Can learning be facilitated by transcranial magnetic stimulation?

Sadly (or should I be happy that Google is this awesome? Not to mention the rate of scientific progress!), all I really had to do to come up with an answer was perform a Google search for "learning transcranial magnetic stimulation". The first hit, a ScienceDaily page (Ruhr-University Bochum, 2011) page, lists some journal references (Mix, Benali, Eysel, & Funke, 2010; Benali et al., 2011) that effectively say (in laymen's terms), "Yes!" Here's ScienceDaily's summary (I'll let you read the rest at the source):

  What sounds like science fiction is actually possible: thanks to magnetic stimulation, the activity of certain brain nerve cells can be deliberately influenced. What happens in the brain in this context has been unclear up to now. Medical experts have now shown that various stimulus patterns changed the activity of distinct neuronal cell types. In addition, certain stimulus patterns led to rats learning more easily. [Emphasis added.]

To show how hard I'm working to really earn that bounty of yours, here's the summary from the second Google hit, a review article on this very topic (Reis et al., 2008; again, plenty more info at the source):

  In summary, the scarce studies performed so far point to the encouraging conclusion that noninvasive brain stimulation can contribute to the understanding of mechanisms underlying motor learning and motor memory formation and raise the exciting hypothesis that this increased understanding could in the future result in the development of new strategies to enhance specific stages of learning and memory processing in healthy humans and in patients with brain lesions (see chapter by Gerloff et al.). [Gerloff et al. doesn't appear in the references; emphasis added.]

Edit: I see from your comment that you want me to explain the mechanism. Since you offer a bounty, I'll play along and dance for it a bit. Here's another excerpt from Reis and colleagues (2008, page 6 of 16):

  It would be theoretically possible to facilitate motor learning processes in which [the primary motor cortex] is involved by enhancing excitability in the “learning” [primary motor cortex (Pascual–Leone, Valls–Solé, Wassermann, & Hallett, 1994)] or by decreasing excitability in the “resting” [primary motor cortex (Schambra, Sawaki, & Cohen, 2003; Plewnia, Lotze, & Gerloff, 2003)], but see also Wassermann[, Wedegaertner, Ziemann, George, & Chen (1998)]. The intrinsic intracortical mechanisms by which these oversimplified models may operate remain to be identified ([Perez & Cohen, 2008; Daskalakis, Paradiso, Christensen, Fitzgerald, Gunraj, & Chen, 2004; Koch, Franca, Mochizuki, Marconi, Caltagirone, & Rothwell, 2007;] see for discussion chapters by Walsh et al., Di Lazzaro et al., Berardelli et al.). [References unavailable for these three discussion chapters; emphasis added.]

You may want to read the review further for yourself or ask follow-up questions if this is an unsatisfactory explanation of the mechanism.

Since that review was a little hesitant to conclude conclusively, and it's five years old now, I'll also throw in a brand-new bit of original research (Wall et al., 2013) that demonstrates the supportive trend continues:

  Conclusion: These preliminary findings suggest rTMS does not adversely impact neurocognitive functioning in adolescents and may provide subtle enhancement of verbal memory as measured by the CAVLT. Further controlled investigations with larger sample sizes and rigorous trial designs are warranted to confirm and extend these findings. [Emphasis added.]

$\uparrow$ That $\uparrow$ was the fifth Google hit! Also, the seventh (Jelić et al., 2013) says it's not a placebo effect!

Going a little wide, transcranial direct current stimulation (which is somewhat different from magnetic stimulation, though maybe not in ways that concern you) works too (Fields, 2011; Kincses, Antal, Nitsche, Bártfai, & Paulus, 2004; Fregni et al., 2005; Nitsche et al., 2003; Ohn et al., 2008; Flöel, Rösser, Michka, Knecht, & Breitenstein, 2008; Chi & Snyder, 2012)—you can even try it yourself for $249 or £179! I just had to follow a few links from the 14th Google hit (Mims, 2012) to find all that. I'm a little shocked (pardon the pun) at how legit this actually seems...

Edit (by Fizz): Note that a more recent (2017) meta-analysis of tDCS studies found significant problems with their p-curves, making the authors of this meta-analysis conclude that

  Using a p-curve analysis, we found no evidence that the tDCS studies had evidential
  value (33% power or greater), with the estimate of statistical power of these studies being
  approximately 14% for the cognitive studies, and 5% (what would be expected from
  randomly generated data) for the working memory studies.

Also (16th Google hit), it looks like the U.S. National Institutes of Health Clinical Center is currently recruiting participants for their study, "The Effect of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Learning With Reward in Healthy Humans", so maybe you could even get Uncle Sam to pay you (for testing magnetic, not electrical stimulation)! However, if I'm reading that right, it's a study of learning disruption, which is another potential (and maybe not-so-desirable) application of TMS, according to the 18th hit (De Weerd et al., 2012).

Edit: Reis and colleagues (2008) also review this disruptive process somewhat; I get the impression that disruption is much easier than enhancement to achieve with magnetic stimulation (not sure whether this applies to direct electrical current as well). It seems TMS has been used mostly to knock out brain function temporarily in localized areas to simulate the effects of brain lesions. Use of TMS to enhance excitability rather than inhibit it seems to be the more recent innovation, and maybe a separable effect (i.e., it may be possible to excite the brain using TMS without causing inhibition).

In anticipation of the next question, "Is it safe?" I feel I should add that this is definitely not my area of expertise – I got a B- in biopsych as an undergrad – so again, I'll let the experts speak for themselves (Poreisz, Boros, Antal, & Paulus, 2007), but as a fan of dystopian sci-fi, I will at least say that the short-term dangers seem like they could've been much worse! Same for the ethical ramifications, more or less (Hamilton, Messing, & Chatterjee, 2011). It's reassuring to see so much thought going into this already; I might otherwise be worried about how far behind the times we seem to be here! BTW, these last revelations come thanks in part to the 33rd Google hit (Oremus, 2013). I'm afraid no amount of tDCS will allow us to keep up with Google...

P.S. From what I've seen in skimming some of these, it doesn't have anything in particular to do with the limbic system (which includes the amygdala). I saw a brief explanation suggesting it affects myelination, which is basically the process by which the brain speeds up electrical signal transmission. Myelin is a sort of segmented coating for the axons of neurons, which can be quite long individually. Myelin allows electrical signals (action potentials) to jump across myelinated segments quickly, rather than propagating relatively slowly across every millimeter in the normal fashion. I also saw some indication that transcranial electromagnetic (didn't note which) stimulation might speed up other aspects of neural construction, such as the rate at which connections form (not just the rate at which they upgrade from the neural equivalents of a dial-up modem to fiber-optic).

References

Benali, A., Trippe, J., Weiler, E., Mix, A., Petrasch–Parwez, E., Girzalsky, W., ... & Funke, K. (2011). Theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation alters cortical inhibition. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(4), 1193–1203.
Boggio, P. S., Ferrucci, R., Rigonatti, S. P., Covre, P., Nitsche, M., Pascual–Leone, A., & Fregni, F. (2006). Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on working memory in patients with Parkinson's disease. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 249(1), 31–38. Retrieved from http://www.tmslab.org/publications/154.pdf.
Chi, R. P., & Snyder, A. W. (2012). Brain stimulation enables the solution of an inherently difficult problem. Neuroscience Letters, 515(2), 121–124. Retrieved from http://ingienous.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/snyder-9-dots-paper.pdf.
Daskalakis, Z. J., Paradiso, G. O., Christensen, B. K., Fitzgerald, Gunraj, & Chen. (2004). Exploring the connectivity between the cerebellum and motor cortex in humans. Journal of Physiology, 557, 689–700. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1665103/.
De Weerd, P., Reithler, J., van de Ven, V., Been, M., Jacobs, C., & Sack, A. T. (2012). Posttraining transcranial magnetic stimulation of striate cortex disrupts consolidation early in visual skill learning. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(6), 1981–1988. Retrieved from http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/6/1981.long.
Fields, R. D. (2011, November 25). Amping up brain function: Transcranial stimulation shows promise in speeding up learning. Scientific American: Mind & Brain. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amping-up-brain-function/.
Flöel, A., Rösser, N., Michka, O., Knecht, S., & Breitenstein, C. (2008). Noninvasive brain stimulation improves language learning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(8), 1415–1422. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/5548486_Noninvasive_brain_stimulation_improves_language_learning/file/5046351db1c615613a.pdf.
Fregni, F., Boggio, P. S., Nitsche, M., Bermpohl, F., Antal, A., Feredoes, E., ... & Pascual–Leone, A. (2005). Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of prefrontal cortex enhances working memory. Experimental Brain Research, 166(1), 23–30. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/7745540_Anodal_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_of_prefrontal_cortex_enhances_working_memory/file/9fcfd50a3483033595.pdf.
Hamilton, R., Messing, S., & Chatterjee, A. (2011). Rethinking the thinking cap Ethics of neural enhancement using noninvasive brain stimulation. Neurology, 76(2), 187–193. Retrieved from http://wernicke.ccn.upenn.edu/~chatterjee/anjan_pdfs/Neurology_2011_HamiltonMessing_Chatterjee.pdf.
Jelić, M. B., Stevanović, V. B., Milanović, S. D., Ljubisavljević, M. R., & Filipović, S. R. (2013). Transcranial magnetic stimulation has no placebo effect on motor learning. Clinical Neurophysiology, 124(8). 1646–1651.
Kincses, T. Z., Antal, A., Nitsche, M. A., Bártfai, O., & Paulus, W. (2004). Facilitation of probabilistic classification learning by transcranial direct current stimulation of the prefrontal cortex in the human. Neuropsychologia, 42(1), 113–117. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/9011312_Facilitation_of_probabilistic_classification_learning_by_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_of_the_prefrontal_cortex_in_the_human/file/d912f50597d44df446.pdf.
Koch, G., Franca, M., Mochizuki, H., Marconi, Caltagirone, & Rothwell. (2007). Interactions between pairs of transcranial magnetic stimuli over the human left dorsal premotor cortex differ from those seen in primary motor cortex. Journal of Physiology, 578, 551–562. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2075160/.
Mims, C. (2012, March 8). DIY kit overclocks your brain with direct current. Technology Review: View. Retrieved from http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427177/diy-kit-overclocks-your-brain-with-direct-current/.
Mix, A., Benali, A., Eysel, U. T., & Funke, K. (2010). Continuous and intermittent transcranial magnetic theta burst stimulation modify tactile learning performance and cortical protein expression in the rat differently. European Journal of Neuroscience, 32(9), 1575–1586.
Nitsche, M. A., Schauenburg, A., Lang, N., Liebetanz, D., Exner, C., Paulus, W., & Tergau, F. (2003). Facilitation of implicit motor learning by weak transcranial direct current stimulation of the primary motor cortex in the human. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(4), 619–626. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitation_of_implicit_motor_learning_by_weak_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_of_the_primary_motor_cortex_in_the_human/file/79e4150ae2024da0f0.pdf.
Ohn, S. H., Park, C. I., Yoo, W. K., Ko, M. H., Choi, K. P., Kim, G. M., ... & Kim, Y. H. (2008). Time-dependent effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on the enhancement of working memory. Neuroreport, 19(1), 43–47. Retrieved from http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/Time-dependent%20effect%20of%20transcranial%20direct%20current%20stimulation%20on%20the%20enhancement%20of%20working%20memory.pdf.
Oremus, W. (2013, April 1). Spark of genius. Slate: Technology: Superman. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/superman/2013/04/tdcs_and_rtms_is_brain_stimulation_safe_and_effective.html.
Pascual–Leone, A., Valls–Solé, J., Wassermann, E. M., & Hallett, M. (1994). Responses to rapid-rate transcranial magnetic stimulation of the human motor cortex. Brain. 117(4), 847–858.
Perez, M. A., & Cohen, L. G. (in press as cited in Reis et al., 2008). Mechanisms underlying functional changes in the primary motor cortex ipsilateral to an active hand. Journal of Neuroscience.
Plewnia, C., Lotze, M., & Gerloff, C. (2003). Disinhibition of the contralateral motor cortex by low-frequency rTMS. Neuroreport, 14, 609–612.
Poreisz, C., Boros, K., Antal, A., & Paulus, W. (2007). Safety aspects of transcranial direct current stimulation concerning healthy subjects and patients. Brain Research Bulletin, 72(4), 208–214. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6377248_Safety_aspects_of_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_concerning_healthy_subjects_and_patients/file/9fcfd50a34830ccb05.pdf.
Reis, J., Robertson, E. M., Krakauer, J. W., Rothwell, J., Marshall, L., Gerloff, C., ... & Cohen, L. G. (2008). Consensus: Can transcranial direct current stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation enhance motor learning and memory formation?. Brain Stimulation, 1(4), 363–369. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2621080/.
Ruhr-University Bochum. (2011, January 29). Learn more quickly by transcranial magnetic brain stimulation, study in rats suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 10, 2014 from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110128121629.htm.
Schambra, H. M., Sawaki, L., & Cohen, L. G. (2003). Modulation of excitability of human motor cortex (M1) by 1 Hz transcranial magnetic stimulation of the contralateral M1. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114, 130–133.
Wall, C. A., Croarkin, P. E., McClintock, S. M., Murphy, L. L., Bandel, L. A., Sim, L. A., & Sampson, S. M. (2013). Neurocognitive effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in adolescents with major depressive disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4(165). Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3859914/.
Wassermann, E. M., Wedegaertner, F. R., Ziemann, U., et al. (1998). Crossed reduction of human motor cortex excitability by 1-Hz transcranial magnetic stimulation. Neuroscience Letters, 250, 141–144.


Why do some people seem to disregard the choice of doing nothing (The Zero Choice)?

More generally, you are asking about a common tendency to substitute a sub-set of  alternative actions for the entire set without realizing it.

Beyond the contribution of pure habit, it seems to be related to several common decision making biases, including attentional bias and focusing effect, though it doesn't exactly match any.  I don't recall seeing this investigated directly.

"Zero choice" is a poor choice of terminology, it evokes the "null hypothesis" (as Ben Brocka alluded to in the comments), which in decision making usually means "do nothing", not a call to consider a broader set of alternatives.


Do stimulants increase the IQ tests score for everyone?

IQ in ADHD sufferers indeed increases with the treatment of stimulants, such as methylphenidate (Meyes et al., 1994). This is thought to rely on the attention-narrowing effect of stimulants, i.e., they cause the
 easily distracted ADHD child to focus better on the IQ task (Aman, 1996).

It is an interesting question indeed whether such an effect also plays a role in healthy controls. Indeed it does, at least according to one study, where a control population was subjected to amphetamine.

Amphetamine improves performance on spatial working memory, Stroop tasks and enhances language production (Barch & Carter, 2005). The authors did, however, not measure performance on full blown IQ tests.

References
- Aman, J Development Phys Disabil (1996); 8(4): 347-65
- Barch & Karter, Schizophrenia Res (2005); 77(1): 43-58
- Meyes et al., DMCN (1994); 36(12): 1099–107


What, if anything, sets humans apart from other species?

Some articles with some information pertinent to your question, hope this helps:

According to "Human and animal cognition: Continuity and discontinuity" (Premack, 2007), that as several species have skills once thought to be unique to humans, that this suggests that there is a misleading (the article's word) disparity between 'brain' and 'mind'.  So the article's focus is on:

  What are the dissimilarities?

When examining 8 aspects, or competencies, including teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language, the authors found that the similarities to be minor, but the dissimilarities to be very large and that there is no disparity.

Each of these points are discussed in depth in the article (too big for this answer); however, the article's author concludes with a fundamental difference:

  Animal competencies are mainly adaptations restricted to a single goal. Human competencies are domain-general and serve numerous goals. For instance “planning” may be tied to episodic memory, suggesting a broad competence.

Going further, according to "Evolution of the brain and intelligence", (Roth and Dicke, 2005), that a main difference is due to:

  factors that correlate better with intelligence are
  the number of cortical neurons and conduction velocity,
  as the basis for information-processing capacity.

and critically (bolding mine):

  The outstanding intelligence of humans
  appears to result from a combination and enhancement
  of properties found in non-human primates, such as
  theory of mind, imitation and language, rather than from
  ‘unique’ properties.


Is there a research field which holds close connections between computational neuroscience and classical robotics

Yes, it's often called Neurorobotics. There are several labs doing this kind of research. Here's a small sample:

Jeff Krichmar at UC Irvine.
The Neurorobotics Research Laboratory at Humboldt Unveristy
The Neurorobotics Lab at Drexel University
Jun Tani at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
NxR at Northwestern


Correct term for realistic user behaviour and decision making

Science in general refers to ecological validity as the degree to which materials and settings in a study approximate the real world that is being examined.

Therefore, such limitations could be referred to as limitations to ecological validity. Often, such limitations are inherent to running an experimental study, as opposed to studying the real world. Whether or not this is a risk to the overall validity of your study depends on what conclusions you intend to draw from the results.


How do you call the cognitive bias of not seeing self as the common denominator?

While I am not sure if people actually do overestimate the incidence of a minority group (or maybe they do, I would want to see the data), we can treat this as a philosophical question about what we would call that phenomenon were it to exist.

The notion of bias in psychology is less precisely defined than a similar notion of bias that lives within the fields of computer science, machine learning, and computational cognitive science. This notion of bias is simply the property of an learning algorithm or a cognitive model or a person that cause it to favor some hypotheses or explanations over others in the absence of specific data. For example, if I come across an unknown large animal with big teeth, I may have a bias that causes me to expect it to attack, even though I do not have any direct experience as to whether or not it is friendly. If you think about it, any prediction we make requires such a bias, because we never have data about what has not yet happened. If you are interested in learning more about this, I suggest reading Hume, Tversky and Kahneman, and Mitchell as a start.

I agree that what you are talking about is a bias in this sense, but I do not know whether there is an established term for the specific type of bias. In general, while it is useful for exams and for reference, I recommend avoiding leaning too hard on the idea that all phenomena fit neatly into well-defined and labeled concepts such as "selection bias" or "reverse physical attractiveness stereotype." While some people might have a term for the phenomenon you have mentioned, it is more useful to articulate and understand it in terms of what it is: a cognitive tendency to overestimate subpopulations in large cities in the absence of relevant data.

Whether this is a general phenomenon about human estimation or it is limited to cases of subpopulation estimates in large cities is an empirical question. If you want to know more, you'll have to run some experiments!

Edit: Now that I think about it, this sounds like like the availability heuristic discovered by Tversky and Kahneman. Basically, the availability heuristic (or bias) is the conflation of the biased sample that you have easy access to with the full population. In the case of your example, an Italian person living in an Italian community would likely run into a lot of Italians day-to-day and therefore might come to believe that Italians are prevalent in the total population, even though this incidence of seeing Italians is solely due to his membership in this particular community.


How does the alpha brain wave frequency range distribute over the population?

Alpha oscillations vary in frequency within a single subject from brain area to brain area (Başar, 2012),  likely because there is not a single phenomenon underlying all examples of alpha oscillations.  At this point in time, an answer to this question would be very difficult because we don't even know what alpha oscillations are.

Reference

Başar, E. (2012). A review of alpha activity in integrative brain function: fundamental physiology, sensory coding, cognition and pathology. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 86(1), 1-24.


What is the name of the bias when one expects you to possess his knowledge?

If you had asked about cognitive distortions, I probably could've answered straight away about one of those!

I think it might be an illusion of transparency. Your example somewhat aligns to the definition provided by Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky (1998):

  "... we refer to this tendency to overestimate the extent to which others can read one's internal states as the illusion of transparency." (p.332)

However it doesn't necessarily meet the criteria for someone expecting another person to know the same things that they do. The illusion of transparency is rather an exaggeration of transparency rather than an exaggeration of being epistemologically levelled.

It could be a projection bias or an assumed similarity bias - both of which might be relevant to your scenario. Projection bias refers to the tendency to assume that others share one's current emotional states and thoughts (Hsee & Reid, 2006). An assumed similarity bias refers to the bias that others are similar to the self (Srivastava, Guglielmo & Beer, 2010). The response - "well, how should have I known that. I'm not inside of your mind." is a product of those biases being invalidated.

Hopefully, these were the ones you were looking for.

References

Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K. & Medvec, V.H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332-346
Hsee, C.K., Reid, H. (2006). Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(1), 31–37
Srivastava, S., Guglielmo, S. & Beer, J.S. (2010). Perceiving others’ personalities: Examining the dimensionality, assumed similarity to the self, and stability of perceiver effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 520–534


What's the difference between executive functions and cognitive control?

You are right to suspect that cognitive control and executive function are essentially interchangeable, at least for most purposes. Among researchers in the area, I would say there is a slight difference, however.

Cognitive control refers to the more abstract concept and affords researchers more degrees of freedom in defining what that means operationally speaking. Here is a fairly representative example of its use, from Botvinick et al. (2001), found on a quick Scholar search:

  A remarkable feature of the human cognitive system is its ability to configure itself for the performance of specific tasks through appropriate adjustments in perceptual selection, response biasing and the on-line maintenance of contextual information. The processes behind such adaptability, referred to collectively as cognitive control ...

Executive function, meanwhile, tends to either depend directly or conceptually on the seminal paper by Miyake et al. (2000), which more explicitly models this sort of control in terms of shifting, updating and inhibition functions. This is an extremely influential and productive model, and at least within the context of working memory research, I would say it sees more use than the more conceptual 'cognitive control'.

References

Botvinick, M. M., Braver, T. S., Barch, D. M., Carter, C. S., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological review, 108(3), 624.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive psychology, 41(1), 49-100.


Is cognitive science hypothesis-based or bound to strict experiments involving statistics?

You may want to have a look at our 40 questions to date that use the statistics tag. These may demonstrate the complexity of our applications in statistics. Wikipedia also has an entire psychological statistics page that seems intended to index other pages on specific applications. Psychological experiments commonly test null hypotheses (e.g., $H_0$: the experimental treatment and placebo control conditions will not differ in measures of an outcome variable), so experimental methods and hypothesis testing methods do not exclude one another. Moreover, concern for placebo effects implies a study may be at least loosely related to cognitive-psychology itself, as placebo effects involve cognitive-neuroscience, neurobiology, psychopharmacology, and experimental-psychology, maybe among others. Plenty to read!


Theories of Emotion: Schachter's Two Factor Theory Example

I think it's because he interprets his emotion as anticipation and excitement because of the context - because he's about to go skydiving which is fun and exciting.  If he was at home watching a boring TV show and had the same physiological experience, he might think he was having a symptom of some kind of heart disease.  If he'd just tried a new drug and had the experience, he'd think it a side effect of the drug.  If he'd just met a new person and had the racing heart, he might think he was in love.  The physiological response (racing heart) is necessary, but it needs to be defined cognitively according to the context (skydiving), that's the two-factor theory.


How can a narcissist be given negative feedback without triggering aggressive behavior?

This is a very interesting question but the answer is very complicated, so I hope to clarify some general issues and perhaps be able to divide the question into more specific questions.

In the first place it would be advisable to differentiate between a markedly narcissistic personality and what might well be considered a personality disorder. From this differentiation we could focus more on the subject of the negotiation or therapy.

Cooperative negotiation. (It is not so much an explicit negotiation, can be considered a technique that pursues the influence) It is something that must be studied for a long time, and also practice through role-playing. It is important to take into account our own negotiation profile. This is a complicated topic because often the key is to lead the person to a negotiation or agreement perspective and this contrasts with posing clear positions that are not negotiable.

I not negociate                                                                 I negociate

[---- 0 space margin ----] --------------------------------------[---- 1 space margin ----]

                                    ^
                                    |

                          stance point, here and now

This is usually worked in the manuals under the terms negotiation profile, negotiation style. It can be consulted in Morton's books.

Personality disorder and violence (explicitly clinical). There are different professional specialization courses about: different personality disorders, for specific areas (schools, family, psychiatric context), focused on types of situations (bad news communication, psychology in emergencies, first aid psychological, and how to intervene in situations of violence.

You can also find more information on the internet about reinforcement, learning, Behaviorism and behavior modification.

In short there is no formula or conditions that warrant that providing feedback to a narcissistic person does not lead to a violent response, this is something that professionals must study for a long time, I think that the most appropriate is a professional to handle such situations.

Sources about Histrionic Personality Disorder:

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5). pg 667 and next.

Sources of cooperative negotiation:

Morton Deutsch and Peter Coleman. (2000). The handbook of conflict resolution: theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Taylor, A. (2002). The Handbook of family dispute resolution: Mediation theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Lax, D. and Sebenius, J. K. (1986). The manager as negotiator: Bargaining for cooperation and competitive gain. New York: The Free Press.

Sources about Conflict in social psychology (conflict and violence are recurrent themes in social psychology manuals, so many manuals could be cited):

Forgas, J. P., Kruglanski, A. W. and Williams, K. D. (2011). The psychology of social conflict and aggression. New York: Psychology press.


The phenomena broadly makes sense in terms of information processing models of memory and cognition.

The phonological loop

For example, you could think about the phenomena in terms of a phonological loop. To Quote the Wikipedia article on Baddeley's model of working memory

  The phonological loop (or "articulatory loop") as a whole deals with
  sound or phonological information. It consists of two parts: a
  short-term phonological store with auditory memory traces that are
  subject to rapid decay and an articulatory rehearsal component
  (sometimes called the articulatory loop) that can revive the memory
  traces.

  Any auditory verbal information is assumed to enter automatically into
  the phonological store. Visually presented language can be transformed
  into phonological code by silent articulation and thereby be encoded
  into the phonological store. This transformation is facilitated by the
  articulatory control process. The phonological store acts as an 'inner
  ear', remembering speech sounds in their temporal order, whilst the
  articulatory process acts as an 'inner voice' and repeats the series
  of words (or other speech elements) on a loop to prevent them from
  decaying. The phonological loop may play a key role in the acquisition
  of vocabulary, particularly in the early childhood years.[3] It may
  also be vital for learning a second language.

Applying this to the phenomena

In the very short term (perhaps a few seconds), you presumably have a internal representation of the raw sound, which might if you were to attend to it afterwards be then processed into words and meaning.
Alternatively, you may hear the words but not process the meaning. Presumably these words can remain represented for a little longer in your short term memory than can the raw sounds (as a very rough guess, perhaps up to 10 or 20 seconds). And then you can return to the words and process them.
Another possibility is that you have basically processed the meaning of the original words, but were perhaps immediately distracted, and then a little later you remembered what was said and that you need to respond.


It an Intelligence test which was not well designed based off Spearmen's work. Performance evaluations like this can lead to promotion if you score well. If you find a correlation exists in the organization I suggest you take multiple intelligence tests multiple times to learn the testing methods of questions to score better.


Lottery question, why do we people think this is logic?

It is a variation of a classical fallacy:

  The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the
  fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the mistaken belief that, if
  something happens more frequently than normal during a given period,
  it will happen less frequently in the future. It may also be stated as
  the belief that, if something happens less frequently than normal
  during a given period, it will happen more frequently in the future. (Source: WikiPedia)

The fact that the number was advertised as having been a winning number makes it salient to the respondent, just as if it would have won multiple times in a row. So, judging through the fallacy above, the number is less likely to win again.

We rarely judge mathematically or logically if we are not prompted or educated to do so, we rely judgements on heuristics instead.


Why are some people jealous of other people's success?

Social Order and Hierarchy. As Humans our brains are designed to see where we fit in the social order. If someones success is perceived as a threat, it can lead to anxiety and fear from the person whom is resentful and jealous.

While in the modern world there is no need for this fear, our ancestors had to compete within their tribe(s) for resources,status,choice etc. If one member of the tribe gained more status than another they would have more access to resources, supplies, privilege, reproductive power etc. This could lead to competition from other members of the tribe fearful that they would not have enough resources, or access to enough supplies, ultimately seeing one of their tribe members as a potential threat to their own well-being.This applies to survival and reproduction value as well.

In conclusion: While this type of behavior can still be common, it is a highly outdated form of thinking that comes from our hardwired tribe mentality, defense mechanisms,and the need for humans to look for for a social order and hierarchy in modern society.


Difference between psychosis and schizophrenia

Psychosis is part of schizophrenia, and it can be part of other psychiatric disorders, too. Psychosis is a concept that describes specific symptoms. Schizophrenia is a mental illness that has psychotic features. When broken down into symptoms, the notion of schizophrenia vs psychosis makes sense.

Psychosis isn’t a mental disorder by itself. Instead, specific features define the experience psychologists call psychosis. Some of the psychotic symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, confusion, and confused speech.


Are there any connectionist models that integrate reinforcement and  fully supervised learning?

I'm not sure I fully understand your design; perhaps you can clarify what you want your network to learn, why TD-learning "isn't cutting it", and what you mean by 'reinforcement' and  'prediction' learning. In particular, TD-learning is a reinforcement learning model, and it does reward based on predicted (and not just observed) outcomes. However, you seem to be describing reinforcement and prediction learning as orthogonal models, so again, I'm not sure I understand correctly.

As a general suggestion, you might consider using an Elman/Jordan network (e.g. recurrent neural network/RNN). Rather than relying on knowledge of only the current state to make a prediction about the next state, RNN can learn to recognize sequences of events. This is especially useful for predicting future states in a task that unfolds over time (e.g. [1]). I suggest this mostly because you say your task is a 'real-time control' task, but without more knowledge of your task I don't really know if this is appropriate.

As for your suggestion of using two different learning mechanisms to modify a single set of weights-- I don't have the answer, but it seems counterintuitive to me. You're using two different optimization techniques on a single set of data. If the techniques disagree, your network will probably never learn its connection weights. If they agree (i.e., converge on the same answer) then I'm not certain you're adding any value by having two learning mechanisms.

[1] Elman (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science, 14, 179-211. Retrieved from http://synapse.cs.byu.edu/~dan/678/papers/Recurrent/Elman.pdf


Study of recollection of drawings based on labels

Based on your description I was able to find the following:

-Klatzky, R.L. & Rafnel, K. (1976).Labeling effects on memory for nonsense pictures. Memory & Cognition, 4(6), 717-720. (there is a pdf version on researchgate.net, I couldn't upload it here)

-Bower, G.H., Karlin, M.B., & Dueck, A. (1975). Comprehension and memory for pictures. Memory and Cognition, 3(2), 216-220. (pdf here)

However, the design and results of those studies are a bit different from what you describe. Labeling facilitated free recall (reproduction) better than no labeling when someone was presented with droodles (images with no meaning). Also, in the Klatzky and Rafnel study, it was shown that meaningful labels contributed to significantly better free recall of images than meaningless labels. So I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but you can take a look.


What are the considerations for using wide-reaching messages and training over individual-focused efforts for changing behavior?

The first thing that comes to mind when reading this is diffusion of responsibility. Because responsibility has not been explicitly assigned, as it would be in a one-on-one meeting, people tend to feel like they do not need to do anything.


How can psychometric or behavioural tests be used in banking to evaluate creditworthiness?

Not really my area of expertise, but I find that a very interesting question and googled a bit for answers.

EFL (Entrepreneurial Finance Lab) is a for-profit company claiming to be the market leader in psychometric loan scoring. The company has been spun out of a research project of the Center of International Development at Harvard University. EFL's method has been covered in a number of media reports (e.g., here and here).

The basic idea is to apply psychometric data as the basis for determining whether to give micro-finance loans to would-be entrepreneurs in developing countries. In such emerging markets, traditional credit scoring used in industrialized nations are either not available or less reliable. If it works psychometrics might help to give loans to entrepreneurs who are less likely to default and thereby fight poverty in a more efficient way.

Given that this is a proprietary test, it is difficult to get detailed information about the kind of data that is used. According to the news reports and the company website, they assess fluid intelligence, certain attitudes and beliefs that are predictive of entrepreneurial success (e.g., locus of control), concrete business skills, and ethics and honesty. Part of these data rely on self-report questions, others seem use more behavioral data (e.g., performance in intelligence tasks or risk games).

To predict creditworthiness, they use Bayesian hierarchical modeling. From what I gather, initially, they used data from meta-analyses of predictors of entrepreneurial success as input (e.g., Rauch & Frese, 2007). Now, they seem to use their own data for model-building.

A source for more information on how this works may be a book that has been published by the founders of EFL (Klinger, Khwaja, & del Carpio, 2013). Citing from an abstract of chapter 2 of the book:

  Regarding the Big 5 personality traits, extroversion is found to be strongly related to higher profit levels, with weaker relationships for
  agreeableness (positive) and conscientiousness (negative).

  Interestingly, integrity is found to have a weak negative relationship with profits: the most honest entrepreneurs aren't the most honest (sic). Conversely, when considering default risk, the lowest risk entrepreneurs also tend to score higher on the integrity assessment, as well as register higher levels of conscientiousness.

  Digit span (fluid intelligence), controlling for level of education, is negatively related to profit levels, but is not related to default risk.

  When combined, these relationships with conscientiousness, honesty, and level of education have an AUC (a common metric of credit score predictive power) of 0.57 – 0.66, which is not extraordinarily strong when compared to credit scoring models in high - information countries and market segments, but it is sufficient to add significant value to the risk analysis task facing banks lending to SMEs in emerging markets.

  We show that for one of the sample banks, risk of default for low-scoring clients is 50% higher than it is for high-scoring clients. Furthermore, we show that these results can be improved by customizing models to each country and financial institution, which isn't surprising given the cultural differences between Peru, Colombia, Kenya and South Africa. While traditional methods of model building suffer challenges of doing this customization without large amounts of data, new methodologies such as Bayesian methods are shown to offer promise to improve results even further, making customization without over-fitting possible and further strengthening the case for using psychometric tools for credit risk analysis.

An obvious question is whether this type of assessment can be gamed by malicious borrowers and loan officers (who tell their customers how they think they should answer to get the loan). EFL says they take various measures to prevent that (e.g., checking whether certain loan officers cause unlikely patterns of responses for their clients, randomization of responses, analyzing questions that have no obvious "right" answer, etc.).

The company claims to by highly successful in improving the quality of loan decisions by presenting a series of case studies. Nevertheless, given that this is a for-profit company and all analyses take place behind closed doors, it might be prudent to take this information with a grain of salt.

References

Klinger, B., Khwaja, A. I., & del Carpio, C. (2013). Enterprising Psychometrics and Poverty Reduction. SpringerBriefs in Psychology. New York, NY: Springer New York. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-1-4614-7227-8

Rauch, A., & Frese, M. (2007). Let’s put the person back into entrepreneurship research: A meta-analysis on the relationship between business owners’ personality traits, business creation, and success. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 16, 353–385. doi:10.1080/13594320701595438


Differential diagnosis for shortness of breath from anxiety

I think that if you combine the reading of the DSM with a pharmaceutical book such as the BNF you will get the desired results when you know what your client is prescribed.


Evolutionary game theory in the cognitive sciences

There are some mentions of Evolutionary Game Theory in this Behavior & Brain Sciences (BBS) article by Andrew Colman (2003). The main article itself only has a brief section on EGT. However, like all BBS articles, there are short commentary articles after the main article. A few of these deal directly with EGT. I was able to find the relevant articles within the larger document by doing a find for "evolutionary game theory".

There are a few references throughout the BBS article to studies within cognitive science using EGT. One particularly relevant one to your question is Colman & Wilson (1997). They modeled antisocial personality disorder in an evolutionary game, to show that stable states arise in a variety of situations in which some of the agents behave antisocially. They treat this as a model for explaining why there seems to be a relatively stable proportion of people who behave in an antisocial manner across societies.


Why is Asperger Syndrome poorly recognised in France?

I am by no means any sort of expert at the French mental health system, but I was curious and found a few reasons that may indicate why such a philosophy is prevalent.

In this blog, an American psychologist analyzes the differences between the American and French schools of thought on ADHD, but the observations hold for other conditions as well.  While Asperger's and ASD aren't necessarily part of the traditional psychiatric clusters, their treatment is often allocated to psychiatrists in the U.S.

From a pragmatic perspective, the very basis for diagnosis for children in France is not based on the DSM as it is in America, the French developed their own manual for diagnosis in children:

  They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA (Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L'Enfant et de L'Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000.

More importantly, as the article points out, psychiatric disorders are treated more from a psychosocial perspective, rather than a physiological or pharmacological one.  That's not to say this is wrong, but it's drastically different in taking cues from a child's social situation/"maladjustment" rather than trying to attribute a psychiatric cause to the condition.

It seems as though the French psychiatric/psychological community is likely to allocate the actual medical bases of these and other disorders to the (non-psychiatric) medical community:

  A general comment regarding the French mental health system is that the distinction between the social and the medical components of care is too often unclear, and the management of social problems is frequently delegated to medical institutions and professionals.

So, while the French psychiatric community may be less likely to recognize Asperger's, it may be that the neurological or educational communities may view it in the same light that American's do.  Certainly, I would assume that those psychiatrists more steeped in experimental methods and treatments would have some understanding of the neuroanatomical advances that are being made in autism spectrum disorders, so the beliefs you outline in the quote may not be universal.

Also from a practical perspective, because of the philosophy of treating many of these conditions from a psychosocial perspective, there aren't a lot of resources allocated to child psychiatric patients.  While a patient with Asperger's is no more or less likely to be hospitalized as another, the overall trend seems to indicate the resources dedicated to outpatient practitioners may be as scarce as those for inpatients (and from the article, does seem to have a much higher density in Southern France and metropolitan areas):

  The number of child and adolescent psychiatric beds is relatively low (0.19 beds per 1000 inhabitants) and a large number of sectors (n=182) have no child and adolescent beds at all...not driven by the pressure of cutting costs.  It was decided upon by child psychiatrists who thought the the hospitalisation of children could be replaced by day hospitalisation and community psychiatry.

Reference:

MENTAL, O. O. (2003). Focus on psychiatry in France. BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY, 183, 466-471.[DOI] [Free PDF]


How does the group that is not stressed and not reactivated act as a control for time in Schwabe & Wolf 2010?

It appears that they tested all of the participants (control & stress) at the same time:

  Memory was assessed 24 h after learning. According to the model
  by Joels and colleagues (2006), it can be predicted that learning under
  stress enhances memory, in particular for stress context-related
  information
  Twenty-four hours after learning, participants returned to the
  laboratory and completed a free recall test
  Immediately after the free recall test, participants were given a
  recognition test.
  All testing took place in the morning between 8 am and 1 pm to
  control for the diurnal variation of the stress hormone cortisol. On
  day 1, participants heard a list of eight neutral words that were related
  to the stressor as well as eight negative, eight positive and eight
  neutral, stressor-unrelated words while they were exposed to stress
  or a control condition (for details see below). On the following day,
  participants returned to the laboratory and completed a free recall
  and a recognition test for the words they heard the day before.

I can't find anywhere within the text that says "To control for the effect of time on memory, we had another control group that was not stressed and did not reactivate experiences from their past."

They found that:

  Learning under stress reduced both free recall and recognition
  performance 24 h after learning.

All taken from your reference:

Schwabe, L., & Wolf, O. T. (2010). Learning under stress impairs memory formation. Neurobiology of learning and memory, 93(2), 183-188.


How many words are toddlers "making up"?

From my knowledge.  Children do make up words and sounds that feel similar to the ones they are intended to mean.  However, as the child develops these pseudo-words begin to disappear.  New temporary replacement words may form as they begin to understand that they are not using the correct words.  However, developmentally a child should be speaking in full sentences by about 3 years old and definitely by 4 years old.  They will most likely continue to have problems with various connecting words, plurals, and saying words how they appear to sound (even if they say them wrong).

It helps with their learning to break down words into syllables so that they can grasp how each sound works together to form the words that you are using to communicate with them.  I'll see if I can find my old developmental psychology book to back this up more, but I'm going on a class I took years ago.  That and watching 3 kids move through the stages (got a 22 month old, 3, and 7 year old myself).


Can you make yourself like/hate something when you learned to hate/like it during early life?

I think most of "loving" and "hating" happens on unconscious level or conscious but automatic level. Aaron T. Beck noticed that thoughts were not as unconscious as Freud had previously theorized and called them "automatic thoughts".
I don't see any reason for someone to start hating football but also you can get bored for watching it for 20 years. But you have techniques, exercises and therapies that can help you love yourself, start hate smoking or stop overeating for example.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be used for solving current problems and modifying dysfunctional (inaccurate and/or unhelpful) thinking and behavior.


The first option is to investigate exactly what his worries are and to put them in perspective. Often, people catastrophize their fears, imagining the worst possible scenario for a given situation. While that outcome may be a realistic possibility, often is not the only or even the most likely possibility.
For instance, is he afraid that people will think he lacks intelligence? Or that people will laugh and make fun of him? You might examine his thought this way:

What is the worst possible outcome if he stutters or freezes in
front of another person?

What is the best possible outcome in the same situation?

What does he think is the most likely outcome? (Usually this is
somewhere in between the two extremes).

Second, you can caution him against mind-reading (i.e., assuming he knows what others will say, do or think). If he is concerned that when he freezes, "people will think I'm stupid," encourage him to think of other possibilities. They might think that, or they might just be confused, or they might recognize he's socially uncomfortable and have compassion.
Third, while the thought or fear itself may be true (e.g. "She made fun of me") the meaning he attaches to it might not be completely valid.
What does it say about him? For instance, if he thinks "She's right, I'm stupid, I'm a loser" you can explore all of his strengths and things he does well. Often people maximize painful experiences or don't give themselves credit for other accomplishments. Other thoughts, such as "This is something I struggle with, but I'm good at other things," might be more adaptive.
What does it say about that other person? You could work with him to reframe his thoughts (e.g. "She just doesn't understand and isn't sure how to react," or "That person has to be mean to others to make himself feel good; what he says isn't really true.")
What does it mean if someone reacts poorly when he freezes? If his thought is akin to "They'll think I'm stupid" figure out what it would mean in his life if they thought that way. How would that impact him? Is it "If I freeze, they'll think I'm stupid, and then I won't....get the job, make a friend, etc."? If you can figure out what consequences he is concerned about, then you can go back to option 1 and think through how likely those scenarios are.
Often fears and anxieties have some kernel of realistic risk to them. Some spiders or snakes can be dangerous, some people can judge us and be cruel, etc. However, if the fear is paralyzing, there is often a distortion to the thoughts that can be discussed and possibly adapted to reduce anxiety.
This book may provide additional ideas:
Beck, J. S. (2011). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond. Guilford Press. (pgs. 1801-84 discuss some of the points mentioned above).


Is a concept of machiavellianism useful?

What I'm going to say here pertains mostly to your previous question on this topic, rather than this one, which does strike me as a bit of knee-jerk reaction, however, it might help with this one as well.

Mach-IV has, by design, four main factors but in opposite pairs, so only two main sub-scales, which are added for the total score

negative (vs. positive) interpersonal tactics
cynical (vs. positive) view of human nature

You can actually look up how the individual questions load into these factors, for instance Table 2 in this paper, the full text of which is freely available. It is possible to score high on one but not the other sub-scale. There are also to two odd questions about Morality in the Mach-IV, but this is a rather poorly designed part of the test. Mach-IV has an overall degree of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) of 0.7 (mentioned in that paper), which is borderline acceptable.

There is a newer Machiavellianism test that has seen some adoption, called Machiavellian Personality Scale--MPS (2009) which you might be able to find/take; the authors have made it freely available. MPS has more independent scales:

Distrust of Others (five items)
Desire for Status (three items),
Desire for Control (three items)
Amorality (five items).

As for usefulness, I don't know of real-world uses of Mach-IV outside of research. It's not like you won't land a job at Best Buy by failing it; actually machiavelianism might help you score such a job, but I'm digressing too mcuh already.


does the fact that Psychology Today take neurolinguistic programming seriously delegitimize the magazine?

A similar question has been discussed on the Meta site associated with this Stack.

In summary: Psychology Today doesn't really have any legitimacy to invalidate in the first place. It's just a collection of blogs without any peer review process.

Psychology Today is a popular science magazine, not a peer-reviewed publication. There are some good articles on the site; there are also many bad ones. Some articles cite peer-reviewed literature: if you find a peer-reviewed source on Psychology Today, feel free to read it for yourself!

The editors may keep certain content off the site, but they are not adhering to any standards of evidence or standards of clinical care. It's fine to cite for a source of popular claims, but doesn't have any scientific weight.

The main purpose of the Psychology Today website seems to be as a paid directory for psychology professionals - basically, people sign up, post their pictures and biography and a phone number to try to collect clients.

Some of the editors have brief biographies posted - it seems clear that the editorial staff have their expertise in publishing/journalism, like you would expect for a popular magazine. They do not have the sort of editorial staff that a reputable journal has, which would include university research scientists at the top of their research field.

In their media guide for educational advertisers the site compares itself (favorably, from the viewpoint of an advertiser) in terms of # of viewers to sites like The Atlantic, Oprah, Time, The New  Yorker, Fortune, Popular Mechanics, and National Geographic. Many of those sites also have some good content, but may be more readily recognizable as popular magazines. If they were a site for reputable science content you could expect that they would instead compare themselves with other peer-reviewed content.

Many of the pages have language along the lines of "Verified by Psychology Today" but in every case I see this it seems to refer to their directory of psychology professionals rather than any of the blog content. I don't know what the verification process entails.


What study examined the effect of number of traumatic life events on falling into poverty?

This effect was identified in a report by the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development (Jensen et al., 2006). It specifically indicated that individuals experiencing eight or more "life shocks" (negative life events) experienced significantly more negative socioeconomic outcomes.

This effect is referenced on Wikipedia's Cycle of Poverty page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty), which links to a news story on the report (Berry, 2006) and the report itself.

A summary of the report's findings were later published in an academic journal (Jensen et al., 2007).

Berry, R. (2006, July 12). "Life shocks" tip people into hardship.
The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10390891
Jensen, J., Krishnan, V., Hodgson, R., Sathiyandra, S., Templeton,
R., Jones, D., ... & Beynon, P. (2006). New Zealand Living Standards
2004 Ngā Āhuatanga Noho o Aotearoa. Wellington: Ministry of Social      Development. Retrieved from:
http://media.nzherald.co.nz/webcontent/document/pdf/living-standards-2004.pdf
Jensen, J., Sathiyandra, S., & Matangi-Want, M. (2007). The 2004 New
Zealand Living Standards Survey: What does it signal about the importance of multiple disadvantage?. Social Policy Journal of New  Zealand, 30, 110-144.


Phineas Gage style indeed (is that a precursor to Gangnam style?) - ironically (referring to one large iron rod), Phineas Gage's accident is believed to have entirely removed his OFC, as well as parts of his PFC.  Though Gage likely suffered some mental changes, his recovery was a far cry from any sweeping "lose his decision-making ability entirely" diagnosis, even with injuries more extensive than just the OFC, so I think we can safely rule out the statement above without resorting to unethical experimentation.

This misconception may have originated with Antonio Damasio:

  Antonio Damasio, in support of his somatic marker hypothesis (relating
  decision-making to emotions and their biological underpinnings), draws
  parallels between behaviors he ascribes to Gage and those of modern
  patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. But
  Damasio's depiction of Gage has been severely criticized ...

In neuroscience, this type of error is called a "reverse inference".  For example, if we find that a particular region of the brain is active when subjects experience an "emotion", we can't then conclude that it always means subjects are experiencing that "emotion" when it is active.  That brain region may have other functions besides that emotion, many other brain regions may be involved in experiencing that emotion, and different regions may be involved in different contexts.

Furthermore, in modern emotion traditions, the distinction between emotion and cognition in general tends to be blurry, to the extent that some popular emotion models argue that the two cannot feasibly be separated.  In other words, depending on your preferred model, "emotion" may refer to all cognition (the entire brain), so the answer to your question would be ... yes?

Note: I don't know anything about Jonah Lehrer's book, but Wikipedia says:

  On March 1, 2013, following revelations that Lehrer has been caught in
  numerous falsifications in his œuvre of writings, Houghton Mifflin
  Harcourt announced the book was taken "off sale" after an internal
  review.


Why do people bid on online auctions sooner than a few seconds before it ends?

One advantage of auctions, to the seller, is that buyers can get caught up in bidding wars and spend more than they intended to.  Any auction platform that gets paid by what the auction takes in is going to want or hope for that.

I assume you're referring to eBay-style auctions.  eBay encourages bidding frenzies.  If you bid on an item and are outbid, they will notify you and encourage you to bid more.  As the auction draws to a close, they will notify bidders who aren't currently in the lead.  They're hoping at least some bidders will think bidding is fun, and will think of winning the auction as succeeding.  The thrill may be that of gambling or similar.

I don't see any advantage in waiting for the last few seconds.  I decide how much I'm willing to pay for something, and enter that amount whenever.  The only way someone will find out how much I bid is to outbid me, and then I don't want to win the auction.  Trying to time my bid for the end of the auction would sometimes be very inconvenient.  If there's going to be a bidding frenzy at the end, the price will either go over mine or not, and I think it very unlikely that when I bid makes much difference in that.  It should be clear that I don't think bidding by itself is fun, and that I don't want to win the auction by paying more for an item than I value it, which as you've seen isn't the universal approach.


Is it conceivable to transmit all sound information in the tactile modality?

First of all, interesting question, and thanks for sharing the video!

Secondly, you write:

  There seem to be no doubts that she has the same perception of music than any other great musician...

I have to disagree. She may be able to sense vibrations, but it can never match normal hearing. This, because the human ear is better equipped to analyze acoustic sounds than the tactile system. Acoustic frequencies can be heard between 20 Hz and 20 kHz and maximum sensitivity is at 4 kHz. The tactile sense has a lower minimum, but its optimum lies at 250 Hz, and the maximum at approximately 500 Hz. Hence, the  human ear exceeds the tactile system by 5 octaves. More importantly, however, is the exquisite sensitivity of the human ear that outperforms the tactile system in orders of magnitude.

In effect, the musician can acoustically feel only tones of low frequency of high loudness. What she can pick up is the tactile sensation from playing the instrument, however.

Note that Beethoven was deaf, and composed master pieces. Importantly, both Beethoven and Glennie were not congenitally deaf, but lost their hearing later in life. Hence, their sense of acoustics was already shaped, and my guess is both relied heavily on their memory of hearing.

To translate the acoustic dynamic range into a vibrotactile one, one would have to compress the acoustic dynamic range onto the vibrotactile dynamic range. Frequency compression is exactly what has been done in vibrotactile devices that substituted hearing  for touch. One example of such an approach is the TickleTalker. This device was designed as a vibrotactile hearing aid to increase speech recognition in the profoundly deaf. Although the idea worked, it never became a success (Cowan et al., 1990). In general, sensory substitution approaches suffer important drawbacks (see why-is-sensory-substitution-not-that-successful).

An important factor with the TickleTalker is that the frequency range as well as the frequency resolution of the ear is much better in the ear than in touch. In turn, the quality of vibrotactile hearing is inferior to acoustic hearing.

However, the biggest factor in the case of vibrotactile hearing substitution not being successful is the fact that cochlear implants are very effective in restoring sensorineural hearing loss. Cochlear implants directly stimulate the auditory nerve, thereby bypassing the defective hair cells, the most common cause of deafness. Note, however, that brain stem implants and cortical implants are used as well, that together cover nearly all causes of deafness. Hence, these devices actually restore hearing in deaf patients. The resolution is not too great (7 effective frequency channels, give or take), but speech understanding scores in cochlear implants users is overall remarkably good. Some are even able to talk over the phone.

Reference
- Cowan et al.,  Australian Journal of Audiology (1990)

Further Reading
- why-is-sensory-substitution-not-that-successful


Basically an introverted or shy person is caught in a viscious circle:

you don't interact with people much because often you don't feel the need
because of this you don't have much practice in interacting with other people
so if you try to interact when you do feel the urge, you feel that you don't interact very successfully or even "fail"
this in turn reinforces your wish to not interact

What you need to do is break out of this self-reinforcing circle. But how?

If you want to become better at speaking a foreign language, reading books about language learning is not going to help you much. What you need to do is practice that language.

The only thing that will help you gain social competence is practice your social skills.

Cognitive-behavioural therapy for pathologically shy people consists of many components, such as psychoeducation (understanding the causes, stabilizing factors, and symptoms of your trait) and correction of dysfunctional beliefs (you are not worth less, on the contrary there are positive aspects of being introverted), which, in self-help, you can do with a book or through meditation, but the one central methodology, and the only thing that will instigate a change, is getting into the situation that you are afraid of: exposition (facing what you fear to lose your fear by realizing nothing bad is happening) and behavior training (building a new habit and competence).

If you want to help youself, you can of course read books on your problem to better understand what is going on and what you might do, but then you need to get out and do it. I would do:

define your ultimate goal (e.g. I want to be able to talk in front of an audience without stuttering)
break this mountain of a goal down into small, manageable goals (e.g. if you are afraid of approaching attractive girls, start with old ladies)
all goals, the ultimate and the subordinate goals, must be concrete and measurable (e.g. not "I want to be more extroverted", but "I want to smile back next time Paul smiles at me"); it must be absolutely clear and unmistakeable when you are in the situation you want to change and when you have achieved your goal; nothing vague and general that no-one can meet
practice regularly (e.g. consciously smile at every person you encounter on your way to work, every day)
this may be hard, so don't force yourself to be friendly to everybody all the time, note that even extroverted people don't interact with everybody always, and certainly are not always friendly; give yourself breaks and allow yourself to rest from your exercises (e.g. plan to not smile on your way home)
slowly increase difficulty (e.g. in week two start to say "hi" to those people that smile back; in week three, mention the wonderful weather; etc.)
accept that you are not extroverted, i.e. don't expect yourself to become what you are not comfortable with; be content with gaining confidence and competence to be outgoing whenever you feel like it, but allow yourself to remain by yourself when that is what you want; just try to observe yourself and take note of when you really want to be alone and when you are only afraid of socializing
accept that not everyone will love you; competent extroverts experience many refusals, they just have many prositive encounters to balance them; you aren't interested in everybody either, are you? so don't take it personal, move on to the next person and see if he is more welcoming -- one of the next persons will be
write a diary of what you did, what happened, any changes in your feeling and behaviour and in the reactions of the other people, and plan the next step
ask yourself: "What would I do if I weren't afraid?", then do that


What comes first? Thought or electric activity?

There is ongoing electrical activity in the brain, there's even a lot of it when we are asleep when we are not 'thinking' at all, and also when we are unconscious and even when in coma. When brain activity does cease, i.e., its electrical activity becomes unmeasurable, there's a definite medical emergency.
Thus, there is unceasing activity in the brain. This activity includes both random 'noise' like neuronal jitter (Freeman, 1996) or constitutively active neuronal populations like those in the auditory (Wang & Bergles, 2015) or optic nerves (Sernagor & Grzywacz, 1996), as well as voluntary activity. In turn, the occurrence of random or controlled 'thoughts' is not so strange, as there is ongoing activation of neuronal pathways and activation in one neuron will trigger activity in others.
As a side note, and alluded to in the comments, thoughts are hardly voluntary; think psychotic patients who can experience their thoughts as intrusive or instructing them to do nasty things, people with OCD who have oppressing thoughts they have to do stuff, or folks suffering from PTSD who repeatedly experience flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.
As you say, all brain activity eventually boils down to ion gradients in the brain. Every cell in our body needs ion gradients to function properly for that matter.
What comes first? Activity or thoughts? Activity, because even random thoughts need a trigger to occur. How do these impulses come into being? Pre-existing activity.
References
- Freeman, Int J Neural Syst (1996); 7(4): 473-80
- Sernagor & Grzywacz, Current Biology (1996); 6(11): 1503-8
- Wang & Bergles, Cell Tissue Res (2015); 361(1): 65–75


Where in the brain is meaning extracted from visual information?

The short answer is we don't know for sure. Look up "alexia" and "agraphia"; pinpointing the regions of the brain that, if damaged, interfere with reading might give some indication of the cortical regions involved.

Visual cortex (back of the brain) is obviously necessary for the general population, but it's clearly possible for blind people to learn to read without vision. I'm not aware if blind people require an intact visual cortex or not.

There is a nice study showing that semantic information is present in a very compact form in the hippocampus: Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain.
Quian Quiroga R, Reddy L, Kreiman G, Koch C and Fried I
Nature, 435: 1102-1107; 2005. PDF


What is meant by "degrees of freedom" in fMRI?

In a statistical context, any independent datum adds a degree of freedom. So when Friston talks about "sufficient degrees of freedom to render the variability of the action's estimate small enough" he simply means "sufficient sample size to cancel out noise". At least that's my take on it, based only on the single quoted phrase(!).


After doing more research and based on another discussion(s) on this forum, I'll attempt to answer this question.

It sounds like escapism doesn't rank really high on most psychologists' radar. In addition, the hierarchy of needs has largely fallen out of favor, making my question irrelevant for some. There's also the problem of defining "escapism" in the first place.

One could include the need for privacy under escapism. The rigors of prison include a dehumanizing lack of privacy. In the case of torture (e.g. Guantanamo), prisoners' minds can be further manipulated to prevent other forms of escapism.

If one wanted to create a more comprehensive hierarchy of needs than Maslow's, escapism could certainly deserve its own spot alongside social connections and esteem. Or perhaps escapism and esteem could be grouped together as "individual needs," as opposed to social connections.

Though people can obviously survive and even thrive in the absence of social connections, escapism is something we all carry with us. For example, most people daydream, which could be considered a form of escapism.

I see privacy as the polar corollary of social connections - everyone needs a balance of social influences and privacy. I see escapism as a separate phenomenon that largely overlaps with privacy.


Is there a Big Five personality assessment under an open-commercial license?

The IPIP scales are in the public domain: https://ipip.ori.org/
They are intended to have no restrictions on use.

https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm

  Because the IPIP has been placed in the public domain, permission has already been automatically granted for any person to use IPIP items, scales, and inventories for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial..
  It is not necessary to contact the IPIP site author (Lew Goldberg) or the IPIP Consultant (John A. Johnson) for permission to use IPIP materials. Requests for permission to use IPIP materials will be answered by sending the requester a link to this page.


Name for the need to reply “you can’t fire me, I quit”

I don't know of any term that refers specifically to this sort of counter-offensive reaction to ending a social relationship (be it romantic, professional, or otherwise), but I vaguely recall reading about some theory that distinguished reactions to relational stress as follows:
$$\begin{array}{c|c|c|}&\mathbf{Active}&\mathbf{Passive}\\\hline\mathbf{Constructive}&\rm Actively\ constructive&\rm Passively\ constructive\\\hline\mathbf{Destructive}&\rm Actively\ destructive&\rm Passively\ destructive\\\hline\end{array}$$
The reaction in question is actively destructive. A passive alternative would be less decisive / assertive, and either patient / understanding / cooperative (i.e., constructive) or apathetic / pessimistic / negative (i.e., destructive). Sorry I don't have a reference off the top of my head; I think this came from my social psych textbook as an undergrad, but I'm not sure.

As for plausible explanatory constructs, consider:

Dominant personality
Avoidant or anxious-ambivalent (i.e., insecure) attachment style
Needs for power and autonomy
Behavioral tendencies involving defensiveness and reactance

Certain defense mechanisms may apply depending on whether the person is reacting genuinely or just defensively (and doesn't actually want to end the relationship).


How is the size of a video related to its perceived quality?

At least for images (I don't know of such a result tested on videos) for a given resolution, there is an optimal display size (assuming constant viewing distance. otherwise, display size should be measured in angles from the viewers point of view). In a paper from 1989, Peter Barten provided a formula to compute this effect [1]. The gist can be seen in the following figure from that paper:

For the low resolution images (e.g 100px wide) there is a slight advantage in quality ranking for the smaller screen over larger ones. However, as the number of pixels increases, the perceived quality on the small screen saturates, and larger screen are preferred.

[1]  The Effects of Picture Size and Definition on Perceived Image Quality. Barten, P. G. J; IEEE Trans.on Electron Devices, 36 (9), p. 1865-9, Sept.1989
doi: 10.1109/16.34260


The question is why sometimes we report certain psychiatric conditions as being discrete (henceforth categorical) and sometimes as being dimensional (or in a spectrum).

The answer is related to the history of psychiatric classifications. By the time DSM-III was designed, there was an increasing resistance to psychoanalysis in America. Psychoanalysis tended to organize disorders in a dimensional fashion (have a look at this podcast. So the final product (DSM-III) translated that resistance by organizing all conditions in categories, increasing significantly their number as well.

In the past 10 years the lack of success (this is questionable, but psychiatry did not developed as well as, say, oncology)  of the field made some scholars rethink about the exclusive use of categories.

It seems that categories are suited health insurances and legal objectives. For instance, judges are normally interested to know whether someone has or not a condition in order to decide about responsibility (necessary and sufficient conditions). The same with health insurance companies.

The problem is that psychiatry should be thinking on advancing the field, instead of satisfying the legal system or the health insurance companies (these are very important issues as well, don't get me wrong, but they are secondary).

Now the question is: are mental disorders really dimensional things? What are the evidences for thinking this way? I will only mention on argument and then I will suggest some readings to read all the other findings that suggests so.

The level of co-occurrence of mental disorders (co-morbidity) are very high. So that alcoholism is commonly accompanied by anxiety and depression. Depression and anxiety are themselves commonly found together, and the same for almost all the other hundreds of conditions. That means that perhaps a dimensional approach would be a better one to treat theses concepts.

Why do we accept that personality and intelligence are the type of things that should be treated as dimensional, then? Because the psychologists have been working without giving as much attention to politics than the psychiatrists in the last half-century. And they developed the statistical scaffolding for their theories on personality and intelligence, quite independently from psychiatrists. That is why these subjects are treated today as dimensional, whereas mental disorders are treated as categorical (note though that personality disorders also exists in the classification systems and DSM-5 attempts to introduce some dimensional approach on the subject).

Finally, why Autism has been taken as a spectrum condition? Simply because its study has gained traction only recently, and also because the main researchers in the area used methods from psychology to develop their ideas.

So the answer is that your perception that disorders are discrete is something inherited by the long use of classification systems like DSM, but that it will change shortly.

References:

Bentall, R. P. (2004). Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. Penguin.
Volkmar, F. R., & McPartland, J. C. (2014). From Kanner to DSM-5: autism as an evolving diagnostic concept. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 10, 193–212. http://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032813-153710
APA. (2013). DSM 5. American Psychiatric Association. http://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596.744053
Zachar, P. (2000). Psychiatric disorders are not natural kinds. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 7(3), 167–182.


Web-based tools for documenting studies?

The Open Science Framework will do some of what you ask for. Additionally, it will allow you to preregister your hypotheses to properly distinguish confirmatory and exploratory research.

Features (quoted from the homepage).

  Document and archive studies
  Share and find materials, scripts, data
  Detail individual contributions
  Increase transparency
  Time-stamp materials


Is there a learning style that involves learning best by teaching others?

Learning Styles

There is a large literature on learning styles particularly in educational psychology. See for example, the wikipedia page on learning styles.

You will soon discover that there are many different taxonomies of learning styles. Thus, there are certainly more than three "theorised" learning styles.

However, more importantly, there have been some serious critiques of the assumptions of learning styles. In particular, I would question whether people really have important domain general learning styles, and whether pedagogy should be adapted to such a domain general learning style.

I agree that instruction should be tailored to the individual. However, I think that generally it is more effective to consider what the individual already knows (and in some cases, think about their motivations) and tailor the format with regards to pre-existing knowledge and skills.

Furthermore, I think it is generally more useful to think about what makes for effective learning in general, as opposed to thinking about how people learn in different ways.

Learning by teaching

In the case, of learning by teaching, I imagine that this could be a relatively effective learning methodology in general. From personal experience, I know that I learn a lot about a subject by teaching it. It forces you to understand the material. Students can ask you questions which forces you to learn more. Consideration of how to teach the material can encourage a deeper understanding in order to provide a structured teaching experience. The mere fact of spending time on a subject should also foster further learning.

I imagine there are many articles on the topic of learning through teaching.
I found one article by Cortese (2005) who wrote:

  The great learning potential inherent in teaching would appear to be
  generated as the result of a particular aspect of the teaching process
  itself: the encounter with diversity, which on the one hand tends to
  increase reﬂexivity while on the other hand tends to break down
  resistance to change. ... Teaching also proved to be an important
  opportunity for recognizing one’s own ignorance and thereby rendering
  oneself open to the possibility of learning.

References

Cortese, C. G. (2005). Learning through teaching. Management Learning, 36(1), 87-115. PDF


Are Satoshi Kanazawa's findings about racial differences in attractiveness valid?

The first thing to note is that the study was not published as a peer-reviewed journal article. It was published as a blog post. Thus, it has not gone through a peer review process. While the reader can function as the reviewer, the article does not follow the structure of a journal article. As such, there is an inadequate description of the method in the blog post to facilitate a proper evaluation of the study, although if you follow a trail of references, there may be more information, such as in this related post comparing male and female attractiveness ratings.

Here is a critique of Kanazawa's blog post "Why black women are less physically attractive than other women":

Subjectivity of ratings: Kanazawa states that "the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively". This is incorrect. Any rating by an individual of someone's attractiveness involves a degree of subjectivity. By averaging ratings over many raters we can obtain what we might call inter-subjective agreement about attractiveness. The more raters you have then the more reliable will be the individual-level measurement. That said, even such inter-subjective ratings will be influenced by the pool of raters used. For example, what is the gender, racial, composition of the raters. To what extent do these factors influence the ratings provided? Raters also come from a particular historical period where there are particular views about attractiveness. Thus, it's important to consider these factors when discussing any measure of attractiveness.
Error in ratings: Kanazawa gets attractiveness ratings by averaging three ratings from three raters." From these three scores, I can compute the latent physical attractiveness score". This is not true.  Three raters is better than one. But there would still be substantial unreliability in measuring "latent physical attractiveness". This is over and above the general issue of there being different definitions of latent physical attractiveness based on the pool of raters used and definitions applied. Kanazawa then goes on to make other points about factor analysis which are incorrect (e.g., claiming that factor analysis "eliminates all random measurement errors"). That said, some unreliability in measuring individual attractiveness is not fatal to the study. If anything, it would reduce observed group differences.
Inadequate sample and rater description: There is no explicit reporting of sample sizes or sampling procedure. Thus, it is difficult to evaluate how robust the results are and whether the groups are comparable on other relevant factors such as age, dress, and so on. Furthermore, the lack of information about where the sample comes from and where the raters come from make it difficult to see to what extent any findings would generalise to other times, places, and locations.
No standard deviations provided: There is no standard deviation provided which makes it difficult to assess the size of the group differences. If we assume that attractiveness ratings are z-scores (which is likely if derived from a factor analysis). Then the differences in attractiveness ratings between black and white women were about 0.25 standard deviations. Thus, whatever the ratings captured, if you assume SD=1, then the differences between black and white women is fairly small.
Inadequate discussion of covariates: Kanazawa inadequately discusses covariates that might explain any observed differences. He briefly mentions BMI and intelligence as covariates. However, there are presumably many relevant covariates including age, socio-economic status, physical health and more. An adequate analysis would explore a wide range of covariates and how they relate to attractiveness ratings, and the degree to which group differences are altered by such measures. In particular, taking the perspective of evolutionary psychology requires that you first rule out short term cultural explanations such as poverty and health related explanations.
Inadequate discussion of explanations: Kanazawa writes that "the only thing I can think of that might potentially explain [the differences] is testosterone". This seems quite naive when I can think of a wide range of reasons why any observed differences could emerge, such as socio-economic status, money spent on appearance, lifestyle factors related to health and exercise, and most importantly culture-specific values about attractiveness that the raters may be applying.


What research exists in the areas of formulating questions and "problem shaping"?

There are no known domain-general ways of formulating good questions and problems—what constitutes a good question or problem formulation depends on the field or domain. A good psychology question is different from a good literary question, which in turn is different from a good business question.
Because there are no known domain-independent ways of formulating good questions and problems, but I believe this is a valuable question, I will focus my answer on the limited literature covering the formulation of good behavioral and social science questions. In general, while formulating good questions is specific to the domain or related set of domains of interest, research on ideation or idea generation is covered by the field of creativity research (but this does not cover good questions).
Research heuristics and hypothesis generation
Theory
Many scientific methodology courses focus almost entirely on study design and hypothesis testing appropriate for the field, while neglecting the critical aspects of hypothesis generation and research heuristics. Research is somewhat scarce, but some frameworks have been proposed, of which I am most familiar with McGuire's 49 research heuristics (McGuire, 1997). These heuristics are grouped into five categories, which I will try to briefly summarize.

Sensitivity to provocative natural occurrences: Systematically paying attention, making systematic observations, looking for anomalies (unexpected, nonobvious relations) and attempting to explain these.
Simple conceptual analysis: Thought and experiments conceptual analysis such as counterexamples, imagining counterfactuals, reversing causal direction and so forth on a defined set of phenomena.
Complex conceptual analysis: Deductive reasoning and generalization, convergent-divergent ideation processes and metatheorical techniques.
Reinterpretations of past research: Expert knowledge, reevaluating the scope of evidence accounted for and meta-analysis or review.
Collecting new or reanalyzing old data: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of new evidence, or novel analysis of existing evidence.

McGuire's theoretical framework is not the only one. Lubart and Getz (1998), for example, proposed three different research heuristics within the domain of psychology based on a historical analysis of psychological research. They named these the trilogy-of-mind heuristic ("the mind comprises cognition, conation and affection"), the emotions-as-moods ("complex human emotion reduces to simple moods") heuristic, and the analysis-of-variance ("the map is the territory") heuristic. Both frameworks are ultimately based on analysis of heuristics researchers have used, rather than directly investigating these heuristics' efficacy, however.
Others have questioned whether the search for such heuristics is a good idea in the first place. For example, a critique of research heuristics in a related field leveled by Anderson, De Dreu and Nijstad (2004) is the dilemma that research heuristics may "routizine" research. This is a possible problem, and they also report evidence for "a heavy focus on replication–extension, cross-sectional designs, and a single level of analysis in innovation research." However, it is not clear that this routinization caused by research heuristics.
Evidence
Unfortunately, the neglect of hypothesis generation in scientific training is reflected in the empirical literature, if not the theoretical literature. There are no or very limited empirical research programmes or frameworks directly investigating the relative or absolute efficacy of different research heuristics or approaches, even in terms of relatively obtainable measures like impact factor or publication rate. Therefore, although I subjectively find them helpful, we ultimately cannot say with confidence whether or which of any of McGuire's (or others') heuristics are effective for formulating good questions and problems or not.
References

Anderson, N., De Dreu, C. K. W. and Nijstad, B. A. (2004), The routinization of innovation research: a constructively critical review of the state-of-the-science. J. Organiz. Behav., 25: 147–173. doi: 10.1002/job.236
Lubart, T. I. and Getz, I. (1998), The Influence of Heuristics on Psychological Science: A Case Study of Research on Creativity. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 28: 435–457. doi: 10.1111/1468-5914.00083
McGuire, W. J. (1997). Creative hypothesis generating in psychology: Some useful heuristics. Annual review of psychology, 48(1), 1-30.


The visual analogue scale (VAS) has been used in some research. For a direct comparison in one study, see Vickers who compared VAS vs. 7-point Likert.

It's interesting that Vicker found a similar effect to that found in a highly cited paper by Dawes on 5/7-point Likert vs 10-point Likert, namely that more points on the scale result in a lower average score... despite the fact that the stuff measured in these two studies was completely different: muscle soreness and respectively customer satisfaction. Well, the probability of this coincidence is 50%, but I couldn't find any meta-analysis of this type of study.

One additional issue with Likert (and other ordinal) scales is that some researchers use the wrong statistics on it, like those assuming normal distribution, c.f. Bishop and Herron, who also discuss some finer points.

Refs (spelled out):

AJ Vickers, Comparison of an ordinal and a continuous outcome measure of muscle soreness,  Int J Technology Assess Health Care. 1999;15(04):709–716
J Dawes, "Do data characteristics change according to the number of scale points used? An experiment using 5-point, 7-point and 10-point scales", Int J Market Res. 2008;51(1)
PA Bishop and RL Herron, Use and Misuse of the Likert Item Responses and Other Ordinal Measures, Int J Exerc Sci. 2015; 8(3): 297–302.


Do the motivations and fears behind Enneagram have any scientific reasoning?

The Enneagram model of personality (Riso and Hudson, 1999) has limited and mixed scientific evidence supporting it. One of the few studies reporting on the model's validity (Newgent et al., 2004) concluded the following in their abstract.

  Results of 287 participants were analyzed. Alpha suggests an adequate degree of internal consistency. Evidence provides mixed support for construct validity using correlational and canonical analyses but strong support for heuristic value.

Newgent et al. (2004)'s interpretation is consistent with my own reading of the limited Enneagram validation literature that exists. However, other validation studies do report their results in more unequivocally positive terms.

One such study claimed that they distinguished Enneagram types using a unique pattern of traits, values and implicit motives, thereby demonstrating that the Enneagram typology provides a way of describing the "whole person" (Sutton, Allinson and Williams, 2013). Another claimed that the enneagram typology appears to have diagnostic, prognostic, and heuristic value for the study of personality structure and dynamics (Wagner and Walker, 1983).

These claims are based on simple statistically significant relationships, however, which is frankly speaking more consistent with the interpretation of Newgent et al. (2004).

References

Newgent, R.A., Parr, P.E., Newman, I. & Higgins, K.K. (2004). The Riso-Hudson Enneagram type indicator: Estimates of reliability and validity. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 36, pp. 226–237.
Riso, D. R., & Hudson, R. (1999). The Riso-Hudson Enneagram type indicator. New York: The Enneagram Institute.
Sutton, A., Allinson, C., Williams, H. (2013). Personality type and work-related outcomes: An exploratory application of the Enneagram model, European Management Journal, Volume 31, Issue 3, June 2013, pp. 234-249, ISSN 0263-2373. doi: 10.1016/j.emj.2012.12.004.
Wagner, J. P. and Walker, R. E. (1983), Reliability and validity study of a Sufi personality typology: The enneagram. J. Clin. Psychol., 39: 712–717.


In the clinical definition, PTSD is a psychological disorder that develops in some people after a trauma. Interestingly, not every traumatized person develops chronic (ongoing) or acute (short-term) PTSD, nor has every person who develops PTSD gone through a dangerous event. The 'trauma' in the name can refer to events as diverse as hearing about a traumatic event from another person or seeing it on TV, or the death of a loved one (even if you weren't there).

The most important parts of diagnosing any mental illness are (a) is it causing suffering (either to the patient or other people), (b) it is statistically significant (is it unusual for the culture of the patient).

In the case of PTSD, it is enough that they are suffering for the clinician to look further.

PTSD usually occurs within 3 months of the incident, but some people develop symptoms after more than a year. Most people recover within 6 months, but others have long-term chronic symptoms.

To be diagnosed, a patient must have a constellation of varied symptoms. The ICD-10 and the DSM-5 describe the most common diagnostic criteria used today.

The best plan for a clinician is generally to develop a holistic outlook that takes into account the dynamics of the patient's case rather than to try to pigeonhole the patient into diagnostic criteria. Someone who experienced a traumatic event and has residual anxiety and depression may or may not be diagnostic with PTSD. PTSD, under the DSM-5 criteria, must include one re-experiencing symptom, one avoidance symptom, two arousal and reactivity symptoms, and two cognition and mood symptoms.

Since the treatment most commonly indicated for PTSD is anti-depressants/sleep aids and psychotherapy, which are also the treatments for many other mental illnesses, the particular diagnosis is less important than the welfare of the patient. PTSD patients can also benefit from exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring.

The US National Institute of Mental Health has a good introductory article on the subject.