Is there any standardized test / questionnaire to measure frustration?

Frustration is measured in various ways. In psychology, frustration is seen as occurring when an anticipated reward or outcome is blocked (Berkowitz, 1989). The block can be either internal (the person’s lack of skill, knowledge) or external (environment, situation) (Shorkey & Crocker, 1981). Some papers and measures focus on the block itself (Dollard et al, 1939), while others focus on the individual’s reaction to the block (Amsel, 1958). Others focus on frustration tolerance, which is the degree to which a person can tolerate being frustrated and persist in that situation. Frustration tolerance is more trait-like (measuring a consistent way someone handles challenging situations, which is stable over time), and from your question it sounds like you’re more interested in something that measure state frustration (emotional reaction in the moment). Unfortunately, there are more validated instruments that assess frustration tolerance than “in the moment” frustration, though some might be adapted for your purposes. Options for both are summarized below:

Frustration Tolerance

Harrington’s Frustration Discomfort Scale assesses frustration intolerance beliefs using four subscales: discomfort intolerance emotional intolerance, achievement frustration, and entitlement (Harrington, 2005). Each subscale consists of 7 items which are answered on a 5 point Likert-type scale ranging from “absent” to “very strong.” Items are designed to tap “common thoughts and beliefs people may have when they are distressed or frustrated.” Questions are phrased to refer to general reactions, not a specific situation. A five-subscale version also exists, though the four-subscale version appears to have been used more often (Jibeen, 2013; Stankovic & Vukosavljevic-Gvozden, 2011; Wilde, 2012).
Wright, Lam, & Brown (2009) – The five item Frustrative Nonreward Responsiveness Scale seems to assess the likelihood an individual will quit or lose interest in a task when they cannot meet their goal, but does not seem to tap the emotion of anger. (This is a good reminder that the frustration “block” can precede many emotions such as anger, sadness, and boredom). Items are answered on a four point scale ranging from “very true for me” to “very false for me.” Questions are phrased in a way that asks the person to predict how they will respond to a frustrating situation.
The Frustration Scale consists of 3 items asking how frustrating a particular job or task has been; items are answered on a 7-point Likert scale, with higher scores indicating more frustration (Peters, O’Connor, & Rudolf, 1980). Questions are asked in the past tense, but if administered immediately following the task, this may meet your needs.

In the Moment Frustration

Scime and Norvilitis (2006) presented children with a challenging task (blindfolding them and asking them to complete a 15 piece puzzle). They assessed frustration by having children report their frustration level on a 4 point scale (“a lot” to “not at all”) and whether they were more likely to quit and more likely to get frustrated than other children on a 5 point scale (“a lot more” to “a lot less”). They also asked the children to describe (open response) how they knew they were frustrated and how they manage frustration.
Other studies have measured frustration by a combination of direct survey questions (similar to those used by Scime & Norvitilis, 2006, typically limited to 1-2 items) and physiological data such as heart rate, strength of grip or speed of use of a computer mouse or lever, or the electrical impulses from facial muscles  (Douglas & Perry, 1994; Hazlett, 2003; Reynolds, 2001)
Hoppmann (2009) describes the use of think-aloud techniques (having the participant narrate their experience out loud) in order to identify rising frustration and the “tipping point” of frustration.

On a side note, as a psychologist I typically conceptualize emotions as a single word or image, and cognitions as full sentences. Many validated symptom or personality trait measures seek to capture the person’s experience over a certain period of time (a week, a month), because you can capture many instances of the emotion and come up with a cohesive assessment. However, if I were to clinically ask a client about a particular emotion “in the moment,” as is done in some anxiety or trauma therapies (e.g., how angry/frightened/anxious are you right now), I would do so in a single question. If I wanted to understand why they felt that way, I would ask more questions and start tapping into cognitions.

Amsel, A. (1958). The role of frustrative nonreward in noncontinuous reward situations. Psychological Bulletin, 55, 102-119.
Berkowitz, L. (1989). Frustration-aggression hypothesis: Examination and reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106(1), 59-73.
Dollard, J. Doob, L., Miller, N., Mowrer, O., & Sears, R. (1939). Frustration and Aggression. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Douglas, V. I., & Perry, P. A. (1994). Effects of reward and nonreward on frustration and attention in attention deficit disorder. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 22(3), 281-302.
Hazlett, R. (2003). Measurement of use frustration: A biologic approach. CHI EA ’03 Extended Abstracts in Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, New York, 734-735. Doi:10.1145/765891.765958
Harrington, N. (2005). The Frustration Discomfort Scale: Development and psychometric properties. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 12, 374-387.
Hoppmann, T. K. (2009). Examining the ‘point of frustration.’ The think-aloud method applied to online search tasks. Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 43, 211-224. DOI 10.1007/s11135-007-9116-0
Jibeen, T. (2013). Frustration intolerance beliefs as predictors of emotional problems in university undergraduates. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 31(1), 16-26. Doi: 10.1007/s10942-012-0154-8.
Peters, L. H., O’Connor, E. J., & Rudolf, C. J. (1980). The behavioral and affective consequences of performance-relevant situational variables. Organization Behavior & Human Performance, 25(1), 79-96. doi: 10.1016/0030-5073(80)90026-4
Reynolds, C. J. (2001). The sensing and measurement of frustration with computers. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (unpublished Master’s Thesis). Cambridge, MA. Retrieved from: http://vismod.media.mit.edu/tech-reports/TR-559.pdf
Scime, M., & Norvilitis, J. M. (2006). Task performance and response to frustration in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Psychology in the Schools, 43(3), 377-386.
Shorkey, C. T., & Crocker, S. B. (1981). Frustration theory: a source of unifying concepts for  generalist practice. Social Work, 26(5), 374-379
Stankovic, S. & Vukosavljevic-Gvozden, T. (2011). The relationship of a measure of frustration intolerance with emotional dysfunction in a student sample. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 29(1), 17-34. DOI: 10.1007/s10942-011-0128-2.
Wilde, J. (2012). The relationship between frustration intolerance and academic achievement in college. International Journal of Higher Education, 1(2), 1-8. DOI: 10.5430/ijhe.v1n2p1
Wright, K. A., Lam, D. H., & Brown, R. G. (2009). Reduced approach motivation following nonreward: Extension of the BIS/BAS scales. Personality and Individual Differences, 47(7), 753-757. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2009.06.015


Do people (under)value free stuff?

As you have mentioned, value can be conceptualized to mean different things. For the purposes of this answer lets just assume that value is measured by whether individuals are equally likely to use/chose free stuff as paid stuff - in line with the Ted talk by Esther Duflo.

Based on this assumption, I reviewed the literature and some competing narratives emerged.

First, research suggests that people actually value (i.e., choose/use) free things more than they should given the products utility - the so called zero price effect. As {1} state:

  People appear to act as if zero pricing of a good not only decreases
  its cost but also adds to its benefits.

They give this example:

  When Ben and Jerry’s offer free ice-cream cones, or Starbucks offers
  free coffee, many people spend hours in line waiting to get the free
  item, which they could buy on a different day for two to three
  dollars. At ﬁrst glance, it might not be surprising that the demand
  for a good is very high when the price is very low (zero), but the
  extent of the effect is intuitively too large to be explained by this
  simple economic argument.

There is a lot of additional research on this "zero price effect" which you can check out if you want (see here).

Second, research also suggests people use prices as a signals for value, and therefore will value things more highly if they are (i) more expensive or costly to procure, or (ii) more scarce. For instance in {2} Cialdini talks about how you can sometimes get people to buy more of a product by increasing the price. Additionally, some research suggests that people value things more as they invest more effort/money {3,4}. Additionally, in {2} Cialdini discusses how people generally value scarce things more highly, and things that are free, are less scarce, it appears to follow that they are not likely to be as highly valued as items one must pay for.

Third, research in developmental economics suggests that people will value products equally much when they are free/paid for. This research {e.g., 5} suggests that peoples usages of mosquito nets is not significantly, influenced by the amount of money they have to pay for them - that people are approximately as likely to use nets they got for free, and those they paid for.

I hope, that this is helpful, even if this isn't a definitive, or comprehensive answer.

References:

{1} Shampanier, K., et al. (2007). "Zero as a special price: The true value of free products." Marketing Science 26(6): 742-757.

[2]  Cialdini, R. B. (2009) Influence: science and practice , 5 ed., Boston, Massachusetts: Pearson.

[3] Norton, M. I., Mochon, D. and Ariely, D. (2012) 'The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love', Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22, 453-460.

[4] Thomas, M., et al. (2004). When Do Higher Prices Increase Demand? The Dual Role of Price in Consumers’ Value Judgments.

[5] Hoffmann, V., et al. (2009). "Do Free Goods Stick to Poor Households? Experimental Evidence on Insecticide Treated Bednets." World Development 37(3): 607-617.


How to analyze reaction times and accuracy together?

MANOVA is definitely a bad idea given that one dv is continuous and the other is binomial. After exploring a number of different approaches to combining RT and accuracy data, I've come to conclude that the best current approach is to use linear ballistic accumulator model (e.g., see Donkin et al 2011).

The LBA is a simple (structurally and computationally) framework that lets you speak to the different processes (info processing efficiency vs response criterion) that jointly contribute to RT and error data.

References

Donkin, C., Brown, S. & Heathcote, A. (2011). Drawing conclusions from choice response time models: A tutorial using the linear ballistic accumulator. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 55, 140-151. PDF


Is Fluid Intelligence Dropoff With Age an Established Fact?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


How do Terence Tao's "three stages of rigorousness" relate to cognitive science?

Mathematics is the

  abstract science of number, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts (pure mathematics), or as applied to other disciplines such as physics and engineering (applied mathematics)

Cognitive sciences are

  the interdisciplinary, scientific studies of the mind and its processes

I think that mathematics is a way to achieve something, to put it bluntly, it's a tool. A tool to, for example, model certain brain processes. Further,  math is an abstract tool; cognitive sciences is an applied science. Cognitive sciences can use math to accomplish its goals. By contrast, math can never use Cognitive Sciences to prove anything.

Now you say that rigor means

  [an] emphasis [on] theory; comfortably manipulat[ing] abstract mathematical objects without focusing too much on what such objects actually “mean"

I don't think one can study the mind without focusing on what it means. Instead, studying the mind is often done exactly to try to find out how it works and what certain findings mean! Now -

Scientific rigor in general means

  the quality of being believable or trustworthy

While in maths it has a specific meaning:

  logical validity or accuracy

So in terms of semantics the answer is that it is indeed a matter of meaning. Rigor can mean a lot of things, which is different across disciplines.


What are some psychologically normal reasons for a parent to reject their child?

A cuckolded father would be likely to reject a child who is discovered to not be his own. From evolutionary perspective, men who get cuckolded and take care of a genetically-distant man's child would fail to reproduce their own genes and increase the chance of survival of the genes of the other man who did the cuckolding. Thus rejecting such a child would be an evolutionary adaptation to the problem of paternity uncertainty.

Another reason could be that the mother misjudged the commitment of the father, and mated before such bond was established. This could be in combination with a father who's mating strategy favors fertilizing high quantity of women over investing in few offspring with one woman.


Are there any standard tests to measure psychopathy?

The Hare Psychopathology Checklist is considered the current gold standard for measuring potential psychopathy. If you're interested in psychopathology, the book Without Conscience by Robert Hare, Ph.D., is a fascinating read. He has a second book called Snakes In Suits, which I have not yet read, so I cannot recommend or not recommend it. Dr. Hare has a website with a lot of fascinating information and links about psychopathy.

Anyhow, the Hare Psychopathology Checklist is abbreviated as the PCL. There is the regular PCL (First Edition), the PCL-SV (Screening Version), the PCL-R (Second Edition - Revised - Adults), and the PCL-YV (Youth Version). Only a clinical professional specifically trained in administration of the PCL or PCL-R can give an accurate assessment and interpret the results. When I was working with offenders, I sent exactly three individuals to have a PCL-R assessment and all three times the offender came back as having exceptionally high psychopathy scores. When you work with offenders you learn what the psychopathy vibe feels like.

The primary purpose of the PCL, any version, is to determine if psychopathy is present. There is no perfect test to predict recidivism in any population; there are simply risk factors that, when combined together, demonstrate a lesser or higher presumption of risk for recidivism, and risk is dynamic (see below). If I may quote from the Colorado Department of Safety, Division of Criminal Justice, Sex Offender Management Board, as I did in my answer regarding pedophilia, I think this sums up recidivism in psychopaths quite nicely:

Risk is dynamic. Treatment and supervision systems must be flexible enough to impose greater external interventions during periods of high risk and reduce interventions as offenders internalize and demonstrate risk management skills.
The presence of certain character or personality disorders is a risk factor for sexual re-offense. Mental health science has no identified cure for personality disorders. As a result, long-term treatment and supervision may benefit adult sex offenders with
personality or character disorders to maintain changes and refrain from sexual re-offense.
Prediction of the risk of re-offense for sex offenders is in the early stages of development. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the likelihood of re-offense or future victim selection.

John Pick listed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale in his answer.

When working with offenders, we administered a self-answered test called the ASUS, which addresses risk factors. As well, we administered the Level of Supervision Inventory (LSI) which also looks for risk factors in offenders on community supervision (I'm being vague here because both the ASUS and the LSI are copyrighted material).

There are hundreds of articles on psychopathy and a variety of topics. The website HALO works with law enforcement in topics in forensic psychology, including psychopathology.


How does the personality of a successful leader influence the development of his children?

This is an extremely interesting question. I'm going to take a different approach to the question by focusing on both personality traits and leadership theories (e.g. authentic leadership, transformational leadership, servant leadership etc) to answer whether those two distinct areas can influence leaders' children's development. I will admit that I didn't come across specific studies on the actual family situations of leaders and the developmental impacts of the leader's personality traits towards their children.

Experiential learning and development by children

See Murphy and Johnson (2011) about how early life experiences and parenting styles can shape the development of a children in relation to general development and leadership potential.

  but parents undoubtedly work to inﬂuence their children's thoughts on
  leadership, through role modeling leadership and through the leader
  behaviors and experiences they encourage in their children ... “[Parents…] contribute to their children's religious beliefs,
  intellectual and occupational interests, feelings of self-esteem or
  inadequacy, adherence to traditional or modern notions of masculinity
  and femininity, helpfulness to others, skills, and values (Beer,
  Arnold, & Loehlin, 1998; Kruger, Hicks, & McGue, 2001; McCrae et al.,
  2000)” (Wade & Tavris, 2008, p. 502).

Servant leadership promotes spirituality and servant behaviours in leaders, i.e. serve your employees first before you serve the company. This type of behaviour from a leader would most likely influence the parent's value and style of parenting. For example, leaders who are recognised as servant leaders may be generous and selfless - this may spill over into their parenting style to be compassionate and caring towards their children which in turn, influences their children's development into similar characters.

ADDED: Destructive leaders, narcissism and potential impact on children

Behaviours of destructive leaders tend to be correlated to narcissism (Padilla et al., 2007). Assuming that these behaviours manifest in the home/family environment, there is some evidence that child narcissism can arise from the parent's control over them (Horton, 2010):

  There is also substantial evidence supporting the object relations
  viewpoint that child narcissism comes from a parent’s selﬁsh use of
  the child that is manifest in excessive or inconsistent parental
  control. For example, both Horton and colleagues (2006) and Miller and
  Campbell (2008) found that psychological control correlated positively
  with maladaptive narcissism...

Similarly, destructive leadership involves an element of the urge to control (Padilla et al., 2007):

  ... destructive leadership involves control and coercion rather than
  persuasion and commitment (Howell & Avolio, 1992; Sankowsky, 1995)

I would dare say that if we compared destructive leaders (core trait: narcissism) and servant leaders (core: selflessness) - both would exhibit different parenting styles that both impact a child's development. Children of the former group may grow up to develop childhood narcissism which may stretch out to adulthood. Children of the latter group may grow to develop selfless behaviours in childhood and adulthood. Yet, I wish there would be a study demonstrating this.

References

Murphy, S.E. & Johnson, S.K. (2011). The beneﬁts of a long-lens approach to leader development: Understanding
the seeds of leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 22, 459-470
Horton, R. S. (2010). On environmental sources of child narcissism: Are parents really to blame? (pp. 125-143), In Barry, C, Kerig, P. K, Stellwagen, K. K, & Barry, T. T (Eds.) Narcissism and Machiavellianism in Youth: Implications for the Development of Adaptive and Maladaptive Behavior. Washington, D.C.: APA Press.
Padilla, A., Hogan, R. & Kaiser, R.B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers,
and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18, 176-194


If someone becomes a split-brain patient, which side will "maintain" the continuity in their consciousness?

If by continuity you mean, "a feeling that I am who I was before the operation, (perhaps with some changes)", then it seems that each hemisphere would separately maintain continuity, in the same way patients after massive strokes and other sudden brain injuries don't usually feel "they are a different person".
Research by Turk et al. (2003) suggests it's just the left hemisphere, because only the left hemisphere has the 'interpreter' module.
However, other research by Turk et al. (2002) find that both hemispheres of a split brain patient recognize his own face, similar to Sperry et al. (1979). I think these face recognition tests tell us less about the 'feeling of self' than tests of access to autobiographical memories before the operation, and their emotional content, but I couldn't find any such studies.
A good review of the field instead was done by Uddin in 2011.

Sperry, R. W., Zaidel, E., & Zaidel, D. (1979). Self recognition and social awareness in the deconnected minor hemisphere. Neuropsychologia, 17(2), 153–166. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(79)90006-X
Turk, D. J., Heatherton, T. F., Kelley, W. M., Funnell, M. G., Gazzaniga, M. S., & Macrae, C. N. (2002). Mike or me? Self-recognition in a split-brain patient. Nature Neuroscience, 5(9), 841–842. doi:10.1038/nn907
Turk, D. J., Heatherton, T. F., Macrae, C. N., Kelley, W. M., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2003). Out of Contact, Out of Mind. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1001(1), 65–78. doi:10.1196/annals.1279.005
Uddin, L. Q. (2011). Brain connectivity and the self: The case of cerebral disconnection. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(1), 94–98. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.09.009


Does language learning improve or worsen the ability to remember and process information?

What I do not quite understand is: What is (according to Syka) "useless information" and how should we "avoid" this kind of information?

Let me try and answer this as follows: During our lifetime, our brain undergoes "synaptic pruning", which lasts from childhood into puberty. Basically, the brain gets rid of "unused" synapses to make space for more complex structures according to the principle of "use it or lose it". It has been hypothesised that sleep has a similar function in that it helps decrease the strength of synapses in order to save energy and not store what you may have referred to as "information ballast" (Synaptic Homoestasis Hypothesis). The creation of new synapses continues throughout our life, which is why there is (some) neural plasticity even in old adulthood. Thus, the brain itself knows how to get rid of irrelevant information (i.e. whatever it does not use) and is receptive to learning even in old age.

What is more, the brain grows with its tasks. So if you avoid learning new tasks, your brain will effectively decline and so will most cognitive skills (working memory, executive functions, processing speed, reasoning etc.). Likewise, our brain does not easily transfer skills from one task to general cognition. If you start doing Sudokus 5h a day, you will improve your Sudoku skills, but not your general ability to reason, for instance. Thus, to the contrary, it seems that what best maintains cognitive functioning in old age is continued engagement in cognitively challenging activities (see Park 2014) rather than the avoidance of new information.

With multilingualism, there is currently a hot debate about its benefits for cognition. For one, it has been shown that bilinguals have a smaller lexicon (per language) than monolinguals - but generally, vocabulary keeps increasing over the lifespan, so I would not worry about that. Ellen Bialystok is a strong defender of the "bilingual advantage", arguing that cognitive skills are even better preserved in bilinguals than in monolinguals, and she provided cross-sectional data showing that symptoms of dementia are delayed by 4 years in bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. The group of Kenneth Paap challenges these findings, arguing that there is no bilingual advantage see Vaughn 2015 for a discussion, but there is little to no evidence suggesting a disadvantage for cognitive ability in bilinguals. Starting to learn a new language in adulthood is even more promising, as it has been shown to promote grey matter increase in areas also responsible for cognitive functions that are known to decline in old age (see Antoniou et al., 2013).

In summary, I do not know of "information ballast" impairing basic mental mechanisms, but knowing more than one language has certainly not been shown to decrease your mental health.


Can the Philosophy thought game "The experience machine" be answered by Positive Psychology?

The experience machine is meant to be an argument against hedonism in that it's supposed to show that humans value other things than happiness and therefore wouldn't/shouldn't hook themselves up to the machine (whether it succeeds in doing this is another matter; Nozick simply points out that it would be "absurd" for anyone to connect oneself to the machine, an in my opinion extremely weak argument).

As such, the machine in the thought experiment is meant to supply you with whatever experiences that will create the largest amount of happiness for you (however, it's never explicitly stated that the experiences would have to be happy experiences; it's simply stated that the machine would be able to supply you with whatever experiences you desired, and when addressing a hedonist, those experiences would be happy experiences). If this means that you need a big chunk of sad, soul crushing experiences from time to time just to be happy the rest of the time, then so be it; as long as there is some pattern of experiences that in the end would generate more happiness for you than what you would experience in real life (a.k.a your real life isn't perfect), the thought experiment applies.

So, regarding your last question, the thought experiment really is immune to the kind of objections that you bring up, which means that we can't be informed about the solution to it by empirical research.

With that said, the question of how much and what type of negative experiences, if any, we need to be able to experiences happiness is interesting, but I don't have the answer to that one.

(Random speculations mode commencing: However, in my view, this seems to be more of an assumption that people make rather than something that is firmly based in science. Do we have the same intuition when it comes to pain? Would we say that a person who was raped and tortured since birth wouldn't be worth rescuing since she because of the lack of positive experiences didn't experience any negative experiences? Is there a reason to believe that this alleged relationship between positive and negative experiences isn't symmetrical?)


Is practice more effective if spaced over time?

There are probably too many different possible variables here to make any broad declarations of which specific interval is most effective.

There are "between session" improvements in procedural memory, which may result from consolidation of memory especially during sleep. There can also be between session decays as learned skills deteriorate over time. Optimizing the between session change is the key factor in optimizing time spent training vs improvement.

Hauptmann et al. 2005 found that in the specific context they tested, "between session" improvements were optimized when subjects stopped training at the point of saturation of learning. That is, they practiced in one session until they stopped seeing improvement during that session to optimize the total learning per time practiced. The specific amount of time spent training before saturation was not the same for all subjects.

It isn't clear how broadly applicable this finding would be, and in the context of physically demanding tasks like sport there could easily be non-mental factors that dominate: for example, if your training saturates because you are injuring yourself, you may be physically limited in training rather than mentally limited.

Brashers-Krug, T., Shadmehr, R., & Bizzi, E. (1996). Consolidation in human motor memory. Nature, 382(6588), 252.

Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 114.

Hauptmann, B., Reinhart, E., Brandt, S. A., & Karni, A. (2005). The predictive value of the leveling off of within session performance for procedural memory consolidation. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(2), 181-189.

Karni, A., Tanne, D., Rubenstein, B. S., Askenasy, J. J., & Sagi, D. (1994). Dependence on REM sleep of overnight improvement of a perceptual skill. Science, 265(5172), 679-682.


What happens at sampling rates lower or higher that the Nyquist rate?

Short practical answer

  for a signal to be properly sampled, it has to be done [at] the Nyquist sampling rate

Up front: sampling at the Nyquist frequency is the bare minimum rate to reproduce the frequency of the input signal. Dependent on your demands, I would advise to go at least 2 times that, if not more, to reproduce amplitude and shape of the signal. In other words, higher sampling rates yield better reconstructed signals.

Background
The problem is that in this digital age, analogue signals are sampled digitally, i.e. at fixed sampling rates. The Nyquist criterion states that the sampling rate should be at least twice the target frequency of the signal.

Suppose the target signal is a simple sinusoid with a frequency f (Fig. 1). And let us start with the worst-case scenario, namely a digital sampling rate (SR) equaling f. In this scenario, we end up with a straight line in the digitally recorded signal (upper panel).

In case we slightly increase the SR to 4/3 the result is not much better (lower panel).

In fact, it is not until we we go to doubling the SR to 2 times f, that we obtain a saw-tooth with a frequency equaling the input signal. The shape is, however, unlike the input signal, but at least we have the target input frequency right. However, this does not mean we can faithfully reproduce the signal. For one thing, the amplitude of the input signal will depend on the phase shift between SR and the signal. From here on, you can imagine that going to 4 f will substantially improve the reconstructed signal in terms of shape and amplitude (see, e.g. this web page of Cardif Universiy).

Fig. 1. Discrete sampling of an analogue target signal. source: National Instruments


Is there any evidence for or against the existence of neurons that encode surface slant in vision?

Yes there is evidence of the encoding of surface slant in the visual field

Disparity-Based Coding of Three-Dimensional Surface Orientation by Macaque Middle Temporal Neurons

We now show that MT
contains robust, disparity-based signals regarding the 3-D orientation (tilt and slant) of planar surfaces. This tilt selectivity does
not result from vergence eye movements or subtle monocular
dot-density cues, and approximately one-half of MT neurons
respond more strongly to a tilted stimulus (i.e., a nonzero slant)
than to any frontoparallel stimulus of the same size (data not
shown). In addition, we show that the tilt preference of MT neurons is primarily independent of the mean depth and slant of the
surface, properties that may simplify the extraction of 3-D orientation signals from a population of MT neurons.

Representation of 3-D surface orientation by velocity and disparity gradient cues in area MT

This study demonstrates that single MT neurons signal 3-D surface orientation (tilt and slant) via selectivity for velocity and disparity gradients, and to a lesser degree, for texture gradients. Selectivity is similar in multiunit activity recorded simultaneously, suggesting that 3-D surface orientation tuning is clustered in MT. Tilt selectivity is generally enhanced when multiple gradient cues are presented together, indicating that MT may integrate cues to represent surface structure with greater fidelity. This occurs despite the fact that tilt preferences for disparity and velocity gradients are poorly correlated overall. In addition, we found that responses to the combined stimulus, which contains all three gradient cues, are well approximated by a linear weighted sum of responses to the individual cues, with disparity and velocity gradients weighted most heavily. This study provides the first systematic examination of neural integration of multiple gradient cues to surface orientation and suggests that area MT contains an early multicue representation of 3-D surface structure.


Does every human brain have the same shape?

No, not at all--or not necessarily; different sulci & gyri may be different shapes--this is one of the reasons why individual brains are transformed or normalized into standard space in group analysis of MRI data (see here for a good basic explanation of how & why this is done). In some cases canonical landmarks may be missing entirely--famously, an autopsy showed Albert Einstein to have quite anomalous anatomy in the area of the frontal operculum or Sylvian fissure.


Body temperature increasing when trying to solve difficult problems

The "overheat" (flushing of the skin) you experience is a common-enough reaction to stress, part of the fight-or-flight response. It's not uncommon for people to experince it during exams; generally exam/test axniety is related to both internal and external factors (or perception thereof)

  Self-esteem was a significant and strong predictor of test anxiety. Perceived difficulty of the test and the high-stakes nature or consequences of the test was also related to higher test anxiety.

It's beyond the scope of this site to suggest individualized treatments, but generally  you may want to read about anxiety disorders and panic attacks, more specifically.

Although there are vast amounts of academic publications about the measurement and the effects of test anxiety, the amount of publications trying to assess coping strategies appears a lot more limited. E.g. I found a small study about relaxation techniques, Larson and Rose (2011), which found them effective on reducing the anxiety, but ultimately having no impact on test resuts.

Although I usually recommend Wikipedia as a good first read on many topics, their article on test anxiety is pretty bad, especially in the treatment section, with a heavy emphasis on medication... almost entirely sourced from a poor-quality site. That's in sharp contrast for instance with NHS' take on the matter, which makes virtually no mention of medication. Even the (US) Mayo clinic for instance doesn't place much emphasis on medication for test anxiety.

And what I discovered in the last two paragraphs turns out is also reflect in others' conclusions e.g. UCLA's  Center for Mental Health in Schools:

  In a 2013 review, von der Embse, Barterian, and Segool (2013) concluded that “there are few studies
  that have examined test-anxiety interventions with elementary and secondary school students.
  However, techniques including biofeedback, behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, priming
  competency, and mixed approaches have demonstrated promising results.” While medication also
  is discussed, it is not the preferred treatment and, if prescribed, is to be used in conjunction with
  psychological interventions (Tracy, 2012).

Alas this UCLA source/quote is focused on pre-university education and tests. However the paper of von der Embse pointed to an older meta-analysis that didn't have this narrower focus, Eregne (2003), which concluded that

  The treatment of test anxiety has been quite successful in reducing the test anxiety level of clients. The most effective treatments appear to be those that combine skill-focussed approaches with behaviour or cognitive approaches. Individually conducted programs, along with programs that combined individual and group counselling formats, produced the greatest changes.

And this older paper (whose primary studies were almost exclusively aimed at university students) has a fairly detailed assessment of the effectiveness of various types of interventions (although I personally wonder if there was enough statistical power for each kind to draw such definitive conclusions):

  Test anxiety reduction groups was
  categorized into 21 different interventions. The observed differences
  among these interventions were significant. Type of the intervention
  was related to the effectiveness of the intervention. Behavioural treatments
  included systematic desensitization, relaxation training, anxiety
  management training, hypnosis and other behavioural treatments such
  as modelling and extinction. Systematic desensitization and other
  behavioural techniques were found to be effective, E+ = 0.90 and E+ = 1.01
  respectively. Relaxation training alone and hypnotherapy were
  moderately effective, E+ = 0.50 and E+ = 0.52 respectively. Although
  Hembree’s (1988) meta-analytic study supported the effectiveness of
  relaxation training, this finding has been contradicted in the literature.
  Among cognitive therapies, cognitive restructuring produced the
  largest effect size (E+ = 1.11). However, rational-emotive therapy and
  other cognitive techniques produced moderate effect sizes, E+ = 0.54 and
  E+ = 0.48 respectively. These findings are also consistent with previous
  studies (DiTomasso, 1980; O’Bryan, 1986; Thompson, 1987). These
  interventions may be effective on the emotionality and ‘worry’ components
  of the test anxiety construct as proposed by Spielberger and Vagg (1995).
  The result of this meta-analysis indicate that effectiveness of cognitive
  therapies increased when they were combined with skill-focussed
  techniques. This finding is consistent with O’Bryan’s (1986) metaanalytic
  study. Clients may increase their sense of readiness and their
  confidence level by learning different study and test taking skills.
  Cognitive behavioural interventions were found to be small to moderately
  effective in reducing test anxiety. This contradicts the findings of the
  studies conducted by DiTomasso (1980) and Gambles (1994).
  Study skills training alone had a small effect size (E+ = 0.28). This
  indicates that test anxiety cannot be explained by a learning deficit
  model which indicates the lack of effective study skills and test taking
  skills. While cognitive and behavioural treatment techniques focus on
  relieving symptoms of test anxiety that interfere with an individual’s
  ability to perform well or be comfortable in testing situations, other
  researchers have conceptualized test anxiety as a result of a deficit of
  knowledge, training, ability to study, or test-taking skills. These theorists
  suggest that improving an individual’s skills in these areas will result in
  improved performance and comfort. Results of this meta-analysis indicate
  that this may not necessarily be the case. Study skills training when
  measured by test anxiety show only small and moderate effect sizes
  (E+ = 0.28, E+ = 0.43, E+ = 0.45). These results indicate that subjects
  treated with study skills training have only moderate improvement
  when compared with individuals who receive no treatment. However, a
  trend is indicated for significant improvement when study skills training
  is combined with cognitive or behavioural interventions. One of the
  significant findings of this study is that effectiveness of behavioural or
  cognitive interventions is increased whenever they are combined with
  study skills training.
  Although a number of interventions have been suggested and tested in
  test anxiety reduction, an integrated approach, utilizing various strategies
  in combination, is likely have special value. Such a combined program
  might include such components as: (1) applicable information about
  studying and test taking skills; (2) opportunity to observe someone take
  tests, or test-like problems; (3) increasing self-monitoring and practice
  self-control especially of behaviour and thought in test-taking situations;
  (4) practice in attending to the task in hand, attentional training and
  (5) learning how to relax under test specific conditions.
  Modality. The test anxiety reduction programs which were done with
  groups and individuals together produced larger effect sizes (E+ = 0.84);
  second, the group format had an effect size of (E+ = 0.67). The individual
  format had the smallest effect size (E+ = 0.34). Most of the intervention
  programs (83 percent) were conducted in the group format. It is highly
  likely that clients in groups can get other students’ perceptions and get
  alternative solutions to their problems. They may see that they are not
  the only person who has problems related to test anxiety; they may gain
  therapeutic benefit in group formats and easily transfer it into their
  daily lives.

Also his ("E+") measure of effect size is based on Hunter and Schmidt (1990) methodology, which itself has been criticized by some for allegedly inflating effect sizes.


Our emotional responses to colors is based on two factors : innate behavior and acquired behavior (aslo known as nature and nurture).

Innate behavior is build in our genes, it is instinctive and performed without being based upon prior experience (that is, in the absence of learning), and is therefore an expression of innate biological factors. This innate behavior is formed through evolution. The evolutionary aesthetics can explain the innate factor of emotional response to colors.

  Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in
  which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to
  have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success.

  Based on this theory, things like color preference, preferred mate
  body ratios, shapes, emotional ties with objects, and many other
  aspects of the aesthetic experience can be explained with reference to
  human evolution.

Acquired behavior is formed through our exepriences with the world. Our day to day interactions with our enviroment creates emotional responses and some of these responses are associated to certain colors. Also the culture has a great influence on how we interpret and subsequently emotionaly response to colors.

examples of cultural color associations:

  Take France, for example, where yellow signifies jealously, betrayal,
  weakness, and contradiction. In the 10th century, the French painted
  the doors of traitors and criminals yellow.

  In Japanese culture, yellow has represented bravery, wealth, and
  refinement since the War of Dynasties in 1357. During this time,
  warriors wore yellow chrysanthemums—which represent the emperor in
  Japan and royal family—as a pledge of courage.

some addtional articles:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201104/why-we-prefer-certain-colors


List of research paper meta information sites

Very interesting question! I would mention https://www.semanticscholar.org/, they do something similar to scite. They classify citations into e.g. "Cites Results" or "Cites Background", they describe their method in this paper.


I remember trying using single-epoch measurements with electroretinogram (ERG) recordings. Basically, ERG responses are electrical potential recordings from the neural activity in the retina. ERGs are usually also obtained using ensemble averages.
The single-sweep ERG amplitude measures were, as expected, also really messy due to random noise and eye movement artifacts that are normally averaged out when using ensemble averages. However, when using all 250 available individual epochs I had at the time, I could still show that ERG amplitudes slowly declined along the duration of the recording. So I took advantage of all available recordings by plotting all available amplitudes against time and performing linear regression. Linear regression is a particularly robust statistical method when a lot of data is available.
In your case, where you basically wish to do an analysis of variance on  populations of people, I would try to pool all the data available per subject and determine the standard deviation, or a related variance parameter. Then doing that for all 20 normal subjects will yield a collection of variabilities. This could then be compared to the older population. I can't advice you on the most appropriate statistical test unfortunately, but for a starters you can simply plot the 2 point clouds and compare them visually. If it looks promising, you can do a t-test (which is likely not the most appropriate test, but it will give you a fair indication). If it all looks promising, you have to find a proper analysis of variance to compare the two.


How do people perceive subjective scales?

If I understand you correctly, you are trying to learn about good practice in designing studies involving subjective scales? Then getting actual answers to such surveys might not be very helpful. You might rather want to know the impact of your survey design and the answering-environment on the answers of the respondent.

These are broad questions. Neither do I have the expertise nor the space to give you comprehensive answers here. Some suggestions though. As far as study design is concerned, you may want to consult Survey Methodology. In particular, section 5.3.5 deals with the implications of the type of scales used as possible answers. In fact, any other Survey Methodology textbook should cover this topic.

A lot of experiments also study the impact of social environment on perceptions and the construction of subjective opinions. Among others, Solomon Asch is a pioneer of experimental investigations of subjective perception. His most famous experiment is related to the conformity effect. He shows that people tend to conform to the perception of the group they are put in, even when this goes against strong visual evidences, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnT2FcuZaYI.

In another famous experiment, Asch studied the "recency" and the "primacy" effect. The subject of the experiment where enumerated a list of personality traits (generous, peaceful, wise, mean,...) and subsequently asked to described the person. Asch question was whether, in describing the fictitious individual, people would rely more heavily on the first enumerated traits (the "primacy" effect), or would rather focus on the last ones they where presented (the "recency" effect). Asch results tend to show a dominance of the "primacy" effect.

Again, it would be too long to present a list of the numerous experiments and theoretical attempt to grasp perceptions mechanisms here. The literature is broad but the topic is classical. If you read french, it is notably covered in chapter two of "Psychologie Sociale" by Jacques-Philippe Leyens and Vincent Yzerbyt, but it should be covered in any good (social) psychology textbook. Unless you have a more specific question, this might be the right way to start learning about it.


Is there a term for enjoying or liking the feeling of guilt

I don't think there's a term specifically for pleasurable guilt.

However, depending on whom you ask, there's a couple ways we can talk about this feeling.

If we assume that guilt can only be experienced as negative, then we might describe pleasurable guilt as pleasure about guilt (i.e., a positive meta-emotional experience of guilt; for a review on meta-emotions, see Mendonca, 2013).  In other words, you experience a sense of pleasure in response to, and perhaps alongside, your emotion of negative guilt.
If we take a psychological constructivist view of emotions (Condon, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barrett, 2014), then we can hypothesize that even prototypically negative emotions can be experienced as positive (e.g., positive fear, or conversely, negative happiness; see also Wilson-Mendenhall, Barrett, & Barsalou, 2014). So guilt isn't necessarily negative, even though our prototypical conceptualization of guilt is that it's negative.  That is to say that guilt is not made up of a specific and consistent set of experiences, behaviors, and cognitions. Instead, it's a heterogeneous category that can include negative or positive experiences--depending on how the individual constructs his or her affective experience.  The photo below (taken from Condon et al., 2014) shows how fear might be conceptualized as either negative or positive--and perhaps you can extrapolate from there how guilt might be similar.

By the way, the fruit category is meant to show a continuum of typical-atypical fruit examples (orange-olive), which perhaps helps to clarify the idea of typical-atypical fear (and guilt).

EDIT: To be clear, fear tends to be conceptualized as a negative emotion involving anticipation of a negative event in the future (e.g., a snake will bite me).  Guilt tends to be conceptualized as a negative emotion about a negative past event for which you feel personally responsible.  In this case, I'm using fear to describe the continuum of typical vs. atypical emotions, but note that guilt will have a different continuum.


Is low self-esteem, a brain chemical imbalance problem, rather than a personality defect, and can't be fixed by any amount of counselling/self-help?

Low self-esteem can be the result of severeal things, implying depression and other mental disorders, past experiences (harassement for example). We can "fix" low self-esteem through non-drug therapy, but sometimes we can't. There is no fixed answer, it varies from person to person.

My personnal experience :
I am a schizoaffective and asperger person, for me, self-esteem is something really instable because of depressive/hypomaniac phases and schizophrenic symptoms. It is not something that I can control, except with high medication.

Sources and readings :

Low self-esteem and psychiatric patients: Part I – The relationship between low self-esteem and psychiatric diagnosis
Low Self-Esteem Is Related to Aggression, Antisocial Behavior, and Delinquency
Self-Esteem and Adolescent Problems: Modeling Reciprocal Effects


Can a hyperpolarized neuron fire action potentials?

Perhaps this is not what you asked, but there's a phenomenon called rebound spiking or postinhibitory spiking where a hyperpolarization causes spiking. This is due to the oscillatory property of membrane dynamics (certain subsets of type-II neurons). Spikes can be evoked after inhibitory current stops. Figure 7.29 from Izhikevich's book:

Here's a partial figure from Hasselmo 2014 (recordings from entorhinal cortex stellate cells).

References:

Hasselmo, M. E. (2014). Neuronal rebound spiking, resonance frequency and theta cycle skipping may contribute to grid cell firing in medial entorhinal cortex. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 369(1635):20120523+.
Izhikevich, E. M. (2007). Dynamical systems in neuroscience : the geometry of excitability and bursting. Computational neuroscience. MIT Press.


Difference between brain and electronic device signals

This is a pretty broad question, however I think it's common enough that I think it's worth trying to answer. I'll break it down into the following:

What signals do the brain send?
How are these signals different than electronic signals?

1. Brain Signals

The brain has a lot of different signaling modalities. Some fast acting, some slow acting. Mostly, neurons communicate with the ions/chemicals you've mentioned above, which are actually called neurotransmitters.

2. Brain Signals vs. Electronic Device Signals

Spikes vs. Pulses

Electronic devices communicate by raising a potential on a wire and wait for the target of the communication to receive that pulse. The pulse can either be on or off. Neurons communicate via spikes, where the information is not "on" or "off", but also the frequency of the spikes and the spacing between the spikes.

Localised vs. Variable scopes

Electronic device pulses have clearly defined destinations. Although neurotransmitters can target a specific neuron, they can also modulate a group of neurons. This is called neuromodulation.

Static vs. adaptive

The wires on an electronic device do no change in strength. However, there are a TON of mechanisms for how the brain learns. The brain's "wires" called synapses, change in their effectiveness of transmission over time. The neurons themselves change in receptivity over time.

The Brain is not a Computer

To summarize, a computer or other electronic device is a really poor metaphor for the brain. I discuss this in my blog post "Understanding the Brain: Where Metaphors Limit You" if you would like a more in depth discussion on the subject.


Lets introduce some notation. Lets $S_i$, with $i = 1 ,2$, represents the different stimulus classes and $R_j$, with $j = 1, 2$, represents the different responses. In a one-interval task$^1$, $S_1$ is presented half the time and $S_2$ is presented half the time. In a typical two-interval task, stimulus $U_1 = <S_1,S_2>$ is presented half the time and and  $U_2 = <S_2,S_1>$ is presented the other half.

The responses $R_1$/$R_2$ can be yes/no, a/b, up/down, or anything you want and it does not matter in either the one or two interval cases. In the two interval case, it is just as valid to ask did the first interval contain the signal: YES -- NO? as which interval  contained the signal: 1 -- 2?

With a transformed staircase, you might run into problems. It is not clear exactly what you are proposing to do. If you always present $U_1$, or present $U_1$ half the time and $U_2$ the other half, then the response that causes you to increase the difference between $S_1$ and $S_2$ would always be $R_j$ (with whatever $j$ you arbitrarily choose based on your labeling of the responses). To get around this you could present some catch trials with $<S_1, S_1>$ and maybe even some $<S_2, S_2>$, but what happens if you get unlucky and get a bunch of $<S_1, S_1>$ trials in a row. You will likely keep reducing the difference between $S_1$ and $S_2$, but that is strange since the signal level is not relevant in the catch trials.

While you can probably get away with it, there are likely better procedures/methods (e.g., dual pair comparison)

$^1$ I study audition so am used to talking about temporal intervals while sometimes in vision multiple stimuli are presented across different regions of the visual field. From a signal detection vantage, it doesn't matter.


Types of receptors on a single synapse or neuron

One synapse can have different types of receptors for the same neurotransmitter (NT) (example: Glutamate - most glutamatergic synapses have both AMPA and NMDA types of receptors). Synapses can also have receptors for different neurotransmitters (see link).
One neuron can also have different types of synapses which operate with different NT. An example of that would be shunting inhibition, when first comes excitatory synapse (NT - Glu), which depolarizes the membrane, but AP propagation is stopped by the inhibitory synapse (NT - GABA) which comes later.

Hope it helps, I am also just a beginner :)


Neuroplasticity and Treatment of Depression

It may interest you to know that depression and anxiety relate to emotional stability (essentially the opposite of neuroticism), a personality trait which tends to decrease over the lifespan, especially in young adulthood (Roberts & Mroczek, 2008). Here's a figure depicting this trend (bottom left):

This article points out that most of the personality changes depicted above occur during young adulthood. This supports the hypothesis that plasticity is an important enabling factor in these changes. Roberts and Mroczek also describe these changes as mostly positive, which supports the hypothesis that these changes are a partly intentional process of social adjustment. I'm not aware of any evidence that supports these hypotheses more directly, but any such evidence would also support the plausibility of interventions that target neuroticism during earlier life stages when plasticity is generally greater.

The language of plasticity appears sparsely in a similar article that describes change in adult personality (Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003), though no explicit references to neural plasticity appear. However, this article also presents a complication and a challenge through its own evidence of change in neuroticism over the lifespan, depicted in this figure (top left; neuroticism $\approx (-1)\cdot$ emotional stability):

The complication is the sex difference in change over time: only women's neuroticism seems to decrease in this study's evidence. The challenge is the apparent linearity of both trends; neither supports the importance of plasticity. Therefore it's not clear that any intervention focused on altering neuroticism would function equally well for both sexes, nor take advantage of neuroplasticity. Nonetheless, a very recent article recognized the malleability of neuroticism and recommended exploration of options that would intervene at this basic trait level of disorder development (Barlow, Sauer-Zavala, Carl, Bullis, & Ellard, 2013, in press). Thus it seems further evidence to support your idea may be forthcoming!

Neuroticism aside, other recent articles have promoted biofeedback, neural decoding, and neural interface technology as ways of "targeting", "promoting", and "exploiting" neuroplasticity in treating neurological dysfunction (Wang et al., 2010; Seitz, 2013; incidentally, Seitz works at my alma mater and published this shortly after I graduated...it's a small world). Biofeedback and neurofeedback have established applications in the treatment of depression and anxiety (see for review Yucha & Montgomery, 2008). Biofeedback methods seem to have been around just about as long as theories of neuroplasticity (discounting one particularly early study at the end of the 18th century), so I wouldn't say biofeedback was intended as a neuroplasticity-based approach, but evidently it has turned out to be a somewhat inadvertent application of neuroplasticity. Clearly, theorists and clinicians are actively capitalizing on this convenient convergence of neurology and clinical methodology – this trend seems likely to continue.

References

- Barlow, D. H., Sauer-Zavala, S., Carl, J. R., Bullis, J. R., & Ellard, K. K. (2013, October 14; in press). The nature, diagnosis, and treatment of neuroticism: Back to the future. Clinical Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/2167702613505532.
- Roberts, B. W., & Mroczek, D. (2008). Personality trait change in adulthood. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(1), 31–35. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743415/.
- Seitz, A. R. (2013). Cognitive neuroscience: targeting neuroplasticity with neural decoding and biofeedback. Current Biology, 23(5), R210-R212.
- Srivastava, S., John, O. P., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2003). Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: set like plaster or persistent change? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(5), 1041–1053. Retrieved from http://j.b5z.net/i/u/2043019/i/PersonalityDevelopmentInAdults.pdf.
- Wang, W., Collinger, J. L., Perez, M. A., Tyler-Kabara, E. C., Cohen, L. G., Birbaumer, N., ... & Weber, D. J. (2010). Neural interface technology for rehabilitation: exploiting and promoting neuroplasticity. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America, 21(1), 157–178. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788507/.
- Yucha, C., & Montgomery, D. (2008). Evidence-based practice in biofeedback and neurofeedback. Wheat Ridge, CO: AAPB. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20101009135554/http://isnr.org/uploads/EvidenceBasedYuchaMontgomeryW.pdf.


Are there any long term cognitive impairments from prolonged period reduced sleep?

Wikipedia has some good information on this issue. Search for:

Effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance

In summary, 'yes', sleep deprivation can have a multitude of negative consequences on your cognitive abilities, like weakening your ability to handle complex cognitive tasks.


What is considered an error in the sustained attention to response task (SART)?

Both are errors indeed. Pressing when a 3 is shown is called a false alarm, and not pressing when a three is shown is a miss. Correct responses are (1) hits (pressing when anything but a three is shown) or (2) correct rejections (not pressing with a three).

These classifications are used in signal detection theory (Wiki). More specifically, they are used to calculate sensitivity and bias.

Sensitivity, or d-prime (see also other questions on CogSci, e.g. Calculating d-prime), is the metric for how well one can distinguish targets from distractors. Bias, on the other hand, is:

  the extent to which one response is more probable than another (Wiki)


What makes the difficulty of an arithmetic item? The operation or its length?

Difficulty of an item could be operationalised in a variety of ways: probability of getting the item correct, amount of time required to complete, amount of resources required to complete, etc.

Item response theory perspective

That said, in the item response theory literature item difficulty is typically synonymous with a parameter related to probability of getting an item correct. For example, in a basic three parameter logistic model, you might have a an equation like follows:

$$
p_i(\theta) = c_i + \frac{1 - c_i}{1 + \exp(-a_i(\theta - b_i))}
$$

where $\theta$ indexes individual ability, $c_i$ is a guessing parameter for item $i$, particularly relevant for multiple choice items, $a_i$ is the degree to which the item discriminates between individuals, and $b_i$ indexes item difficulty.

Of relevance to your question, this model asserts that the probability of getting an item correct is related to a number of factors including the ability of the individual and the difficulty of the item.

More complex models would permit individual by item interactions, where for example some individuals are better at math problems where as other are better at language problems.

Cognitive psychology perspective

Another perspective on item difficulty comes from cognitive psychology. We might alternatively call this feature of an item, its complexity. From such a perspective we could analyse the component processes of the task to develop a model of its complexity. From this perspective, 2 + 2 + 2 is more complex than 2 + 2 because it generally requires more operations to solve. E.g., an individual needs to first solve 2 + 2 as a subtask, store that value in working memory, and then add 2 to the stored value.

However, I think a cognitive strategy learning perspective provides further insight. Ultimately, it may be the strategy that has a particular complexity rather than the item per se. And strategies are acquired with practice and training. For example, when a young child solves the problem 2 + 2, they may have to apply the somewhat complex strategy of recognising this as an addition problem, counting fingers 1 and 2, then counting two more fingers 1 and 2 and then counting all the finger 1,2,3,4. Alternatively, when most adults see 2 + 2, they are able to immediately and reliably retrieve the correct answer from memory. Or for example, if you are able to use a calculator, the difficulty of multiplication of large numbers is dramatically reduced.

There is a large literature on what is sometimes called algorithm-retrieval shift. I summarise some of this literature in my thesis (Anglim, 2011). To read more, you could check out Delaney et al (1988) or perhaps some of Robert Siegler's work (e.g., Lemaire and Siegler, 1995; he has a huge amount of research on strategies used in mathematical problems). I'd also encourage you to check out some of the many articles using the ACT-R framework (see below). The main point is that over time, complex tasks become simplified as individuals optimise knowledge, strategies, and task representations to the task domain.

From such a perspective, 2 + 2 is easier from 2 + 2 + 2 for a number of reasons. It is simpler in terms of the typical strategies that are used, but also the structure of typical task environments means that 2 + 2 + 2 will be less frequently encountered than 2 + 2. Thus, individuals are more likely to switch to a retrieval process on 2 + 2.

Summary

complexity and difficulty are strategy specific
the environment influences task and strategy learning
and thus, the environment can influence experienced complexity and difficulty

References

Anglim, J. (2011). Strategies in skill acquisition: reconciling continuous models of the learning curve with abrupt strategy shifts. PDF
Delaney, P. F., Reder, L. M., Staszewski, J. J., & Ritter, F. E. (1998).
The strategy-specic nature of improvement: The power law ap-
plies by strategy within task. Psychological Science, 9(1) 1-7.
Lemaire, P., & Siegler, R. S. (1995). Four aspects of strategic change:
Contributions to children's learning of multiplication. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 124 , 83-{97.
Robert Sigler: See website for many publications with free PDFs http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/
ACT-R Literature on Mathematical Problem Solving: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/publications/index.php?subtopic=22


Do lonely people get addicted more easily than social counterparts?

First of all, the rat experience is not so relevant to  a great extent to the question.
Animals can't reason (they can't have their own belief system and plan for the future).

However, there is some similarity with rats and humans. Rats are social creatures too. It could be that loneliness causes bad feelings and a distraction technique could be the drugs to which they got addicted.
That might explain why the rats got addicted to the drugs. For animals is all about stimuli, they don't have a belief system. I think that even if a social rat saw the drug and tried it once and a few more times it would get addicted. Same for people, drugs can be as part of a recreational/social activity.

Another comment, is that loneliness is basically the feeling of stress (because it is an inner feeling of unhappiness and a mix of anxiety, all which brings the person to rationalize that he is lonely). I would argue that since loneliness creates stress, to relief stress the individual turns to an avoidant stress coping strategy which is  drugs consumption.

My account is one, there are more accounts of that relationship that other people add. But I struggle to bring any other relationships that will not be seen as being too much based correlation.

Also note that there are different mentality behind different psychology. Addiction of gambling is not the same as being addicted of drugs. In the former, the addict is addicted to win and in the latter the addict is addicted to the drug that kills the mental/physiological pain s/he has.

Some research:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X03001779


How common are single-author research articles in cognitive psychology?

To target the question in the question body here:

This question is quite opinion-based, because everyone can decide to frown upon something. However, I think that, in general, it's much more about:

Who the author is, i.e., what is their track record in the field;
What their affiliation is;
What the quality of the article is;
What the quality (e.g. impact factor) of the journal is.

These considerations are, at least to me, much more important than how many authors follow or precede someone in the author list. I would never judge an article on the number of authors per se. Lastly, (invited) review papers are often authored by just one author, even in the STEM sciences.


Resources for adults supporting a partner with childhood sexual trauma

Rape and sexual assault definitely does not only affect the assaulted, but also the friends and family as they can feel helpless, not knowing what is best to do to help and support the assaulted.
As I mentioned in the comments, support groups such as

RAINN (US)
Call 800 656 4673 or 800 656 HOPE
https://www.rainn.org and
Survivors Trust (UK)
Call 0808 801 0331
https://www.thesurvivorstrust.org
See also: https://www.thesurvivorstrust.org/national-helplines for other national helplines

provide support to survivor's partners, friends and family too.
The following books are recommended by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre

Allies in healing: when the person you love was sexually abused as a child, by Laura DavisISBN: 978-0060552992Laura Davis is also the author of the well known book for survivors called The Courage to Heal Workbook which is a companion to the main book The Courage to Heal she co-authored with Ellen Bass
Allies in Healing is available through Amazon as a Kindle book for a much cheaper price than a printed copy if that suits you.

Ghosts in the bedroom: A guide for partners of incest survivors, by Ken GraberISBN: 978-1558741164
Ken Graber draws from personal experience to show how partners can accept responsibility for their own issues, support the recovery of the incest or sexual abuse survivor, and work toward solving relationship problems together.


Neurological disorders affecting body language

This is usually referred to as emotional expression or affect display, which can be verbal as well as non-verbal, whereas body language is exclusively non-verbal, and not exclusive to emotion.
This function can certainly go wrong:

There are a few disorders that show deficiency in emotional expression
and response. These include alexithymia, autism, hypomimia and
involuntary expression disorder.

And also:

Disorders involving ... reduced affect displays most commonly include
schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder, depression, autism and
persons with traumatic brain injuries.

However, afflicted individuals do not typically substitute one expression for another - they usually either do not express some emotions (eg, Spock, who would have been diagnosed with alexithymia), or they express some emotions inappropriately (eg, the Joker, who presumably suffers from PBA).  It's unlikely that someone would express happiness by tapping their foot, or laughter by blinking their eyes.


What is the simplest entity that would be considered "conscious"?

As strange as it may seem the answer to the question is that when two braincells or neurons work together a small conciousness is created. We have billions of neurons so that conciousness would be rather small. Of course, this depends on the definition of counciousness and neurons.


What are the differences between Orch OR and Hartley's vibratiuncles?

As far as I can tell, the common theme is that "vibration" is involved in both of them. But that's where the similarities seem to stop.

Hartley formulated specific hypotheses such as

  Pleasure is the result of moderate vibrations, pain of vibrations so violent as to break the continuity of the nerves.

which we now know it's not exactly how these sensations are differentiated, but actually wasn't a bad prediction given the scientific knowledge at the time.

On the other hand Hartley postulated these vibrations to be transmitted by ether, which of course we now know does not exist.

Microtubules are real, but whether quantum vibrations in them have anything to do with consciousness is another matter. As far as I know there's no convincing evidence for it. The Orch OR article on Wikipedia discusses some theoretical criticism as well.


Does pessimism lead to greater happiness because low expectations lead to less disappointment?

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

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

Pessimism also leads to being more careful:

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

There are pros and cons in each of them:

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

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


You guessed it.
Listening to music is a passive activity. It causes no mental burden or stimuli to your thoughts. It is just allowing sound frequencies manipulate your brain and evoke whatever feelings they do in your mind. Whereas for watching movies, you need focus, to follow the story, and make sure you don't miss details. Human characters are involved, evoking love, happiness, disappointment, anger, stress, uncertainty, jealousy, envy, et; a huge emotional and mental burden. Very different from the relax "la-la land" world of music.


What is the psychological cause and meaning of "common sense"?

It is difficult to say that "common sense" is rigidly defined enough to be studied in the way stated above. There are interesting topics concerning common sense in Psychology, but most don't come from the angle you are suggesting. For instance, here is a really decent article discussing cognitive bias and common sense:

http://www.elkinsappsych.com/uploads/8/4/3/5/8435157/cognition-_cognitive_biases_make_common_sense_neither.pdf

You also have to consider that common sense doesn't tend to employ rigid enough requirements for theories; we also allow for conflicting theories to serve as 'valid' explanations. Take for instance:

Birds of a feather flock together vs. opposites attract.


Which physical properties of a stimulus can a human attend to?

I found a paper called Summary statistics in auditory perception (McDermott, Schemitsch & Simoncelli, 2013) that might be relevant to your question. If you can't access it in full, you can a great description of the paper here. Please note that I'm writing about it from memory and that some details might not be correct.

The authors had a task where participants had to judge whether two sound excerpts are same or different. These sound excerpts could, further, have similar or dissimilar summary statistics, meaning that some higher-order regularity was superimposed on the initially generated sounds (such as the somewhat regular pattern of the sound of sea waves crashing, or the wind picking up, or a fire crackling). So, the sounds could differ in a local way (which specific frequency was displayed at some moment) or in a global way (what were the higher-order regularities of these sounds). They then displayed these sounds in pairs for variable amounts of time.

They found that people were better at discriminating sounds from each other when the sounds lasted longer - which is logical - but this was only true if the complex sound textures were different from each other. When the textures were mutually similar, people actually got worse if they listened to the (potentially different) sounds for a longer time.

The interpretation the authors gave is that the auditory system first encodes simple features of sounds, but, once confronted with too much stimulation to keep track of, it instead extracts higher order regularities and relies on these for perception.

I do not have a technical background so I can't go into detail about what these higher order regularities represent, mathematically speaking. But the links come with some images with explanations, and you might be able to glean more information from them than I.

Here is the abstract:

  Sensory signals are transduced at high resolution, but their structure
  must be stored in a more compact format. Here we provide evidence that
  the auditory system summarizes the temporal details of sounds using
  time-averaged statistics. We measured discrimination of 'sound
  textures' that were characterized by particular statistical
  properties, as normally result from the superposition of many acoustic
  features in auditory scenes. When listeners discriminated examples of
  different textures, performance improved with excerpt duration. In
  contrast, when listeners discriminated different examples of the same
  texture, performance declined with duration, a paradoxical result
  given that the information available for discrimination grows with
  duration. These results indicate that once these sounds are of
  moderate length, the brain's representation is limited to
  time-averaged statistics, which, for different examples of the same
  texture, converge to the same values with increasing duration. Such
  statistical representations produce good categorical discrimination,
  but limit the ability to discern temporal detail.

edit: I found a link to the pdf of the second paper I mention.


How to measure confidence in non-binary (e.g. ordinal) choice tasks?

Non-binary choices complicate analysis unnecessarily, as most multiple alternative scenarios can be distilled into multiple binary choices.
Outside of metacognitive literature, I have seen studies that assume the naive Bayesian approach for multi-choice decision confidence, for example, from Satopää et al (2014) in forecasting:

For now, assume that the event can take exactly one of a total of M≥2
different outcomes. Under pure ignorance, the forecaster should assign
a probability of 1/M to each outcome. The more ignorant the forecaster
is, the more we would expect him to shrink his forecasts towards 1/M.

However, this assumption may not hold in the uncalibrated confidence judgments of metacognitive tasks.  There is an interesting paper by Li & Ma (2020):

Experiments on confidence reports have almost exclusively focused on
two-alternative decision-making. ... Here, we test ... a
three-alternative visual categorization task. We found that confidence
reports are best explained by the difference between the posterior
probabilities of the best and the next-best options, rather than by
the posterior probability of the chosen (best) option alone, or by the
overall uncertainty (entropy) of the posterior distribution. Our
results upend the leading notion of decision confidence and instead
suggest that confidence reflects the observer’s subjective probability
that they made the best possible decision.

This would make even 4-choice tasks much more difficult to interpret.


Quit smoking supported by mental training

There is many methods to change craving for nicotine. You can train your brain by the suggesting to yourself (or by hipnotherapeutists) something as: I don't need nicothine. When you are in the trance state for exemple or when you have highly good responses for hipnosis suggestions it will be usefull. In trance people have diffrent reality and their body tell them that i can do that and people can change even chemical responses of their bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotherapy

Another thing is that you can focus on mathematic or poetry so much that you forget about your bad habit and when you do it again and again its Pavlov's Dog effect that it will be automatic response for your psyche. For example - your mathematics will be the cure for the craving for nicotine. However if you stop doing your mathematic, you probably will be smoking again (old habits activate again without mathematics or poetry cure).


What is it called when a person seeks to compare themselves to others?

Cognitive Bias

  A cognitive bias  is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts.

One being:

  Social comparison bias can be defined as having feelings of dislike and competitiveness with someone that is seen physically, or mentally better than yourself.

There are other types of bias that would be appropriate to cover what you have asked in your question, I suggest having a look. For a list of cognitive biases.

This question What are the possible causes of pettiness? and answer touches upon some of the reasons people compare themselves to others.


Recent psychophysical studies using the "Method of Adjustment"?

The recent visual working memory literature has predominately used the method of adjustment. In particular, there is a lot of work using continuous color adjustment tasks:

Wilken P., Ma W. (2004). A detection theory account of change detection. Journal of Vision, 4 (12): 11, 1120–1135.

Zhang, W., & Luck, S. J. (2008). Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory. Nature, 453(7192), 233-235.

Here's a recent open access paper using the method of adjustment:

Brady, T. F. and Alvarez, G.A. (2015). Contextual effects in visual working memory reveal hierarchically structured memory representations. Journal of Vision.
http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2471226


No.

Certainly, in case of artificial vision we know that useful information can be derived from stagnant stimulus on the receptors. Where upon the spatial density of the receptor elements is uniform across the sensor.

Saccadic eye movements make up for the fact that the receptor density especially for color vision falls off sharply as the angle of view increases. So we can view color and sharp detail in a very small field of view. But, intuitively, within this cone developed minds do perceive detail and color since they have special neural connections that can fire if details such as edges of certain angles and thicknesses fall upon them. Also, intuitively, outside of the field of view receptors should be able to perceive details low in spatial frequency.

A quick google on 'vision without saccadic eye movements' revealed This paper which mentions a subject without the ability to move her eyes, who could read with amazing ease. However, she used her head movements to make up for it. One way to know a real answer to your literal unqualified question would be to do an experiment with such a subject and see what she can perceive without head movements.

One other way to see it is mentioned on chap11, page4 from the book referred in the first link in my post:

  Zihl, et al. (1983), reported a patient who had a stroke that damaged a particular region homologous to area MT (MT is in the monkey brain). This patient could no longer see motion although her vision was otherwise normal. This is known as motion agnosia.

Certainly we are not born with developed visual neural pathways and how changing stimuli and feedback help us develop them with time is being studied actively such as in Project Prakash


What areas of mathematics support the study of cognitive science?

Here's my list of math subjects that support the study of brain (from a computational neuroscientist's perspective):

Linear algebra

to understand high dimensions, to compute things quickly, foundation for other math

Calculus

basics for everything continuous valued

Statistics

to analyze any data, you need stats!
basis for modeling, regression, clustering, classification, and all

Differential equations (basis for dynamical system)
Dynamical system

intuition for neural dynamics (deterministic approximation)
modeling single neuron, synapse, small network

Statistical physics

modeling large scale noisy neural dynamics

Information theory

quantify how much "information" is coded in neural signal

Numerical computation

your data and algorithm needs to be implemented in a computer

Convex optimization

your statistics/model requires optimization

Probability theory (basis for stochastic process and statistics)
Stochastic process

model of neural signals, decision process (diffusion), basis for advanced statistics
point process theory is useful for dealing with neural spike trains

Time series analysis (your data is a time series!)
Signal detection theory

psychophysics is often designed to be a detection task

Brain is quite noisy, you need tools to deal with noise. More applied math than pure math is needed.

I have only seen topology being used a handful of times, and they were not very useful nor impressive. I love set theory and mathematical logic, but sadly never used it nor seen it being used.

In addition, real/complex/functional analyses are also useful, just in general.


Evidence that positive rewards are learnt faster than negative rewards?

This is a great question.

Short answer: No, the evidence does not suggest that positive reinforcement is universally more effective than negative reinforcement or punishment.  However, there are still good reasons to focus on rewards over punishment in real-life training/learning situations.

Long answer:

The trouble for folk psychology began with Skinner's somewhat unfortunate choice of terminology...  While Skinner advocated positive reinforcement over negative reinforcement or punishment, it seems to have remained an industry secret that what he meant by those terms is not what the general public thinks he meant.

The modern view of positive and negative reinforcement is that they are essentially synonyms.  They are different ways of looking at the same thing, like describing a glass of water based on how full or how empty it is.  Computationally, as you say, learning algorithms that assign positive values to targets or negative values to non-targets are mathematically equivalent.

Although they are often confused with positive and negative reinforcement, rewards and aversives are different terms with different meanings.  Testing whether one is more effective than the other is tricky, as in practice they are usually qualitatively different.  For example, is ice cream or spanking more effective for getting your kid to do their homework?  The answer is: It depends - how much ice cream, how much spanking...?  Surely we can find a ratio of ice cream to spanking at which they are equally effective.  The type of research that examines this question is interested in determining where that boundary is (here is an example).  Thought experiment: How can qualitatively different feedback mechanisms be applied in machine learning?

Research more likely to answer your question compares positive and negative feedback that is arguably qualitatively equivalent.  For example, compare gaining money to avoiding loss of money, reducing risk to avoiding increase in risk, and it's even possible to compare the effects on animals that are trained in a token economy.  In recent years, the folk psychology idea that positive feedback is universally superior to negative feedback has been called into question by such research.  A few examples:

Michael Perone reviews research demonstrating undesirable effects of positive reinforcement.
Comparing "well done!" to "got it wrong this time", Eveline Crone et al found that before the age of twelve, children perform better with positive feedback, but older children and adults do better with negative feedback.
A study comparing "keep the word Good on the screen" to "keep the word Bad off the screen" found that negative reinforcement may be more effective for some types of learning.
Ayelet Fishbach and Stacey Finkelstein review research that suggests that negative feedback is more effective for experts, and motivates goal pursuit when it signals insufficient progress.
Lots of research into Loss Aversion suggests that avoiding the loss of money is a more powerful motivator than gaining an equivalent amount of money.  However, this phenomenon may not translate to an effect on learning.
Despite all this, note that the evidence in favour of positive reinforcement is much greater - these are just some notable exceptions.

Neurological reasons for the difference in effectiveness between positive and negative feedback have been proposed - for example by Eveline Crone in the study cited above.

Training using rewards is preferred for animal trainers, parents, and teachers in most practical situations:

There is usually a much wider range of undesirable behaviour to punish than desirable behaviour to reward.  Animals and young children have difficulty determining what the desirable behaviour is with only clues about what behaviours are undesirable.  Adults are easier to work with because you can explain the desirable behaviour in words.
Punishment must be applied to all undesirable behaviour to be effective, while reward need only be applied to desirable behaviour, and even then only intermittently, to be effective.
Due to classical conditioning, subjects may attribute punishment to factors unrelated to their behaviour, such as the trainer or the classroom.  They may learn to avoid the trainer, or avoid getting caught, rather than the desirable behaviour.
Notice how none of these points apply to machine learning, where the process is structured, constrained, and automated.

John Maag summarizes reasons to promote positive reinforcement in schools: Namely that teachers often find it convenient and effective (in the short-term) to administer punishment and are overly reliant on it in many situations where positive reinforcement would be more effective and desirable.

Nice video on the topic.


Knowledge in what fields is necessary to develop an EEG brain-computer interface?

Beyond what you've already listed, you'll need advanced signal processing skills, as so far, nobody has figured out how to get much more meaningful information out of the EEG than broad attentional state (alpha blocking and the P300, and the evoked potentials), and maybe some correlates of motor imagery, though none of these have realistically proved themselves yet.

You will need to clean the signal using techniques such as independent component analysis/ICA and wavelet denoising, and identify some weak correlate of mental activity in the strong irrelevant "background" activity. Approaches regarding the latter fall into two camps, as I've noted above: either try to identify some well-known neuropsychological component, such as the P300, on a single-trial basis; and/or use machine learning to agnostically identify a signal, with Support Vector Machines being en vogue right now as far as I know. I assume the latter part you're already informed about.

Check out MOBILab for some of the leading figures with regards to EEG signal processing, but be aware that the EEG is an extremely noisy measure.