What is the influence of "effort put into pursuing wealth" on happiness?

In alignment with the question author's commentary refinement, "It would already be a nice and useful answer if there was -any- clue on -any- type of happiness.":I submit:

Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers. "Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?" American Economic Review 103.3 (2013): 598-604. Web.

Abstract

Many scholars have argued that once “basic needs” have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple datasets, multiple definitions of “basic needs” and multiple questions about well-being, we find no support for this claim. The relationship between well-being and income is roughly linear-log and does not diminish as incomes rise. If there is a satiation point, we are yet to reach it.Summary of findings:To preview, we find no evidence of a satiation point. The income–well-being link that one finds when examining only the poor, is similar to that found when examining only the rich. We show that this finding is robust across a variety of datasets, for various measures of subjective well-being, at various thresholds, and that it holds in roughly equal measure when making cross-national comparisons between rich and poor countries as when making comparisons between rich and poor people within a country.

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In contrast...

Diener, Ed, and Biswas-Diener, Robert. "Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being?" Social Indicators Research 57.2 (2002): 119-169. Web.

Abstract (reformatted for ease of reading)

Four replicable findings have emerged regarding the relation between income and subjective well-being (SWB):There are large correlations between the wealth of nations and the mean reports of SWB in them,There are mostly small correlations between income and SWB within nations, although these correlations appear to be larger in poor nations, and the risk of unhappiness is much higher for poor people,Economic growth in the last decades in most economically developed societies has been accompanied by little rise in SWB, and increases in individual income lead to variable outcomes, andPeople who prize material goals more than other values tend to be substantially less happy, unless they are rich.Thus, more money may enhance SWB when it means avoiding poverty and living in a developed nation, but income appears to increase SWB little over the long-term when more of it is gained by well-off individuals whose material desires rise with their incomes. Several major theories are compatible with most existing findings:The idea that income enhances SWB only insofar as it helps people meet their basic needs, andThe idea that the relation between income and SWB depends on the amount of material desires that people's income allows them to fulfil[].We argue that the first explanation is a special case of the second one. A third explanation is relatively unresearched, the idea that societal norms for production and consumption are essential to understanding the SWB-income interface. In addition, it appears high SWB might increase people's chances for high income. We review the open issues relating income to SWB, and describe the research methods needed to provide improved data that will better illuminate the psychological processes relating money to SWB.

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In spite of the substance in my answer (above), I maintain that the premise and question are poorly framed. Not unlike Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), I firmly believe that a post-modernist philosophical approach is being employed by this line of research that flirts dangerously close to pseudo-science. While there is little doubting the potential for the sensational, I stand with those who venture that applying immature definitions, as well as, recursive and undeclared assumptions create an illusion of scientific maturity that simply does not exist. Further, the current approach (unintentionally?) advocates unsound scientific short-cuts that, at best, run the risk of gross misinterpretation by lay persons -- while at worst, subject the entire body of knowledge to endless premise challenges. There is very little in this thread of research that is meaningful or actionable outside a very narrow community -- and still, for them, most appropriately, only to conclude that more focus is needed. It can, after all, be considered an advance to get off the blank page and begin scratching away at the "we don't know what we don't know" knowledge boundary. I suppose through Dr. Steven Wright (Visiting scientist, Brain and Language Lab, Georgetown University), I can be more cogent (and diplomatic) on this point.

According to Dr. Steve Wright, it is important for researchers to level set their understanding of the meaning happiness before measuring happiness or interpreting statistics for actionable conclusions. He suggests that, currently, two high-level meanings of happiness have emerged. One is happiness as a transitory emotion, a feeling. He further suggests, there are researchers who seem to think this is all there is, and would define a happy life as nothing more than a tally of emotionally “up” or "down" snapshots. While the completely, separate and distinct alternative meaning has a stronger cognitive component (bias), involving memory and judgment (which introduces entirely different, if not equally subjective challenges to scientific measurement and replicability. Finally, Dr. Wright also suggests the integrity of subjects answers can (should?) be viewed through a lens of disbelief -- that is, 'is a respondent's answer true and accurate or skewed selectively and/or unintentionally?Researchers have not yet come to an agreement about this dichotomy. They’re still quite a ways from being able to shed much light on most of the big questions. What’s really known scientifically advances slowly.

Disclaimer:  With the exception of the final blockquote, I am not purporting to channel Dr. Wright. My representation of him is applied interpretation.


Evidence of 'virtually limitless' long-term memory

I have tried to put your question in the context of modern memory research, but without involving specific models (which would make your question far too broad to answer). Hopefully, this will clarify what purpose the construct of long-term memory serves in modern memory theory, and what exactly is meant by it being "unlimited," without giving a chapter-length answer.
What is long-term memory to memory researchers?
Operationally speaking, long-term memory is memory that fails to exhibit the primary effects that characterize, and which we use to define and study, shorter term and working memory, especially capacity limitations and interference. In a sentence, long term memory is memory that has survived the forgetting process for sufficiently long that the expected chance of forgetting asymptotically approaches zero under a particular model. From the article in the question, some very useful context precedes the given quote:

Closely linked with the idea of memory exercising, is the question of
whether long-term memory has a limited storage capacity or is limitless.
This question is illustrated by the textbook anecdote of the professor of
ornithology who stopped learning the names of his students because each
time he learned the name of a student he forgot the name of a bird.

The bolded quote lies at the heart of what memory researchers mean when they say that there are no known limits on long-term memory. Within the context of current storage-based memory models, we may say that long-term memory is limited if and only if cross-domain interference is known to occur at arbitrarily long time scales (i.e., if new memories can "push out" old memories.)
Memory interference
The existence of cross-domain interference is an oft held anecdotal belief, but there is no empirical evidence to support the idea of any such limit on memories that have 'survived' the consolidation process for sufficiently long. It is particularly helpful to understand the effect known as proactive interference here:

Proactive interference (PI)
Suppose I present you with a list of food items (apple, steak, ham), then test your recall. Then, I present you with another list of food items (orange, carrot, chicken soup) and test your recall again. Your performance will be worse than on the first list, because the first list is proactively interfering with your recall of the second list.
Now, if I present yet another food item list, I can increase the PI effect
until your retention approaches zero. If I instead present you with a
list of car parts, your performance goes back to 'normal'. This is
known as release from proactive interference.

The existence of release from proactive interference effects implies that no or very little cross-domain interference occurs at all, even over relatively short scales, and therefore that no long-term cross-domain interference occurs. Based on this alone, it is fair to say that modern memory science is not aware of any limitation on the amount of information the brain is able to store and retrieve.
Concluding remarks
I hope my answer has been informative regarding how memory researchers define memory, and what they mean when they say that long-term memory is "unlimited." As I think your question is getting at, long-term memory is certainly not a well defined construct. It isn't something we can observe directly or even indirectly, but tends to be used as a definitional convenience, at least within a research context.
Long-term memory is simply memory that no longer exhibits the characteristic effects that memory researchers operationally define memory by in the first place; a decidedly negative construct. It isn't wrong to say that long-term memory is unlimited, but it isn't particularly useful knowledge unto itself, either.
Note also that, although the distinction between short- and long-term has remained extremely popular since its introduction in the 60's, it is not universally accepted. Erikssonian long-term working memory theory, process memory theory and ecological psychology are all examples of models or schools of thought that either reject or are entirely incommensurate with the idea of a short vs. long-term distinction, or even that memories are "stored."


What are the practical uses of ontologies?

Interesting question. "Ontology" is often used in confusing and polyvalent ways, so let's start by clearing up the terminology very quickly for those who aren't intimate with the various different meanings.

What does "ontology" mean?

Broadly, ontology the field is the philosophical study of being. An ontology is a method for establishing what beings or entities may exist (cf. epistemology's whether we should believe they exist), how they may be grouped, and the relations they may have.

In information and computer science, "ontology" is used in a related, but not identical sense to refer to formally defined sets of types, properties and the relationships between them. To answer your question, then, relations compose part of an ontology, but ontologies do not comprise sets of relations and nothing but sets of relations. From the Wikipedia page:

  An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can formally exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set of concept definitions, but more general. And it is a different sense of the word than its use in philosophy. -- Tom Gruber, Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing.

(Gruber updated the definition in 2007, but it is not so much different as an extension.)

Ontologies and ACT-R

ACT-R defines a basic ontology with the entities modules, buffers and pattern-matchers, ways to group entities within their type (e.g., perceptual-motor vs. memory modules), and the relations between them.

We use ontologies to abstract away from particular data structures. The ACT-R cognitive architecture both implies and specifies an ontology, and we can use that ontology to extend ACT-R, or make ACT-R talk to other architectures which may not have any data structure overlap with ACT-R. Oltramari et al. (2014) provides an apt concrete ("real"?) example. They coupled ACT-R to the SCOPE knowledge management system, where they use concrete information science ontologies in order to extend ACT-R to use abstract philosophical ontologies.

  In general, ACT-R models only employ as much knowledge as required to perform well-defined cognitive tasks. By and large, they can be seen as “monadic” agents, whose knowledge bases are limited, partially reusable and sporadically portable across experimental conditions. On the contrary, in order to replicate high-level contextual reasoning and pattern recognition in humans, large amount of common-sense knowledge should be available to ACTR: to overcome these limitations, we propose to equip ACT-R with a specific module for processing ontologies [philosophical sense], i.e. semantic specifications of a given domain or application (Guarino, 1998) [information science sense], which are generally used in combination with inference engines for deductive reasoning. Since the ACT-R declarative module supports a relatively coarse-grained semantics based on slot-value pairs, and the procedural system is not optimal to effectively manage complex logical constructs, a specific extension is needed to make ACT-R suitable to fulfill knowledge-intensive cognitive tasks like context-driven spatial reasoning. Accordingly, we engineered an extra module as a bridging component between the cognitive architecture and an external knowledge-base system KBS, SCONE (Fahlman, 2006).

References

Oltramari, A., Vinokurov, Y., Lebiere, C., Oh, J., & Stentz, A. (2014, March). Ontology-Based Cognitive System for Contextual Reasoning in Robot Architectures. In 2014 AAAI Spring Symposium Series.


How large is a neurotransmitter? Max and min sizes?

From the textbook Neuroscience. 2nd edition:

Neuropeptides are relatively large transmitter molecules composed of 3 to 36 amino acids
Individual amino acids, such as glutamate and GABA, as well as the transmitters acetylcholine, serotonin, and histamine, are much smaller than neuropeptides and have therefore come to be called small-molecule neurotransmitters

Large proteins are around 10nm, because the amino acids wrap around each other.
This means that a good estimate of the size of neurotransmitters would be from around 0.5 to 5 nanometers.
Typical synaptic cleft distance is around 20 nanometers


How is the biological accuracy of ANNs typically measured?

One way the biological plausibility of an artificial neural network could be assessed is to look at how much a neural network abstracts away from the behavior of real neurons.

For instance, it is common in psychology and machine learning to use a sigmoidal activation function to determine the output of a node. If biological plausibility is a concern, one might prefer to use the Hodgkin-Huxley model. (See also: other neuronal models).

To many practitioners, biological plausibility is not a primary concern. In most ANNs, each node is not really believed to be implemented by a single neuron in the brain, and thus using a more realistic activation function does not necessarily make the network more biologically realistic.

Personally, I don't think looking at the behavioral accuracy of a biological neural network (compared  to an artificial neural network) says anything about the network's biological plausibility. Using more abstractions might produce more similar behavior due to less overfitting. Another concern is that the ANN could produce the same behavior as a BNN even if the actual computations involved are quite different.


A background assumption is something implied or assumed by what you say, but not explicitly stated.
For instance, if you say 'I feel happy'.  It is implied or assumed that you exist.  It is also implied or assumed that happiness exists.  It is implied and assumed that you have feelings.  It is implied that you have told the truth rather than a lie. A background assumption is that you and I both interpret happiness in a similar way.
Many things we say include background or implied assumptions.  Fortunately, most people make similar background assumptions which means that they don't need to be stated, which greatly aids in efficient communication.
Did you notice that I made the assumption that we all make similar background assumptions?
This question may be better directed to https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/


Why do we have so many wishes and desires?

In the context of evolution, desires and dreams (beyond the lower tier of Maslow's Hierarchy) could be seen as, not an adaptation, but a spandrel of the adaptation of consciousness.

Consciousness allows us higher cognitive skills, particularly the ability to reflect on events and predict events through modelling, which allows us to modify our behavior in a succesful way.   But this extra predictive power also gives us an imagination with which we can imagine ourselves in a better position to exploit our dopamine centers (seek pleasurable activities that don't propagate the species).


Guidelines for self-help group for people who go through divorce/breakup

Aaron Beck is an psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
He is considered the founder of classical approaches to cognitive psychotherapy.

One technique that he suggests is the cognitive technique that generally consists of some steps. N.B. These steps may change depending on the problem, depending on the therapist and depending on the patient-therapist alliance.

According to Beck, negative thoughts result from two separate minds:

The first feels uneasy thinking to flaws of the couple, to all goals not reached, to interpersonal difficulties...
The second cannot ignore these thoughts, because the risk is to loose useful informations that would help to identify the issues that need to be addressed.

You should help the couple to pay attention to those negative thoughts that have to be taken into consideration, neglecting those that you do not think to be useful.

I wish to have been helpful...In conclusion, i suggest Aaron Beck "Love is never enough" (1990)

REFERENCES

Aaron Beck L'amore non basta. Come risolvere i problemi del rapporto di coppia con la terapia cognitiva, Roma: Astrolabio, 1990

@Chris' Edit for English version of book

English version is
Beck, A. 1989. Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems Through Cognitive Therapy. New York:Harper & Row


Near-dream states producing closed-eye visual rendering of the environment

It would seem like what you are experiencing is eidetic memory (Eidetikos) and/or Hypnogogia. Reasons as to how and why this may occur are still being studied. Consider the following here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885948/
"Visual Cues for the Retrieval of Landmark Memories by Navigating Wood Ants" by
Robert A. Harris, Paul Graham, and Thomas S. Collett

Even on short routes, ants can be guided by multiple visual memories. We investigate here the cues controlling memory retrieval as wood ants approach a one- or two-edged landmark to collect sucrose at a point along its base. In such tasks, ants store the desired retinal position of landmark edges at several points along their route. They guide subsequent trips by retrieving the appropriate memory and moving to bring the edges in the scene toward the stored positions.<

And..

Some ants, having located a reliable source of food, shuttle back and forth along idiosyncratic, visually guided routes (e.g., [1–5]); the final stage of their route to a goal is guided by a stored local view or snapshot of the surroundings as seen from a vantage point close to the destination (review [6]). A view of a familiar object stored as a snapshot seems to be encoded in terms of a small set of distinct features, such as oriented edges, color, and retinal size [7–9]. In some experimental situations, ants and bees attend to high-contrast boundaries of objects and guide their path to their destination by moving so as to shift edges in the current retinal image toward their stored retinal positions in the snapshot [7, 9]. If the visual scene is manipulated so that some edges are missing and cannot be matched to the snapshot, the insects will steer as best they can with the remaining edges [7, 9].<

What this seems to be like for us is what has been known as the "Method of Loci".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

The method of loci is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises.<

So, in one sense the brain may perform this operation for some purpose(s) of survival and navigation but these may not be the only reasons. Given that they emerge in these states as you describe makes it even more difficult to ascertain as you are presumably safe and are not in the process of moving about the room.
Also something to consider which I have shared before is the following paper on Electromagnetic Field Theories of Mind: https://philarchive.org/rec/JONETO?all_versions=1
Hope this helps!


Are there any models of human cognition that do not depend on physicalism or materialism?

Algorithms can be seen as rules defined on various states of the system. Thus, there must be a mapping of the physical states to the abstract states, as well as a mapping of the physical rules/transitions to the abstract rules. David Chalmers is one of the most popular philosophers who discusses the notion of when a physical system implements an abstract computational system. [1] It seems like you are asking for theories of cognition that are truly emergent, however. These do exist - for an overview, see [2]. "Models governed by simple laws, especially models that learn, can give rise to emergent patterns that were not predicted in advance and that, even after they have been observed, may not be fully comprehended by the modeler. To what extent such patterns can or ever will be fully understood remains an open question." This vision of the cognitive sciences falls under the epistemological framework of explanatory pluralism - the view that properties exist on many levels, but their physical basis is the same. However, this is still physicalism - everything supervenes on the physical. [3] Furthermore, we are often required to simulate the basic rules in order to even see the emergent properties in the first place. [4] I think the take home message of this situation is that we can't have science without physicalism.

[1] Chalmers, David J. "A computational foundation for the study of cognition." (1993).

[2] McClelland, James L. "Emergence in cognitive science." Topics in cognitive science 2.4 (2010): 751-770.

[3] http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/physicalism/

[4] Baker, Alan. "Simulation-based definitions of emergence." Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 13.1 (2010): 9.


Does Stockholm syndrome have an equivalent for victims of stalking?

I haven't seen any publication discussing Stockholm Syndrome in relation to stalking, but I have seen the syndrome discussed in relation to domestic violence. I reproduce below the criteria for occurrence in cases of domestic violence

  The victim perceives a person threatening her
  survival. The threats may be physical or psychological.
  It is not important whether others
  view her survival as threatened, but rather
  whether she does.
  The victim perceives the abuser showing her
  some kindness, however small. For example,
  the kindness may be that for one day out of
  the month he does not abuse her.
  The victim is isolated from outsiders. This isolation
  may be physical—she is not permitted to
  have contact with family or friends—and/or
  ideological—she is permitted exposure to
  only the abuser’s perspective.
  The victim does not perceive a way to escape
  the abuser. Batterers use violence to help ensure
  that their partners do not leave them.

In my opinion, it could also happen in cases of stalking... however criterion 3 (victim isolation) seems much less likely to happen in cases of stalking. However, stalking is known to increase the social isolation of the victim in some circumstances (altering her/his pattern of social interaction to avoid the stalker), so stalking could potentially lead to 3... but again, I'm just theorizing off the top of my head.

Source:

NA Jackson (ed.), Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence, Routledge, 2007


How does Parkinson's disease result in tremors?

Parkinson's Disease, as you note, is believed to occur due to damage or degeneration to the basal ganglia, especially the substantia nigra. Cells in the basal ganglia and substantia nigra produce dopamine, and in fact, the majority of the brain's dopaminergic cells have their bodies here, but that isn't the whole story. From Kandel's Principles of Neural Science (the first rule of neuroscience is always to look in your PoNS):

Primarily on the basis of studies in MPTP-treated primates, a working model of the pathophysiology of Parkinson disease has been
developed. According to this model, loss of dopaminergic input from the substantia nigra pars compacta to the striatum leads to increased
activity in the indirect pathway and decreased activity in the direct pathway (see Figure 43-6) because of the different actions of dopamine on
the two pathways (via D1 and D2 receptors, respectively). Both of these changes lead to increased activity in the internal pallidal segment, which
results in increased inhibition of thalamocortical and midbrain tegmental neurons and thus the hypokinetic features of the disease.

Tremors and DBS
Three of the central nervous system's four major dopaminergic pathways originate in the substantia nigra, but it is the nigrostriatal pathway which is believed to be involved in Parkinson's tremors. The nigrostriatal pathway innervates the striatum, which is involved in planning movements. Broadly speaking, because the basal ganglia are involved in action selection and routing information, impaired communication along this pathway can explain tremors as a function of failing to inhibit undesirable actions and facilitating desirable actions (Stocco, Lebiere and Anderson, 2010).
Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has been shown to be effective in alleviating the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease in a number of studies (e.g., Deep-Brain Stimulation for Parkinson's Disease Study Group, 2001; Weaver et al., 2009). However, comparative studies frequently do not explain the theoretical grounding for the method. Kandel provides the answer (first rule of neuroscience):

Selective inactivation of the sensorimotorportion of either the subthalamic nucleus or the internal pallidal segment is sufficient to ameliorate the cardinal parkinsonian motor signs (akinesia, tremor, and rigidity) in MPTP-treated animals (Figure 43-7). Surgical lesions of the posterior (sensorimotor) portion of the internal pallidal segment (pallidotomy) in patients with advanced, medically intractable cases of Parkinson disease is also highly effective in reversing parkinsonian signs. [...] Thus the hypokinetic features of Parkinson disease appear to result from increased (inhibitory) output from the internal pallidal segment as a result of increased (excitatory) drive from the subthalamic nucleus.

DBS treatments for Parkinson's take advantage of this finding to achieve their effect by directly stimulating the subthamamic nucleus and/or globus pallidus. This implies that the treatment is extremely specific to the mechanism, and though there is no reason to rule out effectiveness in other areas, there is no reason to rule it in, either.
Emotional problems
Parkinson's Disease patients are, perhaps intuitively enough, prone to depression, and as many as 25-40% of sufferers experience depression (Leentjens, 2004). Less intuitive is the finding that future patients are at increased risk of depression in the three years preceding their Parkinson's diagnosis (Leentjens, van den Akker, Metsemakers, Lousberg et al., 2003). One explanation for this finding, however, may lie with the other two dopaminergic pathways in the substantia nigra (mesolimbic and mesocortical), which are involved in affect and emotion, and that the emotional problems arise from the dopaminergic impairment in a manner similar to the tremor symptoms.
Unfortunately, I do not know a mechanism for dementia or sleep issues.
References

Deep-Brain Stimulation for Parkinson's Disease Study Group (2001). Deep-brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus or the pars interna of the globus pallidus in Parkinson's disease. The New England journal of medicine, 345(13), 956.
Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessell, T. M. (Eds.). (2000). Principles of neural science (Vol. 4, pp. 863). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Leentjens, A. F. G. (2004). Depression in Parkinson's disease: conceptual issues and clinical challenges. Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology, 17, 120-126.
Leentjens, A. F. G., van den Akker, M., Metsemakers, J. F. M., Lousberg, R. & Verhey, F. R. J. (2003). Higher incidence of depression preceding the onset of Parkinson's disease: A register study. Movement Disorders, 18(4), 414-418.
Stocco, A., Lebiere, C., & Anderson, J. R. (2010). Conditional routing of information to the cortex: A model of the basal ganglia’s role in cognitive coordination. Psychological review, 117(2), 541.
Weaver, F. M., Follett, K., Stern, M., Hur, K., Harris, C., Marks, W. J., ... & CSP 468 Study Group. (2009). Bilateral deep brain stimulation vs best medical therapy for patients with advanced Parkinson disease: a randomized controlled trial. Jama, 301(1), 63-73.


Cockroach olfactory bulb response to novel stimuli

According to Kay and Stopfer (2006) in their paper, Information processing in the olfactory systems of insects and vertebrates, it looks as though oscillatory firing patterns in insects fire as a mechanism for categorizing all smells, novel and familiar:

  Several imaging techniques that assess afferent or principal neuron
  responses all indicate that odor stimulation evokes maps of activity
  that vary with the odorant; not all odorants activate all glomeruli and principal neurons.

More specifically:

  In both insects and vertebrates, odor stimulation elicits the oscillatory synchronization of responsive principal neurons.

Note that no distinction is being made here between novel and familiar olfactory stimuli. It seems that much of the research on novel olfactory stimuli as related to olfactory bulb firing patterns has been done on vertebrates, as discussed here.


Are there useful applications for three channel consumer EEG?

Point by point:

  The Melon headband has three electrodes. Our primary electrode is on the forehead region known as FP1, where Melon can monitor brainwave activity from the prefrontal cortex.

The problem with this is that electricity doesn't work like that. Current always flows between two points, and our electrodes measure the potential between two locations. After its discovery by Tönnies somewhere in 1938, most EEG amplifiers have been of the differential amplifier design. That means every electrode recording is made up of 3 different sites: the Ground electrode, the Reference, and the target site. What is being reported as activity at FPz is truly ((FPz-Ground) - (Reference-Ground)).
What this entails is that our measurement at the so-called active electrode is not an isolated measure of the activity directly under that electrode alone, but a mix of the activity underlying multiple sites. So what you observe in such a setup is highly dependent on where your Reference is located. I couldn't find where the Melon's Reference sits, but it has to be somewhere on the headband. The headband encircles the skull, and all of the positions allowed by the headband are over cortical areas.
Typical locations for Reference are Cz, Nose or the average, neither of which are possible or meaningful in a 3-electrode headband context. Possibly, the reference is located over the temporal or occipital lobes.

So what the Melon will report as activity at FPz will in truth be a mix between activity at FPz, and activity at some further site also above the cortex. (It is possible they placed their Ground very close to the Reference, which is a very unusual setup ...)

Furthermore, individual electrodes never pick up isolated brain sites. Electrical fields, as those projected by cortical clusters firing in synchrony, are propagated field-like. Every recording site therefore picks up a distinct mix of all of the brain. The activity of sites closer to the electrode will be somewhat stronger since field strength falls off with the square of distance, but the part of the cortex directly under the electrode will still be overwhelmed by the summed activity of everything next to and below it.
All the more so as the strongest activity patterns of the cortex come from the occipital lobes - the so-called alpha rhythm. Alpha usually dominates the cortical activity, as it is a simple synchronized firing.

Moreover, alpha will most likely be artificially reenforced on the Melon by the site of reference, since depending on where the reference is placed, it will necessarily be closer to the occipital lobe than FPz, FPz receives alpha with the inverted polarity of most of the scalp, and subtracting from the residual inverted alpha at FPz the alpha from the reference will lead to substantial alpha effects.

Both of these problems are well known since basically the beginning of the EEG, since Hans Berger himself, discoverer of the EEG, already stumbled on the phenomenon that regardless of where he put his two electrodes (Berger never really got around to appreciating Tönnies' proposal), he'd see very similar activity. Berger's interpretation was that all of the brain partially does basically the same thing, everything in the brain is partially united by one huge common shared oscillatory pattern - alpha.
The activity associated specifically with frontal sites, especially the theta rhythm, is much weaker. Extracting just prefrontal theta activity can be a very hard task, as one can tell from the elaborate methods employed by papers trying to isolate just that, such as this and this.

What especially the second paper will show you however is the most dominant activity at FPz: eye blinks. Here I'm showing you activity from FPz in an experiment of mine.

What you mostly see in the top right image are the red dots. Each of these is a blink by our subject. You see that the dots totally overwhelm the overall activity. The spectrum below gives the same information: it's a simple power-law spectrum with almost all power in very low frequencies, without a specific peak in a frequency range such as theta or alpha.

  I wonder: What can I measure with such an EEG? What applications would be unlikely?
  How can "focus" be quantified?

Interestingly, this might even be possible, since one of the best EEG predictors of focus is alpha amplitude. The distinct prefrontal cortex signals however are not very important here. Rather, the alpha signal is.
Alpha is a very rough indicator of attentiveness, and you'll always get less information out of a single sensor than by simple introspection ("do I feel droopy?"). But you might get a rough correlate of current awareness from looking at alpha power, assuming you position the thing so you get as much alpha out of it as possible (ie., not over FPz). The research in this regard is still in the explorative stage, much before you'd rely on the systems. See for a few examples: a three-channel system like the Melon; a 4-channel system; 14 electrodes.
When I say "it is possible" to do that using a 3-channel system, I do not mean it is possible right now. Nobody has that technology yet. Rather, it might become possible in the future. Although even then I'd rather hope for a larger sensor array.
Note also that these are still very rough guesses - they can tell you if you're drowsy or not, if you are currently falling asleep or not. They won't be able to distinguish more subtle states.

  Would it be possible to identify (different) states of sleep?

I'll have to pass on this one. I'm not a sleep expert. I think the location of the Melon is wrong though.

  Could it be possible to control a cursor/game (left/right movements)?

Possibly - if you place it so that your eye movements reflect as strong positive and negative currents. From brain activity? No. Movement decoding requires much more sensors over very different sites. Motor areas are closer to the middle of the brain, roughly speaking, and that's where you'd need very dense electrode coverage to see anything.

Postscript edit: a few references for decoding movement intentions using (multichannel) EEG. As you see, even with multichannel, high-quality EEG, performance is not especially good.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2014.00222/abstract
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00124/full


How effective are pharmaceutical or therapeutic treatments for jealousy?

Pharmaceutical:
Well, I can tell you there are no pharmaceutical treatments you can take that JUST help you manage "acute jealousy."  Essentially, any drug you would take that may help wouldn't just target "jealousy."  If there even is one that helps you to manage it it will have a global effect and probably be something like an SSRI, SNRI, amphetamine, some other drug that is probably going to end up making you feel worse in the long run.
Pharmaceutical wise, I really just found one study that referenced it at all and it's not very helpful.  Scroll down though, the CBT part is very encouraging.
Because this is such a specific topic really the only thing I found in relation to pharmaceuticals and jealousy was...if you have parkinson's and you are taking dopamine agonists, you can get "delusional jealousy".  So I'd avoid dopamine agonists...maybe?  But you probably don't have parkinson's.  It could be extrapolated to the general population to just say "hey, dopamine agonists may cause 'delusional jealousy'" but that's unlikely - and kind of useless information.  MAYBE you could try a dopamine antagonist (antipsychotic) but those things SUCK so much - just trust me it's not worth it...in fact it's a stupid idea to bring up.

Mov Disord. 2012 Nov;27(13):1679-82. doi: 10.1002/mds.25129. Epub 2012
Nov 13.
Dopamine agonists and delusional jealousy in Parkinson's disease: a
cross-sectional prevalence study.
Poletti M, Perugi G, Logi C, Romano A, Del Dotto P, Ceravolo R, Rossi
G, Pepe P,  Dell'Osso L, Bonuccelli U.
Department of Neuroscience, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
BACKGROUND: Delusional jealousy (DJ) has been described in patients
with Parkinson's disease (PD) on dopaminergic therapy, but a role for
dopaminergic therapy in DJ has not been established. METHODS: The
current cross-sectional study on DJ investigated its association with
dopaminergic therapies compared with their associations with
hallucinations  and its prevalence in PD patients. Eight hundred five
consecutive patients with PD were enrolled between January 2009 and
June 2010. RESULTS: DJ was identified in 20 patients (2.48%) and
hallucinations in 193 patients (23.98%). In the multivariate logistic
regression analyses, dopamine agonists were significantly associated
with DJ (odds ratio, 18.1; 95% CI,
3.0-infinity; P = .0002) but not with hallucinations (odds ratio, 0.73; 95% CI,
0.49-1.10; P = .133). CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that dopamine agonist treatment represents a  risk factor for DJ in PD
independent of the presence of a dementing disorder, and the presence
of this additional nonmotor side effect should be investigated in this
clinical population.
Copyright © 2012 Movement Disorder Society.
PMID: 23150469  [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Edit
Now this was an interesting mini-study I came across along with a whole bunch of other results with the word "pathological jealousy."

J Clin Psychiatry. 1990 Aug;51(8):345-6. Successful fluoxetine
treatment of pathologic jealousy. Lane RD. Source Department of
Psychiatry, University of Health Sciences, Chicago Medical School,
Ill. Abstract A 39-year-old man suddenly became convinced that his
wife had once been unfaithful to him, and soon thereafter he became
depressed. Symptoms of depression responded to imipramine, but the
jealousy did not. A trial of fluoxetine was attempted because of the
obsessional nature of the jealousy. Fluoxetine 60 mg/day resulted in
complete remission of the pathologic jealousy, consistent with the
known efficacy of fluoxetine in obsessive compulsive disorder. PMID:
2380161 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

However, once again, I'm sure that's not the only affect he experienced.  THere were also a few hits with risperdone and primazone actually.  They didn't even have abstracts tho.
Then we have the implication that it may be involved in OCD:

Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 1997 Feb;31(1):133-8.
Morbid jealousy as a variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Parker G, Barrett E.
School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Randwick,
Australia.
OBJECTIVE: To present a representative case vignette and review
several previous  reports, and to then suggest that a percentage of
those with morbid jealousy may  have a variant of obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD). CLINICAL PICTURE: A patient presented volunteering a
diagnosis of depression and  anxiety following recent work and marital
stresses, before describing recent jealousy and harassment of his wife
over an earlier relationship. Obsessional thinking patterns and
compulsive behaviours are described, and it is proposed that the
picture supports a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
TREATMENT AND OUTCOME: The patient was treated as if he had an
obsessive-compulsive disorder, and reported dissipation of his
concerns after cognitive-behavioural intervention. CONCLUSIONS: The
proposition is an important one as a diagnosis of morbid jealousy
often invites therapeutic pessimism, and as managements effective for
OCD (both drug and behavioural) may well be helpful.
PMID: 9088498  [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Which ends with successful treatment with cognitive behavioral therapy as well as (they insinuate) some pharmaceutical treatment having to do with his OCD.
This leads me into my next section though:
Therapeutic
In my opinion:

Jealousy is so specific that said person with jealousy is going to
have to deal with it with something like CBT (although there are several medicines that >could help to treat it...you would probably agree with me that some of their side affects >arn't worth it if one were to try them, said jealous person also has to consider whether >or not their jealousy is "pathological") - not to sound like a
broken record.  There just isn't anything as proven out there.  Said
jealous person also needs to do things that expands their "options"
which would be the ultimate cure - even if it's just meeting randoms
on plenty of fish, there's not much to lose.  In my opinion, it should
be looked at as just gambling or like a slot machine.  Otherwise, if
said jealous person does not change any of their habits....the pattern
of jealousy will continue.

Now I'm going to give you some (the very rare) CBT studies involving specifically jealousy.  I don't have access to the full text of these, if you do - maybe you want to look into them more.  If you generalize "jealousy" into "depression" then I don't even need to really cite all of the studies that show how much CBT works.

Br J Psychiatry. 1996 May;168(5):588-93.
The effectiveness of cognitive therapy in the treatment of
non-psychotic morbid jealousy.
Dolan M, Bishay N.
Ashworth Hospital, Maghull, Liverpool.
BACKGROUND: Although a cognitive-behavioural formulation of morbid
jealousy has been described there is little empirical research into
the practical usefulness of this model. This study evaluated the
effectiveness of treating non-psychotic morbid jealousy using a
cognitive approach. METHOD: Cognitive-behavioural and emotional
measures of jealousy were calibrated  by comparison with 40
non-jealous normal controls. These instruments were used as measures
of change to assess the effectiveness of cognitive therapy in altering
cognitive errors in 30 morbidly jealous out-patient referrals, divided
into delayed and immediate treatment subgroups to assess the stability
of the condition. Both groups completed all measures immediately
before and after treatment, and at follow-up. RESULTS: The instruments
demonstrated significant differences between jealous and non-jealous
subjects on cognitive-behavioural and emotional aspects of jealousy.
The delayed treatment group showed no significant alteration in scores
on any of  the instruments after 12 weeks on the waiting list,
confirming the stability of the condition. In the majority of cases
cognitive therapy aimed at the modification of dysfunctional cognitive
processes resulted in a significant improvement on all jealousy
measures, immediately after treatment and at follow-up. The
improvement reported by patients was supported by the partner's
ratings. CONCLUSION: The results support the postulation of the
cognitive model that modification of cognitive schema by a
schema-focused treatment package results in a significant reduction in
disturbance in all aspects of the jealousy syndrome.
PMID: 8733797  [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Next:

Br J Psychiatry. 1989 Mar;154:386-9.
An uncontrolled study of cognitive therapy for morbid jealousy.
Bishay NR, Petersen N, Tarrier N.
North Manchester General Hospital, Crumpsall.
Thirteen patients presenting with morbid jealousy were treated using a
cognitive  approach adapted from Beck's cognitive therapy for
depression. Cognitions in morbid jealousy showed the characteristics
of automatic thoughts as described by  Beck, and were based on faulty
assumptions derived from interpretations of past experiences. The
cognitive treatment directed mainly at the faulty assumptions resulted
in improvements in TEN (10 out of 13!) patients and no change in one; two patients
dropped out of treatment. The results are considered encouraging.
PMID: 2597841  [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Once again if one were to just generalize the "jealousy" to depression, then click below.  There's a wide variety of them.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=cognitive+behavioral+therapy+depression


What is the name for this form of "influence"?

I have some ideas about your first example. During my course of social psychology a learned about self/social categorization, two concepts that shape how individuals perceive groups. Here are some quick definitions.

Self categorization:

  the process of seeing oneself as a member of a social group (Smith, Mackie & Claypool, 2014)

Social categorization:

  The perceptual classification of people, including the self, into categories (Forsyth, 2014).

According to self and social categorization people automatically view themselves as part of a group and others as part of a group also. I think Phil in your example still views himself as part of the group "catholics" (even though he does not know much about it) and Fred as part of the group "Evangelics". After that there are quite a view phenomenons that suggest people care about their beliefs and about their group status. One good example in this context is the ingroup-outgroup bias:

  The tendency to view the in-group, its members, and its products more positively than other groups, their members, and their products. Ingroup favoritism is more common than outgroup rejection (Forsyth, 2014).
  So, Phil might realize that he is part of the group "catholics" and subsequently becomes more defensive.

Also it could be possible that Phil experiences some form of cognitive dissonance (an adverse psychological state that occurs when an individual simultaneously holds two conflicting cognitions (Forsyth, 2014)), because he claims he is part of the catholic group but is blatantly confronted that he barely knows anything about his group. This might lead to the attitude change you suggest, that he wants to learn more about catholicism.

Of course this is more a description of how processes in groups can work and how people influence each other based on these processes. It is in no way a description of a scientifically backed up process/theory, although the terms used in my description are of course backed by science.

As for the second example, I personally believe there could be a lot of factors that lead to Jake's decision of joining the army. I think it would be hard to pin it down on the few words of the army veteran.

However, I am not an expert on social psychology. So I hope this information helps understanding social processes but it might not be a complete and conclusive answer. If you are interested in social psychology and group dynamics then I recommend to check out Forsyth's book Group dynamics. It explains concepts wihtin the field very well and uses informative examples. Hope this helps in some way.

References

Forsyth, D.R. (2014). Group dynamics (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. ISBN- 13 9781133956532

Smith, E.R., Mackie, D.M., & Claypool, H.M. (2014). Social Psychology (4th ed.). New York, NY: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-84872-894-3


Paper showing that completing most psychological studies is less distressing than daily life

The article could be

How distressing is it to participate in medical research? A calibration study using an everyday events questionnaire.

Petrie, K. J., Faasse, K., Notman, T. A., & O'Carroll, R. (2013).
JRSM short reports, 4, 1-7.

PDF available


Just did some more reading, going to answer my own question:

  Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to mental operations that an individual uses when faced with a relatively novel task that cannot be performed automatically. Inductive and deductive reasoning are generally thought to be the hallmark narrow-ability indicators of Gf. Examples of Gf abilities are: Induction, Pigatian Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning and Speed of Reasoning.

By comparison Crystallized Intelligence (Gc):

  Gc refers to the breadth and depth of a persons acquired knowledge, and the application of this knowledge. Examples of Gc abilities are: Language Development, Lexical Knowledge, General Information, Information about Culture, General Science Information, Communication Abilities etc..

Reference:
Reynolds, C. R., & Fletcher-Janzen, E. (2007). Encyclopedia of Special Education (Vol. 1). Wiley.

If anyone has anything better or more to add, please do.


What is the name of the scientific study of hypothesis formation?

One umbrella term is causal reasoning, though this is a bit broader since there are theories of causal reasoning that are not about hypothesis testing.

A Google Scholar search for "causal reasoning psychology" generates several hundred thousand hits, and the first page is full of relevant papers.

Getting more specific, Klayman & Ha (1987) wrote an influential article about the kinds of hypothesis testing you describe. Looking at the papers that cite that article might give you some additional leads into the literature.


What factors influence a person or group of people's empathy toward another group?

Empathy can be measured in many different ways. As this source outlines:

  Psychologists distinguish between measurements of situational
  empathy—that is, empathic reactions in a specific situation—and
  measurements of dispositional empathy, where empathy is understood as
  a person's stable character trait. Situational empathy is measured
  either by asking subjects about their experiences immediately after
  they were exposed to a particular situation, by studying the “facial,
  gestural, and vocal indices of empathy-related responding” (Zhou,
  Valiente, and Eisenberg 2003, 275), or by various physiological
  measures such as the measurement of heart rate or skin conductance.

Empathy is influenced by a very wide range of factors. Some are innate (e.g., one's capacity for empathy), some are due to upbringing and some are related to the characteristics of the individual or group involved (e.g, their familiarity, or appearance). I couldn't find a comprehensive list of these different factors (probably as there are too many), but [1,2,3,4] should give you a sense of the range of factors.

Please let me know if you require any further clarification such as a more specific question.

References:

1 McDonald, Nicole M., and Daniel S. Messinger. "The development of empathy: How, when, and why." Moral Behavior and Free Will: A Neurobiological and Philosophical Aprroach (2011): 341-368.

[2] JACKSON, P. L., MELTZOFF, A. N. & DECETY, J. 2005. How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy. NeuroImage, 24, 771-779.

[3] GALLESE, V. 2003. The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology, 36, 171-180.

[4] CHAPMAN, E., BARON-COHEN, S., AUYEUNG, B., KNICKMEYER, R., TAYLOR, K. & HACKETT, G. 2006. Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test. Social Neuroscience, 1, 135-148.


Has the Open-Source Psychometrics Project been well received by the community?

As a matter of anecdote, I've used some of this data for teaching purposes, and I've heard of others doing the same.

As Bryan notes, there is a list of journal articles that have used the data: https://openpsychometrics.org/_rawdata/cited/ This includes many well-regarded journals in personality and individual differences research.

One main limitation is that the data tends to be based around single scales. In contrast, I imagine in a lot of uses cases for potential publications rely on relating multiple scales with each other.

That said, I imagine these datasets could be useful for examining various general questions about scale properties and test structure. You could also  look at  demographic correlates of test scores. And the data would be interesting if you were interested in the psychometric properties of the specific tests that are reported.

A second limitation is that there seems to be limited information about the nature of data collection and data cleaning. That said, for many purposes, a massive online convenience sample of online participants may be useful.


Deception and nose touching - does it work for things that are about to be said in prepared speeches?

You wrote:

For the purposes of this question I would assume that it's fairly common knowledge in psychology that people touch nose or cover the mouth when saying something part of them does not believe to be true.

Avoid make assumptions like this. This is not common knowledge, and in fact it is not even true.
Vrij et al. (2010) discuss the literature on non-verbal lie detection and conclude:

The meta-analyses that have been published to date
have made clear that there are no nonverbal and verbal cues
uniquely related to deceit. In other words, reliable cues to
deception akin to Pinocchio’s growing nose do not exist
(DePaulo et al., 2003; Masip et al., 2005; Sporer & Schwandt,
2006, 2007; Vrij, 2005)

Vrij & Granhag (2007) mentions "touching the nose" as an example of a non-verbal cue to deception found in a police interrogation manual, Gordon & Fleisher (2002). They also review 5 other police interrogation manuals which don't mention it as a cue to deception. In my brief lit search, I couldn't find any psychology papers which discuss touching the nose as a reliable cue to deception.
After a brief look at Gordon & Fleisher (2002), it is clear to me that their methods are pseudoscientific, full of ad-hoc reasoning. Judge for yourself:

There appears to be a link between deception and the nose. Perhaps it is because the nerve network for emotions, to a large extent, evolved from our neural networks involved in smelling [26]. The sense of smell was primitive man's fundamental survival mechanism. Touching or pinching the nose is a reliable gesture of disbelief [4]. The nonverbal message appears to be "it stinks' (Figure 9.17). If you are talking and the listener pinches his nose, he is nonverbally communicating that he thinks what you are saying stinks. If he is talking and pinching his nose, he thinks what he is saying stinks.

Oh, but what's that reference they cite? Surely that must shed some light on this. Diligent readers will scan to the bibliography only to find that they are citing a previous version of the same manuscript! Yes, you heard right: a recursive citation. Not exactly the most reliable source.
Vrij & Granhag (2007) suggest:

Since cues akin to Pinocchio's nose do not exist, lie detectors will fail in their task if they just look for such cues. Rather, interview techniques need to be employed, for example, to control for individual differences between individuals.

References

Gordon, N. J., & Fleisher, W. L. (2010). Effective interviewing and interrogation techniques. Academic Press.
Vrij, A., & Granhag, P.A. (2007). Interviewing to detect deception. Offenders' memories of violent crimes, 32, 279.
Vrij, A., Granhag, P. A., & Porter, S. (2010). Pitfalls and opportunities in nonverbal and verbal lie detection. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 11(3), 89-121. PDF


Studies on visually recognizable personality traits?

I am currently reading a book called "Snoop", written by researcher Sam Gosling (I recommend this very interesting book!). He's doing just the kind of research I am looking for, and thus I've found tons of research documents on these things:

  Our research focuses on the following issues:

  Everyday manifestations of personality – Which cues are reliably
  linked to what individuals are like?

  Everyday person perception – Which cues do individuals use to form
  their impressions of others?

  Consensus – Do observers agree with one another in their impressions
  of others?

  Accuracy – Are observers impressions of others accurate?

  Stereotype use – how do stereotypes hinder or promote consensus and
  accuracy?
  - http://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/current-research/everyday-manifestations-of-personality/

http://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/publications/

The expression and perception of personality in everyday life

Back, M. D., Stopfer, J. M., Vazire, S., Gaddis, S., Schmukle, S. C., Egloff, B., & Gosling, S. D. (2010). Facebook profiles reflect actual personality not self-idealization. Psychological Science, 21, 372-374.

Carney, D. R., Jost, J. T., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2008). The secret lives of liberals and conservatives: Personality profiles, interaction styles, and the things they leave behind. Political Psychology, 29, 807-840.

Gebauer, J. E., Bleidorn, W., Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., Lamb, M. E., & Potter, J. (in press). Cross-Cultural Variations in Big Five Relations with Religiosity: A Socio-Cultural Motives Perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Gosling, S. D., Augustine, A. A., Vazire, S., Holtzman, N., & Gaddis, S. (2011). Manifestations of personality in Online Social Networks: Self-reported Facebook-related behaviors and observable profile information. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14, 483-488. [DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2010.0087]

Gosling, S. D., Gaddis, S., & Vazire, S. (2008). First impressions based on the environments we create and inhabit. In N. Ambady, & J. J. Skowronski (Eds.), First Impressions (pp. 334-356). New York: Guilford.

Gosling, S. D., Gifford, R., & McCunn, L. (2013). The selection, creation, and perception of interior spaces: An environmental psychology approach. In G. Brooker & L. Weinthal (Eds.), The Handbook of Interior Design (pp. 278-290). Oxford, UK: Berg.

Gosling, S. D., Ko, S. J., Mannarelli, T., & Morris, M. E. (2002). A Room with a cue: Judgments of personality based on offices and bedrooms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 379-398. [Available in pdf]

Gosling, S. D., Sandy, C. J., & Potter, J. (2010). Personalities of self-identified “dog people” and “cat people.” Anthrozoös, 23, 213-222.

Graham, L. T., & Gosling, S. D. (2012). Impressions of World of Warcraft players’ personalities based on their usernames: Interobserver consensus but no accuracy. Journal of Research in Personality, 46, 599-603.

Graham, L. T., & Gosling, S. D. (2013). Personality profiles associated with different motivations for playing World of Warcraft. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 16, 189-193.

Graham, L. T., & Sandy, C. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Manifestations of individual differences in physical and virtual environments. In T. Chamorro-Premuzic, S. von Stumm, & A. Furnham (Eds.), Handbook of Individual Differences (pp. 773-800). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Mehl, M. R., Gosling, S. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2006). Personality in its natural habitat: Manifestations and implicit folk theories of personality in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 862-877.

Naumann, L. P., Vazire, S., Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2009). Personality judgments based on physical appearance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 1661-1671

Obschonka, M., Schmitt-Rodermund, E., Silbereisen, R. K., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2013). The regional distribution and correlates of an entrepreneurship-prone personality profile in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom: A socioecological perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105, 104-122. [DOI: 10.1037/a0032275]

Rentfrow, P. J., Goldberg, L. R., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., Gosling, S. D., & Levitin, D. J. (2012). The song remains the same: A replication and extension of the MUSIC model. Music Perception, 30,161-185. [DOI: 10.1525/MP.2012.30.2.161]

Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2003). The do re mi’s of everyday life: The structure and personality correlates of music preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1236-1256. [Available in pdf]

Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2006). Message in a Ballad: The role of music preferences in interpersonal perception. Psychological Science, 17, 236-242. [Available in pdf]

Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2007). The content and validity of music-genre stereotypes among college students. Psychology of Music, 35, 306-326.

Rentfrow, P. J., Gosling, S. D., Jokela, M., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Potter, J. (2013). Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105, 996-1012. [DOI: 10.1037/a0034434]

Rentfrow, P. J., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2008). A theory of the emergence, persistence, and expression of geographic variation in psychological characteristics. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 339-369.

Sandy, C. J., Gosling, S. D., & Durant, J. (2013). Predicting Consumer Behavior and Media Preferences: The Comparative Validity of Personality Traits and Demographic Variables. Psychology and Marketing, 30, 937-949. [DOI: 10.1002/mar.20657]

Swann, W. B., Jr., Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2003). The precarious couple effect: Verbally inhibited men + critical, disinhibited women = bad chemistry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 1095-1106. [Available in pdf]

Vazire, S., Naumann, L. P., Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2009). Smiling reflects different emotions in men and women. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 403-405.

Vazire, S., Naumann, L. P., Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2008). Portrait of a narcissist: Manifestations of narcissism in physical appearance. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 1439-1447.

Vazire, S. & Gosling, S. D. (2004). e-perceptions: Personality impressions based on personal websites. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 123-132. [Available in pdf]

Wilson, R. E., Gosling, S. D., & Graham, L. T. (2012). A review of Facebook research in the social sciences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 203-220. [DOI 10.1177/1745691612442904]

Anderson, C. P., Ames, D. R., & Gosling, S. D. (2008) Punishing hubris: The perils of status self-enhancement in teams and organizations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 90-101.

Erdle, S., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2009). Does self-esteem account for the higher-order factors of the Big Five? Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 921-922.

Gosling, S. D., Sandy, C. J., & Potter, J. (2010). Personalities of self-identified “dog people” and “cat people.” Anthrozoös, 23, 213-222.

Gosling, S. D., & Srivastava, S. (2011). Changes in perceptions of George W. Bush’s personality in the wake of the September 11 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Acta de Investigación Psicológica, 3, 486-490.

Jost, J. T., Hawkins, C. B., Nosek, B. A., Hennes, E. P., Stern, C., Gosling, S. D., & Graham, J. (2014). Belief in a Just God (and a Just Society): A System Justification Perspective on Religious Ideology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 34, 56-81. [Translated to: Jost, J. T., Hawkins, C. B., Nosek, B. A., Hennes, E. P., Stern, C., Gosling, S. D., & Graham, J. (in press). Creencia en un dios justo: La Religión como una forma de Justificación del Sistema. Psicologia Politica, 47, 55-89.]

Mathieu, M. T., & Gosling, S. D. (2012). The accuracy or inaccuracy of affective forecasts depends on how the question is framed: A meta-analysis of past studies. Psychological Science, 23, 161-162. [DOI: 10.1177/0956797611427044]

Pennebaker, J. W., Gosling, S. D., & Ferrell, J. (2013). Daily online testing in large classes: Boosting college performance while reducing achievement gaps. PLOS ONE, 9, e79774. [doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0079774]

Ramírez-Esparza, N., Gosling, S. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Paradox lost: Unraveling the puzzle of Simpatia. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 39, 685-702.

Robins, R. W., Tracy, J. L., Trzesniewski, K. H., Potter, J., & Gosling, S. D. (2001). Personality correlates of self-esteem. Journal of Research in Personality, 35, 463-482. [Available in pdf]

Vazire, S., Naumann, L. P., Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2009). Smiling reflects different emotions in men and women. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 403-405.

Wood, D., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2007). Normality evaluations and their relation to personality traits and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 861-879.


Why do people who stutter have less difficulty singing than speaking?

Short answer
Singing increases the duration of voiced intervals in stutterers.

Background
Singing is an example of one of the most effective methods to decrease stuttering* (Stager, 2003). It is a so-called fluency-increasing (FI) condition in stutterers and reduces stuttering by more than 90%. Some of the few, subtle acoustic differences between song and speech are the more isochronous rhythm and greater fundamental frequency stability within each syllable in songs (Tierney et al., 2012). Other effective fluency-evoking conditions are speech pacing (e.g., with a metronome), chorus speaking, speech slowing, and whispering (Andrews et al., 1982).

The main effects of FI conditions (including singing) are an increase in phonation duration and speech slowing. The reduction of stuttering seems most directly related to phonation. Phonation is the production of vocal sounds, i.e., vowels. Specifically, the frequency of very short (in the range of 30–150 ms) phonated intervals is decreased, and the longer duration phonated intervals are increased when stutterers are singing. Indeed, it has been suggested that the most effective FI conditions, and perhaps therefore the most effective treatments for stuttering, might share the common property of reducing the number or proportion of short intervals of phonation, or of quick transitions between phonated and nonphonated speech production, and/or might be associated with an increased number or proportion of longer, slower, or more consistent phonation. Among the best supported treatment approaches for stuttering are those that emphasize increased, prolonged, or continuous phonation and/or slower initiation of speech (referred to as prolonged speech treatment programs) (Ingham, 2012).

Most fluency-evoking conditions, however, have only temporary effects. Moreover, normal fluency has been defined for stuttering in terms of four variables or characteristics: the absence of stuttering events, speech rate within a normal
range, normal overall naturalness of speech, and normal levels of physical and cognitive effort on the part of the speaker. Of the various methods used, only chorus speaking meets these four demands (Ingham, 2012).

References
- Andrews et al., J Speech Hear Res (1982); 25(2): 208-16
- Ingham et al., J Comm Disorders (2012); 45: 198–211
- Stager et al., J Fluency Disorders (2003); 28: 319–36
- Tierney et al., Cereb Cortex (2012); 23(2):249-54

Note
* Being a stotterer myself, I wish to emphasize that when the speech therapist at primary school instructed me to sing my presentation to my class mates to reduce my stuttering I chose the less embarrassing alternative, namely stammering unintelligibly for half an hour about the planets in the solar system instead of singing about them. One can quickly envision the utter non-practicality of the singing approach in everyday life. The effect of FI conditions is scientifically interesting, and they are useful tools for speech therapists, but they are not practical treatments, unfortunately.


Does a more ergonomic and user friendly interface/device make the human brain work less?

ISO 9241, a standard covering ergonomics of human-computer interaction, defines in its subsection 9241-110, "Dialogue Principles", that the interface in information systems should be (among other things):

suitable for the task
facilitate learning
conform with user expectations
describe its own purpose and functioning

You could translate all this to:

  Don't make the user think too hard about what he has to do

Shneiderman, in his "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" and Nielsen in his "10 Usability Heuristics of User Interface Design" (also on Wikipedia), make this even more explicit:

Shneiderman, Rule 8: Reduce short-term memory load
Nielsen, Heuristic 6: Recognition rather than recall

Reducing cognitive load is part of the industry definition of usability. By that definition a usable product "makes the human brain work less".

Sources:

ISO 9241-110:2006 http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=38009
Nielsen, J. (1994). Heuristic evaluation. In J. Nielsen & R. L. Mack (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods (pp. 25-64). New York: Wiley.
Shneiderman, B., & Plaisant, C. (2010). Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.


How does listening to music decrease stress?

This may be happening due to beat entrainment. Different music genres have different beat and rhythm patterns. The ones that are calming will generally have a lower beat and rhythm frequencies. The lower beat and rhythm frequencies are similar to the frequency of heartbeat and breathing when a person is feeling calm and/or relaxed. Through the process of entrainment, the person's breathing and heartbeat may synchronize with the music, thus calming the person. The mechanism could be working by counter-acting the effects of shallow breathing.


Digital Marketing often produces 'content' for users to consume.
That content is ment to catch and keep the attention of the user, in an attempt to make the user trust and follow the sender (usually a website or blog).
When the user shows engagement like clicking the right buttons, the user will somehow be tempted with some kind of offer (a newsletter, a free ebook, etc). If the user takes that bait, there will later be an offer to actually buy something.

The whole idea here is to catch and keep the users' attention.
One of the most common ways to achieve this, is by making lists of something the user might want to read\see.
In order to have users click(open) the content to begin with, the writer needs to make the content seem valuable in only 1 short line.
By typing the number of entries on that list, the writer is trying to make a point: There's stuff to see her, come check it out!


Analyzing control questions data for a survey

You seem to be concerned with reliability, and more specifically internal reliability. Internal reliability is the degree to which different questions are measuring the same construct. This concept is used often in psychology and is usually measured using Cronbach's alpha. However, it is typically used to measure the reliability of a test, and not the reliability of an individual.

As Jeromy Anglim points out, I think it's important to consider the goal here. Using a two question Likert scale is probably not good enough to reliably detect outliers: What if the respondent checked all '4s' on a 7-point Likert scale? Reversing the scale would have no effect.

One alternative approach is to employ an instructional manipulation check (Oppenheimer et al., 2009). The gist of the technique is to trap participants into answering a question in a specific way that they could only have done by reading the instructions carefully. Here is an example from a survey administered by Facebook:

While this technique may throw out a few good participants, it will almost certainly raise the signal-to-noise ratio of your data by only including participants who followed instructions and read questions before answering.

Another tried and true technique is to use a computer-administered test and look at reaction times. You may be able to throw out a few responses (or whole participants) by simply looking for outliers in response time that are below the mean.

  Oppenheimer, D. M., Meyvis, T., & Davidenko, N. (2009). Instructional manipulation checks: Detecting satisficing to increase statistical power. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 867-872.


What's the difference between injunctive norms and descriptive norms?

The distinction stems from research on the "Focus Theory of Normative Conduct" (e.g., Cialdini et al. 1990)

Injunctive norms refer to the perception of what ought to be, or as you state, perceptions of what is approved or disapproved by others.

Example: If you think that other people would consider tax fraud as something that is morally wrong, you would perceive an injunctive norm.

Descriptive norms refer to the perception of what is. Or, in other words, perceptions about how people do in fact behave.

Example: If you think that most people engage in tax fraud, that would be a descriptive norm.

As you can see, injunctive and descriptive norms are distinct concepts. Sometimes they may overlap (tax fraud is wrong, and nobody does it). However they may also conflict (tax fraud is perceived to be wrong, but everyone does it). Of course they can also be about positive things (it's a good thing to eat 5 portions of veggies each day vs. nobody does that).

Reference

Cialdini, R. B., Reno, R. R., & Kallgren, C. A. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 1015–1026. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.58.6.1015