Is quick left brain vs right brain test fake?

Without references, you state:

  In this picture if you noticed her rotating clockwise you are right
  brain dominant.

We discourage asking questions on this site (or in science in general) which are based on unverified/referenced premises. However, given that this is a very common notion found online, I will try to answer your question by first helping you rephrase it.

What you should have asked is something along the lines of:

  I have read online articles (e.g., on learning-mind.com) which claim that if you perceive the
  figure in the following image rotate clockwise it means you are right
  brain dominant and when you see her rotating counterclockwise it means
  you are left brain dominant. However, the mechanism behind this is not
  well explained. How does this test work and what exactly does it imply?

To answer:

This figure is known as the 'Spinning Dancer' and there is a wikipedia article on it. The wikipedia entry states that:

  In popular psychology, the illusion has been incorrectly[6] identified
  as a personality test that supposedly reveals which hemisphere of the
  brain is dominant in the observer.

They link to NEUROLOGICAblog, "Left Brain – Right brain and the Spinning Girl", which explains that:

  This news article, like many others, ignores the true source of this
  optical illusion and instead claims it is a quick test to see if you
  use more of your right brain or left brain. This is utter nonsense,
  but the “right-brain/left brain” thing is in the public consciousness
  and won’t be going away anytime soon.

Instead, they explain what is actually going on:

  The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette
  illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or
  the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back
  and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional
  representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world.
  So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is
  uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may
  just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or
  counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is
  complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.

In case you have specific questions on what 'hemispheric dominance' is and how we can determine it, the article (to my understanding, correctly) mentions:

  We also do have hemispheric dominance, but that determines mostly your
  handedness and the probability of language being on the right or the
  left. There is also often asymmetry for memory, with some being right
  or left hemisphere dominant.

I'm certain you can find more scientific sources on this by googling (I would recommend Google Scholar), or by looking on this site. At the time of writing, we have 12 search results on 'hemispheric dominance'.


What kind of political views are sociopaths more likely to espouse?

One 2017 paper does try to correlate the dark tetrad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism) to extremist political views:

Previous research on personality and political attitudes has been conducted in countries where political parties from the center dominate the political system. In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent either left-wing or right-wing political policies [Austrian presidential election of 2016]. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism were associated with right-wing political orientation, whereas narcissism and psychopathy were associated with political extremism. Moreover, the relationships between personality and right-wing political orientation and extremism, respectively, were relatively independent from each other.

Going the other way around, a 2019 review of research on the psychological profiling of extremists doesn't quite tie them with any particular personality (disorder) but it does generally correlate them with psychological distress:

Empirical findings support a relationship between psychological distress and extreme political ideologies. Compared with moderates, political extremists—on both the left and right of the spectrum—report stronger anxiety about their economic future (van Prooijen, Krouwel, Boiten, & Eendebak, 2015). Furthermore, extremists are more suspicious than moderates about governmental institutions, suggesting distressed expectations of these institutions (Inglehart, 1987). Experimental findings are consistent with these insights. For instance, people psychologically compensate for feelings of uncertainty and fear through strong ideological convictions (McGregor, Prentice, & Nash, 2013), and inducing a loss of significance increases extreme beliefs on both the left and right (Webber et al., 2018).
The link between psychological distress and political extremism is inconsistent with the assumption of the rigidity-of-the-right model that psychological distress stimulates conservative ideologies only. We note, however, that psychological distress stimulates a preference for leaders who, in addition to being radical, are also group-oriented (Hogg, Meehan, & Farquharson, 2010). Feelings of distress therefore make political currents that are not only extreme but also nationalistic particularly appealing. Indeed, the majority of studies indicating a right-wing shift under conditions of uncertainty were conducted in Western countries where the political currents that combine radicalism with nationalism happen to be right wing (e.g., the United States, several European Union, or EU, member states; Jost, 2017). Would distress exert similar effects in countries where the political currents that combine radicalism with nationalism are mostly located on the left, such as Venezuela (i.e., Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro), Ecuador (i.e., Evo Morales), or Nicaragua (i.e., Daniel Ortega; e.g., Müller, 2016)?

The review paper goes to discuss "cognitive simplicity" (by this they mean a black-and-white perception of the social world), overconfidence, and intolerance as other established (if somewhat obvious) psychological traits of extremists.
I guess a tentative conclusion from this might be that personality abnormalities (beyond those discrete traits) don't feature high on the psychological profile of extremists (i.e. there might a few psychopaths among the extremists, but most extremists might be just "suffering" from those four discrete traits). Or perhaps more research is needed.


Why are EEG markers usually sent over the parallel port?

I think this is for scientists who like to design their own setups. I doubt medical EEGs have a parallel port. You do not always want to sync to a computer. You will often want to synhcronize it to a photodiode, an eyetracker, a tactile stimulator etc. With a parallel port you just plug that trigger to a given pin then you know that everytime your get an integer containing 2^(pin number) you have received a trigger on that pin: for ex. trigger on pin 0 if you are reading 1, on pin 4 if you are reading 16, and on pins 1, 3 and 6 if you are reading 74. Yes, you could read your triggers with a micropchip, then use a serial-USB converter, but that's needlessly complicated and less accurate. USB have surprisingly unreliable timings for a port that can work at such a high baudrate. So it's usually better to synchronize everything to an external input. I usually synchronize an eeg and an eyetracker to a photodiode, then I know they are synchronized perfectly (yet they often have a 1msec difference for some reason).

On top of that, I'm sure there must be some backward compatibility issues. If you are a small lab that has built a complicated setup over the years, you might not want to change your EEG if it means changing your entire apparatus.


It depends on ambient light, but in darkness, humans can detect as few as several photons, perhaps even down to a single photon (though all detection at these low levels is probabilistic - see Tinsley et al, 2016).

Therefore, this depends on the ambient light (ideal detection in darkness), and the number of photons. At this level of detection, it doesn't really make much sense to think about the duration of the signal: the duration can be infinitesimally brief as long as the intensity is enough to hit the retina with a few photons in the visible range.

A flash of 'darkness' is much different. Introducing dark flashes to a signal that previously had no dark flashes will be perceived as a change in intensity; you can read about contrast sensitivity to find these detection limits. The other attribute that is studied is the flicker fusion threshold which is the frame rate at which a flicker (i.e., alternation of dark and light flashes) can be perceived. The exact frequency of the flicker fusion threshold varies with condition, so there is no single number I can give to answer that question (see Brindley et al, 1966 for some ranges), except to say that it is typically less than 60 Hz for still images and higher frequency for brighter light (that is, if the light is brighter, you detect flicker at higher frequencies) and higher frequencies for moving objects.

Brindley, G. S., Du Croz, J. J., & Rushton, W. A. H. (1966). The flicker fusion frequency of the blue‐sensitive mechanism of colour vision. The Journal of physiology, 183(2), 497-500.

Tinsley, J. N., Molodtsov, M. I., Prevedel, R., Wartmann, D., Espigulé-Pons, J., Lauwers, M., & Vaziri, A. (2016). Direct detection of a single photon by humans. Nature communications, 7, 12172.


Does inhibiting automatic processing requires attention?

Terms - attention vs consciousness

I guess that by attention you mean:

  The focus of our conscious process.

Until recently, neither attention nor consciousness were rigorously defined. But now you may find the following definitions:

Selective attention - a subconscious process that selects from a multitude of candidates the most salient one.
Consciousness - a cortex-global top-down process that has access to ,and controls lower-level processes.

The latter is actually termed conscious access and the whole definition is over-simplified, but will suffice for now.

On man, chicken and ANN

The problem with using the term attention is that while it's valid to say that a human attend to something (meaning that that something is the focus of consciousness), saying the same for a chicken is problematic - a chicken may attend to something yet we doubt it is conscious. We are pretty certain that worms aren't.

Further, it is fairly easy to build an artificial neural network that has a preference to this or that stimuli (by that given an impression of attentive selection), yet isn't capable of consciousness (ie, acyclic network).

Inhibiting automatic processes

That's really a fancy name to a change in behaviour. You may argue that not all behaviour is automatic - some is conscious-controlled, so let's stick to automatic behaviour.

Whether with humans, more so with chickens, and definitely with ANNs, a change in automatic behaviour is possible with neither attention nor consciousness (well... we wouldn't be here otherwise).

With humans, for example, you may have never paid attention (consciously processed) to the lips size of your co-worker, but you will notice a botox procedure. Other examples include people with slow and gradual deterioration of a particular brain function - where these people may be oblivious to the compensation processes their brain develops.

So you can inhibit automatic processes without attention or consciousness.

But consciousness is far more effective

However, our current understanding of consciousness also demonstrates that in its core is an amplified process far stronger and global than any automatic process. What's more, consciousness often involves many feedback iterations - so the process is not only stronger, but also longer.

This means that anything that have triumphed the selective attention competition and thus have entered our consciousness has a far greater potential to alter behaviour.

Levels of processing is probably a good demonstration of this.


Why can’t my eyes gaze around at a constant rate?

Short answer
Smooth-pursuit eye movements require something to pursuit. Intentionally attempting to make such an eye movement in the absence of an appropriate moving visual target will
result in a saccade instead.
Background
Your question concerns two types of basic eye movements, namely saccades and smooth-pursuit eye movements.
Saccades are rapid movements of the eyes to change the point of fixation. They occur for instance during reading and while gazing across a room. Saccades can be made voluntarily or involuntary (Purves, 2001).
Smooth pursuit movements are slower eye movements that keep a moving stimulus focused on the retina. One can voluntarily decide whether to follow a moving stimulus or not. However, making a smooth-pursuit movement in the absence of a moving stimulus is next to impossible for most people. Instead, when attempting to do this, a saccade is made instead. Performing a smooth-pursuit movement in the absence of a moving target seems to be possible, but requires a lot of training (Purves, 2001).
Reference
- Purves et al. (eds). Neuroscience, 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates (2001). Types of Eye Movements and Their Functions


Memory game - short or long-term memory?

Short-term memory capacity is very limited (How much can users hold in their short term memory), and that seems to be a fundamental property of short-term memory (Can working memory actually be improved?). So the longer this game progressed, the less likely it would be that players could keep the information in short-term memory. A few items would be fine. Ten items would be difficult, and items would start to drop out of short-term memory.
Memory experts use techniques like the method of loci to associate new information with an existing structure held in long-term memory. So they would have a significant advantage in this game.


Why do participants prefer to give input values that are "round numbers"?

The effect you are referring to is called heaping. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a source discussing the psychological aspect of this phenomenon, but I found an article about a statistical approach to heaped data.

  Roberts JM, Brewer DD. (2001) Measures and tests of heaping in
  discrete quantitative distributions. Journal of Applied Statistics
  28(7), 887-896. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02664760120074960

  Abstract   Heaping is often found in discrete quantitative data based on subject responses to open-ended interview questions or
  observer assessments. Heaping occurs when subjects or observers prefer
  some set of numbers as responses (e.g. multiples of 5) simply because
  of the features of this set. Although heaping represents a common type
  of measurement error, apparently no prior general measure of heaping
  exists. We present simple measures and tests of heaping in discrete
  quantitative data, illustrate them with data from an epidemiologic
  study, and evaluate the bias of these statistics. These techniques
  permit formal measurement of heaping and facilitate comparisons of the
  degree of heaping in data from different samples, substantive domains,
  and data collection methods.


Can drugs support emotional developement in personality disorders?

This question is a bit broad. The main reason it can be easily answered is that the answer is mostly no. According to a 2016 recent review:

for cluster A personality disorders, which among other things feature low empathy and social aversion there's not a lot going on regarding pharmacotherapy:

  Patients with schizotypal personality disorder have been analyzed in few small open-label studies using typical and atypical antipsychotics. There are no randomized controlled trials for patients with schizoid or paranoid personality disorder, and there is not a robust evidence about the efficacy of psychoactive drugs in these patients.

for cluster B (which include narcissistic and borderline PD) there is more pharmacotherapy in practice, in particular for the latter:

  Antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers are used by a significantly higher percentage of borderline patients than other people with personality disorders [...] Cochrane review found that second-generation antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids have some beneficial effects in these patients, while antidepressants may be helpful when comorbid conditions are present.

They don't say anything about narcissistic PD, so my guess is pharmacotherapy is not much of much help there.

for cluster C (which includes avoidant and obsessive-compulsive) they also note briefly that

  There are no randomized controlled trials of drug treatment for cluster C personality disorders, although it can be argued that antidepressants might be of some help. Particularly, in patients with obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, use of SSRIs may be helpful, especially if anxiety is present


Is there a method to count objects without a pattern?

The act of perceiving quantity without actually counting is known as subitizing, and it's something we can all do up to quantities of about 4 (i.e. you can tell how many fingers someone is holding up without counting them, right?).

This open access article seems to review the idea quite nicely (although I've only skimmed it), including reference to so called "savants". There's also this paper, claiming that transcranial magnetic stimulation can temporarily induce subitizing abilities for larger numbers in participants, though personally I'm dubious.

Finally, to the best of my knowledge, the original, and definitive account of this ability (on which the scene in Rain Man was apparently based; Kim Peek, the inspiration for most of the film, apparently didn't couldn't, or didn't subitize like this) was by Oliver Sachs, in this wonderful book, but basically summarized in this article. If you really are interested, I can't recommend the book strongly enough, it's the reason I did psychology in the first place. It should probably be noted that I've heard criticisms of Sachs' account of the Twins somewhere, but I can't currently find a reference for them, so I don't think it's universally accepted that anyone can actually do this in reality.


If ADHD is caused by brain structure, why isn't analysis of brain structure used to diagnose it?

ADHD is not 'caused' by a brain structure. However, there are observable differences in the brains of ADHD sufferers compared to non-ADHD sufferers.

For example, ADHD sufferers have a disproportionately greater decrease in volume in the left side of the prefrontal cortex, as well as the posterior parietal cortex.

In addition, there is typically a reduction in the number of dopamine receptors, as well as a sensitivity to neurotransmitter activity. Thus, stimulants and cognitive enhancements are often used to treat ADHD.

This paper does a good, in-depth job of mapping networks and brain connectivity to ADHD. If you were to read it, you might notice a problem -- it isn't the case that there is one 'brain structure' that ADHD sufferers have that non-sufferers do not have, nor is it just one brain structure that is affected. The way that ADHD seems to 'work' in the brain is very complex, and there is still much to be learned about the brain before we can go about diagnosing people based on MRI data.

Furthermore, the line between ADHD and other mental disorders is not clearly drawn. Inattentiveness could stem from depression, trauma, or insomnia, for example. Mania and/or hyperactivity could stem from bipolar disorder or histrionic personality disorder. We are so far from figuring the brain out that we can only rely on context at this point in time.


A lot of people study the neural code of the retina. The output from retina are the retinal ganglion neurons (RGC). Their input-output relation and circuits are well modeled (but not fully understood).

Usual preparation is to put retina harvested from an animal on an electrode array and record their responses to movies. See references below:

Baden, T., Berens, P., Franke, K., Román Rosón, M., Bethge, M., and Euler, T. (2016). The functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells in the mouse. Nature, 529(7586):345-350.
Field, G. D., Gauthier, J. L., Sher, A., Greschner, M., Machado, T. A., Jepson, L. H., Shlens, J., Gunning, D. E., Mathieson, K., Dabrowski, W., Paninski, L., Litke, A. M., and Chichilnisky, E. J. (2010). Functional connectivity in the retina at the resolution of photoreceptors. Nature, 467(7316):673-677.
Pillow, J. W., Paninski, L., Uzzell, V. J., Simoncelli, E. P., and Chichilnisky, E. J. (2005). Prediction and decoding of retinal ganglion cell responses with a probabilistic spiking model. Journal of Neuroscience, 25:11003-11013.


Is the energy of an action potential divided among multiple axon terminals?

From my understanding, no, this is not the case: action potentials, in the axon terminal(s) and other non-myelinated areas, travel like a wave, thus activating all terminals with the same starting energy.

In the myelinated areas of the axon, however, the charge instead performs Saltatory conduction, where the charge jumps from one node of Ranvier to the next extremely quickly.

You may be interested in the Wikipedia article on Neurotransmission.  Unfortunately, a few of the citation links on that page are dead, but it should offer some good material anyway.


Is there a difference between visual short term memory and visual working memory?

The distinction between these terms is a matter of ongoing empirical research.  They form part of a set of potential taxonomical categorizations of visual memory (VM).  So far proposed sub-parts of VM include: Iconic (or sensory) memory, short-term (VSTM), fragile short-term (fVSTM), working memory (VWM), and long-term (VLTM) memory.  The distinction between short-term and long-term visual memory is generally accepted, as is iconic memory; the others are still actively debated.

As the neurological validity of these terms is still controversial, it is not unusual for them to be used interchangeably.  For example:

  We consider VSTM and visual working memory (VWM) as the same set of
  processes.

The additional sub-part distinctions are proposed by Sligte and Lamme (2011) (who refer to VSTM as an umbrella term for all the non-long-term memory sub-parts):

  Traditionally, VSTM is thought to operate on either a short time-scale
  with high capacity - iconic memory - or a long time scale with small
  capacity - visual working memory. Recent research suggests that in
  addition, an intermediate stage of memory in between iconic memory and
  visual working memory exists. This intermediate stage has a large
  capacity and a lifetime of several seconds, but is easily overwritten
  by new stimulation. We therefore termed it fragile VSTM.


References for biologically plausible models of knowledge representation?

In my experience, the term "semantic knowledge" (or semantic memory or conceptual knowledge) is generally used to refer to knowledge of objects, word meanings, facts and people, without connection to any particular time or place. The neural basis of this kind of knowledge is more or less agreed to depend on a distributed network of cortical brain regions (e.g., Martin, 2007; Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007). Tim Rogers and Jay McClelland (e.g., Rogers & McClelland, 2004) are among the leaders in developing biologically plausible computational models of semantic memory (and many others are working on it as well).

Goals are usually put in the domain of "executive functions" or "cognitive control" and generally associated with prefrontal (and frontal) cortical regions. I know somewhat less about this area of research, but there are definitely biologically plausible models being developed, including by Botvinick and Plaut (2004) and you might find what you're looking for in the work of Munakata and O'Reilly (e.g., Munakata et al., 2011)

References

Botvinick, M. M., & Plaut, D. C. (2004). Doing Without Schema Hierarchies: A Recurrent Connectionist Approach to Normal and Impaired Routine Sequential Action. Psychological Review, 111(2), 395-429, free pdf.
Martin, A. (2007). The representation of object concepts in the brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 25-45, free pdf.
Munakata, Y., Herd, S. A., Chatham, C. H., Depue, B. E., Banich, M. T., & O’Reilly, R. C. (2011). A unified framework for inhibitory control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(10), 453-459.
Patterson, K. E., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 976-987, free pdf.
Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2004). Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Explanations of responses to real graphic harm

I'm not an expert in social cognition and this may be considered somewhat speculative, but I wouldn't be surprised if the literature found a link between shocking images and their high informational value (along the lines of a delta in reinforcement-learning models).

Intuitively, one would expect that visual representations of potentially dangerous situations would be extremely informative and therefore extremely salient.  Indeed, emotion-induced blindness studies suggest that gory stimuli benefit from the deployment of massive attentional resources, to the point that they may exclude other salient stimuli.

Where this gets speculative is why this is experienced as something pleasurable.  I'd suggest that highly-informative stimuli might be pleasurable in general.  On the pure social psychology end of things, a search for "morbid curiosity" is bound to turn up some relevant results (as suggested by @medica).

I'll leave it up to you to explore these three bibliographic trails. =)


How to train our brain to see everything in slow motion?

Here is an article that explains that the time warp during near death experiences is an illusion. http://www.livescience.com/2117-time-slow-emergencies.html In such situations, the mind captures more memories of the event. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."


How do you run a risk / gambling experiment using Qualtrics or Amazon Turk?

This would be easy to implement in Inquisit. Inquisit has a web interface and is particularly designed for branching and randomisation of trials. If the coding sounds too complex, you can always contact Inquisit and pay them to program the task. From my experience, the cost is not that great for simple scripts.

You can see an example of the Iowa Gambling Task in Inquisit here. That's a lot more complex than what you are describing, but it should give you a feel for what is possible with Inquisit.

You could set up Inquisit with Mechanical Turk as you would most external surveys. See this discussion of mechanical turk.


Which R packages have good collections of psychology datasets?

Some extremely large personality data sets can be downloaded at http://personality-testing.info/_rawdata/ in CSV format.

They are not packaged in R, but I post the link because you indicate in your reply to USER:what that you are having trouble finding any data sets what so ever.


As I pointed out in Technical term for "hidden addictions", the term addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you. Often it can start with a habit but then it becomes an addiction because there is a compulsion to continue the habit.

You can continue with your daily life without carrying out a task which is habit, but if you are addicted to doing it you have a feeling of necessity to do it otherwise you cannot function.

  Addiction is most commonly associated with gambling, drugs, alcohol and nicotine, but it's possible to be addicted to just about anything

So to answer your question, there can be good habits but there are no good types of addiction as they affect your life to the point where you "cannot live" without the addiction.


What books should I study to have a decent understanding of psychology?

I’ve compiled a reading list based on the books I acquired during my undergraduate and graduate psychology programs. I’ve not listed the year I took the course because, with the exception of Introduction to Psychology being required first year and History and Systems being required in our last year (History and Systems was supposed to serve as a GRE study aid), the order of the courses were very flexible. Although there were some topics that were more likely to be taken in the second or third year, that was primarily due to how the instructor had structured the course; courses with more rigorous writing or exam requirements were reserved for later years. Because you will be conducting a self-study, you should generally be able to read/explore these topics in the order that you want.

Also, please note that all programs have a range of elective topics and areas of concentration that will vary. Finally, these books were all sufficient textbooks but are not the only option. In my experience, if you look at the top three psychology textbooks on Amazon for a given topic (e.g., social psychology) they will generally cover the same information and should meet your needs. I recommend using this list as a starting place to develop a list of psychology topics, rather than a strict list of books. You can read textbook reviews or consumer feedback and determine which book you prefer for a given topic. I have listed the most recent editions for the books that I used, but for most topics (except perhaps the neuropsychology books and abnormal [due to DSM-5]) you could safely use older editions dating back ten years.

Introduction to Psychology: This will provide you with an introductory overview of the field, including major theories and areas of psychology. The areas listed in this book (biological psychology, sensation and perception, consciousness, learning, memory, thinking/language/intelligence, motivation and emotion, lifespan development, human sexuality, personality, social psychology, and abnormal psychology) make up the core classes that were part of my undergraduate program.

Hockenbury, D. H., & Hockenbury, S. E. (2012). Psychology. Worth
Publishers. ISBN: 1429243678

Abnormal Psychology

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2001). Abnormal Psychology. McGraw Hill. ISBN:
0-07-235799-1
Barlow, D., & Durand, V. (2014). Abnormal psychology: An integrative
approach. Cengage Learning. ISBN: 1285755618
Halgin, R. P. (Ed.). (2000). Taking sides: Clashing views on
controversial issues in abnormal psychology. Dushkin/McGraw-Hill.
ISBN: 0-07-237193-5

Social Psychology

Brehm, S. S., Kassin, S. M., & Fein, S. (2001). Social Psychology.
Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN: 0-618-12964-2

Biological Psychology/Neuropsychology

Kalat, J. (2012). Biological psychology. Cengage Learning. ISBN:
1111831009
Kolb, B., & Whishaw, I. Q. (2009). Fundamentals of human
neuropsychology. Macmillan. ISBN: 0716795868

Sensation and Perception: Neuropsychology specific to the five senses

Goldstein, E. (2013). Sensation and perception. Cengage Learning.
ISBN: 1133958494

Lifespan Development: The psychology of cognitive, emotional, and social development from birth to death.

Berger, K. S. (2003). The developing person through childhood and
adolescence. Macmillan. ISBN: 1-57259-429-2
Berk, L. (2013). Development through the lifespan. Pearson Education
India. ISBN: 0205957609

History and Systems of Psychology: While Intro to Psych will provide an overview of major areas and disciplines of psychology, this will provide a better sense of the development of psychology as a field and origin of different branches of psychology.

Thorne, B. M., & Henley, T. B. (1997). Connections in the history and
systems of psychology. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. ISBN:
0-618-41512-2

Behavior Therapy/Learning: This was an undergraduate introduction to classic learning theory and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Powell, R., Honey, P., & Symbaluk, D. (2012). Introduction to
learning and behavior. Cengage Learning. ISBN: 111183430X
Spiegler, M., & Guevremont, D. (2009). Contemporary behavior therapy.
Cengage Learning. ISBN: 049550906X
Seligman, M. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and
death. A series of books in psychology. New York, NY: WH
Freeman/Times Books/Henry Holt & Co. ISBN: 0-7167-0752-7

Human Sexuality

Miracle, T. S., Miracle, A. W., & Baumeister, R. F. (2003). Human
sexuality: Meeting your basic needs. Prentice Hall. ISBN:
0-13-032658-5

Research Methods and Statistics: Included here because it is required in most programs, though it may not be of interest to you.

Smith, R., & Davis, S. (2012). The psychologist as detective: An
introduction to conducting research in psychology. ISBN: 0205859070
Gravetter, F., & Wallnau, L. (2006). Statistics for the behavioral
sciences. Cengage Learning. ISBN: 0-495-60220-5

My graduate work focused on clinical psychology and research, which this reading list reflects:

Sansone, C., Morf, C. C., & Panter, A. T. (Eds.). (2003). The Sage
handbook of methods in social psychology. Sage Publications. ISBN:
076192535X
Knapp, S. J., & VandeCreek, L. D. (2006). Practical ethics for
psychologists: A positive approach. American Psychological
Association. ISBN: 1-59147-326-8
Egan, G. (2013). The skilled helper: A problem-management and
opportunity-development approach to helping. Cengage Learning. ISBN:
0-495-60189-6
Dobson, K. S. (Ed.). (2009). Handbook of cognitive-behavioral
therapies. Guilford Press. ISBN: 978-1-60623-437-2
Beck, J. S. (2011). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond.
Guilford Press. ISBN: 978-1-60918-504-6
Corrigan, P. W., Mueser, K. T., Bond, G. R., Drake, R. E., & Solomon,
P. (2012). Principles and practice of psychiatric rehabilitation: An
empirical approach. Guilford Press. ISBN: 978-1-60623-344-3
Sue, D. W., & Sue, D. (2012). Counseling the culturally diverse:
Theory and practice. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-0-470-08632-2


Are there any open task sets available to assess workload using secondary task measures?

Since you mentioned the Stroop specifically, several versions of the Stroop task are available for Inquisit here.

Randall Engle's lab also maintains a set of validated working memory tasks, which are available on request to researchers. They include full and shortened versions of operation-, symmetry-, reading- and rotation-span for E-Prime 2.0.

Assuming I read the question correctly, any of these should satisfy the requirements.


Is there a formal name for "I'm right, don't try to challenge me" / "if you push against me I will be 100x more stubborn" personality trait?

Defensive Pride I would say match your question title.


What is the most comprehensive model of executive control?

Currently, the most comprehensive cognitive model of executive functions would have to be the model proposed by Miyake et al. (2000).
(It is probably best not to confuse being the most comprehensive cognitive model with being a strong explanation, because the executive functions remain one of the most poorly understood areas of cognition, but it's a very useful model.)
Miyake-Friedman Model

This individual differences study examined the separability of three often postulated executive functions—mental set shifting (“Shifting”), information updating and monitoring (“Updating”), and inhibition of prepotent responses (“Inhibition”)—and their roles in complex “frontal lobe” or “executive” tasks.

This influential model has engendered thousands of papers applying it to explain many different findings and domains. Psychometric research using confirmatory factor analysis (Duan, Wei, Wang and Shi, 2010) found support for three shifting, updating and inhibition factors, and Friedman et al. (2006) reported evidence for the factors' discriminant validity by comparing it with the Wechsler IQ scale. Practical support for the model has also come from research on ADHD, as reviewed in Wilcutt et al. (2005), and attentional problems in school settings (Friedman et al., 2007).
Finally, the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery also includes an executive functions test informed by the Miyake and Friedman model, which recently received strong support in a review by Zelazo et al. (2013):

In the current study, we sought to assess the reliability and validity of new measures of EF and attention that are part of the NIH Toolbox CB. New versions of the DCCS and the flanker task were designed to provide assessments of two aspects of EF, cognitive flexibility (Toolbox DCCS) and inhibitory control in the context of visual selective attention (Toolbox Flanker). Together with a separate measure of working memory (see Tulsky et al., Chapter 5, this volume), these measures capture the three aspects of EF identified by Miyake et al. (2000) in their work with adults.
Overall, results reveal excellent developmental sensitivity across childhood, excellent test–retest reliability, and excellent convergent validity (except for the Toolbox Flanker, which showed adequate convergent validity among 8–15 year olds). Correlations between the new NIH Toolbox measures and corresponding convergent measures were generally quite high, although for younger children, they were higher for the DCCS than for the flanker measures.

Overall, the tripartite Miyake and Friedman model is extremely well-supported by both the literature and praxis. If a more comprehensive cognitive model of executive function exists, I am not aware of it.
References

Duan, X., Wei, S., Wang, G., & Shi, J. (2010). The relationship between executive functions and intelligence on 11-to 12-year-old children. Psychological Test and Assessment Modeling, 52(4), 419-431.
Friedman, N. P., Haberstick, B. C., Willcutt, E. G., Miyake, A., Young, S. E., Corley, R. P., & Hewitt, J. K. (2007). Greater attention problems during childhood predict poorer executive functioning in late adolescence. Psychological Science, 18(10), 893-900.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive psychology, 41(1), 49-100.
Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., Nigg, J. T., Faraone, S. V., & Pennington, B. F. (2005). Validity of the executive function theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analytic review. Biological psychiatry, 57(11), 1336-1346.
Zelazo, P. D., Anderson, J. E., Richler, J., Wallner‐Allen, K., Beaumont, J. L., & Weintraub, S. (2013). II. NIH toolbox cognition battery (CB): measuring executive function and attention. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 78(4), 16-33.


Psilocybin for treatment of anxiety disorder

There has been some preliminary research in the 1960's. From "The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders" by Vollenweider and Kometer:

Psycholytic therapy was introduced by Ronald Sandison and applied in
Europe at 18 treatment centres. In psycholytic therapy, low to
moderate doses of LSD (50–100 μg), psilocybin (10–15 mg) or,
sporadically, ketamine were used repeatedly as an adjunct in
psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy to accelerate the
therapeutic process by facilitating regression and the recollection
and release of emotionally loaded repressed memories, and by
increasing the transference reaction. A review of 42
studies reported impressive improvement rates in (mostly
treatment-resistant) patients with anxiety disorders (improvement in
70% of patients), depression (in 62% of patients), personality
disorders (in 53–61% of patients), sexual dysfunction (in 50% of
patients) and obsessive–compulsive disorders (in 42% of patients).
Unfortunately, the majority of these studies had serious
methodological flaws by contemporary standards. In particular, with
the absence of adequate control groups and follow-up measurements and
with vague criteria for therapeutic outcome, the studies did not
clearly establish whether it was the drug or the therapeutic
engagement that produced the reported beneficial effect. It was also
difficult to draw firm conclusions regarding potential long-term
efficacy. Nevertheless, the studies provide a conceptual framework for
the application of psychedelics, with the data suggesting that the
most promising indication for psychedelic use might be found in the
treatment of depression and anxiety disorders.


What to call theory where next activity following a fun activity is also perceived as fun?

The most related experiment that I can think, is the one that people were willing to drink more water after seeing a happy face, because they evaluated the water as more positive. See full article bellow :

Face Value: Hidden Smiles Influence Consumption And Judgment.


Is there a term for a measure in which an extremely high or low score is considered bad?

I recommend looking at non-scientific writing describing when too much AND too little of something is not good-- when average/in the middle is best for a certain outcome. This is true in many aspects of life, so you'll find a variety of words that may express what you want to convey about these high-end suboptimal and low-end suboptimal scores.

English StackExchage wordies may know an existing noun/adjective for exactly what you want. If there isn't a word to express what you mean, you're free to create one. Perhaps pairing the prefix "extra-" in the sense of "outside the optimal range", or the prefix "dys-" in the sense of "unfavorable scores" with word(s) relevant to the measure.


What is the null hypothesis, when there is no research hypothesis?

So your independent variable is the bug, and your dependent variable is apple size.

The question asks whether you are testing a directional hypothesis.
Given that researchers are divided about the direction of the effect of the IV on the DV, it makes more sense to treat it as a non-directional hypothesis:

i.e., H0 is that apple size is equal with and without bugs.
The alternative hypothesis is that they are not equal. Or in some senses, there are two alternative hypotheses, one suggesting an increase and another suggesting a decrease.

Of course, you ultimately want to conclude whether there is a difference and if so what is the direction of the effect. Thus, confidence intervals from a frequentist perspective or a posterior density from a bayesian perspective might be more useful in understanding the direction and degree of any effect.

You may also want to read about suggestions for testing the hypothesis of no group differences.


What is the Golden Standard of Testing Fluid Intelligence?

You'll find an answer here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence#Measurement_of_fluid_intelligence

As it mentions, Raven's Progressive Matrix is a popular option that has been shown to load highly on both g and Gf (fluid intelligence).

In terms of gold standard, it is probably preferable to have a battery of measures that are relevant to Gf and take some composite of these. For example, the WAIS performance subscales.

In general, a good measure of fluid intelligence would be inferred from its correlations with other measures. It should also have good reliability and other validity properties. Specifically, when administered in a large battery of cognitive ability measures, a factor analysis should indicate that the test loads highly on a factor that looks like fluid intelligence (i.e., that other measures of fluid intelligence load on). There's more to it than that, but perhaps a starting point.


Why does Asperger's Syndrome seem to overlap with high IQ?

Short answer: Some traits of Asperger's are found in those with high intelligence, and vice versa. In the grander scheme of things, however, it appears that correlation does not imply causation.

Longer answer:

  AS was first described in 1944 by Austrian physician Hans Asperger. He considered it to be a personality disorder characterized by pedantic speech content, impairment of two-way interactions, excellent logical abstract thinking, isolated areas of interest, repetitive and stereotyped play, and ignorance of environmental demands. AS individuals were thought to be capable of originality and creativity in selective fields (Tsai, 1992). Asperger (1979) suggested that his syndrome was more likely to be observed in children of high intelligence and special abilities. However, to date, the clinical literature on AS has focused on children with average or low-average intelligence. There has been surprisingly little examination of AS among gifted children (Barber, 1996; Cash, 1999a; 1999b).

There seem to be at least seven characteristics that are common to both gifted children and children with Aspberger's syndrome. Those are: verbal fluency, a fascination for letters or numbers and/or memorizing information, an intensive interest in a specialized topic, hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli, a large range of abilities due to their specialized interest(s), and uneven social or affective development.

Due to this overlap (and not necessarily in spite of it), Asperger's syndrome is often mistaken for giftedness in children.

There are differences between gifted children without AS and non-gifted children with AS. Unlike gifted children, children with AS often demonstrate motor clumsiness, low tolerance for change or agitation, inability to understand social humor and proper affect, and appear to lack a "theory of mind" (in other words, they may act abnormally and not have any clue that others perceive them to be abnormal).

  Perhaps the most pronounced feature to distinguish a gifted AS student is his or her remarkable lack of insight and awareness regarding the feelings, needs, and interests of other people. An AS child will talk interminably in a monotonous or pedantic tone about a favorite topic, unaware that the listener might not be interested, needs to leave, is bored, or wants to say something. AS children will also interrupt private conversations and enter or leave abruptly without concern for the wishes or needs of others. They seem oblivious to the simplest rules of social conduct, and repeated efforts to instruct them or remind them do not change these behaviors. A pronounced lack of social awareness is not a common characteristic of ordinary gifted children.

Based on this, it does not seem that AS foreshadows high IQ. It seems likely that AS is often misdiagnosed as giftedness/high intelligence, or vice versa, considering the overlap in external behaviors among both groups. In addition, if 100% of your mental energy was spent on one or two very specific interests, and if you set about in such a way that you /only/ talked about those interests whenever possible, you would indeed seem very intelligent and competent. :)


I think we should first clarify the difference between simple mathematical operators and a complete formal axiomatic system. I think it is very clear that exponentiation, square root or multiplication operations are taught. They represent a higher level cognitive ability than simple addition and subtraction.

In the level of more innate abilities, we can still claim that some numeric tendencies do exist in the human infant. Moreover, these are shown to exist in primates, and even rodents (for instance, see Brannon & Terrace, 1998). It is argued that in infants, numbers are represented in two distinct systems; one is responsible for small numbers and their relations, and the second responsible for mass amounts of items (have a look at Feigenson, Dehaene, Spelke, 2004). Briefly speaking, infants can differentiate 2 items from 3 items or 1 item; on the other hand they can distinguish 40 items from 80 items better than they could 60 or 70 items. So this second system operates on a relatively macro level. Moreover, first system not only provides a comparison operator, but addition also. So, infants can understand that two individual objects make 2 objects. For instance, suppose you have a box and three dolls in it. If you remove two of them, they can understand that there is still one more in it. To summarize, numeric abilities at least partially seem to have innate roots.

This is not surprising at all. In evolutionary terms, it is not hard to see that counting objects can be essential, up to a certain point. For instance, it is very important that prey should recognize whether there is a single hunter or two of them. As another example, it is equally important to recognize whether there are 100 or 200 footsteps on the ground, but not that important whether there is 100 or 105 footsteps. There are surely cognitive abilities with innate roots; one other such ability is human face recognition for example. Infants can detect an upright human face right after they are born.

How is such information represented? It does not have to be in an axiomatic fashion. Neurons have a very simple structure themselves, but networks of neurons are capable of great things. They can be represented in states of a dynamical system, like associative memory. Or they can be represented by simple feedforward structures. It is very hard to distinguish that. My primitive claim is that assuming innate formal axiomatic systems is against the rule of parsimony.


Computational models of early learning in children

Here's something I dug up for language: a Computer Science Thesis from Boulder:

The Sensorimotor Foundations of Phonology: A Computational Model of Early Childhood Articulatory and Phonetic Development (1994)

it discusses what it calls HABLAR (Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language
Acquisition by Reinforcement learning).

From the reductionist/biology side, developing brains have a much higher population of gap junctions.  I would speculate that this would create a much more analog brain, as gap junctions are modeled diffusively, unlike synaptic connections, which can be modeled in a more binary way.  I would speculate that the analog driving of the environmental and genetic signals leads to the formation and orgnaization of the synaptic connectivity.

I wonder if one could find a correlation between plasticity and gap junctions.  They are found to connect axons laterally in hippocampal cells (a region of brain that remains plastic through adulthood)


Is there a Brain Mechanism for Reluctance of Studying?

As in everything in psychology and the studies of behaviour and the brain, there are many interpretations for the extremely complicated process of learning. If you want to check a basic (But detailed) book on most of the early understandings on the subject of Learning, I recommend anything written by Michael Domjan; specially "The Principles of Learning and Behavior".
Also, the studies showed in "Cognitive Psychology" by Robert Stenberg (Mainly memory and perception) could shed some light. If these books are not enough, you could always look for more specifics in some books in neural science, like: "Principles of Neural Science", written by Eric Kandel (Chapter 9 covers mostly learning, but I still recommend Chapters 1, 3, 4, 7 and 8)
If you want a more casual answer, learning is something we don't wanna do sometimes because it is very frustrating, exhausting and hard. Even more, if you're trying to study a very difficult subject, where you start to acknowledge your own cognitive limitations and falling victim to our impatience.
Hope this helps.


fMRI repetition time (TR) and stimulus duration

(f)MRI does not have good temporal resolution. If that is needed something like EEG or MEG is used, but the latter have low spatial resolution (hard inverse problem).
Also note that the low temporal resolution of fMRI is due to BOLD response time (i.e. it's not just the case  that the current fMRI technology sucks)

  fMRI’s temporal resolution is limited by hemodynamic response time; typically the BOLD response has a width of ~3s and a peak occurring ~5–6s after the onset of a brief neural stimulus. This is much slower than the underlying neural processes, and temporal information is thereby heavily blurred.

Without getting into the specifics of the experiment (what's that you're actually trying to measure) it's impossible to say whether fMRI (=BOLD) would be inappropriate.

Also noise and blur are not the same issue; loot at some illustrations and it should be obvious without getting into math.


Is there a difference between ADD and ADHD?

They are interchangeable.  ADD was a term used throughout most of the 80s and ADHD aftewards.  In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 1980 (DSM-III) published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) it was named ADD and the name changed to ADHD in the 1987 edition, DSM-III-R (which I can find no online sources of).

ADD has been used to describe a sufferer without the observable hyperactivity but it is still essentially the same thing.  Which leads to the confusion.

Terms used to describe the condition include:

Before 1980, hyperkinetic reaction of childhood
1980-1987, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
1987, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD
1994, ADHD was disected into subtypes, predominantly inattentive (ADHD-PI or ADHD-I), predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-PH or ADHD-HI), and combined type (ADHD-C).


Are dice and domino dot arrangement conventions related to readability?

These dots are known as pips. Pip placement tends to follow a convention, but this placement may vary by region, as you can see by this comparison between Western and Asian dice (from wikipedia):

I suspect this arrangement has nothing to do with cognitive science or usability, but is simply a convention. However, you may note that on the Western-style dice, pips are arranged so as to maximize the distance between any two pips while maintaining symmetry-- this should aid in quick recognition regardless of how the dice are rotated when they land.


What is the state of the art in computerised coding of Thematic Apperception Tests (TATs)?

The state of the art in computer-scored Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT) as of 2015 appears to be that computer-scored TATs do not exist.

There does not appear to be any relevant results on Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scopus for any search I can think of including the term "thematic apperception" which yield any example or mention of computer-scored TATs, and all recent studies utilizing TATs have reported using standard versions (e.g., Turk et al., 2010). A 2013 book dedicated to the TAT, A practical guide to the Thematic Apperception Test: The TAT in clinical practice also fails to make any mention of computer-scored or otherwise computerized implementations of the TAT.

References

Aronow, E., Weiss, K. A., & Reznikoff, M. (2013). A practical guide to the Thematic Apperception Test: The TAT in clinical practice. Routledge.
Turk, A. A., Brown, W. S., Symington, M., & Paul, L. K. (2010). Social narratives in agenesis of the corpus callosum: linguistic analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test. Neuropsychologia, 48(1), 43-50.


Why do some people only work well under pressure?

I have often wondered about this, as I know I do this, even setting myself arbitrary deadlines, not always with the best results.  The following is not an opinion, but based on some information found while, ironically, taking a 'break' from my PhD drafting.

According to "In Search of the Arousal Procrastinator", (Pychyl, 2008), the notion of 'working under pressure' could be based on their cognitive dissonance, concluding (in part):

  a common theme about self-deception and task delay. We often rationalize our current delay because we don't feel like  working on the task by evoking (irrational) beliefs like, "I'll feel more like it tomorrow" or "I work better under pressure." Although this may be the case on rare occasions for some tasks, on the whole these thoughts are simply rationalizations to justify further delay and make us feel good in the short run.

However, according to "Procrastination or 'intentional delay'?" (Novotney), there could be benefits in the procrastination, as it may lead to better planning of what is needed to be done, so the pressure of the deadline is not necessarily entirely harmful.

Other resources cited in the above links:

Ferrari, J. R. (1992). Psychometric validation of two procrastination inventories for adults: Arousal and avoidance measures. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 14, 97-110

Ferrari, J.R., Johnson, J.L., McCown, W.G. (1995). Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research, and Treatment. New York: Springer.

Schouwenburg, H.C., Lay, C., Pychyl, T.A., Ferrari, J.R. (Eds.) (2004). Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings. Washington, DC: APA.

Burka, J.B., & Yuen, L.M. (2nd Edition). (2008). Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now. New York City: Da Capo Lifelong Books.


What are the underlying mechanisms for optimism bias?

Optimism bias refers to a general human tendency to underestimate the likelihood of negative events, and conversely, to overestimate the likelihood of positive events, when making predictions about which events will occur to oneself in the future.

It is a cognitively interesting and widely studied phenomenon, because the human brain and human behavior are broadly believed to be highly adaptive, but optimism bias demonstrates that in many cases, we maintain beliefs in spite of the available evidence. This is a somewhat less surprising finding nowadays, since modern psychology has largely abandoned the idea of humans as rational actors. There was a time, though―a time, in Skinner's heyday, when optimism bias was considered baffling and proper paradoxical.

Sharot (2011) suggested that optimism bias is cognitively maintained by a bias towards updating our beliefs in response to positive prospective information than to negative prospective information. She attributed this to decreased encoding of negative-update information in the right inferior frontal gyrus. In another paper, Sharot, Riccardi, Raio and Phelps (2007) had reported this decreased encoding may be mediated by activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and amygdala:

  Here we report that [optimism bias] was related specifically to enhanced activation in the amygdala and in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex when imagining positive future events relative to negative ones, suggesting a key role for areas involved in monitoring emotional salience in mediating the optimism bias.

In other words, the amygdala appears to evaluate the emotion valence of the information, evoking a regulatory response in the rACC, which is implemented as an inhibited update to negative-update evidence, or optimism bias, by the right inferior frontal gyrus.

References

Sharot, T. (2011). The optimism bias. Current Biology, 21(23), R941-R945.
Sharot, T., Riccardi, A. M., Raio, C. M., & Phelps, E. A. (2007). Neural mechanisms mediating optimism bias. Nature, 450(7166), 102-105.


Does the act of neural-repair fire off neurons?

Question: Does neural repair result in firing neurons?

This is a difficult question. Because a repair occurs when and where there is a damage. If there are abnormal firings of neurons, it will be difficult to sort out which one is the cause. It is also possible that both cause the firings.

However, there is no evidence that the majority of repairs, which are the repairs to maintain healthy cellular structure and functions and which occur ubiquitously all the time in the nervous system in the normal condition, cause abnormal neuronal firings. For example, there is no evidence that abnormal brain waves, seizure activities, or abnormal neurological symptoms occurr in normal people because of these normal repairs.

So, all that can be concluded for now is that the majority of repairs, which occur in the normal condition, do not cause abnormal neuronal firings.

For more, please refer to:

Martino, G., Pluchino, S., Bonfanti, L., & Schwartz, M. (2011). Brain regeneration in physiology and pathology: the immune signature driving therapeutic plasticity of neural stem cells. Physiological reviews, 91(4), 1281-1304. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00032.2010 pcmcid: PMC3552310


Do the students that report "friendly" teachers perform better on standardized tests?

I am answering this in parts, as an overview for issues relating to learning outcomes and perceived teacher friendliness.

To assist, I would categorise friendliness to mean encouragement and rapport (respect may or may not be correlated within this).

Firstly to address integrating theories of teaching and learning.

  Theories of learning and theories of teaching often originate and
  operate independently from one another. This article attempts to
  contribute to the integration of the two types of theories. First, the
  cognitive, affective and regulative activities students use to learn
  are analyzed. Next, different ways in which teachers can regulate the
  learning and thinking activities of students are discussed, as well as
  the teaching strategies they can use for that aim. The third part
  focuses on different ways in which student-regulation and
  teacher-regulation of learning act upon one another. Congruence and
  friction between these modes of control are discussed. From this
  interplay implications are derived for process-oriented teaching,
  aimed at promoting congruence and constructive friction, avoiding
  destructive friction and reducing the gap between learning and
  teaching. 1

Secondly a study that shows the  beneficial and cyclic effect of an encouraging teacher/student relationship. (note the reverse is true for students caught within a negative   cycle)

  On the basis of a new model of motivation, the authors examined the
  effects of 3 dimensions of teacher (n = 14) behavior (involvement,
  structure, and autonomy support) on 144 children's (Grades 3–5)
  behavioral and emotional engagement across a school year.
  Correlational and path analyses revealed that teacher involvement was
  central to children's experiences in the classroom and that teacher
  provision of both autonomy support and optimal structure predicted
  children's motivation across the school year. Reciprocal effects of
  student motivation on teacher behavior were also found. Students who
  showed higher initial behavioral engagement received subsequently more
  of all 3 teacher behaviors. These findings suggest that students who
  are behaviorally disengaged receive teacher responses that should
  further undermine their motivation. The importance of the
  student–teacher relationship, especially interpersonal involvement, in
  optimizing student motivation is highlighted. (PsycINFO Database
  Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) 2

This study examines the effects of positive versus negative verbal reinforcement on different personality types. It would appear that not all people perform best within the cycle of "friendliness".

  However, there was a highly significant interaction between these
  variables; extraverts performed better under positive than negative
  reinforcement, whilst introverts performed better under negative than
  positive reinforcement. 3

Which brings me to my last point, which is that motivation appears to be improved by a balance between friendliness creating a tension within the classroom.  It also shows that both positive and negative reinforcement are necessary.

  Motivation
  • Set a feeling or tone for the lesson. Instructors should try to
  establish a friendly, open atmosphere  that shows the participants
  they will help them learn.
  • Set an appropriate level of concern. The
  level of tension must be adjusted to meet the level of  importance of
  the objective. If the material has a high level of importance, a
  higher level of  tension/stress should be established in the class.
  However, people learn best under low to moderate  stress; if the
  stress is too high, it becomes a barrier to learning.

  Reinforcement
  • Positive reinforcement is normally used by instructors who are
  teaching participants new skills. As  the name implies, positive
  reinforcement is "good" and reinforces "good" (or positive) behavior.
  • Negative reinforcement is the contingent removal of a noxious
  stimulus that tends to increase the  behavior. The contingent
  presentation of a noxious stimulus that tends to decrease a behavior
  is  called Punishment. Reinforcing a behavior will never lead to
  extinction of that behavior by  definition. Punishment and Time Out
  lead to extinction of a particular behavior, but positive or  negative
  reinforcement of that behavior never will 4

In conclusion
From the available studies, an underlying friendliness, which enables approachability b students, facilitates learning, but a certain level of discipline and the boundary creating an unequal relationship is also necessary. Suggesting that balance is the key and there are no hard and fast rules, as people have varying learning styles.

1 Congruence and friction between learning and teaching
Jan D Vermunt, Nico Verloop
Leiden University, ICLON — Graduate School of Education, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0959-4752(98)00028-0, How to Cite or Link Using DOI
Permissions & Reprints

 2 Motivation in the classroom: Reciprocal effects of teacher behavior and student engagement across the school year.
Skinner, Ellen A.; Belmont, Michael J.
Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 85(4), Dec 1993, 571-581. doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.85.4.571

 3 Effects of positive and negative verbal reinforcement on performance as a function of extraversion-introversion: Some tests of Gray's theory
John Boddy, Annabel Carver, Kevin Rowley
Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, England
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(86)90111-X, How to Cite or Link Using DOI
Permissions & Reprints

 4 Carrie Ekey, Literacy Coaches Training, Feb. 2012  PRINCIPLES OF ADULT LEARNING By Stephen LiebSenior Technical Writer and Planner, Arizona Department of Health Servicesand part-time Instructor, South Mountain Community Collegefrom VISION, Fall 1991


How to address a narcissist to go to therapy?

The person prolly isn't a clinical narcissists only a psychologist could diagnose as such. When you do find one though it's a very tough case.

To be honest one of my current psychologist and I discussed the situation of narcissist therapy in detail. I dated someone who fell somewhere in the empathy disorder spectrum. The person wanted me to announce them to the world and due to my socio-economic situation it would result in what little family I have left disowning me. In general psychotherapy can teach someone who is thus sick how to behave in a manner consistent with the norms of society but there remains some question of current methods ability to remedy the disorder in a way that the changes cause the universe which that person experiences not to revolve around them.

I suggest an appeal to ego might work. My appeals to morals, emotions and logic did not work. When I bruised this persons ego centered around them doing something obviously stupid that was causing them physical pain they responded well. The person hurt their foot after we broke up and the doctor would not give them pain meds because they would not ask for fear of becoming addicted. They had however discussed their affinity for Mary Jane so I offered to buy them some pot and they refused. It's legal here but could not afford the trip to the special doctor or the pot itself. I swore fine and when you want your nose reattached for you seem to have your mind to remove it I will pay the plastic surgery. They asked what do you mean and I explained the concept of Cutting off the nose to spite the face. Then my help was accepted. So I would frame the argument around self betterment. Do not attempt to point out fallibility of the individual to self help. They love gifts. Maybe buy a book that deals with psychotherapy and includes something that resembles their problem. (Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt if they are female and maybe the lesser The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed
If male a lot of problems are so inherited from parents and learning about their parents flaws may help them self identify) A lot of important people in the world bare some of the dark triad traits and have learned through therapy how to be more successful and influence people.


Why does a stuffed up nose clear up momentarily when the person having it is startled or has an orgasm?

Norepinephrine is responsible for, among many other things, causing a constriction the nasal vasculature and slowing capillary leakage that would lead to a runny nose.

Both the startle response (sympathetic) and the orgasm response (sharp transition between high peak of sympathetic response and descent into parasympathetic) result in large releases of epinephrine and norepinephrine into the bloodstream from the adrenal medulla.


What is the primary source of the "mount stupid" graphic?

Short answer
The cartoon graphics showing mount stupid seem to be exaggerated, popular-scientific representations, and should, as far as I can see, be regarded as schematics to illustrate a more subtle effect.

Background
From what I can find, the cartoons you provide are exaggerated and simplified versions depicting the more pronounced examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect like in Fig. 1 where subjects performed a Wason task (Schlösser et al., 2013). The mountain is somewhat visible here, especially in panel B where the raw scores are plotted. There the subjective performance increases monotonically, while the perceived score in the poorest quartile is above the second, which resembles the peak you are referring to. However, this is one of the most pronounced samples I could find and it may well be caused by variance, as other graphs in that same paper, other sources you provide above (Kruger & Dunning, 1999) don't show this peak. Similarly, plots in Dunning (2011) are less pronounced at this point.

Fig. 1. Actual versus perceived performance on Wason task. Dotted line represents where perceived performance should lay according to the Krajč–Ortmann model. source: (Schlösser et al., 2013)

References
- Dunning, Advances Exp Soc Psych (2011); 44: 247-96
- Kruger & Dunning, J Personality Social Psych (1999); 77(6): 121-34
- Schlösser et al., J Economic Psych (2013); 39: 85-100


Is there a validated questionnaire on consumer well-being?

There are many consumer satisfaction tests available, see for a somewhat dated but informative review Westbrook & Oliver (1981). Most often, simple, single-item rating scales are employed. Reportedly, there is little uniformity in the number of scale steps used and in the anchoring. They often range from 3-point labeled rating scales (e.g.., good - neutral - bad) to 10- and 11-point variants labeled only at the extremes and midpoint (e.g., 0= bad; 5 = neutral; 10= excellent).

An interesting consumer questionnaire I found was devised by Lou et al. (2007). It was devised for assessing people's satisfaction with drinking water and consisted of a general part I with personal information (Fig. 1), and a part II specifically testing consumer satisfaction (Fig. 2). Because the authors targeted specifically the defining characteristics of drinking water based on the Water Taste and Odor Wheel you might want to adapt certain questions in part II to match your specific needs.

Fig. 1. Part I. General information. source: Lou et al. (2007)

Fig. 2. Part II. Consumer satisfaction. source: Lou et al. (2007)

References
- Lou et al. J Environmental Management (2007); 82(1): 1-12
- Westbrook & Oliver, Advances Consumer Res (1981); 8: 94-99


How did Shaver (1970) manipulate similarity in the defensive attribution study?

This article has several experiments included in it. These have different operational definitions of variables, and specifically differ in their definitions of "similarity". I'll assume you are talking about Experiment 3 where the hypothetical child is injured. From the end of Experiment 2 (p. 108, c. 2, first full paragraph):

  ... a third experiment was conducted in which perceived personal similarity was one of the dependent variables ... Thus, only severity of consequences was
  actually manipulated.

So for this situation (Experiment 3), similarity is actually treated as an outcome and is not manipulated.


Neurotransmitters appearance in the evolutionary process

Neurobiology and Evolution are not exactly my field of expertise, but I'll try to answer anyway.

  Are there any neurotransmitters that appeared only in human evolution history?

Probably not. The common human neurotransmitters we know of, are also found in other animals. More surprisingly, most of them are also found in organisms with no nervous-system, such as microorganisms and plants. This has even led some to advocate the change of the name neurotransmitters to biomediaters (Roshchina, 2010).

It is believed that most of the changes in the nervous system occur at the circuitry level, and are not the introduction of new types of neurotransmitters. For example, Venter et al (1988) write:

  The presence of hormones, neurotransmitters, their receptors and biosynthetic and degradative enzymes is clearly not only associated with the present and the recent past but with the past several hundred million years. Evidence is mounting which indicates substantial conservation of protein structure and function of these receptors and enzymes over these tremendous periods of time. These findings indicate that the evolution and development of the nervous system was not dependent upon the formation of new or better transmitter substances, receptor proteins, transducers and effector proteins but involved better utilization of these highly developed elements in creating advanced and refined circuitry.

And Winer and Larue (1996) write:

  Many features in the mammalian sensory thalamus, such as the types of neurons, their connections, or their neurotransmitters, are conserved in evolution.

However, it is important to remember that there are changes related to the neurotransmitters and how they are used in the brain. For example, Burki and Kaessmann (2004) showed that one gene encoding the enzyme glutamate dehydrogenase, which is important in the neurotransmitter glutamate recycling process has appeared less than 23 million years ago in our evolution. Grailhe et al (2001) show that one type of Serotonin recceptor has disappeared somewhere in the evolution between rodents and humans.

References

Roshchina, V. V. (2010). Evolutionary considerations of neurotransmitters in microbial, plant, and animal cells. In Microbial Endocrinology (pp. 17-52). Springer New York.
Venter, J. C., Di Porzio, U., Robinson, D. A., Shreeve, S. M., Lai, J., Kerlavage, A. R., ... & Fraser, C. M. (1988). Evolution of neurotransmitter receptor systems. Progress in neurobiology, 30(2-3), 105.
Winer, J. A., & Larue, D. T. (1996). Evolution of GABAergic circuitry in the mammalian medial geniculate body. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 93(7), 3083-3087.
Burki, F., & Kaessmann, H. (2004). Birth and adaptive evolution of a hominoid gene that supports high neurotransmitter flux. Nature genetics, 36(10), 1061-1063.
Grailhe, R., Grabtree, G. W., & Hen, R. (2001). Human 5-HT5 receptors: the 5-HT5A receptor is functional but the 5-HT 5B receptor was lost during mammalian evolution. European journal of pharmacology, 418(3), 157-167.


Connections between different theories of personality

It's unclear if the idea of 'translation' from one personality framework to another is a meaningful concept. A score on any given personality factor represents some weighted combination of measures - usually endorsement of questionnaire items like "I am the life of the party", etc.

As such, every factor score is a unique variable that probably doesn't reflect some underlying property of the human brain, but is a scientifically convenient construct

Though personality theories are usually based on how different trait scores factor analyse, and so they often have a lot of overlap. Eysenck's Neuroticism and Extroversion factors are very similar to the Big Five N and E factors, because those emerge very strongly when you look at the common clusters of human traits. But they aren't identical, because they're comprised of different items and exist in a different multidimensional test structure with different cross-loadings.

The different theories are different because they cannot be translated to one another, though similarities can always be drawn.


Looking for happines in marriage survey according to living/not living together before marriage

A study reported, in the 80's, that unmarried cohabitation prior to marriage was associated with "significantly" lower marital satisfaction, but did not report an effect size. They also reported that the duration of unmarried cohabitation was unrelated to marital satisfaction(DeMaris and Leslie, 1984). A later study by the same lead author from the 90's reported that unmarried cohabitation predicted later divorce after controlling for time in union (DeMaris and Rao, 1992), which I include because time in union could be a confounding factor and I could not find direct evidence.
Wydick (2007) gave a game theoretic account of why unmarried cohabitation may lead to relatively decreased marital satisfaction which I am not qualified to evaluate, but the paper cites a number of empirical studies that support DeMaris' older thesis, so this paper may also be of some interest.
Not to speculate, but this is subjectively surprising to me. When I began the literature search, I was confident the idea was nonsense, and yet here we are.
References

DeMaris, A., & Leslie, G. R. (1984). Cohabitation with the future spouse: Its influence upon marital satisfaction and communication. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 77-84.
DeMaris, A., & Rao, K. V. (1992). Premarital cohabitation and subsequent marital stability in the United States: A reassessment. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 178-190.
Wydick, B. (2007). Grandma was right: Why cohabitation undermines relational satisfaction, but is increasing anyway. Kyklos, 60(4), 617-645.


Name for compulsive need to mimic another's symptoms of illness?

Siblings as children do this alot. Most people grow out of it. I would think these symptoms reflect a kind of hypochondriasis which is a factitious disorder with an underlying dependant (or inverse dependence) disorder. It could also be an incorrect empathic response due to a narcissistic disorder. The aggressive features as a response to others doubts definitely is a little paranoia and tends me to lean to some kind of narcissistic attention getting type thing. In rare cases it could be a full blown extreme factitious disorder. Faking tests and everything. They had an entire episode of house (s5e18) dedicate to the lady who publically urinated green and faked a seizure to get House interested in her fake illness.


In which way does what you do right after class affect knowledge retention?

The reason you instinctively feel that a walk in the woods is better than TV may be partially related to the schemas you've developed around both activities. You get the feeling that talking a walk is a more "intellectual" activity than TV because that's you expectation based on what you've heard, and your experiences of TV being a lazy activity for pleasure, not because TV inherently "rots your brain".

That said, the other half of things is probably the answer you're looking for. Right after class, your memories of the lecture are still malleable and not yet incorporated into long-term memory. The Wikipedia article on this is a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation


As Bryan indicates, this question is hardly answerable in the context of science. However, I can take a bash at it;

  Can anyone explain what she means by this? Isn't the melancholic, in the last analysis, the same as the depressed?

No, melancholy is more of a 'normal' emotional state, whereas depression is a debilitating mental illness associated with morbid symptoms and higher chances of suicide.

As to that other passage, I reckon that's really a biased, opinion-fueled statement with no relation whatsoever in science. To cite a part of the wiki page on her:

  Her [...] work includes [...] intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history.

These areas of expertise are quite far from science. Psychoanalysis comes closest, but even that is disputed in terms of not being embedded in evidence-based science.


What is the test-retest correlation for HEXACO personality?

I have not yet found HEXACO domain estimates. I've had a lock through the main articles listed as references on http://hexaco.org/references but they seem to focus more on internal structure.

However, the HEXACO-PI is quite similar to the the NEO-PI in terms of number of items per domain and the general approach to trait measurement. Thus, I would expect that NEO-PI stability would provide a ballpark of what to expect. The following is a summary of few studies from the Wikipedia article on the NEO-PI.

  The test retest reliability of an early version of the NEO after 3 months was: N = .87, E = .91, O = .86.[14]
  The test retest reliability reported in the manual of the NEO PI-R over 6 years was: N = .83, E = .82, O = .83, A = .63, C = .79.
  A 2001 study by Kurtz and Parrish[15] on the short-term test-retest reliability yielded coefficients of α = .91–.93 for domains and α
  =.70–.91 for facets after a one-week interval. ...
  A 2006 study by Terracciano et al.[16] on the long-term test-retest reliability yielded coefficients of α = .78–.85 for domains and α =
  .57–.82 for facets after a 10-year interval.

SOURCE

References

McCrae, R. R.; Costa, P. T. (1983). "Joint factors in self-reports and ratings: Neuroticism, extraversion and openness to experience". Personality and Individual Differences 4 (3): 245–255. doi:10.1016/0191-8869(83)90146-0.
Kurtz J. E., Parrish C. L. (2001). "Semantic response consistency and protocol validity in structured personality assessment: The case of the NEO PI-R". Journal of Personality Assessment 76 (2): 315–332. doi:10.1207/S15327752JPA7602_12. PMID 11393463.
Terracciano, A.; Abdel-Khalek,et al (2005). "National Character Does Not Reflect Mean Personality Trait Levels in 49 Cultures". Science 310 (5745): 96–100. doi:10.1126/science.1117199. PMC 2775052. PMID 16210536.


Long story short, aspiration for leadership / dominance.

By having bullied someone (and not having been told where to get off), the bully effectively establishes dominance over the victim, which indulges their ego and makes them feel strong and lifeworthy.

Anybody with power or strong character can become a bully towards less strong/powerful ones, unless educated or motivated not to.

That said, bullies do not necessarily have anything common in their childhood histories that caused them to become bullies, however, having been bullied in the past or having seen bullying increases the likelihood of one becoming a bully. Vivid examples of this are dedovshchina and ragging — where people justify their bully behaviour by "I was bullied by older mates before, now it is my turn to take it out on the newcomers", or simply seeing that as a de-facto tradition.


What are some of the drawbacks to probabilistic models of cognition?

Probabilistic approaches of this sort are usually referred to more specifically as the bayesian approach and Chater and Tanenbaum are definitely bayesians (I have not read much by Yuille and can't comment). Bayesianism is more than just increasing in popularity and being encouraged; it is considered one of the big-4 approaches to cognitive-modeling, with the other 3 being: connectionism, rule-based, and dynamic systems. The bayesian approach has many positives and produced many great results, but since your question is about the drawbacks I will focus exclusively on that. Two major drawbacks are: neural grounding and rationality.

Neural grounding is a weakness that plagues all of the big-4 and cognitive science in general. The idea is that as we build models of the mind, we want to eventually ground them in the brain; this is a standard feature of reductionism. The bayesian approach is often summarized as "probabilities over rules", and suffers from the same difficulty of neural grounding as the rule-based approach did. It is often not clear how the brain implements this sophisticated bayesian inference (but the field is well aware of this problem, and works hard to resolve it). Is this a game killer? Not really, connectionism is often considered the more 'biologically-plausible' alternative, but most popular connectionist models can be just as easily questioned on their biological viability. The issue can also be sidestepped completely by saying that we do wish to address cognition at a different level that biological implementation (sort of how thermodynamics can have laws without the specific grounding provided by statistical mechanics). An example of this on our site is looking for behaviorist interpretations of models (note that decision field theory falls more into the dynamic systems approach, so it isn't a perfect example).

For me, the much more prominent weakness is rationality. Bayes rule is inherently rational -- humans are not; a bayesian has to use various hacks to account for human irrationality. Connectionism does not suffer from this drawback, and neither do some exotic approaches like Busemeyer's quantum cognition (I provide a sketch in this answer). If you want to see why models based on classical probability have a difficulty explaining aspects of human irrationality, take a look at Busemeyer, J. R., Wang, Z., & Townsend, J. T. (2006).


Who first proposed using ROC curves in a psychological context?

I worked out the answer to the question just as I was about to post it.

Swets (1973) writes of a 1954 conference that

  Peterson and Birdsall had presented it a year earlier in a technical
  report. So it is fair to say, from the vantage point of psychology,
  that Peterson and Birdsall showed us how to plot the data.

Unless Swets is mistaken, the answer is Peterson and Birdsall (1953).

Peterson, W. W., & Birdsall, T. G. The Theory of Signal Detectability (1953). Technical report No. 13, Electronic Defense Group, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Swets, J. A. (1973). The relative operating characteristic in psychology. Science, 182(4116), 990-1000.


Why do people get syllables mixed up when trying to recall words?

One way of thinking about speech production is using a spreading activation architecture. Say I want to produce the word "rooster." I have a meaning to be expressed (feathery avian animal loud...etc). These semantic representations send activation down to various matching words (bird, rooster, chicken...etc). As these words collect evidence for themselves, they send activation down to their corresponding sounds (bird sends activation to the sounds /b/, /r/, and /d/; rooster sends activation to /r/, /u/, /s/, /t/ ..etc). Once any node (word, sound..etc) receives enough evidence for itself, it is selected. There are nuances about how and when nodes become selected and how activation is passed, but this is the gist. In addition, there is noise in the system based on words that were previously said, upcoming words, words that are semantically related and so on.  This noise introduces the possibility for speech errors. Some errors are more likely than others depending on the amount of evidence they have collected. For example, in the example I presented here, the /r/ sound got more activation than the other sounds because it is collecting activation because it appears once in the word 'bird' and twice in the word 'rooster.' This sound might be more or less likely to be produced erroneously compared to sounds like /s/. These error probabilities explain why we are more likely to make real word errors, and why tongue twisters are so tricky. See the following article for more information.

Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological review, 93(3), 283.


What are some reasons that make rule-based reasoning about morality more intuitive than utilitarian reasoning?

I don't know if this really answers your question, but at a high level, rule-based reasoning about anything is more intuitive. By this I mean, rules are heuristics-- and having heuristics makes for more efficient reaction formation, decision-making, action, etc. The time and energy to process a stimulus, including a morally relevant scenario, is reduced when applying a heuristic, like a rule.
Morality is not my area of expertise, But I will add that there's possibly also a component here of some discomfort associated with making moral evaluations. Moral judgements serve as functional guides of behavioral consequences and outcomes (having real impact in people's lives), and typically involve some degree of uncertainty. This may cause discomfort, whereas rule-based reasoning allows for avoidance of careful thought and therefore avoidance of that discomfort ..? Just a thought, no real evidence to back that


Short answer
Hypothesis (1)

Background
The question is quite broad, as exemplified by the statement: They may be insecure about their looks, their (odd) behavior, or may question whether they belong to a group (of friends, colleagues and what not).

Personally and anecdotally, I think that a healthy self-doubt forms the core of self-reflection and allows a social animal like Homo sapiens to improve its behavior and mold itself according to the social structure with all its rights and obligations.

To approach this question with a less opinion-based perspective, I think that the root of a possible answer is the question what happens when people lack any self-doubt. I'm not a psychologist, but narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) comes to mind. The characteristic features of this condition are dominance, arrogance, superiority, power seeking, and disregard of others. All these traits seem to fit a total lack of self doubt (Ronningstam, 2011). However, some phenotypes of this condition may include insecure people, but it is just for the purpose of showing what people may turn into that lack self-doubt (and admittedly oversimplifying NPD). The typical NPD sufferer therefore won't fit in well in a social structure, and humankind, obviously, has built highly complex social societies.

In terms of evolution, Joseph Henrich explains that long before the origins of agriculture, when humans expanded across the globe from the arid deserts of Australia to the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic, survival in the immense diversity of habitats depended not on specific genetic adaptations, but on large bodies of culturally transmitted know-how, abilities, and skills that no single individual could figure out in his or her lifetime. Even among foraging societies, humans show an immense variety of social organizations, group sizes, kinship structures, and mating patterns. He explains that this diversity is at least partially rooted in culturally-acquired and widely shared social rules.

Reference
- Ronningstam, J Psychiatric Practice (2011); 17(2): 89–99


Why is inward electrical current negative?

This is just a chosen convention in biology. All that matters is we use a consistent convention. The one chosen is that outward positively charged ion movement is positive, inward positively charged current is negative; outward negatively charged current is negative, inward negatively charged current is positive.
It would be valid to do everything the opposite way, just change some signs in relevant equations, but since this is the convention everyone uses it's best to stay consistent with it.
Importantly, there is not really a conflict with "current direction is the way positive charge would flow" convention in physics, it's just that you have to determine a reference point. We think of the inside of a cell as the reference, so when positive charge moves from the reference to outside the reference (outward current), we call this positive current. We plot positive currents moving in the opposite direction as negative, which makes sense, but rather than only calling these "negative current" we recognize that this means positive charge is moving inward so a synonym is "inward current".
This convention is also consistent with the convention chosen for voltage. We describe a "negative membrane potential" when the inside is negative relative to the outside. Current is given by:
I = V/R
So, when membrane voltage is negative we say the inside is more negative than outside, and we get a "negative current" if we open some sodium channels and let those positive ions move in. If we used the other current convention we'd have to use a non-standard equation like
I = -V/R
or change the direction in which we describe voltage across the membrane to describe the potential of the outside rather than potential of the inside.


What causes systematic under- or over-estimation of general knowledge quantities?

One theory that may explain this is is Kahneman and Tversky's anchoring heuristic.

If you ask how much fuel the space shuttle needs, most people don't have the proper background knowledge to answer this accurately. Instead, they'll rely on a piece of information they do know--e.g., how much fuel a car needs--and adjust from there. Responses will be biased towards the anchor. Since a car requires very little fuel in comparison (~12 gallons), people will tend to underestimate the true response (~500,000 gallons).

If you first told them: The cruise ship The Norwegian Dream holds roughly 350,000 gallons of fuel, and then asked how much fuel weight the space shuttle needs, their answers will likely be closer to the truth. (Though there is the confounding variable of size-- larger vessels need more fuel, but even small vessels will need a lot of fuel to launch into space).

When it comes to horses, people have more accurate anchors-- such as a human, or an elephant-- and will tend to make more accurate judgments.

Although there are certainly more cues that people use to make size judgments, a complete theory must take into account one's background knowledge. Thus, even the anchoring heuristic   is limited in that we must know what people are likely to use as an anchor for any given question.


What is a belief, and how does it differ from an opinion?

Edit: This article from the Guardian reviews research into what forms and influences belief, gives some make up of what a belief is, but I could not find a, and separate, scientific defintion.
A opinion is a judgement based on facts while a belief is a conviction based on personal values.

 An opinion is a judgment based on facts, an honest attempt to draw a reasonable conclusion from factual evidence. (For example, we know that millions of people go without proper medical care, and so you form the opinion that the country should institute national health insurance even though it would cost billions of dollars.) An opinion is potentially changeable--depending on how the evidence is interpreted. By themselves, opinions have little power to convince. You must always let your reader know what your evidence is and how it led you to arrive at your opinion.
Unlike an opinion, a belief is a conviction based on cultural or personal faith, morality, or values. Statements such as "Capital punishment is legalized murder" are often called "opinions" because they express viewpoints, but they are not based on facts or other evidence. They cannot be disproved or even contested in a rational or logical manner. Since beliefs are inarguable, they cannot serve as the thesis of a formal argument.

Colorado State University