Are there reliable ways to distinguish anger from fear, be it through body, mind, internally, externally?

The most conservative answer is that we can reliably distinguish anger from fear if we constrain our examination to a particular context, a set of stimuli, or a person.   However, studies on emotions within single individuals have only begun to attract funding, so we don't quite know yet how well we can do this.

If we ignore contextual and individual differences, then our ability to reliably distinguish between these emotions drops significantly. This is because fear and anger can manifest very differently depending on the context and/or person (there's large variability in a bunch of response systems: facial, bodily, neural, behavioral, etc.), which prevents us from classifying them accurately or in a perceiver-independent (i.e., objective) way.

But let's look at some papers...

Brain

Here are the results from this meta-analysis for anger and fear:

Body

I've read a meta-analysis under review that used fancy statistical analyses to distinguish emotions by physiology.  The conclusion was that we can't distinguish emotions based on physiological variables, so as of right now we don't believe there are reliable physiological differences.

For relevant reading, see this paper, which provides a systematic qualitative review.

Face

This is still under study.  The idea of universal facial expressions is incredibly controversial (e.g., Nelson & Russell, 2013), so it's best not to take it as fact, independent of your theoretical orientation.  It's quite possible that under many circumstances we can distinguish "anger faces" and "fear faces," but others we cannot.

However, the most important point is that it's not even clear that we can reliably know that an "anger face" is actually an "anger face" and a "fear face" is actually a "fear face," given that there can be so much variability in facial production and perception (e.g., this recent study).  I've never even seen Ekman's "universal" fear face in real life.

Behavior

Anger and fear are traditionally contrasted in terms of approach and withdrawal, respectively.  However, this probably isn't a reliable difference (e.g., this paper), as it depends on goals, environmental constraints, etc.

Overall... it's pretty difficult to objectively determine if someone is experiencing a certain emotion, let alone distinguishing between two of them. We might be able to do it better as we take a more idiographic approach, but studies like that have only begun to emerge.  Some people argue that multivariate analyses are the answer, but even these aren't reliable classifiers from one context to another.


The short answer to your question Can a person with delusions completely acknowledge their delusions is yes. But it depends.

There are quite a few psychological disorders that have symptoms of delusion or hallucination.

Bentall et al. (2009) took a look at the structure of paranoid delusions. They concluded that emotion related and cognitive processes are involved in paranoid delusions of participants.

I think that a more complex answer to your question is that in the way you have described, the delusions would likely have been attempted to be shattered by loved ones and other people that are involved in the person with delusions life.

Hallucinations can be symptoms of many psychological disorders such as:

Unipolar and Bipolar Affective Disorders (Black & Nasrallah, 1989)
Mood Disorders (Signer, et al., 1989)
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (ptsd) (Scott et al., 2007)

This article may be very helpful to your story, the authors discuss delusional thought among non clinical patients i.e., people with no discernible psychological disorder (Freeman, 2006).

References:

Bentall, R. P., Rowse, G., Shryane, N., Kinderman, P., Howard, R., Blackwood, N., ... & Corcoran, R. (2009). The cognitive and affective structure of paranoid delusions: a transdiagnostic investigation of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and depression. Archives of general psychiatry, 66(3), 236-247. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.1

Black D. W. & Nasrallah A. (1989). Hallucinations and Delusions in 1,715 Patients with Unipolar and Bipolar Affective Disorders. Psychopathology 22(1), 28-34. doi: 10.1159/000284576

Freeman, D. (2006). Delusions in the nonclinical population
 Current Psychiatry Reports 8(3), 191-204. doi: 10.1007/s11920-006-0023-1

Scott, J. G., Nurcombe, B., Sheridan, J. & McFarland M. (2007) Hallucinations in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder and psychotic disorder, Australasian Psychiatry, 15(1), 44-48, DOI: 10.1080/10398560601083084

Signer, S. F., Cummings, J. L., & Benson, D. F. (1989). Delusions and mood disorders in patients with chronic aphasia. The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 1(1), 40-45.
doi: 10.1176/jnp.1.1.40


Hebbian Learning - Understanding Simultaneous Firing

You basically have 2 options:

Manually fire both neurons together that you want to pair - do this as many
times as needed to pair them.  After learning, it should be
sufficient to fire only one neuron for the second neuron to fire as
desired.
Assign a starting weight to the connection between the
neurons such that firing one will trigger the other.  This is
basically shortcutting the above learning process.

Normally, the learning process in neural networks is based on multiple simultaneous inputs - not just one.  The network learns the statistical probability of input neurons firing together, and is eventually able to predict them without them firing.  So a test case of a single neuron firing can be used after learning is complete (the first option) or when you restore a previously saved matrix of a trained network (the second option).


Your initial intuition, that eliminating subvocalization makes understanding more difficult, seems to be consistent with empirical evidence. Slowiaczek and Clifton (1980) investigated the effect of eliminating subvocalization on reading comprehension, and concluded the following.

  In these experiments, reading for meaning was severely impaired when subvocalization was suppressed. Listening comprehension was also reduced by suppressing subvocalization, but the effect was much smaller. We conclude that there was a general interference effect from the secondary task, but that the significantly greater interference effect for reading was due to the specific function of subvocalization in reading.

In general, all of the methods listed for suppressing subvocalization could also be understood as forms of articulatory suppression. Under the influential Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory, the phonological loop subsystem is believed to facilitate long-term learning in part via articulatory rehearsal, and articulatory suppression corresponds to tasks which interfere with this function.

References

Slowiaczek, M. L., & Clifton, C. (1980). Subvocalization and reading for meaning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(5), 573-582.


I'm not active on this board, so please forgive me if my answer is not up to community standards.

I am not a psychologist, but I have some experience with mental illness (maybe too much.)

True paranoia (or Paranoid Personality Disorder/PPD) is much more pronounced than thinking that people can spy on you through your mobile. Whether it's true or not isn't relevant, really. In this case, there is a kernel of truth to their fears, which becomes exacerbated.*

  According to the DSM-5, persons with Paranoid Personality Disorder will have trouble operating with others in the workplace, educational or social settings (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). It is noted that people with PPD are more frequently unemployed or working more menial jobs than the general population (Mueser, Mischel, Adams, Harvey, McClure, Look, Leung, & Siever, 2013).They tend to be solitary, self sufficient, and secretive, and will have difficulty making or maintaining intimate relationships or close friendships. (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Persons with PPD may experience a conflict, in that they want intimate relationships and friendships, but do not have a level of trust which is an essential element of such relationships.

If many of the other criteria aren't met, it's probably not paranoia. On the other hand, if your interactions are limited, you may not know about other criteria, so this might be paranoia.

  How to help people who may suffer from Paranoia?

It's very difficult, even for therapists, because challenging their belief systems makes the person very defensive. They do not tend to have much self insight, which makes therapy challenging. Clearly you are not in a therapeutic relationship with the user; I would try to steer them in the right direction security-wise, and then (gently and respectfully) disengage.

  So far, I have tried to tell those looking for help with their supposed hacker problems that they are likely not being attacked, and that it seems to me that they may be affected by paranoia.

I would definitely avoid this, as this is giving a diagnosis, which you should not do (I believe it's unethical) over a brief interaction on the internet. I'm not surprised they counter by claiming that they are not paranoid and that their problems are real. To someone who's paranoid, their problems are real.

In case my answer isn't well explained,

  I'm not sure if bluntly saying "I think you may have a mental health problem" is beneficial though, and if it may do more harm than good. For this reason, I am asking this question, how exactly I should act and how to best help people.

Unless you are in a close personal relationship with someone, I think it's not in their best interests to tell them they may suffer from a mental illness, whether they do or not. First, you do not know. Second, they will most likely be defensive if not offended as well.

My reaction would be to be kind and gentle with the person, avoid overt confrontation ("That's not possible...") and let people close to them tell them they need professional help.

*Laptop cameras have been hacked, and worse.

**I know people who believe Pizzagate was real. Te truth doesn't matter if you like conspiracy theories.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostics and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Washington. DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.


What are the pros and cons of the hot sauce paradigm to measure aggression?

The hot sauce paradigm was reviewed as part of a paper discussing laboratory measures of aggression. They argued that the hot sauce paradigm's main advantages are that it is very economical, easily quantifiable, less likely than other methods to be interpreted competitively, and that it has ecological validity (Ritter and Eslea, 2005).

Given the prevalence of its use, there appears to be a surprisingly limited amount of validation studies for the hot sauce paradigm. Adachi and Willoughby (2011) reported the following in a more tangential discussion of aggression measures.

  Lieberman et al. [1999] found that scores on [the hot sauce] paradigm were positively related to both trait and physical aggression scores on the Buss and Perry (1992) Aggression Questionnaire, supporting the convergent validity of the Hot Sauce Paradigm, although to date no study has measured its association with aggressive behavior outside the lab.

Ayduk, Gyurak and Luerssen (2008) suggested that one threat to the hot sauce paradigm's validity comes from rejection sensitivity (RS): "a processing disposition to anxiously expect, readily perceive and overreact to rejection." They reported that failing to control for RS could influence the results in a hot-sauce paradigm, but that statistical control was sufficient to guard against it.

The Ritter and Eslea (2005) review also provides an extensive and general critique of the hot sauce paradigm and other classic aggression measures, but this is not readily summarized. The potential problems raised by the review relate to mediating variables, social cognition, affect, questions of overt/covert aggression, among others. Overall, the biggest weakness of the method appears to be the apparent inability to conclusively rule out the influence of mediators and moderators.

References

Adachi, P. J., & Willoughby, T. (2011). The effect of video game competition and violence on aggressive behavior: Which characteristic has the greatest influence?. Psychology of Violence, 1(4), 259.
Ayduk, Ö., Gyurak, A., & Luerssen, A. (2008). Individual differences in the rejection–aggression link in the hot sauce paradigm: The case of rejection sensitivity. Journal of experimental social psychology, 44(3), 775-782.
Buss, A. H., & Perry, M. (1992). The aggression questionnaire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 452– 459.
Lieberman, J. D., Soloman, S., Greenberg, J., & McGregor, H. A. (1999). A hot new way to measure aggression: Hot sauce allocation. Aggressive Behavior, 25, 331–348.
Ritter, D., & Eslea, M. (2005). Hot sauce, toy guns, and graffiti: A critical account of current laboratory aggression paradigms. Aggressive Behavior, 31(5), 407-419.


Is it possible to run multiple thought processes concurrently?

Parallel processes are often studied in a so called 'dual task' paradigm, where participants are drawing a picture and reciting a poem or, as in your example, counting and thinking about other things.
Often this method is used to demonstrate limits in attention and find insights into how the brain works (in a serial versus parallel manner). Training is an important factor in this question. It has been shown that with a sufficient amount of training a lot of tasks can be done parallel very well - so if you sit there long enough and automize the counting the rest will follow.


Problem with IQ tests in Murray's "The Bell Curve"?

After some significant searching myself I don't believe that what you've stated was one of the many criticisms of "The Bell Curve".

It wouldn't be impossible for the review you read to go something like,

"Murray's, "The Bell Curve" is akin to other racially biased research like as XYZ's "IQ Research", in which XYZ claimed that African students had, on average, lower IQs, but when the research was reviewed showed that those students had received a test in English, while their primary language was French."

Memory can be a tricky thing and the way connections are formed around subjects we don't use often is haphazard at best.


How much more efficient is interleaving skills when learning?

I think it would be unfair to reduce this effect to a single number-- most certainly, it depends on the task at hand, as well as a number of other factors.

To give a rough idea, though, you may want to look at Richland et al. (2005) who found roughly a 25% increase in retention on a knowledge test when using interleaving. Also noted in this article,

  Interleaving has been shown  to be more effective for producing
  learning than blocking or  massing learning (A1A2A3A4A5B1B2B3B4B5) on
  many  diverse sets of stimuli including word pairs (Battig, 1979),
  motor patterns (Shea & Morgan, 1979), and word translations
  (Richland, Bjork & Finley, 2004)

Robert Bjork claims that interleaving is only one intervention among a class of "desirable difficulties", or things that might make your task seem harder but will improve it in the long run. Other such desirable difficulties include generation (e.g., fill in the blank rather than multiple choice; see Karpicke & Roediger (2008)) and the spacing effect (studying at regular spaced intervals is more effective than studying everything all at once). Bjork has shown that interleaving is not just an artifact of the spacing effect--after all, interleaving requires spacing--but that its contribution to retention is in addition to spacing.

If you head on over to Bjork's lab webpage you'll see that he has a decades of research publications available free for download.

Richland, Bjork, Finley, & Linn (2005). Linking Cognitive Science to Education: Generation and Interleaving Effects. FREE PDF

Karpicke, & Roediger (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968. Retreived from https://www.msu.edu/course/psy/101/altmann/karpickeRoediger08.pdf


Calculating statistical significance in behaviour change

This answer should provide a reasonable discussion of how to compare the two results for statistical significance.

We have n1 = n2 = n3 = 158. We have p1 = 128/158, p2 = 67/158, and p3 = 64/168. Just run the hypothesis test on each pair to see if there is a significant shift.

However, there is a bigger issue here. This question should have been answered before you started collecting data. The first thing you should be doing is coming up with your theory to test. Then you design your experiment. And only then should you be collecting the data, unless your goal is just to collect large amounts of data for future theory testing, which does not seem to be the case here (Best Research Practices).


What is the name of the phenomenon that would make me choose A over B because I was influenced by a trend?

Bandwagon effect:

  The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others. In other words, the bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so. As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence.

And the reason why you were not completely happy with the other questions you found (mostly on social pressure) is that there's perhaps not a single source of "bias" for the bandwagon effect. Depending on the actual phenomenon studied, social pressure or information cascades make more sense as an explanation for a given instance of the bandwagon effect. At least with respect to SE voting patterns, probably the latter makes a bit more sense. The two causes are probably not mutually exclusive.


Pros and Cons of PsychoPy for designing psychological experiments?

I highly recommend PsychoPy over E-prime. Why?

Keeping track of who has the e-prime dongle is annoying.
Students learn it more easily (see data below).
E-prime uses visual basic (boo) and PsychoPy uses Python (yay!).
PsychoPy easily integrates with R, matlab, and HTML.
Everyone is doing it... (see data).

Some folks at UCSD did a survey in summer/fall 2014 asking researchers for their opinions. Here is a summary of the findings.


Explanation of "I never thought I'd get this far"

This is a good question which cannot really be provided with scientifically proven reasons, so we can only look at possibilities.

From personal experience as a therapist, anecdotally I can say that with some people, the meme would not be complete.  With these people the situation would be

  I didn't think I would get this far so quickly

and that could be a key point with many others.

When planning for the future, do you plan for things you know you will reach very soon or do you include those points where you cannot envisage getting to right now?

Forward planning can be different from person to person, and if you haven't planned for a particular eventuality, how do you know what you want to do, let alone how you should do things?

The comment at the bottom of your image:

  I have managed to change my name and gender on ALL of my legal documents! So what's next?

can be a comment of surprise, and maybe despair; or it could be:

  Good! I have that out of the way, now do I have to do anything else?

The processes involved with identity change can be daunting and therefore some choose to take things a step at a time rather than planning the whole process before carrying it out.

Is the person aware of all the things they need to do?
Can they cope?
Do they have the support of professional organizations to help along the way?
Do they have support from friends and family?

All these things and more will affect how the person will be dealing with the situation.


Does Computer science has any role to play in Cognitive science?

Yes. Computer science is one of central disciplines of cognitive science. In fact, the dominant, central dogma of modern (i.e., the last 50 years) cognitive science is that cognition is computation. This SEP article elaborates on this thesis:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/

Even if you don't think that cognition is computation, you would still likely think that computer science is relevant to cognitive science insofar as CompSci is necessary for computational modeling of any phenomena. For example, some dynamical systems theorists would use computational, dynamical models of cognitive processes, even if they aren't claiming that the mind is computing differential or difference equations. (Just like we might use differential equations to model hurricanes, even if we maybe don't think the hurricane itself is computing the equations.)

I'm less sure of what is considered "creativity studies", exactly, but I can imagine that computer science would be relevant. For example, CS -- and linguistics -- is definitely interested in questions like "How are an infinite number of expressions created from finite means?" Different kinds of grammars -- like regular grammars vs context-free grammars -- have different 'creative' powers. Creativity here is more defined in purely formal terms, as opposed to perhaps the semantic/artistic terms that you may have in mind. But, I and many others would argue, formal creativity and semantic/artistic creativity are intimately related.


for a persistent perceptual experience, why is video able to have a lower frame rate than audio?

Sound is pressure waves; young humans can hear (aka, detect pressure waves) up to about 20 kHz. To produce these high frequency waves with a speaker with a time-domain signal, it is necessary to have a sampling rate at least 2x the highest frequency that will be represented. In practice, those very high frequencies aren't included in music, and definitely aren't included in speech, so ~44kHz is sufficient. There is a membrane inside the cochlea that is structured to vibrate at different frequencies along its length. At the higher frequencies, neurons don't actually respond to every sound wave, they respond to the envelope, so it is possible to respond to frequencies much higher than the frequencies that neurons can even fire at.

Vision depends on detection of photons. A photon hits a photosensitive molecule in a photoreceptor in the retina, which causes a chemical change. That changed chemical binds to a protein, which causes a cascade of events that ultimately causes a change in the release of a neurotransmitter. Vision is slow: the cascade in response to a single photon takes on the order of 100s of milliseconds. We can detect things a bit faster than that because the visual system responds to changes so the slope of that response is a relevant feature, but overall this slow process means that light information is low-pass filtered. As long as a signal is sufficiently faster than this low-pass filter, differences between a frame-by-frame versus a smooth signal are mostly not noticed. However, it isn't true that 24 frames per second is a limit. Modern monitors often operate much faster, such as 60-144Hz, because these faster frame rates are important for perception of smooth motion at high speeds. Slower frame rates are sufficient when changes are small, however.

In nature, a lot of things vibrate a high frequencies into the 1000s of Hz, so there are good evolutionary reasons to detect high frequency sounds. However, very few things move at those speeds, and those that do are typically not behaviorally relevant (e.g., you don't need to see every sweep of an insect's wings to detect it as an insect).


How to refer to the phenomenon of people only absorbing evidence which confirms their beliefs?

The actual act of "Trying to see only the sentence which confirms his beliefs" would generally be called confirmation bias.


Has the labelling and overshadowing effect from the Hannah Experiment been replicated?

This is basically describing stereotyping. (Several biases overlap to form these, depending which theory you prefer the most.)
The most cited paper that cites Darley & Gross seem to be a 1995 review titled "Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes". It cites D & G for implicit stereotyping (research):

Although research on stereotypes has often used direct or explicit
measures (see Judd & Park, 1993), there are also substantial
research programs on stereotypes that use indirect measures—
ones in which a stigmatizing feature with which a stereotype
is associated (e.g., weight, race, or gender) is peripheral
to the respondent's judgment task (e.g., Darley & Gross, 1983)
or in which the purpose of investigation is otherwise disguised
(e.g., Hamilton & GifFord, 1976). Crosby, Bromley, and Saxe
(1980) were able to locate enough research using indirect measures
of prejudicial stereotypes to conclude that "anti-Black
sentiments are much more prevalent among White Americans
than the survey data [i.e., direct or explicit measures of stereotypes]
lead one to expect." Although the use of indirect measures
in these studies often reflects the researchers' intent to
avoid intrusion of unwanted demand or impression-management
artifacts (which would plausibly suppress accurate expressions
of conscious stereotypes), some of the research that is
summarized just below was designed specifically to investigate
unconscious operation of stereotypes. These studies suggest that
stereotypes are often expressed implicitly in the behavior of persons
who explicitly disavow the stereotype. The next two sections
focus attention on race and gender stereotypes because
these, having been much more heavily investigated than other
stereotypes, have provided the most persuasive evidence for implicit
stereotyping.

Wikipedia also has a more specific article on implicit stereotype, although it seems someone was unhappy with it... The wiki article claims:

Implicit stereotype was first defined by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in 1995

which is probably referring to the above 1995 review, but I'm not sure how correct is the claim that Banaji & Greenwald were the first to define the notion. (They clearly were not the first to study it.)
Greenwald has actually co-authored a more recent (2019) review titled just "Implicit Social Cognition", which (I guess) could  be useful to check for research progress on implicit stereotyping. Most of the later research seems to have involved (the veritable explosion of) IAT studies. Greenwald (2019) summarizes several meta-analyses and does some moderator analysis.
For a broader theoretical perspective (and to clarify what Greenwald and
Banaji actually introduced--it's actually the term "implicit cognition", with a specific def), Hahn  & Gawronski (2015) write contrasting Greenwald's conception with De Houwer et al.'s:

Drawing on the notion of implicit memory, Greenwald and
Banaji (1995) defined implicit cognition as “introspectively
unidentified (or inaccurately identified) trace of past experience
that mediates responses” (p. 5). Although this definition was
meant to imply unawareness of the sources of mental contents,
it has often been interpreted to imply unawareness of the
mental contents themselves (e.g., unawareness of the source of
an attitude vs. unawareness of the attitude itself). However, the
latter interpretation conflicts with a considerable body of
evidence, suggesting that the psychological constructs captured
by nonreactive, computerized measures are consciously accessible
and thus not unconscious (e.g., Hahn et al., 2014).
More recently, De Houwer et al. (2009) proposed an alternative
conceptualization to overcome the common confusion
regarding the meaning of the term implicit. [...]
Measurement procedures [...] may be
described as direct if their measurement outcomes are based on
participants’ self-assessment of the to-be-measured attribute
(e.g., when participants’ racial attitudes are inferred from their
self-reported liking of Black people). Conversely, measurement procedures may be described as indirect if their outcomes are
not based on a self-assessment (e.g., when participants’ racial
attitudes are inferred from their reaction times to positive and
negative words after being primed with Black faces) or when
it is based on a self-assessment of attributes other than the
to-be-measured attribute (e.g., when participants’ racial attitudes
are inferred from their self-reported liking of a neutral
object after being primed with Black faces).

Applying the latter categorization to D & G (1983) study, they clearly used an indirect measure in De Houwer's categorization. Thus from this methodological perspective (after glancing over De Houwer et al.) D & G (1983) is an affect priming study.


Is acceptance of the science of global warming by politicians primarily a result of the bandwagon effect?

First off, political agendas in Western democratic countries are, of course, shaped by the masses.

Secondly, global warming is becoming a science in its own right. Climatology is important and is based on models based on historical data to predict the future, taking into account current greenhouse gas concentrations, melting of the polar caps, sea levels, population growth and what not. In other words, it is far too complicated a subject to be completely understood by the regular ground folks.

Thus, indeed, [intelligent, capable] politicians rely on scientists to do the thinking for them. In turn, politician's agendas are shaped by the populace so their focus is, and should be guided by the masses.

This should, however, not be a reason to adhere to hypotheses and theories to be correct or incorrect based on the people's opinion. And hence I do not agree that politician's opinions in general are shaped according to the bandwagon appeal.


In measuring preferences, is the magnitude of the question wording effect topic-dependent?

Self-report methodology was one of my qualifying exam topics as a doctoral student of social and personality psychology, so I've got a ton of references to offer, but I confess I haven't read most of them very thoroughly (if at all), and I've forgotten where exactly I've read some of this. It's really a very broad topic as well, so I won't list most I know of that might be relevant here, but I can probably offer more on specific subtopics per request.

Very many relationships exist between respondent characteristics and response biases that depend on survey design. It would be practically unimaginable if topic-in-question weren't a moderating factor for some of them. Social desirability in particular is a form of bias that depends heavily on survey design, participant characteristics, and topic of study. Wikipedia offers a pretty good intro-level summary:

  The tendency poses a serious problem with conducting research with self-reports, especially questionnaires. This bias interferes with the interpretation of average tendencies as well as individual differences.

  Topics where socially desirable responding (SDR) is of special concern are self-reports of abilities, personality, sexual behavior, and drug use. When confronted with the question "How often do you masturbate?", for example, respondents may be pressured by the societal taboo against masturbation, and either under-report the frequency or avoid answering the question. Therefore the mean rates of masturbation derived from self-report surveys are likely to be severe underestimates.

  When confronted with the question, "Do you use drugs/illicit substances?" the respondent may be influenced by the fact that controlled substances, including the more commonly used marijuana, are generally illegal. Respondents may feel pressured to deny any drug use or rationalize it, e.g., "I only smoke marijuana when my friends are around." The bias can also influence reports of number of sexual partners. In fact, the bias may operate in opposite directions for different subgroups: Whereas men tend to inflate the numbers, women tend to underestimate theirs. In either case, the mean reports from both groups are likely to be distorted by social desirability bias.

  Other topics that are sensitive to social desirability bias:

  Personal income and earnings, often inflated when low and deflated when high.
  Feelings of low self-worth and/or powerlessness, often denied.
  Excretory functions, often approached uncomfortably, if discussed at all.
  Compliance with medicinal dosing schedules, often inflated.
  Religion, often either avoided or uncomfortably approached.
  Patriotism, either inflated or, if denied, done so with a fear of other party's judgement.
  Bigotry and intolerance, often denied, even if it exists within the responder.
  Intellectual achievements, often inflated.
  Physical appearance, either inflated or deflated
  Acts of real or imagined physical violence, often denied.
  Indicators of charity or "benevolence," often inflated.
  Illegal acts, often denied.
  [Emphasis added.]

An arguable exception to the second-to-last appears in Smith (1987): people respond less generously and more negatively to "welfare" than "poor".

Wikipedia mentions one of many measures of socially desirable responding, but notes:

  The major concern with SDR scales is that they confound style with content. After all, people actually differ in the degree to which they possess desirable traits (e.g., nuns versus criminals).

Another concern is the potential multidimensionality of social desirability bias. Some arises in consciously deceptive responding; another kind arises from unconscious self-deception. These extent of each of these kinds of social desirability bias may depend differently on individual differences in respondents and question topic and wording.

Wikipedia also gives a brief overview of other response styles, including extreme response style, which relates to demographic (Song, 2007) and personality (Hamilton, 1968) factors. An opposite sort of style, the tendency toward neutral / "don't know" responses may be caused by personal uncertainty, item difficulty, or the sensitivity of the topic (Coombs & Coombs, 1976), so this seems to be a pretty complete example of a kind of bias that depends on all three factors. Another one of these response styles, acquiescence (and vice versa), is a somewhat interesting personality variable unto itself (Couch & Keniston, 1960); its influence can be limited by avoiding the "agree vs. disagree" format, but this may be harder in attitude research than in some other topics.

Below this, Wikipedia mentions that anonymity, confidentiality, and neutralized administration can reduce social desirability bias, so in this sense, contextual factors outside the question itself can affect biasing, especially where the judgment of others (e.g., parents, peers, employers, law enforcement) is of concern (e.g., children of authoritarian parents, friends of judgmental people, job applicants facing personality tests, parolees and prior convicts).

A particularly good review article I have on hand (Schwarz, 1999) discusses issues of "question wording, format, and context," including:

Ambiguity, obscurity, and wordiness
Open-ended responding (see also Geer, 1988) vs. frequency reporting and item rating
Topical subjectivity, demand for expertise, and time-dependence

As this article is a review itself, you can also find plenty of other references through it. Another review article that might interest others here relates survey measurement issues to cognitive issues like memory, comprehension, and schema priming (Jobe & Mingay, 1991), each of which I could easily see being more or less relevant in certain contexts and for certain people in ways that would depend on how a question is worded. Again, another huge reference section to be mined for more specifics there too. Yet another review (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) pertains specifically to error (not necessarily systematic bias) in self-reported information about mental processes due to limited self-awareness / insight and the influence of prior theories or plausibility judgments. Good stuff to bring up here, if I do say so myself!

References

Coombs, C. H., & Coombs, L. C. (1976). “Don't Know” Item Ambiguity or Respondent Uncertainty?. Public Opinion Quarterly, 40(4), 497–514.

Couch, A., & Keniston, K. (1960). Yeasayers and naysayers: Agreeing response set as a personality variable. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(2), 151–174.

Geer, J. G. (1988). What do open-ended questions measure? Public Opinion Quarterly, 52(3), 365–367.

Hamilton, D.L. (1968). Personality attributes associated with extreme response style. Psychological Bulletin, 69(3), 192–203.

Jobe, J. B., & Mingay, D. J. (1991). Cognition and survey measurement: History and overview. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5(3), 175–192.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259. Available online, URL: http://www.apologeticsinthechurch.com/uploads/7/4/5/6/7456646/nisbettwilson.pdf. Retrieved February 5, 2014.

Schwarz, N. (1999). Self-reports: How the questions shape the answers. American Psychologist, 54(2), 93–105. Available online, URL: https://edit.ethz.ch/oat/education/material/material_06_07/material_empirical_methods_06_07/American_Psychologist_Self-Reports.pdf.

Smith, T. W. (1987). That which we call welfare by any other name would smell sweeter: An analysis of the impact of question wording on response patterns. Public Opinion Quarterly, 51(1), 75–83.

Song, X.-Y. (2007). Analysis of multisample structural equation models with applications to Quality of Life data. In S.-Y. Lee (Ed.), Handbook of latent variable and related models, pp. 279–302. North-Holland.


Do we understand the non-subjective mechanisms behind pleasure and pain?

I think part of the answer to your question is going to include the dopamine "reward" pathway in the basal ganglia. In particular, a leading theory of dopaminergic function is the predictive reward error or reinforcement learning hypothesis. In this theory, dopamine neurons signal expectations about the outcome of particular stimuli.

Some key experiments are outlined in Schultz, 1998 (PDF). First, an unexpected reward elicits a short activity increase in dopamine neurons. Second, if a conditioned stimulus (CS) precedes the reward, the dopamine neuron fires in response to the CS but not the reward. That is, the dopamine signal is now a predictive reward signal. Third, if the CS is presented and then the reward does not occur, the response to the CS occurs but the dopamine neuron depresses activity immediately after the reward should have happened.

So the theory goes that dopamine neurons are not simply saying whether a reward has occurred, but rather as a learning signal that adjusts predictions about rewards. If an unpredicted reward occurs, the neuron signals a positive error ("Oops, that was a reward I should know about!"). If a predicted reward occurs, the neuron signals no error at the time of the reward ("shrug, I knew that was going to happen"). If a predicted reward does not occur, the neuron signals a negative error ("Aw shucks, guess that bell doesn't mean food after all.").

A somewhat updated revision of the theory is outlined in a review by Redgrave and Gurney, 2006 (PDF). Importantly, they note that dopamine neurons suppress their activity in response to noxious stimuli (the pain aspect of your question). They also raise some tough questions about how exactly this dopamine signal interacts with other parts of the brain to mediate the learning suggested in the theory.

As with basically all neurobiology theory, a full understanding of how this signal that we detect in individual neurons translates into a coherent behavioral response program is a long ways away. But the basal ganglia, in general, are sometimes thought of as an action selection system (or "decision path" selection to use your words), so the ability of dopamine neurons to signal expectations is relevant.


What is the primary mechanism behind nationalism, sports-team-ism, product-ism etc.?

The terms you are looking for are ingroups and outgroups. From wikipedia:

  In sociology and social psychology, an ingroup, is a social group to
  which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By
  contrast, an outgroup is a social group to which an individual does
  not identify. For example, people may find it psychologically
  meaningful to view themselves according to their race, culture, gender
  or religion. It has been found that the psychological membership of
  social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of
  phenomena.

Googling got me to this book chapter on the topic, but there's plenty more information out there.


Synchronization of perception of sensory information

Short answer
The brain actively integrates and synchronizes sensory inputs, up to the point that it actually delays one modality to match it with another.

Background
Your question is all about intersensory asynchrony and sensory integration.

A well-known example where the two stimulus modalities you mention in your question (light and sound) are perceived as separate, while they are in fact coming from the same event, is a thunder heard after lightning. This is caused by the fact that sound travels at a speed much slower than light, and hence a thunder can lag lightning by seconds (Fig. 1).

source: NASA

In many instances, however, a multimodal perception is actually perceived as being synchronous, while they are in fact offset in time due to differences in physical characteristics of the stimuli. Take the storm as an example - when it is far away, the thunder is perceptually dissociated from the lightning, because the sound lags the light by seconds. But when the thunderstorm is close enough, the auditory crack and visual lightning are perceived as synchronous, while in fact they are still offset because of the sound travelling so much slower than light.

So why does the brain sync perceptions into 1 event, and sometimes not? This has to do with the window of integration. Vroomen and Keetels (2010) conclude in their review on this topic that a stimulus asynchrony in the case of auditory beeps and visual flashes can be between 25 and 50 ms and still be perceived as coming from the same event.

The window of integration between more complex stimuli can be much greater. For example, the window for speech and visual information can be as large as 203 ms. Such large windows of integration point toward higher processes playing a role in the brain. Only temporal lags below 20 msec are expected to go unnoticed because of hard-wired limitations on the resolution power of the individual senses.

Hence, Vroomen and Keetels (2010) argue there must be higher processes at work in the brain that actively synchronize percepts that are offset in time, but seem to belong to one and the same event. One such mechanism is referred to as temporal ventriloquism, which means that a perceptual modality is actively shifted in time to match it with another modality. This effect is most pronounced in visual stimuli. Visual perceptions are in fact actively adjusted in time to match a sound or tactile stimulus. Likely visual percepts are shifted preferably by the brain, because the visual system is the slowest of all the senses.

Reference
Vroomen & Keetels, Att Percept Psychophys 2010; 72(4): 871-84


Procedures behind establishing the IQ scale

Due to fact, that I can´t give a comment, I will post an answer, that is not sufficient. However, I hope this might give you little more insight. Furthermore, my knowledge mainly builds on german IQ Tests.

1.) Usually this is done by the institution/person etc., that has developed the IQ test. However, in some cases the parameters aren´t updated. So, you should always check for this. Especially in regard of very old IQ Tests and the Flynn effect

2.) First, the type of test-sample usually depends on the population, for which the IQ test is being developed (if you want an IQ test for intelligent people in their 20´s, you should go and try it at different universities). In case of Germany: a lot of IQ Tests usually take samples in different parts of Germany, with different demographic attributes. Usually people get paid for participating. Still, in most cases it is hard to sample a representative sample, due to fact that people with higher social status and intelligence tend to agree more easily in participating (“sadly”, you can´t force someone to take part). So, the aspects you have mentioned are indeed a huge problem, with which usually can´t be dealt perfectly. Sometimes people are told, that they won´t get feedback on their performance or only, if they wish to. As you might guess, this barely counters the problem. Furthermore, huge representative samples are expensive to gather. Therefore, the sad truth is, that in most cases it comes down to representative approximations (at least in Germany). These are the reasons why a lot of (german) IQ Tests are biased upwards (f.e. in the IST-2000R more people have been graduated from high School (="Abitur") than the average; this is even worse for the extended version - to counter that, the subsamples are weighted differently). Just as a little note: IQ tests for students are usually better normed, due to the fact, that they can be accessed more easily.
Long story short: Researchers often try to cope with selection bias, but often can´t really avoid it.

3.) to be honest: I have no knowledge on the international landscape

Just as a little note: You will usually find more detailed information in the specific IQ manual. And: When you are using an IQ test, you should always think of whether or not your test-participant can be compared with the test-sample (you shouldn´t have any problems in comparing IQ performance of a 35 year old participant when the test-sample is representative for ages between 20-30, due to the fact, that the decrease in the average (fluid) intelligence from 20 to 35 is not that huge (as compared to the increase in the younger age, see f.e. Baltes (1997) Figure 3). But then of course, you can only make judgments relative to the (unrepresentative) test-sample, not to the whole population itself. This is also the reason, why i don´t really like statments like "my IQ is ...", because such statements always depend on the test-sample and test itself, that was being used.

An article, that is dealing (along with other aspects of the human development) with the development of fluid and crystallized intelligence across the lifespan: Baltes, P. B. (1997). On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny: Selection, optimization, and compensation as foundation of developmental theory. American psychologist, 52(4), 366-380.


Where to find a study on women and selfies?

The Yahoo Lifestyle website gives a popular description of the following study:

Fox & Rooney. The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. Personality and Individual Differences 76 (2015) 161–165

The study basically concludes that in a population of males (and I quote from the abstract):

  Self-objectification and narcissism predicted time spent on SNSs.
  Narcissism and psychopathy predicted the number of selfies posted, whereas narcissism and
  self-objectification predicted editing photographs of oneself posted on SNSs.

With regard to females, the authors justify their choice of a male population on p.162 at the end of the Introduction, and I quote:

  Although some research on SNSs and other interactive media has shown a relationship between use and self-objectification among females (e.g., Fox, Bailenson, & Tricase, 2013; Fox, Ralston, Cooper, & Jones, in press; De Vries & Peter, 2013; Meier & Gray, 2013; Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2012), at this time little is known about men. Given previous findings with females, we anticipate that trait self-objectification will be associated with greater social networking site use [...], more frequently posting selfies [...], and more frequent photo editing [...] by men.

In other words, in females the relation between self-objectification and use of interactive media was already known. The authors have therefore addressed the issue in a population of men.

Sifting through the studies cited in the Fox & Rooney article, and taking into account that your question emphasizes your interest in selfies, the De Vries and Peter study cited in the quote above is probably the reference you are after:

De Vries and Peter. Women on display: The effect of portraying the self online on
women’s self-objectification. Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 1483–1489


Which function to use for fitting learning curves?

Sigmoids are more general and probably better for modeling learning than a simple exponential. Your exponential fits decently, but it probably doesn't describe the actual underlying process very well.
Importantly, learning is often not fastest at the start, there is often some level of "aha!" moment later on. Sigmoids can capture this.
There are a variety of sigmoidal functions, but they are all differentiable and have a central peak in the first derivative. The time to peak and slope at peak are both parameters you can use to measure learning rate, though they measure somewhat different things. Which one is more applicable will depend on how learning in your paradigm varies across subjects and conditions. Looking at the data you posted, the peak slope (peak of the first derivative) is probably a decent choice, although I'm not sure you really have enough data points in the first month to get a good measure.
Exponential fits are likely to be more unstable, and in the data you've posted it looks like your fit is overfitting the beginning and end of the learning process, so you're missing the most important part for determining the actual "speed", which is between your first 3 data points; none of these are fit well. With an exponential fit, you are supposing that the most learning occurs at the point of the first trial. In most tasks without substantial prior instruction, you need at least a couple of trials to even figure out what is going on, and can't start to improve until then. If that first "trial" is a whole block then maybe this is not a terrible assumption, but that's mainly because you've already passed the peak slope of the sigmoidal function early on; if you used the entire data then a sigmoid would still fit better.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve and:
Culler, E., & Girden, E. (1951). The learning curve in relation to other psychometric functions. The American journal of psychology, 64(3), 327-349.
Gallistel, C. R., Fairhurst, S., & Balsam, P. (2004). The learning curve: implications of a quantitative analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(36), 13124-13131.
Daller, M., Turlik, J., & Weir, I. (2013). Vocabulary acquisition and the learning curve. Vocabulary Knowledge: Human ratings and automated measures, 47, 185.


Can the neurological damage done by alcohol be reversed?

Most of the acute neurological effects of ethanol alcohol, such as slurred speech, ataxia, and confusion/sedation, are reversible, and the symptoms will disappear after the blood alcohol level gets down to below the intoxication level. However, in very high dose, alcohol can cause stupor or even coma, with irreversible neurological damages from associated hypoglycemia (from the hypoglycemic effect of alcohol and from concomitantly inadequate food intake) or hypoxemia (from the respiratory depression effect of alcohol). Also, there can be indirect permanent brain damage from falls, car accidents, regurgitation with aspirations, drowning, etc.

Most of the chronic neurological effects of ethanol alcohol, such as Wernicke-Kosakoff syndrome, alcoholic cerebellar degeneration, and alcoholic dementia are irreversible, and at present, there are no effective treatments to reverse neurological damage in these conditions. However, further progression can be halted by quit drinking alcohol. And, in the case of Wernicke’s encephalopathy,  if adequate dose of thiamine is given in time, neurological injuries can be reversed and permanent neurological damage may not occur.

General References.

Healthline. Alcohol-Related Neurologic Disease

Wikipedia. Alcohol intoxication

Wikipedia. Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome

Academic References.

Arts NJM, Walvoort SJW, Kessels RPC. Korsakoff’s syndrome: a critical review. Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat. 2017; 13: 2875–2890. doi: 10.2147/NDT.S130078

Harper C. The Neuropathology of Alcohol-Related Brain Damage. Alcohol and Alcoholism. 2009 Mar-Apr; 44(2):136–140. https://doi.org/10.1093/alcalc/agn102

Ridley NJ, Draper B, Withall A.Alcohol-related dementia: an update of the evidence. Alzheimers Res Ther. 2013; 5(1): 3. doi:10.1186/alzrt157


What is the current status of Paraphrenia?

Paraphrenia is a late-onset mental disorder similar to schizophrenia in that it features the positive symptoms of the disease, such as delusions and/or hallucinations, but lacks the negative symptoms, such as the deterioration of intellect or personality. It seems to be an outdated term (source: Psychology Central).

  Can anyone find a well-focused and detailed experimental review or trial?

I have found a few, albeit all somewhat dated: Ravindran et al. (1999); Lubman & Castle (2002) and Sato & Idha, (2002). I can recommend to see whether these articles are cited in papers published on a later date if you prefer more recent literature.

  Do psychology / psychiatry associations claim it?

Difficult question. The International Late-Onset Schizophrenia Group recognizes the disorder’s late-onset version as “very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis Howard et al. (2000). The CCI in Australia describes it. Smaller, more isolated institutions seem to recognize it, for instance, the Cardif & Vale Action for Mental Health at least acknowledges its existence. As you said, it appeared not in the DSM-IV and V manuals. Instead, more recently paraphrenia has been classified as

  very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis

Patients who present these particular symptoms are generally diagnosed with a variety of other illnesses, including atypical psychosis, schizoaffective disorder, delusional disorder or persistent persecutory state (source: Psychology Central). I am sure when you search under this term you will end up with substantial amounts of resources, including for example the DSM-V manual, where it is included, albeit quite vaguely defined according to Sachdev et al. (2015).

  Manuals that address it in diagnosis or didactically?

Under the more popular name late-onset psychosis, you can find its diagnostic characteristics in the DSM-V manual as stated above, in The Psychosis Manual from Smith et al., in this Master's thesis, among hosts of other sources.

References
- Howard et al., Am J Psychiatry (2000); 157(2): 172-8
- Lubman & Castle, Current Psychiatry (2002); 1(12): 35-44
- MacDougall, Master's thesis (2011), McMaster University
- Ravindran et al., Can J Psychiatry (1999); 44(2):133-7
- Sachdev et al., Harv Rev Psychiatry (2015); 23(5): 320–8
- Sato & Idha, Psychogeriatrics (2002); 2(1): 20–5


what causes an action potential to propagate exactly and why should it propagate?

When a sodium (Na) channel is stimulated by a strong-enough stimulus (such as from an electrical stimulus or from an incoming action potential), it will open and let a lot of Na+ ions influx rapidly into the cell at that channel, creating an action potential there. The locally high concentration of Na+ ion inside the cell at that channel will cause Na+ ions there to spread around immediately. This will cause depolarization and openings of the nearby Na channels, resulting in new actions potentials occurring at the nearby channels. This whole process will repeat itself again at these channels, causing more new action potentials to spread out further. In each cycle of an action potential, the potassium channel opens after the sodium channel does about 1 msec. Although the opening of the potassium channel causes repolarization,  it doesn’t have any effects on the concentration of Na+ ion and does not stop the spreading out of the Na+ ions. Therefore, an action potential inevitably spreads out and out.

If the axon is stimulated at its trunk, the action potential will spread out both ways, up and down the axon. Figure 3.1 A shows a schematic diagram of an axon and the charge distribution along the membrane of that axon. More positive charges exist on the outside of the axon, and more negative charges on the inside. Now consider the consequences of delivering some stimulus to a point in the middle of the axon, Figure 3.1 B. If the depolarization is sufficiently large, voltage-dependent sodium channels will be opened, and an action potential will be initiated, and the sodium ion (Na+) will influx into the cell.
The influx positive charges Na+ will spread to the adjacent regions of the membrane. As the charges move to the adjacent regions of the membrane, the adjacent regions of the membrane will depolarize. If they depolarize sufficiently, voltage-dependent sodium channels in the adjacent regions of the membrane will be opened and "new" action potentials will be initiated, Figure 3.1 C. This perturbance of charge distribution will then spread to the next regions and initiates other "new" action potentials, Figure 3.1 D to 3.1 F.
[The above text and the figure are adapted from Reference 1]

Now, if the action potential spreads down from the axon hillock (which is located to the left side of the axon and is not shown in the picture) as in Figure 3.12 above, it will spread only one way to the distal end of the axon [inset 2, 3, and 5] because the previously depolarized channels will still be inactive (or in refractory period) for a while after the action potential ends [inset 4].
[The above text and the figure are adapted from Reference 2]
References:

Byrne JH. Chapter 3: Propagation of the Action Potential. Neuroscience Online. The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). McGovern Medical School.

Augustine GJ. Chpater 3. Voltage-dependent membrane permeability. In: Purves D, Augustine GJ, David Fitzpatrick D, Hall WC, Lamantia AS, McNamara JO, Williams SM, editors. Neuroscience. 3rd ed. Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates Inc; 2004. ISBN-13: 9780878937257 ISBN-10: 0878937250.


What is the scientific definition of Introversion/Extroversion?

I totally agree. These words have become colloquial and have lost much of their meaning - and are therefore increasingly less helpful. Introversion is confused with shyness and sensitivity, while Extroversion is confused with social skills. This is partly because there is no agreed upon definition, insofar that they are operationally defined by each psychometric test/framework differently. That is to say, the same theoretical construct/concept is measured differently in each test, and therefore are operationally defined by a different set of responses.

Its is generally agreed that is is a continuum and that individuals do not reside exclusively on the same part of the continuum all the time, across contexts (which is where your festival example comes from). That is, an individual may have a strong/weak tendency but may behave differently dependent upon the situation they find themselves in. Anecdotally, for what it's worth, I find an individual's tendency is best revealed when they are under pressure or are experiencing anxiety.

For the original interpretation, look no further than Carl Jung's definition. The most widely accepted operational definition according to most Psychology research is possibly The Three Factor Model, while the most popular operational definition, where most lay people hang their hat is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I'd say people warm to this the most, and is the definition most people are likely referring to when they speak of
Introversion/Extroversion.

Looking to these three sources, you should get the original theoretical definition for the construct.


How do we imagine? How do images have qualia?

This is hardly settled science, but one hypothesis with some empirical support is that

  Visual mental imagery and perception share similar cortical representations (Cichy et al., 2012; Kosslyn, 2005; Pylyshyn, 2003). It has been proposed that, while brain forward connections convey information from the outside world, backward connections might have a dominant role during the forming of mental images in the absence of external bottom-up inputs (Ganis and Schendan, 2008; Ishai et al., 2000; Kalkstein et al., 2011; Kosslyn, 2005).

For more theoretical speculation on the neural basis of qualia you could read Orpwood (2017), although by his own admittance, his ideas (at least in the past) were not terribly clearly presented. He does discuss a theoretical example of olfactory qualia. (I'm mentioning this because you said in the comments that you want to go beyond visual ones.)

Also note that some neuroscientists think the problem of qualia is ill-posed, in that it is intrinsically dualist:

  Typically, qualia are defined by four characteristics. Qualia are private, meaning they cannot be known unless they are experienced through the first-person perspective. Qualia are intrinsic, which indicates that they are self-sufficient and independent of other items in experience. Qualia are also ineffable, signifying that the experience of qualia cannot be sufficiently conveyed through words alone. Finally, qualia are immediately accessible through consciousness, which means that knowledge of qualia is direct and certain, as opposed to knowledge of the physical world, which is indirect and logically deduced.  [...]

  This definition, unfortunately, leads us down a murky path towards dualism, a philosophical position which asserts that there are two kinds of real substances: the physical substance out of which the universe is composed, and the non-physical substance out of which the mind is composed.

Since you asked in the past about the private conceptions of word meanings (as a barrier to common sense), that kinda has the same problem.

If we just stick to qualia as brain processes/representation, regarding pain-related words, for example

  Language is more than a mere medium when it comes to share our pain experiences. In fact, it has been shown that processing pain-related words is associated with enhanced activation of part of the neural circuitry underlying physical pain experiences. [citing four references in support]

  Richter M, Eck J, Straube T, Miltner WH, Weiss T. Do words hurt? Brain activation during the processing of pain-related words. Pain. 2010 Feb;148(2):198–205. pmid:19846255
  Richter M, Schroeter C, Puensch T, Straube T, Hecht H, Ritter A, et al. Pain-related and negative semantic priming enhances perceived pain
  intensity. Pain Res Manag. 2014 Mar-Apr;19(2):69–74. pmid:24716197
  Gu X, Han S. Neural substrates underlying evaluation of pain in actions depicted in words. Behav Brain Res. 2007 Aug 6;181:218–23. pmid:17512615
  Osaka N, Osaka M, Morishita M, Kondo H, Fukuyama H. A word expressing affective pain activates the anterior cingulate cortex in the human brain: an fMRI study. Behav Brain Res. 2004 Aug 12;153:123–127. pmid:15219713

I think this is somewhat analogous to the issue of V1 involvement in visual imagery.


Forgive me for not including any scientific references (I've been out of the human movement science for a while), but it is believed that movements are saved and executed in a "goal-directed" way. It is not the case that every muscle has its own area and they are individually activated on a scale of 0 (no contraction) -100 (max contraction) depending on the movement you make.

So let us look at the smallest units of a movement, the motor/muscle unit (wiki). This is a group of muscle cells that is activated by one efferent neuron. Several muscle units, over several muscles, are activated per movement. The brain cells that activate the neurons that stimulates these motor units are stored in groups, and will/can be activated simultaneously/shortly after one another (but I will not go into the matter of timing).

It is possible for the same movement to be be executed by different sets of muscle units (otherwise doing repetitive bicep curls, for instance, is impossible. The relaxation of muscle fibers is not that fast enough to allow repetitive activation). All these sets of muscle units, or the brains cells that are responsible for activating them, are thus stored nearby each other.

When you are a novice, the brain cells are not organized in a very neat way. It varies a lot which cells are activated together, and this explains the variability of your movement; sometimes, wrong motor units are activated. However, with practice, the connections between the "correct" cells will become stronger, and more specialized groups of cells will form. Moreover, more cells will be "made available" (also called scaffolding) for these type of movements . This cán be seen in the homunculus (the bigger hands e.g. represent more fine-tuned motor control of the fingers). This will improve the odds of executing the movement correctly, and allows you to fine-tune your movements.

If you want references, I'd suggest searching in PubMed for motor control, neuromechanics, learning and scaffolding (making cells available). Here is a website that tells the entire story of taking a motor action, including planning and control of the cerebellum. I omitted these parts of to story so to only focus on the "storing" of the movements.


What is the difference between naive cynicism and naive realism?

The lexical approach may assist. The lexical hypothesis states that, ‘All aspects of human personality, which are or have been of importance, interest or utility, have already become recorded in the substance of language’(Cattell, 1943) and, ‘When an idea is important, people are likely to have a word for it … the more important something is, … the more words there are likely to be’(Miller, 1996). The atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour uses a lexical approach to visualise words using the axes of affiliation and dominance (Mobbs, 2020).
Unsure what is implied by naive, however, the synonyms are:

Cynicism: disbelief, disenchantment, disillusion, distrust, doubt, doubtfulness, dubiety, incredulity, irony, mistrust, negative_thinking, negativity, nihilism, pessimism, sardonicism, scepticism, scoffing, suspicion, and unbelief.

Realism: accuracy, authenticity, clear-sightedness, common_sense, faithfulness, fidelity, level-headedness, naturalism, opportunism, pragmatism, telling_it_like_it_is, truthfulness, and veracity.

The visualisation of cynicism and realism according to the atlas approach are shown below. Optimism, pessimism, altruism and sadism are also included for the purpose of comparison:

In answer to your question, cynicism is both submissive and anti-social.  It is associated with the emotions of anxiety and fear. Realism is neither dominant or submissive and is more associated with the emotions of stability and harmony.  Optimism is both dominant and affiliative and is associated with the emotions of confidence and courage.
References
Cattell RB. The description of personality: basic traits resolved into clusters. J Abnorm Soc Psychol. 1943; 38: 476–506. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054116
Miller GA. The science of words. New York: Scientific American Library; 1996.
Mobbs AED (2020) An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227877
Declared interest: I am the author of the atlas paper.


Simultaneous extracellular recording from different distant sites (in rodents)

I wouldn't know why multi-site cortical extracellular recordings would not be feasible? What would the practical experimental or technical limitation be in your opinion?

As long as you have a multichannel amplifier suitable for extracellular recording and you consider the choice between using a common reference, i.e., monopolar recordings (Ludwig et al., 2009), or using paired recording-reference electrodes for bipolar measurements (Boatman-Reich et al., 2010) you should be fine.

References
- Boatman-Reich et al., Front Comput Neurosci (2010)
- Ludwig et al., J Neurophysiol (2009); 101(3): 1679–89


Which characteristics of neural activity patterns underlie conscious experience?

As discussed previously in this thread, information (specifically, information that exists in the neural circuits), is probably the physical quantity that correlates perfectly with consciousness and, I would like to add, qualia. This is because information can have the same complexity, dynamicity, and content as consciousness and qualia do.

Now, what is the specific neural activity that is or contains information among neural circuits. When a neural circuit is functioning, there are many activities going on in and around that neural circuit: signal processing activities, metabolic activities, structural maintaining (of membranes, organelles, cytoskeletons, etc.) activities, circuit modifying (of synapses, dendrites, axons) activities, changes in supplying blood circulation, oxygen, and other blood constituents, changes in its physical constitutions (temperature, mass, entropy, etc.), etc. But the only activity that has the complexity, dynamicity, content containing capacity as the information does is the signal processing activity. Moreover, it’s the only activity that can communicate locally and extensively with its counterparts in other neural circuits.

So, from current evidence, it is to be concluded that neural processing activities, with its correct spatio-temproal and other profiles, underly the brain’s information-related functions, including consciousness and qualia. Clinical and experimental evidence strongly supports this concept. Anything (such as a certain disease or drug, brain electrical stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation) that mainly affects neural transmissions and significantly interferes with the signal processing activities but does not significantly interfere with other activities significantly interferes the brain’s information-related functions, such as consciousness and qualia. Moreover, the change that occurs in the signal processing activity and that in the brain’s information-related functions (such as consciousness and qualia) occur simultaneously! For more detailed discussion about this matter, please read ref 1 and ref 2.

Now, why do some signal processing activities have qualia or consciousness, why some don’t? There are different explanations for this from some existing theories. The Integrated Information Theory [IIT][3-6] asserts that a conscious experience is a maximally irreducible conceptual structure (MICS), which corresponds to a local maximum of integrated conceptual information (or a local maximum of Φ or Φmax) and provides mathematical formulations to calculate Φ. So, according to this theory, for any signal processing activity to be conscious, it must be complex in a certain way enough for its Φ to reach Φmax there. For example, from its calculations, there is no consciousness during sleeps, generalized seizures, or in the cerebellum – which are all true – even if, in the last two examples, active and complex processing activities are going on. It also calculates that processing activities in computers or robots, no matter how complex, can’t become conscious because they function from fixed software, which isn’t really complex in the IIT way.

According to The Basic Theory of the Mind [1,2], not all signal processing activities can be qualia or consciousness. To be qualia or consciousness, the signals from signal processing activities not only must be accessible by the consciousness neural process but also must be in some specific forms that mean qualia or mean consciousness in the nervous system language, that is, the signals must be in some specific forms that, when processed by neural circuits in the nervous system, will be interpreted to be qualia or consciousness. The theory called this kind of signals “Special signaling pattern” and “Special signaling state”. This is like why all words, except the word is this specific form “consciousness”, do not mean consciousness in English. However, although the theory gives some preliminary characteristics of these special signaling forms, it admits that the complete characteristics of these special signaling forms are not known at present but predicts that these specific forms exist and can be found by investigations.

According to the Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART)[7,8], “all conscious states are resonant states, but not all resonant states are conscious states”. The resonance states must be accessible to consciousness to be conscious. “Indeed, some resonant states, such as the storage of a sequence of events in working memory before rehearsal occurs, or the entorhinal–hippocampal resonances that may dynamically stabilize the learning of entorhinal grid cells and hippocampal place cells, are not accessible to consciousness.” So, they are not conscious. Also, the resonance states must be in some forms to be conscious – they must involve the processes of learning, expectation, and attention. For example, “What sort of resonance supports a conscious percept of surface brightness or color? As noted above, I have predicted that such a consciously visible percept is supported by a surface shroud resonance between visual cortical areas and the parietal cortex that is predicted to play a role in learning invariant object categories (Section17).This prediction illustrates how ART clarifies mechanistic relationships between the CLEARS processes of consciousness, learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony.”

I think these are some preliminary answers that I can gather from some existing theories. They are certainly not the widely-accepted, standard answers. And there are other theories that I’m not familiar with, such as ref 9-11, which may have the answers you’re looking for. So, if you are intereseted and have time, please examine them.

References:

Ukachoke C. Chapter 5 – Theorem IV: A Quale is a Special Kind of Signaling Pattern In: The Basic Theory of the Mind. 1st ed. Bangkok, Thailand; Charansanitwong Printing Co. 2018.
Ukachoke C. Chapter 6 – Theorem V: Consciousness is a Special Kind of Reentrant Signaling State In: The Basic Theory of the Mind. 1st ed. Bangkok, Thailand; Charansanitwong Printing Co. 2018.
Tononi G. An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC Neurosci 2004,5:42. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2202-5-42.
Tononi G. Integrated information theory of consciousness: An updated account. Arch Ital Biol. 2012 Jun-Sep;150(2-3):56-90. DOI: 10.4449/aib.v149i5.1388.
Oizumi M, Albantakis L, Tononi G. From the phenomenology to the mechanisms of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0. PLoS Comput Biol. 2014 May;10(5):e1003588. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588.
Tononi G, Koch C. Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere? Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2015 May 19;370(1668):20140167. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0167.
Grossberg S. Adaptive Resonance Theory: How a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world. Neural Netw. 2013 Jan;37:1-47. DOI: 10.1016/j.neunet.2012.09.017.
Grossberg S. Towards solving the hard problem of consciousness: The varieties of brain resonances and the conscious experiences that they support. Neural Netw. 2017 Mar;87:38-95. DOI: 10.1016/j.neunet.2016.11.003.
McFadden J. The CEMI Field. Theory gestalt information and the meaning of meaning. J Conscious Stud. 2013;20(3-4):3-4.
Sevush S. Single-neuron Theory of Consciousness. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 2005.
Hameroff S, Penrose R. Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'Orch OR' theory. Phys Life Rev. 2014 Mar;11(1):39-78. doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002.


Why do pupils dilate in response to emotional state?

The dilation of the pupil is under control of the sympathetic nervous system. The main role of the sympathetic nervous system is to get the body ready for fast response. The typical example is the 'fight-or-flight' response, but that can also occur in the presence of a potential sexual partner. Therefore, dilated pupils can be a sign of sexual arousal.
Now, that's the response of the person showing the dilated pupils, but your question related to the effect on the other person. People with more dilated pupils are rated as more attractive by observers unaware of this manipulation Tombs & Silverman, 2004 - at least for males looking at females. As an aside, people in ancient Egypt are said to have used atropine, which is a poison extracted from the belladonna plant, as a cosmetic to artificially dilate their pupils.


Can compulsions be defined in a way that is independent of obsessions, culture, etc?

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) includes a new chapter on Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders to reflect the increasing evidence of these disorders’ relatedness to one another and distinction from other anxiety disorders, as well as to help clinicians better identify and treat individuals suffering from these disorders.

You are right that compulsions are

  repetitive behavior/thoughts intended to reduce distress and/or
  prevent a potentially serious situation

and this definition can be used for compulsive behaviour which does not pose a problem.

In this chapter the DSM is talking about disorders which in turn means we are talking about unjustified or socially unacceptable behaviour.


The field of study you should focus on is the one for which you have already identified in your paragraph above which is EEG based "brain-computer interface".
EEG signals are compared by their "features". Each of the signal you have provided above have different features. These features can be mean, variance, frequency, kurtosis, skewness of each of the signals (statistical parameters which also includes fractal dimension, Hjorth parameters, common spatial pattern, fano factor... ...) or power as computed through frequency space algorithms such as fast fourier transform.
More sophisticated techniques such as blind source separation, empirical mode decomposition and wavelet coherence (a phase domain approach) should yield additional insights but these are more reserved for research purposes.
The most common algorithm for post processing is the wavelet transform which plots the energy as a function of both time and frequency.
During a seizure, the wavelet transform will display a clear high energy periodic signal at the lower frequency. While highly efficient in pin pointing exactly where and how the seizure is happening, the wavelet transform is highly advanced (challenging to implement) and runs at O(n^2) for a naive implementation and O(nlogn) for a fast implementation. It is quite computationally expensive.

What you need to implement is a real time seizure detection based on EEG features.
(offline)
This is done first by grabbing the EEG signal when he has a seizure using EEG headsets or through research, estimate what the characteristics of this type of seizures are. (this can be done even with a single electrode).
(real time)
Once this done, hook the patient with the EEG headset and compute the features of the seizure signal at every other other second worth of samples as they stream into a computing platform. The features are constantly compared to the threshold features. When all these features are have their respective threshold (A and B and C and D all meets threshold). Send alert that a seizure is happening.
The threshold approach is a basic one, but because our brain continuously changing and EEG depends on many many external variables, what is commonly used in practice are the detection of seizure through artificial neural networks (ANN) - it will not only tell you when a seizure is happening but could in fact PREDICT when a seizure will occur! (*)
One challenge I can see with what you are attempting to do is that the patient will be constantly hooked up with a headset in order to perform real time seizure prediction. The distance between your USB and the headset will be a hard constraint. The headsets needs to be recharged frequently. Emotiv EPOC (one popular headset) contains 16 electrodes which can be quite burdensome when worn. Wet electrodes provides better data but requires delicate preparation which can take a long time. If worn constantly, I would pick a headset containing a few electrodes at key places like the frontal-polar lobe (since seizure is more easily picked up than other EEG patterns, we don't need many electrodes) and would choose one that is aesthetically pleasing (one from Neurosky or one of the recent headset from Emotiv i.e. insight) and has a long battery life time
Good luck
(*) Prediction of seizure onset in an in-vitro hippocampal slice model of epilepsy using Gaussian-based and wavelet-based artificial neural networks. - A. Chiu


CBT (or something similar): can it be used without a therapist?

There is some research into the efficacy of self-help versus therapy. Usually these studies find that self-help is less effective or not effective at all (e.g. Ehlers et al., 2003, to give just one example), although the relative effectiveness depends on the type and severity of disorders. For example, fear of flying is probably easier to self-treat than a personality disorder like antisocial behavior. The problem with this research in the context of your question is, that the self-help in these studies does not consist in handing out CBT manuals to the patients, but "self-help booklets", and that of course these are limited in content when compared to the full knowledge of a therapist. So to answer your question, I will assume that the "patient" in question knows as much about CBT as any therapist would. Because that would be the prerequisite to applying CBT to him- or herself.

In my opinion there are several problems with self-therapy:

The first step in any therapy is a careful diagnosis. You want to know what your problem is, before you start working on something that you don't suffer from. E.g. you might think that you have a depression, when in truth you are suffering from something that also has depressive symptoms, e.g. social phobia or an eating disorder. Diagnostics is a science of its own and psychologists spend quite some time during their education to learn it. I don't think a layperson can reliably diagnose a psychological problem.
Even if you are an educated psychologist yourself, an honest self-diagnosis might be impossible. Most people – and psychologists are just normal people in this – don't perceive themselves clearly, but are influenced by shame or misconceptions. A typical example is an eating disorder: the whole problem with most eating disorders is that the patients are unable to understand that they have a completely faulty image of themselves. They believe they are overwheight, while they are in fact completely normal or even underwheight. Such a person would never diagnose herself with an eating disorder. Most other mental disorders are the same: the concerned persons don't perceive their problems as problems, or not accurately.
Let's assume you have an accurate diagnosis. Maybe a psychologists diagnosed you, or you are uncommonly objective in your self-assessment (although most likely you fool yourself here, but let's just assume you know what you have). There is the problem that even therapists don't usually know what a patient has at the beginning of a therapy, or not definitely or completely. Their diagnoses are given provisionally, and adapted to new insights they may gain during therapy.
Okay, but let's assume you really, really know what your problem is. Couldn't you help yourself? To answer that, we must understand what a psychological disorder is. There is this model that thinks of all human behavior, normal as well as deviant, as an adaptation to a certain surrounding. You are being abused by your parents, and you develop dissociation to deal with it. This strategy of survival persists even after the situation that caused it no longer exists, because it was a successful strategy and because either it still works (to some degree) or you find yourself unable to unlearn it. There is something inside yourself that keeps you applying the same solutions to the same problems over and over again, even though other solutions would be better. There might be an underlying fear, or simply a deeply ingrained learning, whatever it is, you will find yourself faced with a very strong inner resistance against changing your behavior. What the therapist does is he adapts the therapeutic strategy to your resistance. He observes how you react to the therapy and finds just the right amount of therapy to slip in under your resistance. He finds the kind of things you find yourself able to do. And he offers his emotional support. In a therapy you are not alone, there is someone you can fall back to, someone who understands, accepts and appreciates you as you are, and at the same time supports your attempts at change. It is more than just doing gymnastics exercises blindly each morning. If CBT was only a number of exercises, there would be no therapists, only researchers that published these books with exercises. But these exercises lack adaptability and the human interaction that breaks your resistance to change.
Okay, but what if I know my problem and I'm not self-delusional and I'm really able to deal with my inner resistance? Well, chances are that you don't have a psychological disorder anyway. If your fears and habits don't keep you from dealing with your problems, then you don't have problems. Or only because you don't suffer enough from them to take care of them.

All disorders show a certain percentage of what is called "spontaneous remissions": the problems disappear without therapy. I'm pretty sure that in some of these cases the persons dealt with their problems themselves in some way. They got over it. Not everyone remains hampered for life after child abuse. Some people look at that experience, limit it to the people who abused them, and have normal and healthy relationships with everyone else. Somehow some people get out of their disorders after some period of "darkness" and are able to lead a normal happy life without the help of a therapist. Probably reading a CBT manual and applying some of the insight to one's own life will help some people make a change on their own, and it very likely won't hurt any of the others, but most likely it was something in that person, a certain resilience, or something in their surroundings, like the support of friends or familiy members, or a fundamental outside change, like moving to a new city, that effected this self-healing, not a CBT manual.

Ehlers, A., Clark, D. M., Hackmann, A., McManus, F., Fennell, M., Herbert, C., & Mayou, R. (2003). A randomized controlled trial of cognitive therapy, a self-help booklet, and repeated assessments as early interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 60(10), 1024-1032.


Why do people behave better when observed?

It sounds like rational behaviour (i.e., it is not a cognitive bias). Monitoring generally creates a closer link between behaviour and social consequences (either rewards or punishments).

A huge number of theories capture ideas about how the social context influences behaviour (e.g., social norms).

In the work context, you could look at ideas around maximal and typical performance.

That said, there is literature that looks at the pros and cons of monitoring on workplace performance. In particular, excessively fine grained monitoring can lead to increased stress, lower job satisfaction, turnover, etc. See for example Kinnie et al for a discussion.

References

Kinnie, N., Hutchinson, S., & Purcell, J. (2000). 'Fun and surveillance': the paradox of high commitment management in call centres. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 11(5), 967-985.


Do dreams repeat/continue? Or is it just a perception that a dream repeated?

Disclaimer: My answer is about recurrent dreams. I don't have any immediate sources to consult on the continuation part (and there are less references to it in literature), but I'd be very surprised if it is any different.

Theories

Firstly, there are many of theories that support the notion of recurring dreams. I know not of a single one that (explicitly or even reasonably implicitly) rejects such thing.

On cognitive perception

Secondly, you talk about perception, which in cognitive terms equates conscious access (rather than sensing in everyday language). So if you can (consciously) perceive it, it must be a genuine mental process that made it available (with the sole exception below).

Subjective reports = objective measurements

Thirdly, recurring dreams have been reported and studied for decades (in your case I'd probably start with [1]). Most of dream science is natively based on subjective reports. But recently, scientists have shown that monitored brain activity is in agreement with, and can even predict, those subjective reports [2].

So we really have all reasons to believe that what we perceive as a dream is what we actually dream.

Possible exception?

The one exception for this, and it is my own informed suspicion, is that we may still have a Déjà vu (déjâ rêvé, in the question context) while dreaming - so it may be a false sensation after all. It is the same informed suspicion that tells me that if this happens at all, it should be extremely rare.

Sleep's low retention

As for the latter part of your question:

  we can't recollect the first instance of such a dream. Why is this so?

If one is to make gross simplification, during sleep:

Your long-term memory is 'not available' to remember stuff.
Your short-term memory is even more volatile than it is while you're awake (there isn't central-executive process to exercise retention).

For the same reason, we often remember a dream just after waking up, but unless salient we fail to recall it shortly after.

[1] Zadra, Antonio, and D. C. Donderi. Nightmares and bad dreams: their prevalence and relationship to well-being. Journal of abnormal psychology 109.2 (2000): 273.

[2] Horikawa, Tomoyasu, et al. Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science 340.6132 (2013): 639-642.


Research groups in Computer Science which study Computational Neuroscience

My general advice would be to start by tracking down the faculty that are doing the kind of research you want to do. A good way to do this is to identify journal articles that appeal to you, and then figure out what lab they originated from. The labs might be in a computer science department, a neuroscience department, or even a computational neuroscience department. If the lab seems interesting, then evaluate the program to see if it seems like a good fit. For most graduate programs, individual faculty members have a lot of input into admissions. If there is someone who does the kind of work you want to do, then they are more likely to support your application.

This article has some really helpful advice about how to pursue computational neuroscience in programs that are not specifically 'computational neuroscience' programs.

Of course, there are some computational neuroscience programs, where interdisciplinary research will be the norm. A small sample of the ones that I am aware of:

Boston University
UC San Diego
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU/Pitt


What statistics can compare individual survey responses & others that were measured as a group (from which we need to extract individual responses)?

Sounds like you're looking for a hierarchical model. You might find some joy in  BDA, http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/ (in particular, chapter 5)

To quickly get some idea if this sort of thing is right for you, you could check out this blog-post on one particular example here http://andrewgelman.com/2014/01/21/everything-need-know-bayesian-statistics-learned-eight-schools/

Whether this will work for you also depends quite a bit on what you want to ask (what does 'identify the relationship' mean?) and the target audience. If you do head over to Cross Validated (strongly recommended!) make those things as clear as possible in your question.


What is a test called that involves indicating whether a line has the same slope as a previous image?

The task sounds like a match-to-sample task which is indeed used in working memory studies. In this test participants are presented with a sample stimulus and have to judge whether or not following stimuli resemble this particular stimulus. Depending on the time span between the presentation of the sample stimulus and the following stimuli this task is sometimes also called a delayed match-to-sample task.


How can automatic processing be estimated in an editing task?

What do you mean exactly with 'processes'? If you're thinking about actual movements made during editing (i.e. tiping), this science paper might help. Very simply put, they showed skilled typist have two kinds of control processes, one conscious and one unconscious.

(Science 29 October 2010:
Vol. 330 no. 6004 pp. 683-686
DOI: 10.1126/science.1190483)


What happens when a person "imagines" how food could taste like just from looking at it?

As Josh Gitlin said, imagining something activates more or less the same parts of the brain as actually experiencing it. Behrmann (2000) is a good introduction to this in the visual domain, though that article is a bit outdated now. There is also a lot of evidence that representations of meanings (semantic memory) involve a distributed network of perceptual regions (e.g., Binder & Desai, 2011; also Barsalou, 2008) and there are some computational models that try to capture this (e.g., Rogers et al., 2004). Putting this evidence together suggests that the sight of food (visual input) would spread activation through the semantic network and would activate the other perceptual, emotional, and linguistic associations (taste, smell, food-related memories, etc.). Salivation is one possible outcome of the activation of taste and smell representations; but I think it is also reasonable to expect activation of memories of eating related foods, etc.

Dana Small is one person who has done some very interesting studies on the neuroscience of taste and smell perception, including top-down effects like anticipation (e.g., Small et al., 2008).

References

Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645.

Behrmann, M. (2000). The mind’s eye mapped onto the brain's matter. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(2), 50–54.

Binder, J. R., & Desai, R. H. (2011). The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(11), 527–536. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.10.001

Rogers, T. T., Lambon Ralph, M. A., Garrard, P., Bozeat, S., McClelland, J. L., Hodges, J. R., & Patterson, K. E. (2004). Structure and Deterioration of Semantic Memory: A Neuropsychological and Computational Investigation. Psychological Review, 111(1), 205–235.

Small, D. M., Veldhuizen, M. G., Felsted, J., Mak, Y. E., & McGlone, F. (2008). Separable Substrates for Anticipatory and Consummatory Food Chemosensation. Neuron, 57(5), 786–797.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2008.01.021


Are the incidents of autism spectrum disorder on the rise, or is there an increase due to better definition of diagnostic criteria?

Sociologists King and Bearman have been looking into this (see King & Bearman, 2009a; King & Bearman, 2009b; King & Bearman, 2011; King et al., 2009). They estimate that some of the increases in ASD identification are due to the following:

25% attributed to diagnostic accretion - particularly children with mental retardation now being concurrently diagnosed with ASD.
15% attributed to improved awareness of ASD.
10% attributed to the increase in the age of mothers choosing to have children.
4% to geographic clustering - that is, families might move to an area where services are available, leading to increased diagnoses in specific areas.

This leaves a significant proportion of the increase in ASD identification unexplained, and in need of further investigations.


Is "havening" pseudo-scientific or effective?

First off, I am not familiar with this therapy. There seems to be 251 hits on Scholar (excluding citations and patents) at the time of this writing with a search for "Havening Technique'. Of these 251, there seems to be one single journal article from Gursimran et al. (2015). The publisher of this 'journal', i.e. the Health Science Journal (Insight Medical Publishing) is listed on Baell's list and hence a suspected predatory publisher.

In all, this Havening technique can safely be considered as a technique that has not been described in the scientific literature.

I am deliberately leaving out the reference to the paper, as I regard it a source, not a reference


Can psychosomatic reactions be completely unconcious?

Good question and this is very big topic mate. Short answer is - every psychosomatic disorder is unconscious in the sense that it's coming from psychological tension but reflects itself in some unpleasant somatic/bodily reaction (e.g. headache, lower back pain, high blood pressure). In general, even if you are conscious of the source of psychosomatic reaction (e.g. stressful job causing evening headaches) you can't really talk yourself out of it. But you still can make some short term changes (pop a pill) or long term changes that (quit a job, meditate) to reduce the psychosomatic effects (Grossman et al., 2004).

  Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S., Walach, H. (2004)
  Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits - A
  meta-analysis. JOURNAL OF PSYCHOSOMATIC RESEARCH, 57 (1): 35-43

But it's probably not that simple. While we can say that psychosomatic disorders are by default unconscious, we need to consider wider range of factors that causes them and ask more questions.

One such question is why people get psychosomatic disorders? Stress is the best, most popular, most studied, most quoted, and most mysterious, simple, single answer to this question. Ulcers, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis - you name it. In general terms, increase in cortisol due to stress punches holes in your body, although the lack of cortisol has been argued to have impact too (Heim et al. 2000).

  Heim, C., Ehlert, U., Hellhammer, DH., (2000) The potential role of
  hypocortisolism in the pathophysiology of stress-related bodily
  disorders. PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINOLOGY, 25 (1): 1-35.

But you see, the longer I think about it, the more complicated it becomes. So I stop here.