Which is the most valid/validated scale for diagnosis of Major depression for an Indian population?

I am sharing my research here should anybody find it useful.

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Although PHQ-9 wasn’t developed for an Indian audience, it has been used by multiple
studies in India [1, 2, 3]. It has also been validated for an adolescent population, and a
score of was found to have high sensitivity (87.1%) and specificity (79.7%) [4]. A
modified version of PHQ-9, the PHQ-12, was developed and validated on a South Indian
population of 100 participants. PHQ-12 essentially tests the same symptoms as PHQ-9
but differs in number of questions, the specific wordings of the questions, and the
marking scheme. PHQ-12 lets the patient mark every question in a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. A
‘Yes’ is given a score of 1 and a ‘No’ a score of 0. A total score of >4 according to this

marking scheme has shown the highest sensitivity (92.0%) and specificity (90.7%) when
compared against PHQ-9 [5].
Other popular scales for diagnosis of depression - Hamilton Depression Rating Scale,
Beck Depression Inventory, and Montogomery Asberg Depression Rating Scale - have
been adapted for an Indian population [6, 7, 8]. Brief Patient Health Questionnaire has
also been translated into 11 Indian languages and validated for an Indian population [9].
A novel scale, Amritsar Depressive Inventory (ADI), has been developed based on
symptoms which are more prevalent in Indian populations [10].

Mehrotra, Seema, et al. "Profile of seekers of an internet-based self-help program
for depression in India: observations and implications." International Journal Of
Community Medicine And Public Health (2017).
Sidana, Surbhi, et al. "Prevalence of depression in students of a medical college in
New Delhi: a cross-sectional study." The Australasian medical journal 5.5
(2012): 247.
Thour, Amit, et al. "Depression among patients with diabetes mellitus in North
India evaluated using patient health questionnaire-9." Indian journal of
endocrinology and metabolism 19.2 (2015): 252.
Ganguly, Samrat, et al. "Patient health questionnaire-9 as an effective tool for
screening of depression among Indian adolescents." Journal of Adolescent Health
52.5 (2013): 546-551.
Poongothai, S., et al. "Reliability and validity of a modified PHQ-9 item
inventory (PHQ-12) as a screening instrument for assessing depression in Asian
Indians (CURES-65)." (2009).
Ajmany S, Nandi DN. Adaptation of A. T. Beck et al.'s "an inventory for
measuring depression" Indian J Psychiatry 1973;15:386-90.
Ganguli M, Dube S, Johnston JM, Pandav R, Chandra V, Dodge HH. Depressive
symptoms, cognitive impairment and functional impairment in a rural elderly
population in India: A Hindi version of the geriatric depression scale (GDS-H).
Int J Geriatr Psychiatry 1999;14:807-20.
Raguram R, Weiss MG, Channabasavanna SM, Devms GM. Stigma, depression,
and somatization in south India. Am J Psychiatry 1996;1531043-9.
Kochhar, P. H., S. S. Rajadhyaksha, and V. R. Suvarna. "Translation and
validation of brief patient health questionnaire against DSM IV as a tool to
diagnose major depressive disorder in Indian patients." Journal of postgraduate
medicine 53.2 (2007): 102.
Grover, Sandeep, Alakananda Dutt, and Ajit Avasthi. "An overview of Indian
research in depression." Indian journal of psychiatry 52.Suppl1 (2010): S178.


What are some good references for preprocessing and analysis of the P300 response from EEG data in Python?

I don't exactly what it is you are after, but if you are looking for other analyzing techniques, you should try Independent Component Analysis (ICA). I have heard (but I do not have references) that ICA is better than PCA analyses.

A very neat (and free) Matlab toolbox that has this function is FieldTrip (http://www.fieldtriptoolbox.org/). It is a nicely documented toolbox, including an easy to follow walk through and multiple tutorials, starting from reading in the EEG data, all the way to statistical analyses. FieldTrip is probably your best bet in finding the P300 differences, and still understanding what happens with the data (since you have to specify everything yourself).


Any research on how we use visual category information in visuomotor tasks?

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

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

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

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


I wouldn't call it a disorder, unless it significantly affects your life. Not enjoying music or not being able to produce music is known as "amusia". It probably has to do with differences in perceiving pitch [1]. It can also occur in people with recently fitted hearing aids or cochlear implants [2].

If you are interested in this, there is a chapter about cases of amusia in Oliver Sack's book Musicophilia [3].

References:
[1] Liu F, Patel AD, Fourcin A, Stewart L. (2010). Intonation processing in congenital amusia: discrimination, identification and imitation. Brain. 133(Pt 6):1682-93. doi:10.1093/brain/awq089
[2] Cooper, W., Tobey, E., & Loizou, P. (2008). Music Perception by Cochlear Implant and Normal Hearing Listeners as Measured by the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia. Ear and Hearing, 29(4), 618. doi:10.1097/AUD.0b013e318174e787
[3] http://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/musicophilia/


Check out this question on biology.stackexchange: Do omnivore mammals vary food preferences based on dietary needs?

The answers in that question mention that experiments on Rats and Birds determined that there's an internal chemosensor, the anterior piriform cortex (APC) within bird and rat brains that senses lack of Indispensible Amino Acids (IAA). Animals show aversion to foods that lack IAA in as short as 20-30 minutes.

There's another example listed that mentions that being sodium deficient makes animals like salt more. Their preference for salty taste increases.

I don't know if these findings apply to humans though.


The origin of language may be as much structural as cerebral. I think the key words are larynx and hyoid bone.

I included a link below, but you should really compare several sources, because there are a lot of details, and science's understanding of human evolution is constantly evolving itself.

For example, there's genetic evidence that all living humans are descended from a single African male sometimes called "Scientific Adam." No one knows exactly what made this individual so special, but there's speculation that he might have been the first to really master language. But that might be nothing more than speculation, and I'm just throwing it in as an anecdote. Lots of stuff has been written on the topic.

I believe language is linked with a certain part of the brain, but I don't know any specifics.

The Origins of Human Language: One of the Hardest Problems in Science

P.S. I might add that archaeological evidence suggests that modern humans (Home sapiens) made far greater use of symbols, including art, than Neanderthals did. This is believed to derive from the fact that our species had more advanced language skills, which translated into a better grasp of symbolism.


What is the mental state called when I forget my thoughts?

Short answer
The key term in your question is working memory.

Background
Working memory is involved in information-processing functions such as encoding, storing, and retrieving data and it is a system that temporarily stored and manages information required to carry out cognitive tasks, such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension.

One relatively straightforward test to assess working memory is memory span. In this test the number of items (usually words or numbers) is determined that a person can hold onto and recall. In a typical test of memory span, an examiner reads a list of random numbers aloud at about the rate of one number per second. At the end of a sequence, the person being tested is asked to recall the items in order. The average memory span for normal adults is 7 items (source: Medicine Net).

Note that the definition of working memory, as opposed to short-term memory and, to a lesser extent, long-term memory are not that well defined. In fact, Medicine Net links two identical webpages to short-term memory and working memory. The difference between working memory and short-term memory is indeed subtle. Working memory is generally thought to rely on short-term memory, but to additionally involve processes to effectively use those memories during cognitive tasks. The difference may be explained as (Cowen, 2008):

  [W]orking memory includes short-term memory and other processing
  mechanisms that help to make use of short-term memory.

The difference between short- and long-term memory stores is based on a difference in their duration and in their capacity (Cowen, 2008). Long-term memory, not surprisingly, is of longer duration and it can hold much more information. However, it cannot be accessed as readily compared to short-term and working memory.

Reference
- Cowen, Prog Brain Res (2008); 169: 323–38


Implementation of Bayesian inference on cognitive science research question

A good starting point is probably Alex Etz's Understanding Bayes blog post series. He also co-authored a related paper that should be a great starting point: How to become a Bayesian in eight easy steps: An annotated reading list (link is to pre-print).

Richard Morey's BayesFactor blog is great resource for understanding the Bayesian model comparison approach. He has authored many papers that are relevant, but the blog is the best starting point for learning about the approach.

For a really accessible textbook, John Kruschke's Doing Bayesian Data Analysis is an excellent and thorough treatment of the use of Bayesian parameter estimation in data analysis.  This approach is a bit different from the model comparison approach, but the conceptual ideas are the same. A related paper that motivates the approach in the book is available here.


Difference between real time and old information processing in the brain

Of course. You've differentiated the two already by describing two mutually exclusive processes. If you're looking for terminological differences that delineate theory along this distinction, it seems you're looking to distinguish perception from cognition as it exists and operates independently from the direct influence of sensation. Plenty of cognition does not involve sensation or perception directly. Metacognition is a sort of self-perceptive process that operates apart from sensation in the traditional "five senses" sense, but not all cognition even involves self-perception or conscious awareness of the cognitive processes in question. This may be debatable, but I would call perception a special case of cognition – i.e., cognition is the broader domain of mental processes that subsumes perception, but does not always involve it.

One might also argue that you've only described sensation in your first sentence, not perception. Perception refers more directly to the processing of sensory information that the brain has received, whereas sensation refers to all processes leading up to sensory information processing. Thus sensation may include the process of delivering sensory information to the brain, depending on whose definition you subscribe to. Cognitive processes only enter the equation once the information has arrived, because cognition refers to the processes carried out by the brain – mostly the higher processes, so (again, maybe this is debatable) not even what happens in the rest of the central nervous system. E.g., the optic nerves feed cognitive processes, but do not carry out cognitive processes themselves.

Summary: If your first sentence only refers to raw sensory information being conveyed to the brain before the brain does any work to process this information, then I don't think it describes cognition at all, whereas the second sentence describes cognition directly. If you mean to include the brain's interpretive process in the "receives information" step of the first sentence, then it describes perception, which is only one kind of cognition (or maybe also distinct from cognition by some definitions).


Consciousness is what makes us what we are; however it is very difficult to examine our internal workings and form an external definition for something everyone uses everyday. This is mainly because the mechanisms of consciousness are still a mystery.
Here are two well accepted definitions.

Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."
Philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally valid; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how it can be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious.

-wikipedia

In 1994 David Chalmers published a paper explaining why consciousness is such a challenging phenomenon to understand. Although he wasn’t the first to discuss these challenges, he was the first to categorize them into two types of problems: “easy” problems and the “hard” problem. Easy problems involve the explanation of how the mind integrates information, focuses attention and allows us to report on mental states. Though not a piece of cake, such problems are easy because solving them only requires that we determine the mechanisms that explain these behaviors. Easy problems are physical by nature, falling within the empirical domains of psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. Given the current trend in science of the mind, we’re confident that one day we will solve these problems.
The hard problem, by contrast, may never be solved. Specifically, the hard problem is determining why or how consciousness occurs given the right arrangement of brain matter. What makes it hard is that we cannot just point to some physical mechanism to solve it, for that would be the solution to the easy problem. Instead, our goal is to explain why certain physical mechanism gives rise to consciousness instead of something else or nothing at all. Consider an analogy from physics: knowing every equation predicting how mass and gravity interact does not tell us why they interact in the way they do. To understand why mass and gravity interact, we must appeal to highly esoteric explanations involving relativity, quantum mechanics or string theory.

-What is Consciousness?


Mental illness vs mental condition vs mental disorder

To answer those questions, first, we need to define the above-mentioned terms:

  A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically
  significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion
  regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the
  psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying
  mental functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

  Mental illness is  characterized as “maladaptive responses to
  stressors from the internal or external environment, evidenced by
  thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are incongruent with the local
  and cultural norms, and that interfere with the individual’s social,
  occupational, and/or physical functioning (Townsend, 2015).

Furthermore, no books or reliable sources differently defined medical condition and medical disorder  so, let's assume that these terms are synonymous.

By definition, medical disorder is any disturbance in a person's mental functioning that can affect his daily routine. Yes, there are medical conditions that are disruptive like patients with psychotic disorders, depressive disorders, substance-related disorders. The latter are considered disruptive in terms that they can harm themselves or others. They require therapies like psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, etc.
Moreover, there are also medical conditions like personality disorders, human sexuality and gender dysphoria, somatic disorders, etc. that are less likely disruptive but can also affect the person's mental functioning. They can either function well in the society or unable to perform activities of daily living.

But still, all mental disorders need treatment whether disruptive or not. It is not about how harmful or peaceful the condition is; it is all about the person's mental capacity and functioning without any maladaptive adaptations

Book Source:
 1. Townsend, M. (2015). Psychiatric mental health nursing: concepts of care in evidence-based practice (8th ed.). FA Davis Company: Philadelphia, PA.


How many items in a list can a human create without repetition?

Recalling items from short term memory is a very different task from creating a list of all unique items. There are a number of strategies for recalling items from short term memory without repeating, you can remember all the items in the list in a random order and all the items you have recalled or you can remember all the items in a fixed order and where you are in the list. When creating a list of unique items you need to create a rule, remember this rule and the number of items you have recalled. The list itself is in long term memory

For example, if you are name as many numbers as you can without repetition, you could say the positive integers 1, 2, 3, ..., N. Equally valid would be the even positive integers 2, 4, 6, 2N. You could also list the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, ..., $\frac{\phi^n-(-\frac{1}{\phi})^n}{\sqrt{5}}$ or if you know them the digits of $\pi$ 3, 1, 4, 1, .... In all of these cases there is a limit to how far you can get since you need to remember the number of items you have given.

Numbers are obviously easier to create rules for than animals, but for animals you could do something like ant, bat, cow, dog, eel, fly, ..., zho, anoa, bear, cuis, deer, ..., zobo, addax, bison, camel, dingo, ..., zebra, ...  I am not sure how far one can really go with this rule, but it will get you pretty far


task-fMRI to determine TMS site (online stimulation with that same task)?

This is not a circular question. In fact, using fMRI to create targets is useful to determine TMS targets outside of the motor cortex or visual cortex. See the study here that used fMRI during a task to generate TMS targets, and then applied theta burst stimulation to those targets: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/21/6059

BOLD contrasts are very useful when using TMS to target sites outside of motor cortex, visual cortex and frontal eye field, where TMS can be validated functionally using motor evoked potentials (MEPs), phosphenes or saccadic eye movements, respectively. Brainsight TMS Navigation enables BOLD contrasts (or peak MNI co-ordinates derived from BOLD contrasts) to be entered as targets for TMS.


Are imprinting and computer literacy connected?

The answer is no. Definition of imprinting is:

A rapid learning process by which a newborn or very young animal establishes a behavior pattern of recognition and attraction towards other animals of its own kind, as well as to specific individuals of its species, such as its parents, or to a substitute for these. Ducklings, for example, will imprint upon and follow the first large moving object they observe. In nature, this is usually their mother, but they can be made to imprint upon other moving objects, such as a soccer ball.

Imprinting is not connected to learning social skills but attachment. Also the problem of learning of computing is matter of fluid, crystalized inteligence and anxiety are better predictors:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1524856/


fMRI images: In-plane resolution, slice thickness

The information you seek is contained in the header of the image file. Matlab has open source tools for reading the header information. e.g., http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/29344-read-medical-data-3d

If you want an even more open source option, NiBabel is an open source python library for reading .nii files (header and image). I think the command  print(header.get_data_shape()) will return the image dimensions. See http://nipy.org/nibabel/nibabel_images.html#the-image-header for instructions.


Is there psychological research on seduction?

Attraction
Social psychology deals extensively with (sexual, erotic, friendly) human-to-human attraction. If you understand attraction, you know how to seduce.
It is true that social psychology does not provide a manual for seduction, and in my opinion this may have two reasons. Social psychology is not an applied, but a basic science, interested in understanding human behavior, not directing it. And there may be ethical objections to providing scientifically proven methods for maliciously manipulating the most intimate emotions, thus providing "weapons" in the "war of the sexes" and causing further discontent in an area of human interaction that is already rife with accusations of abuse. Economic psychology, an applied psychological field, provides manuals of seduction for human-to-product attraction. This is called "persuasive communication". It seems to me that human dating behavior is dysfunctional enough as it is, and does not need more manipulative methods – and what else is seduction if not manipulating someone who would not be attracted to you as you are into being attracted? –, but rather to be freed from them so that we could approach each other with more honesty and mutual understanding and less fear.
Dating Anxiety
Dysfunctions are the speciality of clinical psychology, and in fact clinical psychology has developed treatments (and manuals) for what is commonly (among psychologists) called "dating anxiety" or "heterosocial anxiety".
A short introduction into dating anxiety is provided by Grover, Esterline and Nangle (2014); a conprehensive description of the concept and research (up to their publication) is provided by Hope and Heimberg (1990). A related concept is "courtship disorder" (Freund, 1983).
The treatment of dating anxiety is similar to that of phobias:

Psychoeducation and modification of (false) cognitive biases: The therapist explains that dating anxiety is a common occurence, why it happens, and how dating works, including the perspective (and fears) of the "other side", thus reducing shame and increasing self- and mutual understanding.
Social skills training: Many people suffering from dating anxiety lack in social skills, so a part of the therapy is training how to more successfully interact with other people in general, outside of dating.
Practice dating: Patients train dating with the therapist or with other patients in a group setting.
Systematic desensibilisation: Confronting the patient with desirable persons and frightening situations will cause his fears to abate with habituation. There is a case study of using surrogate partners for this (Zentner & Knox, 2013), but usually the patient has to do this as a homework.

Much of this is similar to what "Pick-Up Artists" teach to the "Seduction Community".
Pick-Up Artists and the Seduction Community
There are only about a handful (psychological, linguistic and sociological) research publications dealing with the seduction community and pick-up artists. Looking at all publications that came up through a Google Scholar search for the phrase "'pick up artist' OR 'pickup artist'" and similar searches on PsychINFO, I found the following:

Pick-up artists use verbal techniques to establish inequality in social status (the authors of the paper call this "doing inequality"), which they then immediately overcome by showing affiliation and affection and making compliments. In this way pick-up artists avoid the impression of threat and dishonor that many women have when men approach them in an openly positive way (Hambling-Jones & Merrision, 2012).
Pick-up artists "perform on a stage", where they are critically judged by an audience, and in the face of this high social risk many techniques only indirectly serve to "pick up" the woman, or not at all, but rather serve to "save face" (Lee, 2009).
The three phases of human courtship behavior – attraction, building comfort and trust, and seduction – have been confirmed by social, physiological and evolutionary psychology (Oesch & Miklousic, 2011).
The assertive and negative (e.g. devaluing the prospective partner) courting methods propagated in pick-up are being used more by men who show high scores in the dark triad of personality traits (narcissism, machiavellism, psychopathy), an "unrestricted" sociosexual orientation (i.e. they tend to sexual contacts without emotional involvement), and a high need for sex and dominance (Crecelius, 2013). Women with low self-esteem, high interpersonal dependence, a strong desire for affiliation and an "unrestricted" sociosexual orientation are more receptive to these negative courtship methods (ibd.).
Tales of failed pick-ups serve to establish homosocial cohesion among male adolescents (Korobov, 2009).
The sexual conquests serve to prove heterosexuality and masculinity and establish "alpha male status" among pick-up artists (Larsen, Kyselova, Monari & Sørensen, 2012).

There are some more publications, mostly sociological, but they are all essayistic and not based on empirical studies. They deal mostly with defective male self-schemata and male degradation of women. In my eyes they don't provide anything new to an already over-emotional and mostly destructive discussion, so I don't list or summarize them here.

Sources:

Crecelius, E. (2013). Dispositional factors that predict the use and success of negative short-term mating tactics (Dissertation). California State University, Fullerton.
Freund, K., Scher, H., & Hucker, S. (1983). The courtship disorders. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 12(5), 369-379.
Grover, R. L., Esterline, K. M., & Nangle, D. W. (2014). Dating anxiety in adolescents. In L. Grossman & S. Walfish (Eds.), Translating Psychological Research into Practice (pp. 405-407). New York: Springer.
Hambling-Jones, O., & Merrison, A. J. (2012). Inequity in the pursuit of intimacy: An analysis of British pick-up artist interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1115-1127.
Hope, D. A., & Heimberg, R. G. (1990). Dating anxiety. In H. Leitenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Social and Evaluation Anxiety (S. 217–246). New York: Plenum.
Korobov, N. (2009). ‘He's got no game’: young men's stories about failed romantic and sexual experiences. Journal of Gender Studies, 18(2), 99-114.
Larsen, V., Kyselova, M., Monari, K., & Sørensen, S. (2012). Beyond ›The Game‹:
Performing masculinity (Dissertation). Roskilde University, Dänemark.
Lee, J. (2009). Escaping embarrassment: Face-work in the rap cipher. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72(4), 306-324.
Oesch, N., & Miklousic, I. (2011). The dating mind: Evolutionary psychology and the emerging science of human courtship. Evolutionary Psychology, 10(5), 899-909.
Zentner, M., & Knox, D. (2013). Surrogates in relationship therapy: A case study in learning how to talk, touch, and kiss. Psychology Journal, 10(2), 63-68.


What keywords to learn more about sense pleasing?

It seems to me is that sense pleasing is better recognized by the term "rewarding stimuli":

stimuli that the brain interprets as intrinsically positive and desirable or as something to approach

Obviously rewarding stimuli isn't necessarily about sensual stimuli, but that would be a good start.


Does associative recognition retrieve target when given re-paired foil?

What is being described in the original question is called Recall-to-Reject Processing. In "Associative recognition: a case of recall-to-reject processing" by Rotello and Heit provides evidence this retrieval of an older memory for comparison with the newer probe, rather than retrieving nothing, does indeed happen.

To show this, they ran three experiments. Experiment 1 dealt with word pairs similarly to the experiment cited in the original post. Experiment 2 test on both word pairs and individual pairs.

The results of Experiment 1 show accuracy was higher for newer pairs than for re-arranged pairs. Consequently, one can infer that Recall-to-Reject had a harder time with re-arranged pairs due to interference [1]. The same occurred in Experiment 2, but additionally showing interference with words similar to those studied.

They summarize the result in their conclusion:

  [Recall-to-Reject Processing] makes a distinctive prediction about the ability of subjects to discriminate completely new test stimuli from stimuli that are new but similar to studied materials. Specifically, the similar test foils should be increasingly rejected, relative to a baseline of completely new items, late in processing (i.e., after information from the recall component of recognition becomes available). The data from Experiments 1 and 2 are consistent with that prediction: We did find that rearranged pairs were increasingly rejected, relative to new pairs, after about 1,000 msec.

However, it should be noted this is quite an old paper and an updated reference would be helpful.

[1] There's also some sort of trend happening with lags, but this isn't really necessary to understand for this answer.


What are higher-level and lower-level brain functions?

Tranel et al. (20003 gives a succinct definition of higher level brain functions in their chapter abstract:

Higher brain functions are the operations of the brain that stand at
the pinnacle of evolution and are largely unique to humans. Verbal
communication, the ability to “think in the future,” and the capacity
to hold multiple tracks of complex information “on-line” at the same
time, are examples of higher mental functions [...]. The higher-order capacities of the
human brain can be captured under the terms “cognition” and
“behavior.” Cognition is composed of intellectual function, memory,
speech and language, complex perception, orientation, attention,
judgment, planning, and decision-making. Behavior is the manifestation
of these cognitive functions. Behavior is guided by another facet of
higher brain function—namely, personality, which describes the
psychological make-up, traits, and response styles that typify a
person’s behaviors across a range of situations and circumstances.

Lower level functions, on the other hand are not that well defined, and I guess it's pretty much anything else than the above :) A look at the visual system can help illustrate the difference (Fig. 1). The purple areas in the figure reflect areas mediating lower-level functions, namely retina (sensation of light), optic nerve (secondary visual neurons that send signal to brain), superior colliculus (low-level localization functions and saccade initiation), and V1 (processing of simple shapes). The higher-level areas, namely 'What' (dorsal stream), 'Where' (ventral stream), 'How' reflect higher level functions that reflect human consciousness, namely the interpretation of the identification of objects, and whether they are stationary, or whether they are moving. These are what Tranel calls 'complex perception'.
However, in contrast to Tranel's definition, these are not solely human capacities, because some animals are well-versed in discriminating different species (a mouse will respond differently to a fellow species and a cat :-) and where a target object is going (the same mouse will generally walk in a different direction than the cat is going). This is probably the answer to your question whether there is a gray area between high and low-level functions in the brain - yes, there is. The two terms are umbrella terms and not that well defined. In fact, I couldn't find a strict definition of 'lower-level' brain functions after a Google search.

Fig. 1. Visual system. Source: The Vision Help blog
Reference
- WebVision -- The Organization of the Retina and Visual System
- Ranel et al., Higher Brain Functions. In: Conn (ed) Neuroscience in Medicine. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ


Does transparency have its own visual channel?

One interesting way to study transparency is by looking at cases where we perceive transparency even though there isn't any objective transparency.

Take this illusion from Adelson (2000) as an example.

In the both panels the diamonds have the same physical brightness (pixel value on the monitor), but our perception of the diamonds on the right is warped by the seemingly-transparent dark stripe that covers the diamonds on the top. Thus, even low-level image features like brightness are perceptually warped by the way our brain perceives the structure of the image.

There are a large number of papers on mathematical models of illusory transparency perception. A starting point might be Anderson (1997) and the references within. But, the general message from this research is that we sometimes perceive transparency as the result of imposing some kind of higher-order structure to make sense of the image.


What (with proper null and experimental method) do you mean by "heuristic"?

What (with proper null and experimental method) do you mean by "instinct"?

What (with proper null and experimental method) do mean by "considering"?

This is a situation where psychological language meets the imperfections of experimental neuroscience. Typical neuroscience tasks are simple because they attempt to isolate some particular behavior in the most parsimonious way possible. Generalization to behavior in the natural state is far removed from this. e.g. consider the humble mouse. It takes 100's-1000's of trials to learn a 2AFC task with visual feedback. It takes ~6 trials (even in absence of cortex and hippocampus via Markus Meister) to learn a complex maze given the right reward condition. Context is everything and ethological context is missing from most modern behavioral assays. A mouse will escape from a looming stimulus with 0 training.

So, although I'm not a mouse myself (but I am an ape), I would say: the mouse "knows" just as well as you do.


Are there physical techniques to relieve eye strain?

EYE RELAXATION

Sit comfortably, close your eyes and cover them with your palms. Be sure that both palms are cupped and do not press on the eyes. Imagine the blackness getting darker and darker. Rest in this manner for five minutes at a time, at least thrice a day.
Stand upright in front of an open window, preferably overlooking greenery. Keep your feet a foot apart, let your arms hang loosely at the sides and be as relaxed as possible. Gently oscillate your body from side to side like a pendulum.
Raise your heels alternately, keeping toes firmly on the ground. Gently swing the whole body to and fro without bending at the waist or hips. Start the exercise with eyes open. Swing like this for a minute and then close your eyes gently, while still swinging. Imagine the apparent movement of the window as clearly as possible.
Open the eyes after a minute and continue this exercise for 10 minutes, alternately closing and opening the eyes. Repeat this exercise at least thrice a day.
Close your eyes and, facing the sun, move your head slowly from side to side. Sun rays cause a rushing of blood to the eyes, relaxing optical muscles and nerves. Do this exercise for 10 minutes thrice a day.
Take a handful of cold water and, bending forward, splash your eyes rapidly, several times. Do not forget to hold water in your mouth while splashing eyes as this cools them down to their nerve ends and freshens them a great deal.

EXERCISES FOR EYE MUSCLES

Sit erect in a comfortable position. Keep your head and neck as relaxed as possible. Gently move your eyes up and down 10 times. The motion should be very slow, uniform and effortless, without moving the head or neck. Let your eyes see as far up and as far down as possible without causing strain. As the eye muscles relax, you will be able to look lower and higher. Repeat this exercise five to six times in a sitting. You can add to the relaxation by resting your eyes in your palms in-between.
Sitting in the same posture as before, move your eyes from side to side. Repeat 10 times. The motion should be very slow, uniform and effortless without moving the head or neck. As in the earlier exercise, you will able to move them farther and more easily with practice. Repeat this exercise five to six times.
Move your eyes gently and slowly around in a circle five times, alternating between clockwise and anti-clockwise motions. Rest for a second and repeat the process five times. Remember that it should be done slowly and effortlessly.
Sit on a terrace where you can see far off objects on the horizon. Look at a distant object and then look at the tip of your nose. Look from one to the other object 10 times. Close your eyes for a second and resume the exercise. Repeat five times and rest your eyes.

The following exercises may be used to alleviate eyes strain

Bhastrika Pranayam (Breath holding exercise)– 2 to 5 minutes.
Kapalbhati Pranayam (Skull shining breath exercise).
Bahya Pranayam (External breath exercise).
Anuloma – Viloma Pranayama (Alternate nostril breathing exercise).

All these can be found here

Yoga- The name popular in West is actually a derivation from the word YOG (which is a Sanskrit word with meaning 'to combine together'). Yog means to combine one's being with the Supreme Power. Sage Patanjali (Pronounced as Paa+ ta + n + ja + li) brought together postures and techniques of breathing together and created Yog Sutra. (The thread of Yog).

This actually transcended from the ideology that a healthy person can understand the meaning of God and compassion better. Therefore, it aims at relieving a man of the diseases so that a healthy body can provide shelter to a healthy soul.

But Yog is trying to handle a Lion. It should be practiced under the guidance of a learned Yog teacher...


One small study (2015)  in otherwise healty subjects, found no correlation between nightmares and the quality of sleep measured using widely used objective methods, or more precisely

  sleep measures obtained by ambulatory polysomnographic recordings revealed no group differences in (a) overall sleep architecture, (b) sleep cycle duration as well as REM density and REM duration in each cycle and (c) sleep architecture when only nights with nightmares were analyzed.

Nonetheless the subjects who experienced nightmares reported worse self-reported sleep quality. Granted, in a study like this, there's always a chance the authors failed to consider some objective sleep measure not commonly known/used today. Anyhow, the author's' conclusion was that

  nightmares result in significant impairment which is independent from disturbed sleep architecture

And thus they suggest one seek specialized treatment for nightmares... which are correlated with quite a few psychiatric disorders, PTSD, anxiety, depression, or borderline personality disorder, to name a few.

Another caveat of this study is that the authors deliberately excluded people with diagnosable psychiatric conditions from the sample. So this study does not exclude the possibility that subjects with (say) PTSD actually do have worse objective sleep... owing to nightmares.


LAURA/LORETA source localization in Matlab

The open-source Matlab package called Fieldtrip has a source analysis function in which you can specify the method you want. These include both sLORETA and eLORETA.

In case you did acquire LOERTA-KEY, you also import sLORETA files into Fieldtrip and continue further analyses.


At what age are women perceived to be most attractive?

OkCupid, a free online dating website (through which I've met two girlfriends myself, incidentally), does some pretty interesting research on the profiles and activity of its users. This particular research blog post presents some fairly on-topic results in "Exhibit C: Looks":

@ArtemKaznatcheev rightly pointed out some range restriction here, so this can't address the validity of an age estimate below 18 years directly, but two things are worth noting:

The overall slope resembles a simple linear trend that might continue upward past 18 years young.
The absolute maximum here appears to be around 19, not 18. I doubt the difference is "significant".

It's not clear to me whose ratings these are or how exactly they were collected (as a user of the site, I remember a 1-5 rating index, and chose to rate women only), so it's hard to trust these results, especially in terms of their representativeness of a general population. Artem also pointed out that a better method for controlling social desirability in these ratings would hide direct information on age from respondents; OkCupid's research differs from the kind you're asking about in that regard too. Nonetheless, it's an empirical hint at the more explicit answer to the related, subjective question where respondents do have this info. Social desirability and age info are present in many normal social interactions after all, so removing age info deliberately might reduce naturalistic applicability of results anyway.
This blog post presents many more graphs on related topics that might interest you (e.g., as alternative operationalizations of attractiveness, or as behavioral correlates), but only one seems to address a moderator directly. That moderator is attractiveness itself! A quote follows this graph:

If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young, and also remove the people you won't realistically want to date (the worst-looking women), you find that everyone else's attractiveness doesn't change much with age.
In other words, given that nobody is drop-dead gorgeous or drop-dead hideous, your average 25 year-old is roughly as good-looking as your average 35 year-old. Yes, throwing out the prettiest of the pretty young things is a clumsy handicap to put on an age-by-age comparison. But at the same time, for the vast majority of men, the best-looking women are simply out of reach, so it's actually accurate to exclude them as possibilities. In fact, unrealistic male expectations inspired this article, so we want to do everything we can to correct for them.
Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good.

I'm particularly doubtful of this second graph though, because it doesn't seem clear that the top and bottom deciles were identified and excluded separately within each year of age. "If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young" actually sounds more like excluding the top decile while ignoring age, which might invalidate this graph. Removing the most extreme deciles of the sample while ignoring age would necessarily flatten the "everybody else" line somewhat, given any asymmetry in relationships between age and membership in these deciles of attractiveness across all ages.

Edit by what. Delete or edit as you see fit.
Nick, I too see a problem with how the most and least attractive women were deleted from the sample. I add this as an edit, as it does not warrant its own answer, but is too long for a comment.
If attractiveness declines with age, we must assume that it declines equally for all women, until this is disproven. So we must assume that a woman who is among the most beautiful at age 21, while still among the most beautiful at age 35, will have lost in overall attractiveness. The same goes for the average and the unattractive woman. We must assume (because we don't have the data) that over all women of all ages and all levels of attractiveness, we have a parallel decline in attractiveness with age, as shown in the graph below:

Now, if you delete the most and least attractive women from your sample, across all ages, you will, as the graph shows, create a sub-sample with no decline in attractiveness. This is an artifact of you tampering with the data and has no explanatory power whatsoever.
If on the other hand you delete the most and least attractive women for each age group, the general "slant" of the graph and the decrease in attractiveness that it represents does not change at all.
What I believe is that okcupid.com do not want to anger their older female customers, so they pimped or sugarcoated their data in a way that flatters the vanity of those women and allays their fears of being unattractive. In short: this section of their blog is advertising, not research.


What is the impact of showing the amount of unattended notifications to the user?

For me it is the inference that the more notifications I have the more value I will have in bothering to click it.

That 1 notification on a social networking site might be a request to play some terrible game.. however 24 notifications are likely to yield at least something beneficial for me to justify having bothered clicking it.

The higher the number the increased urgency I feel to check them (maybe the same person is repeatedly trying to make contact and I am unintentionally ignoring them!).

As for there being a notification with no number, that is easier for me to ignore. In the case of the Windows' PC issues (Action Center) in the task-bar, there is always a notification in it for me, so I have learnt to dismiss it.. I have become de-sensitised to seeing that alert. If however the icon increased in number and I detected this change, then I would deem that to be an increase in urgency and would be more likely to click it again.

I think if I kept clicking Action Center and felt it yielded little value to me then I would be able to filter out if the numbers were to keep increasing, but I would find it more difficult to ignore and feel tricked by it just in-case this new state meant something important this time round..


Short answer
In normally sighted people visual thinking is the dominant mode of thinking and may be intimately associated even with verbal thinking and hence difficult to root out completely.

Background
Human thought can be generally divided into visual and verbal thinking. Visual thinking is mediated by visual imagery, where imagery visual representations are created of things that have been, are, or will be (e.g., life events such as memories of a recent vacation). In contrast, verbal thinking involves thinking in words, for example when you are thinking about what and how you will tell something to friends or colleagues, i.e., inner speech (source: Harvard Gazette, May 2017).

A study by Amit et al (2017) investigated subjects' brain activity when recalling images or sentences. Verbal thoughts resulted in more robust activation of language centers in the brain than during visualizations. However, subjects generated visual images regardless of whether their intent was to visualize or to think verbally. One possible interpretation the authors provide is that visual thinking is a primary mode of thought, which is supported by the notion that verbal abilities appeared later in human evolution and also appears later in childhood.

An interesting notion here is of congenitally blind people that lack visual memory altogether. In these instances, visual imagery is totally absent and in these people verbal thinking may be the only mode of thought available (Zimler & Keenan, 1983). In congenitally deaf-blind individuals the mode of thinking may be further warped into tactile thoughts. These considerations may lead to believe that with sufficient practice, pure-verbal thinking may at least theoretically be possible in the sighted.

References
- Amit et al., Neuroimage (2017); 15(152): 619-27
- Zimler & Keenan, J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn (1983); 9(2): 269-82


Do we all look at pictures from left to right?

When reading you are performing a trained or learned skill, so if your instruction taught you to follow certain order that's what you do. There is a transfer of this behavior ( or any other learnt one for that matter ),into other types of images and situations,but the degree at which it is transferred depends on both context,cues, and expertise to name a few.

So in one way, yes if you are presented with mainly a text based image you are expected to follow your training to some degree.

This is but half the picture, the human visual system has evolved to notice and extract things ( or features ) in a picture or real life, things that move, things with edges, moving things, things that were once important, the whole thing and on an on.

So in order to analyze an image, there seems to be a complex interplay of attention from both your innate visual skills as well as features from the image that due to their novelty or other feature demand your attention, and sometimes even before that, you are making a decision as to what the image is and how to analyze it.

So which direction then ?

Your eyes analyze an image through voluntary and involuntary saccades,(directional eye movements) which due to the above explanation can be directed everywhere depending on a number of things, an interesting feature could be the starting point, or also a random one, and from there on you will keep analyzing the scene based on where your attention is at, here are 2 images being analyzed:

The resulting lines represent patterns of fixation and are called Scan Paths.They differ from one observer to another and from one image to another, as well as depending on which task the observer is given and context.

I am not aware of the same type of studies made with text and mostly text based images and predominantly left right handed subjects, that would probably give us the definite answer, but it is not too far fetched to expect some jumping around the page with periods of directional fixation based on your preferred reading method.

Sources/Notes

Patterns of Fixation were pioneered by the Russian psychologist Yarbus (1965)
Vision Science (Palmer) 11.2 visual selection: eye movements and attention. A whole chapter that goes into detail.
The nefertiti image is from Yarbus, A. L. (1967) Eye Movements and Vision. Basil Haigh (trans.). New York: Plenum Press. The face one ( not sure about the methodology ) from the wiki on saccades.


The 2 concepts you are referring to are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943) and Plutchik’s general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion (Plutchik, 1980). They are totally separate concepts, but can be linked only to a small degree.
As someone progress within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the person can experience a variety of different emotions, depending on their experiences leading up to and upon achieving that level of attainment.
For example, someone who has met all their safety needs may experience a sense of optimism and trust in their environment. When meeting their love and relationship needs there will probably be experiences of love, but also there may be joy and serenity.
If for some reason the person loses an aspect or more of their safety needs, for example, there could be apprehension, worry, fear, annoyance, pensiveness...
References
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological review, 50(4), 370-396. doi: 10.1037/h0054346 Free PDF: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Maslow-1943.pdf
Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In Theories of emotion (pp. 3-33). Academic press. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-558701-3.50007-7 Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Ie1GBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA3


Question concerning Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence

Summary

I think Hawkins' terminology tends to be not as precise as it should be. I guess that's the root cause of this question as well.

The impression that Hawkins says computers or neural networks will never be able to perform certain tasks which are routine for the human brain may be due to his lack of precision.

Details

You write (in a comment):

  I have the impression, that he sees computers and ANNs as somehow the same.

That's not my impression1, so I'll answer two questions:

Regarding Hawkins' statements about artificial neural networks
Regarding Hawkins' statements about "computers"

Regarding Hawkins' statements about artificial neural networks

In chapter 2, "Neural Networks", pp. 23-39, Hawkins talks about a certain kind of artificial neural networks (mainly pp. 24-29).

He's mostly talking about very simple ANNs. See p. 25:

  Most neural networks consisted of a small number of neurons connected in three rows.

It is true that there are a lot of tasks that such simple ANNs can't do (or can't do well), but of course that's not true for more complex ANNs. I think the problem here is that Hawkins' doesn't always make this distinction clear enough, although he says on p. 28:

  I don't want to leave you with the impression that all neural networks are of the simple three-layer variety. Some researchers have continued to study neural networks of different designs. Today the term neural network is used to describe a diverse set of models, some of which are more biologically accurate and some of which are not.

Maybe the following quote on p. 32 could be interpreted such that he actually did foresee some developments after 2004:

  In recent years, belief in the importance of feedback, time, and prediction has been on the rise. But the thunder of AI and classical neural networks kept other approaches subdued and underappreciated for many years.

Regarding Hawkins' statements about "computers"

In chapter 4, "Memory", pp. 65-84, (which contains p. 70ff you mentioned) he does not talk about artificial neural networks, but about "computers". He doesn't specify exactly what he means, but I guess it's roughly "machines that work mostly like current computers".

On p. 67, he says that even "the largest parallel computer imaginable can't solve" certain tasks that the brain can solve. I think that's wrong, but since it's not quite clear what he means by "computer", I'm not sure.

Conclusion

Some or most of Hawkins' claims may be correct, but that depends on what he means by "computers" or "neural networks", and he doesn't always make that clear.

Footnotes

1 For example, this quote on p. 24 seems to imply that he does see a difference:

  A neural network is unlike a computer in that it has no CPU and
  doesn't store information in a centralized memory.


Help to find the International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ)

I would suggest going to the source which is Cloitre, et al. (2018)

The ITQ is a brief, simply worded measure of the core features of PTSD and CPTSD. It is consistent with the organizing principles of the ICD‐11 to maximize clinical utility and international applicability through a focus on a limited but central set of symptoms. The measure is freely available and can be found in the body of this paper.

References
Cloitre, M., Shevlin, M., Brewin, C. R., Bisson, J. I., Roberts, N. P., Maercker, A., ... & Hyland, P. (2018). The International Trauma Questionnaire: development of a self‐report measure of ICD‐11 PTSD and complex PTSD. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. (In Press: September 2018) doi: 10.1111/acps.12956


How do I get the "Avoidance and Inflexibility Scale"?

In the measures subsection of the methods section in the paper you refer to (Gifford et al, 2004), you can see that Gifford et al. (2002) is cited when referring to the AIS questionnaire. However, I cannot seem to find this paper titled "Combining Bupropion SR with acceptance-based behavioral therapy for smoking cessation: Preliminary results from a randomized controlled trial."

Maybe this is what you were referring to when you stated "I cannot find it"?

I did a more general search for "Gifford Avoidance and Inflexibility Scale" and found Gifford & Lillis (2009) in which they cite the original paper you found (Gifford et al., 2004)—hardly useful.

Interestingly, a validation study of the scale was published by different authors (Farris et al., 2015), in which they provide the following citations:

  The Avoidance and Inflexibility Scale (AIS; Gifford, 2001; Gifford,
  2002; Gifford et al., 2002) is a smoking-specific measure of
  experiential avoidance that was specifically developed for
  process-based smoking cessation research.

They also provide the following description:

  Avoidance and Inflexibility Scale (AIS; Gifford et al., 2004) The AIS
  is a 13-item self-report assessment in which respondents to consider
  how they respond to difficult thoughts that encourage smoking (e.g.,
  “I need a cigarette”, “I wish I could have a cigarette now!”),
  different feelings that encourage smoking (e.g., stress, fatigue,
  boredom, enjoyment, satisfaction, etc.), and bodily sensations that
  encourage smoking (e.g., “physical cravings or withdrawal symptoms”).
  Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Not at all to 5 = Very
  much), with higher scores reflecting more inflexibility/avoidance in
  the presence of difficult smoking-related thoughts, feelings, and
  sensations.

Gifford (2001) is an unpublished manuscript. Gifford (2002) is a doctoral dissertation ("Acceptance based treatment for nicotine dependent smokers: Altering the regulatory functions of smoking related affect, physiological symptoms, and cognition.") which I am also unable to find online. Lastly, Gifford et al. (2002) is the first paper we could not find.

The validation study does provide all 13 items in Table 1 (Farris et al., 2015). Combined with the knowledge that it is a 5-point Likert scale (1= Not at all to 5 = Very much) you do have most of the information needed:

However, personally I would recommend you to contact Gifford and explain your struggles in obtaining access to her research, and kindly request her to place a copy of the unpublished materials on ResearchGate, arxiv, or any similar platform.

Gifford EV. The Avoidance and Inflexibility scale. 2001 Unpublished manuscript.
Gifford EV. Doctoral dissertation. University of Nevada; Reno, NV: 2002. Acceptance based treatment for nicotine dependent smokers: Altering the regulatory functions of smoking related affect, physiological symptoms, and cognition.
Gifford, E. V., Antonuccio, D. O., Kohlenberg, B. S., Hayes, S. C., & Piasecki, M. M. (2002). Combining Bupropion SR with acceptance-based behavioral therapy for smoking cessation: Preliminary results from a randomized controlled trial. In annual meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Reno, NV.
Gifford, E. V., Kohlenberg, B. S., Hayes, S. C., Antonuccio, D. O., Piasecki, M. M., Rasmussen-Hall, M. L., & Palm, K. M. (2004). Acceptance-based treatment for smoking cessation. Behavior therapy, 35(4), 689-705.
Gifford, E. V., & Lillis, J. (2009). Avoidance and inflexibility as a common clinical pathway in obesity and smoking treatment. Journal of health psychology, 14(7), 992-996.
Farris, S. G., Zvolensky, M. J., DiBello, A. M., & Schmidt, N. B. (2015). Validation of the Avoidance and Inflexibility Scale (AIS) among treatment-seeking smokers. Psychological assessment, 27(2), 467.


Is it possible to read words a person thinking about via EEG headsets?

What Christiaan says true. It is sheer impossible. However, there is technology that cán "see your mental pictures". In a TED-talk by Mary-Lou Jepsen she explains how fMRI and machine learning algorithms are used to recreate viewed or imagined videos from brain activity. It is a really neat TED-talk and definitely worth watching.

What is possible using EEG is to make a Brain Computer Interface. I discussed this topic briefly in another question (Brain-computer interface with EEG: how to name imaginary movement of a non-self object?). Hopes these answers help you somehow.


Models of romantic relationships evolution

In my opinion, the most important model of monogamous relationships is the attachment model, developed by Bowlby (1969). According to Fraley and Shaver: all romantic, or couple, relationships are attachment relationships. After imprinting, the characteristics of the attachment's figure (generally the mother), and the style of parenting will be recognised by the baby as the ones who are deputy to take care of him. So the baby develops expectations and begins to build his IWM (internal Working Models).
People actively seek and select - even at an unconscious level - people, situations, and relationships that match their expectations and their IWM (Grazia Attili, 2004)

In this frame, Cindy Hazan and Debra Zeifman introduced a model of Romantic relationships based on 4 stages:

Attraction, courting, flirt
Falling in love
Love
Ordinary life and attachment

For more information I recommend:

Grazia Attili "Attaccamento e amore" : https://www.mulino.it/isbn/9788815096845
"Adult Romantic Attachment: Theoretical Developments,
Emerging Controversies, and Unanswered Questions" by Fraley and Shaver http://academic.udayton.edu/jackbauer/Readings%20595/Fraley%2000%20attch%20rev%20copy.pdf
John Bowlby . https://books.google.it/books/about/Attachment.html?id=WA7JejeXYd4C&redir_esc=y


Complexity.  That is, the fundamental laws governing the behavior isn't terribly difficult to comprehend or model.  However, putting it all together and hoping it reproduces the correct behavior is a great challenge.

Once you develop a model that has the appropriate underlying mechanisms in it's components, you still have to put them all together and choose the right parameters and hope you didn't miss anything in terms of modulators that would actively adjust those parameters.  So even if the functional mathematical form of your model is correct, you still have 5-10 parameters for each neuron in the network that you have to get to the right value, including the parameters describing the strength and dynamics of the coupling between neurons.  Just being off by values as small as .001 can sometimes mean the difference between a working model and a failing model.  Now you have 5-10 parameters for 300 neurons... that's 1500-3000 parameters that all need to be "correct" at the same time.

That being said, it's not like we are exceedingly accurate in our models of even single neurons.  We make simplifications and take averages.  There's lots of second messenger and genetic processes involved in neuron function that many models neglect.  This isn't meant to disparage modeling.  It implies that no complex mathematical model will probably ever be able to generalize the neuron for all cases.  Instead, we make models focused on asking specific questions.  We investigate two or three mechanisms at a time and hold all the other considerations constant in order to isolate those mechanisms we're interested in.  So a model I develop to study the effects of the diversity of calcium channels on neuron excitability will have many differences (in parameters selection) from the same model used by somebody studying diversity of potassium channels.  And in some cases, we may even simplify less relevant aspects of the model, e.g., I may only have one potassium channel in my neuron to generalize and average all potassium channels so that I can focus only on calcium diversity and not fuss with more parameters.


There are many reasons why people want to have children :

Some want to have children because they hope it can save their declining marriage / relationship
Some want to have children because they feel instinctively driven towards it
Some want to have children because they feel they're supposed to
Some want to have children because they feel they're missing "something" in their lives
Some want to have children because they want to learn more about themselves
Some want to have children because they want to learn more about the man or woman they love
...

Still, I believe most reasons why people want to have children are perfectly captured by this single quote :

  Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their
  own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit
  the excitement we once felt about, well... everything. A generation
  later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is
  a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life.

  ― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned


Cognitive sciences are an interdisciplinary field between:

psychology
sociology
philosophy
medical sciences
biology
physics
chemistry
palaeontology / anthropology
ethnology
information sciences
linguistics
I believe I forgot something

The core is probably somewhere around psychology, neurobiology (including endocrinology) and artificial intelligence, though others would lay the focus elsewhere.

It does not matter much which of these fields you study, if you aim at an academic career studying cognition, because you will have to make yourself familiar with, or even an expert, in most of the other fields, if you want to go beyond a master's degree. Where you put your focus, is a matter of personal preference, and no matter where that is, you will be working in a team of experts from different fields. I'm studying psychology, and at our institute (of psychology) we have researchers who studied medicine, physics, information science, and pedagogy. In the neuroscience institute next door, there are psychologists, biologists, medical scientists (including psychiatrists) and probably more that I don't know. Despite their different backgrounds, they now all work on the same research topics.

So while it does not matter (much) which first topic you choose, you need to be open and curious of mind, to be successful in science. If, as you say, you are interested only in a very narrow field, interdisciplinary work will be impossible for you. You won't be able to follow your topic to where it leads you. Sometimes, when you research something, you realize that the answer to a relevant question, that you need to answer before you can go on, lies in another field. Then you must study that field. If you don't, that will hamper your understanding and research.

The best scientists, in my opinion, are those that are basically curious and want to understand and learn. They all have their individual talents, and certainly no one can know and understand everything, but the most successful researchers today are experts in several fields and interested in several others.

On the other hand, there are those hard working lab rats that get things done, and they are invaluable, too. The question is, can you see yourself as doing the grunt work, or do you want to really understand it all?

But then maybe that is all something you cannot know in advance. You need to experience things to know if they are for you or not. When I was fresh from school, I had very limited interests and a wide array of clearly defined dislikes (everything I had to learn in school). But in the years that followed, I understood that I am basically interested in everything, even the subjects that I hated in school. And what I found the most interesting at first, I lost interest in after studying it for a few years. Now I study something else.

What I would recommend is:

read the internet sites of the university institutes and some introductory textbooks in the three or four fields that you are most interested in
choose the one whose methodology you like best: do you want to dissect brains, do statistical data analysis, program software, work on people or animals, theorize or spend nights in the lab, ... ?
study that
if after a year or two you realize you want something else, switch (but understand that every field includes stuff you find boring)
finish your master's
reflect on what you learned and understand what interests you for the next few years
find a research group and do your Ph.D.
again reflect and decide on the next steps
don't worry, there are many successful non-linear careers in science


When is it defendable to use manifest instead of latent variables in psychological research?

Experimental psychologists seem quite happy working with single item ad hoc self-report scales, physiological measures, etc. with very little psychometrical assessment so even before talking about a full-fledged latent variable modeling approach, confirmatory factor analysis and the like you might want to wonder why they appear relatively unconcerned with measurement issues in general and why there is still such a big gap between experimental psychology and psychometrics.

Some potential explanations (some of them are not very convincing justifications for not doing latent variable modeling but still explain why people are content using manifest variables):

Experimentalist can create (relatively) strong effects. If you are doing an experiment in which you try to induce disgust by showing pictures of disgusting things to people and your pictures do not seem to produce a measurable effect, you could try to improve your measurement but you can also just use even more disgusting pictures or add a few additional trials in your experiment. On the other hand, when you are creating a personality test for recruitment purposes, you can't just wish candidates would be more different from each other to make your task easier or be happy with estimating the average of all candidates, you really need to assign a score to each candidate with a level of precision that allows you to discriminate between them.
They rely on the nature of the manipulation and its effects on the response and not mainly on the correlation between different scales to interpret their results.
They are often interested in group differences. (Inter-individual differences often dwarf any item-related error so why even care about that? Just add a few participants!)
They still structure their experiments as a test of some ‘nil’ hypothesis (is there an effect or not?)
They are not very interested in effect sizes as such, a consequence of the previous point (if they do compute some effect size measure, it's mostly with an eye for statistical power).

In short, if any statistically significant difference is regarded as an interesting result (i.e. your manipulation had an effect), you don't need to be too concerned about the reliability or meaning of the response.

Interestingly, you seem to be approaching the question from one camp, assuming that latent variable modeling is clearly useful and people need to actively defend themselves for not doing the obvious right thing. You might also turn the question around and ask “Is latent variable modeling all that useful? What does it buy us?” In the context I just highlighted, it might not be so easy to articulate a convincing answer.

And of course, in practice, many people just care about methodology to the smallest extent possible to go about their business, be published and do the things they regard as really interesting. Consequently, many researchers don't hear much about latent variable modeling after they finished their master and they don't even care about it one way or the other because it's just not the way things are done in their disciplines.


Bias by which we tend to accept vague descriptions of ourselves

This is referred to as The Forer Effect after Bertram Forer.
Wikipedia describes it accurately:

  The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum's observation that "we've got something for everyone") is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, and some types of personality tests.

Forer gave the results of a "personality test" to a group of his students composed of random vague statements compiled from horoscopes. Students were asked to rate it's accuracy on a scale from 0 to 5, and the mean score was 4.26.

Forer discussed these findings and the "experiment" in his article The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility.


John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia and Genetic Diversity

Quick (short answer)

No, Calhoon did not account for genetic diversity in his experiments outlined in your question.

Full answer

Reading the article you mentioned, Calhoun (1962) started with wild Norway Rats, also referred to as common rats, brown rats, street rats, sewer rats, or Hanover rats.

  I confined a population of wild Norway rats in a quarter-acre enclosure. 'With an abundance of food and places to live and with predation and disease eliminated or minimized, only the animals' behavior with respect to one another remained as a factor that might affect the increase in their number. There could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density. By the end of 27 months the population had become stabilized at 150 adults. Yet adult mortality was so low that 5,000 adults might have been expected from the observed reproductive rate. The reason this larger population did not materialize was that infant mortality was extremely high. Even with only 150 adults in the enclosure, stress from social interaction led to such disruption of maternal behavior that few young survived.

Then he turned to a domesticated albino strain of the Norway rat under more controlled circumstances indoors, and

  The data for the present discussion come from the histories of six different populations. Each was permitted to increase to approximately twice the number that my experience had indicated could occupy the available space with only moderate stress from social interaction. In each case my associates and I maintained close surveillance of the colonies for 16 months in order to obtain detailed records of the modifications of behavior induced by population density.

There is very little genetic variation in brown rats (Ness, et al. 2012), no matter where in the world you collect them (Ness, 2013). Therefore, apart from the fact that the article was discussing data on a domesticated albino strain of the Norway rat, all the experiments mentioned used brown rats.  There were no black rats, mole rats, or any other kinds of rat used.

References

Calhoun, J.B. (1962). Population density and social pathology. Scientific American, 206, 139—48.

Ness, R. W., Zhang, Y.-H., Cong, L., Wang, Y., Zhang, J.-X., & Keightley, P. D. (2012). Nuclear Gene Variation in Wild Brown Rats. G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, 2(12), 1661—1664.DOI: 10.1534/g3.112.004713 PMCID: PMC3516487

Ness, R. (2013). Genetic diversity of wild brown rats [Online]
Retrieved from: http://sites.utm.utoronto.ca/ness/blog/01182016-1515/genetic-diversity-wild-brown-rats


People do not like change, but need diversification? Is that not contradictive?

Balancing a combination of 'sticking with what you know' and 'exploring new things' is optimal in a lot of environments. What the optimal balance is depends on a bunch of factors like your planning horizon, the distribution of good things in the world (common/rare & similar/dissimilar), and how you interact with them (reusable, like a shortcut, depleting, like a gold mine, or one-shot interaction like buying a house).

People are really surprisingly good at this! Fun search terms for google scholar might be "explore/exploit tradeoff" or "multi-arm bandit problems" [with humans]. But it's a big and complicated literature, actually I'd recommend starting with a popsci version, "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I think you might enjoy it, it's a great book, very readable, and it goes into some detail on this question and a few of its near neighbors.


What is the term used to describe a situation where person doesnt know that he/she actually knows something?

I've seen that movie, it's awesome!
I'd call that "subconscious knowledge" - because you know about something and it influences your behaviour, but your brain and reasoning aren't yet developed enough to understand what you know (and to link it to the behaviour).


How does the brain process generalizations?

The thing that comes to mind first are the Gestalt principles. Up front -  the Gestalt theory of perception has been criticized as being a descriptive theory, and not providing much insight into the processes that lead to perception.

However, the principles do address your question, as the Gestalt theory dictates that humans visually and psychologically attempt to make order out of chaos, to create harmony or structure from seemingly disconnected bits of information. Much of the principles deal with figure/ground separation, but an important other aspect is similarity, and specifically

  Gestalt theory states that things which share visual characteristics
  such as shape, size, color, texture, or value will be seen as
  belonging together in the viewer’s mind.

The principle of grouping (Quinn et al., 2002) is indeed fundamental here:

  The similarity principle claims that elements tend to be integrated into groups if they are similar to each other.

Reference
- Quinn et al, Psych Sci (2002); 13(4)


Are some facial features more important than others in human facial recognition?

In a study by Pelphrey et al., 2002 the authors show that when people are asked to scan a face, they spend about 80% of the time looking at the eyes, about 10% on the nose region, and a few percents on the mouth (the remaining few percentages were spent on other non-core features such as ears, forehead etc). Hence, the eyes by far draw the most attention and represent the most important feature when it comes to facial processing.

A typical example of a visual scan by a human subject as examined by eye tracking is the following (taken from Pelphrey et al., 2002), which shows that the subject scanned the core features of the facial image (eyes, nose, mouth):

Nonetheless, the presence of a complete face makes recognition more efficient than when looking at incomplete faces (Tanaka & Farah, 1993)


Is there a test that measures gender dysphoria?

Short answer
Yes.

Background
A cursory Google Scholar search with the key terms Gender Dysphoria Questionnaire brought up

  The Gender Identity/Gender Dysphoria Questionnaire for Adolescents and
  Adults.

If you wish to search for more related inventories you can look further using keywords like 'gender dysphoria' + 'inventory' / 'test' / 'diagnosis'.

References
- Deogracias et al., J Sex Res (2007); 44(4): 370–9
- Sing et al., J Sex Res (2010); 47(1): 49-58


What exactly is IQ, and how to develop or improve it?

Literal IQ: In a literal sense, IQ is a standardised score derived from intelligence tests. Typically IQ is scaled to have a a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. In that sense, it is a normative score. For children, the norm is defined relative to other children of a similar age, for adults, it is defined relative to an adult population.

IQ as g: But this still leaves the question of what an IQ score ultimately represents. At a slightly more abstract level, IQ scores typically measures something called g (perhaps g for general intelligence). In a statistical sense, g is the first component that is obtained when you perform a principal components or factor analysis of scores across a large number of cognitive ability tests. In non-statistical terms, when you get  scores on many cognitive ability tests you find that each test will typically share something with other tests, but will also contain a unique bit. g is the common bit across many tests.

g as intelligence: Of course this still leaves the question of why there is the common variance across cognitive tests called g and whether we should care. IQ scores certainly correlate highly with educational performance, vocational outcomes, and many other social indicators (common correlations are in the .3 to .6 range).  If you are new to intelligence, a good starting point is Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns which was put together by an APA task in order to deal with some of the controversy around IQ and intelligence. It covers conceptual definitions of intelligence, correlates and more.

Is it possible to develop IQ?
First, by IQ, I assume you mean latent IQ or latent cognitive ability. In contrast, practicing certain types of ability tests may lead to some small improvement on similar types of tests, and somewhat larger improvement on the identical test items. Cheating on a test could lead to getting a huge IQ. And all these strategies may be effective if your goal is to do well on a test perhaps for educational, vocational, or other selection purposes. However, I am assuming that you don't want to just improve on the test, you want to improve your cognitive ability in terms of the underlying ability that such tests aim to measure.

Many quick fixes to boosting intelligence are advertised under the banner such as brain training, however, there is little evidence that they are effective. And there is strong theoretical and empirical evidence that  domain specific practice does not lead to general improvements in cognitive ability. See for example these earlier questions here, here.

I tend to see boosting IQ as an unproductive goal. I think a more useful aim is to try to be good at something more specific. There is plenty of evidence that humans are able to acquire domain specific expertise with practice. IQ might help in some cases, but it is often not a major limiting factor. See the expertise literature for more information about this, from which K. Anders Ericsson is probably the most famous academic.

That said, you'll see in Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns interesting discussions of (a) how IQ changes over childhood, (b) the relative but not complete stability of IQ in adulthood, (c) the many interventions that have been tried to improve IQ, but that generally failed to yield long term increases, (d) the mysterious Flynn effect  representing major generational increases in IQ scores, and so on. Such evidence suggests that IQ is influenced by environmental factors, but that we're not that good at understanding how to increase it. Presumably any intervention targeted at something as general as IQ would need to be similarly general, such as education or generational changes in lifestyles.


How liking and disliking mechanism is developed?

Considering the classical discussion of nature versus nurture, we can assume here that part of the causality is nature (genes, epigenetics) and part is nurture (environment, upbringing). We are all born with a whole bunch of instincts, probably hundreds. Not all these instincts are in effect at a given time, and a baby of course is not going to be displaying those instincts which are not important to its current circumstances, needs, and capabilities. As a child grows, he or she will learn how the world functions and what causes what. This person will slowly build associations between various desires (and urges) and those objects, actions, and places that satisfy said desires and urges. Because each person has different biological needs (different genes means slightly different nutritional needs, ideal temperature, physical needs, et cetera), each person, even if brought up in exactly the same environment, will build different associations with different stimuli and ideas over time. Through a long chain of trial and error with satisfying one's inner needs, each person will further differentiate in preferences.

Although I have no proof on the matter, I suspect that of the various specific (non-general) instincts a person can have, different people have different ones enabled and disabled. This would make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective since you would not want everyone to react the same way to the world around them -- they might all go extinct at the same time if they all reacted disadvantageously to an occurrence that became common. Not everyone (probably nobody) is good at avoiding all kinds of danger and solving all kinds of problems. Plus, a society is far more productive if different people are good at different things, so there is strong selective pressure for a "rolling of the dice" on specific personality characteristics.


Are there personality tests out there with questions based on scenarios?

The Kolbe tests have questions like "If I believed something important could be made to help humanity I would:" with a set of 4 responses where you choose one as most likely and one as least likely. These responses might be "Investigate it; Design it; Sell or promote it; Build it"

The purpose of the test is to find your action style and their internal research indicates a high degree of reliability over time.

I will need to do more research to find it, but there is a test used to help pair up college dorm mates that relies just on a series of groups of photos where the individual just chooses one from each group.


Criteria for Something to be Considered a Mental Disorder

This is not just a broad question, it also differs depending on the specific person holding a specific orientation working at a specific clinical/academic setting. For a DSM-V discussion, see "What is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V" by Stein et al.


In Maylor, E. A., Rabbitt, P. , James, G. H. and Kerr, S. A.. (1990) Comparing the effects of alcohol and intelligence on text recall and recognition. British Journal of Psychology, Vol.81 (No.3). pp. 299-313.

  Forty male subjects were divided into two groups on the basis of their scores on a computerized intelligence test administered in a preliminary session. They then participated in a text recall and recognition experiment in which they received alcohol (1.0 ml/kg body weight) in one session and no alcohol in another session (the order being counterbalanced). Subjects were required to read a short passage, immediately recall as much of it as possible and then select from sets of four sentences the ones that appeared in the original passage (recognition). Although two different passages were used, and subjects knew about the memory tasks in advance, there was nevertheless a significant practice effect: subjects recalled 10.6 per cent more propositions on the second occasion than on the first, but this could be at least partly explained by the fact that they spent 10.0 per cent longer reading the second passage. There was also a significant 7.8 per cent slowing of reading time due to alcohol. Practice did not interact with either intelligence or alcohol on any measure of performance. Alcohol impaired the performance of high intelligence test scorers more than low scorers.

Pihl, R. O., Peterson, J. B., and Lau, M. A., (1993) A biosocial model of the alcohol-aggression relationship. in
Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Supplement, (11), pp. 128–139 reported results from human subject experimentation showing that alcohol affects cortical functioning and reduces the ability to deal with threatening or novel occurrences.


Link between visual-spatial + verbal working memory and intelligence/academic achievement?

Work in progress -

  What is the relationship between the different types of working memory or short-term memory and other types of reasoning abilities (non-working memory reasoning tasks including verbal ability, numerical, spatial, etc.)? Are the different measures of short-term and working memory measuring approximately the same thing?

This is  a good question, but you are a funny person: say hello to positive manifold.

The concept of the general factor of intelligence emerges from the observation that all cognitive tasks are positive correlated with one another, or display positive manifold. It's as though they're all tapping into this invisible phlogiston, the general factor of intelligence/psychometric g. Perhaps the following puts it more succinctly:

From: Sternberg, R. J., & Kaufman, S. B. (Eds.). (2011). The Cambridge handbook of intelligence. Cambridge University Press.

  Is there a relationship between these variables?

As above. The reason why WM is most predictive of academic achievement is essentially because it's thought that it's tapping into the general factor most.

  Somebody who has a strong verbal working memory may generally… Or on the other hand, if somebody has a strong visual-spatial working memory they may generally perform well on intelligence tests on other types of visual-spatial tasks

What you are saying sounds perfectly cogent, but you are making one important assumption here that I don't necessarily agree with: that visuo-spatial WM and verbal WM are so thoroughly dissociable that one can have one that is stronger than the other in the way that I kick a ball real good with my right foot, but am a total ponce with my left foot. Although they are considered separate cognitive structures, I would anticipate that they're still very highly correlated in most people, individual differences notwithstanding.

Here is a snippet I have found:

However, later in the same reference, there is an interesting chapter on individual differences in visuo-spatial WM ability. In it, the authors describe a sample comprising children with learning disabilities where the deficit could be characterised as High Verbal/Low Visuo-Spatial intelligence, and vice-versa. Under some circumstances, the abilities can be dissociated:

From: Cornoldi, C., & Vecchi, T. (2004). Visuo-spatial working memory and individual differences. Psychology Press.

  Of course, there are many other factors that affect ability and learning. Working memory would be a small determinant but a determinant nonetheless.

Here, I disagree. Have you ever attempted to entertain a complicated concept comprising multiple components, only to have it "fall out of your mind" for lack of a better word? In order to process complicated concepts, you need to have some. Working memory is king, and all other abilities are subservient to it.

  How common is the occurance of individuals that have poor verbal working memory and high verbal reasoning scores on intelligence tests for example?

I am going to make a bold a priori claim: it is simply not possible for this to occur.

To argue my point, consider what you are implying: suppose someone was reading a passage of text with a long sentence. If they had very low verbal WMC, what would happen is that the beginning of the sentence would decay before they got to the end; they could never hold the information in the fore of the mind sufficiently long enough to process it, prod it, and synthesise an idea. Likewise for a sophisticated verbal reasoning task; a complex reasoning item has multiple components that must be considered simultaneously.

This reference describes it perfectly:

From: Cowan, N. (2012). Working memory capacity. Psychology press.

Effectively, what I am saying is that robust WMC is a necessary but insufficient component of verbal reasoning ability.

  How about for visual-spatial working memory and non-working memory visual-spatial scores on intelligence tests?

I'm a little confused by this, but I think you're making the same analogy as above. Same deal. However, I will make the point that WMC would represent the bottleneck in cognitive resources that would predict performance.

Having made this claim simply from first principles, let me dig up some evidence for my claims.


Is there evidence to support the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Yes, there are research showing a relationship between skills and not only "sit down tests". A systematic review by Madmood (2016) found "self-reported and demonstrated information literacy skills" supported the Dunning-Kruger phenomena. Demonstrated information literacy was from derived sources such as "observations, field notes, participant reflexive journals, expert grading of searching tasks, analysis of students’ theses, quizzes, and information related assignments".

References:

Mahmood, K. (2016). Do People Overestimate Their Information Literacy Skills? A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Communications in Information Literacy, 10 (2), 199-213. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2016.10.2.24


Are ADHD and OCD under some type of mental illness?

ADHD is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder.

  Neurodevelopmental disorders are impairments of the growth and development of the brain or central nervous system. A narrower use of the term refers to a disorder of brain function that affects emotion, learning ability, self-control and memory and that unfolds as the individual grows.

You are correct in that OCD is generally considered an anxiety disorder. They are not the same because ADHD is characterized by cognitive impairment, and OCD is characterized by anxiety (in the form of obsessions and compulsions). However, you can find both disorders in one person.


What is the test-retest reliability for the Portrait Values Questionnaire?

Shwartz (2003) writes:

  Two studies with students have assessed the test-retest reliability of
  the ten values, as measured by the PVQ. Respondents completed the PVQ
  twice, separated by an interval of two-weeks in Israel and 6 weeks in
  Germany. The test-retest reliabilities (Israel & Germany) were
  moderate to high: power .84 & .77, security .88 & .70, conformity .86
  & .72, tradition .81 & .80, benevolence .82 & .62, universalism .83 &
  .75, self-direction .66 & .70, stimulation .74 & .76, hedonism .84 &
  .65, achievement .83 & .82.

However, It would be good have moreinformation in that description to really evaluate the quality of the data. I.e., Was the data ipsatised? What was the sample size?

Schwartz, Caprara, and Vecchione (2010) measured basic values using the PVQ in a sample 1030 participants before and after an election. They report that

  Test-retest correlations ranged from .65 (benevolence) to .75 (achievement and hedonism).

This 2010 paper seems more relevant given the large adult sample.
Overall, these test-retest correlations are a little lower than what I've often seen with a well-validated measure of personality, where you might see test-retest correlations more in the .75 to .85 range.

In general, it's difficult to say whether these slightly lower correlations reflect the slightly more volatile nature of values or whether it is due to some measurement issues. In particular, I imagine having 3 items for some scales should lead to slightly lower test-retest correlations.

Schwartz, S. H. (2003). A proposal for measuring value orientations across nations. Questionnaire Package of the European Social Survey, 259-290.