From a neuroscientific standpoint, what are the most effective ways to develop empathy, love and compassion for others? From a neuroscientific standpoint, what are the most effective ways to develop empathy, love and compassion for others? For example, in the Buddhist lore there are some meditations targeted at cultivating these emotions, such as metta (loving-kindness) and karuna (compassion), but I admit my complete ignorance regarding the current position of Neuroscience with respect to these techniques (or any other techniques for that matter).

I'm including some relevant papers below, but one important thing to note abot this whole compassion/Buddhism/neuroscience discussion is that neuroscience may not necessarily have the most to say about developing empathy/love/compassion (ELC), especially as compared to "real-world," social psychological, or behavioral measures linking prosocial behavior to certain practices like mindfulness/metta/etc.

What do I mean by that? Consider: let's say we throw people in an fMRI and demonstrate, quasi-experimentally, that increased BOLD response in area K of the brain predicts increased ELC.

Let's then say that we then have a sample group engage in metta practices for six months, and afterward they demonstrate increased ELC (as measured, perhaps, by scales, charity donations, patience--whatever!). If we then threw those people in an fMRI and they didn't demonstrate increased BOLD response in area K, we wouldn't really be able to say that they don't have increased ELC, just because the "neuroscience" doesn't suggest so. All of our applied measures of ELC--sending money to charity, being more patient with their kids, etc.--would still suggest that they effectively built ELC.

So, neuroscience can support existing associations between certain practices and ELC, but it would be difficult to use neuroscience as the independent arbiter of any causal links between ELC and certain practices.

But, to your question: you may find these papers and discussions helpful:

Klimecki et al., Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after
compassion and empathy training; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4040103/

From the abstract: "In response to videos depicting human suffering, empathy training, but not memory training (control group), increased negative affect and brain activations in anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex—brain regions previously associated with empathy for pain. In contrast, subsequent compassion training could reverse the increase in negative effect ... We conclude that training compassion may reflect a new coping strategy to overcome empathic distress and strengthen resilience."
Note that one implication of the distinction between empathy/compassion training is that empathy training may incline us to feel self-concern in the presence of others suffering, which is distinct from the other-directed concern associated with compassion training. I could, from a theoretical perspective, feel complete empathy for your pain but have no motivation to alleviate it; in contrast, to feel compassion is, in some ways, to be concerned with or care about alleviating your suffering. The Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard has explored this distinction: http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/blog/posts/empathy-and-the-cultivation-of-compassion

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A discussion of recent findings on the neuroscience of compassion from UCB's Greater Good research center: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/three_insights_from_the_frontiers_of_the_mind

In sum: yes, meditation training can augment activity in brain areas associated with a whole host of positive traits/emotions--compassion, connectedness, etc. Note again though that demonstrating increased activity in a brain area previously associated with a positive thing is not necessarily the same as causing an increase in that positive thing. Neuroscience has a far ways to go before we can off-the-cuff describe all geographic brain activity in terms of its real-world and experiential consequences.

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Also, here's the "recommended reading" all in one PDF from a 2016 seminar at Harvard Med School on meditation practice and neuroscience. Not all of it is directly related to compassion, but the sum takeaway (for me, at least), is that yes, mindfulness can cause (not just predict) reductions in stress, increases in positive affect, and increases in compassion. (The inter-correlations between some of those measures--like self-compassion and how we treat others--can make exact causal chains hard to suss out, but I believe the overall pattern of results is strong). https://hms.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/assets/Harvard%20Now%20and%20Zen%20Reading%20Materials.pdf

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Stevens and Woodruff's book, The Neuroscience of Empathy, Compassion, and Self-Compassion; https://www.elsevier.com/books/the-neuroscience-of-empathy-compassion-and-self-compassion/stevens/978-0-12-809837-0

To be honest, I haven't read this, but it's a recent edition of their book, and they're both respected psychologists at Northern Arizona State University. If you're looking for a longer exploration of all the recent literature on compassion and neuroscience, this may be up your alley.

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Additional papers on compassion training:

Weng et al. (https://centerhealthyminds.org/assets/files-publications/WengCompassionAssociationForPsychologicalScience.pdf)

"Compassion trainees were instructed to evoke feelings of compassion while silently repeating compassion-generating phrases." (NOTE: these trainees also engaged in a version of metta practice, so that clouds the non-meditative results).
Results: more altruistic behavior post-compassion training, more activation in brain areas associated with compassion (that's a broad way to put that, apologies--I'm not a neuroscience specialist).

Jazaieri et al. (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10902-012-9373-z.pdf)

Participants did "Compassion Cultivation Training," described as such: "Each class includes: (a) pedagogical instruction with active group discussion, (b) a guided group meditation, (c) interactive practical exercises related to the specific step of the week...and (d) exercises designed to prime feelings of open-heartedness or connection to others, either through reading poetry or through reflecting on inspiring stories.
So, unfortunately, the CCT does involve some metta/meditative practices and thus doesn't serve as a perfect comparison to meditative practice--but it includes other exercises as well, perhaps suggesting that even the non-meditative activities contribute to the cultivation of ELC.
Results: "...CCT resulted in significant improvement in [compassion]. Specifically, CCT completers reported reductions in fear of compassion (for others, from others, and for self) and an increase in self-compassion. These findings suggest that not only is the absence of compassion worth investigating but also one’s fear of compassion..."

Again, both of those papers utilize some meditative practices as part of their compassion training, rendering it difficult to parse out exactly what features of the training best served to increase compassion. However, it seems reasonable to assume that, at a minimum, the non-meditative aspects of the compassion training in each case at least did not hurt participants' compassion, and probably enhanced it.


Do people feel emotions less strongly as they grow older? I'm specifically interested in whether or not their maximum ability to feel an emotion decreases as they grow older (so by that I'm meaning - let's ignore the effects of tolerance induced by life experience for now).

Deconstructing your question

There is a difference between the ability to experience an emotion and tendency to experience an emotion.
There is a difference between proportion of time that an individual experiences an emotion and the intensity of that emotion.
Obviously, you could take many approaches to answering this question. Emotions can be viewed from various perspectives including physiological, psychological, and behavioural.

Some empirical evidence

I did a quick search on Google Scholar for 'panas longitudinal study'

PANAS (see Crawford and Henry 2004,
PDF for a a review) is a commonly used self-report questionnaire that aims to measure the frequency with which various positive and negative emotions have been experienced over a given time frame.

I found this interesting article by Kunzmann, Little, and Smith 2000, PDF called
"Is age-related stability of subjective well-being a paradox? Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from the Berlin Aging Study".

The opening section of the article reviews the empirical literature regarding stability and age related trends in self-reported positive and negative affect.
The following are a few interesting points from the article:

Costa et al. 1987 found correlations over 10 years for positive and negative affect of r =.42 and r=.43 respectively. I.e., there is fair amount of stability in individual differences in the experience of emotions.
When Kunzmann et al's review of the literature they cite several large scale studies that showed at the group-level no age effect on negative affect, although a couple of studies suggested their might be a small decline in negative affect with age. These studies varied in the years of life that were of interest, but typically looked at differences between early, middle and older adulthood.
Kunzmann et al also review the evidence for positive affect. The story sounds a little complicated with some studies suggesting a decline in positive affect and others not.
As I've seen before, it seems like cross sectional studies sometimes show bigger effects than longitudinal studies.


What effects does multitasking have on comprehension and memory of audiobooks/speech? I've heard around that our comprehension of audiobooks versus read books is roughly on the same level (the processes aren't really all that different, usually when we read we vocalize the words in our imagination, and when we are listening with attention we recap all the words we hear after we hear them to make them "stick" in a similar kind of way; when we lose our focus on either the words don't stick and it's like we never heard/read them.)

The major difference I see is that when reading we can double back and re-read a word several times until it sticks (which according to some arguments may actually impair comprehension rather than increase it), but when listening we can not do this, which also makes listening a slightly faster process unless you're an avid "speedreader"

So with that out of the way, I'm wondering about the effects (if any) of doing other tasks while we listen to audiobooks on our comprehension and memory of the contents are, especially if the contents are educational or historical material (not novels, where comprehension isn't as important, and our attention is kept more easily (since novels tend to be more exciting/engaging than history or sociology books))

Tasks can include low attention tasks that don't engage the brain that much (like chores, exercise (from swimming to weightlifting), doodling or mini-games (angry-birds or farmwille or flappy bird or tetris even), essentially things that anyone can just space out and do on "auto-pilot" without giving it any thought.

And high attention tasks (like reflex video games such as world of tanks, league of legends/dota2, call of duty or dark souls. Wiring/fixing electronics,  creative drawing/design, sudoku or chess/go, or even programming or math), tasks which require us to stay relatively or completely engaged in order to succeed at them.

Assuming with all the possible low and high attention tasks that there is nothing that can distract your auditory senses (video games for example would be muted, and you wouldn't be playing music), what kind of effect would these kinds of tasks have on a persons memory and comprehension of an audiobook they'd be listening to while doing it?

I've heard some experts claim that some people can focus better on the teacher's voice in class while they're doing something with their hands (most commonly doodling) and that doing something with your ears (essentially instrumental music) can help them focus on written material (i.e. read better with music, hear better while using your hands & eyes for something) I do not know how true that may be, but if it is there is a chance that doing another task while listening to an audiobook could increase your comprehension instead of degrade it as one would normally suspect (meaning I can't rule that out either until I would see some data on this whole thing).

There does not seem to be any research on your exact question on:

the effect of "low attention tasks" and "high attention tasks" on the comprehension and memory of speech modality learning.

However, if we widen the scope of the question to different modalities of learning like reading, then there is ample research. However, most of the research seems to be done on comprehension and not memory.
Low Attention Tasks
Lin Lin et. al. (2009) did a study on college students for assessing their reading performance under three conditions: (a) reading only (silence condition), (b) reading with a video playing in the background (background multitasking condition), and (c) reading and watching video simultaneously (test multitasking condition). They found that the participants performed best in the background condition, i.e. when they had a background video playing. This a surprising finding. A similar study was done by Jennifer Lee et. al. (2011) and found that the performance was similar for cases (a) and (b).
For your case, this suggests that "low attention tasks" will not negatively affect your comprehension, and may even increase comprehension (as suggest by Lee et. al. (2009)).
High Attention Tasks
Beyond conclusions about the effect of low-attention tasks, Jennifer et. al. (2011) also rigorously tested the effect of "high attention tasks". To quote from their abstract:

Participants were given a timed (16 minutes) reading comprehension test in three conditions: Silence (only reading), Background multitasking (reading with a non-tested video shown simultaneously), and Test multitasking (reading with a tested video shown simultaneously) conditions.
Our findings indicated that: (1) participants in the Background condition performed as well as those in the Silence condition, and (2) when participants were tested on their video comprehension, the group in the Test condition performed significantly better than the group in the Background condition. The results of this study suggest that cognitive load plays an important role in determining how much information is retained when students perform more than one task at a time.

Their conclusion tells that the division of cognitive load affects your performance very clearly. Hence, it is best to avoid the high-attention tasks altogether.
References:

Lin Lin, Tip Robertson & Jennifer Lee (2009) Reading Performances Between Novices and Experts in Different Media Multitasking Environments, Computers in the Schools, 26:3, 169-186, DOI: 10.1080/07380560903095162
Jennifer Lee, Lin Lin & Tip Robertson (2012) The impact of media multitasking on learning, Learning, Media and Technology, 37:1, 94-104, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2010.537664

Non-research Sources
Beyond what the current research says, I would like to cite 2 more sources: "Deep Work" book by Cal Newport, and the training modality of Samurai Jack (a fictional character in an animated series).
In "Deep Work", Cal Newport makes a very compelling case for why deep work (i.e. work devoid of all distractions) is so important. The first half of the book is completely dedicated to understanding its importance; while the second half deals with its implementation. Cal Newport is an academic, and so he backs his claims with scientific research and his own careful observations.
Finally, as a kid, I was always fascinated with the training regime of Samurai Jack. When training for sword fighting, he used to blind-fold himself and then train. This made him one of the best Samurais, capable of defeating a redoubtable evil dragon. What I got to understand from his regime was that he was blocking all the various stimuli in order to bring intense focus and really bring out the potential of the remaining active senses.
This is not just true for Samurai Jack. Masters in any field have been doing this through the ages : cutting down stimuli.
It's surprising, then, today we are instead adding more stimuli instead of reducing them. I think it's best to go the old-fashioned way. It's best we embrace the The Samurai Jack Blindfold:


Are spatial memory and mental mapping skills the same? I have a colleague that says they are totally different, that spatial memory is a memory and not a skill while mental mapping is a skill because it can be measured with test and tools.

Based on what I read, doesn't spatial memory encompasses mental mapping?

The two key parts of memory are coding and recall, we code information to our spatial memory, and the recall is the mental map and, therefore, part of memory. I'd be curious to see what your colleague's logic is behind their definition for skill, but from what is provided, I'd argue that the distinction of spatial memory being memory because we can't test it, while the mental map is a skill because we can to be in error. The Weschler Memory Scale (WNS) is designed specifically to evaluate memory (and is often a vital part of a neuropsych assessment) and, by your colleague's logic, the tests within the WMS don't test memory at all, but the way we manifest our results (such as how to use a pencil), and, of course, memory could arguably be considered a skill anyway.


How do you interpret the MSe and partial eta squared reported with an F-statistic? In my area of psychology we report the results of a repeated measures ANOVA with 1 within subjects independent variable as follows:
F(2,60) = 120.29, MSe = 173.09, p<0.05, ηp2 = 0.78
I understand this results means that the main effect of the independent variable was significant, but what do the MSe and ηp2 each tell us?  What would be considered "good" values for these terms?
Thanks!

The outputs of statistical analyses are not "good" or "bad", except that they are definitely bad no matter what numbers you get if you've done your analyses incorrectly, and good if you've chosen an appropriate model, gathered enough data, and avoided statistical pitfalls like p-hacking.

Always report actual p-values, rather than "p<0.05". The only exception is for very small p-values (e.g., p<0.0001).

MSE, the mean squared error, is not easy to interpret by itself. Its range of values completely depends on your measurement scale. For models fit to the same data, a smaller MSE is "better", but it's more complicated than that and there are better methods for model selection (but also problems with model selection generally).

Effect sizes like the partial eta squared depend entirely on the field and type of data being analyzed. Effect sizes that are large in one context may be considered small in another. Partial eta squared measures how much variance is explained by your predictor divided by how much variance is unexplained (plus the numerator), so values closer to 1 mean a bigger effect. 0.78 is usually quite a large effect in psychology, since many measures in psychology depend on individual factors that are hard to capture. Again, however, that isn't necessarily true in every single case.


How can you limit excessive risk-taking at the institutional level? Some firms have a compensation structure that encourages risk-taking while insulating employees from the bad consequences of their decisions.  This creates the potential for moral hazard.

I started thinking about this because of what happened at AIG.  For those unfamiliar with the situation, a small division (AIG Financial Products) in a huge insurance company was able to bankrupt the entire company.  Incentives were very lop-sided for division management relative to the risks they were taking.  Even though management was making millions, they were taking risks an order of magnitude larger than that.  If they lost billions, they would only lose their future income (assuming they would be fired).

My question is, how do you align management/employee incentives at the institutional level in order to prevent this types of moral hazard?

Two things to note:

The situation at AIG is just an example.  I'm not asking for solutions specific
to AIG (e.g. limiting leverage) or financial firms in general.  Many firms
face this type of moral hazard with the CEO (i.e. a "golden parachute").
Aside from not being "at the institutional level", I doubt
regulation is the answer.  While there's a place for regulation,
regulators seem to — at least initially — react to crises instead of
prevent them (though there's no counter-factual for crises
regulators may have prevented).

Optimal contracting under moral hazard is an incredibly rich field. Any answer to your question would rely more on the assumptions being made about risk preferences, effort sets, etc. than any "universal solution" to moral hazard.

That being said, there are a couple of interesting pieces of the literature to note:

Optimal contracts often have a fixed component (the opposite of your "alignment" premise),  with the variable component offered only insofar as it is required to induce more effort from the agent.
Optimal contracts use any information relevant to determining the effort expended by the agent, not just the result.

So I would think an answer would be to reduce (not increase) the amount of compensation variable upon the result and to condition compensation relative to other benchmarks that would indicate whether someone is just benefiting from tailwind.


What are the different branches of Psychoanalysis? I am trying to make a list of the main accepted branches of psychoanalysis to quiz a friend of mine. I don't know much about it and to learn more I need to know the main areas. So far I have

Freudian Psychology
Object Relations Theory
Relations Theory
Self-psychology

Does anyone know of a basic list of the main branches? My friend said these were the main ones, but I couldn't find a source to substantiate that and I want to verify these are indeed considered the main branches.

EDIT:
By a "branch" or "school", I mean a general umbrella term people use to aggregate related trains of thought. In physics, this might be "general relativity" or "quantum mechanics".

In the context of the question I think it makes sense to limit the scope to earlier developments in psychoanalysis. Thompson (1957) gives an overview of what can be called psychoanalytic schools. She includes:

Freudian psychoanalysis
Individual psychology (Alfred Adler)
Analytical psychology (Carl Gustav Jung)
Object relations theory (Sándor Ferenczi, Otto Rank)
(Wilhelm Reich)
Karen Horney (sometimes denoted »Culturalist Psychoanaysis«)
Erich Fromm (sometimes denoted »Culturalist Psychoanaysis«)
Harry Stack Sullivan (sometimes denoted »Culturalist Psychoanaysis«)

On the other hand, several psychoanalytic psychologies can be distinguished. Following a systematization by Gottfried Fischer, there are:

Drive theory/drive psychology (psychodynamic theory)
Ego psychology (Freudian psychoanalytic psychology/structural theory)
Object relations theory
Self psychology

Newer psychoanalytic schools comprise e. g. Lacanian psychoanalysis, interpersonal psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis – but for a more comprehensive list see Kernberg (2001) and Gabbard (2009).

Literature:

Frosh, Stephen (2012). A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. London: Palgrave.
Gabbard, Glen O. (2009) Textbook of Psychotherapeutic Treatments. American Psychiatric Publishing. (Ch. 1: Theoretical Models of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy)
Kernberg, Otto F. (2001). Recent Developments in the Technical Approaches of English-Language Psychoanalytic Schools. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Volume LXX, Issue 3, 519–547.
Thompson, Clara Mabel (1957). The different schools of psychoanalysis. American Journal of Nursing, 57, 1304–1307.
Thompson, Clara Mabel & Mullahy, Patrick (1951). Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development (3rd ed.). New York: Hermitage House.


Is cortical magnification in the visual system related to synaptic pruning, or is it a separate developmental or learning process? I'm primarily interested in learning about current computational models that explain cortical magnification in the visual system.

With this in mind, my specific questions are: (1) Is this phenomenon a result of the synaptic pruning that takes place in the early years of development?
(2) If not, is it a separate "learning" process along the lines of the hippocampus enlargement in London cab drivers?

I would personally like it if the answers were (1) NO (2) YES, but I'd like to know what the latest science says.

No, it's not due to synaptic pruning. If it were due to synaptic pruning babies would have better vision(esp. Peripheral) but that is not the case. Babies only have better hearing.

No, it is not exactly a learning process. Most of the foveal developmental starts during the prenatal period and complete by 18 months postnatal.Most of the inter-individual variance have been linked to genetic factors. There is no conclusive evidence for environmental factors affecting the foveal development. But there is speculation for possible environmental factors.

Reference : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3658155/


Can music be addictive? As playing games for a prolonged period, tend to develop a addictive behavior in humans, Is there any possibility for addiction to music?

I.e., when a person listens to certain list of songs and gets addicted to it, without which the person finds the day boring (or emotionally disturbed)?

According to the article "Addiction to Music Has Biochemical Basis" on Softpedia News by Tudor Vieru, which reports on findings by Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor (Salimpoor & Zatorre, 2013), who both hold appointments as neuroscientists at the McGill University:

"listening to music you like also triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in underlying pleasurable reactions caused by food, drugs and arousal before intercourse"

"The chemical has been linked in a variety of studies with mechanisms underlying addiction in humans, and it would appear that it also plays a role in the way people feel when listening to their favorite tunes."

"Dopamine is important because it makes us want to repeat behaviors. It’s the reason why addictions exist, whether positive or negative,”

"the euphoric ‘highs’ from music are neurochemically reinforced by our brain so we keep coming back to them. It’s like drugs. It works on the same system as cocaine,"

"It’s working on the same systems of addiction, which explain why we’re willing to spend so much time and money trying to achieve musical experiences,"

References
Salimpoor, V. N., & Zatorre, R. J. (2013). Neural interactions that give rise to musical pleasure. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(1), 62–75. 10.1037/a0031819 Free PDF available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f818/f3a9db17e3defb250a0c00ff64b4c4631376.pdf


What is the diagnosis when someone suffers only from negative symptoms of schizophrenia? If someone has almost all of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and no positive symptoms of schizophrenia whatsoever, is that enough to be diagnosed with a mental disorder?

I understand that a diagnosis of schizophrenia is not possible with only negative symptoms.

Short answer
Many people in the general populace suffer one or more negative symptoms that are associated with schizophrenia, but are not diagnosed with a mental illness whatsoever.

Background
Indeed, for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, negative symptoms alone are not enough. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (DSM-5), to meet the criteria for diagnosis of schizophrenia, the patient must have experienced at least 2 of the following symptoms:

Delusions
Hallucinations
Disorganized speech
Disorganized or catatonic behavior
Negative symptoms

Werbeloff et al. (2015) note that, similar to psychotic experiences, negative symptoms are common in the general population, namely between 20–22%. The vast majority of these people do not manifest a clinically diagnosed psychiatric disorder. Negative symptoms do appear to be associated with the development of schizophrenia later in life, and to other non-psychotic disorders. However, neither negative symptoms nor psychotic experiences alone predicted later schizophrenia in their study. It was only the combined presence of both strong positive psychotic experiences and negative symptoms together that showed a statistically significant risk for later schizophrenia.

Reference
- Werbeloff et al., PLoS One (2015); 10(3): e0119852


Can Transcendental meditation be used in lab setting via Digital instructor or do we need a practitioner for TM? I am starting my thesis, and as I was doing research on types of meditations effect on self compassion. I am new to this research, so I had wanted to know from anyone with experience. Someone, who has carried a research regarding Transcendental meditation. I want to know if for using TM for my research, will I need a practitioner or I can use a certified youtube video, where the digital instructor will be enough to guide my participants for TM?

As per the official site:

  The TM technique is not "one size fits all." It's taught one-on-one
  and is carefully personalized for you.

  Only certified TM teachers can instruct you in the authentic TM
  technique.

You could, obviously, perform some form of meditation that you consider equivalent to it. However, you won't be able to claim that you are testing the authentic TM, which is, in general quite secretive regarding the concrete process.

There are TM dropouts who claim to reveal the whole process, like this guideline. Performing upon these also carries the risk of being considered 'not the authentic TM.'


How to recognize people with high need for cognition? In my own little study I am trying to describe the personalities of different persons I know personally, by adding traits to them.

Among other traits, I am looking for those who have a high need for cognition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition).

My challenge is: Those 3 people that I know have high NFC are all introverts, who don't tell others much of their thoughts. This means you need to know them very well or for a long time in order to recognize their NFC. This again implies that I don't really know for sure if anyone else I know have high NFC....

This makes me question 2 things:

Is there any correlation between NFC and extraversion?
Is there any way to recognize or measure people on NFC, without asking them questions? Maybe some kind of typical behavior or attitude for these people?

Like IQ, one's NFC is primarily judged by psychometric self-evaluation rather than behavior. The way in which we recognize NFC from a behavioral standpoint is to recognize the ways in which they seem to produce behaviors that a NFC psychometric test would evaluate.
In other words, if you want to recognize high NFC in others, you might want to familiarize yourself with the questions and traits that psychometric tests associate with high NFC. For example, this test asks questions that are representative of high NFC. So if you were to recognize someone who might answer 'yes' to "I usually end up deliberating about issues even when they do not affect me personally", or "I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours", then you could most likely recognize someone with high NFC.
Other behaviors may be less subtle. For example:

[Those with high need for cognition] like to engage in complex, inquisitive, and analytical thoughts. They feel intrinsically motivated to devote effort to cognitive endeavors, striving to understand objects, events, and individuals. These individuals are less inclined to be biased by superficial factors, such as the appearance of speakers or social comparisons. In addition, they are more inclined to enjoy some experience if their expectations were low.
Interestingly, both need for cognition, as well as need for affect--the motivation to experience strong emotions--increase the likelihood that people will become transported into these narratives (Thompson & Haddock, 2012). If need for cognition is elevated, people contemplate the tales more extensively, and appreciate the complexity of narratives, both of which facilitate transportation. If need for affect is elevated, people enjoy the emotions that transportation can evoke. The implication of this possibility is that need for cognition can, in some instances, increase the susceptibility of people to messages. For example, if an advertisement presents a narrative, need for cognition can facilitate transportation and thus diminish the likelihood of counterarguments. In contrast, if an advertisement presents a series of facts, instead of a narrative, transportation is precluded, and need for cognition could increase the likelihood of counterarguments.

Insofar as NFC and extraversion is concerned, there appears to be a positive correlation between need for cognition, openness, and conscientiousness. Thus, it is represented by openness to new and novel ideas and a willingness to engage in effortful thought (Verplanken, Hazenberg, & Palenewen, 1992). It does not appear to be linked to extroversion.


Why past events reappear in dreams after a certain delay? I know that Freud in his "Interpretation of dreams" provides a number of examples of events influencing dreams several days to several months after the event has occurred. For example, a person sees a red bicycle in a shop and a week later may have a dream about riding/fixing/seeing the same type of red bicycle. Freud provides on example where an event took place months before the dream.
My question is: Has there been any research that explained why there can be a long (4-7 days) delay between a real life event and a dream with elements from the event?
Just to clarify, these are not recurring dreams, but single occurrence dreams about past experiences. Typically the delay between the event and the dream is several days.

Because memory is consolidated during sleep (and dreaming).
http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/11/6/671.full
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/dreams-are-key-to-memory/13157.html
There are also some psychological benefits from easing painful memories.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/11/23/dream-sleep/


Cost of EEG devices suitable for neurolinguistic research What is the cost of an EEG device (electrodes and other indispensable hardware, software if available for standard office computers, or a whole package with a dedicated computer and software) that is of suitable quality for neurolinguistic research? My own attempts to find information on this were futile. The Wikipedia article quotes low-cost devices from US$ 100 onwards, but I'm guessing the very cheap ones are of rather limited use for research. There is also an OPenEEG project, but I'm looking for an out-of-the-box solution. The commercial suppliers I found online do not quote any prices.

I just need a rough estimate to what amount of money is necessary to do any publishable academic research, and how much solution for average research needs would cost - such as 500 Euros/Dollars, 1,000, 10,000...?

We were looking for an EEG device few years ago. The commercial offers were between 20,000 EUR for a 32 passive electrode to 50,000 EUR for an 64/128 active electrode. This included everything except the computers - some offers were without off-line data processing software. I never considered the EEG systems that were not mentioned in the method section of my research domain. And beware of the local regulations and ethical considerations concerning home-made devices for recording human biological signal.


How to engage in the conceptualization process to measure a psychological construct such as femininity? I am in class for Research Methods and I am having troubles with a conceptualizations process. The question is to describe the conceptualization process you would employ to measure femininity. How exactly do you do that?

Conceptualization in a research methods context basically means generating a precise definition. You and I might have different ideas of what it means to be feminine, which would make it difficult to measure. In order to conduct research that measures femininity, a precise definition is needed so that everyone has a common understanding of what exactly it is that is being measured. You might start this process by identifying different aspects of femininity and generating a list. Then you could try to summarize your list with a few sentences that describes your conceptualization or definition of femininity.


Is sluggishly progressing schizophrenia recognized outside of Russia? I've been trying to look up information about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia, but the only source accessible to me was a Wikipedia article, that states that the term “sluggish schizophrenia” was created to diagnose political dissidents, but nevertheless, it has been also adopted in modern Russia.

I wish to know about other countries, which haven't been a part of USSR. Is the term officially recognized in the western world? Is it considered a complete misdiagnosis? Is there some other classification, that is used for the same condition instead?

The idea that schizo type disorders may onset slowly is commonly accepted in the West. We do not have a separate diagnosis for this type of onset in the DSM. Psychotic episodes may happen to individuals before they experience all the symptoms of bipolar or schizo type disorders.

It is common that a patient may begin to hear voices during isolated instances without the trouble with emotions. Then develop trouble with emotions. Then progress into hallucinations. The individual may cope with the isolated psychosis until the psychosis becomes so severe that they are unable to do without medical attention. This progression sometimes takes years.

It is possible that any diagnosis of mental illness can be used for political reasons though.


What Big5 facets correlate with practical sense? Which scientific reports can tell me about Big5 scores correlating with a practical, physical preference?

Examples:

Traits: Practical, Realistic, Down-to-earth, Athletic, Handy, Prefers hands-on work, Problem solver, Focused on the real world

Interests:  Animals, Construction, Driving, Electricity, Hearing, Manual labor, Mechanics, Outdoors, Physical activities, Problem solving, Safety, Seeing, Sensing, Sports, Tangible things, Tasting, Tools, Transportation

As a starting point, you might be interested in studies that have related vocational preferences with personality. In particular, Holland's model of job preferences has been highly studied.

Practical sense sounds a little like the "realistic" dimension in Holland's framework.

Larson et al (2002) report a meta-analysis of the Big 5 and Holland's types.
Based on this meta-analysis, while there were correlations between the Big 5 and other types, there did not appear to be any strong (or even moderate) correlations between the realistic preference and the Big 5:

Note. based on n > 5,000.

References

Larson, L. M., Rottinghaus, P. J., & Borgen, F. H. (2002). Meta-analyses of Big Six interests and Big Five personality factors. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61(2), 217-239.


Amount of noise in (the recognisable definition of) an ERP As I understand it, ERPs can be reliably identified only after the noise (inherent to EEG signals, regardless of the task used to evoke the response) has been largely removed, which is done by averaging across multiple repetitions. The ERP in that case is a recognisable-enough pattern in the EEG signal that it can be reliably pointed out in a graph of the averaged trials, for several electrodes, for instance:

Question #1: if the averaging method is trustworthy enough - assuming enough-many reptitions - to make noise components cancel each other out while leaving reliable effects still in, then why are other non-zero sections of (ripples in) the EEG signal also not defined as ERPs, with some attached meaning (e.g. response to some cognitive task), since they have, after all, survived the same denoising procedure?
It would make sense to trust the EEG signal to really not reflect any effect when the intercept (y) is zero. However, in most EEG plots this seems to (very conveniently!) only happen at the t=0 point. The signal then becomes non-zero but only part of is acknowledged as an ERP, whereas the rest seems to be considered noise even though the plotted signal has been denoised.

EDIT: Question #2: why do such ERP plots - obtained by averaging across repetitions and across subjects - never (in my experience) show a confidence band to show the extent of that cross-repetition/-subject variability? Would that information not be of interest?

Averaging does not perfectly remove the noise. Assuming the signal is perfectly correlated across repetitions/sweeps/trials and the noise is independent, than doing from 1 to 2 sweeps will increase the SNR by 3 dB (i.e., decrease the noise by 1/2), Every doubling in the number of sweeps increases the SNR by 3 dB so that after 1024 sweeps the SNR has improved by at most 30 dB. This means that after averaging there is a minimum magnitude required for a peak/notch to be considered statistically reliable. Any ripples with smaller magnitudes are ignored since they are not statistically reliable.


How to set up a binocular rivalry experiment which splits a single image in two separately controlled ones? The question is about the actual physical setup and steps needed to take in order to experiment with the phenomena. I found a tutorial on jove.com, "How to Create and Use Binocular Rivalry", and it also has a dedicated explanatory article. However, the experiment I want to make is tricky in the following sense:

A regular binocular rivalry experiment has two separate images set up, and normally the image features are controlled in a way that is suitable to exhibit a whatever the experimenters want. In the case that I want to make, images are not separate, they are basically left and right parts of a single image that is usually viewed as a single image as well.

In the experiment, I will manipulate left and right halves of that single image separately, but I want to present halves to different eyes. The particular problem is that I want to calibrate the physical setup so that the physical boundary between images is not exactly visible. I can't just split left and right - the border between the images in the eyes of the observer has to be as small as possible.

How can I present each half of a face, split vertically down the middle, independently to each eye (e.g., left half-left eye), without putting a visible physical boundary between the two image halves?

This is an interesting methodological problem. On the one hand, it seems that any method which would present the halves to the correct eye, and only that eye, would entail a visible boundary, and any method with an invisible boundary would be unable to present the halves as desired. Virtual reality systems present stimuli to each eye separately (e.g., the commercial Oculus Rift), and may therefore present a solution here. It is, however, conceivable that the brain will not correctly integrate two separately presented halves of a face into a percept, and I am not aware of any direct studies, nor can I find any.

One related and interesting example of using virtual reality to study complex visuo-motor behavior, the outfielder problem, was provided by Fink, Foo and Warren (2009). They equipped participants catching baseballs in the air with a Cybermind Visette-Pro HMD virtual reality helmet in order to manipulate the perceived motion of the baseballs. Their ability to successfully execute such a complex visual manipulation suggests that virtual reality systems should be a viable solution for presenting halves of faces independently to each eye.

References

Fink, P. W., Foo, P. S., & Warren, W. H. (2009). Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 14.


What is the relationship between self-perceptions and actual driving ability? I've often heard it said that almost everyone thinks that they are a better than average driver.
If this is true, it could be explained by a number of theories.
Some of these are outlined in this Wikipedia article on illusory superiorty.

I had a few questions:

Has anyone researched the actual correlation between self-perceived and other measures of driving ability?
Has anyone developed a model of the degree to which any bias is due to different causes (e.g., different values of speed versus safety; perceptual differences of others versus self; etc.)?

The results are mixed.

It's well known that in general people will consider themselves above average in most areas, and driving is no exception Do expert drivers have a reduced illusion of superiority?

  Expert police drivers rated themselves as superior to equally qualified drivers, to the same degree as novices, Cohen’s d = .03 ns. Despite their extensive additional training and experience, experts still appear to be as susceptible to illusions of superiority as everyone else.

Drivers' Ratings of Different Components of Their Own Driving Skill: A Greater Illusion of Superiority for Skills That Relate to Accident Involvement also suggests that good appreciation for hazard perception results in higher self-percieved safety even when skill is controlled for:

  Also, ratings of hazard-perception skill related to self-perceived safety after overall skill was controlled for. We suggest that although drivers appear to appreciate the role of hazard perception in safe driving, any safety benefit to be derived from this appreciation may be undermined by drivers' inflated opinions of their own hazard-perception skill. We also tested the relationship between illusory beliefs about driving skill and risk taking and looked at ways of manipulating drivers' illusory beliefs.

Age differences in male drivers' perception of accident risk: The role of perceived driving ability suggests that younger (male) drivers consider themselves equal to older drivers, youunger drivers are involved in more accidents:

  Although young drivers' estimates of accident involvement in the next year were higher than those of older drivers, young drivers gave lower ratings of accident risk for specific driving situations which demanded fast driving reflexes or substantial vehicle-handling skills. Young drivers rated their own risk of an accident and driving abilities as being the same as for older drivers. However, they saw their peers as being significantly higher at risk and having poorer abilities than themselves.

The article Confidence in, and self-rating of, driving ability among older drivers suggests there is no correlation between confidence and driving performance for older drivers. This seems to go against most results but other studies were not focused on older drivers.

  No relationship was found between confidence and adverse driving events or driving performance. Understanding the relationship of confidence and self-rating of driving ability to driving patterns, adverse events and driving performance may provide additional insights into identifying older drivers at increased risk for problems and formulating intervention strategies to help lower risk.

Overall it appears that young drivers are likely to have excessively high confidence in their own ability. There isn't much evidence to suggest that higher or lower confidence actually correlates with a specific skill level.  Older drivers seem to have better driving skill and less overconfidence, but I have not seen results controlling for age and correlating driving ability with confidence except the study on older drivers which showed no correlation.


Why Do People Feel "Safe & Secure" with Their Emotional Distress? I have noticed in some of my family members, who've been through struggles in life, to extremely "cling" into their sad emotions! They don't want let go of it. It almost feels like they feel safe and secure with their emotional "miseries". I have searched the net and found this is a common phenomena in many people. I was wondering if there is any scientific paper written on this subject. I don't know the proper terminology for this behavior. I was hoping someone can shed some light. Thanks,

You are right, and consolation often backfires. this is for 2 reasons.

We as human beings, want to be witnessed, heared. Few year ago a video based on research work of Megan Devine went viral over internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2zLCCRT-nE
https://refugeingrief.com/

Lot of positivity we say, is actually "toxic positivity". It make our pain invalidated, disbelieved, or may have a discriminatory "bad vibes unwelcome" approach. Toxic positivity may oppress people from telling their problem and finding a solution.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-man-cave/201908/toxic-positivity-dont-always-look-the-bright-side


Is there a lot of redundancy in written and spoken language? I read years ago in a pop science book that written and spoken language can be shown to have a high level of redundancy. The speculation was that this served to allow error correction because language is encountered in noisy environments and understanding has a high survival value. The figure I remember is that if 35% of the information remains an attentive listener or reader can still make out the message. This has become a cherished notion in my world view as an indicator that language and human endeavor contains complexity we are not consciously aware of.

I am looking for a knowledgeable confirmation of the idea that spoken or written language contains this redundancy. An impolite smack down due to unexamined confirmation bias is always welcome as well.

It seems that for written English, the figure is 50%.
From pages 27 to 28 of The making of cognitive science: Essays in honor of George A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Estimates of redundancy.  Shannon (1948, 1951) had himself estimated the redundancy of printed English to be about 50 percent.  He had used a technique in which a subject was given a passage of text and then required to guess the next letter until the correct response (i.e., that corresponding to the original text) was given.  Redundancy was calculated from the distribution of the numbers of guesses required.  Garner and Carson (1960) [...] also estimated the redundancy of printed English to be about 50 percent.  Newman and Gerstman (1952) [...] estimated redundancy to be 52 percent.
Uses of redundancy.  [...] Chapanis (1954) and Miller and Friedman (1957) both showed that when text was mutilated by deleting different percentages of letters, subjects were able to restore the missing letters with a high degree of accuracy.  Such restoration is possible because of redundancy, so these experiments showed that redundancy was useful to humans.
[...]
In summary, printed English is redundant, and thus constrained, both in letter sequences within words and in sequences of words themselves.  This redundancy is known to humans, who can use it to reconstruct mutilated text and to recognize and learn words and sequences of words that reflect varying degrees of this constraint.  [...]

From page 1086 of A new kind of science by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, Inc., 2002):

[...] English text typically remains intelligible until about half its characters have been deleted, indicating that it has a redundancy of around 0.5.  Most other languages have slightly higher redundancies, making documents in those languages slightly longer than their counterparts in English.


Efficiency drop when joining and splitting teams What will happen when a team is either split or joined with another team?
After reading about Tuckman's stages of group development, I understand that the new team will probably start at the beginning or go back a few stages depending on how much they know each other and how much they have worked together before.

My questions are:

Has there has been done any research on why you should or should not join or merge teams in short time periods?
By how much will the efficiency drop by on average?
How long does it take on average to become as efficient as before?

EDIT: To read more about tuckman's stages of group development you can go to this site. There is also some books written but to get a quick introduction this would suffice.

Has there has been done any research on why you should or should not
  join or merge teams in short time periods?

One big difference in how the troops were maintained in the second world war was that for the allied forces when a person died/got seriously injured this person was always replaced with another one (under the assumption "you always want the troops to be fully staffed"), whereas the Germans did not replace troop members and the troop kept its original staffing until it became too small when it was just broken up (motivated by group dynamics as you are asking about).

It seems at first a bit counter intuitive, but the Germans performed better due to their strategy than just continuously replace personnel. I am sure there exists a lot of research into this.


Where can I find a longitudinal study with a binary response? I've spent the last couple of months trying to find real data (not simulated) of a longitudinal study, but I can't seem to find one. Any topic and time frame is fine, but the dependent variable must be binary, and a few covariables are also desirable. I appreciate any help immensely!

(1) The statistic software R comes with a number of datasets. You can see which datasets are available with the command data(). Here is an overview.

Among the datasets that came with my distribution of R is the dataset Titanic, which includes the binary variable "Survived", which gives information about which passengers survived the Titanic's maiden voyage.

Another dataset, UCBAdmissions, gives information about which applicants were admitted or rejected to UC Berkeley.

The data in both datasets is grouped (by sex etc.). Both are not longitudinal, though.

You can get information on each dataset with ?datasetname, e.g. ?Titanic. Maybe more datasets include binary variables.

(2) As Jeromy Anglim noted, many statistics text books offer an online data repository. Here is the one for Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models (2nd ed.) by John Fox. Here is the one for Statistik (7th ed.) by Fahrmeir et al. (in German).

(3) Here is a linklist to free datasets, here is another. I guess there are more.


What is the relationship between language and the level of comprehension of consciousness? I asked a similar/related question a couple days ago about how language and/or culture affect an individual's cognitive capacity.

I'm looking for materials, if any, on the subject of a language's relationship with the level of comprehension of consciousness.

For example, if a specific language doesn't have the right words to describe the biological aspects of visual perception, will the individual using that language be able to comprehend all aspects of consciousness as well as an individual using a language which has the words to describe the event?

I've read The Rediscovery of the Mind by John Searle and it discusses some issues of how our current state of understanding consciousness is a function of the scientific progressions of society.  He talks about how we could be misunderstanding/misinterpreting the fundamentals of consciousness when we use out-dated and/or inaccurate definitions & concepts as a scaffold for defining current theories of consciousness.

Are there any books, studies, theories, or relevant materials on this topic?

One thing that comes to mind is the discussion over why English-speaking people think submarines cannot swim, while they think airplanes can fly.  Supposedly in Russian, though, they do refer to submarines as "swimming."

Meanwhile, we ask whether computers can think, without really realizing that this question turns out to be simply a question about semantics, just like the question of whether or not a submarine can swim.

(Edsger Dijkstra said: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.")

The thing is, some words we use we consider, by definition, apply only to humans or animals.  We seem to be more concerned about the pedigree of the thing, than its actual behavior or function.

We use the word "conscious" similar to the word "swim"....it, almost by definition, only applies to living things.  On the other hand, the word "aware" is much more commonly used to refer to something a machine or object might be capable of.  For instance, a thermostat is "aware" of the current temperature in the room, or my computer is "aware" of the other computers on the network.  There is a very real thing we are describing about the thermostat and the computer, and we aren't being metaphorical.  (note that the computer is even aware that one of those computers on the network is actually itself.  Is is therefore "self aware"?)

People use lots of words in everyday speech that fall into this grey area of metaphor or anthropomorphism.  We say a magnet is "attracted" to metal, without it feeling like we are anthropomorphizing or speaking metaphorically...we just define "attract" in a way that can apply to both objects, animals and humans.

Likewise, people instantly understand what we mean if we say the magnet "wants" to stick to the metal, or that a magnet "doesn't like" having its north pole pressed against the north pole of another magnet... but, if you ask them, they might say we are being poetic in our speech by applying those terms to a simple object like a magnet.

As time goes on, more and more words that formerly applied to only people or animals, will start being used to describe things going on in machines.  A cameras "sees". A security system "notices" a person moving in the room. A computer "makes a decision".  A thermostat "tries" to get the temperature in the room to match the one set on its dial.  Siri "understands" what I said.  My Tivo "thinks" I will like a show.  Obviously these aren't just changes in the definitions of words, they go hand in hand with advances in technology that results in our having occasions to meaningfully use the words to apply to non-living things.

So, to get to the point, yes, I think the language we use absolutely affects comprehension of consciousness.  The more we get comfortable using the word "conscious" (and all these other words, "think," "aware," "try," "like," "want," "decide," "detect") to refer to things a machine is capable of, the less we will see the concept of consciousness as being mysterious and magical.  I think that the "hard problem" of consciousness will not be "solved" by science, instead, science, technology, and the evolving way we use language to describe machines will gradually make the problem seem non-existant.


What is the most accurate name for the effect where people find excuses for flaws by leaders? A lot of the time, especially in political behaviour, people are likely to ignore the flaws of a leader or in some cases to somehow spin some bizarre positive angle.

For example, corruption of public finance being spun as "it is good because it shows how entrepreneurial the person is".

Even if not to that extent, this is an effect that is seen a lot, a strange kind of defence.

While many terms come to mind, rose tinted glasses, excusing, shifting the burden, none of these exactly describe the psychological phenomenon here.

What is the phenomenon called?

Confirmation bias is certainly at play here, but I'd narrow that down a bit. It doesn't have a Wikipedia page (yet) but Dan Kahan has been focusing on a variation of motivated reason he calls "Identity-protective cognition". (See Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-protective Cognition for a full discussion.)

Confirmation bias can creep in under many circumstances, but we have an especially strong motivation (very often non-conscious) to promote arguments which align with our own self-identity. The person making the kind of claim you're pointing to probably either feels quite strongly about the issue (a economic libertarian discussing the primacy of market-oriented policies, for example) or the person making the claim (a "tribal" leader, perhaps).

An earlier and more limited aspect of this is the Asch effect. As the wikipedia page on argument from authority notes —

  In repeated and modified instances of the Asch conformity experiments, it was found that high-status individuals create a stronger likelihood of a subject agreeing with an obviously false conclusion, despite the subject normally being able to clearly see that the answer was incorrect.


Peer relationships measurement Is there a method for measuring peer relationships in university students (e.g., a questionnaire)?

I am looking for a questionnaire that can be used to asses the level of peer relationship among students. In other words, how students are able to relate to their peers.

Yes. This field of research is known as social network analysis, or SNA. It existed well before Facebook et al. hijacked the term.

Various resources will include sample questionnaires and the mathematical analysis applied (Networks: An Introduction was for me by far the clearest text on the mathematics of networks; a lot of books on SNA are off-putting once you get to the maths part).

You may also want to google for graph databases (eg, neo4j). I'm pretty sure I've seen a few examples of such analysis floating about.


If you sleep during the day, do you need less sleep at night? If, say, you sleep 2-3 hours during the day (in the afternoon) - Do you need less sleep at night?

After all, subjects feel less tired in the evening after sleeping during day.

Can sleep hours be accumulated in a linear fashion? For example: Will sleeping 3 hours during the day justify sleeping just 4-5 hours during the night?

Short answer: Yes, if you sleep 2--3 hours during the day, you generally need less sleep at night.

Important considerations: However, the short answer is not the full story. In particular, in answer to your question about whether or not sleep hours can be accumulated in a linear fashion, the answer is strictly no, but approximately yes.

To understand the problem with assuming linearity of sleep, consider the extreme example of "sleeping" for one minute, and then being awake the next, and keep doing this for the entire day. In theory, you would have spent 12 hours awake, and 12 hours asleep. But of course, you'll feel exhausted, and would be in desperate need of some good sleep.

What's important to keep in mind, is the different stages of sleep. See http://www.helpguide.org/articles/sleep/how-much-sleep-do-you-need.htm for a good overview.

The Stages of Sleep:

  Non-REM sleep

  Stage N1 (Transition to sleep) – This stage lasts about five minutes.
  Your eyes move slowly under the eyelids, muscle activity slows down,
  and you are easily awakened.

  Stage N2 (Light sleep) – This is the first stage of true sleep,
  lasting from 10 to 25 minutes. Your eye movement stops, heart rate
  slows, and body temperature decreases.

  Stage N3 (Deep sleep) – You’re difficult to awaken, and if you are
  awakened, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and
  disoriented for several minutes. In this deepest stage of sleep, your
  brain waves are extremely slow. Blood flow is directed away from your
  brain and towards your muscles, restoring physical energy.

  REM sleep

  REM sleep (Dream sleep) – About 70 to 90 minutes after falling asleep,
  you enter REM sleep, where dreaming occurs. Your eyes move rapidly,
  your breathing shallows, and your heart rate and blood pressure
  increase. Also during this stage, your arm and leg muscles are
  paralyzed.

In Conclusion: Sleep hours can be thought of as accumulating linearly in blocks of sleep cycles. That is, as long as you hit the right sleep stages during your nap, it counts! Generally, a complete sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes, so sleep in multiples of 90 minutes would be ideal...


Is there any research on what causes a pseudo-scientific mindset? As of late I've been coming across a lot of people online who are convinced that, without much (or any) formal training and often without any collaboration, they have solved a major unsolved problem in the quantitative sciences. They are incredibly attached to the correctness of their solution. They often talk about their god-like cognitive abilities and act as if the scientific community is dogmatic (One guy said he has a "vulcan-like" mind, which I thought was hilarious). Often their "quantitative" theory doesn't even have any real math in it, and they almost never make any experimental predictions.

As someone who has and probably will continue to tutor kids in math and science, I'd like to know what kinds of events at what stage of development lead people to this insane level of hubris and confirmation bias.

Some requested examples:

This youtuber thinks he's proven the Collatz conjecture and other famous problems.

This youtuber solves a bunch of made up problems in fluid dynamics and has a few uncontrolled experiments on video to demonstrate the effectiveness of his model.

This guy. . .thinks he has a theory of everything. . .he wrote an article basically bashing the physics community for not having come up with his theory. I found this Quora post about him.

Many examples are people my age (undergrad) who have approached me in real life and, once we discover a common interest in quantitative science, they start throwing around technobabble about a "major" problem that they've contrived.

There's also a pretty good example of the pretentiousness exhibited by these people in the stack exchange posts linked in the comments.

I'm alas not aware of systematic studies on cause of the pseudo-scientific mindset... But knowing some people who are inclined to that as well as believing some conspiracy theories... I suspect these two share some common causes. It's a lot easier to find science articles about the latter.
One posci article lists some of the usuals suspects regarding the pseudo-scientific mindset:

distrust of scientists/academics (goes well with those inclined to believe conspiracy theories)

and closely related, the Dunning-Krueger effect

various cognitive biases, including

clustering illusion
selection bias
and once some of those take hold, confirmation bias

money or other personal gains, although this isn't necessarily a true mindset, it just looks the same in may contexts, so can be hard to differentiate by an outside observer (let's not get to fMRI studies about detecting lying)

As you can see the putative causes can be pretty diverse...
It turns out there are some studies (and they generally support the above theorizing), for instance:

pre-existing paranormal beliefs were associated with an increased likelihood of students finding paranormal reports scientific, believable and credible.
[...]
Dagnall et al. (2007) suggested that while belief in the paranormal in undergraduate students is not necessarily associated with weakness in probabilistic reasoning, it is more strongly related to weaknesses associated with their understanding of randomness and misunderstanding of chance factors.

Also mostly as a response to uhoh, an NSF survey:

Of the 1,574 [US] adults that were surveyed, only one-third understood and could accurately describe the scientific process. Many Americans also agreed with a variety of pseudoscientific beliefs such as the existence of UFOs (30 percent), astrology (40 percent), and psychic powers (60 percent).

That was in 2003. I doubt things have gotten better in the age of alt-facts. In fact, researchers studying the campaign of Marine Le Pen (MLP), found...

that alternative facts are highly
persuasive: voters exposed to MLP rhetoric move their policy conclusions and voting
intensions toward MLP. Fact checking does nothing to undo these effects despite improving
factual knowledge of voters. Being exposed only to official facts also backfires
on voting intentions, as it increases political support for MLP, although to a smaller
extent than alternative facts, despite moving posteriors about facts toward the truth.

To me that sound similar to some the findings about how pseudoscience gets adopted by some.


Neural Microfilaments for Computation? I just watched an interesting TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d5RetvkkuQ) where a Stuart Hameroff proposes that a neuron's microtubules are responsible for computations, and that they are able to do so on a quantum level. He goes as far as to suggest that this ability to perform quantum computations is in fact the "ghost in the machine", or the connection of our mortal body to the spiritual ethers.

I assumed that our computations were performed by action potentials, EPSPs, IPSPs, etc. Then we store memories and possibly reinforce processing pathways by strengthening synapses.

While certainly interesting in a religious sense, what validity is there to the notion that microtubules are performing calculations / how do they play into this neuro-computational model?

I think Keegan provides a great set of references, but I just wanted to expand on his answer in a little bit more detail. Penrose and Hameroff's ideas are mentioned a lot on the internet and although they are often debunked, you can never do it enough. I want to discuss (1) what microtubules are and (2) are there quantum effects in them? And, more importantly, (3) does that even matter? and (4) is any of this new?
What are microtubules?
Microtubules are a structure in the cytoskeleton that are found in all dividing eukaryotic cells and in most differentiated cell types (Desai & Mitchison, 1997). They are by no means exclusive to neurons, so if you think they bestow consciousness then you have to grant consciousness to all eukaryotes (something that most philosophers would find strange), or you are back at the same difficulty as before in trying to explain how networks of microtubules give rise to consciousness and thus postulating them as your basic units instead of neurons gives you no explanatory power.
Related discussions:
Which organisms have the neuroanatomy Roger Penrose supposes play a role in consciousness?.
Are there quantum effects in microtubules?
In the video, Hameroff describes quantum and classic effects as a ying-and-yang. This is a very misleading picture, for a physicist the world is fundamentally quantum but at large sizes, and high temperatures (i.e. a lot of interaction with an external environment) is well described by our more intuitive laws of classical physics. Thus, the question isn't are there quantum effects, but are the quantum effects significant enough to cause non-classical consequences? Note, that most of chemistry can't be properly explained by classical physics, so every chemical reaction needs quantum effects to make sense, but we don't suggest that this makes every chemical reaction conscious.
The exciting part is that quantum effects do matter in (a non-trivial way) in some biological systems; most notably in photosynthesis (Engel et al, 2007). In particular, a certain energy perturbation after a photon is absorbed follows a quantum random walk, and one could speculate that this can be used for quantum computing, but there is no reason to expect it.
Microtubules are small enough to not completely rule out quantum effects. They are rope like polymers that grow to a length of about 25 micrometers (25000 nm), and have an outer-diameter of around 25 nm or about 200 atoms across. Researchers commonly use quantum dots to play with quantum effects, and these are typically spheres on the order of 10 to 50 atoms in diameter. Note, that we don't know how to couple 5000 quantum dots in one coherent chain (how many you would need to get the length of a microtubule).
However, the issue physicists usually raise, is not one of size but of the time that the microtubule would need to maintain coherence (i.e. a pure quantum state). The reason photosynthesis uses a quantum random walk, is because a classical one would not be fast enough to find a binding site. Thus, in that case the timescales involved are miniscule. The timescales involved in the function of microtubules are much longer, and physicists believe that their state is not coherence for that length of time (Tegmark, 2000).
Even if microtubules are quantum, so what?
This is the real clincher, suppose quantum effects are important to microtubules. Suppose that whole networks of microtubules are able to keep coherent entanglement between. Heck, suppose that the brain is a giant quantum computer. So what?
For a lot of people (like Hameroff), there is this misconception that classical physics does not allow for free well but quantum mechanics does because of wave function collapse. Thankfully, we have Conway & Kochen's (2006) free will theorem which says (more or less), any free will you give to an observer/experimenter in your philosophy of quantum mechanics, you will also have to give that some amount of agency to electrons and other subatomic particles. In other words, if your interpretation of quantum mechanics somehow gives you free-will then it is a trivial kind of free will that every particle in the universe has. Of course, this argument can be explored in much more depth, but I suggest reading someone that is familiar with quantum computing (Aaronson, 2013) instead of Hameroff.
For Penrose (see The Emperor's New Mind) consciousness is non-algorithmic and he suggests that a magical quantum computer could do these non-algorithmic tasks. The reason I use 'magical' is because a real quantum computer is Turing-complete, if a classical computer cannot solve a problem then neither can a quantum one (of course, if a classical computer can solve a problem, then quantum one can as well and might be able to do it qualitatively faster). For a nice computer science debunking of this part of Penrose's argument take a look a Scott Aaronson's lecture notes.
Is any of this even new?
For me, the most disappointing part of this pseudoscience is its lack of novelty. The basic philosophical urge underlying Hameroff's speculation is an over-application of reductionism: consciousness can't be something emergent, there has to be a basic essence to it. Since he can't take the dualist stance of Descartes, he instead postulates that it is"quantum magic". Even this use of quantum magic isn't original—it was an extremely popular type of hokum in the 70s that has been called quantum mysticism.
Related discussion:
What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?
References
Aaronson, S. (2013). The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.0159.
Conway, J., & Kochen, S. (2006). The Free Will Theorem. Foundations of Physics, 36(10): 1441–1473.
Desai, A., & Mitchison, T. J. (1997). Microtubule polymerization dynamics. Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, 13(1): 83–117.
Engel GS, Calhoun TR, Read EL, Ahn TK, Mancal T, Cheng YC et al. (2007). Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems. Nature, 446(7137): 782–6.
Tegmark, M. (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Physical Review E, 61(4): 4194–4206.


What is the fastest way to make an intermittent reinforced behavior become extinct? Let's suppose I trained my dog to touch a button and win a prize in random sequences.

Now I want to make this behavior become extinct.

What is the fastest way:

Not allow my dog to see the button for a time, after that the dog will see the button but not react.
Allow him to touch the button indefinitely until my dog stops.

The fastest way to extinct any behavior is negative reinforcement. But except few specific cases (e.g. self-biting), it's pretty much unethical. Regarding your 2 hypotheses: hypothesis 2 is the classical extinction paradigm. It will first get worse: the animal will repeatedly, almost obsessively, touch the button hoping for a reward. But it will eventually fade away (think weeks for total extinction though). Hypothesis 1 is hard to predict. I'm quite sure the dog will press the button if it remembers it (even after durations longer than in hypothesis 2). But it will probably fade away very quickly. In any case, this would avoid distress and confusion the animal would experience when pressing the button and not getting rewards. Whether it is faster or not is honestly anyone's guess and would presumably depend on how long you trained your dog, how big were the rewards he got and how memorable the button is.


Is metacognition an affective, cognitive, or behavioural variable? Is metacognition an affect or cognitive or behaviour variable ?

I want to study variation in metacognition and working memory ability level and its effect on inductive reasoning.
Therefore i am trying to understand the cognitive system.
I read some literature stating that metacognition is cognition awareness, which implies that it is a cognitive variable, but some say that it is an opinion about how far they can do metacognitive ability. I read about a factor analysis of the Junior Metacognitive Awareness Inventory.

It seems like there are a lot of ideas out there as to what metacognition really is.  Having done my MS thesis in understanding how people learn in engineering programs, I typically think about metacognition as "knowing how to learn."  It's typically a goal of engineering education to teach students these skills.

Therefore, I would say it's mostly a cognitive variable, but it's also a behavior because it's a set of habits about how one thinks.  How are you planning to measure metacognition?  And why inductive reasoning?  Why not critical thinking in general?


Correlation between selfie and Narcissism Are there scientific evidence to correlate selfie pictures and Narcissism? I am curious when and after what threshold does self love move into the Narcissistic phase?

Self-reported number of selfies has been  found to correlate positively with some measures of narcissism in US men (Fox and Rooney, 2015).

  Fox, J., & Rooney, M. C. (2015). The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. Personality & Individual Differences, 76, 161-165. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.12.017


Can changing attitude cure depression? There's a proverb: "everything's decided in mind" - changing attitude of thing may help going through things.

Does it also mean that if someone is depressed then there'd be enough to change how he sees the world to cure his/her depression? Or is it a deeper problem?

The proverb you mention is overly general to the point of being largely false (or at least unfalsifiable, to give some credit to the defensibility of philosophical solipsism otherwise). @JunJun and @felino's answers also generalize too much, but this is partly a consequence of a lack of specificity in the OP. Depression in general is widely misunderstood and commonly oversimplified.

I prefer to conceptualize depression in general as a latent, dimensional, symptomatic state that is linked to its causes by theory, not by definition. This means not directly measured, not truly dichotomous (like clinical diagnosis often is – people are generally either diagnosed as having a mood disorder or not having one, but whether they truly are depressed is more a matter of degree), not a disease or disorder per se but rather a consequence thereof, and not defined as resulting from any one cause. This concept permits research to identify several partial influences that may operate together or separately to produce depression, and this is in fact what research on depression has done.

As @what points out, depression is known to have both genetic and environmental influences. Environmental influences are certainly not decided exclusively in the mind – this is the first reason your proverb overgeneralizes. Second, genetic influences are hardly decided in the sense of being voluntary. What remains may permit voluntary intervention, but not every case of depression leaves anything remaining.

Some cases arise entirely due to overwhelming, unforeseeable, and effectively unavoidable stress.
Some cases arise entirely due to genetic or other neurochemical influences (e.g., drugs, disorders).

Attitude change may aid coping in these circumstances, but one could hardly expect it to cure depressed affect altogether when one has good reasons to feel depressed or no real control over its sources.

However, many cases may arise from problematic attitudes (e.g., low self-esteem, external locus of control, social alienation). As mentioned in my answer to "https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/q/5803/4086" Lyubomirsky (2008) argues that for average people in average circumstances, roughly 2/5 of one's happiness may be altered voluntarily, as through attitude change:

  (source: edbatista.com)  (Based on Lyubomirsky, 2008)

Again, this won't be true in every case, especially those affected by special circumstances or involuntary or biological factors. Still, in many cases, it's enough malleability to facilitate important changes. In a falsely dichotomous model of depression, it's plenty of room in which to cross a clinical threshold and thereby become "not depressed". From a more dimensional standpoint, it's not going to allow anyone to change from the most depressed person to the happiest or vice versa: it's only enough to allow a percentile change of roughly 40% on average.

Several therapeutic modalities and positive psychological interventions incorporate attitude change, e.g.:

Cognitive behavioral therapy
Positive psychotherapy
Expressive therapy
Narrative therapy
Gratitude exercises
Compassion meditation

Reference
Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Penguin.


How to deal with APA in-text citations in long texts? In APA referencing style, the first in-text citation of a work by three to five authors must include all the authors, while the subsequent citations should only mention the first author followed by the expression "et al."

Does this apply literally to a long text such a thesis (in my case, 25 pages)? Or is there some kind of reset, say, for each chapter?

APA style is mostly designed for defining manuscript submission rules for journal articles.

When you seek to apply these rules to a thesis or book, you inevitably have to apply your own rules.

The general principle is that in-text citations should unambiguously identify an end of text reference. Thus, whatever principle you adopt should do this.

For a thesis, I think either approach would be fine. You could use et al across chapters or reset each chapter.

More generally, I think that if you have a combined reference list at the end of the book/thesis, then it's fine to not reset after each chapter. In contrast, if each chapter has its own reference section, then it makes sense to reset each chapter.


Are cognitive flexibility and interference control the same thing? Interference control requires  being able to inhibit irrelevant stimulI ie shift flexibily from something  you are doing and back into it in the presence of competing stimulus. Is it the same as Cognitive Flexibility? Or are they different?

Interference control is the ability to suppress irrelevant information (Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun, 2014). For example, ignoring the sound of the dishwasher in the other room while you are watching a TV show. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between thinking about two (or more) different concepts (Scott, 1962). Cognitive flexibility is further divided into task switching (an unconscious behaviour) and cognitive switching (a conscious behaviour). Interference control and cognitive flexibility are different processes that are grouped under the wide range of functions associated with cognitive control.

References

Gazzaniga, M. S., Ivry, R. B., & Mangun, G. R. (2014). Cognitive Neuroscience: The biology of the mind (4th Ed.) New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Scott, William A. (1962). Cognitive complexity and cognitive flexibility. Sociometry. American Sociological Association. 25 (4): 405–414. doi:10.2307/2785779. JSTOR 2785779.


Heart rate monitor for scientific study I want to measure heart rate as part of a controlled experiment I am setting up. I've been trying to find information on which heart rate monitor to buy, but it's unclear to me which heart rate monitors allow exporting data to PC, and how open the data is. Can I only analyse the data through the software provided by the vendor, or is it common practice to be able to export it as e.g. CSV?

Are there any 'common' heartrate sensors used in the community?
Should I look for monitors which support a certain protocol/format?
Are there any vendors which I should avoid, e.g. when they have closed file formats?

I recently completed a study involving physical ergonomics of rifles.  We monitored heart rate and respiration using the Zephyr BioHarness.  It seemed to work pretty well.

It also monitors movement of the user, if that is of interest to you.

To get data out, it is possible to compile a report and export it to CSV, which works well if you need to do analysis on the data using other programs.


Any research on how we use visual category information in visuomotor tasks? So I've been reading up on the Two-streams Hypothesis*, and it bothers me that the explanations both sides give only extend to tasks involving one type of visual information. For example, an experiment might require subjects to identify the category of an object (ventral stream) or correctly grasp an object (dorsal stream).

But surely there are tasks in the real world that require both sorts of information simultaneously...

For example, suppose I'm out picking apples: I want to put the ripe apples in my basket and knock the rotten apples to the ground. The ripeness categorization would presumably be a ventral task, whereas the action (grasping/knocking down) relies on dorsal information.

Has there been any work on what mechanisms are behind our ability to perform such tasks?

The closest I've come to an answer is this paper about we use rules to select actions, but the actions discussed don't involve the spatial properties  of the rule defining object.

*Brief summary of my understanding of the Two-streams Hypothesis: it posits two separate pathways in the brain for processing visual objects: a dorsal pathway for spatial and affordance information, and a ventral pathway for property and category information.

From personal observation, the consensus seems to be that the two streams hypothesis is an oversimplification of the truth, albeit a useful one.
The primary reason that this hypothesis is seen as an oversimplification is because there is a lot of cross-talk between the two streams. For example, Zanon et al. (2010) provides evidence for functional connectivity using EEG and TMS. Himmelbach & Karnath (2005) provide evidence from neuropsychological patients with optic ataxia.
More direct evidence comes from Borra et al. (2008) and Felleman & Van Essen (1991), who provide evidence for cross-talk between streams in monkeys by tracing cortical connections.
Mahon et al. (2007) adresses your specific question, stating:

In the course of manipulating and using objects, it is necessary to integrate the output of object recognition processes (ventral stream) with information about object motion (left middle temporal gyrus) and the motor commands necessary to realize the function of the objects (left inferior parietal lobule). The efficacy of such an information processing network would be increased if the organization of object recognition processes already anticipated the processing requirements of computations implemented ‘downstream.’ (see article for more details)

There have also been a few updated reviews of the two streams hypothesis, such as  Milner & Goodale (2008), that might clear up some misconceptions.
Another oversimplification is that the functions of each stream are not entirely unique, as is often stated. For instance, areas in both the dorsal and the ventral stream contain neurons which respond to shape encoding (Lehky & Sereno, 2006), despite that this is generally considered a 'ventral' task.
Unfortunately the misconception that these two streams function completely independent of each other, and perform completely independent functions, is still being perpetuated in text books and journal articles.
References

Zanon, M., Busan, P., Monti, F., Pizzolato, G., & Battaglini, P. P. (2010). Cortical connections between dorsal and ventral visual streams in humans: evidence by TMS/EEG co-registration. Brain topography, 22(4), 307-317.
Himmelbach, M., & Karnath, H. O. (2005). Dorsal and ventral stream interaction: contributions from optic ataxia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(4), 632-640. PDF
Borra, E., Belmalih, A., Calzavara, R., Gerbella, M., Murata, A., Rozzi, S., & Luppino, G. (2008). Cortical connections of the macaque anterior intraparietal (AIP) area. Cerebral Cortex, 18(5), 1094-1111.
Felleman, D. J., & Van Essen, D. C. (1991). Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral cortex, 1(1), 1-47.
Mahon, B. Z., Milleville, S. C., Negri, G. A., Rumiati, R. I., Caramazza, A., & Martin, A. (2007). Action-related properties shape object representations in the ventral stream. Neuron, 55(3), 507-520. PDF
Milner, A. D., & Goodale, M. A. (2008). Two visual systems re-viewed. Neuropsychologia, 46(3), 774-785. PDF
Lehky, S. R., & Sereno, A. B. (2007). Comparison of shape encoding in primate dorsal and ventral visual pathways. Journal of neurophysiology, 97(1), 307-319. PDF


Why is surprise, sudden loud sound or movement an element of fear? Why is it that a sudden loud sound or movement, or some kind of surprise tends to invoke fear?

This phenomenon is not restricted to humans and can also be observed in animals

Sheldon Cooper brought this up in TBBT

Its an autonomic (something you cannot control) survival reaction commonly called fight or flight. The fear you would be describing would be a flight reaction. Both fighting and fleeing are designed to help you survive life threatening confrontation.

  An evolutionary psychology explanation is that early animals had to react to threatening stimuli quickly and did not have time to psychologically and physically prepare themselves. The fight or flight response provided them with the mechanisms to rapidly respond to threats against survival.

-wikipedia


Human vision detection of faint blinking or moving point of light, guidelines for sensitivity versus frequency This question is in the neurology/neuroscience rather than the psychology aspect of this site.

I'd like to check the limits of visibility of a (presumably green) LED at large (kilometer) distance, and I'm assuming that modulation of intensity (blinking) or position ("wiggling") would make the same brightness noticeable at larger distances than a steady, stationary point of light.

My options are to vary the frequency and duty cycle of the pulses, and to alternately flash two different LEDs separated by a large enough distance that the point would appear to "wiggle" or move slightly either left/right, or up/down.

Neurologists and human visual processing researchers have studied the limits of visual detection of stimuli for quite a long time, and so the body of work is quite large and therefore beyond my scope of understanding.

Might there be a best frequency or range of frequencies for blinking or "wiggling" that the human vision system might be most sensitive to? I'm just guessing that it might be somewhere near the range of 1 Hz to 10 Hz, but I'm just guessing without any scientific basis.

As far as separation for the "wiggle" what might a best separation or range of separations that might be most noticeable?

An answer that points me to the underlying physiological phenomenon that I should read further about would be just as acceptable as numbers with supporting links. Because I'm not so familliar with the neurology of vision, I can't judge beforehand which way to cast the question.

Possibly helpful for context or background are my previous questions:

How to make a green LED as visually bright as a 0 magnitude star?
How can I estimate the optical power that a single-color LED generates?

I'd like to check the limits of visibility of a (presumably green) LED at large (kilometer) distance, and I'm assuming that modulation of intensity (blinking) or position ("wiggling") would make the same brightness noticeable at larger distances than a steady, stationary point of light.

If you want to 'do the math' Wikipedia provides this webpage on attenuation coefficient, that allows you to calculate intensity versus distance in a medium.
As for your belief that green is most easily visible, that's not strictly true since the human eye has four photoreceptors each tuned to a different frequency, but a slightly different frequency of monochromatic light that was slightly brighter would be perceived as the same color.
It is wide spectrum light acting on different photoreceptors that is interpretated by the brain as being the seeing of a particular color. It's not what you see, it's what you (unconsciously) think you see. It's the addition of wide spectrum light between the frequencies of 498 and 534 nm acting on two photoreceptors that gives the impression that one color is brighter, when in fact it's a range, monochromatic light wouldn't be brighter.
From Wikipedia: Human photoreceptors:

"The photoreceptor proteins in the three types of cones differ in their sensitivity to photons of different wavelengths (see graph). Since cones respond to both the wavelength and intensity of light, the cone's sensitivity to wavelength is measured in terms of its relative rate of response if the intensity of a stimulus is held fixed, while the wavelength is varied. From this, in turn, is inferred the absorbance.[15] The graph normalizes the degree of absorbance on a hundred-point scale. For example, the S cone's relative response peaks around 420 nm (nanometers, a measure of wavelength). This tells us that an S cone is more likely to absorb a photon at 420 nm than at any other wavelength. If light of a different wavelength to which it is less sensitive, say 480 nm, is increased in brightness appropriately, however, it will produce exactly the same response in the S cone. So, the colors of the curves are misleading. Cones cannot detect color by themselves; rather, color vision requires comparison of the signal across different cone types.

So you would want to use 4 different LEDs of 420, 498, 534, and 564 nm each to maximally stimulate each photoreceptor. You could just use a 'white' light with a green filter but that isn't efficient.
As you can see from the graphic, assuming no color blindness (which you probably want to consider) each photoreceptor is equally sensitive.
From Wikipedia's webpage: Color vision - Wavelength and hue detection:

"In very low light levels, vision is scotopic: light is detected by rod cells of the retina. Rods are maximally sensitive to wavelengths near 500 nm, and play little, if any, role in colour vision. In brighter light, such as daylight, vision is photopic: light is detected by cone cells which are responsible for colour vision. Cones are sensitive to a range of wavelengths, but are most sensitive to wavelengths near 555 nm. Between these regions, mesopic vision comes into play and both rods and cones provide signals to the retinal ganglion cells. The shift in colour perception from dim light to daylight gives rise to differences known as the Purkinje effect
The perception of "white" is formed by the entire spectrum of visible light, or by mixing colours of just a few wavelengths in animals with few types of colour receptors. In humans, white light can be perceived by combining wavelengths such as red, green, and blue, or just a pair of complementary colours such as blue and yellow.

That is how the simplified explanation: "green is brighter" comes about.

Photopic relative brightness sensitivity of the human visual system as a function of wavelength (luminosity function).
Having decided upon using a wide spectrum light with a filter or four separate LEDs of a particular frequency we come to flash rate.
Way too slow leaves a lot of 'off time' which saves power but might make it less noticeable (though speed of travel is also a consideration, lighthouses flash slowly and ships travel slowly).
Moderately fast and you run the risk of photosensitive epilepsy (PSE), in particular red light at 4 Hz is most likely to affect 1 in 3000 people.
Continuous light is power inefficient and not attention grabbing, how well would a distant green light with a background of tall trees be seen?
Physiologically amber is the color chosen to avoid red green or blue and is common for stobe lights used on warning signs. Amber is not 'calming blue', 'stimulating / annoying red' nor 'overabundant green'.
The "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices: Inserts Only", by the Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration is worth a look.
The approved, presumably well tested by many Standards over many years, road sign is designed and described this way in North America:

These demo videos: "Feniex Industries - Flash Patterns" show that ready-made devices with a wide range of preset flash patterns in various color combinations can be extremely attention grabbing.
Choosing a ready made strobe light will save the time and cost of designing your own.