Why do some memories stick out more than others? I have noticed this in myself and in many autobiographies as well. Some memories tend to stick out really well even though there appears to be nothing special about them. For example, I vividly remember walking into my babysitter's house once when I was a child. There was nothing special about that day from any other and yet I can remember it much better than some more intense memories I've had of getting hurt or being really happy. In books as well, authors often recount plain memories that one wouldn't expect to stick out. Is there some other factor(than our emotional state at the time) that is involved in making some memories more memorable?

First, whenever talking about memory, it helps to be specific. Memory is, somewhat controversially, categorized in a number of different ways.

I'll take the liberty of assuming that you are specifically referring to episodic memory. Given your examples, we might even call it autobiographical episodic memory.

Episodic memory is special in that it is a highly multimodal kind of memory. It's the kind of memory involved in "mental time travel", or the ability to retrieve a memory over many sensory domains and "relive" it.

As such, there's a lot we don't know about why some of these memories are encoded more strongly than others. This is especially the case for events that we don't remember paying particular attention to, like walking to your babysitter's house.

It could be, as you mentioned, that the emotional state associated with that event is strong.  Or, it could be that there's some combination of sensory inputs (sight, smell, taste, etc) that affect our bottom-up attention and are involved with being able to remember the event (Cabeza, 2008). It could also be that particular dynamic brain states are simply more "friendly" to encoding these memories (Watrous 2014), and your brain may have been in such a state at the time.

It's a very open question. If interested in this kind of memory, I would recommend reading Elements of Episodic Memory (Tulving 1983).

References:

Cabeza, R. Role of posterior parietal regions in episodic memory retrieval: the dual attentional processes hypothesis. Neuropsychologia 46, 1813–1827 (2008).

Watrous, A.J., Ekstrom, A.D. The spectro-contextual encoding and retrieval theory of episodic memory. Front Hum Neurosci, 8 (2014)


Temporally truncate BOLD data I'm analyzing some resting-state data and some of the scans are 10 min while others are 7 min. I need to cut the last 3 min off of those with 10 min scans so everyone has 7 min of resting-state data. I realize I could just delete timeseries columns after processing but I'd like to perform the truncation earlier so that my temporal filtering isn't biased. I believe there's an FSL tool to accomplish this but can't find it. Any suggestions?

It looks like fslroi is the tool I'm looking for. To temporally truncate a scan the usage would be fslroi <input> <output> <tmin> <tsize> where <tmin> would be zero and <tsize> would be the number of volumes you want to keep. Now I just need to figure out how many volumes make up 7 minutes...


Volition v.s. Cognitive Control v.s. Motivational Salience The concepts of volition, cognitive control, and motivational salience, seem quite similar. From the perspective of layman, they all seem to mean "the extent to which your goals influence your behaviors".

So, to psychologists, what is the difference? Or are they actually synonyms, even within psychology?

What sparked the question was that it is almost as if multiple discovery has occurred, and different sets of scientists are studying the same thing without realizing it. I realize though that is rather implausible, since psychologists aren't dumb. Surely if they actually were the same thing, someone would have noticed that besides me. So my conclusion is that there actually is some difference that I don't understand, or that they actually are the same, and psychologists know that, but they just haven't effectively communicated that yet (and so the three wikipedia articles should be merged).

Just as an example, it appears that volition, self-control, and willpower are considered synonyms.

I would argue that they are not the same, but you are correct that there could be some overlap. I think you will also find that people in different schools of thought might prefer a particular term for philosophical reasons in some situations, and in others the terms are more clearly distinct.

I would say that volition involves conscious decisions to do certain behaviors: that's it. In my experience, "volition" isn't often used in neuroscience and psychology, it comes up more often in philosophy. It may also be used in psychiatry but that is a field I am less familiar with. Similarly, self-control and willpower are not typically used in studies of the biological basis of behavior, except to relate to more colloquial discussions.

Cognitive control (see Miller, 2000 and Ridderinkhof et al., 2004) is similar but often involves inhibition of some unwanted behavior. It often comes up in the context of addiction as something that is absent/lacking, or in suppressing attention to an otherwise distracting stimulus. Cognitive control is also used to refer to error detection and behavioral correction, keeping focus towards some future goal. The neural correlates of cognitive control are usually identified in the prefrontal cortex.

Motivational salience (see Berridge & Robinson, 1998, Ventura et al., 2007, and Bromberg-Martin et al., 2010) is in many ways the opposite of cognitive control. Often, cognitive control is marshaled against other salient motivations. For example, in addiction, you could say that there is a high motivational salience towards the rewarding features of a drug: in someone with an addiction, those salient rewards motivate future use of the drug. Suppressing motivational salience in order to achieve some other goal (for example, sobriety) requires cognitive control. The neural correlates of motivational salience are usually identified in the ventral striatum or amygdala.

Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?. Brain research reviews, 28(3), 309-369.

Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2010). Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting. Neuron, 68(5), 815-834.

Miller, E. K. (2000). The prefontral cortex and cognitive control. Nature reviews neuroscience, 1(1), 59.

Ridderinkhof, K. R., Ullsperger, M., Crone, E. A., & Nieuwenhuis, S. (2004). The role of the medial frontal cortex in cognitive control. science, 306(5695), 443-447.

Ventura, R., Morrone, C., & Puglisi-Allegra, S. (2007). Prefrontal/accumbal catecholamine system determines motivational salience attribution to both reward-and aversion-related stimuli. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(12), 5181-5186.


Is there a mindfulness meditation technique that tends to produce gamma rhythms in the brain (and not just the alpha frequencies that are typical)? This is a follow up to a paper (^) that was cited in a response to one of my past questions here. It was found that experienced Buddhist monks generate a substantial increase in gamma waves on demand during their meditation, while novices don't.

This website cites a study (*) that found that mindfulness meditation causes an increase in alpha waves in subjects.

I'm therefore wondering if there is something that the Buddhist monks are doing differently. Is there a mindfulness meditation technique that tends to produce gamma rhythms in the brain (and not just the alpha frequencies that are typical during mindfulness practice)?

Perhaps gamma waves (in the orbitofrontal cortex and areas of the prefrontal cortex) are generated from simply a deeper focus. However, if that's the case, it's still not clear to me how one can attain this. What kind of techniques are likely to lead to this phenomenon? Is it more likely that a more open/wide focus (example cue: "pay attention to all thoughts/feelings/sensations that appear in your mind and, if you get distracted, just come back to the meditation") or narrow/sharp focus (example cue: "pretend to receive a huge reward for focusing on your breath with high clarity and minimal distractions") leads to gamma activity? Are there any other dimensions of mindfulness meditation that are relevant here?

(^) The Brain of Buddha - Christof Koch
(*) Mindfulness starts with the body: somatosensory attention and top-down modulation of cortical alpha rhythms in mindfulness meditation

It looks like increased gamma activity is pronounced simply for long-term meditation practitioners.

  Long-term Vipassana meditators sat in meditation vs. a control rest
  (mind-wandering) state for 21 min in a counterbalanced design with
  spontaneous EEG recorded. Meditation state dynamics were measured with
  spectral decomposition of the last 6 min of the eyes-closed silent
  meditation compared to control state. Meditation was associated with a
  decrease in frontal delta (1–4 Hz) power, especially pronounced in
  those participants not reporting drowsiness during meditation.
  Relative increase in frontal theta (4–8 Hz) power was observed during
  meditation, as well as significantly increased parieto-occipital gamma
  (35–45 Hz) power, but no other state effects were found for the theta
  (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–12 Hz), or beta (12–25 Hz) bands. Alpha power was
  sensitive to condition order, and more experienced meditators
  exhibited no tendency toward enhanced alpha during meditation relative
  to the control task. All participants tended to exhibit decreased
  alpha in association with reported drowsiness. Cross-experimental
  session occipital gamma power was the greatest in meditators with a
  daily practice of 10+ years, and the meditation-related gamma power
  increase was similarly the strongest in such advanced practitioners.
  The findings suggest that long-term Vipassana meditation contributes
  to increased occipital gamma power related to long-term meditational
  expertise and enhanced sensory awareness.

Also,

  Early studies of meditators implicated alpha (8–12 Hz) power increases
  as both a state and trait effect of Yogic, Zen, and Transcendental
  Meditation practice. Later studies have failed to replicate the early
  findings of increased alpha in advanced practitioners but have
  reported increased alpha coherence, especially in assays of TM
  practitioners (Gaylord et al. 1989; Travis 1991; Travis and Pearson
  1999; Travis et al. 2002), theta (4–8 Hz) power, especially in the
  assays of concentrative/focused attention practitioners (Aftanas and
  Golocheikine 2001; Baijal and Srinivasan 2009; Hebert and Lehmann
  1977; Pan et al. 1994), or gamma effects (Lehmann et al. 2001; Lutz et
  al. 2004).

Cahn, B. Rael, Arnaud Delorme, and John Polich. "Occipital gamma activation during Vipassana meditation." Cognitive processing 11.1 (2010): 39-56. doi: 10.1007/s10339-009-0352-1

Whether one can accelerate the gamma power with a particular meditation training technique is another question, however.

Activities likely to trigger gamma power

Even if particular subtypes of mindfuless meditation techniques promoting gamma power in novices may not be known yet, we can conjecture the characteristics thereof based on other activities that trigger gamma activity in the prefrontal cortex. From the comments, Angela Richardson writes

  Noise, flashing lights, movement and high-contrast or striped patterns
  can all increase gamma activity. In some people the resulting increase
  in gamma activity is so large that it causes seizures or migraines. If
  you want a meditation exercise to increase your gamma power then
  imagine loud music, strobe lights and brightly coloured rapidly moving
  shapes and patterns.

However, the corresponding gamma waves are primarily observed in the visual cortex. See

Adjamian, Peyman, et al. "Induced visual illusions and gamma oscillations in human primary visual cortex." European Journal of Neuroscience 20.2 (2004): 587-592. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2004.03495.x

Azizi et al. note that gamma waves also get activated during an n-back exercise, which requires active focus and working memory utilization:

  during cross-modal sensory processing (perception that combines 2
  different senses such as sound and sight). Also, it is shown during
  short-term memory matching of recognized objects, sounds, or tactile
  sensations

Roohi-Azizi, Mahtab, et al. "Changes of the brain’s bioelectrical activity in cognition, consciousness, and some mental disorders." Medical journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran 31 (2017): 53. https://doi.org/10.14196/mjiri.31.53

A common theme in the gamma activity literature seems to be a mental state that is awake and alert, with a deep and selective focus/attention. It has also been observed in the phenomenon of "getting it right" and feature extraction, as Phillip Gilley demonstrates in this beautiful visualization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCpYdSN_kts

A mental state that sufficiently mirrors these characteristics during meditation may possibly lead to the desired gamma activity.


Body Language: Why do we give each other the grumpy/frowning fake smile? I've recently become aware of this - I kinda knew I was always doing it, but just now it got me self conscious and thinking about it:

When crossing paths with a stranger, you are supposed to be friendly and smile at them, acknowledge them through a nod, and so on.

This is particularly the case in many service industries:

grocery stores - associates and customers acknowledging each other (not during checkout, but just walking around in the store)

fellow gym members as well as staff and members (again only walking around, not during particular business related interactions)

Another example might be you walk in a public bathroom and someone just comes out the door, you'll look each other briefly in the eyes, "smile", nod, acknowledge each other, and move on.

Now here's the thing I've become aware of, and mostly guys do this:

We don't actually smile.

In fact, we are kind of grumpy looking. Our mouth and eyebrows go into a frown, we press our lips together, and the only thing close to a smile that we do is to create a crease on the sides of our mouth.

Hard to explain... And hard to find actual pictures of this...

besides that he looks in the distance and he looks concerned, but imagine he looks at you and gives you a nod like that. pretty close!

he looks slightly more surprised, and worried, then what people usually look like, especially because the eyebrows are going up.

he's got too much "darnit!" on his face, and his eyes are sad looking, but again, the general idea comes across.

he has an actual upward curved smile going on, but definietly the lips pressed together like that

So again:

Mostly guys do it
it is done for acknlowledgement/politeness when you cross paths
it usually goes with a nod and brief eye contact, whereas the nod goes down
the eyebrows might seem kind of like a frown, since you're noding down, while looking upwards in the persons eyes
your lips are pressed together
often the mouth will actually go into a reverse smile curve (meaning frown)
the mouth gets kinda pulled to the sides, like we're making a wide mouth, just like when smiling.

First of all: Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you do it? Has it been done to you?

Does it have a proper name?

Why do we do it? Why don't we actually smile? We do we look rather grumpy when smiling like that?

I've noticed that we do a similar face in many different situations. Sometimes someone might tell you something that might make you smile or even laugh, but to them it's rather sincere, so you press your lips together, trying to make a frown, but you still can't help to smile a little.
There are many expressions that this kind of face can express (as you can see in the pictures), they all have a certain subtle difference to them, and definitely very different meanings, but I feel as if the mouth pressed together and kinda mixing a grin with a frown remains constant. The particular facial expression I am talking about is also accompanied by a nod, making it distinct.

Why do we do this so often?

Are we hiding something? Is this some sort of a default expression?

Since this (excellent) question has been around for a while without any answer, I thought I'd give my two cents.

I think we do this as a gesture of respect to the other person. We may fear that if we don't acknowledge them at all, it will come off as rude or arrogant. Maybe we fear that if we don't even look at the other person, we're basically pretending as if they're not there. So we want to acknowledge them in some way. However, they are often a total stranger, so we may feel that saying "hi" or anything like that, is a bit over the top. (Sometimes we may actually say "hi" combined with the frown, though.)

So, as you suggest in the question itself, it's a way to acknowledge the other person.

Now, why not give an authentic smile? Well, because it's a little bit difficult to give a real smile without actually being happy about something. If you see a dear friend for the first time in months, you'll probably give a real smile, because you are genuinely happy to see them. When you meet a total stranger, the truth is that that person doesn't really mean much to you. You might not really feel that you have anything to smile about.

Have you ever tried to smile for a photograph, when you're actually not very happy? It's not easy. The smile often looks inauthentic. Similarly here, we try our best to greet the passing person with respect, but it's not that easy to smile authentically.

Not wanting to look like a fake smiling clown, we may not even try that hard. The other person knows that we're just trying to acknowledge them. They're not looking to give us an Oscar award anyway. And we know that they know that.

If we were to make eye contact with them without altering our facial expression at all, we might end up looking a bit mad. (Imagine it, you cross paths with someone, and they just look into your eyes without altering their facial expression at all. Personally, I would be a bit freaked out if that happened.) Most changes in our expression will be better than nothing (except, of course for a downright hostile or angry face). It means we acknowledge that they are there, and we are making an effort to do so.

There's another possible reason: Fear of rejection. We want to acknowledge the person. So why not give them a real smile? Well, what if you do, and they respond with a careful nod, a frown like the ones in OP, or even totally ignore you? (This is quite possible, since it's not that easy to produce a genuine smile.) When you genuinely smile at someone, you are giving a little part of yourself out to them. If they then merely nod at you, or something like that, most people will feel uncomfortable. As if they just gave someone a gift and the other person was uninterested in the gift. I'm not saying this is a reasonable feeling, I'm just saying it's the way people might feel, thus motivating their behavior.


Is cortisol an effective measure of stress for pre and post task performance? I have a teleoperation system and I want to see how much stress a person is under before during and after operating it. I thought cortisol would be a correlate of stress. Can I measure levels rapidly, say over minutes, and detect an appreciable difference?

Is there a better way? How?

I don't think measuring serum cortisol levels would be a great method of testing for stress. It is expensive, painful, and the results are difficult to interpret. Salivary levels might be better, but this would also be expensive.

To actually determine the effect of stress on cortisol levels, you would need to control for variables including (but not limited to): age, gender, sex steroid levels, pregnancy, lactation, smoking, coffee and alcohol use, diet, level of exercise, genetic factors and habituation to repeated psychosocial stress exposures.[1]

An easier and less costly method would be before and after blood pressure and heart rate measurements.

[1] Why do we respond so differently? Reviewing determinants of human salivary cortisol responses to challenge? Psychoneuroendocrinology Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 2-18


Epigenetics and serotonin (amygdala threat response)? In this article it states that:

  Increased promoter methylation of the serotonin transporter gene
  predicted increased threat related amygdala activity.

I'm finding this somewhat difficult to understand. Increased promoter methylation would imply that the serotonin transporter gene is less expressed, so less serotonin is taken up by the presynaptic neuron, leading to increased serotonin levels in the synaptic cleft. Surely the increased serotonin levels would lead to decreased amygdala response to threat? After all, selective serotonin reputable inhibitors (SSRIs) are used to treat anxiety disorders and depression by reducing uptake of serotonin and increasing serotonin levels as well.

It seems like these two are suggesting two contrasting effects for the same cause? Have I misunderstood something?

From my limited understanding...

First off, you're definitely interpreting this correctly.  The authors note:

  […] methylation of the proximal promoter of human SLC6A4 predicts threat-related amygdala reactivity, possibly reflecting decreased serotonin transporter gene expression and, consequently, reduced regional serotonin reuptake.

However, it's definitely true that increased serotonin signaling is associated with increased amygdala reactivity (e.g., Fakra et al., 2009).

Moreover, SSRI administration in neurotic (Simplicio et al., 2013) and healthy (Bigos et al., 2008) adults seems to initially increase amydgala reactivity to threatening faces.  Simplicio et al. interpret this as facilitating "a process of decreasing emotional avoidance," which would be adaptive in the long-term through greater exposure (and habituation to) "benign 'threat' cues" like faces.

Both Fakra et al. (2009) and Bigos et al. (2008) suggest that acute effects of increased 5HT on amygdala reactivity may have to do with delayed effects on prefrontal cortex, which would otherwise exhibit control over amygdala reactivity. More specifically, Bigos et al. argue:

  While acute 5-HT reuptake blockade may potentiate stimulus-dependent amygdala reactivity, likely through stimulation of excitatory postsynaptic 5-HT receptors located on apical dendrites of glutamatergic neurons (McDonald and Mascagni, 2007), chronic blockade may lead to a more general increase in 5-HT neurotransmission via downregulation of negative feedback 5-HT autoreceptors (Blier and de Montigny, 1999). This shift toward generally increased neurotransmission after chronic reuptake blockade may allow 5-HT to potentiate the response of pyramidal neurons in prefrontal circuits, via volume transmission at excitatory 5-HT receptors localized extrasynaptically (Jansson et al, 2001; Sharp et al, 2007), thereby mediating top-down regulation of the amygdala (Hariri and Holmes, 2006).

So SSRIs might have long-term adaptive consequences via effects on prefrontal cortex, otherwise not seen acutely.


Why does marijuana cause anxiety? Marijuana is getting increasingly used in medical settings. However, one of its disadvantages is anxiety. Does anyone know the reason behind the anxiety? Is it from the marijuana itself, or does it result secondarily due the effects of the marijuana, because, e.g. the user is not comfortable with the effects?

Cannabis can cause an acute and short-lasting episode of anxiety, which often resembles a state of panic. When taken in high doses these effects can be intense and turn into attacks of panic and phobia. About 20–30% of users show brief acute anxiety reactions after smoking the drug. These symptoms tend to occur more in drug-naive subjects and in novel or stressful environments. In contrast, long-term users typically report that cannabis reduces their anxiety (Crippa et al, 2009).

Anxiety is also one of the main manifestations of the cannabis withdrawal syndrome. Its onset is typically between the second and sixth day and lasts from 4 to 14 days.

The main active psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), affects serotonergic, noradrenergic, GABAergic and glutamatergic transmission, but there is relatively little known about how it exactly induces anxiety. One of the reasons being that the psychotic effects of cannabis consumption has received way more attention, likely because it is a more severe side effect than the anxiety symptoms. Cannabidiol has been associated with an anxiolytic effect, perhaps through its effects on 5HT1A receptors (Crippa et al, 2009).

It has been shown that the amount of anxiety also depends on the genetic make-up of the user (Otten et al., 2016).

Acute intoxication could also lead to anxiety secondary to impaired cognitive functioning and the clouding of consciousness (Crippa et al, 2009), as mentioned in the question by the OP.

References
- Crippa et al., Hum Psychopharmacol Clin Exp (2009); 24: 515–23
- Otten et al., Addict Biol (2016); [Epub ahead of print]


Are brain waves electromagnetic waves? Depending upon its activity, the brain emits waves, which represent the summation of individual neurons firing. Are these waves electromagnetic waves?

Short answer
Brain waves are not electromagnetic waves.
Long answer
Measured brain activity, as you already mentioned, is the result of individual neurons firing. The activity exists, in fact, of two parts. First of all, there are the action potentials (APs). APs are current flow within a neuron from one end to the other. The magnitude of these APs (and the summation of many) is so low however, that it is barely measurable.
The actual brain activity we can measure is the result of the second way of signal conduction: post-synaptic potentials as a result of neurotransmitters. (Pyramidal) Neurons communicate with each other through neurotransmitters, which are released from multiple synapses and flow to the axon of the next neuron. The release of the neurotransmitters causes a much larger potential difference that is conducted through different tissues (e.g. bones and skin). The activity that we measure with EEG is thus only the result of potential difference of the pyramidal neurons. Due to how electrical fields work, we are only able to measure the neurons oriented in right angles to the surface of the scalp (see the right picture).

A magnetic field cán also be measured though, but this is in fact the result of the flow in current. If electricity flows through a loop, a magnetic field is generated. Moreover, if there is a magnetic field, electrical current will be generated. This is how MEG works. If there is an electrical current, and you place these loops around the head, the magnetic field will be "caught". Then, in turn, this magnetic field will generated electricity in the MEG recording equipment, thereby recording electrical activity in the brain (See left part of the picture, there are two loops where the magnetic field goes through). The magnetic fields are orthogonal to the electrical fields (look for the Right-hand rule) and neurons that lie parallel to the scalp are more easily measurable. EEG and MEG complement each other thus, and combining them greatly improves localization of activity.
This is a quick and dirty explanation. For a better one, you may want to read the book of Luck: An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique (2014), which explains it really nicely.


What is the independent variable in the Wason 1968 experiment on the Wason Selection Task? Is there even one? It seems to me the point of it was to show that humans are not well adapted to solving deductive reasoning problems, like if P, then Q.

Wason, P. C. (1968). Reasoning about a rule. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20(3):273-281.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

The paper uses rather dense language so I can understand why you might be confused.

The wikipedia page offers a good example of the Wason selection task:

  You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has
  a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The
  visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s)
  must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that
  if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is
  red?

Wason designed the task to examine the human tendencies to make four kinds of inferences. Two valid inferences: modus ponens (if P implies Q and P is true, then Q is true), and modus tollens (if P implies Q and Q is false, then P is false). And also two invalid inferences: denial of the antecedent (if P implies Q and P is false, then Q is false), and affirmation of the consequent (if P implies Q and Q is true, then P is true).

Both experiments in the Wason paper manipulate between an experimental and control condition the instructions and preparation given to participants before they perform the selection. This manipulation defines the independent variables of the experiments that you're asking about.

In the first experiment, subjects in the experimental group are prompted after trying the selection task to "project falsity", or, in other ways, to say what values associated with P, not-P, Q, not-Q in the context of the selection test would make a conditional sentence false. Subjects in the control group were instead merely prompted to think again about their initial selections (ie revise them) "because people often do this task too quickly and get it wrong". Since Wason investigated how these changes in instructions affected behavior, they are the experiment's independent variable.

You can see from this quote here that something similar is going on in the second experiment:

  In the experimental group the conditional sentence was presented and
  the four programme cards were handed to the subjects who were asked to
  pick out “the one card which makes the rule false” (i.e. falsifies the
  conditional sentence). They were then asked to pick out any which
  “prove the rule true.” It was explained to them that their decisions
  meant that the converse of the sentence could not be assumed-“that the
  rule only held one way.” The subjects in the control group were given
  a similar amount of time to understand the conditional sentence without any
  explanation of its meaning.

The special manipulation in the instructions here is that experimental subjects 1) were told that only one card would make the conditional statement false, and 2) received some explanation that the converse of said conditional statement couldn't be assumed. So, they got extra information and Wason examined how it impacted their answers. That's the independent variable for the second experiment.


Anxiety vs Stressfulness in the Big Five? From these sources (1, 2, 3) I have figured out that anxiety and stressfulness are generally defined as:

Anxiety - Prone to have generalized anxiety, panic, specific phobias, worry as well as feeling tension, nerviousness.
Stressfulness - Feeling helpless, overwhelmed under stress, pressure or when facing emergency situations.

But isn't feeling helpless and overwhelmed cause you to feel anxious? And isn't feeling of helplessness and overwhelmed basically comes from anxiety? When I feel overwhelmed, it basically means that I am very anxious at the moment.

Another definition (4) might be that stressfulness is a proclivity to feeling panic. But isn't panic is just a final stage of being anxious?

What is the difference between anxiety and stressfulness?

Your question indicates that your research indicates a close association between stress and anxiety. I've tried a few different approaches to separating these terms but with limited success.  Investigation included a review of:

Concomitant literature
Biological associations
Personality disorders
Lexical relatedness
Concomitant therapies

Concomitant literature
The Journal of Anxiety, Stress & Coping is dedicated to anxiety and stress, which indicates that they are very closely related topics.  The aims of the journal include:

understanding of the relationship between psychological and physiological processes during stressful and anxious states

Google scholar identifies over 3 million articles concurrently including stress and anxiety, indicating some level of association or correlation.
Biological associations

Stress and anxiety appear to be associated in heart disease (Chauvet-Gelinier & Bonin, 2017).

Neuropeptides have been identified that concurrently relate to stress and anxiety (Heilig, 2004; Cohen, 2012).

Personality disorders
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), lists the adjustment disorders (page 286) concurrently with stress and anxiety.  Interestingly, the DSM lists the word 'stress' 237 times and 'anxiety' 1280 times.
Lexical
The Oxford and Collins dictionary lists anxiety and stress as synonyms.  Merriam Webster lists them as near synonyms.
One definition of synonym is that you can use two words interchangeably in a sentence without loss or alteration of meaning.
Anxiety and stress are both abstract nouns and emotions, being able to be used in the sentence:  "I feel a sense of anxiety" and "I feel a sense of stress".
The curators of the Oxford and Merriam Webster dictionaries appear to believe that anxiety and stress are closely associated.
My own research is in the lexical analysis of personality, emotion and behaviour (Mobbs, 2020).  The words stressed and anxious can be visualised as follows.  It is visually apparent that the terms are highly related, possibly synonyms.  The question mentions Big-5; both anxious and stressed are in the region of the atlas denoted by the Big-5's neuroticism dimension.

Therapies
A range of therapies appear to be targeted at concurrently dealing with stress and anxiety, such as:

Group therapy (White, 1992)
Talk therapy,
Cognitive behavioral therapy (Hopkinson, 2019)
Dialectical behavior therapy (Fitzpatrick, 2019)
Music therapy (Umbrello, 2019)
Physical exercise (Mikkelsen, 2017)

References
Chauvet-Gelinier, J. C., & Bonin, B. (2017). Stress, anxiety and depression in heart disease patients: A major challenge for cardiac rehabilitation. Annals of physical and rehabilitation medicine, 60(1), 6-12.
Mikkelsen, K., Stojanovska, L., Polenakovic, M., Bosevski, M., & Apostolopoulos, V. (2017). Exercise and mental health. Maturitas, 106, 48-56.
White, J., Keenan, M., & Brooks, N. (1992). Stress control: a controlled comparative investigation of large group therapy for generalized anxiety disorder. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 20(2), 97-113.
Hopkinson, M. D., Reavell, J., Lane, D. A., & Mallikarjun, P. (2019). Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, anxiety, and stress in caregivers of dementia patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Gerontologist, 59(4), e343-e362.
Fitzpatrick, S., Bailey, K., & Rizvi, S. L. (2019). Changes in Emotions Over the Course of Dialectical Behavior Therapy and the Moderating Role of Depression, Anxiety, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Behavior Therapy.
Umbrello, M., Sorrenti, T., Mistraletti, G., Formenti, P., Chiumello, D., & Terzoni, S. (2019). Music therapy reduces stress and anxiety in critically ill patients: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials. Minerva anestesiologica, 85(8), 886-898.
Heilig, M. (2004). The NPY system in stress, anxiety and depression. Neuropeptides, 38(4), 213-224.
Cohen, H., Liu, T., Kozlovsky, N., Kaplan, Z., Zohar, J., & Mathé, A. A. (2012). The neuropeptide Y (NPY)-ergic system is associated with behavioral resilience to stress exposure in an animal model of post-traumatic stress disorder. Neuropsychopharmacology, 37(2), 350-363.
Mobbs, A. E. (2020). An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour. PloS one, 15(1), e0227877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227877


How is "being in a flow" explained cognitively? When wathcing the European Championship athletics, I hear many people talking about being in a "flow". Flow is defined as follows:

  Flow is an optimal psychological state that occurs when there is a balance between perceived challenges and skills in an activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). It is a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity. 1

This sound nice, but to me it is still a quite abstract definition and it is not really clear to me how being in a flow works. Is there a more low level (cognitive) explanation of being in a flow?

I thought that this paper could shine some light on the subject, but I am unable to access it.

There is a six-step breakdown of 'the flow' or 'zone' from it's creator Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

  Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
  Merging of action and awareness
  A loss of reflective self-consciousness
  A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
  A distortion of temporal experience
  Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

Which can be found from his website

There's also a photo available that denotes when flow would be considered achieved. (Upper Right)

For even easier understanding, an example of the six steps in order from my personal life,

When implementing or working on a new project in Excel/VBA (Work I'm very comfortable with) I usually start with music to block out distractions and assist in focusing.
As my process moves on I'm no longer able to hear the music, though it's still on. My brain is queuing next lines of code to test and my fingers are an output.
I'm less focused on mistakes, mishaps, meetings, or just general things on my plate. My only issue is my task-at-hand
I am the author and implementation. The code is mine. It's finished when I am.
In deep focus, a day that started at 9am and feels like may be 10am is actually closer to 1pm... and I should eat.
Every proper step IS rewarding, I'm challenging myself with a problem and completing work.


What are the visual cognitive abilities of a new born? We know that a newborn (3 days or less) can mimic facial expressions such as tongue protrusion and head movement. This means that the child can detect faces, segment various parts of face like tongue, associate it with its own tongue and similarly detect its head, determine its position with respect to the shoulders and relate it to its own head.

Am I correct in concluding that a newborn's vision is much more advanced than state of art computer vision?

At birth, visual structures are fully present yet immature in their potentials.

Following are the innate visual abilities of an infant

1. detect changes in brightness,
2. distinguish between stationary and kinetic objects,
3. follow kinetic objects in their visual fields.

However, many of these areas are very poorly developed.

With physical improvements such as

1. increased distances between the cornea and retina,
2. increased pupil dimensions,
3. strengthened cones and rods

an infant's visual ability improves with time.

The neuro- pathway and physical changes that underlie these improvements in vision remains a strong focus in research.

Because of an infant's inability to verbally express their visual field, growing research in this field relays heavy on non-verbal cues including

an infants perceived ability to detect patterns and visual changes.

You may find more details here


What science-based strategies can slow down dementia? What are some science-based strategies that could slow down dementia?

For example, do cognitive demanding tasks like solving crosswords, playing with the Rubic's cube, chess, or perhaps stuff like gardening help against dementia?

It depends on the disease that causes dementia. Dementia is a syndrome that has many causes. Some of them are treatable, such as metabolic/infectious diseases. Some are primary degenerative diseases of the nervous system, such as Alzheimer disease, Pick disease, and Huntington disease. Most diseases in the first category are treatable, many are curable. But most diseases in the second category are usually not amenable to treatment. They progress slowly but relentlessly despite any treatment.

Regarding non-pharmacologic treatments, including cognitive training or cognitive rehabilitation, they seem to have some roles in the management of dementia (H C Kales)   but not have spectacular effects and still be inconclusive in improving or maintaining cognitive and functional performance of people with dementia (Diagnosis and Treatment of Dementia).


Does the brain generate identical words in different languages similarly? Saying (or even just thinking) a word or phrase results from activity in multiple regions of your brain. Of course, we can measure/'map' this activity to some degree; From wikipedia:

  EEG measures the brain's electrical activity directly, while other methods record changes in blood flow (e.g., SPECT, fMRI) or metabolic activity (e.g., PET, NIRS), which are indirect markers of brain electrical activity.

The question is, just how precise is this mapping? Is it precise enough to answer the following question? (and if so, has anyone examined it)?

I'm curious if the same word or thought in different languages is produced by the same pattern of brain activity?

For example: does "hello" for a native English speaker generate the same signal response as a Spanish speaker saying "hola"?

More generally, I guess the question I'm asking is: are the signals/activity generated by the brain to create language driven more by the phonetics/orthographics/structure of a word or the meaning/connotation of that word/concept?

Can we quantify that person x speaking the greeting "hello" is more/less similar to a Spanish speaker saying "hola" than, say, both speakers saying "a" (in English a is an article; in Spanish a is equivalent to the English "to")?

Two notes / caveats:

I would assume that the same word in different languages would generate different signals in the same individual (i.e., one who comprehends the meaning of the word in both languages). Though perhaps this isn't true (which could also be very interesting).
Of course perhaps sex, gender, age, or even just general variation between individuals (or even variation within an individual) might produce slightly different activity signals for the same task/word.

Here's an article talking about exactly what you are asking:
EEG decoding of spoken words in bilingual listeners: from words to language invariant semantic-conceptual representations

I can say that the brain obviously has the ability to invariantly represent different stimuli as being the same abstract concept, not even from stimuli in the same domain (such as auditory to auditory) but even across different domains of knowledge (identifying astract conceptual relationships between visual signals and motor signals)! Whether this can be derived purely from EEG, I doubt it because it lacks the precision necessary (which would require single cell recordings of millions of cells at the same time). I should also note that EEG can't tell us much on how the brain generates the spectral graphs that we record, just what the electrical activity is. We also don't even know what exactly causes the signals. Electrical activity may not even be the only indication of invariance, because other underlying mechanisms may be involved. But the idea of invariance, itself, is the very idea of what you are talking about and this phenomenon is found in lots of ways. In fact, anytime anyone relates two different stimuli as the same concept, it's clear that somehow the brain has an invariant representation of the event. There exists some kind of mechanism in the brain to recognize and store abstract concepts, removed from the concrete signals from which the concepts are learned.

"Mirror" neurons are an example of the domain crossing invariance, and something you can Google. These neurons demonstrate invariance by being similarly activated when an animal witnesses another animal performing an action and when the animal performs the action itself (e.g. eating).

However, your question about bilingual invariant representations and the mirror neurons are simply specific examples of a more general phenomenon. In fact, the ability for humans to have such incredible invariance is a major substrate that makes our intellectual capabilities so distinctly advanced compared to even the latest and greatest artificial intelligence attempts.

In the auditory language vs. language example you provided, the differences in auditory signals are ignored and our perception of the concept being communicated remains invariant. The same thing happens in vision. Even though the objective visual signals received by the brain are different, objects can be conceptually related. Just look at one face, then look at another one. You will still be able to identify both objects as the singular concept, "face". You might say "but the general structure of the face is still there". Yet, if you actually look at firing patterns of the neurons, they are still completely different. It's just as mysterious how the brain does this as it is that we can identify differing audio signals as the same concept. Humans possess a variety of invariant abilities in object recognition, such as scale invariance (different sizes), rotational invariance, translational invariance, skew invariance, color invariance, contrast invariance, and many others.

Just keep in mind that even though we possess these invariant abilities, we also maintain the distinctions in parallel. So the answer to your question is both yes and no. We generate both an invariant representation and a variant representation of whatever the stimulus is. Theoretically, both representation types are present in the EEG. However, EEG is not powerful enough to identify the specifics of how this works in language and whether this is even true.


What do anatomical substrates of conditioned taste aversion tell us about  treatment? Conditioned taste aversions (CTAs) or Garcia effect are a byproduct of feeling ill after we've consumed a certain food. These aversions is present even if the illness is not related to ingestion and are difficult to extinguish in humans. This makes sense in light of the fact that in model systems like the rat they are entrenched in brainstem circuitry (Mickley et al., 2011).

With such a deep association taking place, does the likelihood of extinguishing these aversions via cognitive therapy (e.g., CBT) decrease dramatically?  What would be a possible inroad into treating  human subjects with such an aversion?

  Mickley GA, Wilson GN, Remus JL, Ramos L, Ketchesin KD, Biesan OR, Luchsinger JR, & Prodan S. (2011).  Periaqueductal gray c-Fos expression varies relative to the method of conditioned taste aversion extinction employed.  Brain Res.;1423:17-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.09.033

Your question presupposes that 'deep' (in the brainstem) is the same thing as difficult to extinguish. But the anatomical location doesn't tell us how difficult it is to unlearn a CTA. One reason CTAs are difficult to extinguish is because extinction relies upon exposure to the cue (taste, in this case). And not many animals (including humans) will voluntarily re-expose themselves to unpleasant tastes. The resistance to extinction usually claimed for CTAs is more likely due to avoidance behaviour, rather than anatomical location of the neuroplasticity involved. When CTAs are extinguished by forcing the animal to taste the cue (e.g,. by gavaging), extinction occurs at the same rate as other flavour preferences. Source: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/372

An implication for treating CTAs in humans (e.g., after chemotherapy) is that re-exposure to the taste will eventually be successful. Obtaining voluntary re-exposure in the patient might be achieved by counter-conditioning such as combining the taste with a sweet additive.


What is the relation of visual quality and distance from the central field of view? I have read somewhere that

  Our visual perception degrades non-linearly with distance from the
  fovea.

However, it was not referenced. I was wondering if there is a reference talking about this?

Also, is there a scientific reference stating the degradation of vision as a function of degrees in the field of view?

Assuming you are talking about the ability of the visual system to resolve spatial detail (resolution, if you wish), then your question is on visual acuity as a function of eccentricity on the retina (Fig. 1).

Due to the densely packed cones at the fovea (corresponding to the central field of view (FOV), see Fig. 1), visual acuity (VA) is the greatest at the center of fixation. More eccentrically, VA declines markedly. E.g., at 10 minutes of arc (1/6 of a degree) from fixation, there is a 25 % loss of visual acuity (Fig. 1.) This dependence of VA on eccentricity is indeed nonlinear (cf. Fig. 1) and correlates with the cone packing density and photopic resolution in the region up to a few degrees eccentricity.

However, at larger eccentricities, visual acuity is worse than that predicted by cone spacing alone, indicating that other post-receptoral retinal elements are the limiting factor. One of these factors is the increased density of rods in eccentric regions; rods are built for speed and sensitivity. The latter is accomplished in part by funneling the inputs of multiple rods onto a single retinal ganglion cell (RGC). RGCs transmit the signals via the optic nerve to the visual centers in the brain stem, ultimately ending up in the brain. Foveal cones, on the other hand, are connected 1:1 and hence the spatial resolution and thus SA is much better in foveal regions. The foveal region contains high densities of cones (good VA), while more eccentrically more rods are present (worse VA); see Fig. 2. This is exactly the reason that we read by focusing our central foveal view on the characters.

Fig. 1. VA as a functin of eccentricity. Source: Kalloniatis & Luu (2016)

Fig. 2. Rod and cone densities as a function of eccentricity. Source: Kolb (2016)

References
- Kalloniatis & Luu. Visual acuity. In: Webvision. The Organization of the Retina and Visual System. Kolb et al. (eds). Utah University (2016)
- Kolb. Photoreceptors. In: Webvision. The Organization of the Retina and Visual System. Kolb et al. (eds). Utah University (2016)


Why do we wake up when we die in our dreams? A lot of people had some experience with dying in their dreams. They all confirm they remember the whole story until the precise moment of death and it is the death itself what woke them up - not being nervous, scared or shocked (I remember myself dying peacefully in bed in one of my dreams, no fighting or falling involved).

I have never met anyone who continued dreaming after dying - although some religious people should be deeply convinced that the death is not the end of their story. It also quite a common plot of novels or movies: the main character dies and appears in some kind of "afterworld" - I have never met anyone with this experience, though.

Is it caused by the fact that our brain just does not know what happens next when it is all over?

Or is the moment of death such a "low-level" shock for our minds, that it just "reboots"?

When you dream you're in REM sleep (rapid eye movement). REM sleep is only slightly more "deep" than stage 1 of non-REM which means it's not that hard to wake you up in the first place.

Dying in a dream is a stressful event, which causes your brain to release adrenaline. You can't sleep and have an adrenaline rush at the same time so you wake up.

These dreams where you die and wake up are usually more memorable due to the fact that you wake up whereas most people don't remember 95% of their dreams.

Sources:

Adrenalin:

"Being particularly scary or threatening, nightmares can provoke ‘fight and flight’ responses, and the release of adrenalin whilst we are still asleep. Once you awaken from a nightmare it may then take a little time to come down from this elevated state, preventing you from being able to get back to sleep as easily or quickly."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TZOiC23CpI&feature=youtu.be

Profeso Colin Espie, Director of the Sleep Centre at the University of Glasgow and co-founder of Sleepio

Forgetting Dreams:

"We forget almost all dreams soon after waking up. Our forgetfulness is generally attributed to neurochemical conditions in the brain that occur during REM sleep, a phase of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements and dreaming. But that may not be the whole story.
Perhaps the most compelling explanation is the absence of the hormone norepinephrine in the cerebral cortex, a brain region that plays a key role in memory, thought, language and consciousness. A study published in 2002 in the American Journal of Psychiatry supports the theory that the presence of norepinephrine enhances memory in humans, although its role in learning and recall remains controversial."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-memories-of-vivid-dreams/

"At least 95% of all dreams are not remembered. Certain brain chemicals necessary for converting short-term memories into long-term ones are suppressed during REM sleep. Unless a dream is particularly vivid and if one wakes during or immediately after it, the content of the dream is not remembered"

Hobson, J.A.; McCarly, R.W. (1977). "The brain as a dream-state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process". American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (12): 1335–1348.


Generating a factor score for additional data using R and factanal Using this simple R code, I have performed a factor analysis on my dataset:

factanal(df, factors = 6, scores = "regression", rotation = "varimax")

I have now found significant factors that I want to keep. I also have chosen to generate scores using the "regression" argument. I'm still not clear on all the steps factanal uses to provide the scores, but after some digging, I found that the "regression" argument does use what is known as Thomson's regression to generate some score. That score then seems to be turned into a z-score given all the scores.

So here is the question:  Let's say that some new data comes in and I want to be able to give it a score as well. This new data happens to be one individual sample (the equivalent of one row of a new dataset).

Is there a proper way to give an individual sample a score or must the scores be generated on a population basis?

I wrote the following function that takes the fit object returned by factanal and new data that you provide (e.g., a data frame or matrix with identical variable names), along with the original data.

score_new_data <- function(fit, new_data, original_data) {
    means <- sapply(original_data[,row.names(fit$correlation)], mean)
    sds <- sapply(original_data[,row.names(fit$correlation)], sd)
    z <- as.matrix(scale(new_data[,row.names(fit$correlation)],
                         center = means,
                        scale = sds))
    z %*% solve(fit$correlation, fit$loadings)
}

So for example,

bfi <- na.omit(bfi)
variables <- c("A1", "A2", "A3", "A4", "C1", "C2", "C3", "C4")
data <- bfi[,variables]
fit <- factanal(data, factors = 2, scores = "regression", rotation = "varimax")

This is a typical factor analysis.

And now supply some new data along with the fit of the factor analysis and the original data:

 score_new_data(fit, data[1:5, ], data)

And it generates the following:

> score_new_data(fit, data[1:5, ], data)
         Factor1    Factor2
61623  1.4937101  0.1714941
61629 -0.8927227 -1.7240081
61634 -0.4091523 -0.1982590
61640  0.4855813 -1.1968676
61661 -1.2631737  0.6817574

The answer here provides additional details: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4146131/180892

If you look at the code for factanal you can also learn more about what the regression method of scoring involves:

  Lambda <- fit$loadings # lambda are the loadings
  zz <- scale(z, TRUE, TRUE) # matrix of data is z standardized
  # cv is correlation matrix
  sc <- zz %*% solve(cv, Lambda)


Correlation between "mechanical aptitude" and IQ I am an economist working in labour market issues. It is common in my field to divide jobs between those who are intensive in "manual" tasks and those who are intensive in "cognitive" tasks (e.g. here). I want to find evidence about the correlation between the "ability" these jobs require. In particular, I am looking for studies showing the correlation between "manual ability" (perhaps mechanical aptitudes, dexterity, etc) and "cognitive ability" (perhaps general intelligence, IQ, etc).

Most of the references I have found are literally from the first half of last century (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, or here, including work by Spearman, which apparently started this line of research, and has become widely used as a description of different types of "intelligence").

Interestingly, the first old reference above, in page 8, finds a high degree of correlation (0.6 to 0.7), whereas the second old reference states that

  The theory that general intelligence and mechanical ability are distinct
  traits is consistently confirmed by the low correlations found between tests of intelligence and mechanical ability.

but does not provide references. The third old reference, in page 101 of the pdf document, states that the correlation is low (below .30).

Regarding modern references, I have found very few, and I am not sure they are relevant for what I am looking for. For example, this study find predictive power of fine motor skills in mathematical tests. This study find a high correlation between general intelligence and motor skills relating learning taekwondo. This study finds that general intelligence is correlated with job performance across occupations.

So, I am not satisfied with these references. Can you suggest me better literature? Am I using the wrong concepts? Are the references provided above "sufficient"? Any guidance on these issues is very much appreciated!

Can you suggest me better literature? Am I using the wrong concepts? Are the references provided above "sufficient"?

I recommend you take a step back and ask yourself what your question is, and perhaps more importantly, why it is you're asking it. Only then will you have a better idea of what you consider sufficient.

  I am not satisfied with these references.

Unless I had the actual dataset, then I would find nothing satisfactory. This is because I am a weirdo. Depending upon your aims e.g. consultancy work versus PhD thesis versus simple report, perhaps you feel the same way as I do.

  I am an economist working in labour market issues. It is common in my field to divide jobs between those who are intensive in "manual" tasks and those who are intensive in "cognitive" tasks

Nevertheless, if you are an economist, then I suggest your endpoint is not mechanical ability per se, but a far more pragmatic one: the prediction of job performance by cognitive ability. In short, I suspect your actual question can be loosely restated as "what is the predictive validity of cognitive ability and job performance among manual labour employees?"

If I am correct, then you are in luck: this is not a new question. There is good data regarding this matter from the United States Army, partly because they keep very good records, partly because cognitive ability is the basis of eligibility into various military roles.

And you are correct: there is a non-linear relation between IQ and performance; IQ has a high correlation with cognitively demanding jobs (r = 0.80+), while it is far weaker in jobs that are less demanding cognitively demanding (r = ~0.30) e.g. truck driver.

Regardless, IQ remains the best predictor of job performance. Let me dig up some references for you, but I would suggest you don't get distracted by the concept of "other forms of intelligence". In the parlance of biological psychiatry, consider dexterity to be an endophenotype for success in living a successful life as a manual labourer but one that does not fully reflect your endpoint of interest as an economist. This is not to say that I don't believe that they exist, but that as far as you're concerned, perhaps they're thoroughly irrelevant.

EDIT

So, are you actually interested in mechanical ability?

I note that you reference one paper:

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. (2004). General mental ability in the world of work: occupational attainment and job performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 162.

Having read this paper, I note that it reports IQ scores for various occupations. While I wouldn't say it's precisely what you are after, I would have thought that it's very close in spirit to how I am interpreting your question.

For example, it reports the following correlations:

These occupations are not relevant to your question, but reminiscent of the data that I anticipate you're looking for. So this begs the question: what precisely is your interest? Do you actually care about dexterity, or physical coordination, or do you view them as some meaningful intermediary to your actual interest in work-related outcomes?

Be an innovator

Depending on the type of person you are, and how important the question is to you, you may wish to consider answering the question yourself. To be honest, if I really wanted the data, and the data did not exist, I would not settle for anything less than this.

For example, have you ever considered approaching a particular personnel selection company, or perhaps even better, industry stakeholder to conduct such a study themselves? Here, you would identify a nice, exemplar industry that is of particular interest to you, say, truck drivers, and obtain performance ratings of all the employees. As a pilot study (e.g. n = 20), you would then randomly select two samples, one from the the bottom quintile and one from the top quintile of job performers. Perhaps the bottom quintile would represent workers who have or are about to be fired.

You could then perform a computer adaptive test (CAT) of ability and get a fast and accurate estimate of IQ; if this is worth pursuing further, you would hope to see a robust difference in cognitive ability between the two groups. Adaptive testing applies item-response theory to get a more accurate measure of the latent construct (intelligence) than classic test theory because the questions that are presented to the subject are contingent on their running estimate.

The benefit to the funder of this research is that they would have a financial incentive to predict job performance; as an economist, I am sure you can tell me the difference in productivity by way of $$$ the top performers earn a company relative to the average performers. Just remember, it may be illegal to hire someone based on IQ, but "aptitude testing" is acceptable.

Job performance as a function of baseline cognitive ability

Also, an interesting counter-claim to consider is that while there might be little correlation between cognitive ability and job performance in manual labour employment, there could certainly a floor level of ability required for performance . I must admit that I have not previously entertained such an idea, although it is certainly perfectly tenable:

Cook, M., & Cripps, B. (2005). Psychological assessment in the workplace: A manager's guide. John Wiley & Sons.


Have there been any scientific experiments attempting to communicate with one's unconscious mind? For the purposes of this question, I will define unconscious/subconscious as the parts of the human mind that are not normally available for introspection or control, but which are still involved in cognition. These parts of the mind might be involved in memory recall or assimilation of information. While I would define communication as receiving a recognizable response to input.

Have there been experiments attempting to establish communication with the researchers own unconscious mind? If so, what were their results? I'm not looking for "new age" kind of articles, but genuine scientific research findings.

The most direct way of communication that comes to mind would be talking to dream characters in a lucid dream and evaluating their responses upon awakening. Such characters are capable of semi-intelligent speech, and their responses at least casually appear to be related to the question at hand.  A consistent pattern of responses over several dreams might be considered a form of communication.

Another experiment I can think of, which uses non-verbal communication would be using some daily activity to consistently triggers a recurring dream setting at night. For example, intense study causing dreams of classrooms or exams. In this case, the setting can be considered a response of unconscious system.

Another example I can think of is exposing a person to a stimuli which consistently causes  some song to surface and "get stuck in one's head" - earworms during waking cognition. Alternatively, some saying or thought might arise unbidden in response to the stimuli. In this case, this can be considered another form of response.

Have there been scientific experiments along the lines described above? What would be the term I would use to search for "communicating with unconscious" in a scientific setting?

In order to find such studies, it's a good idea to start off with mapping out what kind of situations would be relevant - that is, in what cases would it even be possible to communicate with someone's unconsciousnes?
Then you need to define what kind of communication you are interested in.
Here are some ways to find some kind of unconscious communication: Sleepwalkers, hypnosis(highly controversial), vegetative states and the like, subliminal messages, facial expressions, etc.
As such, the short answer to your question is "yes". The long answer is that your question is too wide.

Here's an article on using unconscious communication as a way of identifying narcissism:

  In this paper I suggest that analytical material implicitly carries in it a message proceeding from the unconscious and which is transmitted through representations. The message is expressed only when the object is recognized as such by the subject. In the narcissistic situation the unconscious message is not emitted.
  http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/3667086

An article on communicating with patients suffering from trauma:

  The interface among trauma, dissociation, and regression is discussed in the context of unconscious communication as a transferential enactment of unsymbolized experience.The view is offered that for certain patients in particular, past experience is not so much unconscious as “frozen in time” and that a key element of the psychoanalytic relationship is bridging dissociated aspects of self through the creation of a dyadic experiential field that is both “inside” and “outside.”
  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10481889109538911?journalCode=hpsd20#.VIAkl8mZGkU

Research on facial expressions:

  Studies reveal that when people are exposed to emotional facial expressions, they spontaneously react with distinct facial electromyographic (EMG) reactions in emotion-relevant facial muscles. These reactions reflect, in part, a tendency to mimic the facial stimuli. We investigated whether corresponding facial reactions can be elicited when people are unconsciously exposed to happy and angry facial expressions. Through use of the backward-masking technique, the subjects were prevented from consciously perceiving 30-ms exposures of happy, neutral, and angry target faces, which immediately were followed and masked by neutral faces. Despite the fact that exposure to happy and angry faces was unconscious, the subjects reacted with distinct facial muscle reactions that corresponded to the happy and angry stimulus faces. Our results show that both positive and negative emotional reactions can be unconsciously evoked, and particularly that important aspects of emotional face-to-face communication can occur on an unconscious level.
  http://pss.sagepub.com/content/11/1/86.short


How to distinguish introvert personality, social anxiety disorder and mild autism? There are the following similarities between introvert personality type, Social anxiety disorder and mild autism

Disinterest in social interaction
Interested in objects than people
May be afraid of being centre of attention
Have difficulty in people skills
May lack eye contact
May have special interest and hyperfocus
Have difficulty guessing others' mind

How to distinguish these conditions are due to  introvert personality, social anxiety disorder and mild autism?

There is an ongoing debate as to whether it is best to view personality disorders as being categorical or dimensional in nature. Your question infers the perspective of the categorical view.  The alternative dimensional perspective suggests that the three disorders you mention are very similar, that is, these three conditions overlap to a large extent with a slight shift along an (as yet unnamed) dimension.
Hopwood, C. J., Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Widiger, T. A., Althoff, R. R., Ansell, E. B., Bach, B., Michael Bagby, R., Blais, M. A., Bornovalova, M. A., Chmielewski, M., Cicero, D. C., Conway, C., De Clercq, B., De Fruyt, F., Docherty, A. R., Eaton, N. R., Edens, J. F., … Zimmermann, J. (2018). The time has come for dimensional personality disorder diagnosis. Personality and Mental Health, 12(1), 82–86. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmh.1408


How does Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning really differ? I was taking a practice ap psychology test and was curious how operant and classical conditioning are different.

My test claims that the difference comes from the fact that Classical conditioning is based on an involuntary action and Operant Conditioning is based on voluntary action but obviously this is false since what may be involuntary/reflexive for some may not be the same for others.

An example they gave is how someone may move their hand away from an iron because of 'reflex' whereas they will attempt to do well on a test because they are aware of a reward, but what about someone that has a lot of experience with the given subject and simply does well on the test because they reflexively feel the need to do well. I know for me personally when given a math problem that I can't immediately solve or outline a heuristic for solving I tend to drop all external thoughts and work on it, often with a the same determination with which my dog chases after a squirrel.

This is of course because over time I have gained enough experience, practice, and interest in the field to do so. Thus for others attempting to solve problems will be a voluntary action, but for me personally I have an involuntary need to work on them.

But then again, when someone throws a ball at me, being that I don't have much experience with sports, I tend to first think "theres a ball!" before the reflex for catching initiates while for others that tends to fire off immediately.

So what is the actual difference between voluntary and involuntary actions besides familiarity with said action?

And if familiarity is the only difference then honestly how do Classical and Operant conditioning differ?

The first thing to note is that both classical and operant conditioning are theories that attempt to explain how specific observable learning behavior works. They are not natural laws that psychology has uncovered, but models. In certain cases, scholars disagree and debate wether what they observed was caused by classical or operant conditioning. An example is apparative treatment of nighttime bedwetting (enuresis nocturna).

A common treatment for nighttime bedwetting includes bedwetting alarms: the child wears special underwear with a sensor that registers moisture and triggers an alarm that wakes the child when the first drops of urine are released. Now the goal of the treatment is that the child notices the stimulus "full bladder", wakes up and goes to the toilet. A treatment that helps the child to wake up after the bed has been wet does not help, because you want to avoid the bedwetting, and the children usually wake up by themselves when they are wet anyway. So how does the alarm treatment for bedwetting work? How does waking a child up *upon* urine release teach a child to wake up *before* urine release?

It could be classical conditioning, but then we would have backward conditioning, because the alarm goes off some time after the stimulus "full bladder". But backward conditioning has been shown to either not work at all or not work well. But the alarm treatment is highly effective. So likely what goes on is operant conditioning, where the wakeup alarm, getting out of bed and changing the bedclothes are aversive elements, and the success (getting up with only a few drops into the bed), the happiness and praise of the parents, and the feeling of competence are rewards.

The debate about how alarm treatment of enuresis works tends towards operant conditioning, but it is by no means decided. Alarm treatment of enuresis could be one rare case of effective backward conditioning.

That said, we can look at what the theoretical difference between classical and operant conditioning are, keeping in mind that these may not be factual, "real" differences in the mechanisms of learning, only in the model:

in operant conditioning a behavior is strengthened because of its consequences: what you do (e.g. smoke as a teen) leads to a reward (e.g. peer approval) or punishment (e.g. angry parents), so you repeat or avoid it, to repeatedly receive the reward or avoid the punishment

in classical conditioning the trigger (e.g. food) of a naturally occuring reaction (e.g. salivation) is paired with some random, unrelated stimulus (e.g. a bell sound), this co-occurence is learned, and as a consequence the orginally unrelated stimulus is perceived as a signal that the trigger will appear; the consequences of the reaction (e.g. drooling or digestion) are completely irrelevant for the learning

You can see that in operant conditioning the original cause (trigger) of the behavior plays no role, while the reinforcement is causally related to the behavior. In classical conditioning the outcome of the behavior plays no role and the learned stimulus has no natural relation to the behavior.


Performance of a damaged brain I have heard stories/reports that if a certain part of the brain (taking care of certain functions) is damaged other parts take over the function of the damaged part.

Intuitively this could mean 2 things:

We are not using the brain to its full capability.
The performance of the brain will take a hit due to other brain centers taking over the functionality of the damaged center.

For me the first one does not make sense since evolutionary selection makes sure we are endowed with the most efficient systems. So what is happening exactly when brain centers get damaged?

To the question "what is happening exactly when brain centres get damaged?". The answer is: When any tissue, including neural tissue, in the body gets damaged, the body will try to repair them. The process of reparation involves many distinct processes, such as the process to get rid of the damaged tissue and the process to regenerate new tissue. But compared with other tissues, such as skin, mucosa, and connective tissue in general, neural tissue has a much more limited capability to regenerate, yet it is not zero. Also, in the nervous system, neural plasticity, which is the adaptation of other neural tissue to perform the function that is impaired or lost, plays the role in the process of reparation too. The following articles may help explain this matter in more details: ref1 and ref 2,  and ref3. And some animal studies of neural plasticity: ref4 and ref5.


How are musical hooks defined/studied in psychology? I know about the common concept of a 'musical hook': a "short riff, passage, or phrase, that is used in popular music to make a song appealing and to 'catch the ear of the listener'."

The Wikipedia article mentions how it is studied in marketing research, and provides two links to websites of organizations which study the 'hook' ('Hooked on music' and 'Hooked!'). However, I am not interested in marketing research and the two websites linked to as 'scientific research', at a glance, do not provide any insight into the research they are conducting.

Is this concept studied within the field of psychology or neuroscience? Is there any domain-specific terminology used to refer to what makes music appealing or 'catch the ear of the listener'? I would like to start reading into this literature but currently do not know what to search for.

Looking into the term earworms lead me to the following answer.

If you search earworms into Google Scholar, at the top of the list is 3 papers, after which the rest seem to be about corn earworms.  The papers are Beaman & Williams (2010) followed by Halpern & Bartlett (2011) which is then followed by Williamson, et al. (2012).

It was the last paper which lead me to the term Involuntary Musical Imagery and the paper was in Psychology of Music which lead me to the field of Music Psychology

  or the psychology of music, [which] may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behavior and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life (Tan, et al.2010; Thompson, 2015).

Searching Google Scholar for Involuntary Musical Imagery leads you to much more.

References

Beaman, C. P., & Williams, T. I. (2010). Earworms (stuck song syndrome): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British Journal of Psychology, 101(4), 637-653. DOI: 10.1348/000712609X479636 PDF: http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/5755/1/earworms_write-upBJP.pdf

Halpern, A. R., & Bartlett, J. C. (2011). The persistence of musical memories: A descriptive study of earworms. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(4), 425-432. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2011.28.4.425 PDF: http://www.academia.edu/download/45162267/The_Persistence_of_Musical_Memories_A_De20160428-27955-1tiomp.pdf

Tan, S., Pfordresher, P., & Harré, R. (2010). Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance. New York: Psychology Press.

Thompson, W. F. (2015) Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music, 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williamson, V. J., Jilka, S. R., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Müllensiefen, D., & Stewart, L. (2012). How do “earworms” start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery. Psychology of Music, 40(3), 259-284. DOI: 10.1177/0305735611418553 PDF: http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas03dm/papers/Williamson_etal_Earworms_POM_2012.pdf


Does high IQ give cause to doubt an ADHD diagnosis? My friend was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, but her parents disagreed with such a diagnosis on the grounds that she had a high IQ which was discovered when her psychologists and psychiatrists were investigating what mental illnesses she may have had.

Edit: There was medicine prescribed, but she and her mother can't remember the name of her prescribed medicine.

I thought back to that when reading this:

  Myth #10: Kids with ADHD won't amount to anything.

  Many famous artists, scientists, and politicians had ADHD as children.
  Here's a list of some well-known celebrities with ADHD:

It seems to me based on that and the things I've heard that people think ADHD in children causes poor academic performance, but the myth is that such poor academic performance is suggesting that said children "won't amount to anything".

So, people don't think that children with ADHD can be geniuses?

Expansion: Is it, however, also a misconception (whether as prevalent as a myth or not) that people who are thought to have mental illnesses instead are geniuses or something like that?

By genius I mean someone with a high IQ.

Sounds to me like someone is making a logical fallacy here, though the origin of this fallacy isn't clear to me.

We cannot go from 'poor academic performance', to 'not amounting to anything', to 'having a low IQ'. These are not relationships of cause and effect.

The motivation to do something ('amount to something', if you will) is driven primarily by the reward-center. The neurotransmitter 'dopamine' is considered to be a large player in this game. Dopamine tends to project to the areas associated with reward (and these areas are clustered into the abstraction known as the pleasure center). Incidentally, ADHD has shown to be a dysfunction of executive reasoning as a result of low dopamine levels.

IQ is not determined by executive functioning. IQ is almost independent of executive functioning. If they were interchangeable, then Albert Einstein would have a very low IQ compared to, say, Donald Trump. I say that it is 'almost' independent because it is not clear that there is no relationship between the two at all. Studies have shown that ADHD sufferers show an average increase of 4.5 IQ points after long-term use of dopamine-reuptake inhibitors. [1]

You might also be interested in this page to answer the second part(?) of your question. It is well-written and extremely insightful.

Sources:

[1] Millichap JG (2010). "Chapter 3: Medications for ADHD". In Millichap JG. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Handbook: A Physician's Guide to ADHD (2nd ed.). New York: Springer. pp. 121–123.


How accurate is this explanation of memory? I'm no cognitive scientist, and this video I'm about to cite is certainly not claiming to be a good cog sci resource, but I have done some studying up on neurology and some of the parts of this guy's (detailed) explanation of how memory works seems different from what I understood.

The video: Film Theory: How to KILL DEADPOOL! (at 6:03) probably gave 85% (or 99%?) of the 7.7 million viewers who watched it the most detailed explanation they'd ever received of how memory works. I'm just curious to know how much of his explanation is accurate.

So, how accurate is this explanation of memory?

Really nice video and pretty much seems to be correct. The only thing that i am questioning is about the patterns. He says they won't exist after regeneration. However, just a thought: if you would replace one neuron of a network with a new (exactly the same but younger) neuron, it would receive the same input and produce the same output right? Then why would a memory be lost. Taking a step further, if an entire network is replaced, wouldn't the hippocampus with Long Term Memories (LTM)s still be able to give the same input to that network, which would then show a similar activation pattern, thus remembering?

To finish my short argument. Assuming that the hippocampus indeed stores the patterns for LTMs and the cells in Deadpool regenerate in an identical way, then I believe that LTMs may still exist after regeneration. Only when the hippocampus is affected, LTMs may be lost. I base this just on my thought experiment however and have no scientific proof. Maybe you can ask the YouTube guy for some references.


How often are complex networks and graph theory useful in computational neuroscience? Complex networks and graph theory seem like they would be important for computational neuroscience, but they don't come up in the literature as often as I would expect. I'm wondering how frequently they are utilized and what specific ways they tend to be applied.

In my opinion as a computational neuroscience researcher, graph theory has not made major inroads into computational neuroscience because we don't have good evidence for what graphs characterise brains.

For example, my research revolves around how patterns of connections between neurons within local cortical circuits relate to information processing mechanisms performed by those circuits. But it's only very recently (e.g. Ko et al. 2011, Cossell et al. 2015, Markram et al. 2015, Lee et al. 2016) that we have detailed experimental data to build a connection graph on a very small scale.

The "small-world" concept was highly influential in neuroscience for a few years, but it turns out that "small-world" doesn't tell you anything much about the computations performed by a network, or even tell you anything much about it's detailed structure.

The work of Sporns (2004) and others have been applied to large-scale experimental data characterising connections between cortical areas. But again, the network motifs that come out from these experimental data sets statistically don't tell us much about what is going on computationally, or even how these areas connect to each other on a fine scale. The problem here is one of physical resolution of the techniques used.

Some aspects of random matrix theory apply to the sorts of networks that we can build, simulating what we know about connections within the brain (e.g. Rajan & Abbott 2006, Muir & Mrsic-Flogel 2015). Much of random matrix theory doesn't apply however, since graphs of realistic networks are non-Hermitian and can be quite constrained.


Can dreams be memorised? Would it be possible to activate the human memory and "access" it by means of encouraging certain hormones, to assist a sleeping body to memorize dreams and later (meaning minutes, days, months or even years) access it again with the same hormones - something like a trained body function.

This could perhaps help in solving certain criminal cases or assist in psychological healing (for schizophrenia and the likes). I'm just curious about the possibilities and have absolutely no knowledge of how the brain works. This was just a wild idea that came to mind and I was wondering about the possibilities.

I don't know how it is when it goes about hormones but for sure dreams can be remembered and this remembering of dreams can be improved.

One of the most popular methods is trying to think about somebody's dreams just after waking up. It is also important to tell it loudly, record it or write it down.
After some time (even few days) of writing down your dreams a person is able to remember not one, but two, three or more dreams from one night.

The case of getting access to your previous dreams lately is connected with lucid dreaming - if you are able to have lucid dreams whenever you want, you also can initiate these situations which you like. But it is much less scientifically described case.


Platforms to make online experiments with counterbalancing There are a number of different interfaces to make an place experiments online, e.g. in questions Software for online psychological experiments that don't require users to download anything or Open source software for running Internet psychological experiments that collect reaction time data.

We have an experimental design that we'd share online, but we've found that one feature may be quite rare - namely counterbalancing. We have 4 conditions, and we'd like participants to be placed in these conditions so that we have more or less equal amount in each by the end. This can be difficult for web studies since it should only count the participants that successfully completed the trial.

Free and open source would be best, we don't have a designated budget to pay for setting up an experiment.

You could try www.gorilla.sc  It's cloud based software specifically designed for running cognitive psychology experiments online without needing to code.  It's not free, but it is affordable - £0.75 per participant.

Counterbalancing of various sorts is built in; randomisers, stimuli set counterbalancers, order counterbalancers.  It sounds like the simple randomiser set to balanced will do what you want.  As long as you stay on top of rejecting Ns that drop out, you'll get a balance in each condition.

There is a GUI questionnaire builder, task builder and experiment tree builder.  So you don't need to do any coding.  The vast majority of cognitive science task can be created in it very easily.

Full disclosure, I created Gorilla.


What is the state of the art in computerised coding of Thematic Apperception Tests (TATs)? Thematic Apperception Tests (TATs) involve showing test takers pictures and getting them to write stories based on the pictures. Coding such stories for themes and traits can be complex, time-consuming, and potentially suffer from issues of unreliability. Thus, it would be interesting to see whether automated computerised coding could make the process of scoring TATs more efficient, reliable, and valid.

What is the current state of computerised coding of TATs?
How does the reliability and validity of computerised coding compare to human coding?

The state of the art in computer-scored Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT) as of 2015 appears to be that computer-scored TATs do not exist.

There does not appear to be any relevant results on Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scopus for any search I can think of including the term "thematic apperception" which yield any example or mention of computer-scored TATs, and all recent studies utilizing TATs have reported using standard versions (e.g., Turk et al., 2010). A 2013 book dedicated to the TAT, A practical guide to the Thematic Apperception Test: The TAT in clinical practice also fails to make any mention of computer-scored or otherwise computerized implementations of the TAT.

References

Aronow, E., Weiss, K. A., & Reznikoff, M. (2013). A practical guide to the Thematic Apperception Test: The TAT in clinical practice. Routledge.
Turk, A. A., Brown, W. S., Symington, M., & Paul, L. K. (2010). Social narratives in agenesis of the corpus callosum: linguistic analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test. Neuropsychologia, 48(1), 43-50.


How does the brain project pain on to a particular part of the body? How does our brain translate periheral sensations due to injuries into pain perceptions? As an in silico analogy - if a stimulus is applied to a sensor it can be transmitted to a microprocessor. The micro processor then processes the information. However, a microprocessor will not cause the sensor to "feel" that stimulus. In other words, the processed information of the sensor is not projected back to that sensor as a perceived stimulus. Hence, in electronic circuits the information is processed unidirectionally. In contrast, in the peripheral nervous system sensory inputs are processed in the central nervous system, ultimately resulting in perceived sensations on the location of the sensor. Thus, apparently, the peripheral and central nervous systems operate in a feedback loop.

How does our nervous system do this? In other words, how does it localize the source of the stimulus (e.g., pain) and turn that sensation into a perception on that location, rather than just unidirectionally process the information?

Short answer
Peripheral sensory information is projected unidirectionally to the brain. A sensory strip of the brain contains a topographical representation of the surface of the body that facilitates the localization of peripheral stimuli. Hence, there is no feedback from the brain to the periphery necessary to locate the source of a peripheral stimulus.

Background
The sensory systems in the skin project unidirectionally to the somatosensory cortex. In the somatosensory cortex there are so-called topographical maps. These maps contain the neurons that connect to different parts of the body. Typically, neurons receiving information from one part of the body are clustered together in the brain. For example, the sensory outputs of the peripheral touch receptors in the finger digits ultimately synapse onto cortical sensory neurons that are close together. Touch receptors in the toes for example are processed farther away (Purves et al, 2001). A famous graphical presentation is the somatosensory homunculus (Fig. 1), showing the areas of the sensory cortex devoted to processing sensory inputs in different bodily parts, including touch;

Fig. 1. Sensory homunculus. source: Russel & Dewy (2007)

The sensory cortex, hence, is a highly structured cortical area, in which sensory information (including outputs from touch, pain, heat and cold receptors for example) is funelled to a topographical representation in the brain. See for a nice introductory this video from Khan Academy.

To answer your question - there is no feedback from the brain back to the periphery necessary to process peripheral sensations into localized perceptions. The bodily map is maintained in the brain and contains all the information necessary to pinpoint the stimulus locus on the skin. This localization is more accurate when more peripheral fibers are present, i.e. when receptor density is higher. This is centrally reflected in the sensory strip in a larger area of the cortex being devoted to bodily parts with denser receptor innervation. This is the reason why the homunculus is so distorted (Fig. 2). For example, the lips, tongue and finger tips are highly sensitive and contain high densities of peripheral receptors. In effect, relatively large areas of the somatosensory cortex are dedicated to processing their inputs.

Fig. 2. 3D representation of the sensory homunculus. source: University of Calgary

Reference
- Purves et al., Neuroscience. 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates (2001)
- Russel & Dewey, Psychology: An Introduction (2007-2014)


How do features of the work environment such as type of pen or color of paper influence productivity and workplace well-being? Background: Recently I have been doing mathematics a whole lot,and I have noticed that my output varies wildly from many external factors,but mostly it is the enviorment I am working in. Namely one of the most unexpected things is that most my output depends on the quality of pen I am using and kind of notebook I am writing in. Last day I went to buy new notebooks and I laid my eyes upon one with especially distinguishing blue-white color scheme,and in my mind it was already set that it will be notebook I will write abstract algebra into,and truly while using that notebook I feel really motivated, it feels like the color of it and the subject of abstract algebra are intertwined in my brain.

Questions:

What is the phenomena called where features of the work environment such as type of pen or color of paper influence productivity or workplace well-being?
How can such features be used to improve productivity?

Environment can be highly motivating through positive and negative forces. The conditions of the world motivated the scientists of the Manhattan project to violate some of their ethics and risk destroying the world in order to create the atomic bomb. Likewise also the oppressed scientist some of which where Jews who were forced into labor on the same project destroyed and sabotaged their work in order to prevent the weapons control by the Nazi's. Then also the USSR was not capable of creating an atomic bomb because of their culture conformity to a specific tenant of Bolshevik and Stalinism stating the atom cannot be subdivided. Galileo also comes to mind yet slaves built the pyramids. These principles of being open free to create, having every comfort of home and preference then motivated in a social and personal way free from tyranny of governmental and cultural oppression allow people to do their best work.
Freud would say your maternal or paternal figure may have wore a blue and white dress during a birthday party or Christmas or other extremely positive event in your childhood which caused you to associate those colors with successes. Which no one could prove unless you happen upon some memory of why those colors are important to you. Likewise also you (or someone else) may have had success with some kind of work or test with a specific kind of pen or pencil. This irrational association connecting certain operating items and conditions with success is fundamental to the human condition.
See below paper for further information:

Effects of Perceived Work Environment on Employees’ Job Behaviour and Organizational Effectiveness
A.K. Srivastava
The study examined the effect of two constituents of work environment (i.e. physical and psychosocial on employees’ job satisfaction and performance, and organizational effectiveness in a sample of 360 technical supervisors and operating core personnel. The analyses revealed that participants who perceived their work environment as to be adequate and favourable scored comparatively higher on the measures of job satisfaction, performance, and perceived organizational effectiveness. The two constituents of work environment were also found causing significant variance in employees’ job behaviour and their perception of organizational effectiveness. Regression analyses revealed that among the various components of work environment, working condition, welfare provisions, interpersonal relations, and trust and support predominantly contribute to employees’ job behaviour and organizational effectiveness. The results also specified that psycho-social environment in work-place exert more impact on employees’ job behaviour and organizational effectiveness than the physical environment does.