What is the neurobiological difference between Jungian Judging and Perceiving individual?

As the Myers Briggs is not particularly valued among personality researchers (see here, for example), it is unlikely that you will find research explicitly focusing on this question.

However, the MBTI types Judging (and its counterpart Perceiving) have been shown to overlap with the Big Five personality dimension conscientiousness (Judging = more conscientious, Perceiving = less conscientious, see this earlier answer). Therefore, you can look for research on the relationship of conscientiousness and brain structures. A limited amount of research as explicitly investigated this question.

Quoting from a review by DeYoung (2010, p. 1173-1174):

  Conscientiousness appears to reflect variation in the capacity for self-discipline and organization that is necessary for this form of top-down
  control. Conscientiousness predicts academic and occupational success, as well as behavior that promote health and longevity (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). It is likely to be associated with functions of the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for much of the human ability to plan and follow complex rules (Bunge & Zelazo, 2006; Miller & Cohen, 2001). A structural MRI study found that Conscientiousness was associated with
  greater volume of the middle frontal gyrus in lateral prefrontal cortex (DeYoung et al., 2010), a region involved in maintaining goal-relevant information in working memory and in the execution of planned action based on abstract rules (Bunge & Zelazo, 2006).

There are some other studies on related constructs that may be interpreted as reflecting reflecting low conscientiousness (e.g., impulsivity, novelty seeking, and sensation seeking)

Again from DeYoung (2010, p. 1174):

  Functional neuroimaging studies have found that individual differences in self-reported impulsivity are associated with neural activity in both dorsal and ventral regions of lateral prefrontal cortex (Asahi, Okamato, Akado, Yamawaki, & Yokota, 2004; Brown, Manuck, Flory, & Hariri, 2006).
  Caution is required in interpreting studies of impulsivity, novelty seeking, and sensation seeking because these traits are heterogeneous in their associations with the Big Five, usually associated with Extraversion and sometimes with Neuroticism, as well as with Conscientiousness (Depue & Collins, 1999; Markon et al., 2005; Whiteside & Lynam, 2001). They seem to be compound traits, influenced by multiple more basic traits. Their
  compound nature appears to reflect the fact that problems of impulse control may be exacerbated both by weakness of the top-down control systems that override impulses (the presumed substrate of Conscientiousness) or by potentiation of the impulses themselves, which may be responses to cues of reward (Extraversion) or punishment (Neuroticism).

Note that this is correlational research that can't answer your causal question.

For a critique of this line of research ("oversimplification") see here, for example.

Also note that the review I cited (DeYoung, 2010) is quite old considering how fast paced the neuroscience literature is. The review should get you started for digging deeper. I couldn't find a more recent review, but there are some additional studies.

For example, Forbes et al. (2014) compared people with brain lesions and found that

  focal damage to the left [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] (Brodmann’s area 9) was associated with high neuroticism and low conscientious factor and facet scores (anxiety and self-discipline, respectively). Compared with lesioned and normal controls, veterans with damage in left DLPFC also reported higher neuroticism and lower conscientiousness facet scores, slower reaction times on the California Computerized Assessment Package assessment, and lower scores on the Delis–Kaplan executive function battery. Findings suggest that while neuroticism and conscientiousness remain psychometrically independent personality dimensions, their component facets may rely on a common neurocognitive infrastructure and executive function resources in general.

References

DeYoung, C. G. (2010). Personality Neuroscience and the Biology of Traits: Personality Neuroscience. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 1165–1180. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00327.x

Forbes, C. E., Poore, J. C., Krueger, F., Barbey, A. K., Solomon, J., & Grafman, J. (2014). The role of executive function and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the expression of neuroticism and conscientiousness. Social Neuroscience, 9, 139–151. doi:10.1080/17470919.2013.871333


What is an interstitial personality trait?

Many personality measures are organised hierarchically where broad traits are defined as the combination of multiple narrow traits. Broad traits are often called domains and narrow traits are often called facets.

Two influential examples are the NEO-PI and the HEXACO models of personality. For example, the NEO-PI has five broad traits and each broad trait is composed of 6 narrow traits. The HEXACO model includes six broad traits and each broad trait is composed of four narrow traits.

However, some measures include narrow traits that do not fit so neatly within a particular hierarchical framework. For example, factor analytic research may indicate that the trait loads substantially on more than one broad trait.

Interstitial traits are narrow traits that are meaningfully correlated with two or more broad traits.

The terminology comes from the word "interstices" meaning "a small space that lies between things". Thus, such traits occupy a narrow unique space that overlaps with more than one broad trait.

I'm not sure whether the term "interstitial" could be used to describe traits that are relatively unrelated to any broad trait.


What science or psychology is behind the Landmark Forum's coursework?

This isn't a direct answer to your question .

I got the sense that Landmark was in the same category as other so called 'power' therapies such as neurolinguistuc programming etc. The 7:30 report - a credible Australian current affairs program - did an story on Landmark last year.

References

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2011/s3367386.htm

Devilly, Grant J. (2005) "Power Therapies and possible threats to the science of psychology and psychiatry", Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 39, No. 6, June 2005, pp. 437-445(9)


Higgins, et al. (2010) linked to in the comments states that sexual dysfunction is a common side effect of antidepressants, particularly of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) and serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRIs) medications.  The reason from what the article points out is that:

  Sex is more than a physical act. It also includes emotional and psychological dimensions. The normal sex cycle consists of four successive phases: desire, arousal, orgasm, and resolution. These phases are facilitated by the interplay of neurotransmitters, hormones, and peptides. Different classes of antidepressants impact on all phases of the sexual response cycle to varying degrees.

The details pertaining to each class of antidepressant are summarised in Table 1 in the article.

Switching from SSRIs

Taylor, et al. (2013) reported that switching from sertraline to nefazodone was significantly less likely to result in re-emergence of the sexual dysfunction and was not associated with any worsening depression. Zajecka (2001) suggests that nefazodone, bupropion, and possibly mirtazapine have minimal or no negative impact on sexual functioning. However, individual responses to this strategy may vary.

  Firstly, the sexual dysfunction may recede but the depressive illness reasserts itself. Secondly, the change of medication may result in other associated side effects which may be more debilitating as they are present throughout the client’s day, not just when they want to have sex. Thirdly, the client who has experienced both the depression and the sexual dysfunction may feel that a ‘little’ depression is preferable to sexual dysfunction (Higgins, et al., 2010).

References

Higgins, A., Nash, M., & Lynch, A. M. (2010). Antidepressant-associated sexual dysfunction: impact, effects, and treatment. Drug, Healthcare and Patient Safety, 2, 141–150. DOI: 10.2147/DHPS.S7634PMCID: PMC3108697 (Full Text Accessible for Disabled)Free PDF: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108697/pdf/dhps-2-141.pdf

Taylor, M. J., Rudkin, L., Bullemor‐Day, P., Lubin, J., Chukwujekwu, C., & Hawton, K. (2013). Strategies for managing sexual dysfunction induced by antidepressant medication. The Cochrane Library 5. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD003382.pub3

Zajecka, J. (2001). Strategies for the treatment of antidepressant-related sexual dysfunction. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 62, 35-43. PMID: 11229451


Is there any research on what causes a pseudo-scientific mindset?

I'm alas not aware of systematic studies on cause of the pseudo-scientific mindset... But knowing some people who are inclined to that as well as believing some conspiracy theories... I suspect these two share some common causes. It's a lot easier to find science articles about the latter.
One posci article lists some of the usuals suspects regarding the pseudo-scientific mindset:

distrust of scientists/academics (goes well with those inclined to believe conspiracy theories)

and closely related, the Dunning-Krueger effect

various cognitive biases, including

clustering illusion
selection bias
and once some of those take hold, confirmation bias

money or other personal gains, although this isn't necessarily a true mindset, it just looks the same in may contexts, so can be hard to differentiate by an outside observer (let's not get to fMRI studies about detecting lying)

As you can see the putative causes can be pretty diverse...
It turns out there are some studies (and they generally support the above theorizing), for instance:

pre-existing paranormal beliefs were associated with an increased likelihood of students finding paranormal reports scientific, believable and credible.
[...]
Dagnall et al. (2007) suggested that while belief in the paranormal in undergraduate students is not necessarily associated with weakness in probabilistic reasoning, it is more strongly related to weaknesses associated with their understanding of randomness and misunderstanding of chance factors.

Also mostly as a response to uhoh, an NSF survey:

Of the 1,574 [US] adults that were surveyed, only one-third understood and could accurately describe the scientific process. Many Americans also agreed with a variety of pseudoscientific beliefs such as the existence of UFOs (30 percent), astrology (40 percent), and psychic powers (60 percent).

That was in 2003. I doubt things have gotten better in the age of alt-facts. In fact, researchers studying the campaign of Marine Le Pen (MLP), found...

that alternative facts are highly
persuasive: voters exposed to MLP rhetoric move their policy conclusions and voting
intensions toward MLP. Fact checking does nothing to undo these effects despite improving
factual knowledge of voters. Being exposed only to official facts also backfires
on voting intentions, as it increases political support for MLP, although to a smaller
extent than alternative facts, despite moving posteriors about facts toward the truth.

To me that sound similar to some the findings about how pseudoscience gets adopted by some.


How to analyze auditory steady state responses?

ASSR analysis is based on the fact that the electrophysiological responses are time locked with the stimulus repetition rate.

There is not one possible method of analysis. Generally spoken, ASSR analysis occurs in the spectral domain, and specifically the frequency of the stimulus repetition rate is analyzed, as well as its harmonics. For example, if the stimulus repetition rate is 100 Hz, the ASSR will occur at 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 300 Hz etc (Fig. 1). The base frequency (in this case, 100 Hz) will have the largest amplitude, and the harmonics decrease in amplitude. Detecting the presence of ASSR in the spectral domain means relying on amplitude and/or phase values (sometimes combined into a vector).

Fig. 1. ASSR base frequency and harmonics. Stimulus rate was 90 Hz. source: The Hearing Review

Sources
- The Hearing Review, November 2007
- Audiology Book (in Dutch)


12 percent of our dreams are in black and white?

It's difficult to tell. Dreams are very hard to analyse scientifically since they can't be objectively measured, only self-reported. Dreams are notoriously difficult to recall after waking, so it's almost impossible to tell for certain.

There are some self-report studies which do assert that some proportion of dreams are in black and white, but this pattern is not seen in dream reports in various historical sources, so a plausible explanation is that black-and-white dreaming is caused mainly by exposure to black-and-white film media throughout the early 20th century, and that the percentage of dreams that are in black-and-white are skewed toward older populations who grew up with black-and-white films (though I don't personally know of any hard data on this point)

See this article by Schwitzgebel, 2001, who recounts several primary sources to this effect: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/267/1/dreamb&w010430.pdf

Reference

Schwitzgebel, E. (2002). Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 33(4), 649-660. PDF


Strengthened Inhibitory Connections Between Neurons

The learning rule you describe (i.e. the change of synaptic weights from source neuron to target neuron depending on the temporal difference between source and target activity) is often referred to as 'classical' or 'standard' STDP (spike-timing dependent plasticity) and is focused on connections between excitatory cells. However, this simple form of plasticity is not enough to explain all experimental observations and has also computational problems with respect to stability i.e. there is in fact no 'standard' STDP, because the weight change is not only dependent on the temporal difference, but also on the voltage, location of the synapse, firing rate, the cell-type and probably other factors, see e.g. this article from 2010 dealing with questions surrounding STDP by Lisman and Spruston.

In short, the form of the learning rule depends on several factors and synaptic plasticity works differently for inhibitory cells.
As the question as to how plasticity works involving inhibitory cells is not an easy topic, I will refer to this review paper which deals with different induction protocols and potential functional implications (e.g. stability, homeostasis):
Review paper on inhibitory synaptic plasticity by Vogels et al.

Very recently, there also has been a research topic in Frontiers of Cellular Neuroscience on this topic: The editorial article briefly summarizes the different contributions


Where can I get data on lie detection and brain activity?

You might have trouble finding raw data but there have been plenty of studies looking at the neurological and physiological activity associated with deception, which may contain answers to your question:

A few examples:
Ganis et al used fMRI and found that both types of lies (rehearsed & spontaneous) elicited more activation than telling the truth in anterior prefrontal cortices (bilaterally), the parahippocampal gyrus (bilaterally), the right precuneus, and the left cerebellum. At least in part, distinct neural networks support different types of deception.

Thackray & Orne published a pretty thorough comparison of lie detection methods.

Bradley & Janisse looked at threat and deception but discuss physiological response in depth.

Abe et al used PET scans to argue that we have distinct neural pathways for deception.

Additionally Sip et al discuss the efficacy of deception detection and studies summarising that

  The problems
  that bedevilled the old technology have not
  been eliminated by the new

References:

Ganis, G., Kosslyn, S. M., Stose, S., Thompson, W. L., & Yurgelun-Todd, D. A. (2003). Neural correlates of different types of deception: an fMRI investigation. Cerebral cortex, 13(8), 830-836.

Thackray, R. I., & Orne, M. T. (1968). A COMPARISON OF PHYSIOLOGICAL INDICES IN DETECTION OE DECEPTION. Psychophysiology, 4(3), 329-339.

Bradley, M. T., & Janisse, M. P. (1981). Accuracy demonstrations, threat, and the detection of deception: Cardiovascular, electrodermal, and pupillary measures. Psychophysiology, 18(3), 307-315.

Abe, N., Suzuki, M., Mori, E., Itoh, M., & Fujii, T. (2007). Deceiving others: distinct neural responses of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala in simple fabrication and deception with social interactions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19(2), 287-295.

Sip, K. E., Roepstorff, A., McGregor, W., & Frith, C. D. (2008). Detecting deception: the scope and limits. Trends in cognitive sciences, 12(2), 48-53.


There doesn't seem to be much research on this, but based on my review of the research it appears that deaf people are generally slower readers than non-deaf readers - but that this may be affected by age. Essentially they may start as slower readers but become faster readers when they are older. See the evidence I found below:

Conrad, Richard. "The reading ability of deaf school‐leavers." British Journal of Educational Psychology 47.2 (1977): 138-148.

“4.5% of young deaf people were able to read at the level commensurate with their age”

Shroyer, Edgar H., and Jack Birch. "Captions and reading rates of hearing-impaired students." American Annals of the Deaf 125.7 (1980): 916-922.

The mean of the median scores for Hams and Sipay(s (1975) fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade students (intermediate) is 145 words per minute compared with a mean of 142 for the intermediate deaf students. For the hearing students on a junior high school level, the mean of the median reading rates was 188 words per minute and the mean for the deaf students 181 words per minute.

Hearing high school students had a mean of 216 words per minute compared with a mean of 275 words per minute for deaf students

Kelly L, Barac-Cikoja D. The comprehension of skilled deaf readers: The roles of word recognition and other potentially critical aspects of competence. In: Cain K, Oakhill J, editors. Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective. Guilford Press; 2007. pp. 244–279.

The median reading level of young deaf adults graduating from high school is 8 years below the average of their hearing peers

Bélanger, N. N., Slattery, T. J., Mayberry, R. I., & Rayner, K. (2012). Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading. Psychological Science, 23(7), 816-823.

Reading rate (words per minute) as a function of window size for skilled hearing readers (SKH), skilled deaf readers (SKD) and less skilled deaf readers (LSKD)


Does sleep-talking typically happen during NREM or REM sleep?

It seems like there is a common idea that dreaming occurs only during REM sleep, but I'm not quite sure why this persists. Scientists interested in sleep and dreaming have known for a long time that dreams occur in both NREM and REM sleep, and there are many papers comparing NREM to REM dreams.

Cavallero, C., Cicogna, P., Natale, V., Occhionero, M., & Zito, A. (1992). Slow wave sleep dreaming. Sleep, 15(6), 562-566.

A fairly old paper on sleep talking concludes:

  The distribution of sleep-talking incidents by time of night does not differ significantly from a random distribution.

  Sleep talking occurs both in REM
  (rapid eye movement) and NREM (no rapid
  eye movement) stages of sleep.

  Sleep-talking incidents occurring during REM periods were different in character
  from those occurring in NREM periods

Of note, in looking at their data:

  Of the 84 sleep-talking incidents, 7 (8%) occurred in REM periods, 53 (63%) occurred in Stage 2, and 24 (29%) in Stages 3 and 4.

Therefore, it does appear that there are fewer events during REM sleep, but because REM sleep is a smaller fraction of the night this difference is exaggerated.

Related to dreaming,

  Only 2 awakenings were made following REM sleep-talking incidents. Both REM awakenings produced detailed reports of "disturbing" dreams.

and

  By any of the usual criteria, one would say
  that subjects are dreaming while speaking
  during REM periods. All of the recent data
  on the relationship between dreaming and
  REM periods indicate that dreams occur
  during these periods.

However:

  if we accept the NREM
  waking report of mental activity as repre
  sentative of the mental activity that was
  actually occurring during the incident, we
  would describe these mental experiences as
  less "dreamlike" than the REM experiences.

Therefore, it seems like sleep-talking during REM is more associated with dreaming; sleep-talking with NREM may not be, and may be more associated with internal thoughts or just brief arousals.

Rechtschaffen, A., Goodenough, D. R., & Shapiro, A. (1962). Patterns of sleep talking. Archives of General Psychiatry, 7(6), 418-426.


Does dream recall disturb the processes of memory consolidation?

I am not aware of any study that specifically addresses dream recall, but there is a growing literature about "memory reconsolidation" or "post-reactivation plasticity", the idea that memory reactivation (recall) can temporarily return a memory to a state of high fragility and susceptibility to interference, after which a process similar to consolidation makes it more resistent again. Most  memory reconsolidation work has been with animals, but there are a few studies with human subjects [1][2]. [3] is an interesting paper about (re)consolidation of motor memory during slow-wave sleep. [4] and [5] are good reviews of the field.

[1] Hupbach, A., Gomez, R., Hardt, O., & Nadel, L. (2007). Reconsolidation of episodic memories: A subtle reminder triggers integration of new information. Learning & Memory, 14(1-2), 47 -53. doi:10.1101/lm.365707

[2] Forcato, C., Burgos, V. L., Argibay, P. F., Molina, V. A., Pedreira, M. E., & Maldonado, H. (2007). Reconsolidation of declarative memory in humans. Learning & Memory, 14(4), 295-303. doi:10.1101/lm.486107

[3] Walker, M. P., Brakefield, T., Hobson, J. A., & Stickgold, R. (2003). Dissociable stages of human memory consolidation and reconsolidation. Nature, 425(6958), 616–620. doi:10.1038/nature01930

[4] Nader, K., & Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: the case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 224–234. doi:10.1038/nrn2590

[5] Schiller, D., & Phelps, E. A. (2011). Does Reconsolidation Occur in Humans? Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 5. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00024


Can attention be improved to reduce the frequency of mistakes?

Sounds like a class of faults resulting mainly from a common sequence: habituation, automation, assimilation, discrimination error.

Habituation. The tasks you describe are generally simple, ordinary, and as you say, there is a "correct" way to do them that is known. This would encourage a heuristic-based approach to problem-solving response generation. Heuristics are generally not foolproof, but they're fast and relatively effortless. Suits these "mindless" tasks well when there are lots to do that just need doing.
Automation. The easier and more routine a task becomes is the more one will handle it without conscious, deliberate thought: i.e., without attention to detail or inhibition of first-impression-based impulses. One focuses instead on other decisions or plans; there's always the rest of the week to look forward to or worry about, and the task at hand is so boring that focusing on it is aversive.
Assimilation. Rote task performance that thus motivates diversion of attention for the sake of both efficiency and entertainment thereby encourages assimilation of new stimuli. In many ways, this process actually comes first, leading to habituation and automation. I bring it up now to transition my focus from the learning processes to the case-by-case response pattern that results. Assimilation is the foundation of habituation and automation, but it also results, as these are the processes of self-reinforcing feedback from assimilation decisions. More simply stated, when assimilation happens often, habits form. As habits flourish, automaticity sets in. At this point, one almost always chooses to assimilate a new scenario into existing schemas; it's harder to resist the urge.
Discrimination error.
Motivated inattention and hastened task processing inhibits accommodation. Thus when one operates on an imperfect heuristic (that may be redundant), applying incomplete schemas to new situations that are not represented accurately in these classes of supposedly known problems leads to errors. E.g., seeing a ton of multiplication problems might bias one toward ignoring the operator, failing to notice a 45º rotation of the symmetrical cross shape, and producing 15 when presented with $3+5$. Being frustrated with my elaborate jargon and complex sentence construction might incline a reader to skim; if the reader's intended task is to edit, s/he might expect more errors where errors are to be found, and in skimming, miss the extra word in a the sentence that constitutes an error. After frequent experiences of assimilation produce automated habits, one can hardly be blamed; the tendency is innate, adaptive, and somewhat invariant in terms of simple prevalence. I.e., most normal people do it, and variation mostly exists in relative frequencies $>0$.

Excluding abnormal individuals might make the phenomenon more invariant. Abnormal function like in the cognitive tendencies of people with obsessive compulsive personality disorder might present stronger exceptions to the rule that "everybody makes dumb mistakes sometimes," even somewhat often. But then again OCPD might not be such an exception, as its theoretical representations don't entirely match its real manifestations. (Same for its fictional representations; see my answer to Why is Mr. Monk unsure?)

I'm sure plenty of research can be found on how to encourage adaptive accommodation to prevent errors. I'm inclined to look toward motivation- and personality-based approaches, as those are my specialties – hence you might say they inform my own schemas and heuristics, encouraging me to assimilate your problem as just another of the kind I'm familiar with. If I fail to respond appropriately to any subtleties in your question as a result, consider it a demonstration! I admit I've spent most of my time so far on just reformulating and recapitulating the issue you describe.

Moving briefly into some modification strategies then, consider motivating attention. This can be achieved by increasing the sense of challenge to optimal levels that induce flow, which is a state of very intense, self-motivated, even blissful focus. Just produce the challenge by requiring higher accuracy, not faster task completion.

On somewhat less modifiable notes pertaining to individual differences in error frequencies, conscientiousness and cognitive complexity seem like relevant traits. Conscientiousness relates to attention to detail and concern for error prevention. Cognitive complexity relates to adaptive thought and tolerance for complex or multitudinous schemas, which would discourage over-application of too-simple schemas for every problem encountered.


What is the word for: "I have to do" in CBT?

You could be referring to two different things.

1) This is an example of an intermediate belief. Cognitions can be thought of as three levels: automatic thoughts (which are the first thoughts that pop into our heads), intermediate beliefs (which often take the form of rules, attitudes, and assumptions), and core beliefs (which reflect our deepest levels of thought and core values).

An example is:

Situation: Not understanding part of a lecture
Automatic thought: I'll never learn this! I'm an idiot! Why bother trying?
Intermediate beliefs: (which can take the form of should or must statements)

*Attitude: Failing at anything is terrible

*Assumption: If I challenge myself, I'm sure to fail. If I do things that come easily, I'll succeed.

*Rule: If I can't do this easily, I should just give up.
Core belief: I'm incompetent

2) The statements you mention are also examples of dysfunctional thoughts (also called cognitive distortions), specifically all-or-nothing thinking (seeing things in black or white) or "imperatives" (should or must statements).

These errors in thinking are our tendency to draw invalid conclusions or selectively pay attention to evidence to support our thinking.
Example of all-or-nothing thinking: If I don't get a 100% on the test, I'm a failure. If she doesn't return my phone call immediately, she hates me. (That second example is also a bit of jumping to conclusions).
Example of imperatives: Making any mistake is terrible; I should always do my best. If I ask for help, I am weak; I must be completely self-reliant.

Search these terms for more information: Intermediate beliefs, dysfunctional thoughts, cognitive distortions

Reference:

Beck, J.S. (2011). Cognitive Behavior Therapy. 2nd Edition. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.


What was the experiment where a person is given something and then has to share it with another person

The experiment you are referring to is usually called the ultimatum game, and was first experimentally tested by Güth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze in 1982 [1].

[1]  Güth, Werner, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze. "An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 3.4 (1982): 367-388. PDF


Asking "What's wrong in you life?" → Person sees more problems

This is priming effect. There are some experiments closely related to your observation:
Strack, F., Martin, L.L. and Schwarz, N. (1988), Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments of life satisfaction. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol., 18: 429-442. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420180505
In this paper, the significant change in correlation between happiness and subject of previously asked question was observed, as against to the same question asked after the question about happiness.
Also framing effect can be related to your question: the way which question about person's life is asked can change the expected answer to the question (along with temporal opinion about given subject). When the process is repetitive, it can factor into more permanent change.
Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel (1981). "The Framing of decisions and the psychology of choice". Science. 211 (4481): 453–58. doi:10.1126/science.7455683
Related to this is also confrmation bias - in case of a question about some negative aspects of some subject (in this case life), more negative memories about it is primed, what substancially changes the way we process the subject
Nickerson, Raymond S. (June 1998), "Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises", Review of General Psychology, 2 (2): 175–220, doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175


Neural correlates of pleasantness and unpleasantness

Simply put, pleasant/unpleasant sensations are associated with the activation of certain brain regions:

  Many affective stimuli are hedonically complex mixtures containing
  both pleasant and unpleasant components. To investigate whether the
  brain represents the overall affective value of such complex stimuli,
  or the affective value of the different components simultaneously, we
  used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain
  activations to a pleasant odor (jasmine), an unpleasant odor (indole),
  and a mixture of the two that was pleasant. In brain regions that
  represented the pleasantness of the odors such as the medial
  orbitofrontal cortex (as shown by activations that correlated with the
  pleasantness ratings), the mixture produced activations of similar
  magnitude to the pleasant jasmine, but very different from the
  unpleasant indole. These regions thus emphasize the pleasant aspects
  of the mixture. In contrast, in regions representing the
  unpleasantness of odors such as the dorsal anterior cingulate and
  midorbitofrontal cortex the mixture produced activations that were
  relatively further from the pleasant component jasmine and closer to
  the indole. (The Journal of Neuro Science)


What is the reason behind terrorist attacks?

As others have mentioned, different individuals and groups can have broad (and conflicting) motivations for specific actions. I found this post on the Politics SE while looking up a similar question, though I don't know if this is exactly what you are asking. The post asks why ISIS performs terrorist attacks when it brings them more attention and threat. Ultimately, they just have different goals. Looking at it from one perspective, it seems "wrong". Looking at it from another, it completely makes sense.

This answer (to the above question) does a great job of explaining how ISIS stated goals relate. These goals are not focused on conquest or "winning" in the traditional sense, but much more on bringing division into the world. If this is the goal, terrorist attacks that bring fear, racism, and religious judgement from the West are right (again, towards this purpose).

Long story short: they have a different goal than many people. These attacks are actually quite rational, when working towards that goal. It is the goal itself that we find irrational.

As to why people believe in one goal vs. another: I don't think that this has a universal answer. Lots of complex things can go into this belief, and they can greatly vary by individual.


What is the consensus on the Golden Rectangle?

A quick search found a 2015 paper titled "Time to let go? No automatic aesthetic preference for the golden ratio in art pictures."

  The golden ratio is a frequently studied topic in many scientific disciplines, and, in psychology, it has been proposed as being a (universal) law governing aesthetic preferences. Empirical evidence for the golden ratio is equivocal and typically demonstrated through explicit (i.e., conscious, deliberate) evaluations using direct measurement methods (e.g., surveys). Here, we examined whether the golden ratio reflects an automatically elicited preference using the Implicit Association Test. We used real art images, with the foreground object presented in the golden ratio as well as either in the center (Studies 1 and 2) or ¾ ratio (Study 3). Both explicit and implicit evaluations did not reveal a clear preference for the golden ratio over other ratios. A possible preference for the golden ratio does not seem to be automatically elicited and may, rather, be driven by art expertise. This again calls into dispute the universality of a preference for the golden ratio.

So based on this it's disputable, at the very least, that the golden ratio is as pleasing as the received wisdom claims. I could not find something like a meta-analysis.


Participant / Subject Pool Management Solutions

here is an open source project: http://www.goeritz.net/panelware/

With a paper: http://www.goeritz.net/panelware/BRM4.pdf

Might be a little outdated but still work ...


Interclick interval resolution of the ear

There have been studies on this, both with paired clicks and long streams of clicks.  Normal listeners can detect changes of the sort you describe with essentially perfect reliability down to about 45 ms and with better chance performance below 30 ms.  I haven't been able to find a study measuring the minimal threshold for this change, but from the studies I have found it should probably be in the 10-20 ms range.

As for how the interval affects it, the answer depends on the direction of change and the direction of interval change, so it is hard to give a single answer.  The affect seems to be larger at larger interval changes.

Note that this is a very low-level task, with slightly higher modulation rates processed at the very lowest levels of the auditory pathway.  It is also a task that is highly "conserved" evolutionarily, that is it is very consistent across species.  Fish have similar performance to humans at this task.  And not that in the stream study, it used mismatch negativity, which is a change in electrical activity in your brain that occurs even if you are not paying attention to the stimulus and don't consciously notice the change.


NEO-FFI vs. NEO-FFI-3: What's the difference?

First a bit of background for those who may not know what NEO-FFI is...

NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) is a shortened version of the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) now in its 3rd edition (NEO-PI-3). Both inventories were first published in 1985 and now the NEO-FFI is also in its 3rd edition as of 2005 (NEO-FFI-3).

NEO-FFI-3 measures the "Big 5" personality traits (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness), comprises 60 items and is designed to take 10 to 15 minutes to complete; by contrast, the NEO-PI-3  takes 45 to 60 minutes to complete.

Both NEO-PI and NEO-FFI were originally developed for use with adult men and women without overt psychopathy.

Now onto the question of difference between the 2nd and 3rd editions

The latest revision of the NEO-FFI involved the replacement of 15 of the 60 items to improve readability and psychometric properties.  The revised edition is now thought to be more suitable for younger individuals and is also thought to have a stronger factor structure and increased reliability (McCrae & Costa, 2010).

For further reading, see the NEO research bibliography

References

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr., (2010). NEO Inventories: Professional manual. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc.


People's subjective tendency: Is there a mathematical model?

I think there is a mathematical model for this.
Have a look at Bayes' Theorem. It is also very interesting from a philosophical and psychological point of view.

Here is a link from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/


Can an extravert suffer from social anxiety disorder?

It's pretty difficult to imagine a person with Social Anxiety Disorder being an extrovert.  The symptoms of SAD include [1]:

  Intense fear of interacting with strangers and of being judged
  Worrying about embarrassing or humiliating yourself or that others think that you look anxious
  Anxiety that disrupts your daily routine, work, school or other activities
  Avoiding doing things or speaking to people out of fear of embarrassment
  Avoiding situations where you might be the center of attention
  Difficulty making eye contact or talking

Signs and symptoms include blushing, sweating, trembling or shaking, fast heartbeat, upset stomach, nausea, shaky voice, muscle tension, confusion, diarrhea, and cold, clammy hands.

Extroverts, on the other hand, usually don't have any problems with the above situations.

Introversion and extroversion are not either/or, but exist on a continuum. One can have attributes of both, and empathy with both. SAD is not on this continuum.

[1] Mayo Clinic


EEG in fMRI: High frequency "deltas" in EEG after gradient artifact removal

These seem to be simply gradient artifact remnants- Brain products analyzer didn't fully clean them.

Looking over the spectrogram of another EEG before the gradient artifact removal- it seems as if this noise is merely leftovers of the gradient artifact caused by the fMRI system (noticed that these spikes were greatly reduced by the brain vision analyzer gradient artifact cleaner, but in some cases- this transform left much noise in these frequencies).


Is "gaslighting" a mainstream concept in the cognitive sciences?

The wikipedia article you linked to regarding the term Gaslighting has references to clinical and research literature.

Dorpat, (1996) talks about the incidences of Gaslighting conducted by therapists.

  In treatment, the psychotherapist is in a position of power. Often, this power is unintentionally abused. While trying to embody a compassionate concern for patients, therapists use accepted techniques that can inadvertently lead to control, indoctrination, and therapeutic failure. Contrary to the stated tradition and values of psychotherapy, they subtly coerce patients rather than respect and genuinely help them. The more gross kinds of patient abuse, deliberate ones such as sexual and financial exploitation, are expressly forbidden by professional organizations. However, there are no regulations discouraging the more covert forms of manipulation, which are not even considered exploitative by many clinicians.

Jacobson & Gottman, (1998) talks about wife batterers.

  After their decade of research with more than 200 couples, the authors conclude that not all batterers are alike, nor is the progression of their violence always predictable. But they have found that batterers tend to fall into one of two categories, which they call "Pit Bulls" and "Cobras". Pit Bulls, men whose emotions quickly boil over, are driven by deep insecurity and an unhealthy dependence on the mates whom they abuse. Pit Bulls also tend to become stalkers, unable to let go of relationships that have ended.

  Cobras, on the other hand, are cool and methodical as they inflict pain and humiliation on their spouses or lovers (Source: Google Books synopsis)

In the book, it says

  A tactic of emotional abuse that is common among Pit Bulls, but not Cobras, is the phenomenon known as "gaslighting."  (The term comes from the film Gaslight, in which Charles Boyer convinces Ingrid Bergman that she is going insane.)  We gave an example of this phenomenon with Dave and Judy, in which he blatantly denied that he was a batterer.  Gaslighting is a systematic attach on the wife's perception of reality.

The term has been used in articles I have read within the last few months including one by Christine Louis de Canonville (2017) who has a B.A. (Hons.) degree in Psychology, and Sarkis (2017) within PsychologyToday.

If you search Google Scholar, the site will return thousands of results including articles in therapy journals, so the concept of gaslighting is widely accepted in the cognitive sciences.

References

Dorpat, T. L. (1996). Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation, and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. New York:Jason AronsonISBN-10: 1-5682-1828-1ISBN-13: 978-1-5682-1828-1

Jacobson, N. S. & Gottman, J. M. (1998). When Men Batter Women: New Insights into Ending Abusive Relationships. New York:Simon and SchusterISBN-10: 1-4165-5133-6ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5133-1

Louis de Canonville, C. (2017). The Effects of Gaslighting on Victims of Narcissistic Abuse [Online]Available at: http://narcissisticbehavior.net/the-effects-of-gaslighting-in-narcissistic-victim-syndrome/

Sarkis, S. (2017) Are Gaslighters Aware of What They Do? [Online]Available at:https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/are-gaslighters-aware-what-they-do


This is Unilateral Control Model of Behaviour.  The opposite is "Give Up Control Model" and in the middle, you have "Mutual Learning".  You can see another copy of Unilateral Control's definition here.

  Having goals is essential to being effective as an individual, team, and organization. But when you use a unilateral control mindset, you see challenging situations as a contest in which there are winners and losers.


Yes.  Clare W. Graves was a contemporary of Maslow.  He and Maslow used to go back and forth – as Graves thought Maslow's theory was incomplete (too closed).  At the end, Maslow agreed with Graves.  Graves died before much of his work was really accepted.  Cowan and Beck carried on his work.

It is, in my humble opinion, the most brilliant explanation for human development ever created.  It covers humanity as individuals and as collections (cultures), and Graves also created a system of change theory that matched.

You'll find the most ardent advocate is Don Beck, who was largely responsible (using the theories developed by Graves) to assist Mandela in South Africa.  It's called Spiral Dynamics Integral now by Don Beck.  There are many who continue studying this work.

Research confirms it.  There is ongoing research (Online PeopleScan) that is used by cutting-edge consultants in business and organizations.


How to measure verbal and visual working memory?

Conway et al. (2005) gives a really nice overview of tasks to measure working memory capacity (WMC). I would refer to that publication for details about the tasks. I'll summarize two tasks below that are related to your question.

Verbal Working Memory.
A classic way to measure verbal working memory is a reading span task. The task involves presenting sentences to a subject who makes a judgment about whether the sentence is coherent or not. The subject must also remember some key word (e.g. the last word) in the sentence. The subject reads several such sentences, and then has to recall all of the key words in order. The more sentences that the subject can read, the higher their verbal working memory.

Visual Working Memory
Visual/spatial working memory can be tested in a similar way, but with spatial stimuli instead of sentences. One such task is a rotation-span task. In this task, you see a rotated letter, like this:

You have to make a judgment about whether the letter is in the correct orientation (if it were upright, would it be normal or flipped?). After you do that, you then see something like this:

You have to remember what direction the arrow was pointing. You then repeat the process several times, alternating between letters and arrows, until you are asked to recall the order of orientations for all the arrows you saw.


Are human behavior and brain dynamics well described as an optimization?

Quirin et al (2020) have developed a dynamic systems approach that uses optimisation consider behaviour and personality.
Quirin, M., Robinson, M. D., Rauthmann, J. F., Kuhl, J., Read, S. J., Tops, M., and DeYoung, C. G. (2020) The Dynamics of Personality Approach (DPA): 20 Tenets for Uncovering the Causal Mechanisms of Personality. Eur. J. Pers., https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2295.


Do some Photosensitive epileptics desire seizures?

The article I found goes into the general phenomenon of seizure self-induction, but does spend quite a bit of time on photosensitive epilepsy (PSE).  It's a review, so there are plenty of references.

It first points out the prevalence of PSE, which occurs in between 2-5% of the population, and approximately 25% of those affected by the disorder are thought to self-stimulate.

The article supports the assertion on Wikipedia that developmentally challenged and "learning disabled" children are most prone to these self-inductive behaviors, but states that children of normal intelligence and higher may have developed strategies to avoid getting caught doing so during recorded sessions.  It does not go into much depth regarding adults self-inducing, but tacitly assumes that adults of normal intelligence would be more likely to understand the harm that a seizure could bring them.

There is support for the notion that children with television induced seizures do try to seek out televisions for this self-stimulation behavior, but the article cautions that this compulsive behavior may be associated with the seizure activity itself, and not something the patients are consciously doing, many describe it as "irresistable."

The article lists a handful of reasons that are commonly thought to promote self-induction:

  Compulsion - whether for pleasure seeking or as a result of seizure activity
  Willful avoidance of stress or boredom
  Hedonistic motivation - to experience an "aura"/trance or other pleasurable feelings
  Sense of control - so they can have a "say" over when their seizures occur, and also so that they can reap the benefits of the refractory period
  Attention seeking - being the "sick patient" for sympathetic family members
  Self-treatment - the patient can give themselves a dose of "convulsive therapy" at will, if this gives them therapeutic relief of concomitant disorders

Stronger doses of anticonvulsant medications, medications to quell any pleasurable reinforcement gained from inducing seizures, specialized contact lenses or glasses to block more light (in the case of PSE), and general behavioral modification strategies are all treatment approaches that can be used.  Emphasis is given to knowing when children are self-inducing and involving a psychiatrist in the loop of neurological and pediatric care.

  Ng, B-Y (2002) Psychiatric aspects of self-induced epileptic
  seizures.  Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry,36:534–543.


This is called "demand characteristics":

  ... an experimental artifact where participants form an interpretation
  of the experiment's purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to
  fit that interpretation.

An example is:

  The good-participant role in which the participant attempts to discern
  the experimenter's hypotheses and to confirm them. The participant
  does not want to "ruin" the experiment.

Demand characteristics are a type of response bias:

  ... a general term for a wide range of cognitive biases that influence
  the responses of participants away from an accurate or truthful
  response. These biases are most prevalent in the types of studies and
  research that involve participant self-report, such as structured
  interviews or surveys.

Another related type of response bias is the "social desirability bias":

  ... the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner
  that will be viewed favorably by others.


Why don't the Big 5 personality traits have more neutral names?

Well, in a recent debate whether Big Five is... ahem... sexist, this was mentioned, which pertains your question:

  There’s another flaw when it comes to taking Big Five personality tests online. The online versions of the Big Five traits inform people of negative character traits, without explaining that the positivity or negativity of all characteristics is shaped by context.

  Costa believes that the Big Five’s willingness to point out negative traits makes the test more accurate: Myers-Briggs avoids “anything that could be negative. And that’s a great big marketing thing,” he says. But each potentially negative Big Five character trait is informed by the situation. “They’re only negative in certain contexts,” he says.

  For example, Costa explains, agreeable people are great for a blind date, but tend to be overly dependent. Disagreeable people, meanwhile, aren’t good at smoothing over arguments. But they’re also less likely to obediently follow immoral orders—such as those demonstrated by the Milgram experiment, wherein participants are asked to administer increasingly intense electric shocks to a victim. (The longer IPIP-NEO test briefly acknowledged the importance of context, noting, “agreeableness is not useful in situations that require tough or absolute objective decisions,” but the Big Five Inventory website offered no such explanations.)

For more context, Paul Costa is one the original authors of NEO-PI, one of the main instruments that shaped Big Five testing.

So, according to him, avoiding negativity either explicit (or the complementary/implicit one) in the design wasn't a goal because it hindered accuracy. I guess that doesn't completely answer the question about naming of the dimensions, but it's probably informative. (Do note that one of the Big 5 dimensions has a rather negative name--neuroticism.)

Costa's point about commercial tests' negativity-avoidance seems to apply to DISC as well.

The factor-naming issue itself was covered in detail in a 1992 paper of McCrae and John (which has very high number of citations for a psychology paper):

  The consensus that five-factorists see among themselves may be puzzling to outsiders because the "disagreement among analysts as to factor titles" that Tupes and Christal noted still plagues the field (John,
  1990b). Factor names reflect historical accidents, conceptual positions,
  and the entrenchment that comes from a published body of literature
  and from published instruments. There are two prominent systems for
  naming the factors, one derived from the lexical tradition and one from
  the questionnaire tradition.

  Many writers take Norman's (1963) annunciation of an "adequate
  taxonomy of personality attributes" derived from Cattell's reduction of
  natural language trait terms as the formal beginning of the FFM, and
  the factor numbers and names Norman chose—I: Extraversion or Surgency; II: Agreeableness; III: Conscientiousness; IV: Emotional Stability;
  and V: Culture—are often used. Peabody and Goldberg (1989)
  have noted that the order in which these factors emerged roughly parallels
  their representation among English language trait terms in the
  dictionary: Many more words can be found to describe aspects of Factors
  I through III than of Factors IV and V. The factor numbers, I to V,
  are thus meaningful designations. Roman numerals also have the advantage
  of being theoretically neutral; they seem to stand above the fray
  of disputed factor interpretations.

  The second tradition that led to the modern FFM comes from the
  analysis of questionnaires, and particularly from the work of H. J.
  Eysenck, who identified Extraversion (E) and Neuroticism (N) as major
  components of psychological tests. (It was Wiggins, 1968, who dubbed
  these the "Big Two," setting the stage for Goldberg's 1981 designation
  of the FFM as the "Big Five.") Costa and McCrae (1980) added
  a dimension they called Openness to Experience (O), and later (1985,
  1989) created scales to measure Agreeableness (A) and Conscientiousness
  (C). A number of publications (e.g., Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1990;
  Funder & Colvin, 1988; Tellegen & Waller, in press; Wiggins & Pincus,
  1989; Zuckerman, Bernieri, Koestner, & Rosenthal, 1989) have
  adopted this nomenclature. Note that N corresponds to low Emotional
  Stability, —IV, and O is a variant of Norman's Factor V.

  If the advantage of the Norman numbers is their theoretical neutrality,
  the disadvantage is their low mnemonic value. Initials, originally popularized
  by H. J. Eysenck, are easier to interpret, and they may be less
  theoretically laden than full names. To those for whom Neuroticism
  connotes psychiatric disorder, negative affectivity (Watson & Clark,
  1984) or simply nervousness may seem more apt; all can be characterized
  by N. Likewise, E can also stand for energy or enthusiasm (cf.
  Watson & Clark, in press); O for originality; A for affiliation (Leary,
  1957) or affection (Brand, 1984), and C for constraint (Tellegen, 1982)
  or control (Krug & Johns, 1986).

So yes, if the spelled-out names really bother interpretation-wise, an alternative is to use just the first letter designator (and/or numbers, but the latter seems a less popular approach). I did see recent papers do the former (use just the letters) although mainly in tables for compactness.

And in excruciating detail as to level of consensus on the naming of each factor (which seems to be roughly N > E ~ A ~ C > O), the same paper continues:

  The problem of what to call the factors is not merely a matter of convention.
  The labels refiect conceptualizations, and five-factor advocates
  differ in the details of their views on the factors, and thus in their
  preferred names. [...]

  There is probably the least controversy about the definition of N. N
  represents individual differences in the tendency to experience distress,
  and in the cognitive and behavioral styles that follow from this tendency.
  High N scorers experience chronic negative affects (Watson &
  Clark, 1984) and are prone to the development of a variety of psychiatric
  disorders (Zonderman, Stone, & Costa, 1989). The recurrent
  nervous tension, depression, frustration, guilt, and self-consciousness
  that such individuals feel is often associated with irrational thinking,
  low self-esteem, poor control of impulses and cravings, somatic complaints,
  and ineffective coping (McCrae & Costa, 1987). Individuals
  low in N are not necessarily high in positive mental health, however
  that may be defined—they are simply calm, relaxed, even-tempered,
  unflappable.

  Despite the long and common use of the term Extraversion, there is
  less consensus about E. Most of the differences can be traced to the
  fact that E and A together define the Interpersonal Circumplex, around
  which interpersonal terms are spaced almost evenly. The traditional
  axes of the circumplex are Dominance (or Status) and Affiliation (or
  Love; Wiggins, 1979), and the major dispute about E (Norman's Factor
  1) concerns its alignment with these axes. Goldberg (1990), guided
  by his analyses of English language trait terms, and Wiggins (in press),
  guided by the interpersonal tradition, identify this factor with Dominance.
  McCrae and Costa (1989c) argue that E is best seen as located
  midway between Dominance and Warmth (although perhaps a bit closer
  to Dominance). This position, which Peabody and Goldberg (1989)
  designate as I', is close to the location of such traditional questionnaire
  measures of E as H. J. Eysenck and S. B. G. Eysenck's (1975) E scale
  and the EI scale of the MBTI.

  The advantage ofthe I' position is that it aligns the factor more closely
  with its noninterpersonal aspects, particularly positive emotionality. As
  Watson and Clark describe in their contribution to this issue, the tendencies
  to experience positive and negative emotions are not opposites, but
  orthogonal dimensions that define an affective plane. People who are
  cheerful, enthusiastic, optimistic, and energetic are not necessarily low
  in anxiety or depression—that depends on their level of N. But cheerful
  people consistently tend to be dominant, talkative, sociable, and warm,
  and Watson and Clark (in press) argue that positive emotionality should
  be seen as the core of E. This somewhat unorthodox view is probably
  a useful corrective to the narrowly interpersonal interpretation of E as
  sociability.

  E is distinguished by its breadth of content. In their review, Watson
  and Clark (in press) identified seven components of E: venturesomeness,
  affiliation, positive affectivity, energy, ascendance, and ambition.
  As Table 1 shows, Costa and McCrae's view of E is similarly broad,
  although they would divide affiliation into warmth and gregariousness
  and assign ambition to C." The fact that such a wide variety of interpersonal,
  affective, and temperamental variables covary probably accounts
  for the fact that this factor is so well represented in English language
  adjectives and so often described by personality theorists.
  The lexical literature suggests that individuals low in E can be described
  as quiet, reserved, retiring, shy, silent, and withdrawn (John,
  1990a), and Q-sort correlates point to emotional blandness and overcontrol
  of impulses as additional attributes. Nowhere in this description
  is introspectiveness seen: Low E must be distinguished from Guilford's
  (1977) Thinking Introversion (which is more closely related to O and
  C). The confusion between social and thinking introversions is perpetuated
  in the MBTI, where both kinds of traits are attributed to individuals
  classified as Introverts. In fact, the MBTI EI scale is a relatively pure
  measure of low E (McCrae & Costa, 1989a).

  The label Agreeableness has been almost universally used for Norman's
  Factor II, but as Digman (1990) noted, "Agreeableness . . .
  seems tepid for a dimension that appears to involve the more humane
  aspects of humanity—characteristics such as altruism, nurturance, caring,
  and emotional support at the one end of the dimension, and hos
  tility, indifference to others, self-centeredness, spitefulness, and jealousy
  at the other" (pp. 422-424). Digman and Takemoto-Chock (1981)
  offered "Friendly Compliance versus Hostile Noncompliance" as an
  alternative descriptor for the factor, and Graziano and Eisenberg (in
  press) adopted the contrast "Agreeableness versus Antagonism."
  Because A must be orthogonal to E, the location—and thus the interpretation—
  of A depends to some extent on one's view of E. Again,
  Goldberg and Wiggins see this factor as Love or Warmth; Costa et al.
  (1991) note a cluster of attributes that blend Warmth and Submission,
  including trust, modesty, and compliance.

  Like A, C is a highly evaluated dimension; indeed, A and C are
  the classic dimensions of character, describing "good" versus "evil"
  and "strong-willed" versus "weak-willed" individuals. Perhaps it was
  these moral overtones that often led scientific psychologists to ignore
  these factors, but in fact, both represent objectively observable dimensions
  of individual differences. Some people are thorough, neat, wellorganized,
  diligent, and achievement-oriented, whereas others are not,
  and self-reports of these characteristics can be validated by peer or
  spouse ratings (McCrae & Costa, 1987).

  A number of different conceptions of C have been offered. Tellegen's
  (1982) Constraint and Hogan's (1986) Prudence reflect an inhibitive
  view of C as a dimension that holds impulsive behavior in check.
  Digman and Takemoto-Chock's (1981) Will to Achieve represents a
  proactive view of C as a dimension that organizes and directs behavior.
  The term Conscientiousness combines both aspects, because it can
  mean either governed by conscience or diligent and thorough. Empirically,
  both kinds of traits seem to covary.

  The greatest controversy concerns O, and the root ofthe controversy
  is the disparity between natural language and questionnaire studies.
  Studies of trait adjectives in English (Goldberg, 1990; John, 1990a)
  and German (Ostendorf, 1990) typically show a factor defined by such
  items as intelligent, imaginative, and perceptive, and researchers from
  Fiske (1949) to Hogan (1986) and Digman (1990) have identified this
  factor as some form of Intellect. However, many traits related to O
  are not represented among English trait adjectives—there is, for example,
  no single English word that means "sensitive to art and beauty"
  (McCrae, 1990). Researchers using questionnaires have typically found
  a much broader factor that includes, in addition to creativity and intellectual
  interests, differentiated emotions, aesthetic sensitivity, need for
  variety, and unconventional values. This broader concept can be traced
  to Rogers (1961), Rokeach (1960), and Coan (1974); McCrae and Costa
  (in press) have argued that O is seen structurally in the depth, scope,
  and permeability of consciousness, and motivationally in the need for
  variety and experience. Ideas, of course, form an important aspect of
  consciousness, but fantasies, feelings, sensations, and values are also
  experiences to which individuals can be more or less open.
  Several discussions of the relative merits of these two conceptions
  have been offered (Digman, 1990; John, 1990a; McCrae & Costa,
  1985b, in press; Peabody & Goldberg, 1989). One point that should
  be emphasized is that neither Openness nor Intellect is equivalent to
  measured intelligence; O is a dimension of personality, not intellectual
  ability, and many people score high in O without having a correspondingly
  high IQ.

  A recent study illustrates the empirical basis for broadening the conception
  of this factor beyond Intellect. John (1989a) examined ACL
  and CQS data from expert raters at the Institute of Personality Assessment
  and Research. Based on a review of the literature, a panel of
  judges selected 112 prototype items from the ACL to mark the five dimensions.
  Many of the terms selected to represent O were consistent
  with either an Intellect or an Openness interpretation, including wide
  interests, imaginative, original, curious, and artistic. But because the
  literature emphasized the Intellect interpretation, judges also included
  such terms as wise, logical, and foresighted. When observer ratings on
  the 112 items were factored for a sample of 280 ratees, the five-factor
  model was clearly recovered, but wise, logical, and foresighted were
  not among the clear definers of the Intellect/Openness factor (Table 1
  lists the six highest-loading adjectives). Empirical analyses shifted the
  factor from a clear Intellect to a mixed Intellect/Openness factor.
  When ACL factor scores were correlated with CQS ratings by the
  same experts, the significant correlates (|r | > .40) showed the full range
  of traits associated with Openness. Individuals rated low on the factor
  were described by "judges in conventional terms," "favors conservative
  values," and "represses anxiety;" those rated high were described by
  "high degree of intellectual capacity," "enjoys aesthetic impressions,"
  "has wide interests," and "unusual, unconventional thought." As seen
  in this list, O includes aspects of intellect, but is considerably broader
  in scope.

What is obvious from all this is that many researchers have gone to great lengths to put interpretive names to the factors. You can argue that that is a bad thing, but then I'm not here to argue the counterpoint, but to show it happened.

There are however some researchers which have argued that [counter]point, on the basis that interpretive naming can lead to further testable hypotheses as to the underlying mechanisms for the factors:

  Whatever
  the inadequacies of the natural language for
  scientific systematics, broad dimensions inferred
  from folk usage are not a bad place
  to start a taxonomy. Even in the biological
  taxonomy of animals, “the technical system
  evolved from the vernacular” (Simpson,
  1961, pp. 12–13).

  Obviously, a system that initially derives
  from the natural language does not need to
  reify such terms indefinitely. Indeed, several of
  the dimensions included among the Big Five,
  most notably Extraversion and Neuroticism,
  have been the target of various physiological
  and mechanistic explanations (e.g., Canli et
  al., 2001; see also L. A. Clark, 2005). In research
  on emotion regulatory processes, the
  links between the Big Five, the chronic use
  of particular regulatory strategies, and their
  emotional and social consequences are being
  articulated (John & Gross, 2007). Similarly,
  the conceptual explication of Extraversion
  and Neuroticism as persistent dispositions
  toward thinking and behaving in ways that
  foster, respectively, positive and negative affective
  experiences (e.g., Tellegen, 1985; see
  also Clark & Watson, Chapter 9, this volume)
  promises to connect the Big Five with
  individual differences in affective functioning,
  which, in turn, may be studied in more tightly
  controlled laboratory settings (see Gross,
  Chapter 28, this volume). At this point, the
  Big Five differentiate domains of individual
  differences that have similar surface manifestations—
  just like the early animal taxonomy
  that was transformed by better accounts of
  evolutionary processes and by the advent of
  new tools, such as molecular genetics. Likewise,
  the structures and processes underlying
  these personality trait domains are now
  beginning to be explicated. Explanatory and mechanistic terms will likely change the definition
  and assessment of the Big Five dimensions
  as we know them today.


What article reported variability in supporting hypotheses across disciplines?

Fanelli D (2010) “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10068. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010068

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010068


Whats analysis of both sides is called in psychology?

As highlighted in the comments, not all observations necessarily need a term in psychology, but there is a term for this.

Therapy plans will often involve getting the client to try to look at their situation (past or present) in a different context. Some people would call this "wearing other peoples shoes", or in other words they might say "if I were in their shoes...", and some will call it looking at it from another person's viewpoint or perspective.

The more accepted term you are after is Emotional Intelligence (Bertram, et al.  2016), also known as Emotional quotient (EQ) and Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EIQ), yet I dislike the terms involving intelligence because it insinuates that those who find difficulty with looking at certain people's points of view are not as intelligent as others who can.  Yet this is not necessarily the case.

Emotional Intelligence involves the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one's goal(s) (Coleman, 2008),
 and Jeremy E. Sherman, PhD. calls it Empathic Intelligence (Sherman, 2009).

References

Bertram K., Randazzo J., Alabi N., Levenson J., Doucette J. T., & Barbosa, P. (2016). Strong correlations between empathy, emotional intelligence, and personality traits among podiatric medical students: A cross-sectional study. Education for Health, (29)3, 186. DOI: 10.4103/1357-6283.204224, PMID 28406102

Colman, Andrew (2008). A Dictionary of Psychology (3 ed.). Oxford University Press.DOI: 10.1093/acref/9780199534067.001.0001

Sherman, J. (2009). Empathic Intelligence: To put yourself in their shoes, unlace yours. PsychologyToday [Online]Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/200905/empathic-intelligence-put-yourself-in-their-shoes-unlace-yours


Are there mental states that make the mind more susceptible to other negative mental states?

Daniel Gilbert actually coined a term called immune neglect (Gilbert et al., 1998), which describes a common bias in affective forecasting.  The idea is that when we try to predict how we'll feel following a negative situation, we fail to take into account (i.e., we neglect) that our psychological "immune system" will kick in and return us to some neutral baseline.  So we overestimate how bad we'll feel.

Indeed, the idea that we have some homeostatic mechanism(s) (or really, allostatic; Sterling, 2014) that brings us back to some baseline has been thrown around in psychology for a while (e.g., Forgas & Ciarrochi, 2002), but emerging theory is starting to take this idea seriously (e.g., Barrett & Simmons, 2015; Craig, 2003; Sterling, 2014; Sterling & Laughlin, 2015).

So to your main question: what kinds of states make us susceptible to other negative mental states? One answer is a negative prior (e.g., Beck, 1979; Huys, Daw, & Dayan, 2015), which shapes your predictions about the world.  For example, if you grew up in a threatening environment, you might develop a prior that yields predictions that the world will be threatening.  Indeed, you might even discount evidence against your predictions (i.e., that the world is not threatening).

This is actually considered adaptive--you're using your prior knowledge ("the world is/was threatening") to make predictions about the world ("the world will be threatening") and to guide how much you weight the errors in your predictions ("the world is not threatening").  After all, if you've only been exposed to threat, then it's good to be hypervigilant to more potential threat and hypovigilant to potential indications otherwise.

So--that's what happens in depression, for example.  You get "stuck" in a negative state because your negative prior leads you to weight negative information more heavily (Garrett et al., 2014) and ignore "the full range of signals from many sources" (Sterling, 2014).  If you fail to change your prior in accordance with new evidence, then you'll behave maladaptively and remain depressed.

I think my answer is slightly incoherent and not complete, and I think there's probably a whole lot more to explain…but I hope it gives you some idea of what's going on.


Is pattern recognition a measure of spatial IQ?

Not a complete answer, but you might want to look at the most widely accepted framework for organising cognitive abilities: The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93Carroll_theory

In this model speeded rotation is situated under visual processing.
But you'd have to check what is meant by perceptual speed.

In my thesis, I measured Cube Comparison (which is a kind of mental rotation task) along with several common measures of perceptual speed (speed of comparing, sorting numbers, and finding numbers in a set) and I found that cube comparison tended to load on both perceptual speed and general ability factors.
http://cogprints.org/8035/7/anglim-2011-skill-acquisition-phd-thesis.pdf


Research in neuroscience allowed to distinguish two concepts: "liking" and "wanting". Berridge and colleagues distinguished two different brain mechanisms for that.

By injecting a tiny droplet of amphetamine drug in the nucleus accumbens (dopamine system), they noted an increase of the incentive salience that cues trigger for their reward without altering other components of desire or reward.
Experimentally, they also found that the generation of pleasure “liking” is more restricted neurochemically: opioid stimulation but not dopamine stimulation in some limbic strutures can enhance “liking”, whereas “wanting” is enhanced by both.

Research suggest that liking and wanting belongs to two different pathways mediated by opioid and dopamine circuits.
This distinction between liking and wanting could lead to ambivalent processes individuals could like what they do not want and want what they do not like.

To conlude, according to Berridge there are different "hedonic hotspots" in the brain that, according to the types of valences of the external stimuli, may modulate different processes such as: wanting, liking and 'needing'

References :

Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience and Psychology Laboratory


I think there's very likely a connection between the two, but not a direct one.

The first difficulty will be visible when you dig into the literature on Dual Process Theory — that's the overarching theory that describes what is commonly referred to as System 1/System 2. The long list of descriptors in the table on that Wikipedia page will hint at the problem: variations on the theory have been used to explain so much that it has been difficult for researchers to agree on a neurological basis.

Two good academic articles:

Keith Stanovich and Richard West coined the "System 1/System 2" term in a 2000 paper: Individual difference in reasoning: implications for the rationality debate? in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which was accompanied by a broad response of peer comments.

A dozen years later, Jonathan Evans and Stanovich wrote Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate. There are undoubtedly important papers which are more recent, but I think what you'll discover is that the theory, while useful, is controversial.

The connection that bridges the two probably resides in Executive Function. Just to pull a paragraph from a paper that illustrates this:

  The dual-process theory suggests that less efficient dopamine-mediated
  reinforcement processes and deficient extinction of previously
  reinforced behavior may explain behavioral changes often described as
  poor executive functions or as response disinhibition.

That invocation of a dual-process theory probably won't sound familiar to anyone whose exposure to the theory was by way of Kahneman's book, but you can see that the connection is via executive functions.

If you amend your search to connections between Executive Function and ADHD, you'll hit pay dirt quite quickly. A good article to start with is Thomas Brown's ADD/ADHD and Impaired Executive Function in Clinical Practice (2008).

And it becomes fairly clear that there probably is a connection: ADHD probably interferes with either or both of System 1 or System 2. But which, and how?

Getting to your explicit question: Do individuals with ADHD rely more on System 1 thinking? Since System 1 thinking is, broadly speaking, subconscious, the answer is probably not. Maybe a little. It seems more likely (to me) that ADHD shifts the focus of thinking in ways that, perhaps, disconnects some System 1 processing from the System 2 thinking which we might expect to have followed it, but that doesn't mean that less System 2 thinking is taking place. A very different hypothesis could assert that some System 1 process is degraded, leading to a larger amount of poorly directed System 2 thinking. There doesn't seem to be much research targeting this question yet.

With respect to the Test of Variables of Attention, note this text from the "About" page:

  The duration of testing is a significant factor, since subjects who
  are older and more intelligent can compensate for mild or moderate
  attention problems for 5, 10, even 15 minutes.

That word "compensate" should give you pause. Is it plausible that some automatic System 1 response is detecting attentional drift and correcting it? Or that, with age, some subjects will have compensated by consciously directing (System 2) themselves to refocus?

The 2013 blog post you link to is interesting, but appears to be a little haphazard. The blogger seems to believe that a fast or "global thinker" could trigger a false-positive for ADHD. I'd suggest looking into the research connecting ADHD and high IQ. There's not too much of it, but it is interesting. Two articles you might start with: Executive Function Impairments in High IQ Adults With ADHD (2009) (although the focus is on adults, not children) or Co-Occurrence of ADHD and High IQ (2010).


What causes people to remember events which did not take place?

There is some misinformation out there put forth by Brooks Agnew about "remembering the future".  This is the same guy who advocates a "hollow earth" theory.  It's not grounded in science, I'm afraid.

We predict and imagine the future.  Often our predictions aren't even conscious (reflexes, for instance, can be programmed in the lower brain; we're often not conscious of our reflexes until right after they've done their job).  But reflexes are a product of the past, either genetically, or through experience (depending on the reflex).

In fact, we generally consider it one of the arrows of time that humans remember the past and not the future; with Newtonian physics, deterministic physics implied events were completely invertible (reversible in time) while remaining valid.  This is one of the interesting features of classical physics.  There are now, many physically observable arrows of time, though: entropy, expansion of universe, quantum arrow (wave function collapse).

just a wiki article to get you started,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time


What is the cause of frequent nightmares?

Nightmares can be defined as (Pagel, 2000):

  ...vivid and terrifying nocturnal episodes in which the dreamer is abruptly awakened from sleep. Typically, the dreamer wakes from REM sleep and is able to describe a detailed, associative, often bizarre dream plot. Usually, the dreamer has difficulty returning to sleep.

Nightmares are common and can be a normal reaction to stress. Frequent occurrence of nightmares, however, may become a disorder when it impairs the sufferer's everyday life and may then be referred to as Nightmare Disorder (formerly Dream Anxiety Disorder) or "repeated nightmares," which is a term defined more specifically as a series of nightmares with a recurring theme (source: Psychology Today).

Nightmare disorder is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as:

  [R]epeated awakenings with recollection of terrifying dreams, usually
  involving threats to survival, safety or physical integrity.

Causes of nightmare disorder, according to WebMD, Psychology Today and (Sheaves et al., 2015) are:

Anxiety or stress, for example due to a major life event
Depression
Psychosis
Sleep deprivation
Illness with a fever
Medication side effects
Drug or alcohol withdrawal
Excessive alcohol consumption
Sleep apnea, narcolepsy or restless legs syndrome or other sleep disorders
Eating just before going to bed, which raises the body's metabolism and brain activity

References
- Pagel, Am Fam Physician (2000); 61(7): 2037-42
- Sheaves et al., Can J Psychiatry (2015); 60(8): 354–61


in R : How to check RT's for ex-gaussian fit with the fitdistrplus package

To answer the question relating to start values for the parameters for use with fitdist:

  I would like to check for an ex-gaussian distribution fit (GAMLSS package), but the fitdist function ask for "start" parameters and I have no idea how to get them: any help would be much appreciated.

Where possible, knowledge of the behavior of similar reaction times can be used. This might be particularly helpful when the sample skewness (see below) is not suitable for obtaining starting values, since skewness in particular might be anticipated to reasonably similar across different but related circumstances.

As Jeromy says, start values generally just need to be rough ballpark estimates, so if you have some experience of fits you may be able to supply suitable guesses. But if you don't have any suitable idea, there's still something you can do.

The Wikipedia page on the ExGaussian distribution offers some possibilities.

Firstly, it gives method-of-moments-related estimators based on the sample mean, variance and skewness (labelled $m, s^2$, and $\gamma_1$ there):

$${\displaystyle {\hat {\mu }}=m-s\left({\frac {\gamma _{1}}{2}}\right)^{1/3},}$$

$${\displaystyle {\hat {\sigma }^{2}}=s^{2}\left[1-\left({\frac {\gamma _{1}}{2}}\right)^{2/3}\right],}$$

$${\displaystyle {\hat {\tau }}=s\left({\frac {\gamma _{1}}{2}}\right)^{1/3}.}$$

The main thing to note there is that the $\tau$ (scale) parameter there is the same as the $\nu$ parameter in the GAMLSS function exGAUS (and is the inverse of the $\lambda$ rate-parameter in the definition of the distribution at the top of the Wikipedia article). The easy way to do this is by starting with $\hat{\tau}$:

$${\displaystyle {\hat {\tau }}=s\left({\frac {\gamma _{1}}{2}}\right)^{1/3}.}$$

then

$$ \hat {\mu }=m-\hat{\tau}$$

$$\hat {\sigma}^{2}=s^{2}-\hat{\tau}^2\,.$$

However, you need to be careful that you don't end up with implausible values for the parameters which might happen if the sample skewness were negative (leading to an impossible value for $\tau$) or if the sample skewness were very large (perhaps leading to issues with the other two parameters, such as a negative variance) -- this must be checked.

On the other hand problems here should also be seen as a warning; if those things happen with the method of moments, there's strong potential for the likelihood function to not behave nicely as well.

The article also mentions the range of the nonparametric skew (a skewness measure based on the second Pearson skewness), which relates the mean, median and standard deviation. This might be used in place of the moment-skewness (with some suitable modification) to obtain an estimate of the scale parameter of the exponential component.

An alternative would be to look at quantile-matching  (such as a calculation based on a high, low and middling quantile) or at estimates from quantile-based measures of location, scale and skewness, but the quantiles are not in general simple functions of the parameters; the existence of quantile and cdf functions in GAMLSS make this potentially viable as a strategy, however. This would be more complex but more likely to lead to feasible values of the parameters, at least in the case where the skewness is very large.

The notion of finding a "best" distribution -- and in particular searching for one with a given set of data -- is not especially useful. No simple distribution will be a perfect fit (no simple model will be exactly correct). Models are useful representations rather than perfect descriptions. If one has a simple model which usually fits fairly well and has some theoretical basis by which its parameters and relationships between distributions based on different estimates can be understood, that's a good reason to use it. We should not be overly concerned about a "best" model for a particular data set so much as an adequate model across a variety of data of similar kinds.

In relation to the title -- fitdist (from package fitdistrplus, or fitdistr in MASS) will give parameter estimates for a fitted distribution but doesn't really tell you whether the fit is good enough for some particular purpose or other (i.e. it doesn't really check the quality of the fit in a practical sense).


Can somebody provide a standard test to measure ones working memory & short term memory

It might be difficult to distinguish between belief-based and actual memory difficulties, especially in a self-administered test. The most objective measure would be a computerised assessment, e.g. the Automatic Working Memory Assessment, which contains measures of short-term and working memory in the verbal and spatial domain [1]. Some commonly used assessments of these constructs are [2]:

Verbal short-term memory: digit span, running span
Verbal working memory: backward digit span, n-back span
Spatial short-term memory: dot matrix, forward Corsi block task
Spatial working memory: backward Corsi block task

[1] http://doi.org/10.1080/01443410802243828
[2] http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1201


Which is the shortest duration for a pitch difference in audio signals to be perceived by the human auditory system?

It really depends on what you mean by difference in pitch. Subjects can discriminate differences in frequency for very short tones, but it does not mean they are being perceived as pitch differences. The classic paper in this area is Moore (1973):

As the duration is reduced from 200 ms to 6.25 ms, performance falls off, especially for low frequency tones. It is worth noting that creating extermely short sounds with narrow bandwidths is difficult. With a 12.5 ms duration, subjects can still discriminate between tones with frequencies of 250 Hz and 255.7 Hz (a Delta f of 5.7 Hz and a (Delta f)/f of 0.023).

C4 has a frequency of 261.63 Hz and C4# has a frequency of 277.18 Hz for a Delta f of 15.55 Hz and a (Delta f)/f of about 0.06. One would expect that you could discriminate C4 from C4# with durations substantially shorter than 12.5 ms

In regards to your "bonus question", when the stimulus consists of two tones, things get very complicated. Judgements like can you hear both tones are very different from can you hear the difference between a single tone and the pair of tones.


Is it normal for men in long term relationships to want to have sexual relationships with other women?

The issue here is 'normality' - normal is a shifting social construct, meaning that any answer concerning normal will be based on culture, and thus could change depending on the culture in context.  A better question would be, is it adaptive or maladaptive for the person in question.

But I don't think that's what you're asking - (I could be wrong) it seems you're asking more about satisfaction of desire and whether a single partner can accomplish that.

Let me flip the question around:

  If a woman who is married or in a long term relationship wants to have sexual relationships with other men, is this pathological, deviant, maybe even a disorder? Or is it part of normal and healthy female sexuality?

We can flip the gender pronouns - but in doing so, we notice an underlying assumption of male promiscuity in the original question (likely related to the idea of 'spreading seed' or a belief in a biological imperative to have as many children as possible (if this is actually true, why aren't all people constantly having children?  I'm not saying it's not true; I'm saying it's much more complicated than that)).

Getting closer to an answer, let me pose more questions:

Does a happy/successful/[insert judgment function here] relationship require that both partners be satisfied in all of their desires?

-- or --
Does a happy/successful/[insert judgment function here] relationship require that both partners learn how to control their own desires instead of being directed by them?

But that's a false dichotomy; the answer will never just be one or the other.  A successful relationship will, first and foremost, involve communication.  If you can communicate your desires with each other, you can both, jointly/together, pursue a sense of satisfaction (or a sense of control over that desire).

But not being able to communicate dissatisfaction is itself a sign of underlying problems in a relationship.


Can someone who is never speaking of himself and present himself as very altruistic be egocentric / narcissistic?

According to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, in some circumstances, people help because they genuinely care about the welfare of the other person and not because of any other personal goal i.e. avoid distress, social norm, Self-affirmation etc.

  The empathy-altruism hypothesis basically states that
  psychological altruism does exist and is evoked by the empathic desire
  to help someone who is suffering. Feelings of empathic concern are
  contrasted with feelings of personal distress, which compel people to
  reduce their own unpleasant emotions. People with empathic concern
  help others in distress even when exposure to the situation could be
  easily avoided, whereas those lacking in empathic concern avoid
  helping unless it is difficult or impossible to avoid exposure to
  another's suffering.

...

  The social exchange theory states that altruism does not exist unless
  benefits to the helper outweigh the costs. C. Daniel Batson disagrees.
  He holds that people help others in need out of genuine concern for
  the well-being of the other person. The key ingredient to helping is
  "empathic concern". According to his 'empathy-altruism hypothesis', if
  you feel empathy towards another person you will help them, regardless
  of what you can gain from it (1991).

There is a lot of debate about the empathy-altruism hypothesis theory, but I tend to agree with it.


Why would someone seek treatment for Apraxia of speech?

There appear to be more than your two basic problems: see Wikipedia's list of characteristics. Subjective difficulty in producing speech appears to be one particularly plausible reason to self-initiate treatment.

I don't see any indication of a lack of concern for how speech is received by others.
Some forms seem to be progressive, but not all are:

  Recent research has established the existence of primary progressive apraxia of speech caused by neuroanatomic motor atrophy.[19][20]

By comparison, stroke can introduce acute apraxia of speech that can (rarely) improve over time.
I wouldn't say "unacceptable", but undesirable seems true enough in general. Plenty of variation in rate of speech is normal and acceptable, but extremely slow speech can be grating. Tonal variation is expected in most languages with which I'm at all familiar, but again, most people probably understand that some people will be more or less monotone. Again, extreme monotonicity will tend to violate expectations and raise complaints, because variations in pitch and emphasis carry useful semantic information in normal speech. Personally, I've been criticized for speaking in monotone at many times in my life, but never for having too wildly fluctuating intonation, even though I've tried to exaggerate this quality somewhat compensatorily. Yet as with all anecdotes, your mileage may vary.

References
19. Josephs, K. A., & Duffy, J. R. (2008). Apraxia of speech and nonfluent aphasia: A new clinical marker for corticobasal degeneration and progressive supranuclear palsy. Current Opinion in Neurology, 21(6), 688–692.
20. Josephs, K. A., Duffy, J. R., Strand, E. A., Machulda, M. M., Senjem, M. L., Master, A. V., Lowe, V. J., Jack, C. R. Jr., & Whitwell, J. L. (2012). Characterizing a neurodegenerative syndrome: Primary progressive apraxia of speech. Brain, 135(5), 1522–1536. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338923/.


During synchronized waves oscillation (alpha beta etc...) do neurons fire only once for each wave cycle?

Probably, the "oscillation" refers to the signals of eeg/ecog/meg? If this is the case, then the answer is NO, individual neurons in a local network are firing with much higher rate then the frequency of the oscillatory field produced by the network. (Otherwise, the oscillations would look more like a ripples, not like the periodic function.) The exact number of spikes of any given individual neuron is vary over time within a certain range and most probably different from one cycle of the network-level oscillation to another.

In general, individual neuronal activity is probabilistic, not deterministic. So, any natural situation is changing the probability of the spike, but it is never 100% predictable.


Can hate to same gender parent cause homosexualism?

Gender is not, despite what others might say, a social construct, and neither is sexuality, just google David Rimmer to see what happens when researchers have messed with these. While we don't understand what causes homo-sexuality fully, typically speaking sexuality seems to be influenced by hormone exposure in the womb, when a human is a foetus. Although studies have found that roughly 5-10% of people have had same-sex sexual experiences, this appears to be relatively common in adolescence although it does happen later in life too. Speculatively its possible that this partly comes from people learning about themselves and their sexuality. However despite people having these same-sex experiences only 1-3% of people identify as homo or bisexual. Why do people have these experiences? There are a a multitude of reasons, some people are homosexual, while some may be curious or undecided, or perhaps some other reason.

Ignoring the sexuality side and looking at group identification: people have all sorts of reasons for identifying with particular groups or demographics. While relationships with parents are certainly cause for being rebelliousness, its not going to turn anyone homosexual who isn't already inclined. There seems to be no recent evidence about parenting style and sexuality, apart from on religious websites that have no place here, although stonewall say that there is no relationship. However the research linking the two is absent, which usually suggests either it hasn't been researcher properly or, more likely, that there is no relationship at all.


Q: Does distraction cause us to skip to the next step in a motor plan?

A: It depends on the processes in progress, characteristics of the subject and characteristics of the signal to produce interference (based on an orientation reflex that is the beginning of an act of involuntary attention), many factors, mainly:

Characteristics of the process involved in the distraction (mainly nature of the stimulus but also what relevance it has for the subject).
The nature of the processes that are being executed in the motor plan (automatic or controlled, these processes differ in practice, memory, difficulty, relectivity, required level of effort, etc.) (processes related to sports can be automated much from training).
Characteristics of the subject (different capacities of selective attention, etc.).

See: Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing. Perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84, 127-190.


Can the act of studying more be a defense mechanism?

Whilst I am a defender of Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychology, please be aware that this covers areas of psychology considered by some here to be pseudoscientific.  With that in mind, you are right to question the hyposthesis that any defence mechanism involved would be displacement.

Ego defence mechanisms theorized by Sigmund Freud, could have a role in the situation you are talking about, but they also may not.  Displacement involves displacing emotions towards an issue onto another issue.

Using a similar scenario to yours for an example, someone who is frustrated with their grades in science education may displace their emotions towards those grades on to their tutor.  In this situation, instead of internalizing the issue with themselves not understanding the subject, they blame the tutor for not teaching them properly.

The defence mechanism you are talking about, is loosely connected to sublimation (satisfying an impulse - e.g. aggression - with a substitute object).  In your scenario, the person is channelling their frustration constructively by trying to improve the situation through more studying.