “resident persons” (or “alters,” who are alternative personalities sharing the body), “fronting” (when one resident person takes control over the behavior in a particular moment or period of time) and “host” (the original personality, often the one who has been present from birth). [...]

  Most systems do not report amnesic barriers or recall traumatic events, and they insist that their multiplicity is something they were born with. Many of them call this healthy or a natural state of identity.

  Multiples are a heterogeneous group. According to their posts, their triggers, how they switch between resident persons and the way they organize real-life behaviors differ greatly from one system to another.

  A recurring topic on forums is the gender identity of multiples. Many multiples experience transgender issues and gender dysphoria because their residents have different genders and sexual preferences. There are many similarities between multiplicity and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights activism. Multiplicity uses many of the terms that the LGBTQ community uses, such as “coming out,” which means “revealing themselves” to the outside world as a multiple.

The first 3 vignettes (interviews) in the paper do involve antecedent trauma (two of them quite clearly) or report switching being somewhat stress-related. The 4th vignette is perhaps an example where trauma is not involved, but it does involve autism. The 5th vignette is perhaps the one with the least co-morbidity:

  “I'm the host. I'm agender, because I don't like to be identified by gender. We've decided, it's better that I talk because I've been here the whole time,” a 22-year-old female voice introduced herself. She lives in a small town with family and currently studies psychology in college. [...]

  The system started about seven years ago, when the body was 15 years old. “We are not traumagenic; it just happened,” she stated. “In the very beginning, there were only two people who argued. One day I woke up and felt as if someone was possessing me. First I thought that I was losing my mind. It was crazy.” Then, a couple of months later, another person switched in, but it did not communicate with her. A little later, someone else came in and established order. Then, more switched in. There are fairly original members, and there are other ones who gradually showed up.

  Her parents know about the system, but they have never met other members. “My mum asked me if I wanted to kill her,” she stated. Her teachers do not know about her system because she would never allow switching in the classroom. She talked to professionals, and they do not think it is a problem; they see it as a sort of help. Given that she has not had trauma or amnesia, they do not believe it is DID. She added, “It isn't interfering with my life now. On the contrary, it is helpful.”


Is there cognizance or meta-awareness of classical conditioning? Behaviorism's initial popularity was largely due to it's ability to take cognition and consciousness out of the equation; bringing it close to something that could be tested completely objectively by judging behaviors. Two of the most significant remaining findings of behaviorism are classical and operant conditioning. Because these acts can be studied in terms only of stimulus and reaction, cognition is largely ignored in related studies, especially in the traditional radical behaviorists' work.

My question is, to what extent is cognition actually at work during classical conditioning? Has it been shown that participants in studies are actually aware that they are starting to associate the conditioned stimulus with either the unconditioned stimulus or the conditioned response?

I'm excluding operant conditioning as I assume that at least for humans it is much more likely that a conscious awareness of the associations between stimuli and punishment/reward will result; perhaps this assumption is incorrect, I just thought it would help narrow the scope of the question. Feel free to correct me if it's wrong, I thought it should probably be a separate question however.

I'll also exclude Conditioned Taste Aversion as it's a rather special case and often only takes a single exposure to stimulus.

Is there evidence of conscious awareness of classical conditioning, especially while the association process is still going on?

I'm not sure what you're asking.  If it's found that there's awareness of the relationships in the experiment then typically it's argued that's not conditioning and the behaviour is modified through insight.  It's been a bone of contention with respect to classical conditioning and humans in the past.  You might want to look at Lovibond and Shanks (2002).  I think some of the thinking there is wrongheaded (how you assess awareness).  Nevertheless, it's a start for looking into the topic.

If you're asking if there's an awareness of the effects of being conditioned separate from those of stimulus and response correlations, I don't think anyone has ever tested that.

Lovibond, P. F. and Shanks, D. R. (2002). The role of awareness in Pavlovian conditioning: Empirical evidence and theoretical implications. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 28(1):3–26.


Are there guidelines in the peer reviewing process on assessing methodology? Usually an article goes through a peer-review process before it is published, and from what I here it is quite common that the reviewers "demand" some changes.

Are there guidelines for peer- reviewers, especially as the methodological side of things is concerned?
Are  "methodology specialists" incorporated in the process?

This does not really answer your question (because it doesn't deal in detail with methodological issues), but there is a nice journal article that deals with problems of the peer review process in general by evaluating "great scientific works of the past" from the perspective of current social sciences:

Trafimov, D., & Rice, S. (2009). What if social scientists had reviewed great scientific works of the past? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4, 65-78. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01107.x Available online at http://cda.psych.uiuc.edu/writing_class_material/perspectives_articles/trafimow.pdf

The reference list has some articles on statistical/mathematical methodology questions.

In another interesting article, Gerd Gigerenzer shows how p-values are misinterpreted in current research and null hypothesis testing is made a false requirement for the acceptance of papers by major journals:

Gigerenzer, G., Krauss, S., & Vitouch, O. (2004). The null ritual: What you always wanted to know about significance testing but were afraid to ask. In D. Kaplan (Ed.), The Sage Handbook of Quantitative Methodology for the Social Sciences (pp. 391-408). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Available online at http://www.sozialpsychologie.uni-frankfurt.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/GG_Null_20042.pdf

A Google search for "peer review guidelines" brings many hits from publishers and institutions. Maybe some of them deal with methodological issues in more detail.


Any study related to intimacy with nature and link with how it affects hormones or other chemical equations of brain? I was looking for some research study that links activity/response of brain stimulated due to natural scenery (or walk but i guess that is more implausible situation just to track what is going on in brain while being out of an scanner)

I googled but it results are useless. Is there any study done related to this? Please post link to resource related to the issue.

PS: I am not a person with great grasp at cognitive science but just curious to know things more scientifically.

The positive impact of natural scenery on individuals well being has been well studied. I found a few studies looking at the physiological effects of viewing natural scenes.

Electroencephalography (EEG) has been used to access the electrical activity of the localized brain cortex associated with natural and urban environments (Ulrich, 1981; Nakamura, 1992). Ulrich reported that subjects shown urban and scenes produced more alpha (relaxation) activity when viewing nature scenes. High alpha amplitudes are associated with lower levels of physiological
arousal as well as feelings of wakeful relaxation.

More recently Kim at al (2010) conducted a functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) study exposing participants to either rural (natural) or urban scenery, they found that different areas of the brain were active when viewing the different scenes:

  Activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus, globus pallidus, putamen
  and head of the caudate nucleus was dominant during rural scenery
  viewing, whereas activation of the hippocampus, parahippocamus and
  amygdala was dominant during urban scenery viewing (p < 0.01). These
  findings allow better characterization of neural activation,
  suggesting an inherent preference towards nature-friendly living.

In terms of hormones, cortisol, amylase and adrenaline would be the ones changed by exposure to natural scenes as these are the hormones most associated with stress (Rashkova et al, 2012; Takahashi, 2005; Takai, 2004).

Park et al (2007) got two groups of participants to spend time in either a forest or a city for a day and then swap and spend a day in the opposite environment they found that:

The concentration of salivary cortisol in the forest area first group was significantly lower than that of the group that went to the city area first even after being in both landscapes.

It's worth noting however that a meta-analysis by Bowler et al (2010) found that research looking at hormones and natural environments was not consistent:

  Meta-analysis of data on blood pressure and cortisol concentrations
  found less evidence of a consistent difference between environments
  across studies.

  Other hormones, or measures of hormone activation, apart from
  cortisol, have also been investigated such as adrenaline and
  noradrenalin and salivary amylase.  Across these different studies and
  outcomes, their results provide mixed findings, with no clear,
  consistent difference emerging in the effect of different
  environments.

References:

Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L. M., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). A systematic review of evidence for the added benefits to health of exposure to natural environments. BMC public health, 10(1), 456.

Park, B. J., Tsunetsugu, Y., Kasetani, T., Hirano, H., Kagawa, T., Sato, M., & Miyazaki, Y. (2007). Physiological effects of Shinrin-yoku (taking in the atmosphere of the forest)-using salivary cortisol and cerebral activity as indicators. Journal of Physiological Anthropology, 26(2), 123-128.

Takai, N., Yamaguchi, M., Aragaki, T., Eto, K., Uchihashi, K., & Nishikawa, Y. (2004). Effect of psychological stress on the salivary cortisol and amylase levels in healthy young adults. Archives of oral biology, 49(12), 963-968.

Takahashi, T., Ikeda, K., Ishikawa, M., Kitamura, N., Tsukasaki, T., Nakama, D., & Kameda, T. (2005). Anxiety, reactivity, and social stress-induced cortisol elevation in humans. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 26(4), 351-354.

Rashkova, M. R., Ribagin, L. S., & Toneva, N. G. (2012). Correlation between salivary α-amylase and stress-related anxiety. Folia medica, 54(2), 46-51.

Ulrich, R. S. (1981). Natural versus urban scenes some psychophysiological effects. Environment and behavior, 13(5), 523-556.

Nakamura, R., & Fujii, E. (1992). A comparative study of the characteristics of the electroencephalogram when observing a hedge and a concrete block fence. Journal of the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architects, 55(5), 139-144.

Kim, G. W., Jeong, G. W., Kim, T. H., Baek, H. S., Oh, S. K., Kang, H. K., ... & Song, J. K. (2010). Functional neuroanatomy associated with natural and urban scenic views in the human brain: 3.0 T functional MR imaging. Korean Journal of Radiology, 11(5), 507-513.

Kim, T. H., Jeong, G. W., Baek, H. S., Kim, G. W., Sundaram, T., Kang, H. K., ... & Song, J. K. (2010). Human brain activation in response to visual stimulation with rural and urban scenery pictures: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Science of the total environment, 408(12), 2600-2607.