Biologically plausible cognitive model of Wisconsin card sorting task

Amos (2000) and Monchi et al. (2000) use the similar approach of assigning each card attribute to a node and using mutual inhibition to choose the right one. Although their models are biologically plausible and make many neuroanatomical predictions, they are functionally implausible. Their networks are created for the unique purpose of of completing the WCST. This type of specialization isn't found in the brain as far as I know. I'm also having a really hard time understanding on Monchi is using Leaky-Integrate-Fire neurons to compute functions, but that might be a topic for another question.

Rougier et al. (2005) use Leabra, which has been criticized for it's lack of biological plausibility. For further elaboration on these criticism, which is mostly centered around the biologically-implausible use of a Winner-Takes-All computational block being used, check out How to Build a Brain by Chris Eliasmith.

Bishra et al. (2010) only define symbolic rules. There's no neuroanatomical mapping. Consequently, although they claim tuned parameters could predict performance, there doesn't seem to any definition of where these parameters come from.

In conclusion, although none of the approaches are perfectly biologically plausible, Amos and Monchi seem to definitely come out on top. Although hard-coded concepts such as the possible parameters for matching are totally acceptable, a model that integrates with a larger more general system while remaining biologically plausible would be ideal.


Licensing when using the NEO-FFI instrument

Yes, a license is needed for most uses of the NEO-FFI. Here's a quote from PAR's Permissions & Licensing page:

  Tests, test protocols, test items, normative data, score reports, and other related materials are copyrighted and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from PAR. The reproduction of any part of PAR’s copyrighted tests and related materials in any way, without permission, whether the reproductions are sold or provided free for use, is a violation of federal copyright law.

  If you plan to use a test in its entirety, please purchase the published version of the test...

  If you plan to modify or use only part of a test, written permission is required prior to using any PAR proprietary material. Written permission is required prior to:

  Using a translation. All of our translations have been approved. Back-translations have been conducted by an individual unfamiliar with the English version of the test and the back-translation has been forwarded to the author/PAR for review and approval.
  Using any part of a test;
  Using a modified format of a test;
  Translating a test into a language for which it is not currently available;
  Including a few sample items or other materials (i.e., tables, charts, graphs) in a publication or appendix of a dissertation or thesis. PAR will not grant permission to include an entire test or scale in any publication, including dissertations and theses.

Anyway, yes, there are plenty of free tests! One such resource my former advisor (Dan Ozer, personality assessor extraordinaire) has always seemed to favor is the International Personality Item Pool. It might give you a headache to see how many options you actually have just through this source, just for measuring broad personality traits akin to the Big Five. In our work, we've generally used the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991), which is also freely available for non-commercial use, but is somewhat basic (44 items, 5 factors, no facets). If that's not basic enough for you, you may also want to consider Saucier's (1994) Mini-Markers, which has 40 items and one fewer Likert scale option. Even shorter is Rammstedt and John's (2007) 10-item short version of the BFI!

I should add that this question is a partial duplicate: @JeromyAnglim already asked (and answered!) the question about free alternatives here: What free scientific measures of Big 5 personality are available? His list is more comprehensive, and I'm about to go add Rammstedt and John's over there, so this post won't have anything unique from that thread once I do (except the bit about the NEO-FFI licensing).

One might almost be inclined to say there are too many options! As for me, I'm with Martha Stewart on this one: "It's a good thing."

References

John, O. P., Donahue, E. M., & Kentle, R. L. (1991). The big five inventory—versions 4a and 54. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Personality and Social Research.

Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(1), 203–212. Available online, URL: http://www.westmont.edu/_academics/departments/psychology/documents/Rammstedt_and_John.pdf.

Saucier, G. (1994). Mini-markers: A brief version of Goldberg's unipolar Big-Five markers. Journal of Personality Assessment, 63(3), 506–516. Available online, URL: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~prsnlty/SAUCIER/Saucier.Minimarkers.Full.pdf.


Why do I perform better at rhythm games after a long period of not playing?

Short answer
Long-term memory formation (consolidation) takes weeks, or even years.

Background
Unfortunately my observations haven't been published yet, but an interesting thing I see with listening tests in noise is that people are systematically performing better when they come in a week later for a re-test.

Now I'll add some background information about types of memory as a general answer (Fig. 1).

The most relevant type here is long-term memory. There are a number of sub-types but one is most relevant for your question:

procedural memory (Pitel et al., 2014)

  is defined as the memory system in charge of the encoding, storage,
  and retrieval of the procedures (rather than episodes) that underlie
  motor, visuospatial, or cognitive skills

It includes such arbitrary matter of understanding the test (listen and repeat sentences / play a game) and other when subjects perform a certain task for the first time.

Now an important part of long term memory is consolidation (Miller, 2008), which is

  Memory consolidation is defined as a time-dependent process by which recent learned experiences are transformed into long-term memory, presumably by structural and chemical changes in the nervous system (e.g., the strengthening of synaptic connections between neurons).

Consolidation stabilizes memories after initial acquisition. Synaptic consolidation is the same as long-term potentiation and occurs within the first few hours after learning. Systems consolidation is the process where hippocampus-dependent memories become independent over a period of weeks to years.

After a while of playing and being past your peak, you may simply get tired, bored, or loose focus for other reasons, which reduces performance.

References
- Miller, Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference
(2008); 1: 53–3
- Pitel et al., Handbook of Clinical Neurology (2014); 125: 211-25

Fig. 1. Types of memory. source: The Human Memory


Why do we talk unconsciously while sleeping

Brief periods of sleep-talking (somniloquy), mostly gibberish, are quite common, particularly in children.  It is not typically useful to call something a "disorder" unless it is causing a problem.  Aside from disturbing others, sleep-talking is rarely problematic by itself, but in combination with other parasomnias (behaviours that indicate arousal during sleep) may be symptomatic of a more concerning sleep disorder.

Sleep-talking while dreaming is most often associated with REM sleep.  However, note that not all sleep-talking happens while dreaming, and both dreaming and sleep-talking may also occur during transitions from non-REM sleep to waking state (partial arousal).

REM sleep normally involves a loss of voluntary muscle movement, referred to as REM sleep atonia, that prevents dreamers from physically interacting with their dreams:

  When the body shifts into REM sleep, motor neurons throughout the body
  undergo a process called hyperpolarization: their already-negative
  membrane potential decreases by another 2–10 millivolts, thereby
  raising the threshold which a stimulus must overcome to excite them.
  Muscle inhibition may result from unavailability of monoamine
  neurotransmitters (restraining the abundance of acetylcholine in the
  brainstem) and perhaps from mechanisms used in waking muscle
  inhibition.

The process involved with REM sleep motor inhibition is complex and not fully understood, but presumably, a deviation from or malfunction in this process may result in temporary partial loss of atonia, or partial arousal during non-REM sleep, that can trigger sleep-talking.  Causes of such anomalies include medication, alcohol and drugs, illness, genetics, mental disorders, and stress.  Of course, partial arousal can also be triggered by external stimuli.

When associated with more complete loss of atonia, and occurring nightly or even multiple times a night, sleep-talking while dreaming is a common symptom of RBD, a sleep disorder in which patients act out their dreams.  As RBD is itself potentially a symptom of a degenerative neurological disorder, significant chronic loss of atonia, including vivid sleep-talking, particularly in the elderly, would be more concerning than sleep-talking on its own.


Does completing a thesis make you a better practicing psychologist?

You might want to study differences in PsyD and PhD clinical psychologists.  The thesis per se doesn't seem to be the question but the focus on research.  A PsyD dissertation generally does not involve the conducting of an original line of research while the PhD does.  I can't think of a better way to equate your groups at the moment.

As a comment I'd like to mention that the benefits of a scientist-practitioner model reach beyond the immediate and are best seen long term, as the practice of psychology evolves.  Someone trained only in therapeutic techniques is trained in a stagnant psychology and is ill equipped to understand new research that motivates changes in the field.  They may change but the decision to won't be as well grounded in science and will be more based on their clinical judgment.

If you've ever been to a clinical conference where the budding field of clinical neuroscience was endorsed by a speaker through a careful presentation of (astoundingly powerful) research and logical argument you'd see an embarrassing number of practitioners making serious scientific errors dismissing the idea.  And it's not just a bias against new but an inability to make sound scientific judgments.  The ridiculous case of Autism and vaccines and how many psychologists actually endorsed that research highlights how we need better scientific training.  A training that many an experienced scientist can tell you really only comes through practice.

If you come up with a better way to produce a clinician on the day after they graduate then you haven't necessarily come up with a better way to train a psychologist.


Do people estimate combined probabilities differently to uncombined ones?

I believe these questions are dealt with by "support theory," the seminal publications being:

Tversky, A., & Koehler, D. J. (1994). Support theory: A nonextensional representation of subjective probability. Psychological Review, 101(4), 547-566.
Rottenstreich, Y., & Tversky, A. (1997). Unpacking, repacking, and anchoring: advances in support theory. Psychological review, 104(2), 406.

One of the basic findings accounted for by support theory is an unpacking effect whereby people judge an event that implicitly consists of a disjunction of many events (e.g., the probability that a person will "die from a natural cause") as less probable than the sum of the probability estimates for some component events that one could "unpack" the original hypothesis into (e.g., the sum of [a] the probability a person will die from heart disease, [b] the probability a person will die from cancer, [c] the probability a person will die from other natural causes). For example, in one study reported in Tversky & Koehler (1994), participants on average judged the probability of the implicit disjunction above ("death from a natural cause") to be 58%, and the probability of the unpacked version to be 22% + 18% + 33% = 73%. In the words of Tversky & Koehler, "unpacking an implicit disjunction may increase, but not decrease, its judged probability" (p. 549).

There is a lot more to support theory than just this unpacking effect, but a more complete summary of the theory is beyond my knowledge.


Does total time exercising matter for cognition more than the time exercising continuously?

Before giving my gut feeling as an answer in the final paragraph I'll first have to explain why I don't think the question can be answered in absolute terms (at least not without additional restrictions).

To start with I'll remind you that our bodies don't just flick over to exercise mode but instead ramp up and down in response to the demands put on them. As a result to make a proper comparison between bursts and sustained exercise isn't as simple as multiplying there duration.

If we take our [calculated MHR][1] as a basic measure of exercise intensity then say a respectable level is 50% to 70% of MHR, the quickest we are going to be able to get into that heart rate zone is with an all out sprint (a very bad idea without warming up) at which point our heart rate will overshoot the mark (sometimes reaching well over 100% since the MHR calculators are pretty rough without doing a full fitness workup) and then drop and eventually settle on a rate after maybe 2 minutes.

But the more likely and sensible scenario  is that we will start exercising at what we feel is the correct intensity and our heart rate will eventually increase over the space of several minutes so that it may be 5 to 10 minutes before we get in the zone.

So while I completely understand where you are coming from with your question it is one that I see a way of testing experimentally - and so i will just give you my subjective answer in what follows.

Since the physiological changes in the brain ([such as increased blood flow, seratonin, BDNF][2]) would I believe happen toward the start of the exercise session and then your brain would adapt to the new exercise demands and stop producing extras of all those goodies leaving them to begin dissipating before you ended the session and for a duration of time after means you would be better off doing bursts of exercise throughout the day to keep triggering that brain response that re-releases the goods.


Applications of computational learning theory in the cognitive sciences

Related to this is several works on the integration or non-integration of computational models in general to cognitive science.  For instance, the Tractable Cognition Thesis basically says that we can improve cognitive modeling if we limit cognitive models to those tractably implementable on a Turing machine.

Van Rooij, I.  2008.  The Tractable Cognition Thesis.  Cognitive Science 32:939-984.  http://staff.science.uva.nl/~szymanik/papers/TractableCognition.pdf

Personally, I disagree with the Tractable Cognition Thesis, and think, similar to Copeland, that a better model would be of an Oracle machine:

Copeland, J.  1998.  Turing's O-Machines, Searle, Penrose, and the Brain.  Analysis 58(2):128-138.

My own work goes ahead in this regard, and proposes how O-machines can be specifically integrated into cognitive psychology.  I give a presentation on it here and the proceedings will be published next year, but message me and I can provide a draft copy if you would like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chQvZrkznbg&feature=plcp


What neurobiological changes are associated with the end of the critical period in children?

The truth is, we don't fully know. There are likely a number of factors. One of them seems to be the Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). This molecule seems to be involved with maintaining and encouraging neuron growth. In Rats with a transgenically accelerated rise in BDNF levels, the critical period began earlier, and finished earlier as well (Huang et al., 1999). This doesn't exactly get at the heart of the question, because clearly there is some interaction between experience and expression of this gene. It's a good starting point, however.
References
Huang, Z.J., Kirkwood, A., Pizzorusso, T., Porciatti, V., Morales, B., Bear, M.F., Maffei, L., & Tonegawa, S. (1999) "BDNF Regulates the Maturation of Inhibition and the Critical Period of Plasticity in Mouse Visual Cortex", Cell 98(6): 739-755. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81509-3


Do psychiatrists have educational requirements other than an MD?

The only required degree to become a psychiatrist is a doctoral degree (M.D.). Using your example, yes those people could train to become psychiatrists.

After passing the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and going through med school, most students undergo a psychiatric residency (aka. clerkship) where they are trained in different medical centers (hospitals, health clinics, psychiatric wards, etc.). This allows the prospective psychiatrist to gain "real world" experience. After a psychiatric residency, psychiatrists must then take an exam issued by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. If they pass this exam they are certified and can then legally practice as a psychiatrist.

Source:  http://study.com/articles/Psychiatrist_Educational_Requirements_for_Psychiatrists.html

Edit: Med school teaches you theoretical psychiatric knowledge whereas the clerkship will teach you how to apply it. The clerkship could also train you in specialty fields.


What metrics are used to measure success in treating dysthymia?

The measures of dysthymia are similar to that for major depression. Dysthymia is not as acute as major depression and one of the key indicators for diagnosis is that it is persistent.

Dysthymia is a chronic type of depression in which a person's moods are regularly low. However, symptoms are not as severe as with major depression.
The main symptom of dysthymia is a low, dark, or sad mood on most days
for at least 2 years. In children and adolescents, the mood can be
irritable instead of depressed and lasts for at least 1 year.
In addition, two or more of the following symptoms will be present
almost all of the time that a person has dysthymia:
Feelings of hopelessness Too little or too much sleep Low energy or
fatigue Low self-esteem Poor appetite or overeating Poor concentration
People with dysthymia will often take a negative or discouraging view
of themselves, their future, other people, and life events. Problems
often seem more difficult to solve.

Much of the treatment involves good mental and physical health practices. Exercise, diet sleep, taking up hobbies, having a balance between work and play.
Professional therapy my also assist, in helping the individual to work through underlying causes of unhappiness, such as destructive behavioural patterns, unresolved conflicts, etc.
SSRIs have proven to be an effective treatment for dysthymia. It should be noted that the standard treatment for dysthymia is considerably longer than for major depression. This could be because of the fact it is a debilitating, long term condition.

The treatment of dysthymia with medication:
When antidepressants are prescribed for dysthymia, the treatment lasts for up to five (5) years (range: 2 to 5 years). This is much longer than the treatment time for major depression (range: 6 to 18 months). Until the availability of the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) medications, it was difficult to keep a dysthymic person on medication for the several years needed to treat the condition. SSRIs have fewer side effects than the older types of medications for depression, namely the MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor) medications and the TCA (tricyclic antidepressant) medications.


Equivalent Circuit of cell membrane potential

The author has just chosen to draw the battery "backward" in the diagram to go along with the negative sign. In the equations, the direction of the battery should just be oriented by convention according to outward vs. inward.

Note that $E_{K} = -75 mV$. If you were to use instead your equation:

$$V_m = -E_{K} + I_{K} / g_{K}$$

you would need to take $E_{K} = 75 mV$ and you'd arrive at the same answer.

I'd say there is a bit of a physics vs. biology clash here; in physics, it's more typical to go with certain explicit/literal conventions which then fit nicely into particular equations, and that's how you're thinking about it. In biology, we tend to take some shortcuts.


Qualitative scoring for responses to design fluency task

To measure the frequencies of different patterns (do some patterns occur more frequently that others based on group) I see this as a chi-squared test of independence. If you are unfamiliar with the test, a quick example is here. For your situation, all participants would get the same placements of dots, and you would count how often each possible pattern is drawn. In this design you would have two variables: 1 being control/AD, and the other being "design" with levels of every design drawn (if there are low frequencies on the designs, check out Fisher's Exact Test).

As you mention, the only way you could get enough data for RM ANOVA is to add up all of the frequencies for all of the graphs. Not knowing the theoretical backing for this measure, are all of them designed to be equivalent? At the very least it seems that the 5 dot and the 10 dot should be separated...

All my 2 cents, but on to your real questions:

1) Your "control sample" would be, in essence, a normative group (you would be determining what the "normal" person's frequencies were). These samples tend to be quite large and drawn with very rigorous designs. Check out your standard errors of your measures and see if they are acceptable (if they are, then the representativeness of your population may be your large concern with a small normative sample).

2) Double dipping is almost always a big "no-no." Idiosyncrasies in your initial "control sample" would drop down to your "clinical sample," casting doubt on the internal validity of the study. If the classifications are made for/from one group it usually follows that, in comparing to a second group, the second group with almost always not meet perfectly with the classification. In regression, this concept is that of "overfitting the model." One way you can get around this is create your classifications with, say, half of the control group, and use the other half as the clinical group. This has two problems, though: you further reduce your sample size; and I'd cast questions on the validity of "making classifications" (especially with so small a sample). Perhaps look at making all possible connections their own level of a categorical variable (combining only reflections and rotations).


Gender differences in IQ among undergraduate psychology students

I think what happens is that researchers often don't report on - or at least don't highlight - uninteresting results, partly because of the difficulty getting uninteresting results published.  So given that gender differences in IQ in general are eliminated for validity, a lack of gender differences in IQ amongst a seemingly arbitrary sub-population such as undergraduate psychology students doesn't seem to merit attention.  I similarly wouldn't expect to find a study published about the lack of gender differences in IQ amongst say, red-haired truck drivers with carpal tunnel syndrome.  In fact, researchers often highlight the usefulness of psychology students as research subjects for being representative of the general population in many respects, in addition to being convenient to recruit.

On the other hand, as undergraduate psychology students are so often used as subjects in many areas of research, it shouldn't be too difficult to find data that records both IQ and gender, and confirm that it is indeed uninteresting.

Starting in the 1990's, there was a flurry of research based on some interesting results - that there are gender differences in estimates of IQ (presumably due to some stereotypes).  Although these studies don't specifically focus on gender differences in IQ amongst undergraduate psychology students, some of them do measure and report gender and IQ, and in some cases, the subjects are in fact undergraduate psychology students.  Here are some examples:

Furham & Rawles (1995) "Sex differences in the estimation of intelligence":

  ... despite the fact that psychology attaches no significant gender
  differences to general intelligence, psychology students appeared to
  believe in the superiority of males.

Paulhus & Williams (2002) "The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism,
Machiavellianism, and psychopathy":

  Two hundred and forty-five undergraduate psychology students (65%
  female) participated in the present study for extra course credit. ...
  The only association with cognitive ability was the small positive
  correlation between IQ and narcissism.

Chamorro-Premuzic et al (2005) "The relationship between personality traits, subjectively-assessed and fluid intelligence":

  A total of 182 undergraduate students from British and American
  universities participated in this study. ... 49 males and 132 females
  were included in the statistical analysis ... Students participated in
  this study as part of two lectures on personality and intelligence
  assessment ... Correlations between Raven's test scores (Gf), SAI, ...
  gender and age are presented in Table 1.

(Sex is listed in Table 1 as having a correlation with Gf of -.00.)  There are many other similar examples from all over the world.

In some ways, the premise of the question seems odd: In as much as IQ is correlated with academic achievement (and it is, again for validity), it should correlate as much with acceptance to the program as it does with graduation results.  Thus, other reasons, such as discrimination or life choices might seem like better explanations.  Another possibility to consider is that psychology students are not always enrolled in the psychology program, and might include a disproportionate number of female students early on, who are actually from other programs that list psychology as a requirement, and have a female dominated enrolment throughout (eg, nursing).

However, the question is not entirely baseless.  More recent research has started to use alternative measures of intelligence that are not gender-corrected as standard IQ tests are.  This research does show gender bias in different sub-types of intelligence, and to some degree, overall intelligence.  From a 2011 thesis:

  No uniform agreement exists about male advantage in general
  intelligence (‘g’) (e.g. Colom & Garcia-Lopez, 2002; Deary et al.,
  2003; Halpern et al., 2007; Jackson & Rushton, 2006; Lynn, 1999;
  Spelke, 2005), with historically no sex differences presumed, as
  evidenced by the development of standardised intelligence tests (e.g.
  Ackerman, 2006; Wechsler, 1944). Recent investigations have supplied
  contradicting data, with male advantage reported on various measures
  of Gf and Gc, such as General Knowledge Test (GKT), Raven’s Standard
  and Progressive Matrices (SPM) and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
  (WAIS) (cf. Lynn, Allik, & Irwing, 2004; Lynn, Irwing, & Cammock,
  2001; Lynn, Wilberg, & Margraf-Stiksrud, 2004).

The paper goes on to describe such a study, conducted on 85 undergraduate psychology students, that confirms the gender bias in "g" in that population as well.


Can ESP and out-of-body phenomena be understood as a form of dreaming or hallucination?

In some form yes if patient is mesmerized by visual heartbeats, acording to Sciencedaily. Also is connected to someones beliefs. But in my opinion could also be induced by drugs in mices.

So, out of body experience could be umbrella term for more than one phenomenon. Some of them could be caused by hypnotics, some not. I'm not sure if those experiments could negate afterlife, because all of them are conducted while subject is alive. It is not that kind of experimental design.

1) Jane Aspell and Lukas Heydrich. Turning body and self inside out: Visualized heartbeats alter bodily self-consciousness and tactile perception. Psychological Science, 2013

2) University of Manchester. "'Out-of-body' Experiences May Come From Within." ScienceDaily, 24 Aug. 2005. Web. 1 Sep. 2013.

3) Jason J. Braithwaite, Dana Samson, Ian Apperly, Emma Broglia, Johan Hulleman. Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population: Evidence for an increased role of temporal-lobe instability, body-distortion processing, and impairments in own-body transformations. Cortex, 2011;**

4) Disturbances In Brain." ScienceDaily, 6 Mar. 2007. Web. 1 Sep. 2013.

5) http://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/14432


Any studies on the phenomenon of photo-taking even in dire situations?

Firstly  historical background:
The phenomena of people witnessing atrocities and not acting predates photo taking. It is known as Diffusion of responsibility or Bystander effect. (1) The likelihood of an individual offering assistance or calling for help is inversely proportion to the number of people present in the group.
This phenomena can be attributed to the concepts of deindividuation (2) and victim blaming (3). Deindividuation is the notion that an individual loses their independent consciousness to a degree as being drawn into a group consciousness, that acting within a group, revokes all personal responsibility and accountability for actions or inactions.
Victim blaming is the propensity for people to blame the victims of violent crimes for somehow being complicit in bringing about the crime. By reckless behavior, perceived immoral conduct. This can the false comfort people seek as a protection, that it wouldn't happen to them, as such events are not part of chance, but rather have causal roots within the victim.
I believe the cause underlying this mentality runs deeper into the human  psyche and taps into a primitive part of human nature that will form a subconscious alliance with the perceived stronger aggressor and so have less mercy towards the weaker victim. This is seen in more personal and extreme cases in the Stockholm Syndrome and on the coninuum of domestic violence. The following quote demonstrates this argument where the threat is real and present. I postulate this fear is underlying within many people's subconscious.

It is important to remember that Stockholm Syndrome develops subconsciously and on an involuntary basis. The strategy is a survival instinct that develops as an attempt to survive in a threatening and controlling environment. (4)

Photo taking:
There has always been a voyeuristic nature to photography. (5)
The advent of internet communication, social media and the glut of social networking platforms have given rise to a popular form of communication, via the image. Pinterest being a good example. The availability of new technologies enabling people to take photos and upload instantly online, makes a tragic scene an tantalising opportunity for individuals to gain recognition online. Perhaps enhancing their perceived status or popularity, at the very least gaining them attention.
The psychology of the photographer:
This is a little researched area. I cannot find much on this topic, maybe somebody else can.
This book by Joel Morgovsky examines some of these issues (I am unable to quote further  than the following):

While photographs are the most abundant image form in the world today, they are, at the same time, also the least carefully analyzed. Not one psychologist, to this writer’s knowledge, has attempted to apply relevant research on imagery and the creative process to the study of photographs as personal and cultural communications. Writers, painters, sculptors and scientists have served for years as illustrations of the creative personality, the creative process, and the creative product; photographers and photographs have not (Lindauer, 1977). (6)

It appears Joel Morgovsky has an interest in ongoing research into this:

According to Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) member Joel Morgovsky, pictures aren't just windows through which we look out onto the world--they also serve as mirrors into the photographer's mind. (7)

References:

(1) The Bystander Effect: A Lens for Understanding Patterns of Participation James M. Hudson & Amy S. Bruckman DOI:10.1207/s15327809jls1302_2

(2) Zimbardo, Phillip G. The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos, In W. T. Arnold and D. Levine (eds.), Nebraska symposium on Motiviation, Vol 17., 1969.

(3) Blaming the Victim and Exonerating the Perpetrator in Cases of Rape and Robbery: Is There a Double Standard? Steffen Bieneck, Barbara Krahé doi: 10.1177/0886260510372945

(4) Rainn.org Stockholm Syndrome Dr Joseph Carver

(5) Exposed: Voyeurism Surveillance and the camera since 1870 Sandra S Phillips and Simon Baker portrait.gov.au

(6) Noses on Our Faces: The Non-Use of Photography in Psychological Research and Practice
Joel Morgovsky DOI 10.1007/978-1-4684-1179-9_18

(7) American Pyschological Association Funding opportunities


Is it possible to calculate d prime if no catch trials were done?

In order to estimate d' for a particular signal level, we need an estimate of the hit rate at that signal level and an estimate of the false alarm (FA) rate. Typically, the FA rate is estimated from the no-signal catch trials.

With a paradigm like the method of constant stimuli, the assumption is that the false alarm rate is constant and doesn't depend on the past trials. Therefore, if you had 500 trials spread across 4 different signal levels and catch trials, you can either use all the catch trials to calculate a single common FA rate or you can randomly group the catch trials to get 4 estimates of the FA rate (this has some statistical advantages). The key is the catch trials are all assumed to be independent.

If instead of 500 trials with 4 signal levels and catch trials, you have 500 trials and 5 signal levels and no catch trials, it might seem that you have no way to estimate the FA rate. That is wrong. If you fit a psychometric function to the hit rate data, the lower asymptote is the FA rate. If all you signal levels lead to high hit rates and you don't know the underlying psychometric function, your estimate of the FA rate is going to be crappy. If they are all at high hit rates and the underlying psychometric function is know and well behaved at the tails, then you can get a good estimate of the FA rate. Even better is if some of the signal levels had low hit rates and that you have a reasonable estimate of the tail.

For data like yours where there are multiple signal levels:

chose a psychometric function
fit the the curve
if the fit is good, estimate the lower asymptote


Why do people talk fast in presentations when nervous?

I am experienced presenter, my job is to show presentation, organize educations and trainings to different people, with different personality traits in different situation. Until now I collected more the 700 hours of presentation and more then 120 hours of presentation education. In the beginning I had also that problem, but I overcome it by exercise. Now I am completely relaxed when present.

In my opinion cause of this is social anxiety in self presentation:
Here is one research, but I am sure you can find several more if you look to literature section.

Social anxiety, self-presentation, and the self-serving bias in causal attribution [1980].

Also people get aroused because if they think that other judge them, especially if they do not present a lot... here is model how people conclude others judge them

Mood and judgement: The affect infusion model (AIM) [1995]

EDIT: In this case 'fast talking' is indicator of public speaking fear, so you cant using 'public speaking fear' as cause of 'fast talking' because it will be circular definition. Here is a try to explain this in S-O-R paradigm:

State anxiety patterns for public speaking and the behavior inhibition system [2009]

I don't know exactly what is happening in brain but I assume that something is happening in giri of the hippocampus (working memory) which is overloaded with information of judging environment and accommodate presentation, but also have significant role in speech production.


Why does a person feel sad without knowing the reason?

Modern theories of emotion suggest that like many aspects of self-knowledge, emotion is "inferred" rather than "introspected".

This is exemplified by a classic experiment in which men were surveyed by an attractive female interviewer while on a bridge.  Some of the men were on a "fear-arousing" suspension bridge, while other men were on a "non-fear-arousing" solid bridge.  Men surveyed on the suspension bridge were more likely to include sexual content in their answers, and more likely to call the interviewer later.  Presumably the men on the suspension bridge were more aroused than the ones on the solid bridge, and misattributed their arousal to the attractiveness of the interviewer.

Similar research supports the idea that physiological inputs (eg, the effects of hormones in our system) are combined with a process of inference to produce emotion.

Imagine having a low level of serotonin in your brain.  This may cause a negative effect on your mood - sadness.  Now you want to know why.  So you search for possible reasons: Maybe a conversation you had recently didn't go well, maybe your bank account is low on funds, maybe you notice that you haven't spent time with friends lately...  Successful attribution typically requires a plausible cause-and-effect relationship - that is, the most likely explanation is probably the correct one.

Put another way, people in general sense physiological states (such as sadness) without knowing why.  They then (unconsciously) "guess" why through inference.  Sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong.  If you've ever had a girlfriend on her period blame her feelings on the way you treat her, then you know what I mean.  So the reality is that people who feel sad and don't know why, are ... accurate.  The only difference between feeling sad and knowing why, and feeling sad and not knowing why, is successful attribution - coming up with a plausible guess.


What is the distribution of performance in academic programming subjects?

Our university has a public grade distribution database, so I did a really quick analysis on some historical data to see if there was any support for this idea. To my surprise, it appears that there might be. But, my analysis is very limited.

I downloaded the grade distributions for all intro psychology and intro computer science classes from 2010-2014. This gave me the grades of about 15,000 psychology students and about 1,500 computer science students. I summed up the count for each letter grade, and then normalized to a percentage of students. Apologies for the somewhat ugly chart, but here's what I found:

The distribution for letter grades seems pretty consistent across both disciplines, but what jumps out to me is the assignment of "W" grades, which is the grade received when a student withdraws from the course after being enrolled for at least the first week of classes. About 20% of all intro CS students withdraw from the class, while less than 5% of intro psych students do. This might indicate that a larger number of CS students find the course to be too challenging for them, and withdraw rather than get a low grade.


Why doesn't psychology impose higher standards to solve its replication crisis?

High standards are being proposed, but not taken up very quickly.

Psychology is currently undergoing a transition in methods between the traditional approach of hypothesizing after results are known (e.g., Bem, 1980) and new statistical and design methods that have fewer false positives, such as focusing on effect sizes and confidence intervals over significance, pre-registration, Registered Reports, sharing of code and data, replication, meta-analysis, multi-site replication such as the Psychological Accelerator and Many Labs, error detection tools, etc. Note that even if these techniques are demonstrably superior for inference quality, their uptake within the discipline and coverage in undergraduate and graduate coursework depends on current faculty changing their beliefs and practices. Historically in science, this is a slow and fraught process (Kuhn, 1962); sometimes fields have had to wait for faculty to die before new methods can take full root. It doesn't look like it will take that long, but I mention this to highlight the difference between superior methods existing and whether they are implemented within a field. Psychology is currently undergoing something of a struggle between reformers and supporters of the status quo.

@Chris Rogers makes another good point that measurement of psychological constructs such as motivation is necessarily indirect, and people are exceptionally variable by context, making the design of measures more contextual than in physics. The lack of stable evidence is not an indication of standards alone.


How to randomise order of survey items in Qualtrics where some items have to appear together?

There is probably a better way of doing this, but you could probably do this using the block feature in Qualtrics. For example, I often do this when I have several multi-item scales. Each scale is a block. You might randomise item order within a block, but you can also randomise the order of blocks.

So you could group questions (e.g., 1 and 1a) into their own block and then randomise blocks.

See here for info: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-flow/standard-elements/randomizer/


Any link between IQ and a person's ability to create or mimic sounds?

According to Howard Gardner and his theory of Multiple Intelligence, I can propose that there is no link between IQ and the ability to mimic sound.

The IQ test (originating in the work by Alfred Binet) is not a measure of intelligence pre-se, but rather a measure of the ability of the subject to comprehend in the manner expected.  [Look for Gardner's explanation of the Hammer, Screw Driver and Nail question.]  Gardner proposes that we have the ability to either master or lack in 7 different types of intelligence.  (Not as in one stronger than the other, more like at different levels for each one.)

IQ measures some elements of linguistic, mathematical and spacial intelligence, but does not measure the others.  According to Gardner, the musical intelligence is the ability to comprehend tones, and patterns in sound quicker than others.  I thus propose that mimicking should have some direct correlation with Musical Intelligence, and since Musical Intelligence in not a measure in the IQ test there will be no link.


What cognitive processes occur during a mental exhaustion or 'burnout'?

One of the older theories suggested that a person literally runs out of brain-fuel when they hit the wall (Baumeister et al, 1998). They called this state "ego depletion" and it refers to the kind of mental burnout you are talking about. There is currently a lot of research activity on this topic because we (psychologists) assumed for over a decade that some resource was depleted in the brain but have found no evidence for any such resource. Newer theories suggest that people go through a kind of motivational cycle in which people tend to approach longer-term goals with delayed rewards (e.g., doing homework) for some period of time, followed by pursuit of shorter-term goals with immediate rewards (e.g., eating, leisure, etc.; see Kurzban et al, 2013 for a great discussion).

Thus, people with high self-control are people who spend relatively more time engaging in "labor" and impulsive people spend relatively more time pursuing leisure. The cyclical nature of motivation has clear adaptive qualities and the burnout that you feel after working for long periods is thought to be your brain doing exactly what it is designed to do: keep you from neglecting short term goals which are/were just as essential for survival as long-term goals. This is in direct contrast with the brain-fuel idea, which models burnout as self-control failure. See the Inzlicht article for a critique of brain-fuel models.

One interesting area of work that is related to all of this comes from the ADHD literature. The drugs developed to treat ADHD have demonstrated a clear connection between dopamine activity in the frontal lobes and the ability to persist in pursuing labor goals. It might be tempting to think that dopamine is the phantom brain-fuel we've been looking for, but note that the brain has no problem producing dopamine (i.e., it doesn't "run out"). Nobody has really pursued this, but it will be interesting to see how psychologists integrate the role of dopamine and frontal lobe functioning into self-control models. The Barkley reference below is an old one, but it is a good review of ADHD research that is relevant to this topic.

Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological bulletin, 121(1), 65.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 74(5), 1252.

Inzlicht, M., Schmeichel, B. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2014). Why self-control seems (but may not be) limited. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(3), 127-133.

Kurzban, R., Duckworth, A., Kable, J. W., & Myers, J. (2013). An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(06), 661-679.


What is the condition called when someone believes that robots should be treated as though they are human?

The term robot humanization can be used to describe a psychological trait for considering certain robots to be human-like.
Life-like humanization of robots has been the aim of artificial intelligence (AI) research for many years, and we seem to be getting there with a robot called Sophia.

Using artificial intelligence, Sophia can communicate with people and even use facial expressions to convey emotions - and looks eerily human as she does so (ITV, 2017).

A YouTube video of a 2019 interview with Sophia on UK television programme This Morning can be seen at https://youtu.be/5_jp9CwJhcA
The pros and cons of AI being used to humanize robots have been debated for quite a while (Giger et al. 2019). One con is that the more a robot is humanized, the less likely people are to sacrifice it in favour of a fellow human (Nijssen et al. 2019).
References
Giger, J. C., Piçarra, N., Alves‐Oliveira, P., Oliveira, R., & Arriaga, P. (2019). Humanization of robots: Is it really such a good idea? Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 1(2), 111-123. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.147
Nijssen, S. R. R., Müller, B. C. N., van Baaren R. B., & Paulus, M. (2019) Saving the Robot or the Human? Robots Who Feel Deserve Moral Care. Social Cognition, 37(1): 41 https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2019.37.1.41
ITV. (2017) Meet Sophia, the eerily human-like robot... Retrieved from https://www.itv.com/goodmorningbritain/news/sophia-the-robot-freaks-our-piers-morgan-and-susanna-reid


Why is an image of a face without features disturbing?

It's from fear sprung out of the inability to clearly identify and interpret something and from that know how to react to it.

There's something skewed with what you see, something deviating from your mental model of what a face (in this example) looks like. That makes us perceive it as something unknown, and what's unknown is also perceived as unpredictable and induces an uneasiness and discomfort.

The reason why this is unpleasant:

But this isn't:

Is because the latter is clearly an illustration and can be subconsciously dismissed as something static/dead, and by that predictable and nonthreatening. In the first image we have a hard time identifying what it is we see, whether it's something that's alive or if it's dead. This makes us uncomfortable since we don't know how we should react to it, even if it's just an image.

Being confronted by it in real life would without a doubt be very disturbing since then there is no escape, it's very real, very unknown and therefore very unpredictable.


Are There National Personality Archetypes?

News reporter Colin Woodard has published a book describing "11 nations" of North America, each with its unique personality, that also influences the individuals that live within their confines. For instance, Puritain northeasterners tend to well-educated, liberal "good government" types. Slightly to the south and west are the commercially oriented "New Netherlands" types that retain the early Dutch influence. The Midlanders and Appalachians are more fragmented and less pro-Government than others. The Tidewater and the South are more "traditional" areas that prefer state to Federal authority. The rugged western parts of the country value hard work and self-sufficiency and (mostly) have libertarian tendencies. "New France" and "First" (Indian) nations are unique subcultures within this group.

Each area was initially shaped by its historical experience, and later attracted the immigrants that were most like it.


Do students exhibit rational behavior in determining study time?

I think this is a very interesting question that I'm not sure we know the answer to. As we move towards online-based instruction, the question of whether students "optimally" determine their study time is extremely relevant. For instance, if students are allowed to "self-pace" themselves, will they do so optimally? Going to lectures in part may serve as a "commitment device" to go to class.

The only good economic study I know of is by David Figlio et al "Is it Live or is it Internet?: Experimental Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning". It also has the virtue of (attempting) to be a randomized controlled trial. However, I'm sure that there are probably other behavioral economics or psychology studies worth visiting.

The authors write,

  "Without the nudge of having to attend classes, the authors suggested,
  it can be easy to let recorded lectures pile up unwatched. Indeed, it
  is common at Florida to see students in libraries cramming viewings of
  a dozen lectures back to back before exams."

Here is a link to the paper (gated, unfortunately):
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16089

Also a popular press description:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05collegeside.html


Research into the "how" is ongoing. From the most recent review I could find, the effect of cannabis on the dopamine system is not entirely elucidated, even on a quantitative level:

  The onset of effects of THC appears to be delayed relative to the onset
  of other psychotomimetic drugs, suggesting that the effects of THC may be downstream to its
  primary site of action. Given that the endocannabinoid system is principally a neuromodulatory
  system, perhaps the psychosis-relevant effects of THC are related to the consequences of CB1R
  activation on other neurotransmitter systems implicated in the neurobiology of psychosis.
  Cannabinoid Dopaminergic Interactions: Single doses of dopamine (D2) receptor antagonists
  (olanzapine and haloperidol) have been shown to reverse the acute psychotomimetic effects of
  THC in healthy subjects in two HLS (5, 6) although not in the third (7). Furthermore, chronic D2
  antagonist treatment failed to protect schizophrenia patients from the symptom exacerbating
  effects of THC (32).

  Preclinical studies demonstrate that THC administration increases striatal dopamine
  release by 25-100%, but the human data are mixed with two studies reporting no significant
  increase (91, 92) and one study reporting a 3.9% increase in striatal dopamine release (93).
  These studies had small sample sizes and differed in the THC doses, routes of administration
  and imaging methodology. A re-analysis combining data from two studies (91, 93) reported a
  significant but small increase in THC-induced dopamine release (94). Of note, in contrast to
  amphetamine and cocaine, which induce large increases in striatal DA release (10-30%) in
  humans, THC at doses that produce robust behavioral effects induces small (2-5%) increases in
  dopamine release. More recently, Kuepper et al, 2013 reported that individuals with psychosis as
  well as those with a family history of psychosis demonstrated THC-induced striatal dopamine
  release, but this was not observed in the controls suggesting that dopamine may be involved
  particularly in the effects of THC in those with an increased risk for psychosis (95).

The review also covers several genes that have been implicated in both schizophrenia and vulnerability to THC-induced psychosis:

  In the striatum, clearance of synaptic dopamine is highly dependent on the dopamine
  transporter (DAT). A polymorphism of the DAT1 gene is associated with lower enzymatic activity
  and thus, higher dopamine levels in the striatum, and has previously been associated with
  schizophrenia (81). Bhattacharyya et al. reported that individuals with the 9-repeat allele showed
  increased sensitivity to acute THC-induced psychotic symptoms (82).

  The enzyme AKT1 inactivates glycogen synthase kinase by phosphorylation and their
  interaction has been implicated in schizophrenia (83, 84). Cannabinoids stimulate the AKT1
  pathway via CB1Rs and CB2Rs. Bhattacharyya et al found that a polymorphism of the AKT1
  gene (the GG genotype of the SNP rs1130233) moderated sensitivity to the acute psychosisinducing
  effect of THC (82). Furthermore, a synergistic influence of DAT1 and AKT1 genotypes
  on THC-induced psychotomimetic effects was also reported.

All the DAT/AKT1 data on healthy individual using cannabis with is based on exactly one study, so I reproduce their graphical finding below:

Alas they only reported total PANSS.

In the review, there's more discussion of COMT, which has seen more attention, but suffice to say the results on that have been mixed. It remains to be seen in  the DAT1/AKT1 study can be replicated. It does seem that AKT1 alone has an impact, based on more studies that found the same polymorphism of AKT1 impacts first-episode psychosis in cannabis users and psychotomimetic effects in healty cannabis smokers.

I find it interesting that yet another study on first-episode psychosis has implicated AKT1 polymorphism, however, this time with an interaction that enhanced its effect... except that the other gene involved was not DAT1 (as in the case of psychotomimetic effects on healthy individuals) but rather with DRD2.

Perhaps 10 years from now, this question will have a less tentative answer.

To further complicate the issue, cannabis has more than one active substance:

  CBD is the second most prominent
  cannabinoid in cannabis. Unlike THC, CBD displays CB1R antagonism/inverse agonism
  amongst several other modulatory effects on the endocannabinoid system. The potential
  antipsychotic effects of CBD have drawn increasing attention (20) and some HLS have
  examined the interactive effects of THC and CBD. Pretreatment with CBD is associated with
  lower THC-induced psychotomimetic effects, paranoia and verbal memory impairments (12, 21).
  Furthermore, while THC resulted in increased psychotic symptoms and skin conductance
  responses during processing of fearful faces; CBD, led to a reduction in anxiety and a decrease
  in skin conductance response (22).

For more, there's a slightly older review that's freely available in PMC.

Yet another review that focuses only on THC's effect on dopamine mentions some of the challenges in observing dopamine changes in humans following THC administration: insufficient PET camera resolution and doses that are substantially less than those used in animal models.


The quote you gave was from the beginning of Wikipedia article on Emotional Reasoning and if you read further down in that article it tells you that

  Beck believed that emotional reasoning stemmed from negative thoughts that were uncontrollable and happened without effort.

Emotional Reasoning is a cognitive distortion which amplifies the effects of other cognitive distortions and it is a style of unhelpful thinking whereby you base your view of situations, yourself, or others, on the way you are thinking.  What you are thinking and feeling could be rational but with this situation you are thinking irrationally as there is no hard factual evidence to support the thoughts.

You might think "I feel like an idiot, therefore I am an idiot"; "I feel guilty, therefore I must have done something bad";  "I feel inadequate, therefore I must be a worthless person"; "I'm furious with you, therefore you must have been acting badly and trying to take advantage of me"

Or just as in the question but phrased in this way, "I feel jealous, therefore it must be true that my spouse is being unfaithful".

With Emotional Reasoning you are reacting to what you alone are witnessing.  The proposed situation regarding a haunted house making you feel anxious is not Emotional Reasoning.  You are feeling anxious because you are apprehensive of what might happen if you encounter a ghost/spirit some other people have said they have witnessed.


In SDT, are there other measures of detection sensitivity besides d'?

Yes, there are several alternatives to d'.

First of all, why do we need alternatives to d'?

d' assumes the distribution of internal representation of signal and noise are Gaussian. This assumption is common, but may not be true, and a measure that does not make this assumption is more robust.
There are technical problems computing d' when the Hit Rate or the False Alarm Rate are 0 or 1 (d' becomes inf or -inf).

Proposed alternatives to d' include:

Area under the ROC (Green & Swets, 1966)
A' (Pollak & Norman, 1964), A'' (Smith, 1995) which is a correction of A', and A (Zhang & Mueller, 2005) which is a correction of A''.
S' (Balakrishnan, 1998)

Balakrishnan, J. D. (1998). Some more sensitive measures of sensitivity and response bias. Psychological Methods, 3(1), 68.

Zhang, J., & Mueller, S. T. (2005). A note on ROC analysis and non-parametric estimate of sensitivity. Psychometrika, 70(1), 203-212.

Smith, W. D. (1995). Clarification of sensitivity measure A'. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 39(1), 82-89.

Pollack, I., & Norman, D. A. (1964). A non-parametric analysis of recognition experiments. Psychonomic Science.

Green, D. M., & Swets, J. A. (1966). Signal detection theory and psychophysics (Vol. 1). New York: Wiley.


On a related note, I attempted an answer on the question: What causes a person to be curious, inquisitive and explorative?

Context

The younger generations (like mine) have developed in an over-stimulated environment. We are no longer satisfied nor amazed by simple things. As budgets for show-business and entertainment companies grew, so did our standards for amazement and wonder. [1]

  In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline — e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine — has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less. [2]

Like this quote denotes, I sometimes feel that everything is already explored or have been done before. This vision often cause a reflex to search for existing answers before even tackling a problem on my own.

He continues by saying that we are not going to school because of an initial desire to learn and understand the world, but because the existing world wants us to learn what it considers important:

  In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. [2]

Factors of influence

Motivation (in any flavor) can be influenced by personality characteristics, environmental factors and social situations. For example, there is a negative correlation between being in a depressed state and demonstrating curiosity in general.

  It has been suggested that a decline in curiosity is one characteristic manifested by depressed individuals. [...] Results indicated that subjects made temporarily depressed reported significantly less state curiosity, perceived value of information, and desire for additional knowledge than elated or neutral subjects. [3]

Now if we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it seems obvious that people with less satisfied needs are not naturally led to be curious. This implies that any society, family or individual that never approves the work of others, that can't provide security or food to its members doesn't provide an environment suitable for curiosity to develop.

There might also be physiological and developmental predispositions to grow up curious about the world. You can read more about these here and here.

Training?

The next section is highly subjective as it contains personal opinions

While there are things you can do to increase the likelihood of becoming curious about a particular subjects, I don't believe curiosity is something you can unlock with a magical treatment. Don't force it. It develops with time and new experiences.

Thing I would suggest:

Making practical uses of a subject, making links to other subjects you are already interested in. For instance, I became highly motivated in math and physics classes after finding an application for it in 3D game development. On another note, some people tackle life's problems with metaphors of things they know well.
Breaking the desire for stability, security and familiarity. Here is some media on the subject: Sell your crap. Pay your debt. Do what you love, Fuck your comfort zone.
Learning to learn (as stereotypical as it may sound) and doing things that you love.
Surround yourself with curious, motivated and interesting people. It will lead to very interesting discussions and you will learn lots of stuff from each other.


How do neurons know where to send transmitters?

When a neuron fires an action potential, it doesn't "select" a target. It releases neurotransmitter (somewhat probabilistically, as vesicle release has a probability <1 at most synapses) to every cell it synapses on, all of the thousands you reference.
What is important for selectivity is the development of synapses, which are shaped by axon guidance cues and later by synaptic plasticity. All of this is laid down well before an action potential causes neurotransmitter release.
However, for almost all connections in the brain, a post-synaptic neuron won't fire due to the activity of a single pre-synaptic cell. Therefore, the selectivity in which neurons will fire an action potential is driven by the population of neurons that are previously active, not any one cell. Neurons that fire in the near future can be said to be determined by the combination of all the neurons firing in the recent past, including both excitatory and inhibitory neurons. This gives brains an incredible diversity of possible states. If we are to simplify neurons as "firing" or "not firing" in a given time window that would equal 2^(number of neurons) possible states, each leading to a different subsequent state.


Why do some people undergo sudden savant syndrome?

Savant syndrome can be congenital or acquired.[1,2] The acquired savant syndrome can occur in people with stroke, head injury, and even some degenerative diseases (such as dementia) that affect the left fronto-temporal lobe. [1] Transcranial magnetic stimulations of this area, which can cause inhibition in this area, can also elicit these kinds of unusual capacities too, even though only transiently. [3-5] So, there is a theory that the extraordinary skills of savants, such as calculating, memorizing, and performing music, exist latently within us all but are not normally accessible because there is inhibition from some areas, especially the left fronto-temporal lobe.

  Snyder and Mitchell (1999) have argued that the extraordinary skills of savants, including mathematics and drawing, are within us all but cannot normally be accessed without some form of brain damage. It has also been argued that such skills can be made accessible to normal people by switching off part of their brain artificially using magnetic pulses (Carter, 1999). Using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to interrupt the function of the frontotemporal lobe, a region of the brain implicated in the development of savant skills (Miller et al., 1996,1998), we tested this hypothesis. Here we show that savant-type skills improved in 5 out of 17 participants during the period of stimulation.[4]

So, lesions at the left fronto-temporal lobe can cause disinhibition of neural processes in some other areas and enable those areas to function with extraordinary capacities [3,4]; thus, some people can suddenly develop savant syndrome because there is an acute lesion, such as stroke, head trauma, and even transcranial magnetic stimulation, at the left fronto-temporal lobe (or other yet-undiscovered inhibiting areas) thereby releasing the latent savant skill.

References:

Treffert DA. The savant syndrome: An extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present, future. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 May 27; 364(1522): 1351–1357doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0326.
Wikipedia. Savant syndrome.
Snyder A. Explaining and inducing savant skills: Privileged access to lower level, less-processed information. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 May 27; 364(1522): 1399–1405. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0290.
Young RL, Ridding MC, Morrell TL. Switching skills on by turning off part of the brain. Neurocase. 2004 Jun;10(3):215-22.
Snyder A, Bahramali H, Hawker T, Mitchell DJ. Savant-like numerosity skills revealed in normal people by magnetic pulses. Perception. 2006;35(6):837-45.


Islam and participation in acts of political violence

A good, and very pertinent question. This speculative and blunt answer is based on the literature that I have studied as part of understanding behavior change. It is a simplification of the literature, but it should set a foundation that you could build on if you wanted to investigate further and develop a more nuanced view.

  Is religious affiliation really a predisposing factor for people to
  actually commit acts of terrorism and politically-motivated violence?

I start with a basic assumption: As terrorists are people we can assume that they are motivated by the same things as people in general.

Based on this assumption it seems more than reasonable to expect that religious affiliation would influence behavior, and in some cases influence likelihood of violence and terrorism. In all that follows you can assume that I am contrasting one 'more benign' form of religious affiliation, such as atheism, with another form which is more easily used to justify violence, such as Christianity or Islam. The following are some reasons why having one type of affiliation rather than the other might affect behavior:

Mental characteristics, such as values, attitudes, and beliefs, have a strong influence on behavior [e.g. 1]. Additionally, these mental attributes are influenced by information [e.g., 2], such as what might have been encountered in religious literature. Given this argument, it seems reasonable to assume that the religious literature that terrorists have read could have influenced their mental attributes, and in turn predisposed them, even if just to a small extent, to engage in terrorist behavior.
Expected value has a strong influence on behavior [3]. Essentially, people are more likely to engage in behaviours that they believe will create value for them. For most of us, suicide is a pretty low value outcome but for certain religions, suicide to kill others is going to be rewarded by eternal life, along with a number of devoted companions. Likewise a war can be holy for some religious affiliations but not others. In light of this example, it seems reasonable to assume that religious beliefs that make a terrorist behaviour appear like it will be more rewarding, will in turn influence people with those beliefs,than those without, to be more likely to engage in that behaviour.
Research suggests that most people generally require justifications for their actions to avoid congnitive dissonance [e.g., 4]. Those who have been raised by learning a religious scripture which presents many justifications for violence, would in turn have easy mental access to these justifications when thinking about how to act. Indeed, they might have access to the justification that a supreme, unquestionable, omnipent, ominpotent individual wants them to act in a violent way. Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume that individuals with these sets of justifications could use them to justify violence, while those not in possession of such justifications would not be able to.

I am happy to clarify, or add to this as you wish. I am sure I have oversimplified things in a few cases.

References:

[1]Ajzen, I. and M. Fishbein (2000). "Attitudes and the attitude-behavior relation: Reasoned and automatic processes." European Review of Social Psychology 11(1): 1-33.

[2] Chaiken, S. (1980). "Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39(5): 752-766.

[3] Wigfield, A. and J. S. Eccles (2000). "Expectancy-Value Theory of Achievement Motivation." Contemporary Educational Psychology 25(1): 68-81.

[4] Festinger, L. (1962). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.


how to statistically analyse accuracy data (psycholinguistics)

Sounds interesting!
Transferring counts into percentages definitely loses some information: 1/2 is not the same evidence as 100/200, but the difference is lost as a percentage.

ANOVA is pretty popular, but as you note in the question it can have problems.
Because you have the classic linguistics/psych use-case of non-independent data (ie grouped by participant), you probably want to jump on the mixed effects model bandwagon if you possibly can. I hear it's all the rage.

Some justification/motivation here:

Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of memory and language, 59(4), 434-446.

And R package to do the heavy lifting for you here:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glmm/vignettes/intro.pdf

Sounds like you have the binomial-input case.


How are real life events translated into dream symbolism?

We do not know a lot about how dreams work yet. However, there are some theories out there. One theory of particular interest is that are dreams are a means of reverse learning.

  In 1983
  Francis Crick of the Salk Institute in La
  Jolla, Calif., and Graeme Mitchison of
  the University of Cambridge in England
  proposed the idea of reverse learning.
  Working from the Hobson-McCarley
  assumption of random neocortical bombardment
  by PGO waves and their own
  knowledge of the behavior of stimulated
  neural networks, they postulated that a
  complex associational neural network
  such as the neocortex might become
  overloaded by vast amounts of incoming
  information. The neocortex could then
  develop false, or “parasitic,” thoughts
  that would jeopardize the true and orderly
  storage of memory.
  According to Crick and Mitchison’s
  hypothesis, REM sleep served to erase
  these spurious associations on a regular
  basis. Random PGO waves impinged on
  the neocortex, resulting in erasure, or unlearning,
  of the false information. This
  process served an essential function: it
  allowed the orderly processing of memory.
  In humans, dreams were a running
  record of these parasitic thoughts—material
  to be purged from memory.

At any rate, it seems that dreams are less a representation of an event and more a byproduct of random impulses coming from the brain stem. These may be made less 'random' (seemingly) only because the things we think about most and spend most our energy on are probably more likely to be 'happened upon' in the dream state.

Any further tendency to recognize a certain dream pattern after a certain event may be an occurrence of this, as well as an instance of selective remembering, or remembering the instances that support your case and neglecting the instances that don't. Having dreams of a classroom in college is normal because you are in classrooms (and you are unconsciously forced to remember the topics you have picked up on in your own middle school classrooms, which may be later 'dream material'), and associating these dreams with futile mental effort is a broad case, considering that college is essentially a four-year cycle of seemingly-futile mental effort. ;)


What is a good example of a psychological theory that became formalized into neural and computational terms?

Check out all of the videos in this playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrppe54fixc&list=PL1hKzFfV5qJlVTjD8XWzyiaHxBZZ7iWs9&index=3

The particular video I linked gives the example of the "Papez circuit".  Other interviewees mention other examples as well.


Does 3rd person reference to self change perception of self?

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

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

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


How do you raise the stakes in an experiment without actually paying people money?

Make them create something with their own hands, something hard to make and use that as currency.

I first became aware of this type of experiments from a ted talk by Dan Ariely which I recommend you watch, specially the last part:

What Pushes Us To Work Hard — Even When We Don't Have To?

The gist from these behavioral economics experiments, is that we value things we make substantially higher than an impartial evaluator,even more if making them was difficult,challenging or rewarding; so if you don't have money but have willing  experimenters, you could possibly make them create something, let them assign a value and then use it as currency.

You experiment would be as follow:

Create something - Origami,painting, sculpture of themselves
Assign Value - Ask them how much would they sell it for
Substitute for currency - Take their thing away from them, now you have something you can reward them with or even fraction.


Awareness of unconditional positive regard

Unconditional Positive Regard is one of the core conditions in Person Centered Counselling and so is congruence.

In order for you to provide Unconditional  Positive Regard (UPR), you need to be congruent and in order for you to be congruent you need to be genuine in your responses.  Therefore, you should only provide the truth to any question asked.

You need to tell them what UPR is and that in order for UPR to exist you will be non-judgemental and you would provide a safe and warm environment for them to explore what is troubling them in the here and now.


Are there any vocal chord experiments that attempt to synthesize communication externally?

I have studied computational neuroscience, first as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and then as a graduate student at UCSD and the Salk Institute.

As an answer to your question, to my knowledge, and after a quick search on google scholar, there are no studies that try to reroute auditory information to the visual cortex through the vocal chords.

And I wouldn't imagine there would be. Auditory (cochlear, thalamic and cortical) and visual (retinal, thalamic and cortical) processing centers  are highly optimized for different flavors of information. Visual information is higher band-width, continuous along multiple dimensions, and relies on many parallel filters and aggregators. Auditory information is serial, and recursive.

Here's some information that might help you get to the heart of your inquiry. First, take a look at neural prosthetics in general. These facillitate information delivery directly to the nervous system, bypassing sensory input:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroprosthetics

For a look at sensory modality switching, take a look at delivering visual information through tongue stimulators (work pioneered by an interesting researcher named Paul Bach-y-Rita):

Finally, take a look at an experiment in which visual information is sent to the auditory cortex, by way of thalamic surgery in ferrets, if I have my citation correct. The auditory cortex proved to be able to adapt to the visual information by forming some structural characteristics of the visual cortex:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v404/n6780/abs/404841a0.html

Perhaps the most interesting part of that last link, in terms of your inquiry, is that the visual information did not bypass auditory processing centers. It transformed them.


Is there a technical term for someone being burnt out on something they enjoy?

There is no specific term for this entire phenomenon because there is more than one psychological theory playing a role in your overindulgence or "binge". Fatigue from repetitiveness, durability bias, and habituation all play a huge role in determining how long you can listen to a certain song before its gets repetitive and boring.
On the other hand, tolerance from substance abuse has its own special term: Drug Habituation.
You would be best off searching scholarly journals using the keywords fatigue and habituation.

Further Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation
http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/durability_bias.htm


Asking for illogical things to make extreme views normal?

It is a concept called "Overton Window". I finally found the article. It is not an effect though:

  There’s a concept in political theory developed by Joseph P. Overton which suggests that there’s a “window” of acceptable ideas and policy proposals in public discourse. Everything inside the window is normal and expected, while everything outside the window is radical, ridiculous, or unthinkable. And Overton argued that the easiest way to move that window was to force people to consider ideas at the extremes, as far away from the window as possible. Because forcing people to consider an unthinkable idea, even if they rejected it, would make all less extreme ideas seem acceptable by comparison -- it would move the “window” slowly in that direction.


What determines whether sensitization or desensitization occurs?

The terminology in this area can be a source of confusion because sensitization is not usually meant as the opposite of desensitization but of habituation. E.g., Blumstein (2016)

  People have written about habituation, a process that leads to decreased responsiveness to a stimulus, as
  well as its counterpart, sensitization, or an increased responsiveness to a stimulus, for over 2000 years.

So what's desensitization then? Well...

Systematic desensitization is basically an extinction procedure for (assumed) previously conditioned stimuli:

  Behavior therapy employs interventions based on classical and operant conditioning. An early example is Wolpe’s (1954) systematic desensitization in which patients are taught progressive relaxation techniques and then are systematically exposed to stimuli that elicit fear while in a relaxed state. Because the relaxation response is incompatible with anxiety, it weakens the learned association between a stimulus and an anxiety response.

And desensitization is often taken to mean the roughly the same as the systematic one, e.g. Clay (2007):

  Desensitization is generally described as a process by which the active pairing of a positive reinforcer with a negative event causes the negative event to slowly lose its ability to adversely influence behavior (Chance, P., 2003). This active process is also called counter-conditioning. Systematic desensitization has been used successfully to treat human phobias, such as fear of flying, fear of public speaking, and fear of spiders, and has also been used to reduce the intensity of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in veterans of the Vietnam War (Chance, P., 2003). For animals, a similarly competing response could be eating. Using competing responses to interfere with a fearful response is an integral part of the systematic desensitization process as defined by Wolpe (1958, as cited by Callen, E.J., & Boyd, T.L., 1990).

To add to this confusion, some mean by sensitization only the conditioned version, e.g.

  Sensitization occurs when a reaction to a stimulus causes an increased reaction to a second stimulus. It is essentially an exaggerated startle response and is often seen in trauma survivors.

But this is actually not that wrong, because unlike for habituation, it's hard to come up with many examples of unconditioned sensitization, e.g. what does Blumstein give (for both)?

  Habituation is a process that leads to decreased responsiveness
  to a stimulus with repeated presentation and is often adaptive in
  that it makes it less likely that individuals will respond to harmless
  stimuli. Found throughout the animal kingdom, some plants have
  also been shown to habituate (Jensen, Dill, & Cahill, 2011). However,
  habituation may also have consequences. Aesop recognized
  the consequences of habitation 2500 years ago when he noted that
  the boy who cried wolf would ultimately be ignored when he
  needed help to fend off a real wolf.

  Habituation's counterpart is sensitization--the increased
  responsiveness to a stimulus with repeated presentation. Sensitization
  may be adaptive if it helps animals avoid potentially risky or
  costly situations. Being sensitized to the sound of bees may help
  elephants avoid getting their sensitive trunks stung (sensu King,
  Douglas-Hamilton, & Vollrath, 2007), and may help allergic
  humans avoid an anaphylactic reaction. But it too may be costly. For
  instance, while drug addiction is usually thought to involve some
  degree of tolerance to drugs, indeed, it also involves sensitized
  responses that can be used diagnostically because greater salience
  is attached to the drugs and drug-associated cues (Steketee &
  Kalivas, 2011). Living without risk is impossible (Sagarin et al.,
  2010), and the public may become sensitized to real or manufactured
  threats repeated by the press (e.g. consider the U.S. government
  assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or the
  American response to Ebola cases being treated in the United States
  in September--November 2014). Over-reacting to risk can lead to
  costly foreign policy mis-steps and costly public health responses.

Somewhat more interesting examples are given by Çevik (2014)

  The signal value of a stimulus is correlated with its potential to support responsiveness, which for a given set of physical parameters depends largely on the history of non-associative learning, i.e., habituation and sensitization for the stimulus. Habituation refers to the reduction in the probability or amplitude of responding that is observed upon inconsequential stimulus repetition. For example, repeated delivery of an odor at constant inter-stimulus-intervals (ISI) would eventually lead to the habituation of the response that is initially triggered by the odor. I say eventually, because depending on the parameters of the stimulation protocol (e.g., odor concentration, frequency of odor presentation), a temporary increment in responsiveness might initially be observed. If, however, an appetitive gustatory stimulus (e.g., sugar) is repeated with the same ISI, depending again on the concentration of sugar, frequency of stimulation, and the physiological state of the organism, this protocol is likely to result in an increment in the probability of responding, i.e., sensitization. Finally if odor and sugar are paired instead of being presented separately, the standard paradigm for Pavlovian conditioning would ensue, where the two stimuli would now be termed conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimuli (US), respectively. Hence, associative learning can be suggested to entail an evasion from habituation for the CS as it signals the arrival of a sensitizing event, the US, and a conditioned response (CR) would then be triggered during the CS in anticipation of the US.

And he actually proposes some general rules:

  habituation might be the default fate for most stimuli in the absence of top-down modulation (although see Horn and Hinde, 1970 for examples of non-habituating reflexes). [...]

  the likelihood of habituation, i.e., the inability of a perceivable stimulus to control behavior is higher for distal stimuli, whereas the likelihood of sensitization is higher for stimuli that come into direct contact with the body to activate gustatory and/or mechanoreceptors.

Although his rules are derived from research on flies.

The wiki sensitization page you mention doesn't talk of PTSD as far as I can tell.

From what I know of PTSD research in this area, it involves conditioned stimuli, e.g. a fairly cited paper in this line, Orr et al.:

  Differential conditioning was assessed in 15 medication-free individuals meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria for chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 18 trauma-exposed individuals who never developed PTSD (non-PTSD). Conditioned stimuli (CSs) were colored circles, and the unconditioned stimulus was a "highly annoying" electrical stimulus. Individuals with PTSD had higher resting heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) levels and produced larger SC orienting responses. During conditioning, the PTSD group showed larger differential SC, HR, and electromyogram responses to the reinforced vs. nonreinforced stimuli (CS+ vs. CS-) compared with the non-PTSD group. Only PTSD participants continued to show differential SC responses to CS+ vs. CS- during extinction trials. Results suggest that individuals with PTSD have higher sympathetic nervous system arousal at the time of conditioning and are more conditionable than trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD.

In that paper, PTSD patients were harder to de-condition or "desensitize" to use your terminology (see the sentence about extinction in the abstract I quoted above); PTSD patients also showed increased responses (compared to controls) to conditioned stimuli after conditioning took place, although as far as I can tell they were not easier to "sensitize"/condition, at least in that experiment.

The interaction between conditioned and unconditioned exposures to a stressful stimulus is fairly complex (even in animal [models]) and assumed to be of importance in PTSD. It's been known for a long time (Rescorla, 1974) that giving stronger unconditioned footshocks to rats increases their conditioned response to moderate footshock. So this is a kind of sensitization when conditional and unconditional effects interact. A more recent line of work on this interaction:

  Rats presented with a single session of repeated
  painful footshocks normally express a robust and persistent
  associative fear of the training context (Gale et al., 2004; Poulos
  et al., 2009), whereas subsequent new fear learning to a single
  footshock of the same intensity becomes sensitized to a newly
  trained context or a tone (Rau et al., 2005). We call this phenomenon
  stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL). Pharmacologically
  induced (NMDA antagonism) and naturally occurring (preweaned
  pups) amnesia of the repeated footshock context fail to disrupt this
  sensitized fear learning (Rau et al., 2005; Long & Fanselow, 2012;
  Poulos et al., 2013). These results suggest that prior exposure to a
  repeated footshock stress, independent of a contextual fear memory,
  enhances subsequent fear learning when footshock intensity is
  held constant. Further evidence that stress influences future learning
  and does not produce its effect by generalization between the
  stress and conditioning contexts is that SEFL only occurs when the
  stress occurs prior to the one-trial fear conditioning (Rau et al.,
  2005). [...]

  SEFL would be a particularly problematic component of posttrauma behavior if intense
  stress results in substantial fear conditioning under conditions that would not normally support conditioning.
  Therefore, we determined if SEFL occurred when the conditioning shock was substantially
  milder than the SEFL-inducing shock. The results indicate that exposure to a sensitizing regimen of shock
  can convert a mild footshock that normally does not support measurable levels of fear conditioning into
  one that causes substantial learned fear. Moreover, as the intensity of single footshock increases, so does
  the capacity of the prior stressor to contribute to the sensitization of fear responses.


Are intelligence scores correlated with detection of second stimulus in an Attentional Blink test?

CHCH mentions in the comments that Attentional Blink has been shown to correlate with operation span, a component of working memory. (Colzato et al., 2007)

It has also been demonstrated that working memory correlates highly with general intelligence. (Colom et al., 2004)

So yes, performance on an attentional blink task correlates with intelligence scores.

  Colom, R., Rebollo, I., Palacios, A., Juan-Espinosa, M., & Kyllonen,
  P. C. (2004). Working memory is (almost) perfectly predicted by< i>
  g. Intelligence, 32(3), 277-296. PDF

  Colzato, L. S., Spapé, M. M., Pannebakker, M. M., & Hommel, B. (2007).
  Working memory and the attentional blink: Blink size is predicted by
  individual differences in operation span. Psychonomic Bulletin &
  Review, 14(6), 1051-1057. PDF


Preconciousness is associated with intense activation, yet confined to sensori-motor processors ;
 Occipito-temporal loops and local synchrony ;
 Priming at multiple levels ;
 No reportability while attention is occupied elsewhere ;

quora could also provide some answers : https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-core-of-human-consciousness/answer/Daisi-Lui ;

preconsciousness could have started earlier than consciousness ;

Freud, S., Strachey, J., In Freud, A., In Rothgeb, C. L., Richards, A., & Scientific Literature Corporation. (1953). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud.


The "Triune brain" model is obsolete, what is the name of the model that replaces it?

There isn’t a new model, exactly, since as the poster stated, the brain doesn’t operate as a model and earlier versions of brain structures simply modify themselves to evolve— it’s one brain. Meaning, one’s “lizard brain” is actually just a mammalian brain now. The new model perhaps is The Human Brain? But given that the Triune model was most popularized by lawyers needing it for defense against emotional (irrational) behavior and psychologists adopted it for explanation of emotional dysregulation, then likely the best replacement is theory about emotion. Emotions are not well understood, and there are several theories about them, but the latest and most provocative development is the Theory of Constructed Emotion. See Barrett-Feldman et al.


Do introverts tend to experience more psychological problems?

Several other disorders relate to introversion, including:

Avoidant personality disorder (Morey et al., 2002)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (Samuels et al., 2000)
Schizotypal personality disorder (Funder, 1997? Don't have it on-hand, but will try to verify this later when I do.)
Schizoid personality disorder (Morey et al., 2002)
Generalized anxiety disorder in young adults (ages 25–39; Kessler et al., 2008)

I would not expect lack of ideas to mediate these relationships. Introversion is sometimes thought to relate to "richer inner worlds" (can't recall where I read that, and I don't put a lot of stock in the claim). Introversion relates negatively to openness to experience, but seems to have a complex relationship with creativity. A common theory about introversion is that it relates to interest in reading (found some such evidence in Chinese adolescents so far; Lau & Cheung, 1988); this would certainly help with any lack of ideas.

References
- Funder, D. C. (1997). The personality puzzle. W. W. Norton & Co.
- Kessler, R. C., Gruber, M., Hettema, J. M., Hwang, I., Sampson, N., & Yonkers, K. A. (2008).  Comorbid major depression and generalized anxiety disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey follow-up.  Psychological Medicine, 38(3), 365–374.
- Lau, S., & Cheung, S. M. (1988). Reading interests of Chinese adolescents: Effects of personal and social factors. International Journal of Psychology, 23(1-6), 695–705.
- Morey, L. C., Gunderson, J. G., Quigley, B. D., Shea, M. T., Skodol, A. E., McGlashan, T. H., ... & Zanarini, M. C. (2002). The representation of borderline, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, and schizotypal personality disorders by the five-factor model. Journal of Personality Disorders, 16(3), 215–234.
- Samuels, J., Nestadt, G., Bienvenu, O. J., Costa, P. T., Riddle, M. A., Liang, K. Y., ... & Cullen, B. (2000). Personality disorders and normal personality dimensions in obsessive—compulsive disorder. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 177(5), 457–462. Retrieved from http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/177/5/457.long.


Are any kinds of behavior proved to correlate with estrogen levels?

Ehrhardt, A.A. (1978) states that

  A review of the behavioral effects of estrogen has to be divided on the basis of different time periods. During the critical phase of brain differentiation (which is species specific and takes place either before birth or neonatally), various sex hormones have long-term and permanent effects on behavior. Therefore, their action has been termed developmental or organizational. In contrast, hormones in adulthood, after the critical phase has passed, affect reversible changes in behavior and have been called activational.

An article in the Scientific American links to other several studies including Smith, C.T., et al. (2014) revealing that

  greater increases in estrogen levels across the menstrual cycle led to less impulsive decision making.

whilst Kritzer, M.F. and Kohama, S.G. (1999) states that

  estrogen increased dopamine innervation in the primate prefrontal cortex.

References

Ehrhardt, A. A. (1978). Behavioral Effects of Estrogen in the Human Female In: Pediatrics, 62(6);PMID: 724354

Kritzer, M.F. and Kohama, S.G. (1999). Ovarian hormones differentially influence immunoreactivity for dopamine beta- hydroxylase, choline acetyltransferase, and serotonin in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of adult rhesus monkeys In: The Journal of Comparitive Neurology, 409(3): pp 438-51;PMID: 10379829 DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1096-9861(19990705)409:3<438::AID-CNE8>3.0.CO;2-5

Smith, C. T., Sierra, Y., Oppler, S. H., & Boettiger, C. A. (2014). Ovarian Cycle Effects on Immediate Reward Selection Bias in Humans: A Role for Estradiol In: Journal of Neuroscience, 34(16): pp 5468-5476; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0014-14.2014


What is actually going on in your brain during a night terror?

Night terrors, a type of parasomnia has been the subject of considerable study.

According to "Insights from studying human sleep
disorders" (Mahowald and Schenck, 2005), parasomnias are in two categories:

  The common parasomnias are another example of
  ‘dissociated sleep states’, representing the simultaneous admixture of
  wakefulness and either NREM sleep (disorders of arousal such as
  sleepwalking or sleep terrors) or wakefulness and REM sleep (REM
  sleep behaviour disorder). Parasomnias may result in striking clinical
  phenomena, which appear as the brain becomes reorganized across
  states, and are therefore apt to occur during the transition from one
  state to another.

Sleep terrors are an example of NREM sleep disorder and are usually the result of febrile illness, sleep deprivation, physical activity, emotional stress and medications - so the question about the bed can relate, particularly if the bed is causing lack of sleep.


Of course the mind is not independent of the brain.  Otherwise, nobody would do recreational drugs, psychiatric drugs would be useless, and our whole theory of light and color perception, sound perception, and every other sensory perception would be useless and make no predictions.  All of these things tell us how signal in the environment are transduced into electrical signals and processed in the brain.  And while we don't know exactly how it becomes a mental experience (The Hard Problem), we know that there are many direct relationships between activity in the brain and perceptions and states in the mind.

The mind isn't just memories and experiences stored in the brain though, it's also active processing of current stimuli, which includes spontaneous activity that may randomly draw on memories and experiences, but not in a sensible or meaningful way.  That is to say, there are biological processes that aren't really necessary to brain/mind, but to metabolism or long-term evolutionary benefit, yet they still influence brain/mind and we sometimes ascribe meaning to them without merit.


Free online intelligence test with norm table, high reliability, and must be printable?

Online Test: Try iqtest.dk. It is basically a copy of Raven's Progressive Matrices.

This test is developed with the aim of measuring your Intelligence Quotient (IQ). The test is Culture Fair, i.e. it minimises the effect of cultural variables, such as language, mathematics, etc. The test is based on logic, but is furthermore designed to test learning capability, memory, innovative thinking and the ability to simultaneously address several problems.

The test measures the general intelligence - g.
The calculation of IQ is based on answers from more than 250,000 people.