What is the difference between IQ and Executive Function?

As I mentioned in my comment: IQ is a measurement that is believed to correlate with certain aspects of 'intelligence'. Executive function is "an umbrella term for cognitive processes such as planning, working memory, attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning, inhibition, mental flexibility, multi-tasking, initiation and monitoring of actions." The two are not directly comparable.
However there are measures of executive function through tests like Wisconsin card sorting, verbal fluency, and trial making, cognitive estimates test, verbal fluency for animals, simplified six element (Burgess et al., 1998; Ardila, Pineda, & Rosselli, 2000). Burges et al. (1998) found that these load on 3 main factors: inhibition, intentionality, and executive memory. Ardila et al. (2000) found that these tests do not correlate well with IQ tests and concluded that traditional intelligence tests are not an appropriate metric for executive function.
However, Mahone et al. (2002) studied normal and ADHD children and found that some measures of executive function (Rey Osterrieth Complex Figure, Variables of Attention – Visual
Test, Letter Word Fluency) correlated moderately with IQ. In fact IQ scores accounted for a greater proportion of variance in the EF measures (~10% of the variance) than the diagnosis of ADHD (~0.4% of the variance). They also found that measures of executive function at average IQ differ between children with ADHD and those without. However, this effect disappears for children with above average IQ.
To me this discrepancy suggests that we don't know how to measure executive function very well. This is to be expected, since a huge umbrella term like executive function is a tell-tale sign that we are lumping a lot of things we don't understand well together under one umbrella until we learn more.
References

Ardila, A., Pineda, D., & Rosselli, M. [2000] "Correlation Between Intelligence Test Scores and ExecutiveFunction Measures." Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 15(1): 31-36.

Burgess, P.W., Alderman, N., Evans, J., Emslie, H., & Wilson, B.A. [1998] "The ecological validity of tests of executive function." Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 4: 547-558.

Mahone, E.M., Hagelthorn, K.M., Cutting, L.E., Schuerholz, L.J., Pelletier, S.F., Rawlins, C., Singer, H.S., & Denckla, M.B. [200] "Effects of IQ on Executive Function Measures in Children with ADHD." Child Neuropsychology 8(1): 52-65.


It is very typical to record response times. Usually using a computer keyboard. It's easy to program or some software can do it for you (e.g. e-prime). You can also use already-made response boxes (e.g. RTbox), or make your own (e.g. with an arduino). As pointed out, it is usually good to control for performance to prevent speed-accuracy tradeoff confounds.

Li, X., Liang, Z., Kleiner, M., & Lu, Z. L. (2010). RTbox: a device for highly accurate response time measurements. Behavior Research Methods, 42(1), 212-225.

Schubert, T. W., D’Ausilio, A., & Canto, R. (2013). Using Arduino microcontroller boards to measure response latencies. Behavior research methods, 45(4), 1332-1346.


Are there studies on the effect of nicotine patches on dream vividness and dream recall?

Here's the only one that's easy to find in google scholar, but there might be more:

Page, F., Coleman, G., & Conduit, R. (2006). The effect of transdermal nicotine patches on sleep and dreams. Physiology & Behavior, 88(4), 425-432.


What is the difference between the structure and the conception of an empirical study in psychology?

The word Empirical means (emphasis mine):

Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. (Oxford English Dictionary)

relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory — an empirical basis for the theory — and capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment (Merriam-Webster)

One comment over in english.SE states

I could, eg, use some mathematical theorem as "evidence", based purely on the fact that it's been "proven" mathematically, without any sort of practical test.

In order for Psychology to be scientific, it needs to have empirical evidence to back it up, and this is where the problem lies with some people.  As pointed out, if you stick to hard and fast rules on what constitutes a science, then most psychology will be considered pseudoscientific.
The top voted answer to Is psychology a science? states:

Clinical psychology is not technically a science, but an applied science, or in other words, a technology.

If you are a "hard scientist", you will have problems with some aspects of psychology.


What are the purported mechanisms of eidetic memory and why is it comorbid with autism?

From my very brief skim of the field, it seems like the consensus is that savants have access to the kind of low-level information processing which non-savants do not. I'll summarize one such theory in some detail, since it's the one that I've happened to read. But I'm not an expert in this field and this is just one of the theories, the rest of which I haven't studied. I'll provide some pointers to the other theories at the end.

Snyder (2009) speculates that "savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels". This is something that everyone would in principle have the potential for: savants are accessing information that is present in everyone's brain, but not normally available for introspection. As some supporting evidence for this idea, Snyder notes that savant-like abilities can sometimes be artificially induced in healthy individuals by inhibiting a part of the brain, and that savant abilities are known to appear spontaneously and suddenly in childhood or as a result of brain injuries. Once acquired, savant abilities typically do not improve by training.

  I have argued that the extraordinary skills of savants are latent in us all and that they can be induced artificially owing to the inhibiting influence of low-frequency rTMS, that is, by turning off part of the brain, not by exciting it. My hypothesis is that savant skills are facilitated by privileged access to raw, less-processed sensory information, information that exists in all brains but is inaccessible owing to top-down inhibition. Thus, autistic savants tend to see a more literal, less filtered view of the world. Their ‘skill’ or performance does not depend on active learning, but simply on an effortless ‘reading off’ of this less-processed information.

Snyder does not explicitly draw the connection between this and memory, but I would infer the connection to be as follows. Non-savants mostly consciously process information that has been packaged into holistic, high-level concepts, and it is these high-level concepts that are stored into memory. When we try to recall something that happened, we cannot recall specific details, because they were never stored into memory in the first place. Savants think more in terms of low-level details, so that's also what gets stored in memory.

As for the autism connection, Snyder proposes that a lack of high-level concept formation and seeing things mainly in terms of low-level detail is what autism essentially is. High-level concepts allow us to order the world and understand it, and autists are lacking in those kinds of concepts.

So why are all autists not savants? There are many varieties and degrees of autism, and it is conceivable that a lack of high-level concept formation could be caused by many different things. Some of those things could also cause more widespread damage to other systems. Snyder's suggestion is that autist savants represent autism in its "purest" form, uncontaminated by other disorders. (And why are all savants not autists? Presumably because they have access to both low-level and high-level concepts.)

How well-supported is this theory? Writing in the same issue as Snyder, Happé & Frith (2009) note that Snyder's hypothesis is "controversial", but note that a lot of other theorists also propose explanations which seem to imply some sort of focus on low-level processing:

  Several authors in this issue offer hypotheses for why autism should be associated with talent, with remarkable consensus that the ability to process local information plays a key role. Happé & Vital (2009) suggest that detail-focused attention and memory predispose to the development of talent, both in the general population and in autism. Baron-Cohen et al. (2009) suggest that superior sensory acuity across modalities underlies such detail focus, which in turn fosters the tendency to explore and master closed systems (e.g. the calendar). With the enhanced perceptual functioning theory, Mottron et al. (2009) propose that locally orientated processing and, specifically, detection of patterns in the environment, underlies the high incidence of savant skills in autism. Plaisted Grant & Davis (2009) also emphasize the qualitative differences in perceptual and cognitive processing in ASD, and make tentative links to underlying neural systems. These very different theorists share the view that an ability to attend to and process featural information plays an important part in predisposing to special skills of a savant sort. This view is upheld, for example, in a detailed case study of a prodigious mnemonist and calculator with Asperger syndrome and synaesthesia who shows a preference for local processing and an unusual pattern of brain activation while remembering digits (Bor et al. 2007).

Likewise, Neumann et al. (2010):

  One way to approach the question of how savants achieve their
  astonishing abilities is to investigate their brain activity during
  savant skills demonstration. Most theoretical accounts act on the
  assumption that some lower-level (perceptual) information processing
  mechanisms are enhanced in contrast to [41,7], or at the
  cost of higher-level operations [65,20,56,16]. Thus, single aspects
  of perception or lower-level information processing are preferentially
  processed or accessed resulting in a local or early processing
  bias that is benefiting for the development of savant skills. This is
  associated with an enhanced memory trace for these features [41].
  Treffert [61], assuming different brain mechanisms, postulated a
  model that implies compensatory right-hemispheric functioning
  after left-hemisphere damage and reliance upon lower-level procedural
  memory due to damage of higher-level memory.

So at least some version of this theory seems to be right. See the references below if you want to look more into the other theories.

References

Happé, F. & Frith, U. (2009) The beautiful otherness of the autistic mind. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 364(1522):1345-1350. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1345.full

Neumann N, et al. The mind of the mnemonists: An MEG and neuropsychological study of autistic memory savants. Behav Brain Res (2010). http://ki.se/content/1/c6/10/06/19/Neumann_2010_BBR%5B1%5D.pdf

Snyder A. (2009) Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower
level, less-processed information. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 364(1522):1399–405. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1399.long

References cited in the quote from Happé & Frith:

Baron-Cohen S., Ashwin E., Ashwin C., Tavassoli T., Chakrabarti B. (2009) Talent in autism: hyper-systemizing, hyper-attention to detail and sensory hypersensitivity. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1377–1383. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0337.

Bor D., Billington J., Baron-Cohen S. (2007) Savant memory for digits in a case of synaesthesia and Asperger syndrome is related to hyperactivity in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Neurocase. 13, 311–319. doi:10.1080/13554790701844945.

Happé F., Vital P. (2009) What aspects of autism predispose to talent?. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1369–1375. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0332.

Mottron L., Dawson M., Soulières I. (2009) Enhanced perception in savant syndrome: patterns, structure and creativity. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1385–1391. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0333.

Plaisted Grant K., Davis G. (2009) Perception and apperception in autism: rejecting the inverse assumption. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 364, 1393–1398. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0001.

References cited in the quote from Neumann et al.:

[7] Bölte S, Hubl D, Dierks T, Holtmann M, Poustka F. An fMRI-study of locally oriented
perception in autism: altered early visual processing of the block design
test. J Neural Transm 2008;115(3):545–52.

[20] Happé F. Understanding assets and deficits in autism: why success is more
interesting than failure. Psychologist 1999;12:540–6.

[56] Snyder AW, Mitchell DJ. Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing?:
the mind’s secret arithmetic. Proc Biol Sci 1999;266(1419):587–92.

[41] Mottron L, Dawson M, Soulieres I, Hubert B, Burack J. Enhanced perceptual
functioning in autism: an update, and eight principles of autistic perception. J
Autism Dev Disord 2006;36(1):27–43.

[61] Treffert DA. Extraordinary people. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc.; 2006.

[65] Waterhouse L. Speculations on the neuroanatomical substrate of special talents.
In: Obler LK, Fein D, editors. The exceptional brain.NewYork: The Guilford
Press; 1988. p. 493–512.


Is Golden Ratio's association with perceived beauty a myth?

I found a little discussion of the issue in Russell (2000), where he summarises some of the views of the scientific literature:

  Recent reviews of the empirical literature bearing on the claim of
  special aesthetic significance for this ratio in the context of the
  perception of simple figures include Green (1995), Hoge (1995), and
  contributors to a dedicated edition of Empirical Studies of the Arts
  (Hoge 1997). Some investigators doubt that the golden section has any
  aesthetic significance, even suggesting that research on it be
  abandoned (Boselie 1992, 1997; Davis and Jahnke 1991). Others prefer
  to leave the question open, especially in view of the methodological
  difficulties associated with testing the significance of the golden
  section (Green 1995).

Green (1995) argues that "[t]here seems to be, in fact, real psychological effects associated with the golden section, but they are relatively sensitive to careless methodological practices."

Russel (2000) explored the height to width ratio of a large database of famous paintings and did not find any particular support for a preference for the golden-section. Russel suggests that in the real world functional factors tend to constrain ratios.

McManus (1980, PDF) provides an interesting discussion of the methodological issues and the findings of research that has empirically studied aesthetic judgements of simple figures. McManus advocates the use of the paired-comparison method whereby participants make aesthetic judgements on which of series of pairs of objects is more aesthetically attractive. McManus observed that there were substantial individual differences in such preferences. McManus felt that existing empirical research was unable to adequately differentiate preference for the golden-section versus other similar ratios such as 1.5, 1.6 or 1.75.

References

Boselie F, 1992. "The golden section has no special aesthetic attractivity!" Empirical Studies of the Arts 10 1-18.
Boselie F, 1997 "The golden section and the shape of objects" Empirical Studies of the Arts 15 131-141.
Davis S T, Jahnke J C, 1991 "Unity and the golden section: Rules for aesthetic choice?" American Journal of Psychology 104 257 ^ 277
Green C D, 1995 "All that glitters: a review of psychological research on the aesthetics of the
golden section" Perception 24 937-968
Hoge H, 1995 "Fechner's experimental aesthetics and the golden section hypothesis today" Empirical
Studies of the Arts 13 131-148.
Hoge H, 1997 "Why a special issue on the golden section hypothesis? An introduction" Empirical
Studies of the Arts 15 111-114
Russell, P.A. (2000). Testing the aesthetic significance of the golden-section rectangle. PERCEPTION-LONDON-, 29, 1413-1422.
McManus, IC (1980). The aesthetics of simple figures. British Journal of Psychology, 71, 505-524. PDF


My research on your question has so far not showed any disorder that matches this description. Something we all suffer from, however, is confirmation bias. We interpret new information in the light of our current views and disregard information that don't match our existing beliefs. Research has shown that being confronted with convincing arguments for the opposite view might strengthen our belief in the one we already hold. You can read more about this in books like Mistakes Were Made But not By Me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by_Me)


Do people who experience heautoscopy become unable to see their reflected image in a mirror?

While acknowledging the fact that Google delivers personalized results, I am fairly sure a Google search for "heautoscopy" will deliver you bucket loads of papers to read - I have copied a random handful for your convenience below under 'further reading'.
However, a popular source seems to contradict your definition, as it states heautoscopy as being:

A hallucination in which one sees one's own body from a distance.
Heautoscopy may occur as a symptom in schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Your own referenced Brugger (2002) paper gives a nice definition of both terms in one go:

In an autoscopic hallucination the observer's perspective is clearly body-centred, and the visual image of one's own body appears as a mirror reversal. Heautoscopy (i.e., the encounter with an alter ego or doppelgänger), is defined as a reduplication not only of bodily appearance, but also of aspects of one's psychological self.

Not being able to see ones own reflection in a mirror would be an entirely different phenomenon, more akin to mirrored-self misidentification
Further reading
- Blanke & Mohr, Brain Res Brain Res Rev (2005); 50(1): 184-99
- Brugger, Cogn Neuropsychiatry (2002); 7(3): 179-94
- Brugger et al., J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry (1994); 57(7): 838–39


Can someone not feel i.e. neglect pain sensation?

Totally neglect pain? Probably not, but mediate pain sensation? Definetly!

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304395989902303

  Results revealed that, in general, cognitive coping strategies are more effective in alleviating pain as compared to either no-treatment or expectancy controls. Each individual class of strategies significantly attenuates pain although the imagery methods are the most effective whereas pain acknowledging is the least effective.

Further reading:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661308001575
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304395903002975


Why does neuroplasticity decrease in adults?

Another reason for reduced plasticity in adults is that learning something different in the presence of an existing knowledge structure is more difficult than learning from a "blank slate". In a sense, you get interference from the known language (for example). One person who has developed this argument computationally is Jay McClelland in the context of native Japanese speakers learning the English /r/-/l/ distinction (e.g., McCandliss et al., 2002), though I think the principle may apply more generally.

The idea is that "reduced plasticity" is just a consequence of interference from the established knowledge rather than a fundamental change in plasticity. Part of the argument is that you only see reduced plasticity when there is a conflict between the (for example) first language and second language; aspects of the second language that match the first language are learned very quickly.


Are there statistics about how many assertive people there are in the world?

One method of estimating assertiveness would be to look at scores on self-report tests that aim to measure assertiveness. Measuring in this way suggests that assertiveness, as with other traits, is on a continuum. Thus, classifying someone as assertive or not assertive would involve a judgement call.
Nonetheless, once you have an estimate of the proportion passing such a threshold, you could then multiply population size by proportion classified as assertive to get a population estimate of assertiveness.

The NEO-IPIP has an assertiveness scale. But you'd have to hunt down some reasonable test norms. Alternatively, the NEO-PI would also be useful and the test manual would provide means and standard deviations for the corresponding assertiveness scale.

E3: ASSERTIVENESS (.84)
+ keyed
    Take charge.
    Try to lead others.
    Can talk others into doing things.
    Seek to influence others.
    Take control of things.

– keyed
    Wait for others to lead the way.
    Keep in the background.
    Have little to say.
    Don't like to draw attention to myself.
    Hold back my opinions.

Herzberger et al (1984) provides one simple example.
They created what they called the Assertiveness Self-Report Inventory.
It included items like

  When my date has acted rudely at a party, I don' hesitate to let him/her know I don'd like it.
  After eating an excellent meal at a restaurant, I do not hesitate to compliment the chef.
  When people use my car and don't refill the tank, I let them know I feel unfairly treated.

Overall there were 25 items True/False items like this. Using a relatively small university sample (around 150 all up),  mean number of items endorsed was around 10 and the standard deviation was around 4. You could potentially look more carefully at such items perhaps using expert raters of scores to generate a threshold above which constitutes an assertive personality. For sake of example, you might determine that participants who have endorsed  12 items or more are deemed to be "assertive". If you had the raw data, you could determine what sample endorsed 12 or more items. Failing that, you could get an approximate estimate using a normal distribution approximation based on the mean and standard deviation or some variant on this approach.

Of course, there are many limitations to this approach:

Self-reported personality is not the same as behaviour or some more objective or other report measure of personality.
defining the cut-off can be somewhat arbitrary.
You would need to define more clearly how you want to conceptualise assertiveness, in that you seem to be distinguishing a more adaptive form of assertiveness in contrast to a more aggressive approach.
Getting representative and large norms for even one country is difficult, let alone the entire world. That said, the NEO-PI and IPIP are likely to offer reasonable existing sources.
As others have mentioned, cultural norms should have a dramatic effect on what constitutes reasonable ways of asserting your interests in social ettings. This sociological perspective may even provide a better understanding the phenomena of interest.

References

Herzberger, S. D., Chan, E., & Katz, J. (1984). The development of an assertiveness self-report inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48(3), 317-323.


From fMRI study,  "Neural Correlates of Hate"

Viewing a hated face resulted in increased activity in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in premotor cortex, in the frontal pole and bilaterally in the medial insula. We also found three areas where activation correlated linearly with the declared level of hatred, the right insula, right premotor cortex and the right fronto-medial gyrus. One area of deactivation was found in the right superior frontal gyrus. The study thus shows that there is a unique pattern of activity in the brain in the context of hate. Though distinct from the pattern of activity that correlates with romantic love, this pattern nevertheless shares two areas with the latter, namely the putamen and the insula.

This is only a study in which hated faces were seen, so really it measures more than merely were hatred "is born", or it might not even catch that at all. It's not too clear how one could find that out.
Another paper has it more concisely as

the so-called ‘hate circuit' involving the superior frontal gyrus, insula and putamen

What's interesting in this latter paper is that this circuit was apparently "uncoupled" by depression.
Although it's veering off-topic, the authors of the latter paper have offered a less techincal interpretatoin of their finding in the mass media

"We were a bit shocked when we first saw these results," says lead researcher Jianfeng Feng, a professor of computer science at the University of Warwick who specializes in biology. Feelings of self-hatred are a common feature of depression, he explains, so one would expect those feelings to also be more intense when directed toward other people.
Instead, it's as if the brains of depressed people hate incorrectly. The brain disruptions the researchers observed could be a sign that people with depression have an impaired ability to cope with -- and learn from -- social situations in which they feel hate, Feng says. This may explain why they often turn emotions such as hatred and anger inward, instead of handling them in more constructive ways, he adds.

The thing to keep in mind that the "hate circuit" was labelled so after a narrow task (viewing hated images), which might not cover all the ways humans can hate.  If the studies on love (which are more numerous) are a good analogy, "different types of love involve distinct cerebral networks, including those for higher cognitive functions such as social cognition and bodily self-representation". Although surely interesting, this line of research (on hate) is pretty much in its infancy (in my opinion).
Also, one cannot be certain a brain area is necessary for a certain function (say hate) just from brain imaging. One needs to "mess" with the brain area in question, which is usually unethical, except in rare cases, e.g. epilepsy patients who have had electrodes implanted. (I suggest you watch Kanwisher TED talk on this for more explanations.) In the case of the "hate circuit" no such evidence has been found yet, and history of neuroscience shows that it can take a really long time to have a confirmation like that for any association found by immaging.


Why do larger animals need bigger brains?

Brain size isn't necessarily a determinant of intelligence. That notion was a  assumption of neuroscientists of the past, a speculation that lead to many problematic socio-psychological projections.
The size difference of brains might simply match the morphology of the species, but sometimes it doesn't scale so evenly, as with crocodiles, whose brains remain roughly the same size their whole lives even as their bodies grow. I personally wonder if this relates to the hypothesis that brains evolved to meet the need for movement (the "moving hypothesis").
Often larger animals have larger brains to fit their morphology, but they don't necessarily have more neurons. Having more neurons might be the reason for the greater intelligence (or, perhaps a better phrasing, greater cognitive flexibility) of species like Homo sapiens. This hypothesis is explained in detail in Suzana Herculano-Houzel's paper "Brains matter, bodies maybe not: The case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/herculano-houzel-2011-anyas/


How do thoughts work at the neuron level?

It has been proposed that spontaneous cortical activity may have a lot to do with cortical processing not related to external sensory.

  Within a spontaneously active network, we observe the sudden “ignition” of one out of many possible coherent states of high-level activity amidst cortical neurons with long-distance projections. During such an ignited state, spontaneous activity can block external sensory processing. We relate those properties to experimental observations on the neural bases of endogenous states of consciousness, and particularly the blocking of access to consciousness that occurs in the psychophysical phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” in which normal subjects intensely engaged in mental activity fail to notice salient but irrelevant sensory stimuli.

The spontaneous cortical activity itself has been studied at a more reductionist level where they've been separated into multimodal functional motifs.  Perhaps these functional motifs form the basis for the nature of stray thoughts.


Why do individuals initially dislike things that they end up ultimately liking?

It could be the case that it takes time to like some thinks. We get habituated by being exposed to the same stimuli, here music. The dislike decreases after repeated presentations and the likeness may occur, if at all. At the same time, there is a continuous 'strive' between 'familiarity' and 'change'. The experience of 'change' we face by listening to some songs at the beginning, might become the experience of 'familiar' sounds and the liking could develop.
The same experience I've had with some food preparations.


Which area of psychology studies false beliefs?

These are typically called cognitive distortions and are a mainstay of CBT, but are equally likely to be addressed by any cognitive psychotherapist.  This is usually done by building skills to identify and challenge such thoughts.
In the much older (and largely outdated) school of psychoanalysis, these are typically referred to as a defense mechanism called rationalizations.
In contrast, behavioral therapies are less likely to directly address such thoughts.  With this paradigm, distortions typically subside once the underlying behavior pattern is addressed (eg, by improving social skills, and actually making friends).


What is the fear/paralysis that occurs before doing an irreversible action?

Philosopher Walter Kaufmann calls this fear "decidophobia", but I have never read and cannot find any psychological publications using that term.

If you think about the phenomenon, it becomes apparent that anyone can clearly observe when a person hesitates to decide, but even that person herself could probably not clearly identify all the emotions that accompany this behavior, and, if there is fear, what the exact object of that fear is – the fear could be of anything from deciding between two equally desirable alternatives (fear to decide) to the outcome of a decision that is in fact already made (fear to finalize the decision and face the results).

Psychology therefore prefers to study observable behavior and calls this behavior "decision avoidance".

The above answers the question you asked in the title of you question. Your post itself describes a bundle of symptoms that to me are reminiscent of what persons with obsessive-compulsive disorder experience. Many such disorders begin with a worry that something was forgotten and lead to extended rituals of checking for hours if the water is turned off or the lights are out. The problem here is that these people become increasingly incabable of trusting their perceptions and have to repeat certain actions until they are finally convinced the thing was done.

An example is of a woman who frequently goes on business trips and, upon returning home, has to read the name of her city several times loudly letter-by-letter at the airport to get the feeling that she is actually there.

Since I know nothing about you beyond your post, your problem – if it is one – is hard to diagnose. If this "fear to decide" affects your well-being, I recommend you go see a psychologist and talk to them about it.


Are there lying or social desirability items in IPIP pool?

There are IPIP self-deception and impression management scales presumably modelled on the similarly named Paulhus scales (reliabilities in brackets):

SOURCE: http://ipip.ori.org/newPASKey.htm#Self-Deception

SELF-DECEPTION [.80]

+ keyed
    Always know why I do things.
    Just know that I will be a success.
    Know that my decisions are correct.
    Feel comfortable with myself.
    Like to take responsibility for making decisions.

– keyed
    Am not always honest with myself.
    Sometimes have trouble making up my mind.
    Dislike myself.
    Worry about what people think of me.
    Have a low opinion of myself.

IMPRESSION-MANAGEMENT [.82]

+ keyed
    Would never take things that aren't mine.
    Would never cheat on my taxes.
    Believe there is never an excuse for lying.
    Always admit it when I make a mistake.
    Rarely talk about sex.
    Return extra change when a cashier makes a mistake.
    Try to follow the rules.
    Easily resist temptations.
    Tell the truth.
    Rarely overindulge.

– keyed
    Have sometimes had to tell a lie.
    Use swear words.
    Use flattery to get ahead.
    Am not always what I appear to be.
    Break rules.
    Cheat to get ahead.
    Don't always practice what I preach.
    Misuse power.
    Get back at others.
    Am likely to show off if I get the chance.


Neurologically, how does a thought terminate?

I'm not sure if the neuroscientific community has reached a consensus on what a "thought" is, but it seems you're using it here as synonymous with a neuronal firing pattern.
If one models this as an attractor in a dynamical system of a circuit or network of neurons, then I would look into Ichiro Tsuda's concept of "chaotic itinerancy" http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Chaotic_itinerancy which gives a formalization for how attractors transition to chaos then to [usually new] attractors.
An important intuitive notion is that attractors dissipate when they become unstable.
If a sensory stimulus or a memory or imagination creates a stable pattern of neurons that fire in association with it, then what initiated the firing pattern in the first place seems like it should have something to do with how it destabilizes. There is a causal connection between stimulus and neuronal activity. I believe attention would affect what fires and for how long, and Karl Friston's "free energy principle" seems like a good formalization of how that happens, but I haven't fully studied it myself.
There is a counterintuitive observation where neurons adjacent to those of the receptive fields of a sensory stimulus can keep firing for up to 3 hrs after the stimulus (cf. "Plasticity of Receptive Fields in Early Stages of the Adult Visual System" U.T. Eysel, in "Perceptual Learning", M. Fahl & T. Poggio, eds), so maybe the neuronal substrate of thoughts last longer than they consciously appear to. My guess is they would only last forever if there was nothing else to think about


Is there any update on the hypothesis on primary emotions corresponding on "love"?

This hypothesis relies on a number of ideas that are difficult to defend in light of the past decade of emotion research.

Most notably, there is almost no evidence of modular "emotion systems" in the brain that coordinate some sort of stereotyped emotional response (1 2 3 4).

Moreover, rigidity in responding is often related to reduced evolutionary fitness.  High fitness species have behavioral and genetic flexibility (see the evo-bio literature on degeneracy and variability).

Moreover, there's strong evidence that the brain is predictive, not reactive (for a starting point on this idea, see 5), which rejects the traditional stimulus-response paradigm (e.g., "triggering" a circuit).

The theory also relies on an outdated understanding of neurotransmitter functions (e.g., 6 7).

Overall, this theory needs to be heavily revised in order to account for contemporary findings.


What is the difference between emotions, intuition and affect?

Affect is a fundamental feature of consciousness and is a mental representation of input from the body to the brain.  Affect corresponds to feelings of (un)pleasantness and activation (arousal).

Emotions are conceptualizations (interpretations) of your affect in a given context.  You might feel pleasant and highly aroused (an affective feeling) on a roller coaster, and your conceptualization of that affect in that context would be "excitement" (an emotional feeling).  In this sense, emotions are what we would traditionally consider to be "cognitive."

Source

Under this scheme, intuition doesn't really have a direct, formal relationship to affect or emotion, although intuitions are often affective (well, pretty much everything is affective).  But see here for a more informed discussion of the literature.


What does cognitive science say about whether to learn mathematics top-down from research papers?

This is a part answer to this question, specifically if research has been done for this problem.  Also, some perspectives of a Maths and Physics teacher of over a decade experience.  Somewhat ironically, I am going to start by making a parallel to a topic that is arguably an equivalent in the Sciences: Physics - as in my experience, I have seen similarities in terms of top=down vs bottom-up learning.
According to "Learning to think like a Physicist: A review of research based instructional strategies" (Van Heuvelen, 1991), many studies then have found that conventional teaching methods (bottom-up in a lot of places), in their use of "primitive formula-centred problem solving" fail to properly develop topic and subject related reasoning and problem solving.
The point here is that enquiry based problem solving, which can be considered as 'top-down' allows the student to learn the topics and concepts within a context, in doing so, they see how various topics link together, that may not be so apparent when working with formula-centred methods.  A caveat here, it is absolutely critical that the students have some background knowledge and skills that could be used in their enquiry, these would potentially be enhanced through a top-down type of enquiry.
This is emphasised further in the chapter "Research on Teaching Mathematics: The Unsolved Problem of Teachers' Mathematical Knowledge" (Ball, 2001), who asset that the most common encounter with mathematics is a set of rules to be memorised, equivalent to the 'primitive formula-centred problem solving' model described in the previous article, resulting in the subject not only being misunderstood, but underappreciated. This is an advantage of a top-down approach, according to the article (and my own experience), where if the student starts with a query (from an article or unfamiliar question), then it turns into a mathematical challenge, rather than a pedagogical one.
Finally, a key point from the chapter "Learning to think mathematically: Problem solving, metacognition, and sense-making in Mathematics" (Schoenfeld, 1992), make several key points outlined above, and:

Present problem situations that closely resemble real situations in their
richness and complexity so that the experience that students gain in the
Learning to think mathematically, classroom will be transferable.

This includes taking an unfamiliar problem, and using skills and knowledge that they have to disassemble the problem to understand its components.  Essentially, a great skill can be developed in the top-down approach - how to break down a big unfamiliar problem into its more familiar ingredients.
Hope this helps.


You are correct in that these terms are very close in definition, but terminology is not just about identifying a concept. Terminology is also about identifying the perspective from which you will look at the concept and the community to which you, as the researcher, belong. Here, free-riding and social loafing have very different histories.

Social loafing comes from the social psychology literature and is most closely associated with the methods and typical explanations of that field. Thus, you will typically encounter social loafing around discussions of motivation, diffusion of responsibility, and feeling of effort as dispensable.

Free-riding comes from the economics and game theory literature and is most closely associated with the models and methods of those fields. Thus, you will typically encounter free-riding around discussions of cost-benefit analysis, rational choice, and (the paradox of) cooperation.

The only difference in concept (that I know of) comes from the economics focus on rationality. Social psychologists would classify as social loafing situations where the 'slacking' of an individual hurts not only the group, but their own performance as well (they would have individually -- not just as a group -- gotten a higher payoff if they didn't slack). On the other hand, economists, would not consider this as a case of (rational) free-riding, since they reserve that word for social dilemmas where cooperating costs you more than the marginal increase you get from the benefit to the group, but where everybody free-riding is even worse.

Of course, the terms cross-fertilize, especially in the direction of free-riding entering the discussions of social loafing. In the social psychology literature, you will see free-riding used as an explanation of social loafing in cases where the experimenters believe that the choice to loaf is based on a (rational) cost/benefit analysis instead of some of the other factors I discussed.


Physiological differences between brains of Conservatives and Liberals

The easiest way to work forward from a well-cited article is to do a forward Google Search. My answer is almost completely based on such a search and concentrates on three brain regions: amygdala, insula cortex, and the  anterior cingulate cortex; note that all three regions are linked to emotion.

Keep in mind: when you take any two groups of people that differ significantly in behavior, socio-economic background, age, education-level, etc. It is not difficult to find differences between them on many fronts, and certain brain-structures is one of them. The difficulty of these studies, is two-fold: (1) the researchers have to do very good controls to make it believable that the difference loads on political ideology and not one of the many other things differences in political ideology usually correlates with, and (2) provide (or at least make believable to exist) some sort of causal relationship between the brain-structures they observe and the relevant behavior (i.e. political leaning). When you read these papers, these are the two points you should carefully check.

Oxley et al. (2008) showed that you don't need a brain scaner to observe correlations between physiological differences and political ideology:

  [I]ndividuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War.

The nice thing about these measurements, is that a mechanism for the correlation is easier to establish: if you are more likely to react strongly in your experiencing and
processing environmental threats, then you are more likely to have that reflected in your political ideology.

Schreiber et al. (2009) followed a similar line of thought by studying how Republicans and Democrats perform in a risk-taking tasks. While the 54 participants were evaluating risks, the researchers used an fMRI to look at the activation in their amygdala. This is a natural brain region to look at, since it is believed to be important for emotional processing. They concluded:

  a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations achieves better accuracy in predicting whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican than a well established model in political science based on parental socialization of party identification.

The importance of the amygdala has also been tested across culturues. Rule et al. (2010) conducted a study in snap judgements in voting decisons of American and Japanese natives and showed analogous activation of the amygdala in both groups even though the traits that lead to judgments differ across the two cultures.

The importance of the insula is also not surprising, since this brain region is associated with processing of social emotions such as disgust (Wicker et al., 2003), reacting to norm-violation in ultimatum game (Sanfey et al., 2003), and empathy (Singer, 2006). Chiao et al. (2009) showed that activation in the left anterior insula (and anterior cingulate) cortex is linked with preference for hierarchical rather than egalitarian social relations; something of importance for differentiating the Conservative/Liberal mindset.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in the experience of anxiety, and empathy (Decety & Jackson, 2004). Recently, Inzlicht et al. (2009) linked activity in the ACC to religiousness; in a behavioral task they showed:

  Results showed that stronger religious zeal and greater belief in God were associated with less ﬁring of the ACC in response to error and with commission of fewer errors. These correlations remained strong even after we controlled for personality and cognitive ability. These results suggest that religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and acting within one’s environment, thereby acting as a buffer against anxiety and minimizing the experience of error.

Since religion is often an important distinguishing factor between conservatives and liberals, it is not surprising for activity in the ACC to also be distinguishing for political ideology.


How do I find the right psychologist for myself?

If you are lucky, you might be able to find a psychologist or a group practice who blogs specifically about bullying? That might a good way to find out the opinions and direction of how they would approach therapy with you. Unfortunately, there are no simple or easy ways to predict or decipher bias or the direction of the therapy. Usually it is worth visiting a couple of psychologists and decide after a couple of sessions?


What do within-subjects studies of job applicant personality test faking say about the covariance between developmental and job applicant scores?

Richard Griffith and Patrick Converse (2012) provide a good review of    personality faking research that has employed a within-subjects design to examine changes in responses to personality tests between an applicant and a development context.

The following represent my review of the papers identified by Griffith and Converse (2012). I take it as fairly well established in the literature that most, but not all, studies find differences in group means between between different applicant and non-applicant conditions. This review focusses on individual differences in whether people fake and the amount of faking.

Arthur et al (2010)

Among other things, Arthur et al (2010) reported two studies that looked at differences in responding between participants completing a personality test as job applicant and then around a year later completing the same personality test as an anonymous research participant.

SEM_d: The authors used the standard error of test-retest measurement $\text{SEM}_d$ to classify in an operationalised way whether a participant had engaged in response distortion in the high-stakes context

$\text{SEM}_d \lt 1$ indicated lower score at time 2 (i.e., faking)
$\text{SEM}_d \gt 1$ indicated higher score
$|\text{SEM}_d| \lt 1$ indicated unchanged score (i.e., honest)

Results in study 1 suggested that for most personality scales a little over 30% of scores were classified as lower in the low stakes condition.

Of course this value should be interpreted in light of the fact that based on the normal distribution and the chosen cut-offs, one would expect around 16% above this cut-off. There are also issues of regression to the mean, and reduced reliability in the extremes that could be considered in a more sophisticated analysis. Finally, this indicator of faking does not provide information on the distribution of faking scores.

SEM_d by job applicant score:
They also explore the prevalence of score reduction relative to scores in the high stakes condition. They conclude that prevalence of score reduction does not vary with High stakes scores. However, the graphs are a little difficult to interpret (being stacked bar charts). Also, by design the graphs answer the question of what proportion of test takers at a given level are faking, which is interesting , but they don't answer the question of whether true score is related to faking.

Correlation between applicant and research context scores:
Table 5 reports $\text{time}_1 - \text{time}_2$ correlations for both studies for the Big 5. Correlations are between .49 and .78.
Such correlations make sense in light of the idea that some participants are answering honestly and others are faking. This should produce correlations a little lower than typical test-retest reliabilities.

Of course, many factors influence correlations of personality test scores in applicant and research contexts. In particular, reliability of the test and time between tests would be important. Thus, it's a little difficult to say how much of the observed reduction in the correlation is due to faking in the applicant context, and how much is due to other factors.

The researchers do provide an $n=44$ sample of participants in Study 1 who completed both conditions in low stakes contexts (i.e., existing employee and research contexts). These correlations are reported in Table 6. The following analysis using R shows the correlations for the two conditions, where theory would suggest that the High Stakes-Low Stakes (i.e., HL) condition should have smaller correlations, although the observed difference is fairly minimal.

x <- data.frame(matrix(c(0.53, 0.55, 0.51, 0.7, 0.66, 0.56, 0.49,
    0.5, 0.87, 0.75), ncol = 2))
names(x) <- c("HL", "LL")
row.names(x) <- c("Agreeableness", "Conscientiousness", "Emotional stability",
    "Extraversion", "Openness")
x$diff <- x$HL - x$LL
round(rbind(x, Mean = sapply(x, mean)), 2)
##                       HL   LL  diff
## Agreeableness       0.53 0.56 -0.03
## Conscientiousness   0.55 0.49  0.06
## Emotional stability 0.51 0.50  0.01
## Extraversion        0.70 0.87 -0.17
## Openness            0.66 0.75 -0.09
## Mean                0.59 0.63 -0.04

Griffith et al (2007)

Griffith et al (2007) conducted a study where 60 applicants completed a 30-item measure of conscientiousness first in a job applicant setting. Then one month later, they completed the test under instructions to answer the test honestly and to fake.

They found a correlation between honest and applicant of $r =.50$, and a standardised difference between honest and applicant of $d = 61$.
This shows that scores are increasing in applicant settings, and that there are individual differences in the extent to which this occurs. Although the absence of knowledge of the test-retest correlation in an honest-honest context makes it a little difficult to assess the degree to which this correlation is less than would be expected.

They also employed several indices to act as difference score thresholds, which classified 31 or 22 percent of applicants as faking depending on the index.

In a latter part of the paper there is also some discussion of variation in the size of the difference score.

Ellingson et al (2007):

Ellinson et al performed a study based on a large database of participants who had completed a personality test under the four combinations of development and selection contexts.

Average Development-development sample correlations were $.66$ were a little bit higher than average development-selection ($r=.62$) and selection-development ($r=.57$) correlations.

Average increases from session 1 to 2 suggested somewhat low levels of response distortion.

                           average scale d
development/development     0.14
development/selection       0.26
selection/development       0.04
selection/development       0.07

As far as I can tell, there was no specific discussion of the distribution of change scores.

Others

Donovan et al (2008) and Peterson et al (2008) sound interesting, but they are conference presentations so the publications are not readily available.

Summary

Thus, in summary, there is some evidence that the correlation is lower between applicant and development conditions than it would between two comparable development conditions.
Presumably the size of this drop in correlation is related to the amount of faking, and that the amount of faking is related to the amount of individual differences in faking.

There is certainly a qualitative awareness of there being different categories of  faking.
Ellingson write:

  Conservative estimates from this line of research suggest that
  less than 20% of applicants intentionally distort their responses
  and that less than 4% of applicants do so to an extreme degree

However, I haven't yet read much from these within-subject studies about the distribution of faking scores, nor have I seen formal mathematical models of the change scores, even though the data would permit such analyses.

References

Arthur, W., Jr., Glaze, R. M., Villado, A. J., & Taylor, J. E. (2010). The magnitude and extent of cheating and response distortion effects on unproctored Internet based test of cognitive ability and personality. International Journal for Selection and Assessment, 18, 1-16. PDF
Donovan, J. J., Dwight, S. A., & Schneider D. (2008). Faking in the real world: Evidence from a field study. In R. L. Griffith & M. H. Peterson (Chairs), Examining faking using within-subjects designs and applicant data. Symposium conducted at the 23rd Annual Conference for the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psyhcology, San Francisco, CA.
Ellingson, J. E., Sackett, P. R., & Connelly, B. S. (2007). Personality assessment across selection and development contexts:  Insights into response distortion. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 386-395.
Griffith, R. L. & Converse, P. D. (2012). The rules of evidence and the prevalence of applicant faking in New Perspectives on Faking in Personality Assessment, Chapter 3, 34-52.
Griffith, R. L., Chmielowski, R., & Yoshita, Y. (2007). Do applicants fake? An examination of the frequency of applicant faking behavior. Personnel Review, 36, 341-355. PDF
Peterson, M. P. Griffith, R. L., O'Connel, M. S., & Isaacson, J. A. (2008). Examining faking in real job applicants: A with-subjects investigation of score changes across applicant and research settings. Paper presented at the 23rd annual meeting for the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, San Francisco, California.


Why are people biased against overweight people?

It is easy to fall into an interpretive bias when evaluating the capabilities of overweight people. In other words, we understand that they are not as physically capable, and therefore undervalued/underestimated due to the interpretive bias.

Another thing is, similar to the idea of racism, Positive Distinctiveness kicks in. This is where, as humans, we see ourselves as part of a group (in this case, a non-overweight group) and we like to perceive our group as the more significant one. Unfortunately, one of the ways to perceive ourselves that way is by looking down on other groups (overweight people), and therefore they are undervalued.


How can different ion channels of the same type have different cell responses?

Quibbling about other types of LTP (not mediated by NDMA receptors) aside, this is a good question, with a rather intricate answer.
Basically (NDMAR mediated) LTP is not merely activated by calcium, but rather by CaMKII, which essentially acts a sort longer-term chemical memory for calcium that was once "detected" in a spine. A couple of points quoted from a fairly recent review paper:

[a] bulk calcium signal, when produced by depolarization of voltage-dependent calcium channels, is not sufficient to activate CaMKII.

a calcium signal will stay largely within the activated spine. The next step in the long-term potentiation cascade is the binding of calcium to the four binding sites on calmodulin. Calcium-saturated calmodulin keeps calcium bound for ~1 ms, a long enough time for calmodulin to diffuse within the spine and to bind CaMKII, but too short a period of time to diffuse out of the spine. [...] CaMKII diffuses at a very slow rate (for CaMKII to exit spines may take many minutes), activated CaMKII is mostly localized to the activated spine.

So basically a fast signal (calcium) gets converted into a (spatially) slow but locally persistent CaMKII signal (via calmodulin). As I understand it, anyway.


Is there a causal connection between repressive sexual morality and antisocial behavior?

Alfred Kinsey's studies show a noteworthy occurrence of bisexual/homosexual behavior and multiple partners in the population, despite the fixture of heterosexual monogamy in our culture. EDIT: This first statement is intended to demonstrate that non-heterosexual behavior does naturally occur in the population. I am rewriting the rest to be much less ambiguous.

James A. Haught wrote that Western religion has always been a haven for the sexually repressed. One could argue strongly against sexual repression in light of the Catholic church abuse scandals. The next logical step is that sexual repression creates pathology, and thus anti-social behavior.


How to track eye movements with electrodes?

I believe this tutorial covers exactly what you are looking for. It describes how to use a relatively cheap kit ($150) to detect eye movements and eye blinks. It includes software and hardware information.


Neural oscillations and activity patterns

Frequency analysis
All time-varying signals can be decomposed into the frequency domain, e.g. using the Fourier transform. This is a common technique for analyzing brain signals, e.g. from EEG.
However, doing this transform does not mean that the underlying signals are oscillatory in nature. Even if we talk about power in some particular frequency band, that does not mean we are talking about an oscillation at that frequency. Event-related potentials are often analyzed in the time domain, but nothing would stop you from analyzing them in the frequency domain.
Packets vs oscillations
When you write "memory and thinking is associated with these neural oscillations", this can be true of frequency analyses but yet not really related to oscillations. Artur Luczak and Ken Harris have argued for evidence of "packet-based" communication in neocortex (see for example their Luczak et al 2015 review). Effectively these are bursts of activity lasting on the order of 100-100s of milliseconds. They've shown that in anesthetized states these "packets" are revealed in a slow "oscillatory" power in the EEG/LFP, which makes sense: if you have a bunch of events that last 100-100s of milliseconds, you're going to find power in the low frequency bands. However, these are not oscillations. They are discrete events. In the wake state, the same events happen, but because there are no gaps between them, you don't see an oscillation in the EEG.
More generally, this is true of any events in frequency analysis. If you add a bunch of events lasting, say, 50 milliseconds to a white noise signal, you will see an increase in power in the vicinity of 10 Hz. They need not oscillate at all.
Separating oscillations from 'power law' power-frequency relationships
Some researchers have argued that we should be more aware of evidence for and against true "oscillations" when analyzing EEG. From Donoghue et al 2020:

Following historical traditions, the vast majority of the studies examining oscillations rely on canonical frequency bands, which are approximately defined as: infraslow (<0.1 Hz), delta (1–4 Hz), theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–12 Hz), beta (12–30 Hz), low gamma (30–60 Hz), high-frequency activity (60–250 Hz) and fast ripples (200–400 Hz). Although most of these bands are often described as oscillations, standard approaches fail to assess whether an oscillation—meaning rhythmic activity within a narrowband frequency range—is truly present (Fig. 1a,b).

They recommend analyzing frequency-domain signals in terms of the broadband power (dominated by the lowest frequencies), the exponent of power decay with frequency (neural signals are typically in the range of 1/f or 1/f^2, but this easily generalizes to 1/f^a), and then isolating evidence for actual oscillations that deviate from these parametric fits (linear in log-log space):

In this figure, you would only identify an oscillation in the alpha 8-12 Hz range. All of the rest of the power spectrum derives from non-oscillatory time-varying neuronal activity, which still has some detectable frequency structure.
Power-law brain activity, criticality, and chaos
Another area of emphasis in the analysis of brain signals is the idea of criticality, in particular work by John Beggs. Criticality is the border between chaotic and organized (oscillatory) activity. A prediction of this theory is exactly the power-law decay with frequency (1/f^a) described above. This scheme refers to "neuronal avalanches" which are events of synchronized neural activity that share some features with the "packets" of Luczak and Harris. Waking brains tend to be near this critical point, whereas during sleep there is much more oscillatory organization and the brain is further from critical. Although criticality can be described as "near chaos", I think it's important to recognize that it is not chaos, no matter how complicated it is. It's still quite organized, just organized in a way that optimizes information processing. Oscillations that are too organized have little capacity to transmit information (consider the information transmission limitations of radio bands that humans use for television, radio, and cell phones, for example).

Beggs, J. M. (2008). The criticality hypothesis: how local cortical networks might optimize information processing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 366(1864), 329-343.
Donoghue, T., Haller, M., Peterson, E. J., Varma, P., Sebastian, P., Gao, R., ... & Voytek, B. (2020). Parameterizing neural power spectra into periodic and aperiodic components. Nature neuroscience, 23(12), 1655-1665.
Luczak, A., McNaughton, B. L., & Harris, K. D. (2015). Packet-based communication in the cortex. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(12), 745-755.


How do children understand the concept of number size?

Short answer
It has been argued that infants are born with an ability to recognize,  distinguish and even operate on small numbers.

Background
Speaking from experience (n = 2 :-) toddlers learn to count, first of all. That means they know 2 comes after 1, 3 after 2 etc. In conjunction, we read them stories, like the very hungry caterpillar that graphically shows how, consecutively, the little critter starts eating holes in 1 apple, 2 pears, 3 plums and so forth, after which the caterpillar turns into a butterfly (Fig. 1). So there's the element of a growing and developing critter (time) eating more and more pieces of fruit (size). Meanwhile the parent will count the ever growing number of fruit out loud. These kinds of books are highly appealing to 2-year olds in my experience. My 3-year old can count, and has a reasonable idea of what it means. My 5-year old can perform simple mathematical operations, and will have a reasonable idea that 2+2 is less than 4+4.

So much for the anecdotal evidence - In the literature it has been argued that infants are born with an ability to recognize and distinguish among ones, twos, and threes, and can even operate on very small numbers, e.g., recognize that one object added to another makes two - all before they develop verbal-based counting competencies. It may in fact go so far that infants are innately born with counting principles, allowing them to count nonverbally (Baroody et al., 2005)

This information leads me to believe that all the effort (us) parents put into reading the 'Very Hungry Caterpillar' is more to associate language to mathematics, i.e., to provide the lexicon to talk about math, rather than to educate them on maths per se.

Fig.1. Graphical content of 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'. source: Little Folk Visuals

Reference
- The development of young children's early number and operation sense and its implications for early childhood education. In B. Spodek & O. N. Saracho (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of young children (187-221). Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers


Do children inherit intelligence from their mothers and not their fathers?

The psychology-spot article mostly links to researches done on mice. Only three links are about human genetics. One is philosophical in nature, other two deal with mental retardation. This study says that:

  "X chromosome contains a significantly higher number of genes that, when mutated, cause mental impairment".

We know that boys get their X chromosome from their mothers. Therefore, they inherit mental retardation from their mothers. But look at the terminology used in the research paper. They have not found some IQ value stored somewhere in the X chromosome. Therefore, we cannot say that mutations in the X chromosome is responsible for high intelligence as well (the study proposes such a link, but has no data to support it). There is a mystery here: if mothers carry key to mental retardation in sons, it must be a hidden trait in women because they do not exhibit that deviation as much as men.

This study takes mother's IQ into account, but it does not make any attempt to establish a direct link between the IQ of mother and son.

Conclusion: We can assume that boys inherit mental retardation from mothers (because boys get mother's X chromosome). We can not assume anything else yet, not from this study.

The following is pure speculation: Men have higher deviation in their intelligence Bell curve on both sides. If one side of it is linked to their mothers, the other side might as well be, but it probably has nothing to do with the intelligence of the mother. In my personal opinion, that article is just wishful feminist thinking. If such link was present, it would have been highlighted long ago.


Why do we need to break down long sentences to understand them?

First off, the difficulty in the specific example given in the question is more a matter of proper writing habits than anything else. The use of parentheses is often discouraged because it disrupts sentence structure and therefore interferes with the flow of information. Secondly, the use of referring words (pronouns) to earlier parts of the sentence are generally encouraged, barred that the pronoun is unambiguous. In the example the pronoun is ambiguous, as both 'stimuli' and 'studies' can be 'task-related'. The cited sentence is therefore a prime example of how not to write a decent English sentence and could be a textbook example for Scientific-English writing courses.

In terms of cognition, it is indeed related to working memory, as you need to remember the words in the earlier part of the sentence. Of course attention (vigilance) is needed to extract the information in the sentence. Executive function therefore is involved, as it includes all aforementioned processes.


Do distractors create false learning in multiple choice questions?

To answer your initial statement: no, I don't think they do more harm than good. The testing effect has been shown overall to improve scores compared to traditional studying (though only for long term memory, see (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006) for an interesting discussion), implying that it is doing more good than harm. This study assumes an overall positive effect without feedback to learners on whether they were right or wrong, and where students who incorrectly retrieved do not "learn" or maintain memory (Kornell, Bjork, & Garcia, 2011). Providing feedback to learners on correct and incorrect responses, however, will increase retention even for students who did not correctly retrieve, and may be one of the best ways for these students to learn (Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009).

Part 1: So far as negative learning from selecting an answer, this directly relates to your third question (as mentioned above). Students who got answers correct (successful retrieval) are hypothesized to better maintain memory, while students who didn't will not better maintain (Kornell et al., 2011). Though this seems obvious, remember that retrieval rates naturally decrease over time (the goal is to maintain a high retrieval rate).

Part 2: In a word, yes. Given this, they each measure different things (and should be used for different purposes). Personally, I use a "post-lecture" quiz as an "exit-ticket" (sorry, background with high school freshman) to quickly check where misconceptions lie. These quizzes are reviewed prior to students leaving the class in order to identify and address misconceptions (formative assessment). I've found that waiting can allow more connections to be made (and thus, higher level responses), but if the material is not encoded correctly false connections can be made (reinforcing incorrect information).

Part 3: Not reviewing the quiz is hypothesized to create a "bifurcation" where those who got answers right better remember, and those who did not get the answers right steadily decrease (again, a natural pattern in retrieval over time). The "testing effect" exists because overall students are theorized to do better, but again, there will be a split in student growth between those who remembered and those who didn't (Kornell et al., 2011). Reviewing the quiz immediately (if paper, go over the answers right after the quiz!) is hypothesized to help all students, regardless of whether they initially got the correct answer or not, and thus would be the recommended method to improve students' knowledge retention (Kornell et al., 2009).

To summarize: review after taking quizzes acts much like a "studying" effect (where those who got right and wrong answers can learn), while quizzes without review are hypothesized to split learning (those who correctly recall retain, and those who fail to correctly recall don't retain). Both groups are able to be helped through quizzing and reviewing answers.

References

Kornell, N., Bjork, R. A., & Garcia, M. A. (2011). Why tests appear to prevent forgetting: A distribution-based bifurcation model. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(2), 85–97. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.04.002

Kornell, N., Hays, M. J., & Bjork, R. A. (2009). Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(4), 989–998. doi:10.1037/a0015729

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x


Are all conscious experiences stored as memories?

This question can be addressed in many ways. One approach that we have taken is to test memory for what has just recently happened a few seconds ago.  In these experiments we ask people to find a target in a simple visual search, and report its location.  For example we might show them 3 numbers and one letter and ask them to report the location of the letter.  After several minutes of doing this task, we give them a surprise question in which we ask them to tell us the actual letter that they had just located in the most recent trial (which they saw just a few seconds ago).  What we find is that it is easy to find situations in which our participants have very little memory of that letter. What is interesting about this is that they had just located the letter by virtue of the fact that it was a letter.  We presume, therefore, that the letter had briefly entered their awareness.  This can be debated, if one assumes that one can search for letters without actually experiencing the letters.  However we also found the same result with digit-parity tasks (i.e. find the odd number among evens or vice versa).

We called this effect attribute amnesia, since people seem to have amnesia for a specific attribute of a stimulus they had just selected.

So while there are lots of ways to interpret this finding, the clearest result seems to be that performing a mental operation that selects a piece of visual information can leave a memory trace so weak that it cannot be remembered just a few seconds later.  Our interpretation is that the memory was never created in the first place.  We believe that the brain has filters on memory encoding that allow us to process information without remembering it.  It is also possible that it was encoded into memory and immediately forgotten but we do not favor this view as it seems less parsimonious than the filter that prevents encoding in the first place.

Here are some articles on this phenomenon:
Chen, H., & Wyble, B. (2015). Amnesia for object attributes: Failure to report attended information that had just reached conscious awareness. Psychological science, 26(2), 203-210.

Chen, H., Swan, G., & Wyble, B. (2016). Prolonged focal attention without binding: Tracking a ball for half a minute without remembering its color. Cognition, 147, 144-148.

Chen, H., & Wyble, B. (2016). Attribute amnesia reflects a lack of memory consolidation for attended information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(2), 225.

Here are some freely-available pre-prints of related articles if you cannot access the ones above:
https://psyarxiv.com/gbdcr/
https://psyarxiv.com/87yg2/

I apologize that not all of our work is available on preprint servers yet.  I'd be happy to email copies of published articles if you email me at bwyble@gmail.com


let's have a look at the social cognitive theory by Bandura:
It says, that behavior can be acquired by simply watching other people act on something. Maybe you have already heard of the famous bobo-doll experiment, if not here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128Ts5r9NRE
Anyway: behaviorism doesn't care about anything going on inside our mind, like reasoning for example. It simply breaks behavior down to stimulus-response-mechanisms or behavior-response-interactions, that is why behaviorists call the mind a "black box". They simply think in a way of Input-Output mechanisms, the thing in between these two gets neglected.
So, going back to the social cognitive theory: Behaviorists can't explain behavior, that was acquired through observing other people. The person, who is the observer, has never experienced something like a stimulus-response trial, or acted on the behavior on his own. However, we know that it is possible and people need something like a memory, perception, reasoning, to learn in such a way. So, we need cognitive abilities to explain this kind of behavior (we have to look inside the black box), which is incompatible with behaviorism.

In other words: every behavior, that needs or was being activated by something, that is a part of our cognitive abilities, is a behavior, that can't be explained by behaviorism.

Another example is problem solving: To solve a problem, we think about the situation, reassemble the elements and then act. Behaviorism can't account for such a behavior.


What are the consequences of prolonged cognitive dissonance?

Summary (copied from last paragraph)

It appears that extended exposure to cognitive dissonance ignites an initial emotional reaction that is then mediated by the rationalization process. If no rationalization can be made, or if the emotion cannot be effectively controlled by the individual, then the initial emotional reaction may grow more powerful, resulting in mood-regulation disorders such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. [5]

Details

Cognitive dissonance is thought to reveal a human's internal desire for consistency. Those who experience cognitive dissonance become psychologically uncomfortable, and thus may take measure to reduce situations that may induce cognitive dissonance. [1]

Humans have a tendency to want to explain how the world works. There is a discomfort in not 'knowing'. In cognitive dissonance theory, there are several underlying themes, most notably that of religion in cognitive dissonance. Insofar as the theory goes, religion is one helpful mechanism for avoiding cognitive dissonance, as religion often provides an explanation for the nature and generation of the world, as well  as a set of guidelines to follow. This provides humans with internal consistency. Skepticism/loyalty to the 'objective' nature of the scientific method can be another form of avoiding cognitive dissonance. [2] Rejection of any sort of method of navigation (or purpose) in the world often lends itself to a feeling of nihilism, though this is not always related to cognitive dissonance as it is defined.

Sigmund Freud himself observed several instances of what he coined as "Das Unheimliche" -- German for 'the opposite of what is familiar', and translated into English as 'the uncanny'. He describes it as the experience of that which is strangely familiar, not just mysterious. Though the term is not an adequate synonym for 'cognitive dissonance', it is nonetheless relevant in the reaction it produces:

  Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it has been seen as creating cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize, as in the uncanny valley effect.

This initial emotional response is supported by neuroscientific literature when we consider cognitive dissonance as an observable phenomenon. College students who were told to write an argumentative essay in support of a stance that they did not agree with showed increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. Next, the left frontal cortex was activated, which is known to activate the 'approach motivational system'. [3] The motivational directions model asserts that this system regulates one's response to their own anger. If the situation cannot be controlled or changed by the person, they may have less motivation to reduce or regulate their anger, and other emotions may arise. [4]

Thus, it appears that extended exposure to cognitive dissonance ignites an initial emotional reaction that is then mediated by the rationalization process. If no rationalization can be made, or if the emotion cannot be effectively controlled by the individual, then the initial emotional reaction may grow more powerful, resulting in mood-regulation disorders such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. [5]

Sources:

[1] Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. California: Stanford University Press.

[2] R. A. Wicklund, J. W. Brehm. (1976). Perspectives on Cognitive Dissonance.

[3] Beauvois, J. L., Joule, R. V., 1996. A radical dissonance theory. London: Taylor and Francis.

[4] Harmon-Jones, E., Mills, J., Cognitive Dissonance: Perspectives on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 71–99.

[5] Hull, A.M. (2002). Neuroimaging findings in post-traumatic stress disorder. The British Journal of Psychiatry 181: 102-10.


Is there a difference between the time/effort it takes for the blind and the sighted to learn to read Braille?

The time required to learn Braille may vary depending on factors such as age, partial/full and early/late blindness and individual differences (see here), but what has come out of studies such as this is that visual deprivation appears to speed up Braille learning.

In the study I cite, all subjects received the same degree of training, but individuals who had been blindfolded for five days performed better in a Braille discrimination task compared to sighted subjects. The authors take these results to be possibly indicative (though there are some concerns on this suggestion in the article) of neuroplastic changes (Hamilton & Pascual-Leone, 1998) specifically in the somatosensory and visual cortices. Visual deprivation might lead to the recruitment of visual cortex areas for tactile discrimination thus enabling for faster Braille learning.


Any models that act using both streams of visual processing?

Mario Liotti and Don M. Tucker (Brain Asymmetry, MIT, 1996) attempt to explain that the 'corticolimbic architecture is not left/right, but dorsal/ventral". In their opinion, the reason for hemispheric asymmetries can be found in the asymmetries of the dorsal and ventral systems. They proposed that emotional behavior could be interpreted by analyzing the vertical circuits (dorsal/ventral).


Does increased neural complexity slows down brain operation speeds?

Short answer
Increasing neural complexity only increases processing times when neurons are serially linked together.

Background
Neuronal conductance of action potentials takes time, as neuronal signals travel at a speed of 0.5 to 150 m/s through the axon (Purves et al., 2001). Furthermore, synaptic transmission between neurons takes time. A chemical synaptic transmission takes approximately 0.5 ms (Katz & Miledi, 1965). As a consequence, stringing neurons together increases processing time.

For example, if we look at the pain response, the reflex arc is very short, covering as little as two synapses (Fig. 1). The moment you touch a hot pan, you pretty much instantly draw away your hand. This process precedes even before you become consciously aware of the fact you touched something painful. This is because conscious awareness happens in the brain, involving a longer distance to be covered from your finger, and because it involves many more synapses including the brainstem, lower cortical areas and higher cortical areas (Fig. 2).

Processing time does not necessarily have to increase when processing complexity is increased, as long as the processing takes place in parallel. For example, multiple visual pathways in the human brain run in parallel, for example the 'what' and 'where' processing in the brain in the ventral and dorsal streams (Van Polanen & Davare, 2016), as depicted in Fig. 3.

Fig. 1. Pain reflex arc. source: Owlcation

Fig. 2. Conscious pain pathway. source: neuwritewest

Fig. 3. Parallel processing of 'what' and 'where' information in the visual system. source: Brainscape

References
- Katz & Miledi, J Physiol (1965); 181(3): 656–70
- Purves et al. (eds), Neuroscience, 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates
- Van Polanen & Davare, Neuropsychologia (2015); 79: 186–91


Read "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Foer or watch or listen to transcripts of the world's memory experts, such as Ben Pridmore. You'll notice that they have their own special techniques to make abstract concepts more memorable. These individuals have increased difficulty with less concrete themes, however, and it may be best to process the to-be-remembered items not by focusing on imagery but, perhaps, semantic meaning or another sort of deep encoding.


Question: Are the images just a collection of neurons firing?

Answer: Evidence from clinical neurology and cognitive neuroscience at present shows that all mental activities, not just the image of a banana, occur from neural firings. Without neural firings, no mental activities can occur. What’s more, when the neural firings change, the mental activities invariably change accordingly. That’s why mental activities change whenever neural firings change because of diseases affecting their neural circuits (stroke, trauma, tumor, encephalitis, hypoglycemia, migraine aura, epileptic activity, neurotransmission-interfering drugs, etc.) or because of electrical or magnetic stimulation to the neural circuits. There has never been a scientific report documenting a mental activity occurring by itself without neural firings.

Now, one can postulate that a mental image is something that occurs separately and additionally to the neural firing or one can postulate that a mental image is something that occurs inherently in the neural firing without any additional entity occurring. At present, I think there is no consensus on this yet. But, in my opinion, I favor the second case as some authors do. For example, Moutoussis K (ref 1): “… a specific brain–activation pattern, leading to the formation of a specific percept. …  specific, individual perceptual experiences are caused by specific, individual brain activation pattern …”, Roederer JG (ref 2): “when does a specific distribution of neural firings actually become a mental image? This neural activity distribution does not become anything – it is the image.”, and Ukachoke C (ref 3): “…a mental process is the information-processing process, which is an entity that functionally occurs intrinsically in the physical neural process, not an additional entity that occurs separately from the neural process…”. (If you’re interested in more detailed discussion, you can read ref 3; I think it provides a good, systematic, and evidence-based argument for the case.)

Question: It (the mental image of banana) doesn't feel physical, but for me to be able to see it, it must be physical, right? Are the images in our heads physical?

Answer: This, the mental image of banana, is an interesting phenomenon that’s baffled philosophers, neuroscientists, and others who ponder over it for a long time. It (the mental image of banana) and other similar phenomena, such as the sound of the note C, the odor of the rose, and the feeling of a pinprick, that occur in our minds are called qualia [ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7]. Each has unique phenomenal characteristics that cannot be described by other phenomena and has to be experienced directly to know what it is like: what the mental image of banana is like, what the sound of the note C is like, what the odor of the rose is like, etc. (You never can describe these phenomena to anyone who has never had experiences of similar kinds of phenomena before, such as, you never can describe what the color red is like to the congenitally blind person, etc.) Again, at present, I don’t think there is a consensus on what qualia are. So, whether they are physical phenomena or not are still unsettled.

However, some author argues that qualia are physical phenomena and actually are just special kinds of information in the nervous system that neural circuits use to communicate some special information among them. These special kinds of information can occur from neural firings in some special ways. Because neurons are firing in some special ways, special kinds of information with those baffling phenomenal characteristics (vision, sound, odor, etc. in our mind) can occur. This is how qualia (including the mental image of banana) occur in the brain. If this is the case and if we count information as a physical entity, then qualia are physical entities. But they are not conventional physical entities like mass, energy, or force, because they are a different kind of physical entities – they are information entities. That’s why they (including the mental image of banana) don’t feel physical to you. (If you’re interested in more detailed discussion, you can read this article (ref 8))

References.

Moutoussis K. The machine behind the stage: A neurobiological approach toward theoretical issues of sensory perception. Front Psychol. 2016;7:1357.
Roederer JG. Pragmatic information in biology and physics. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2016 Mar 13;374(2063). PII: 20150152.
Ukachoke C. Theorem II: The Mind is the Composite of All Information-processing Processes of the Brain. In: The Basic Theory of the Mind. 1st ed, 2018. Bangkok, Thailand.
Kanai R, Tsuchiya N. Qualia. Current Biology. 2012 May;22(10):392–396.
Tye M. Qualia. Zalta EN, editor. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kind A. Qualia. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Qualia. Wikipedia.
Ukachoke C. Chapter 3 – Qualia, Conscious Awareness, and Conscious Experiences. In: The Basic Theory of the Mind. 1st ed, 2018. Bangkok, Thailand.


What are some examples of emergent abilities?

Many tasks can be decomposed into subtasks. And in a similar way the skills required to perform a task can be decomposed into component skills. For more detailed discussion, check out discussion of task analysis.

A few examples:

Driving a manual car requires an additional component skill (using the clutch and gearshift) over and above all the skills required to drive an automatic car (knowledge and application of road rules, speed control, vehicle control, etc.).
Writing an email requires a wide range of skills including basic skills in using computers, skills in communication and writing, and so on.

Much of education is based on the idea of layering new skills on top of those already established. For example, reading, writing, numeracy, and computing skills are fundamental to a lot of what is taught at university.

Another perspective on your question is to think about transfer and training.

Transfer: Skills in many tasks involve transferring what we already know and then developing some task specific adaptations. For example, if you were to write a report in industry after starting a new job, you would build on all your previous training in report writing, but there would also be some domain specific learning related to the new job. In this sense, the previous acquired skills assist performance, but domain-specific learning is required.
Training: Training, practice, and experience also tend to have a certain structure. Development of skill in an overall task tends to lead to development of component skills. For example, when learning to drive a car, an individual will tend to get practice in all the component skills. The nature of experience itself will encourage development of steering, road navigation, and gear changes. Training can also be designed to deliberately compartmentalise skill development (e.g., see the part-whole training discussions [Naylor et al (1963)]).

Relating all this to your specific question, defining component skills and emergent abilities as discrete entities is difficult. Transfer is often relative, and each task in a new context or with different details can alter the dynamics of transfer and performance.

References

Naylor, J. C., & Briggs, G. E. (1963). Effects of task complexity and task organization on the relative efficiency of part and whole training methods. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(3), 217.


What percentage of questions on Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV 23 deal with environmental issues and climate change?

Your environmental issue is more a matter of philosophy than intelligence, as it is determined mainly subjectively by views and beliefs, driven by ideologies. It's not what the current, more objective definition is of intelligence

For example, standard IQ tests consist mainly of more objective questions on things like:

Block Design, that measures an individual’s ability to analyze and synthesize an abstract design and reproduce that design from colored plastic blocks;
Similarities, that measures logical thinking, verbal concept formation and verbal abstract reasoning;
Digit Span, measuring short-term auditory memory and attention;
Picture Concepts, to measure categorical, abstract reasoning;
Coding, that measures visual-motor dexterity, associative nonverbal learning, and nonverbal short-term memory;
etc etc etc.

Although I, personally, totally agree with you that smart people care about the future, the harsh reality is that people totally ignorant, and even baldly dismissive of the global impact of man, causing the 6th mass extinction (Holocene extinction) and all, can still score highly on the intelligence scale on the currently accepted outcome measures of IQ [no explicit political examples due to my position as moderator here].


Is there a name for the experience/ phenomenon of dreaming while being partially awake?

A dream where you are aware you are dreaming is called a lucid dream (see also La Berge et al 1981). Lucid dreams can have varying level of control; in La Berge et al 1981 subjects were able to report by eye movements and fist clenches when they were lucid dreaming, and were verified to be in REM sleep when this occurred.

Being aware of your outside surroundings, on the other hand, is called being awake and is not the same as dreaming but could be considered daydreaming.

Some people report that they often have lucid dreams, and lucid dreaming is more common in some patient populations like narcoleptics (Dodet et al 2015).

There are methods to encourage lucid dreaming if one wants to experience them (La Berge 1980, Zadra et al 1992).

Dodet, P., Chavez, M., Leu-Semenescu, S., Golmard, J. L., & Arnulf, I. (2015). Lucid dreaming in narcolepsy. Sleep, 38(3), 487-497.

La Berge, S. P. (1980). Lucid dreaming as a learnable skill: A case study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51(3_suppl2), 1039-1042.

La Berge, S. P., Nagel, L. E., Dement, W. C., & Zarcone Jr, V. P. (1981). Lucid dreaming verified by volitional communication during REM sleep. Perceptual and motor skills, 52(3), 727-732.

Zadra, A. L., Donderi, D. C., & Pihl, R. O. (1992). Efficacy of lucid dream induction for lucid and non-lucid dreamers. Dreaming, 2(2), 85.


What does the statement mean "50% of happiness is determined by genetics"?

The statement 50% of happiness is determined by genetics is presumably talking about heritability estimates.

It is probably talking about the percentage of variance explained by genetics.

These estimates are commonly estimated using twin studies. For example, you administer a survey to people that ask a bunch of questions about how happy they feel. There are a variety of measures (e.g., life satisfaction measures, quality of life measures, measures of tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions). If you administer these measures to twins, some of which are fraternal and some of which are identical, you can compare the degree to which the overlap in happiness scores increases in the identical over the fraternal twins.

A wide range of theories of well-being suggest that most people are happy most of the time. There is also theory to suggest that a person's emotional tendencies (e.g., see neuroticism, extraversion, well-being, and so on) are quite stable over long periods of time (i.e., over many years). So this does suggest, that at the very least, it is unusual for someone's emotional tendency to change dramatically over time.


Has there been research on the impact of gay parents on the sexual orientation of adopted children?

Farr, R. H., Forssell, S. L., & Patterson, C. J. (2010). Parenting and child development in adoptive families: Does parental sexual orientation matter?. Applied Developmental Science, 14(3), 164-178. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2010.500958
Free PDF from escholarship.org

This study investigated child development and parenting in 106 families headed by 27 lesbian, 29 gay, and 50 heterosexual couples (80% White, M = 42 years) with young adopted children (41% White, M = 3 years). Parents and teachers reported that, on average, children were developing in typical ways. Measures of children's adjustment, parenting approaches, parenting stress, and couple relationship adjustment were not significantly associated with parental sexual orientation. However, several family process variables—parenting stress, parenting approaches, and couple relationship adjustment—were found to be significantly associated with children's adjustment, regardless of parental sexual orientation.

Herek, G. M. (2014). Evaluating the methodology of social science research on sexual orientation and parenting: A tale of three studies. UCDL Rev., 48, 583. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/davlr48&div=18&id=&page=
Free PDF from law.ucdavis.edu

For at least four decades, questions about the well-being of children raised by sexual minority individuals or same-sex couples have figured prominently in public debates about adoption, foster parenting, child custody and visitation, and marriage equality. Those debates have often focused on questions of law, personal values, and morality, but many have also included empirically testable assertions about the relationship (or lack thereof) between parents' sexual orientation and their children's developmental outcomes. The social science research that has empirically assessed the validity of those assertions is the focus of the present paper.

Patterson, C. J. (2017). Parents' sexual orientation and children's development. Child Development Perspectives, 11(1), 45-49.  https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12207

What if any influence does parents' sexual orientation have on children's development? Research suggests that, contrary to concerns voiced by many observers, parents' sexual orientation has little if any direct impact on children's development. Even so, some distinctive qualities of experiences in families of lesbian and gay parents have been noted, and their implications are not fully understood. Moreover, research on individual differences among families headed by lesbian mothers and gay fathers, and their possible impact on children, is still in its early phases. In this article, I provide an overview of research in this area and offer suggestions for further studies.

Stacey, J., & Biblarz, T. J. (2001). (How) does the sexual orientation of parents matter?. American Sociological Review, 159-183. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657413

Opponents of lesbian and gay parental rights claim that children with lesbigay parents are at higher risk for a variety of negative outcomes. Yet most research in psychology concludes that there are no differences in developmental outcomes between children raised by lesbigay parents and those raised by heterosexual parents. The analysis here challenges this defensive conceptual framework and analyzes how heterosexism has hampered intellectual progress in the field.