Do nice guys finish last? I read a recent article, suggesting that

  the nicest guys in a society are selected last by females.

The article continues to identify the cause as a lack of aggressive nature and competitiveness, with these being ostensibly desirable traits. This is a common sentiment that is often expressed in popular media, yet rarely sourced. I was wondering if there were any psychology studies exploring this topic, or any further explanation to shed light on this topic.

Is male prosocial activity and perceived niceness associated with sexual outcomes?

The question of whether "nice guys finish last", also known as the nice guy stereotype, is often studied in an economic or resource-allocation context as a more general case. According to the Competitive Altruism Hypothesis (e.g., Hardy and Van Vugt, 2006) altruistic or prosocial behavior helps the actor to accumulate social status, which in turn confers material benefits such as increased access to resources. In their words,

Individuals may behave altruistically for reputation reasons because selective benefits (associated with status) accrue to the generous.

Prosocial behavior and attraction
For the general case of resource allocation, reputation and status are plausible mechanisms for deriving benefits from prosocial and altruistic behavior, and covering this literature at length is probably beyond the scope of the question. Luckily, the question has also been tested specifically with respect to attraction, which is related but not identical to sexual behavior. In a 1995 study, Jensen-Campbell, Graziano and West reported the following results:

In Study 1, prosocial men were rated as more physically and sexually attractive, socially desirable, and desirable as dates than were nonprosocial men. Dominant men were no more attractive than low-dominance men, and male dominance did not interact with male prosocial orientation in eliciting attraction from women. In Study 2, prosocial orientation was manipulated to avoid "personalism," but still affected attraction. Across all measures attraction was an interactive function of dominance and prosocial tendencies. Dominance alone did not increase any form of attraction measured. In Study 3, male prosocial tendencies and dominance interacted to affect women's attraction to men.

Their study has a number of limitations which are worth noting before accepting this at face value, notably that it used attraction rating rather than some form of measure of actual sexual behavior. It therefore remains conceivable that nice guys finish last in real settings because more dominant men can, well, dominate less dominant men out of the 'competition' (attraction vs. sexual behavior problem). The study was also relatively statistically underpowered, which increases the chance of false positives. It is also worth considering that human sexual behavior is almost certainly more complex than can be captured by a single continuum.
A later study found that perceived niceness was a significant factor in women's expressed desire for long-term relationships, whereas physical attractiveness was a significant factor in expressed desire for more casual sex (Urbaniak and Kilmann, 2003). While these findings broadly concur with the Jensen-Campbell study and with the more general Competitive Altruism Hypothesis (nice guys finish first given enough time to accrue status), the study ultimately suffers from the same limitations.
Concluding remarks
It does not seem reasonable to make the unqualified claim that "nice guys finish last," but nor does it seem sound to claim that "nice guys finish first." What we can say is that nice guys do not always finish last, and not-nice guys do not always finish first, but rather, male niceness has different effects over time and contexts. Perceived niceness and prosocial behavior does appear to make a man more attractive on average, but it remains an empirical question whether this increased attractiveness really translates into successfully attracting women.
References

Hardy, C. L., & Van Vugt, M. (2006). Nice guys finish first: The competitive altruism hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(10), 1402-1413.
Jensen-Campbell, L. A., Graziano, W. G., & West, S. G. (1995). Dominance, prosocial orientation, and female preferences: Do nice guys really finish last?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(3), 427.
Urbaniak, G. C., & Kilmann, P. R. (2003). Physical attractiveness and the “nice guy paradox”: Do nice guys really finish last?. Sex Roles, 49(9-10), 413-426.


Is there a phenomenon where one feels alienation towards certain body parts I am wondering whether is there a name for a phenomenon where one has feelings of "alienation" or feels that body parts (limbs, internal organs, etc) do not belong to him or are not "part of his body" ?

For example - imagine a case where someone loses an arm and is transplanted with a new one, to which he feels that it does not really belong to his body.

I am looking for the name and some details about this type of psychological condition

The condition is called Somatoparaphrenia, and was first described by Josef Gerstmann, in this paper:

Gerstmann, J. (1942). Problem of imperception of disease and of impaired body territories with organic lesions: relation to body scheme and its disorders. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 48(6), 890.

For a more recent review of the topic, see:

Vallar, G., & Ronchi, R. (2009). Somatoparaphrenia: a body delusion. A review of the neuropsychological literature. Experimental Brain Research, 192(3), 533-551.

Relevant parts from this review's abstract:

  Somatoparaphrenia has been reported, with a few exceptions, in
  right-brain-damaged patients, with motor and somatosensory deficits, and the syndrome of unilateral spatial neglect.
  Somatoparaphrenia, most often characterized by a delusion
  of disownership of left-sided body parts, may however
  occur without associated anosognosia for motor deficits,
  and personal neglect ... Somatoparaphrenia is often brought about by extensive right-sided lesions, but patients with posterior (parietal-temporal), and
  insular damage are on record, as well as a few patients with
  subcortical lesions.


How to classify and understand emotions of people using chat and text messaging lingo and emoticons? I am looking for scholarly, peer-reviewed articles that discuss natural language processing (NLP) involving chat or text messaging lingo/acronyms and the affect of chat participants based on language and emoticons. Anyone have a good recommendation?

I am already familiar with the recent work involving using Twitter to assess the general mood of society as a means of predicting the stock market. They used the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood as Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, or Happy. I am looking for other examples that assess general affect, ideally by applying more scientific psychometric tests to NLP.

I am not trying to use the data for prediction. I am seeking to use machine learning algorithms to classify/categorize conversations.

References:

Bollen, J., Mao, H., Zeng, X-J. (2011).  Twitter mood predicts the stock market.    Journal of Computational Science, 2(1),1-8.  [DOI]

The field that is doing this work you describe is sentiment analysis.  From Wikipedia:

  A basic task in sentiment analysis is classifying the polarity of a given text at the document, sentence, or feature/aspect level — whether the expressed opinion in a document, a sentence or an entity feature/aspect is positive, negative, or neutral. Advanced, "beyond polarity" sentiment classification looks, for instance, at emotional states such as "angry," "sad," and "happy."

From an introductory course (lots of good references on this page)

  This work is in the general area of sentiment analysis, opinion extraction or opinion mining, and feature-based opinion summarization from the user-generated content or user-generated media on the Web, e.g., reviews, forum and group discussions, and blogs. In our KDD-2004 (Minqing Hu and Bing Liu. "Mining and summarizing customer reviews." Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, Seattle, Washington, USA, Aug 22-25, 2004.) paper, we proposed the Feature-Based Opinion Mining model, which is now also called Aspect-Based Opinion Mining (as the term feature here can confuse with the term feature used in machine learning). The output of such opinion mining is a feature-based opinion summary or aspect-based opinion summary. The area is also related to sentiment classification. Our current work is in two main areas, which reflect two kinds of opinions (or evaluations)

  Mining regular (or direct) opinions. Ex: (1). This camera is great. (2). After taking the drug, I got stomach pain.
  Mining comparative opinions. Ex: Coke tastes better than Pepsi.

In terms of your actual goals, scroll down to extra credit on this page, and you'll find an exercise that goes through a scenario close to what you describe with emoticons.

In terms of peer-reviewed, Chmiel A, Sienkiewicz J, et al (2011). Collective emotions online and their influence on community life, PLoS One, 6(7), e22207. PDF.  I'm sure there are others in mainstream NLP journals, but I'm for want of a database that lists them.


Why both hypokinetic and hyperkinetic changes are seen in Parkinsons? In Parkinsons disorder the substanstia nigra pars compacta get affected and there is destruction of the dopaminergic neurons, which ultimately disturbs the direct and indirect pathways. Now we know indirect pathway is overall inhibitory to movement and direct pathway is overall stimulatory.
Now because both of these pathways are not working properly, can we consider this as a reason for both hypokinetic and hyperkinetic disorders seen in Parkinsons? Or there is some other explanation.

I am not highly proficient in neuroscience, but I managed to find the following  from Sonne et al. (2020) which may help while you wait for a more proficient answer. (Emphasis mine)

While most forms of Parkinson disease are due to the insidious degeneration of the substantia nigra over a lifetime or during old age, the cause of that degeneration is unknown. These forms of Parkinson disease are termed idiopathic due to their unknown cause. A great deal of research is being done to identify these causes, which can include peripheral inflammation,[15] metabolic insufficiency,[16] and various environmental toxins,[17][18][19] which have been shown to affect the substantia nigra. Several other neurological conditions exhibit parkinsonian-like signs and symptoms by affecting the dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra. These include drug-induced parkinsonism in which a patient is taking a pharmaceutical compound, such as antipsychotics and antihypertensive, that affects dopamine metabolism.

Brydon L, Harrison NA, Walker C, Steptoe A, Critchley HD. Peripheral inflammation is associated with altered substantia nigra activity and psychomotor slowing in humans. Biol Psychiatry. 2008 Jun 01;63(11):1022-9. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
Yang L, Wang H, Liu L, Xie A. The Role of Insulin/IGF-1/PI3K/Akt/GSK3β Signaling in Parkinson's Disease Dementia. Front Neurosci. 2018;12:73. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
Langston JW, Irwin I, Langston EB, Forno LS. 1-Methyl-4-phenylpyridinium ion (MPP+): identification of a metabolite of MPTP, a toxin selective to the substantia nigra. Neurosci Lett. 1984 Jul 13;48(1):87-92. [PubMed]
Gash DM, Rutland K, Hudson NL, Sullivan PG, Bing G, Cass WA, Pandya JD, Liu M, Choi DY, Hunter RL, Gerhardt GA, Smith CD, Slevin JT, Prince TS. Trichloroethylene: Parkinsonism and complex 1 mitochondrial neurotoxicity. Ann Neurol. 2008 Feb;63(2):184-92. [PubMed]
Tanner CM, Kamel F, Ross GW, Hoppin JA, Goldman SM, Korell M, Marras C, Bhudhikanok GS, Kasten M, Chade AR, Comyns K, Richards MB, Meng C, Priestley B, Fernandez HH, Cambi F, Umbach DM, Blair A, Sandler DP, Langston JW. Rotenone, paraquat, and Parkinson's disease. Environ Health Perspect. 2011 Jun;119(6):866-72. PMC free article PubMed

Reference
Sonne J, Reddy V, Beato MR. (2020) Neuroanatomy, Substantia Nigra. In: StatPearls. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK536995/


At what age are infants first able to perform pattern recognition? Chronologically, when is pattern recognition first developed in an infant?

To be considered the first, abilities observed in that instance should prolong throughout the development process. In other words, the instance cannot lapse or be of a temporal nature.

This question is difficult to answer if you do not specify what kind of pattern recognition you refer to. In the context of human development, pattern recognition can be as simple as recognizing a row of dots as a line (Gestalt perception) or experiencing the pop-out effect (see Treisman's feature integration theory), but it can also be as complex as face recognition, speech recognition, or reading. Nevertheless, the complexity of a pattern recognition ability does not necessarily correlate with the time of its acquisition. Face recognition, for instance, happens to work pretty early.

There is good evidence (e.g., Pascalis et al 1995) that 4 days old newborns can recognize their mother's face, an ability that definitely requires pattern recognition. Note that this example is a rather conservative estimate: if the newborn is able to detect its mother's face at the forth day, it was able to detect faces probably earlier.

As a more liberal estimate: there are reports of unborn children that respond to certain voices or certain kinds of music already in their mother's womb (for instance being calmed by certain pieces of music). This should definitely require pattern recognition.

References

Pascalis O, de Schonen S, Morton J, Deruelle C, Fabre-Grenet M. (1995) Mother's face recognition in neonates: a replication and an extension. Infant Behavior and Development 17:79–85.


To what extent does AFQT correlate with IQ? Wikipedia has a pretty non-informative page as to the nature of the (US) Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) as it mostly talks of results ranges etc. What I could descipher from there is it that it has three (or maybe four, depending on how one counts) [sub]parts,

Arithmetic Reasoning (AR) – 30 questions in 36 minutes
Mathematics Knowledge (MK) – 25 questions in 24 minutes
Verbal Expression (VE)= (WK)+(PC)

Word Knowledge (WK) – 35 questions in 11 minutes
Paragraph Comprehension (PC) – 11 questions in 22 minutes

and

  The formula for computing an AFQT score is: AR + MK + (2 x VE).

That sounds a bit like SAT... and a quick search found one paper that talks of "cognitive skills as measured by the AFQT". (SAT is pretty well correlated with IQ.) So, to what extent does AFQT correlate to more traditional IQ [sub-]scores?

An answer is found in an official memo, albeit from 1980, where

the correlation of AFQT with WAIS (no version specified) was stated as 0.8 based on a Army "fact sheet" from 1965; the details of the comparative test could not be found
an Air Force comparison found (in 1974) that the correlation (again with WAIS, no version specified) for white enlistees was (again) 0.8 but 0.77 for black enlistees.

(This ~0.8 is actually about the same as the correlation of IQ tests with SAT.) I don't know if the AFQT is still the same as back then.

A official-looking 2006 concordance/translation table of AFQT score with SAT scores can also be found, although it's rather summary; it doesn't mention a correlation coefficient.


How can psychometry measure the very high IQ's in adults? From Wikipedia's page on Mental age, we learn that:

  Originally, the differences between mental age and chronological age were used to compute the intelligence quotient, or IQ. This was computed using the ratio method, with the following formula: mental age/chronological age * 100 = IQ. No matter what the child's chronological age, if the mental age is the same as the chronological age, then the IQ will equal 100.[4]
  An IQ of 100 thus indicates a child of average intellectual development. For a gifted child, the mental age is above the chronological age, and the IQ is higher than 140; for a mentally retarded child, the mental age is below the chronological age, and the IQ is below 70.

In this way, precocious children can get exceptionally high scores (e.g. scores above 160, s.d. 15), even if they answer correctly only a fraction of the total number of questions, provided the test is sufficiently hard in comparison with their actual chronological age. However, I am not aware of any tests for adults that discriminate accurately above the threshold of IQ $\sim$ 160 - their accuracy is even less than 4 s.d., taking into account a ceiling effect.

How can psychometry assess an IQ of 170 or 180 in adults when the rarity of such scores is 1 in several millions?
Can the IQ scores of exceptionally and profoundly gifted children be extrapolated into adulthood?
Is it true that that a profoundly gifted child with an IQ of 170 would score better than 99.9998% of the general population?
It seems that two different definitions of IQs are used here: is there a correlation between them?

General points about IQ measurement

IQ scores are standardised scores typically with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. As Ben Cole notes, IQ scores are typically normed relative to age groups in children, and then normed relative to the adult population for adults.

Can the IQ scores of exceptionally and profoundly gifted children be extrapolated into adulthood?

IQ scores correlate very highly over time. That said, correlations decrease as (a) the period of time between testing sessions increases, and (b) the earlier the age of initial testing (e.g., testing at 2,3, 4, 5 years of age, etc.). Presumably greater periods of cognitive change have the potential for greater individual differences in that change, and such greater potential for reductions in the correlation over time.

Here's an extract from a major review of IQ testing and intelligence relevant to stability that reiterates these points with sources (Neisser et al, 1996):

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

So, in summary exceptionally gifted children will tend generally to be highly intelligent adults. However, there are a few notes of caution:

Any IQ measurement has error. Thus, the IQ measurement is only an estimate of the individual's true IQ. For standard IQ tests, the size of this measurement error is greater as you move towards the tails of the distribution of IQ scores, such as is the case with the very gifted.
There is an effect known as regression toward the mean. This says, among other things, that when two measures are imperfectly correlated, extreme scores on one variable will tend to be relatively less extreme on the other. This can be explained both in terms of measurement error (i.e., those identified as having a 160 IQ might just have got luck on the test) and in imperfect correlation of latent IQ over time. Thus, in general if you identify a sample of very high IQ children and select them, you may find that there average IQ drops at a second time point. They'll still of course be measured as very intelligent on average.

Is it true that that a profoundly gifted child with an IQ of 170 would score better than 99.9998% of the general population?

A child's IQ is defined relative to a population of children of the same age as that child, and not the general population.

Based on a definition of IQ as a normative score, you get the following percentiles using R:

> iq <- c(100, 115, 130, 145, 160, 170)
> percentile <- 100 * pnorm(iq, 100, 15)
> cbind(iq, percentile=round(percentile, 6))
      iq percentile
[1,] 100   50.00000
[2,] 115   84.13447
[3,] 130   97.72499
[4,] 145   99.86501
[5,] 160   99.99683
[6,] 170   99.99985

Thus, yes, you are correct in a theoretical sense that a true IQ of 170 by definition implies that that individual has an IQ greater than 99.99985% of the relevant normative population.

However, the reality is that you never measure true IQ. You only get responses to an individual on a test. And this measurement is made with error, and this error in measurement is typically greater at the high end. Thus, you get a measure with confidence intervals or some form of bayesian estimate of IQ. Furthermore, there is also error in measuring population norms as well. Thus, if you want to be more precise in your description of what a test says about an individual's IQ, then you need to specify a range on that individual's IQ, and this range would be larger at the high end, because intelligence tests are not typically optimised to the high end and normative estimates of IQ at the high end would be less precise.

References

Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard Jr, T. J., Boykin, A. W., Brody, N., Ceci, S. J., ... & Urbina, S. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American psychologist, 51(2), 77. PDF


What personality traits moderate the effects of trauma on empathy? Logically there are three ways trauma can affect a person's propensity for empathy.

increase
decrease
no change

What are the key personality traits that can be used as predictors of this outcome?

There is a large and diverse literature on this topic which paints a complex picture of the relationship between trauma and empathy.

Some studies have found significant trauma symptoms to be related to less empathy. A study of Israeli children who had experienced the trauma of Arab missile attacks found that 66% of children with very negative attitudes towards Arabs had severe posttraumatic symptoms, while none of the children who expressed balanced attitudes towards Arabs had severe posttraumatic symptoms (Laor, Wolmer, & Cohen, 2004). Children with balanced attitudes also exhibited more prosocial behavior, offering to donate 35% more candy to ill peers than children with more negative attitudes. Overall, the authors found that those with very negative attitudes were less able to regulate their behavior, had poorer defense mechanisms, and had more externalizing and PTSD symptoms, while children with balanced attitudes were older and had fewer symptoms and more positive defenses. Thus, while children with better coping styles had both fewer trauma symptoms and were more empathetic/generous, is not possible to determine the direction of these relationships in this study. Also, the coping styles and attitudes of these child could be highly influenced by the environment (i.e., their parents’ behavior and attitudes).

A study of college students found that over 26% reported significant PTSD symptoms and 29-58% various forms of psychological distress following the 9/11 attacks, despite having no personal connection to the event (Woodward, Murrell, & Bettler, 2005). The study also found that a person’s level of empathy was positively correlated with the amount of traumatic stress symptoms they reported; perhaps not surprising, as you might need a certain level of empathy to experience someone else’s trauma so acutely. Additionally, while traumatic stress symptoms were positively correlated with the amount of psychological distress the person was experiencing, empathy was negatively correlated with psychological stress, both directly and via the person’s interpersonal style. That is, those individuals with more empathy and with positive interpersonal styles (a combination of coping skills, attachment, and social support), had better psychological functioning in the face of trauma.

Other studies have found that trauma may impact empathy in different ways, depending on the type of trauma. One study suggests that trauma which is directed at the self (abuse or severe illness) may not stimulate empathy for the self, resulting in negative psychological  outcomes, but that trauma directed at another (losing a loved one, witnessing injury/abuse of a loved one) may stimulate empathy to help the other person (Keinan, Shrira, & Shmotkin, 2012). Thus, even if the person experiences an event as traumatic, the motivation to help the victim (or others who care about the victim) may result in surges of empathy.

Another study found that only certain types of empathy were impacted by trauma (Nietisbach, Maercker, Rossler, & Haker, 2010). When these authors compared individuals with PTSD to those without PTSD, they found that both groups had similar levels of the complex empathic skills such as social cognition (i.e., being able to recognize faux pas or take the perspective of others), but individuals with PTSD symptoms were less likely to demonstrate more basic empathic skills such as “empathic contagion,” yawning or laughing when seeing someone else yawn or laugh. The authors also noted that individuals with PTSD for whom more time had passed since their trauma had a greater ability to take the perspective of others compared to individuals with PTSD who were closer to their time of trauma; this may indicate a change in empathic ability over time. Finally, they found that both individuals with PTSD and those without PTSD reported similar self-reported levels of empathy for others, but that those with PTSD reported greater distress when faced with the difficulties of others. The authors hypothesized that individuals with PTSD may be consciously avoiding empathic contagion due to this heightened experience of distress when watching others struggle, meaning part of the empathic deficit may actually be a defense mechanism.

A study of veterans with PTSD found that those who lacked empathy were more likely to be verbally, but not physically or impulsively, aggressive (Teten, Miller, Bailey, Dunn, & Kent, 2008). However, those veterans who also experienced alexithymia, meaning they are unable to name or describe their emotions with words, were more likely to be impulsively aggressive; a lack of empathy was not significantly associated with impulsive aggression. So, when considering aggressive behavior and trauma, it may be important to recognize that not all negative behavior is necessarily due to trauma’s impact on empathy.

Other studies have focused on the role of trauma in increasing empathy or helping behavior. One study found that individuals with greater numbers of lifetime traumatic events had greater self-reported empathy and volunteering behavior than those with fewer traumatic events (Frazier et al., 2013). However, this study was unable to conclude whether trauma had led to increases in empathy and whether such an increase was the reason for the increased prosocial behavior. Staub and Vollhardt (2008) have suggested that there are a specific set of experiences that may promote “altruism born of suffering” (i.e., increased empathy in reaction to trauma). Specifically, they propose if individuals who experience a traumatic event then experience psychological healing, social support, positive self-action, and altruistic role models, they may experience a range of post-traumatic growth including increased empathy and prosocial behavior. Staub and Vollhardt (2008) do note as others authors have that empathizing with other people’s distress can cause distress and possibly decrease empathy unless sufficient coping mechanisms are in place. A 2009 paper reviews recent evidence for this concept, and emphasizes the need for a better understanding of the experiences which lead to altruism following trauma, rather than suffering or revenge (Vollhardt, 2009).

In sum, trauma can impact empathy and prosocial behavior in a variety of ways, depending on individual characteristics and context. The links below should provide you a starting point to find additional resources on this topic. While most of the literature focuses on the impact of trauma on adults with “normal” empathic responses prior to the trauma, Music (2012) provides a theoretical argument that the development and acquisition of empathy may not occur properly when children are subjected to significant abuse or neglect. His paper may be a good reference if you’re interested not only in how trauma impacts existing capacity for empathy, but in how it impacts the development of empathy.

Frazier, P., Greer, C., Gabrielsen, S., Tennen, H., Park, C., & Tomich, P. (2013). The relation between trauma exposure and prosocial behavior. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 5(3), 286-294. DOI: 10.1037/a0027255.

Keinan, G, Shrira, A., & Shmotkin, D. (2012). The association between cumulative adversity and mental health: considering dose and primary focus of adversity. Quality of Life Research, 21, 1149-1158.

Laor, N., Wolmer, L., & Cohen, D. J. (2004). Attitudes toward Arabs of Israeli children exposed to missile attacks: The role of personality functions. The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 41(1), 23-32.

Music, G. (2012). Selfless genes, altruism, and trauma: Research and clinical implications. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 28(2), 154-171. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0118.2012.01276.x

Nietlisbach, G., Maercker, A., Rossler, W., & Haker, H. (2010). Are empathic abilities impaired in posttraumatic stress disorder? Psychological Reports, 106(3), 832-844. DOI: 10.2466/PR0.106.3.832-844

Staub, E., & Vollhardt, J. (2008). Altruism born of suffering: The roots of caring and helping after victimization and other trauma. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78(3), 267-280. DOI: 10.1037/a0014223

Teten, A. L., Miller, L. A., Bailey, S. D., Dunn, N. J., & Kent, T. A. (2008). Empathic deficits and alexithymia in trauma-related impulsive aggression. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 26, 823-832. DOI: 10.1002/bsl.843

Vollhardt, J. (2009). Altruism born of suffering and prosocial behavior following adverse life events: A review and conceptualization. Social Justice Research, 22, 53-97. DOI: 10.1007/s11211-009-0088-1

Woodward, L. E., Murrell, S. A., & Bettler, R. F. (2005). Empathy and interpersonal style: A mediational model of secondary traumatic stress symptomology following 9/11. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, & Trauma, 11(4), 1-28. DOI: 10.1300/J146v11n04_01


Taking into account reliability of Raven's Matrices and Self Monitoring tests I've results of two tests administered to university students:

the 18-item true-false version of the Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder & Gangestad, 1986);
the Raven Progressive Matrices Test (John & Raven, 2003).

In the past I've been assessing personality profiles of students, referring to the five factor model of personality and using a test based on the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 2006). In this case I was measuring reliability by Alpha coefficients. However, these coefficient seems not to make sense in a test like Raven's where there are only correct and wrong answers. Same doubts apply to the other test.

Should I measure the reliability of these two tests (Raven and Self-monitoring) on my sample? If so, which measure should I use?

Regarding Cronbach's $\alpha$, Wikipedia writes:

  It has been proposed that $\alpha$ can be viewed as the expected correlation of two tests that measure the same construct.

Note that correlation is a nonparametric concept. Its definition is independent on the functional form and functional relationship of the two variables. There are numerous ways to measure correlation that take the functional form into account. Pearson correlation and point-biserial correlation are probably the most well known.

In the case of two binary variables some notable measures are: Matthews correlation coefficient, Cohen's $\kappa$ or Pearson's $\phi$. One may also consider measures from Signal detection theory. Cronbach's $\alpha$ is also applicable to binary variables. In fact, the Wikipedia page lists a simplified formula (due to Cronbach, 1970) for the case where both variables are binary.

To conclude, there is nothing wrong with application of Cronbach's $\alpha$ to binary items. Still, other measures of relationship between two binary variables exist and may be worth considering.

Reference: Cronbach LJ (1970). Essentials of Psychological Testing. Harper & Row. p. 161.


Does 3rd person reference to self change perception of self? If you refer to yourself in the third person for a day how does your understanding of self change? For example are you more inclined to consider your actions and motivations from and external perspective and perhaps question them more deeply? Or perhaps, does an exercise like this lead to detachment from self and perhaps some form of depersonalization? And is there any research in this area?

One way to think about this is called "self-distancing" (e.g., Kross & Ayduk, 2011), which has primarily been studied in terms of emotion regulation.  Self-distancing is when you view your experiences from a third-person perspective.  This is generally considered to be an adaptive form of self-reflection (as opposed to rumination, which is generally considered to be maladaptive). However, as a rule, most things are neither purely adaptive or maladaptive.

Self-distancing is a relatively potent strategy for dampening negative emotions (Webb, Miles & Sheeran, 2012) and is associated with reduced cardiovascular reactivity to negative experiences (Ayduk & Kross, 2008). It's also associated with a reduction in intrusive thoughts and more problem-solving behavior (Ayduk & Kross, 2010).

If you're interested in learning more about this, look up Ozlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross.


What's the frequency of the ringing in my ear? I have ringing in my ears that has become constant over time. Most of the time I just ignore it, to tell you the truth I can't even remember when it started. Lately I'm curious what the frequency of the ringing is.

Is it the same for everyone or does it vary?The answer seems to be that it varies

Are there any usual suspect frequencies?

If it's always different from person to person, what's the easiest way of figuring out what it is? Is there an app for that? I still haven't found answer to this

When I chew something tough, many times I can hear the ringing increase in loudness and decrease as I flex my jaw and release. Thought this might be relevent.

The frequency is individual, and known as tinnitus frequency or pitch.
From  Okamoto et al., 2010:

Our target notched music introduced a functional deafferentation of
auditory neurons corresponding to the eliminated frequency
band, and because this frequency band overlapped the individual
tinnitus frequency, the notched music no longer stimulated the
cortical area corresponding to the tinnitus frequency, although it
still excited surrounding neuron.

There is a dependency on "training" (from a Discover article):

Even in adulthood, experiencing new sounds can rewire the auditory cortex.
If a rat is trained to recognize sounds at a particular frequency, the
corresponding region of the tone map will get bigger.

From König et al., 2006:

To further examine the relation between tinnitus pitch
and hearing loss, we grouped the patients by tinnitus pitch
(<=3 kHz, 4 kHz, >=6 kHz) and calculated the mean audiogram as well as the mean audiogram edge frequency for
each group

References
Okamoto, H., Stracke, H., Stoll, W., & Pantev, C. (2010). Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 1207-1210. PDF
König, O., Schaette, R., Kempter, R., & Gross, M. (2006). Course of hearing loss and occurrence of tinnitus. Hearing research, 221(1), 59-64. PDF


When was cognitve dissonance discovered? I am trying to understand when cognitive dissonance was first defined. Would mental health professionals have known about the concept of cognitive dissonance in 1972?

Glen McGhee's "A Cultural History of Cognitive Dissonance," (2005/2014) notes that Gustav Ichheiser (1897-1969) dealt with personal dissonance and dissonance reduction in 1928 (212 Note 2). Also Kurt Lewin's tension theory, and Festinger's level of aspiration work in 1940.

Lorne L. Dawson also has an interesting chapter, "Clearing the Underbrush: Moving Beyond Festinger To A New Paradigm For The Study of Failed Prophecy" (2011) that reminds us of the seminal role that Festinger/Riecken/Schachter, "When Prophecy Fails" (1956) plays in the development of cognitive dissonance theory.

Cognitive dissonance has been a part of social psychology and experimental psychology for a long time -- but what do you mean by "mental health professionals"? How were they trained? Where did they go to school? In the 1970s, there were numerous therapies, including Gestalt, Rogerian, Reichian, Freudian, Jungian, etc. Or are you talking about social workers? MSWs?


Does mindfulness meditation work for highly inattentive individuals? Mindfulness practice requires extensive concentration for a prolonged period of time (e.g., attending to breath/body sensation for above 5 minutes).  It is reasonable to assume that it might be challenging for people who are highly inattentive. However, mindfulness has been used as a health intervention for individuals with ADHD (with inattention as a symptom).

One recent review with 9 studies (Lee et al., 2017) found that mindfulness is effective for adults with ADHD, yet it is

  unclear whether mindfulness-based intervention is effective for children and adolescence with ADHD due to limited studies available and the limitations of the study design in the reviewed studies.

What are the recent mindfulness studies involving children with ADHD? And is there any research on people with inattention only?

References

Lee, C. S., Ma, M. T., Ho, H. Y., Tsang, K. K., Zheng, Y. Y., & Wu, Z. Y. (2017). The effectiveness of mindfulness-based intervention in attention on individuals with ADHD: A systematic review. Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy, 30, 33-41. doi: 10.1016/j.hkjot.2017.05.001

The most up-to-date research I can find at the moment specifically looking at children with ADHD is a systematic review and meta-analysis by Chimiklis et al (2018), and they point out that yoga, mindfulness and meditation should not be considered first-line interventions for ADHD but may help and more research is needed.

Considerable risk for bias was found across studies. Given significant methodological limitations of the literature, positive effect sizes found in studies should be interpreted with caution; these interventions should not be considered first-line interventions for ADHD. However, preliminary findings suggest yoga, mindfulness, and meditation may be beneficial for youth with ADHD, but extensive research is required to validate the efficacy of these interventions.

References
Chimiklis, A. L., Dahl, V., Spears, A. P., Goss, K., Fogarty, K., & Chacko, A. (2018). Yoga, mindfulness, and meditation interventions for youth with ADHD: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 1-14. 10.1007/s10826-018-1148-7


LAURA/LORETA source localization in Matlab Is there a Matlab toolbox for doing source localization using LAURA or sLORETA within Matlab (not requiring additional software like LORETA-KEY, etc.)?

The open-source Matlab package called Fieldtrip has a source analysis function in which you can specify the method you want. These include both sLORETA and eLORETA.

In case you did acquire LOERTA-KEY, you also import sLORETA files into Fieldtrip and continue further analyses.


LSD and tryptamines harmless or neurotoxic? It's commonly stated by numerous people that LSD and trytamines like DMT and psilocin are physically harmless and not neurotoxic. Is there evidence for this?

I recently read 5-meo-Dipt which is a tryptamine might be neurotoxic. Why would 5-meo-Dipt be neurotoxic but DMT and psilocin not be? From my understanding some people micro-dose with LSD and some tryptamines to feel sharper and increase felt intelligence.

Why would one tryptamine neurotoxic and others make someone feel more intelligent? Obviously "feel" is self reported and subjective, but I'm assuming there might be some truth to this if people aren't tripping when experiencing these micro dosing effects. LSD isn't a tryptamine, but I think some people do similar things with tryptamines. I'm hoping someone with a better understand of neurology can answer this.

To restate my question are typtamines and LSD generally neurotoxic and if not, could you please link to a study on it and what mechanism makes 5-meo-dipt possibly different, could other factors might have lead to a wrong conclusion, like for example harmful environment stress on rats or do you think all tryptamines are neurotoxic?

I'm trying to understand the possible reasons or lack there of for neurotoxicity in LSD and tryptamines but there seems to be lack of reliable sources.

Short answer
All neuropsychopharmaceuticals, including the tryptamines, are potentially neurotoxic depending on the dose at which they are ingested.

Background

Neurotoxicity is, arguaby, a broad definition. According to the NIH, neurotoxicity can be caused by processes ranging from radiation to transplants, and from chemical toxins to cosmetics. NIH defines neurotoxicity as:

  Neurotoxicity occurs when the exposure to natural or manmade toxic substances (neurotoxicants) alters the normal activity of the nervous system. This can eventually disrupt or even kill neurons, key cells that transmit and process signals in the brain and other parts of the nervous system. Neurotoxicity can result from exposure to substances used in chemotherapy, radiation treatment, drug therapies, and organ transplants, as well as exposure to heavy metals such as lead and mercury, certain foods and food additives, pesticides, industrial and/or cleaning solvents, cosmetics, and some naturally occurring substances.

LSD is a tryptamine (Shulgin, & Shulgin, 1997), see Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. LSD contains the tryptamine structure (in red). source: Shroomery

Secondly, every compound is toxic when taken in large quantities. For instance, water can kill, referred to as water intoxication, for example as seen in people tripping on MDMA and taking in too much water (Ballantyne, 2007). Oxygen, another key to life, is a deadly gas when taken in artificially high concentrations for too long. Likewise, neuropharmacologically active compounds will hence eventually become neurotoxins. This, because the definition of neurotoxic is indeed quite broad (source: NIH):

  Neurotoxicity occurs when the exposure to natural or manmade toxic substances (neurotoxicants) alters the normal activity of the nervous system. This can eventually disrupt or even kill neurons, key cells that transmit and process signals in the brain and other parts of the nervous system.

Thus when you ask

  are tryptamines, including LSD [sic] generally neurotoxic?

Then the answer is yes, depending on the dose.

Reversely, then, every neurotoxin becomes non-toxic once taken below a certain threshold dose. If this is what you refer to by 'microdosages', then yes, even the most potent toxin becomes harmless.

To specifically answer your question with regard to LSD and psilocin: LSD is suspected to be neurotoxic at clinically applied dosages (Larsen, 2014), and psilocin can result in convulsions and death follow massive overdose (Gold et al., 2003).

References
- Ballantyne, Sci Am 2007
- Gold et al., Atlas of Clinical Neurology, Springer. pp 503-24
- Larsen, Hist Psychiatry (2016); 27(2):172-89
- Shulgin & Shulgin, Tihkal - The Continuation, pp. 490-99


How do I obtain recordings of the P300 wave of the event-related potential in the EEG? I am trying to understand how to analyze the ERP (Event-Related Potentials) from EEG recordings and in particular  the P300 wave.

I have come up with a few questions which I hope you might be able to help with:

I assume that the number of repetitions of the stimulus should give better results, but I am not sure why. On the one hand, it should help, because averaged results are usually better in electrophysiology. On the other hand, maybe there is some unwanted adaptation effect in the subject? So, are repetitions wanted in this kind of experiment?
There are time points in which I didn't expect P300 but the brain activity was not 0. I understand that there is always a background activity in the brain, but maybe there is more to it? And if so, are there certain frequencies that are expected in the EEG?
When I analyze the data using an average response, should I assume anything on the P300 response?
What is the recommended sample Rate I should use? I guess there should be an advantage for high sample rates to increase resolution, but I am not sure about that. Am I right, or maybe a lower sample rate has advantages that I am not aware of?

The P300 wave is a positive deflection in the human event-related potential (ERP). A common experiment in which it is analyzed is the "oddball" paradigm, where a subject detects an occasional target stimulus in a regular train of standard stimuli. The P300 wave only occurs if the subject is actively engaged in the task of detecting the targets and its amplitude varies with the improbability of the targets. Its latency varies with the difficulty of discriminating the target stimulus from the standard stimuli. A typical peak latency when a young adult subject makes a simple discrimination is 300 ms. The P300 wave may represent the transfer of information to consciousness, a process that involves many different regions of the brain (Picton, 1992).

Your questions:

ad. 1: Averaging reduces the random background EEG activity (noise), as well as artifacts due to movement or eye blinks. Random events will average out, while the ERP itself, being highly synchronized with the stimulus, will persist in the signal. In short: averaging increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Is this wanted? - That depends on the SNR you wish to obtain. The more averages, the better the SNR. [M]aybe there is an unwanted adaptation effect of the subject - if you are afraid of adaptation - do repeated measures and analyze single ERPs, or small chunks of averages across the recording - it will give you an idea whether there is adaptation, and if yes, how much. I wouldn't worry about it too much. The long time scale of P300 recordings (second-range) allows the nervous system plenty of time to recover.
ad. 2. There is always background EEG, except in (brain) dead subjects - and these subjects won't be too cooperative. [A]re there certain frequencies that are expected in the EEG - ERPs are not analyzed in the frequency domain, but in the time domain. If you are interested in the frequency content of the EEG; it is much dependent on the state of the subject. An awake, vigilant test subject with their eyes open will show beta activity (6 - 31 Hz band).
ad. 3. Averaging doesn't change the timing characteristics of the ERP, barred the recording is properly time-locked with the stimulus.
ad. 4. Higher sampling rates are generally better. If your system allows it, crank it up. You can always downsample later. Downsampling may have the advantage of smoothing high-frequency noise and enhancing the ease of handling of the data. ERPs are slow responses, so you don't need 100 kHz signals. For EEG generally 500 Hz is used, because according to the Nyquist criterion you need at least twice the numbers of samples than your highest frequency of interest. The gamma band is 32+ Hz, so 500 Hz is pretty safe (De Haan, 2013). For ERPs, 200 Hz may be sufficient. Wikipedia suggests higher rates for EEG.

References
 - De Haan, Infant EEG and Event-Related Potentials; Psychology Press (2013)
 - Picton, J Clin Neurophysiol (1992); 9(4): 456-79


SSRI Medications and Problem solving I'm an Electronics Engineer and I work in Software Development.
I'm on SSRIs, for years for different conditions, like bipoar, GAD, ..etc.

I feel that my problem solving abilities really dropped down, I would like to know from researchers, do these medications really affect the brain, or it stops it for more thoughts?
For exmaple those medications help for OCD, and that means it really stops or relax the thoughts, I feel the same no care feelings for solving mathematical, algorithmic problems or any thing that has huge brain activity.

I need to know what is the latest research for that area.

Memory impairments are connected to fluid inteligence... read this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16206235

Also consider that stress and ageing decrease fluid inteligence. In addition you said that you care less to solve... it is motivational not cognitive problem.

for real conclusion try to find if you did take any inteligence test (with norms) and try to visit clinical psychologist to compare your new result to old result.

Result from clinical psychologist is most important because maybe you have only impression.


Cognitive biases ontogenesis Are cognitive biases "hardcoded" into our brain or learned?
And have they evolved over time e.g. more cognitive biases could emerge evolutionally?

Either, depending on the bias.
For example, the Müller-Lyer illusion could well have some significant learned aspects (how much is debated). Categorical perception of phonemes is a kind of bias, I guess, that's definitely mostly learning. At the other end of the spectrum supposedly 'irrational' context effects in decision making have been observed in slime molds, those are probably universal (so they're probably also adaptive).

In general it's probably not very useful to split cognition into 'biases' and 'the rest'. Maybe think of cognition as a memory system (with some flaws and a salience-not-probability weighting scheme) a reasoning/decision system (with limited resources and high time pressures) a perceptual system (facing a fundamentally underspecified problem) etc etc... the 'biases' are not really distinct processes. From that framing the question is hard to answer. If you singled out a particular bias, probably someone here could tell an evo story about how it came to be though! Maybe even a plausible one.


What makes someone attractive psychologically? What makes a person particularly attractive to another person, specifically the opposite sex?
Why would the brain evolve this trait to target specific genes (that make someone look pretty), and exclude others (that make someone look ugly)?

This seems to differ from the accepted idea that ancient female humans were attracted to stronger, more able bodied men due to survival instinct. Facial features seem to have nothing to do with survival or natural selection.

So, why are facial features significant to assessing beauty?
Also, how does the brain process physical features as good or bad?

With regard to your first question about the psychological processes of interpersonal attraction there are (at least) 4 factors that have been found in the social psychology literature.

Contextual Aspects.
People are more likely to develop attraction
towards those they see more frequently than others. This is known as
the Mere Exposure Effect (Saegert, Swap & Zajonc, 1973).
Attributes of the Target Person.
The perceived attractiveness (for example of the
face) is another factor.  The comments point to resources regarding
this aspect.
Attributes of the Perceiver.
Mood has an effect on interpersonal attraction. Being in a positive mood makes a person more likely to develop attraction (Gouaux, 1971).
Aspects of the relationship between Perceiver and Target Person.
Perceived similarity has an effect on interpersonal attraction (Byrne, 1971).  Similarities can serve as a positive reinforcement of the attitudes of the perceiver.
They are also the foundation for common activities and also which in
turn lead to closer relationship.

References

Byrne, D. E. (1971). The attraction paradigm (Bd. 11). New York: Academic Press.

Condon, J. W., & Crano, W. D. (1988). Inferred evaluation and the relation between attitude similarity and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 789.

Gouaux, C. (1971). Induced affective states and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 20, 37–43.

Saegert, S., Swap, W., & Zajonc, R. B. (1973). Exposure, context, and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 25(2), 234-242.


Mechanism for deleting old memories Do we have any mechanism for deleting neuronal connections?

That is, if I learn a better version for doing something, I assume the brain will create a new neuronal connection, and we will use this connection. However, what happens to the old, non-used version? Does it fades away after a while? or is it enough to have a better, stronger connection to have the older version ignored, even if present?

Yes.

One particular mechanism for reducing synaptic strength is called long-term depression (note: this terminology is not related to the mental health term depression). Much like the opposite process that strengthens synapses, certain firing patterns tend to weaken synapses.

Additionally, synaptic scaling is a homeostatic mechanism by which more excited cells become less excitable over time, including by reducing their response to inputs globally (this is also a particular category of long-term depression). If you keep re-strengthening certain synapses, and then scaling all of them down, the result over multiple iterations is that those synapses that don't get re-strengthened get weaker.

The synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep suggests that this process occurs during sleep and is a key reason why sleep is important (there are many other theories about sleep, however).


Psychological explanation for the success of "class systems" in video games Over the last decade, Role Playing Games and Mobile Online Battle Arenas have been a dominating force in the video gaming industry, millions of people playing sometimes every day and often being quite passionate about their favorite game.

The thing that strikes me when looking at the most successful of those games (not sure I'm allowed to say any names) is the recurring presence of "class systems", ways to label characters and players with a specific set of abilities and roles.

Examples of this are the classic "warrior, mage, hunter, assassin..." classes attributed to RPG characters or the the "tank, support, damage dealer..." roles that players in MOBAS take on in a team.

What I find interesting is that players seem to like having a more or less defined role, class or play style in these systems.
One such example of this phenomena is the use of the pronoun "a" to refer to someone or oneself:

      "I am a mage player"
      "He is a [insert MOBA character name] main" (main here means most played character)
      "Where the heck is our support?" (referring to the player playing in the support role)
      "She is the best [insert MOBA character name] on the     EU server"

Is there a psychological explanation to why people seem particularly attracted to these systems that "label them" in a way?

My hypotheses:

  - The discomfort of not fully knowing one's personnality and capabilities drive people to "symplify their personnalities" by endorsing specific roles in these games.

  -  Players "specialize " themselves as a way to get singled out and feel special.

Please tell me if there is something I can do to make the question better, this is my first time asking on this site.

There are many explanations and counter examples for this phenomenon. Perhaps I can provide my two cents.
According to Kendrick et al pyramid, an updated pyramid of need, Status/Esteem seems to be reasonably applied to the class systems. Such systems allow the players to practice mastery, in other words, the need to feel competence. This is similar to your understanding of "specialize themselves to feel special".

For example, two players of healer/damage class may compare HPS/DPS
(Healing per second / Damage per second ) to see who is more
competent. Tanks see who understand the mechanics of the fight more
thoroughly. At this point, the goal shifts from defeating the boss to climbing the highest in the HPS/DPS meter. (this is similar to many sports, where players play for the stats).  This example applies to "World of Warcraft", one of the earliest MMORPG that introduces the triangle system (tank, healer, damage). The class system provides a measure within the group.
Another example would be "Guild Wars 2", a game that has no class
system. Players heal, attack, and tank on their own even in a group
setting. The game is a relatively much relaxing game in comparison
with World of Warcraft, which has many hard core gamers.

There are way many other possible explanations on this aspect, but it might be hard to examine specific reasons because there is too much variation in the individuals.


Any models that act using both streams of visual processing? The Two-Stream Hypothesis, where object properties are processed independently from spatial information, remains the most well established theory of visual processing. However, it concerns me that most models that reference this theory stop at the end of the two streams (as per the cartoon model in the image below); they never say how the mind translates those sources of information into action (i.e. the two arrows in the picture never meet).

Are there models and/or theories out there that try and situate the Two Streams of information into a full perception action cycle?
And if not, then why not (e.g. complexity, better theories, different level of analysis, etc.)?

Mario Liotti and Don M. Tucker (Brain Asymmetry, MIT, 1996) attempt to explain that the 'corticolimbic architecture is not left/right, but dorsal/ventral". In their opinion, the reason for hemispheric asymmetries can be found in the asymmetries of the dorsal and ventral systems. They proposed that emotional behavior could be interpreted by analyzing the vertical circuits (dorsal/ventral).


Strange question in a job-interview I would like to ask you the reasoning behind a question they asked me during a job interview (with a psychologist) a few years ago.

He basically handed me a bunch of colored cards (fifteen at least), asked me to think of my own logical order and to sort the cards according to the chosen order.

After I ordered them, he took notes on a sheet of my result, took the papers from me, shuffled them and gave them back to me, telling them to reposition them in the same order they had previously chosen.
And he added "70% of people change the order of at least one card in the second round".
It is clear that he only told me to influence me.

What is the purpose of this test?
I'm very curious.

I mentioned in the comment that it could be just a memory test, but now, with knowing a bit more of the context (it was an interview to join a bank), it could be a test about how you stick with your first decision and how you are influenced by an obvious suggestion  to change it because, supposedly, "70% people before you did", so to change the logic by which you ordered the cards the first time.

It was one of the aptitude tests, probably a variant of a situational judgement test.


Which personality traits are proved to correlate with any facial features? I pretty certain I have read somewhere about certain  personality traits that correlate with certain facial features, but I can't remember just what or where I read. I think the personality traits may have been measured with Big 5 or something close.

I'm not looking for cranial or racial correlations, but facial feature correlations within cultures/ethnicities. I.e specific types of wrinkles.
I'm also not looking for perceptions from other people, but measured personalities.

Testosterone is already proved to correlate to behavioral tendencies, which in turn is part of personality: Are any kinds of behavior proved to correlate with testosterone levels?
I suppose Estrogen levels would correlate somehow as well.
It would be natural that i.e people who score high at Five Factor's 'Positive Feelings' would have more smiling wrinkles.
I found an abstract by Roger W. Squier and John R. C. Mew on the topic, but I couldn't access the report.

This might be a broad topic, but could someone give me some clues? It would be nice if I could see some research reports with measured correlations.

Reading people's faces to determine their character is called physiognomy.

Some might downplay the idea that it is real but

  scientists are nowadays starting to accept that there may be a correlation between the shape of the face and characteristics. In fact, a recent study showed that men with a wide face tend to feel more powerful. The scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee also noticed that men with this characteristic had a tendency to lie more in business in order to make more money. Find out more: The Royal Society Publishing (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1193).

Paunonen, S. V., Ewan, K., Earthy, J., Lefave, S. and Goldberg, H. (1999), Facial Features as Personality Cues. Journal of Personality, 67(3): pp 555–583. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00065

Talked about 2 studies which

  examined the effects of the appearance of specific facial features on attributions of personality. In Study 1, photographs of men and women were computer-manipulated to have larger than average or smaller than average eye size, and wider than average or narrower than average eye spacing. In Study 2, eye size and mouth fullness were similarly altered. Although it was found that neither eye spacing nor mouth fullness had any effect on perceptions of the targets' personality or physical characteristics, eye size had strong effects in both studies. Analyses of covariance revealed that the personality trait ratings that varied with eye size were mediated primarily by perceived differences in the targets’ masculinity-femininity and babyfacedness, and to a lesser extent by attractiveness.

There is also

Kramer, R. S. S. and Ward, R. (2010) Internal facial features are signals of personality and health. The Quarterly Journal Of Experimental Psychology, 63(11) DOI: 10.1080/17470211003770912

  We investigated forms of socially relevant information signalled from static images of the face. We created composite images from women scoring high and low values on personality and health dimensions and measured the accuracy of raters in discriminating high from low trait values. We also looked specifically at the information content within the internal facial features, by presenting the composite images with an occluding mask. Four of the Big Five traits were accurately discriminated on the basis of the internal facial features alone (conscientiousness was the exception), as was physical health. The addition of external features in the full-face images led to improved detection for extraversion and physical health and poorer performance on intellect/imagination (or openness). Visual appearance based on internal facial features alone can therefore accurately predict behavioural biases in the form of personality, as well as levels of physical health.


Can a device create/guide neuron connections between them? Is there a device of some sort that could promote/guide/create exact connections between neurons? I wish there was a device that could get me PhD by just wearing it for a few months.

You can't get a PhD using an electronic device, that's the stuff for movies (Fig. 1). Plus, as I claim in my profile, there's a lot more to science than learning new material:

  Behind the great achievements of a Gauss or an Einstein is in all
  cases a life devoted to contemplation, curiosity, collaboration and,
  perhaps most of all, hard work (Burrell, 2015).

However, to bring your question down to a more elementary level, there are concepts in development to guide neuronal growth toward certain targets, for example for use in cochlear implants (CIs). CIs stimulate the inner ear in people with severe hearing impairment. A CI basically consists of an array of electrodes that is guided into the inner ear. Because the electrode contacts are situated relatively far from the target neurons (spiral ganglion cells making up the auditory nerve, see Fig. 2), scientists have been contemplating how to bring the source closer to the target. One way to (theoretically) do this is to coat the electrode array with a solution releasing neurotrophic factor(s), such as BDNF(e.g., Ramku et al. (2017)). These compounds are known to act as chemo-attractants that can stimulate and guide neural outgrowths.

Fig. 1. Reaves learning Kunf Fu. source: EJ4

Fig. 2. CI. source: Debener (2016)

References
- Burrell, Sci Am, September issue 2015
- Debener, Cortical plasticity in cochlear implant users (2016). Thesis
- Ramku et al., Open Access Maced J Med Sci (2017); 5(2): 121–5


Regarding "a human brain can hold enough information to fill 10 libraries", can we quantify the memory required for a given task? It is not the exact phrase, but I have heard variations of this claim. I am wondering whether such claim is supported by a study or experiment. I am also curious if there is a way to sort of vaguely quantify memory. In other words, is there a way to know how much memory/resources a type of task occupies? For example, is it possible to know experimentally whether the muscle memory required to play a piano needs more memory/resources than the memory needed to read a piano sheet?

First, consider that those questions can potentially be answered only in animals, like mice. There is no way to test such things in humans, because methods like fMRI give resolution of $\approx$1,000,000 neurons. In order to test your hypothesis, you need resolution below the neuronal level, because what your need to see is how the connections (synapses) between neurons are established. Theoretically, you can train mice to run a maze. Then, with a microscope, one can count how many synapses were created. I think, to date, you cannot do this without killing the mice. If so, then you will take other mice and teach them to play piano :) So, the difference between change of connections might be your estimate. But you cannot know whether two tasks are equivalent, so you may end up comparing apples and tomatoes. Overall, the term "memory" is not something that is precisely defined on a biological level, like RAM or hard-drive capacity on a PC. There are prominent hypotheses about how memories are created (connections between neurons), but those are still hypotheses.

You might be interested to read this book; hopefully it is not too complicated without much background: Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Seung, 2012)

Reference

Seung, S. (2012). Connectome: How the brain's wiring makes us who we are. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade.


What is Joan suffering from in this example? Joan has seen several specialists and undergone numerous diagnostic tests to determine the cause of her recurring headaches and episodes of dizziness. The doctors are perplexed and can seem to find no physiological cause for Joan's symptoms.

My guess would be between 3 possible disorders:

If she's lying about the headaches and dizziness, then she is seeking attention which could point to Histrionic Personality Disorder (if she makes a big scene every time she goes to get tested).
If she's not lying and the doctors can't find a physiological symptom, then it could be Generalized Anxiety Disorder (she keeps going to get tested because she is having trouble identifying cause of stress).
If she is not lying, then she could just be imagining the headaches and suffering from schizophrenia, which is characterized by breaks from reality (as in, she imagines the headaches and dizziness but they don't really occur.

I don't think you can rule out that she really is suffering from headaches and dizziness.  Just because the doctors can't find a physiological cause doesn't mean that there isn't one.


How does the brain encode order of information in sentences/stories? When memorizing a sentence or a full story: then, how does the brain encode the order of the words of the sentence or the sentences in the story?

Similar to your other question, this one reduces to "what are the neural mechanisms behind language?", which is very much a work in progress.

The only neural model of language that I currently know of is the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), which is largely theoretical and only has some super basic examples.

Basically, the SPA represents language as vector manipulation. The vectors are represented in neurons using the Neural Engineering Framework.

For more details on how this is done, check out "How to Build a Brain" by Chris Eliasmith and the work by Peter Blouw who is trying to solve part of this problem with his PhD thesis.


Evidence and arguments for and against bounded rationality? Can anyone point me to a couple prominent papers on Simon's concept of bounded rationality (i.e., that human rationality is shaped by limitations in our ability to ingest and process information)? Specifically, I'm looking for empirical evidence for or against and arguments against (I'm content with Simon's own arguments for.) I know the literature on this is extensive; I just need a very high-level overview with some credible scholarly support.

The Paradox of Choice is probably the area best supported by empirical evidence that argues for [the existence of] satisficiers. If you'd rather read a shorter paper, "Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice." with the same lead author (Barryt Schwartz) has > 1K citation in Google Scholar; there's a free pdf in CiteseerX. And on the flip-side of that, Scheibehenne et al.'s "Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A
Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload" "a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published
and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036), we found a mean effect size of
virtually zero but considerable variance between studies". The latter paper has about 500 citations in GS, but it's also published in 2010 vs 2002 for the Schwartz et al. paper. That might not be the last word in this matter, because 2015 brought us Chernev et al.'s "Choice Overload: a Conceptual Review and Meta-analysis" while agreeing with the zero overall effect from the 2010 meta-analysis, does a meta-regression to obtain as significant explanatory variables for the variance: choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty, and decision goal. As the names of these are not always self-explanatory, here's the authors' details:

  (1) The
  complexity of the choice set describes the aspects of the decision set associated with the particular values of the choice options: the presence of a dominant option in
  the choice set, the overall attractiveness of the options in the choice set, and the relationship between individual options in the decision set (alignability and
  complementarity); (2) The difficulty of the decision task refers to the general structural characteristics of the decision problem: time constraints, decision
  accountability, and number of attributes describing each option; (3) Preference uncertainty refers to the degree to which individuals have articulated preferences with
  respect to the decision at hand and has been operationalized by two factors: the level of product-specific expertise and the availability of an articulated ideal point; and
  (4) The decision goal reflects the degree to which individuals aim to minimize the cognitive effort involved in making a choice among the options contained in the
  available assortments and is operationalized by two measures: decision intent (buying vs. browsing) and decision focus (choosing an assortment vs. choosing a
  particular option). In this context, we expect higher levels of decision task difficulty, greater choice set complexity, higher preference uncertainty, and a more
  prominent, effort-minimizing goal to produce greater choice overload.

The latter paper is too new to assess its impact but insofar it has about 70 citations in GS, which is not too shabby.

Another highly cited paper is Kahneman's "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics". Although it has "Bounded Rationality" in its title and pays homage to Simon in the opening paragraph, this is farther from Simon's own ideas of satisficing as the basis of bounded rationality. Kahaneman proposes that "(i) that most judgments and most choices are made intuitively; (ii) that the rules that govern intuition are generally similar to the rules of perception". The kinds of problems used to illustrate the latter (e.g. the bat and ball problem) are not necessarily the choice problems that Simon had in mind.

And on a somewhat (but not entirely) contrarian note, Camerer's book Behavioral Game Theory (>5 K citations if GS is correct) (see this for a review), which has a sort of precis in a paper of his (much less cited thatn the book though), states:

  Even though strategic thinking is limited, behaviour can
  approximate equilibrium predictions surprisingly well if
  people can learn over time (or through imitation or some
  other adaptive process).

And he has some experimental data to prove it. I'm a bit surprised computer scientists don't stroke their ego more often with the result from 'table 1' in this paper of Camerer. I guess it's not that well known (only about ~100 citations).

Anyway, my point here is that unlike the one-off experiments with choice or puzzles, iterated versions tend to produce results suggesting that the bounds on human rationality are farther than might be conceived in simpler experiments. But simultaneously this finding is also an argument for bounded rationality, at least a computational version thereof.

And speaking computational interpretations, there have been some theoretical works examining (arguing for) bounded rationality from the latter perspective, e.g. Kao and Velupillai; the latter author also has a book-length exposition titled Computable Economics. Frankly the only people who seem to argue against any bounds (as opposed to just bounds in some 'homo economicus' experiments) are those who argue for a non-computational theory of mind, like Penrose so forth; SEP has a good review of these.


Psychometric information on IPIP representation of NEO facets The IPIP (International Personality Item Pool) website provides a copy of the IPIP representation of the NEO 30 facet form.

It also provides some information comparing IPIP NEO with official NEO.
However, the information provided is incomplete for making an assessment of the psychometric properties of the test. For example, I'd like to know about: (a) how items were chosen; (b) what was the sample size and characteristics used to generate the comparative correlation information provided; and (c) what is the factor structure of the IPIP NEO.

Thus, my questions:

Where can I find information on how the IPIP NEO (30 facet version) was developed?
What studies have examined the psychometric properties of the IPIP NEO (30 facet version) both in absolute terms and relative to the official NEO?

The table found at your second link (comparing the IPIP NEO and official NEO) seems to have come from this paper by Goldberg (1999): http://projects.ori.org/lrg/PDFs_papers/A%20broad-bandwidth%20inventory.pdf. This paper discusses the generation of the IPIP items as well as the sample it was originally administered in. A 2006 paper (also by Goldberg) provides additional information on IPIP development:

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate information on the factor structure of the IPIP NEO 30 facet form, only the IPIP 50-item FFM (Ehrhart, Roesch, Ehrhart, & Kilian, 2008), which seems to be a different measure (http://ipip.ori.org/newFinding_Labeling_IPIP_Scales.htm).

Ehrhart, K. H., Roesch, S. C., Ehrhart, M. G., & Kilian, B. (2008). A test of the factor structure equivalence of the 50-Item IPIP Five-Factor Model Measure across gender and ethnic groups. Journal of Personality Assessment, 90(5), 507–516.

Goldberg, L. A., Johnson, J. A., Hogan, R. , Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, & Gough, H. G. (2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96.


What is the relationship between Working Memory and Attention, and how can one assess his WM? If someone who had low working memory scores as a child suddenly sees in improvement in attention as he grows older, does his ability to hold and manipulate information also increase? Or does attention serve as bottleneck score for such working memory exams?

Also, is there a way for someone to assess his WM at home?

Engle has published extensive papers about this topic and if you are interested I suggest looking him up.

In 2001 Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle (In Engle, 2002) attempted to directly measure the relationship between WM and executive attention, and conclude that that the underlying factor responsible for the relationship between measures of
WM capacity and performance on higher-order cognitive tasks is a
domain-free executive-attention system.

  Although individuals possessing different WM capacities will
  show differences in number of items stored in a variety of memory
  tasks, this is a result of differing ability to maintain and inhibit
  information, particularly in the face of distraction and interference.
  Only when the context makes it difficult to maintain the appropriate task
  goal do people with high WM spans perform better than people with low
  WM spans.

In 2003  he found that:

  Individual differences in working-memory (WM) capacity predicted performance on the Stroop task in 5 experiments, indicating the importance of executive control and goal maintenance to selective attention

In my opinion the two are obviously linked however it would be difficult to infer causality or direction in the relationship. It would make sense that if your attention improves your working memory would also improve, however it's hard to say if one causes the other  or if they are intrinsically linked and would just both increase at the same time.

In terms of measuring WM at home here is a link to an n-back test which I think will be fairly easy to do at home:

http://cognitivefun.net/test/4

The n-back task requires participants to decide whether each stimulus in a sequence matches the one that appeared n items ago. N-back has become a standard measure for WMC, however treat results with a pinch of salt as Kane et al (2007) have called it's validity into question.

References:

Engle, R. W. (2002). Working memory capacity as executive attention. Current directions in psychological science, 11(1), 19-23.

Kane, M. J., & Engle, R. W. (2003). Working-memory capacity and the control of attention: the contributions of goal neglect, response competition, and task set to Stroop interference. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 132(1), 47.

Kane, M. J., Conway, A. R., Miura, T. K., & Colflesh, G. J. (2007). Working memory, attention control, and the N-back task: a question of construct validity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(3), 615.


Why is empathy not a part of the Big 5 personality traits? I have looked at the big 5 personality traits, and they include 5 basic factors: openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness. Why is empathy not on the list?

The basic goal of research on the big 5 is to identify those dimensions of personality that can account for the most important differences between people.

How do you determine what is important and "makes the list"? The research from which the Big Five have been derived relies on the lexical hypothesis. In a nutshell, the idea is that if a trait is important, it should be part of our language. So personality researchers such as Allport and Cattell have devised long lists of words existing in our lexicon used to describe the traits of people. Then they asked people to judge themselves with regard to these traits. Finally, they tried to identify underlying (common) dimensions in these trait descriptions by using statistical analyses (e.g. factor analyses). For example, if someone agrees to being a "friendly" person, he or she will probably also agree to being a person who "cares about people". These analyses resulted in the 5 very broad dimensions of personality.

What about empathy? Empathy is highly related to agreeableness. In fact, if you look at personality questionnaires, the agreeableness scales are likely to tap into empathy:

For example, the NEO agreeableness subscale of the International Personality Item Pool includes items such as:
"[I] Am concerned about others." or "[I] Sympathize with others' feelings." which are essentially items measuring empathic concern.
The NEO-PI-R (Costa & Macrae, 1992) is one of the most widely used Big Five questionnaires (with 240 items it's a pretty large and comprehensive one). It describes agreeableness as "the kinds of interactions an individual prefers from compassion to tough mindedness." It has two sub-scales that are related to empathy: Altruism ("active concern for the welfare of others") and Tender-Mindedness ("attitude of sympathy for others.").

This makes clear that from the perspective of the Big Five, empathy may be regarded as an element of agreeableness.

In line with this, agreeableness predicts specific measures of empathic concern and prosocial behavior such as helping.

All of the above should not imply that it has no value to think about and measure empathy as a specific trait (rather than the general agreeableness factor). This is just about different research goals. The goal of the Big 5 is to be maximally parsimonious. Some detail will be lost by this strategy. However, if you are specifically interested in empathy, it may make more sense to focus on it at the cost of parsimony.


Do introverts engage in too much self-control or do they lack impulsivity? Regardless of whether people are extraverts or introverts, if they are asked to act in an extraverted way, this improves their mood (for example Zelenski and others 2012). My question is concerns the reasons for why introverts don't engage in extraverted behavior. According to dual process models of behavior (for example Strack, Deutsch, 2014), human behavior is a combination of impulses and more reflective behavior (for example self-control). It strikes me that extraverted behavior is often quite impulsive (e.g. posting a funny picture of oneself on facebook). So, do introverts lack these impulses, or are they too inclined to keep them under control? Is there any research that has tried to disentangle the two processes?

This may not be a perfect answer to your question but it should be of help. Essentially, I think that research on personality suggests that self control (and thus a lack of impulsivity) may be part of the reason why introverts don't engage in extraverted behavior.

According to personality research on arousal [1], levels of extroversion and introversion are linked to peoples' arousal levels. Extroverts are argued to be under-aroused (in terms of brain arousal) therefore they seek out new stimuli, while the opposite is the case for introverts. Hence as introverts already over-aroused, they are more likely to avoid new stimuli.

While the research you have cited suggests that introverts would actually benefit from seeking more social interaction, the fact that they do not is not particularly surprising as humans frequently fail to act in ways that benefit themselves.

[1]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Arousal


Why is it that in TV series the major part of the shots don´t last longer than 10 seconds? While watching TV series (Game of thrones, Death in paradise, New tricks, etc.) I try to count how long one shot was shown before the next shot was shown. The duration of the shots almost never exceeded 10 seconds. Is there some psychological reason for that?

James E. Cutting has done a number of studies on this topic in the movie domain. Take a look at "Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular   Movies" (Cutting, 2015):

"The pace of popular movies has    increased and statements about  this trend can be found in both the popular media and   in  scholarly works (see, for example, Bordwell and Thompson 2004;  Bordwell,   Staiger, and Thompson 1985; Cutting, Brunick, DeLong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011b; Salt 2006, 2009)"
"...   shorter shot durations make for more cuts, which in turn make for
more intensified demands on viewers’ attention."

More work can be found here:
http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pictures_film.htm


Is Fluid Intelligence Dropoff With Age an Established Fact? The picture below represents the idea that fluid intelligence declines with age. Is this commonly accepted as true and established, even if fitness/learning levels do not decline?

You are asking two very excellent questions.
Is the decline in fluid intelligence commonly accepted as true?
These days it seems generally accepted, that the trend is true. However, this hasn´t been the case a few yeas ago, e.g. see the introduction in Elsayed, Ismail, & Young (1980) for a little impression. The reason behind this is the limited comparability between different studies

due to different designs (longitudinal vs. cross sectional), that come with their own difficulties (f.e. longitudinal = drop out bias/survivorship bias, repetition bias; cross sectional = confounding of cohort and treatment effects - see Hofer & Sliwinski (2001) for more details about that).
due to different intelligence tests, concepts and facets (= "how do we define fluid/ crystallized intelligence"), that have been used (e.g. some solely defined crystillized intellgence as vocublary, see Wang & Kaufmann,1993).
of course there are many other aspects, that are not solely limited to the study of intelligence like small sample sizes, unrepresentative samples or publication bias.

However, as I mentioned at the beginning: these days - after a huge discussion and a lot of studies - it seems fairly accepted, see Verhaeghen & Salthouse (1997) with a meta-analysis or Baltes (1996) for a review-like paper - Kaufman, Salthouse, Scheiber, & Chen (2016) could also be relevant. The main reason behind this seems to be a decline in processing speed and working memory.
On a large scale this seems to come from a general (biological) decline across the lifespan (see Baltes & Smith, 2004), which brings me to your second question.
... even if fitness/learning levels do not decline?
There are a lot of studies, that  show, that physical activity and general fitness seems to have benificial effects on fluid intelligence. This seems to hold for every age (see Elsayed, Ismail, Young (1980) or Linde & Alfermann (2014)(an older sample)). The reasons behind this has not yet been clarified -

one can assume beneficial biological reasons like hightend blood circulation (see. Singh-Manoux, Hillsdon, Brunner, & Marmot, 2005)
or the reduction of distress, which might enhance cognitive functioning.

I would recommend you to read the introductions and discussions of the cited papers (if possible) for further information. However, (sadly) I don't know any studies explicitly investigating the development of fluid intelligence across the lifespan in regard of exercise/physical fitness (I just know, that exercise/fitness has a beneficial effect on fluid intelligence, but how exactly this has an impact on the decline is - for myself- unknown.)
However, I would say, that there will be a decline in older age, which can be buffered by remaining exercising/a good level fitness, but not really stopped. There should still be a decline - at least at a smaller scale. Or as to say in the words of my professor: "it won´t get better".
Of course all assumptions count for the general/average case, not for a single person.

Mohamed Elsayed, A. H. Ismail, R. John Young; Intellectual
Differences of Adult Men Related to Age and Physical Fitness Before
and After an Exercise Program, Journal of Gerontology, Volume 35,
Issue 3, 1 May 1980, Pages 383–387

Hofer, S. M., & Sliwinski, M. J. (2001). Understanding ageing.
Gerontology, 47(6), 341-352.

Wang, J. J., & Kaufman, A. S. (1993). Changes in fluid and crystallized intelligence across the 20-to 90-year age range on the K-BIT. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 11(1), 29-37.

Verhaeghen, P., & Salthouse, T. A. (1997). Meta-analyses of age–cognition relations in adulthood: Estimates of linear and nonlinear age effects and structural models. Psychological bulletin, 122(3), 231.

Kaufman, A. S., Salthouse, T. A., Scheiber, C., & Chen, H. (2016). Age Differences and Educational Attainment Across the Life Span on Three Generations of Wechsler Adult Scales. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 34(5), 421-441.

Baltes, P. B. (1997). On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny: Selection, optimization, and compensation as foundation of developmental theory. American psychologist, 52(4), 366.

Baltes, P. B., & Smith, J. (2004). Lifespan psychology: From developmental contextualism to developmental biocultural co-constructivism. Research in human development, 1(3), 123-144.

Linde, K., & Alfermann, D. (2014). Single versus combined cognitive and physical activity effects on fluid cognitive abilities of healthy older adults: a 4-month randomized controlled trial with follow-up. Journal of aging and physical activity, 22(3), 302-313.

Singh-Manoux, A., Hillsdon, M., Brunner, E., & Marmot, M. (2005). Effects of physical activity on cognitive functioning in middle age: evidence from the Whitehall II prospective cohort study. American journal of public health, 95(12), 2252-2258.


If you can't draw, is that an indication of low spatial IQ? People who can draw obviously can visualize space and objects in their mind. Therefore, people who can't draw obviously cannot. So does that mean that people who can't draw must have low spatial IQ?

Spatial IQ refers to the ability to perform navigation tasks, mental representation, and mental rotation of objects. Therefore, if you have a clear idea or 3D model in mind of what you want to draw but you are not able to reproduce it on paper, I would say does not mean you have a low spatial IQ.
Simple answer:
No. Bad drawing does not mean low spatial IQ
However, the inability of drawing can depend on other factors. Check Neglect syndrome and clock-drawing test.


Why do right-handed people put things in their left pocket, and vice versa? I'm not entirely sure if their is a duplicate of this question, or if this is the right SE site, topic, so sorry in advance if I am wrong.

Throughout my life, I have noticed that many people, including myself, put things in a pocket opposite of their main hand of usage (excluding ambidextrous people.) I am right handed, and I typically put my phone and other objects in my left pocket, and I take it out with my left hand and transfer it to my right hand. A relative of mine who is left-handed does the same thing, although with directions reversed.

Why is this so? What psychological reasons are their to do such an act?

This isn't really something I think is easily Googled, so I am asking here.

Q: Why do right-handed people put things in their left pocket, and vice versa?

A: I suppose that the left pocket means the left shirt-pocket because, in the case of pant-pockets, it is the right pant-pocket that most right-handed people usually put things (a wallet, a mobile phone, etc.) in. The reasons that they use the right pant-pocket are probably that it is more convenient and faster and that it consumes less energy than using the left pant-pocket.

The reason that right-handed people usually put things in their left shirt-pocket and vice versa for the left-handed people is probably the same. For right-handed people, putting things in the right shirt-pocket requires more flexing of the finger, wrist, and elbow joints, which is less comfortable and consumes more energy (for muscle contractions). But, unlike your case, I observe that most people who put things in their left shirt-pocket with their right hand will remove the object from the pocket with their right hand, not with their left hand and then transfer it to the right hand, which will take more time and expend more energy.

Finding ways to spend least energy for any action seems to be a well-preserved selected trait in all animals. It certainly gives a basic advantage for survival to the animals. That’s why, mostly, a man or an animal will always try to walk/fly/swim the shortest path it can to the goal. This preference applies to all other actions. This finding ways to spend least energy is called the principle of least effort:

  “The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort".”[Ref 1]

and

  “Summary. The observations in this section can be summarized by proposing three fundamental principles underlying the study of movement economy.

  The first derives from Hull (1943), to the effect that, when the organism is repeatedly presented with a number of equally reinforced alternative responses, that response requiring the least metabolic energy expenditure will become the dominant response.

  The second principle is that, when either the choice of response has been made or no choice given and a goal response specified, over trials the organism minimizes the metabolic energy expended in achieving the task goal. This economy-learning, or efficiency-learning, relationship, as shown in Figure 7, was first suggested by Freeman (1948), but Brener and Mitchell (1989) have also recognized the same principle.

  The third principle serves to explain these phenomena - the principle of least metabolic energy expenditure. In being receptive to sensory information about metabolic energy expenditure, organisms select the least effortful coordination and control function, and, with practice, the selected control parameters are refined to attain the task goal with less metabolic energy expenditure. The following section examines the contribution of various sources of informational support for response selection and metabolic energy minimization.” [Ref 2]

Thus, the reason that right-handed people put things in their left shirt-pocket is probably an evolutionary biological reason, not a psychological reason.

It should be noted that evolution works in general but not in every case. And variation is another constant facet of evolution. So, not every selected evolutionary trait will appear in all members of a species or will win out over other competing traits and manifest itself every time in a similar situation. Sometimes, another trait wins out. Therefore, some people or some people sometimes will not behave according to this principle of least effort.

References.

Wikipedia. The principle of least effort
Sparrow WA, Newell KM.  Metabolic energy expenditure and the regulation of movement economy. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 1998; 5: 173. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212943