When I first read the article you cited, which was actually just paraphrased from a magazine, I was hoping that the actual researchers would of come up with a hypothesis as to what would of caused this.  If you weren't able to find the actual study, all you have to do is just Google the author's name + their University/College and their page will come up with all the research they've ever done.  Academics love to do this.  And boom the actual study is here:
http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2013/06/25/jech-2012-202024

But they never sought out to at least hypothesize why...which was disheartening.  Sometimes you can find a derivative work on the side there too, which may be trying to explain.  Doesn't look like it here.  Oh well.

Back to your original questions though:

  What would be a good explanation for something such as sleep patterns have an affect on cognition, and specifically higher in girls?

Physiologically and as a general guess: hormones, the subtle differences in the ways that our brains are set up structurally as well as chemically, which could of all been set up by evolution.  The true answer is probably expressed as some sort of very subtle mechanism in the brain that we may not find for a very long time - and that mechanism has been put there by evolution.  We just don't know why yet.  I'm going to halfway guess down below though.

  And are their other examples where one sex is influenced at a higher rate?

I'm sure you can think of a few pretty general stereotypes that are likely true.  In general, girls are more influenced by emotion than guys are.  In general, guys are more influenced by logic than girls are.  I can cite this if you want, but I'm sure you can think of a million examples too.

Do you think that because this study involves cognition, a topic that is usually thought (or maybe just taught) to be independent of gender, that that is completely true?  Evolution would mold cognition just like anything else.  Cognition is a very vague word to use anyway since there are so many different tests to measure it and so many different sub types of cognition.  Admittedly the researcher did a pretty thorough job with her tests, but she didn't do all the tests out there.

As a hypothesis:  Females deal with certain types of stress differently than males do.  Evolutionarily, you could hypothesize a milleu of reasons as to why the "females that responded to this stressor this way usually survived" because of x, y, and/or z.

In this case, they may be more susceptible to disturbances in their sleep (causing stress) and thus handle that type of stress differently than males do.  The study of the underlying causes of stress for a man or a woman is actually a pretty huge field as they seem to believe (you'll see in my citations or the side citations next to them on pubmed.gov) that chronic stress = depression.  It is a widely researched topic because of this.

There is going to be some granularity to this though.  Can't make generalizations.

Here's an interesting study some researchers did that showed the males up:

  Sex differences associated with intermittent swim stress.
  Warner TA, Libman MK, Wooten KL, Drugan RC. Stress. 2013 Aug 12.
  Source Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA.     http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23930864

  Abstract
  Various animal models of depression have been used to seek a greater understanding of stress-related disorders. However, there is still a great need for novel research in this area, as many individuals suffering from depression are resistant to current treatment methods. Moreover, women gave a higher rate of depression, highlighting the need to investigate mechanisms of sex differences. Therefore, we employed a new animal model to assess symptoms of depression, known as intermittent swim stress (ISS). In this model, the animal experiences 100 trials of cold water swim stress. ISS has already been shown to cause signs of behavioral depression in males, but has yet to be assessed in females. Following ISS exposure, we looked at sex differences in the Morris water maze and forced swim test. The results indicated a spatial learning effect only in the hidden platform task between male and female controls, and stressed and control males. A consistent spatial memory effect was seen for males exposed to ISS. In the forced swim test, both sexes exposed to ISS exhibited greater immobility, and the same males and females also showed attenuated climbing and swimming, respectively. The sex differences could be due to different neural substrates for male and females. The goal of this study was to provide the first behavioral examination of sex differences following ISS exposure, so the stage of estrous cycle was not assessed for the females. This is a necessary future direction for subsequent experiments. The current paper highlights the importance of sex differences in response to stress, which may have bearing on disease mechanisms.
  PMID: 23930864 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

So, in that case the males got the blunt of it when having to go through that crazy course.  Their "spatial learning" was messed up in comparison to the female's - whose weren't - but just during one specific part of the course.

It's very granular, but still interesting nonetheless.

Here's another interesting one.  It actually seeks and does a pretty good job at explaining why females tend to overeat as a coping strategy for certain types of stress.  Actually one thing I don't like about this study is how it generalizes the word "stress" instead of the specific "stressor."  Regardless, it does quite a good and interesting job explaining the hormonal, physiological reasons why females overeat when they are "stressed" as the paper says.

  Gender differences in ghrelin response to chronic immobilization stress in
  rats: possible role of estrogen. Elbassuoni EA. Source Physiology
  Department, Minia University School of Medicine, Minia, Egypt.
  emanelbassuoni@yahoo.com. Gen Physiol Biophys. 2013 Aug 12.

  Abstract Ghrelin is a peptidergic hormone
  known to be one of the main hormones involved in the regulation of
  energy balance. Here we evaluated ghrelin response to stress in rats
  after ovariectomy and during estradiol benzoate (EB) therapy and
  compared results of males and females, to know whether ghrelin is
  involved in disordered eating behaviors in response to stress, and for
  understanding differences between males and females in food intake and
  weight gain especially during stress. 96 adult rats were classified
  into; male, female, ovariectomized (Ovx), Ovx with EB. Half animals of
  each group were exposed to immobilization stress 20 min/day for 21
  days. We found that chronic stress significantly augments serum
  ghrelin levels in both males and females, which is correlated with an
  increase in food intake and body weight. Females displayed significant
  higher ghrelin than males especially in response to stress,
  ovariectomy suppresses serum ghrelin in both unstressed and stressed
  females which is rescued by replacement with EB. EB replacement
  augments ghrelin response to stress in Ovx female, and reduces food
  intake and body weight. In conclusion, there is a clear sex difference
  in ghrelin secretion in response to stress caused by EB, since it
  amplifies ghrelin response to stress in females. PMID: 23940093
  [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Here is another really juicy and interesting one actually.  The abstract is long and translated from French, but I'm going to post and bold it to highlight more instances where X variable affects females more than males or vice versa. By the way, the article was written as this big block...I didn't write it this way.  As I began to bold things, they started making all these crazy assumptions which they actually end up proving most of.  The french went REALLY in depth here - at least psychologically.  So if you're interested in some psychological influencers and the differences between them in men and women this is for you:

  Girls are more successful than boys at the university. Gender group differences in models integrating motivational and aggressive
  components correlated with Test-Anxiety.  Masson AM, Hoyois P, Cadot
  M, Nahama V, Petit F, Ansseau M.  Service de Psychiatrie, Université
  de Liège, Belgique.  Encephale. 2004 Jan-Feb;30(1):1-15.
  Abstract
  It is surprising to note the evolution of success rates in Belgian
  universities especially in the first Year. Men are less successful
  than women and the differences are escalating in an alarming way.
  Dropouts take the same direction and women now represent a majority of
  the students at the university. In a previous study, we assessed 616
  students in the first Year at the university of Liège with Vasev, the
  English name of which was TASTE, a self report questionnaire
  constituted of 4 factors: anxiety, self confidence, procrastination
  and performance value; anxiety particularly concerned somatic
  expression of students before and during test evaluations; self
  confidence was a cognitive component close to self efficacy;
  procrastination was the behavioral component characterizing avoidance
  when students are confronted with the risk of failure; performance
  value referred to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. French
  validation of TASTE led to an abbreviated version of 50 items (THEE)
  consisting of 5 factors, the four of TASTE and an additional one, very
  consistent, at first called depression because of its correlations
  with this dimension, then called sense of competence on account of its
  semantic content. Self-competence has been described in the literature
  of Achievement Motivation and corresponded to expectancy and ability
  beliefs in performance process which was also relevant to
  self-efficacy except the particularity of comparison with others,
  which was not included in the last construct. Self-competence has been
  considered as an important part of the Worry component of test
  anxiety. Some Authors didn't hesitate to view causality flowing from
  self-competence to test anxiety and have conceptualized the latter as
  a failure of the self where one's sense of competence has been
  undermined as a result of experienced failure. In our study, only that
  factor was equally scored in women and men whereas it was scored
  higher in failed students. In other respects anxiety and performance
  value were scored higher in women, *self-confidence and procrastination
  higher in men*. Because TASTE didn't discriminate the different
  components of motivation (performance value referred to intrinsic and
  extrinsic motivations without precise distinction) we decided to use
  the MPS (Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale) which gave the
  opportunity to distinguish SOP (Self Oriented Perfectionism) ie, the
  self-imposed unrealistic standards with inability to accept faults in
  order to know and master a subject, that corresponded to intrinsic
  motivation; SPP (Socially Prescribed Perfectionism) ie, the
  exaggerated expectancies of others which are subjectively believed as
  imposed and uncontrollable leading to anxiety, feelings of failure or
  helplessness, that corresponded to extrinsic motivation; POO
  (Perfectionism Oriented to Others) ie, the unrealistic demands
  expected from significant others, which especially characterized
  males. We assumed (I apologize for the assumptions they start making, lol)
  submitted more to society exigencies.** That way extrinsic and intrinsic
  motivations were probably more combined unlike men who, dreading a
  loss of self esteem, tried to avoid failure responsibility in using
  self handicapping or aggressive behaviours, so separating motivation
  in an extrinsic part turned to performance value and an intrinsic one
  more concerned by self confidence and sense of competence with the
  result that the motivational balance was surely disrupted in case of
  high competition leading to failure or avoidance.

  In another previous study we established a structural model illustrating, according to
  gender, correlations between anxiety, sense of incompetence,
  self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism.
  Self-oriented perfectionism was less correlated to socially prescribed
  perfectionism in boys than in girls; furthermore especially by those
  who had never failed, it was negatively correlated to sense of
  incompetence, thus leading to lower scores of anxiety while in girls,
  by contrast, such a correlation didn't exist, thus involving higher
  anxiety. That way, on the one hand, intrinsic and extrinsic
  motivations by female students complementarily operated on the sense
  of incompetence and consequently on anxiety, the emotional component
  of test anxiety; on the other hand, by male students, intrinsic
  motivation had a negative correlation with the sense of incompetence
  and a lower correlation with extrinsic motivation, thereby shedding
  some light on the problem of anxiety level differences according to
  gender. More, that observation corresponded well to the model of
  self-worth where test anxiety was understood as a manifestation of
  perceived incompetence and as a defensive way to ward off negative
  self-evaluation; that model suited particularly well to boys and
  explained their attempts to maintain self-worth when risking academic
  failure. The present research assumes that independence or combination
  of motivation components is also correlated to different expressions
  of aggressiveness: hostility corresponding to threat and
  characterizing more girls while physical aggression is corresponding
  to personal challenge, a more masculine attribution. *If fighting
  against the sense of incompetence actually characterizes men and
  consequently shows too the competitive aspects of performance strong
  enough to mobilize intrinsic motivation, what would be expected
  regarding the notion of threat suspected to be predominant in girls?*
  The idea of using a questionnaire discriminating the specific
  dimensions of aggressiveness in fact the Aggression Questionnaire
  should meet the following purposes: At first establish a French
  version of that aggression questionnaire, perform the factorial
  analyses and internal consistency, compare them with other previous
  samples, then differentiate gender in general and in failure versus
  success situations. Finally include the different components of
  aggressiveness in the first described model and build a new one liable
  to define in boys the explicit pathways between test anxiety,
  perfectionism and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses have confirmed,
  in a 3 factor solution, the presence of emotional (anger), cognitive
  (hostility) and behavioural (physical aggression) components. Internal
  consistency is satisfactory. It is demonstrated that physical
  aggression characterizes boys (F=12.04, p=0.0001) while hostility
  (F=5.22, p=0.0015) and anger (F=0.49, p=0.0001) characterizes girls;
  furthermore it is noted that physical aggression characterizes more
  failed students (F=13.43, p=0.0003). Four models (see figures 2, 3, 4,
  5) have been established, at first focused on the distinction of
  correlations between motivation and cognitive and emotional components
  on the samples of boys (n=268) and girls (348), then developed on the
  samples of successful students, male (n=193) and female (n=271). They
  describe the differentiated action of intrinsic and extrinsic
  motivations on the different components of aggressiveness and
  test-anxiety according to gender and without experience of failure.
  The dynamic process of the organizational factors is different
  according to gender and psychopathology resulting from the
  combinations of behaviors, cognitions and emotions would be assumed,
  prioritizing physical aggression and psychopathy by boys, anxiety and
  depression by girls. Anyway more explanation about the evolution of
  success rates of boys and girls in Belgian universities is proposed.
  PMID: 15029071 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

I can't post anymore links cause I don't have enough rep, but if you go to pubmed.gov and search for the title of this article you'll see many many more related ones that I could just keep citing.  Anyways hope this helps, I gotta get some work done now, ha.

Alright here is more research:

I have the citation with what I feel is the most relevant sentance(s) in the abstract after scanning them.

  Luine V. Sex differences in chronic stress effects on memory in rats. Stress. 2002
  Sep;5(3):205-16. Department of Psychology, Hunter
  College of the City University of New York, NY 10021, USA.
  vluine@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu

  Relevant Sentance: "Given the same chronic stress--21 days of
  restraint for 6 h each day--males were impaired in all of the memory
  tests while females showed enhanced performance of the spatial memory
  tasks and no changes in object recognition performance."

  "recent studies show sexually differentiated cognitive responses to
  chronic stress and underline the importance of considering the
  sex/gender of subjects when studying the stress response."

  Bowman RE, Beck KD, Luine VN. Chronic stress effects on memory: sex
  differences in performance and monoaminergic activity.  Horm Behav.
  2003 Jan;43(1):48-59.  Department of Psychology, Hunter College of the
  City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA.
  bowmanr@sacredheart.edu

  "stress differentially affected central transmitter levels in the
  frontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala depending on sex"

  Bowman RE, Micik R, Gautreaux C, Fernandez L, Luine VN.  Sex-dependent
  changes in anxiety, memory, and monoamines following one week of
  stress. Physiol Behav. 2009 Apr 20;97(1):21-9. doi:
  10.1016/j.physbeh.2009.01.012. Epub 2009 Jan 22.  Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT, United States. bowmanr@sacredheart.edu

  "these sexually dimorphic neurochemical changes following stress may
  underlie the behavioral differences. Current results show that
  short-term restraint elicits sex-dependent behavioral and neural
  changes different from those previously reported for longer term
  stresses and suggest that the temporal relationship between the change
  from adaptive to maladaptive responses to stress is shorter in male
  than female rats."

Now you could easily criticize me here and say I either got too many citations from Bowman RE (which I probably did) or that these are all based in rats...and...well...humans arn't rats.

I can find some more human studies that probably map MRI or something, but part of the value you lose is in that you, for instance, can't squirt them full of estrogen or take their ovaries out and say "try again" let's see how you do (feel free to edit that last part out as it kind of grossed me out too).

Each way has it's own advantage/disadvantages.


Do people with ADHD have reasoning abilities and mathematical abilities just like normal people?

Alright- neurodiversity vs neurotypical label aside, here is the definition of ADHD

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html

Here is the best example I could find which demonstrates effect of ADHD on mathematical reasoning:

http://ldq.sagepub.com/content/16/1/6.short

Here is a comparison between learners who are nonverbal, who have aspergers, and then those who have ADHD

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/87565641.2010.494747#.VM1Cynvwo-g


How does the physical brain know about qualia?

Keep in mind that "qualia" is a philosophical construct whose purpose is largely to stimulate thought and discussion about subjective experience, definitions, and potential empirical implications.  The construct may well turn out to be untenable, but either way, it ought to be useful for elucidating issues relating to "the hard problem".

Your question is a very good one, and has spurred much debate over the nature and meaning of qualia.  Qualia are often regarded as somehow independent of physical properties, but yet as you point out, they clearly affect behaviour somehow.  Here are some points to consider:

One way out of the conundrum is to deny qualia as a useful construct.  Critics of qualia address the issue of subjective experience without qualia in a variety of atlernative ways.
Duality is another approach to qualia, but is not a commonly held view in science.  A more subtle approach is epiphenomenalism, which is a type of dualism that denies qualia any causal role.  However, as you've rightly pointed out, the mere fact that we are discussing qualia suggests that it does have a causal role.
It has been suggested that qualia actually have 2 distinct aspects: An experience that is "ineffable" - cannot be described and does not have a causal role - and a knowledge of the experience that does have a causal role.  While this approach minimizes (or at least constrains) the causal role of qualia, it does not entirely deny it.
Functionalism is a common alternative to dualism that comes in many varieties, and several related approaches with similar postulates (eg, behaviorism, physicalism, and computationalism), suggest that qualia (if they are meaningful at all) supervene on physical systems - that is, they are a natural and direct property of them.  In some interpretations, this makes qualia "independent" of phsyical systems only in the sense that they describe different properties than the cause and effect that we normally focus on, but not in the sense that they can possibly be separated from them as some other interpretations of qualia suggest.  However, many thought experiments about qualia suggest a stronger independence, so therefore, not all varieties of functionalism are compatible with all interpretations of qualia.
Another approach worth mentioning is representationalism, a view that sort of side-steps the cause-and-effect issue by defining qualia as indirect internal representations of external stimulus (objects).  As there are so many varieties of representationalism, it is difficult to pin down what exactly this means for qualia's effect on the brain, but the general gist of it is that qualia are viewed as constructs of the mind that are representational (meaningful) rather than real (causal).
Of course, another common response is that we just don't know, and may never know, as we simply don't have the intellectual capacity to understand - formally, cognitive closure.

There are lots of other approaches that attempt to address the question in yet other ways, but hopefully that's a good summary of the major categories anyway.


Do studies exist that can map specimens of neocortex to the functions they perform(ed) in vivo?

...studies that show that every part of the cortex does essentially the same thing!

I would be much interested in seeing these studies - Although the brain is plastic and inter-individual differences can be substantial, it is generally accepted that functional regions are well defined in terms of their anatomical locations and brain mapping was, and still is, a field of research in its own right.

Studies where

  tiny areas of neocortex [were studied]

have been done, and showing

  what it does

Notable examples include singe-unit recordings (cellular level - as tiny as you can get) that mapped the primary visual cortex (V1) and auditory cortex (AI). Such studies have shown that V1 contains retinotopic maps, and AI contains tonotopic maps, i.e., these studies showed that each region in the retina projects to a well-defined and neatly organized region in V1 (e.g., Cowey, 1979), and well-defined anatomical locations in the cochlea project to well-defined and well organized regions in AI (e.g., Ozaki & Hashimoto, 2007).

  what information it contains

is hard to answer, as the brain is not a hard disk that can be read back. However, studies on Alzheimer patients do reveal that old memories are often relatively spared, while new ones fail to be stored properly, indicating indirectly what information the affected cortex contains.

References
- Cowey, Quarterly J Exp Psychol; 31(1): 1-17
- Ozaki & Hashimoto, Can J Neurol Sci (2007); 34(2): 146-53


Differences in willingness to correct errors made between human and computer interactions

If I understand your question correctly, you have found that participants are more willing to admit to an error if they interact with a computer rather than a human being.

I would suggest reading up on related findings in the field of social desirability. Social desirability is the tendency of humans to think of themselves (self-deceptive enhancement) and try to present themselves towards others in a favorable way (impression management). There have been studies that suggest, that the effects of social desirability--or more precisely impression management--on reporting of sensitive or stigmatizing behavior are attenuated by interaction with computers rather than people (Turner et al., 1998; Joinson, 1999; King & Miles, 1995; Davis, 1999; Reips, 2011).

I suspect this effect is mostly a result of self-administration rather than being specific to computers, but may be a plausible explanation for your finding: Admitting mistakes is much more threatening to a person's self-worth than justifying a decision-- especially, when an experimenter is present.


Objective differences between extroverts and introverts

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).
Synonyms are:
Extrovert: affable, companionable, cordial, demonstrative, exhibitionist, expansive, extroverted, exuberant, friendly, genial, good-humoured, gregarious, lively, outgoing, show-off, showman, sociable, social, socialite, socializer, uninhibited, unreserved.
Introvert: introspective, introverted, loner, private, recluse, remote, reverse, secret, secretive, shrinking violet, solitary, standoffish, unobtrusive, wallflower.
The visualisation of extrovert and introvert according to the atlas approach is shown below:

Therefore, the empirical, measurable, objective differences between extroverts and introverts are:

Both introversion and extroversion are neither dominant or submissive behaviours.  Dominance is roughly equivalent to agency for those familiar with Bakan's definition.

Introverted behaviours are those which isolate the individual from others.

Extroverted behaviours are those which connect the individual to others.

Note: The extroverted behaviours occupy a single cell of the atlas whereas the introverted behaviours occupy two cells.  I would interpret this as an opportunity for improved classification in future editions of the atlas.
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.


Does getting any job (no matter how demeaning) builds up one's character?

I suppose much depends on what one means by "building character"; if it's increasing self-esteem, then the answer is probably no, as you've already pointed out.  But I don't think that's what most people mean by building character.  So what is it?  Certainly you'll learn something from having a demeaning job, because you'll learn something from just about anything; also, it is likely to lower your expectations, so you might be more excited about any given other job and value the money you earn more (see for example this article).  So it's probably possible to adjust the definition of "building character" until it's mostly true.  But after twisting the definition too far, it's unclear that "building character" is a desirable thing to do, so it doesn't offer much in the way of advice for life.

Incidentally, it has been argued that most work in the US is actually fulfilling.


What is the opposite of an insult for the purposes of triggering lasting positive affect?

The words we use have no inherent capacity to evoke negative or positive affect.  Instead, how we appraise, reappraise, attend to, and reflect on those words determines our affective response (e.g., Gross, 1998; Siemer, Mauss, & Gross, 2007).

For example, you could tell one person "You are stupid" and he/she might become extremely upset.  You could tell another person the same thing, and he/she would have no affective response.  Similarly, telling someone "You are nice" could make someone very happy or not change his/her mood at all.

So how can we predict who will respond most intensely? Philippe Verduyn  and colleagues (2009; 2011) have looked at predictors of greater emotion response duration, which include:

The salience of the emotion-eliciting event
How you conceptualize your positive/negative affect (joy lasts longer than anger, which lasts longer than fear)
Intensity of the emotion at onset
Physical reappearances of the emotion-eliciting stimulus
Stimulus-related cognitions with the same valence as the emotion
Social sharing (consistent with Bernard Rimé's work)

How one chooses to regulate their emotions in response to an insult or compliment would also influence emotion reactivity and duration, including tendency to distract oneself from the stimulus (Sheppes et al., 2014) or skill in reappraising the situation (e.g., McRae et al., 2012).

We would also expect depressive rumination (see Susan Nolen-Hoeksema's work) and positive rumination or savoring (e.g., Feldman, Joormann, & Johnson, 2008; Quoidbach, Berry, Hansenne, & Mikolajczak, 2010) to predict intensity of responses to insults and compliments, respectively.

Conclusion

So the point is that there are no special words or phrases that will reliably evoke some level of positive affect.  Instead, the emotional intensity evoked by a stimulus depends on the salience of the stimulus, proximity to the stimulus, and individual differences in emotional responding (i.e., reactivity and regulation; see Gross & Barrett, 2011).  If you take these into account, you can devise more powerful insults and compliments.


How to tell a diagnosis from an actual state?

Doctors are trained not to diagnose a patient subjectively, but to use objective criteria. Psychologists and psychiatrists worldwide have agreed on a set of criteria, by which each doctor should arrive at the same diagnosis, if faced with the same patient.

The current practice is that all mental disorders are defined by a list of symptoms. If a patient shows a certain minimum number of symptoms from this list (no matter, which), it is assumed that he is very probably suffering from that disorder. A sample can be found under the section "Criteria" in the Wikipedia article on Schizophrenia.

This is the currenty way to diagnose a mental disorder, because, despite all its weaknesses (see the section "Criticsm" in the DSM Wikipedia article for an overview), it is believed to be the best of all bad methods (akin to Churchill on democracy) and no replacement has yet been found (unless you count Antipsychiatry as helpful in dealing with mental problems).

The lists of criteria and the minimum number of symptoms are given in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently DSM-IV-TR) and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (currently ICD-10).

As you can conclude from this, a mental disorder is not a reality. It is a construct that consists of a collection of possible symptoms. The "actual state", as you call it, the physiological reality, is not accessible to the psychologist or psychiatrist.


Yes! Binocular rivalry has been studied in monkeys (Logothetis & Schall, 1990; Lehky & Maunsell, 1996)
and extensively in cats (Fries, Roelfsema, Engel, König, & Singer, 1997; Sengpiel, Blakemore, & Harrad, 1995; Sengpiel, Blakemore, Kind, & Harrad, 1994; Sengpiel, Bonhoeffer, Freeman, & Blakemore, 2001; Varela & Singer, 1987; Moore, Spear, Kim, & Xue, 1992; Tong, Guido, Tumosa, Spear, & Heidenreich, 1992),  to say the least. This is all the further I got into a literature search today, but I'm sure there's much more out there.

References
- Fries, P., Roelfsema, P. R., Engel, A. K., König, P., & Singer, W. (1997). Synchronization of oscillatory responses in visual cortex correlates with perception in interocular rivalry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94(23), 12699–12704. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/94/23/12699.full.
- Lehky, S. R., & Maunsell, J. H. (1996). No binocular rivalry in the LGN of alert macaque monkeys. Vision Research, 36(9), 1225–1234. Retrieved from ScienceDirect.
- Logothetis, N. K., & Schall, J. D. (1990). Binocular motion rivalry in macaque monkeys: Eye dominance and tracking eye movements. Vision Research, 30(10), 1409–1419. Retrieved from http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/schall/pdfs/binmoriv.pdf.
- Moore, R. J., Spear, P. D., Kim, C. B., & Xue, J. T. (1992). Binocular processing in the cat's dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus III. Spatial frequency, orientation, and direction sensitivity of nondominant-eye influences. Experimental Brain Research, 89(3), 588–598.
- Sengpiel, F., Blakemore, C., & Harrad, R. (1995). Interocular suppression in the primary visual cortex: A possible neural basis of binocular rivalry. Vision Research, 35(2), 179–195. Retrieved from ScienceDirect.
- Sengpiel, F., Blakemore, C., Kind, P. C., & Harrad, R. (1994). Interocular suppression in the visual cortex of strabismic cats. The Journal of Neuroscience, 14(11), 6855–6871. Retrieved from http://www.jneurosci.org/content/14/11/6855.full.pdf.
- Sengpiel, F., Bonhoeffer, T., Freeman, T. C., & Blakemore, C. (2001). On the relationship between interocular suppression in the primary visual cortex and binocular rivalry. Brain and Mind, 2(1), 39–54.
- Tong, L., Guido, W., Tumosa, N., Spear, P. D., & Heidenreich, S. (1992). Binocular interactions in the cat's dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, II: Effects on dominant-eye spatial-frequency and contrast processing. Visual Neuroscience, 8(06), 557–566.
- Varela, F. J., & Singer, W. (1987). Neuronal dynamics in the visual corticothalamic pathway revealed through binocular rivalry. Experimental Brain Research, 66(1), 10–20.


This answer reflects my own thoughts on this topic, It isn't any generalized opinion of psychologists that I am putting forth.

First:- Each person is indispensable (not just the one we love), comes with his own characteristics, teaches us to look at the world from different perspective. But we notice the impact of the one we love more than any other because we want to feel how he looks at the world, how he feels.

We want to feel how it is to be him? Therefore his characteristics become our characteristics (to an extent). Some people say that you become a person you are in love with. Now he has abandoned you, you miss him more and more because some part of him is still in you.

Failed love empties our world and induces a void within life. If given a chance to pinpoint the worst feeling related with failed love and longing for it, I would say that it's the vacuum that haunts us after the person we love doesn't accept us.

Therefore, trying to move on must be acknowledged as our attempt to fill that vacuum. Of course, by doing so we run the risk of being abandoned again. But that is small compared to our desire to fulfill our love, to fill that void.

Second:- Whether or not we look for someone who reminds us of the person we love is another paradigm of our love history.

How acrimonious the breakup was?
What stage of love were we at when this happened? Because more the time, more difficult will be to give up on the one you love
Who according to us was responsible for the breakup?
How dedicated we were in that relationship?

If a person thinks that he was responsible for the breakup, definitely he would search for someone with similar characteristics and once he finds one, he'd be conscious this time and wouldn't try to repeat his mistakes in this new relationship.

If he holds the other person responsible for the breakup, then it is difficult to try to accept some other person with same characteristics.

Third:- Really, I can't comment on this third one.


Not all liquid or things that are yellow become red when they exist in large quantity. For example, beer, vegetable oil, and normal urine never look red even in large quantity, like in a vat. It really depends on the optical properties of the liquid and the suspended particles in it.

The optical properties of something depend on both its intrinsic factors such as its reflectance, transmittance, and absorptance of the light and the extrinsic factors such as its thickness, the surface that it’s on, the angle of light incidence, and the polarization of the incident light. (This is not to mention psychological factors like the mood when you look at that thing or the surroundings colors or compositions of that thing, which can make that thing look different.)

That’s why a thin film of water is colorless but a large body of water like the lake looks blue. And that’s why there is a phenomenon called iridescence – the phenomenon that certain surfaces appear to change color as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes – like changing rainbow colors on a soap bubble or on a colorless CD surface.

In your case, I think the color reflection and transmission properties of the ink are different. The ink probably reflects mainly the yellow color, so it looks yellow when reflection of colors is the major event – as when the ink is painted on a surface. But the ink probably transmits more of the red color than the yellow color, so it looks red when transmission of colors is the major event – as when you look through it.

N.B. I think you’ll probably get better answers than mine by posting the question on the Physics forum.

References.

II.8. Reflection, Transmission, and Absorption Gigahertz-Optik.
Elements that Affect the Appearance of Color Konica Minolta.
Iridescence Wikipedia.


What structures in the brain are called upon to strengthen coupling between bilateral movements?

It's not so much a "locking" between the two hemispheres as it is a combination of an asymmetrical representation of the ipsilateral (same side) limb in cortex, and phase transitions, which bring the limbs into a more energetically favorable state.

Kelso (1984) compares the phase transition to that of a racehorse, which is able to adjust its gait for the optimal use of oxygen in its blood.  In his study, regardless of whether a subject's limb was loaded or unloaded during a trial, there was a phase resetting after the subject reached a certain frequency (constant within subjects).  You can see in the diagram below that the dotted line of one arm's trajectory is 180° out of phase with the other, the solid line, and at a certain point, they fall into lockstep.

Ziemann (2001) study points to another possible reason for the synchronization.  In right handed subjects, there tends to be a dominance of the left motor cortex in the activation of the ipsilateral hand.  Trying to do different motions with both hands may "pull" the activity towards what the left hand is doing.  Presumably, there might be a similar behavior in left-handed subjects, but as in hearing and language, there is not a perfect symmetry of cortical features for left-handers.

In terms of structures that do govern bilateral coordination, Sadato et al (1997) used PET scanning to establish that, at least in right handed subjects, the right dorsal premotor area along with the right posterior supplementary motor area, were significantly more active while making parallel movements.  I found no further evidence of it, but this could be a channel through which some of the phase shifting is taking place.

References

Kelso, J.A.S. (1984).  Phase transitions and critical behavior in human bimanual coordination.  American Journal of Physiology, 246 (Regulatory Integrative Comp. Physiol 15):R1000-1004.
Sadato, N., Yonekura, Y., et al (1997).  Role of the supplementary motor area and the right premotor cortex in the coordination of bimanual finger movements.  Journal of Neuroscience, 17(24): 9667-9674. PDF
Sakurada, T., Gomi, H., Ito, K. (2009). Multiple interactions between hemispheres of the brain modulating coupling of bilateral movements. The 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, September 2-6, 2009: 5922-5925.
Ziemann, U., Hallett, M. (2001).  Hemispheric asymmetry of ipsilateral motor cortex activation during unimanual motor tasks: further evidence for motor dominance.  Clinical Neurophysiology, 112: 107-113.


What's the term for people who deny others' achievements?

Regarding "What's their problem?" Question,

Long answer:
Social Psychology recognizes the concept of construals, which are how individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them, particularly the behavior or action of others towards themselves.

Two of the basic source/motive of construal in human beings is the need to feel good about ourselves and the need to be accurate. These two needs, however, doesn't always coincide one-another; and when they don't, it builds-up anxiety inside oneself. Leon Festinger further explained those situations as Cognitive Dissonance, an uncomfortable feeling that arose from having two conflicting beliefs/ideas/values at the same time.

As stated in the linked wikipedia article, to reduce dissonance, someone may do one of these 4 things:

  Change behavior/cognition
  Justify behavior/cognition by changing the conflicting cognition
  Justify behavior/cognition by adding new cognition
  Ignore/Deny any information that conflicts with existing beliefs

In your case, your information most likely triggered a cognitive dissonance for him.

Caused by either an upward social-comparison process, which has been proved to be able to happen both subliminally and automatically in a study; and may resulted in negative-affect, especially for someone with low self-esteem and negative mood. i.e "That makes Mike better than me" or "That shows how great Germans are, but I'm not German!" An existing contradicting beliefs. i.e "I hate Mike/Germany" or "I'm far richer than Mike/My country is better than Germany." Having done or still doing something which conflicted with the new information. i.e he just bragged about his brand new car, just explained how Germany is not good, just turned down an offer to live in Germany, etc. Or a combination of all three.

Then, to reduce the dissonance, they just changed their cognition to justify themselves (Lamborghini is not that good anyway), create a new cognition (but his wife is terrible), or simply deny (he must have stolen someone's money) or ignore (whatever, not going to live in German anyway) the information. All those strategies would be easier to employ than actually changing their own behavior (buy a better car than Lamborghini, make an even better invention) or cognition (motivate themselves to earn more money or study more)

Short Answer:
You indirectly arouse his anxiety, either by lowering their self-esteem by presenting a concrete and unavoidable better social comparison target; or by presenting an information which conflicts with his beliefs/ideas/values. In order to reduce that anxiety, and so making them feels good about themselves again, people will either change their behavior/cognition, make justifications, or simply ignore/deny the conflicting information/stimuli.

Really Short Answer:
They are most likely trying to reduces the anxiety which was caused by your information


Is there an accurate online IQ test for measuring 160+ IQs?

There are at least two problems with measuring high intelligence:

(1) Any IQ test has a maximum difficulty. That means that all subjects above a certain intelligence answer all questions correctly and get the same maximum score. This is called the "ceiling effect".

Now you might say, that we simply need to construct a test that is difficult enough for even the most intelligent person to make some mistakes.

(2) The problem with special "high IQ" tests is that you cannot draw a large enough sample to norm this test. An IQ score is not an absolute value, like height, where you measure from a zero point to a certain length and each length has a meaning in itself in relation to that zero point. IQ does not have a zero point (there is no measurable total absence of intelligence), and the values of an IQ test are defined in relation to the average intelligence of the population that person comes from.

To norm a test, it is applied to a large sample of the population, and the mean and the shape of the distribution are calculated. The mean is defined as 100, the distribution is defined by the standard deviation, which for an IQ test is 15. The norming is done for different countries and at different times. This also means, that you cannot compare an IQ score from France to one from Spain, and that you cannot compare an IQ score from 1950 to one from 2007, at least not without some mathematical trickery similar to calculating the temperature in Centigrade from one given in Fahrenheit.

Now, since there are very few very intelligent people, even if all of them took the test your sample would be too small to reliably calculate a mean and the distribution. (And you couldn't test any of them ever again, because they already took the test and know the questions.)

Finally, you wouldn't know how the scores from this test relate to scores from other tests. In an IQ test with which you test the whole population, the average is set to be 100. Since all different IQ tests are normed for the whole population, you can set all their means at 100 and compare their scores. For a test that tests only a non-average subset of the population, like very intelligent people, the average must be somewhere else, because of course highly intelligent people are not of average intelligence. But where do you set it in relation to the 100 of the average population? You would need their scores from a normal IQ test to calculate this, but (now the circle closes) since a normal IQ test cannot measure them due to the ceiling effect, you don't know where they are in relation to the average IQ of 100.

Conclusion:

While you can create an intelligence test to measure the intelligence of highly intelligent people, this test will not give you a result that has any meaning in relation to the IQ, so in fact it is not an IQ test.

IQ is not intelligence (a trait), but a construct. IQ is what is measured by an IQ test, as the saying goes. A high intelligence test measures a different construct.


Which is a better statistical option to compare differences across groups?

If you have single-trial data, the drift-diffusion model/DDM and related models, originating with Roger Ratcliff (1976/1978), can simultaneously fit the whole response distribution, both RTs and accuracies. It captures phenomena such that in some experiments, errors are systematically faster or slower than correct responses.

Fitting and interpreting the DDM can be non-trivial, but it has many advantages, such as

accurately accounting for the distribution of RT data
directly relating to cognitive processes (e.g. evidence accumulation speed, sensory encoding speed)

The DDM works by modeling the decision process as a random walk next to (usually two) decision thresholds (e.g. corresponding to the correct and the incorrect button in a 2-alternative false choice task), which after an initial period of encoding begins drifting towards the correct boundary at a speed corresponding to the effectivity of taking up evidence. Occasionally, the drift process reaches the wrong boundary. When a boundary is crossed, execution of the corresponding response is initiated.

The DDM is fitted to the whole RT distribution and the resulting parameters can be submitted to statistical tests between conditions. For an example of hierarchical Bayesian estimation of the model, consider HDDM.

References

Ratcliff, R. & Murdock, B. B., Jr. (1976). Retrieval processes in recognition memory. Psychological Review, 83, 190-214.
Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85, 59-108.
Forstmann, B. U., Ratcliff, R., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2016). Sequential sampling models in cognitive neuroscience: Advantages, applications, and extensions. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 641-666.
Ratcliff, R., Smith, P.L., Brown, S.D., & McKoon, G. (2016). Diffusion decision model: Current issues and history. Trends in Cognitive Science, 20, 260-281.
Wiecki TV, Sofer I and Frank MJ (2013). HDDM: Hierarchical Bayesian estimation of the Drift-Diffusion Model in Python. Front. Neuroinform. 7:14. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2013.00014


Visual search: complexity of positive vs negative search tasks

I would doubt that the effect you described is an example for the positivity effect, which is a form of attributional bias, rather than connected to basic perceptual phenomena.

Instead I think that the experimental results you described can be explained by a priming effect. Priming describes the phenomenon that the exposure to one stimulus influences the processing of following stimuli. If the first stimulus shares perceptual, semantic, or conceptual similarities with the next stimulus, processing is enhanced (positive priming). If it provides conflicting information, processing can be depressed (negative priming).

Would a computer show the same behavior for these tasks?

Attempts to explain (positive) priming effects usually discuss an activation of associated memory contents, which, in turn, lead to enhancements in the following processing steps.

Since memory access is often indeed a limiting factor of computer performance, priming effects can possibly observed with computers, too. Computer have different types of storage systems which differ in access speed (e.g., hard disc, RAM, cache). For instance, information that is (pre-)loaded into cache memory (which is limited) can be accessed faster than information that is stored on the hard disc. Since it is context dependent which information is in cache memory at a point in time (i.e., it depends on the things you are doing at the moment), memory contents connected to the things you do right now are probably accessed faster (because they are in the cache) than other memory contents, hence, a priming effect.


How do neurons limit their input current?

Current is Voltage (driving potential) times conductance.  As the membrane potential approaches the Nernst potential of the conductance, the current approaches 0.  Conductances can be turned on or off through receptor binding, but there is no such thing as voltage-independent current injection (at least under physiologically relevant conditions).

Indeed, it is the case that if you artificially inject large amplitudes of current into neurons, you observe voltage traces similar to your simulations.  This will very quickly lead to cell death.


Do we recognize ourselves better when we see our mirror image?

Bredart (2003) discusses your exact hypothesis and reports the results of a couple of studies. I'd recommend having a read of the article.

The authors acknowledge that in contrast to familiar others the experience of our own face typically comes through self-inspection in mirrors.

They summarise some relevant literature:

  Troje and Kersten (1999) showed that participants were faster when
  naming frontal views compared with profile views of their own face,
  and that this advantage for frontal views disappeared when naming
  familiar colleagues’ faces. In addition, Laeng and Rouw (2001) showed
  that the full-frontal view is superior to other views for facial
  self-recognition but not for the recognition of other people’s faces.
  A pose corresponding to 22.5 degrees from the frontal view seems to be
  optimal for other people’s faces. However, for highly familiar faces
  (e.g. faces of close friends or partners), the frontal view could be
  recognised as quickly as the 22.5 degrees view. In short, because of
  ecological constraints on visual experience, self-recognition is
  easier from frontal views than from other views. This superiority of
  frontal views was not observed for other highly familiar faces.

They also discuss one methodology that involves "searching for a target face among a set of other faces". Thus, the speed of finding the face is one way operationalising familiarity.

With regards to their findings, the following quotes the abstract:

  Experiment 1 examined our ability to recognise the usual horizontal
  orientation of our own face (mirror orientation) as compared with
  another very familiar face (normal orientation). Participants did not
  use the same kind of information in determining the orientation of
  self-face as in determining the orientation of the other familiar
  face. The proportion of participants who reported having based their
  judgement on the location of an asymmetric feature (e.g. a mole) was
  higher when determining their own face’s orientation than when
  determining the other familiar face’s orientation. In experiment 2,
  participants were presented with pairs of manipulated images of their
  own face and of another familiar face showing conflicting asymmetric
  features and configural information. Each pair consisted of one
  picture showing a given face’s asymmetric features in a
  mirror-reversed position, while the facial configuration was left
  unchanged, and one picture in which the location of the asymmetric
  features was left unchanged, while the facial configuration was
  mirror-reversed. As expected from the hypothesis that asymmetric local
  features are more frequently used for self-face judgements,
  participants chose the picture showing mirror-reversed asymmetric
  features when determining the usual orientation of their own face
  significantly more often than they chose the picture showing normally
  oriented asymmetric features when determining the orientation of the
  other face. These results were explained in terms of competing forward
  and mirror-reversed representations of our own face.

Reference

Bredart, S. (2003). Recognising the usual orientation of one's own face: the role of asymmetrically located details. Perception, 32, . DOC
Laeng B, Rouw R, 2001 “Canonical views of faces and the cerebral hemispheres” Laterality 6 193-224.
Troje N F, Kersten D, 1999 “Viewpoint-dependent recognition of familiar faces” Perception  28 483-487.


To what extent does bilingualism help in education?

This is a phenomenom I was able to witness first hand when I used to work in an International School, where every student had to learn Japanese and English, as well as having their mother-tongue (some had several more languages as well).

In the paper "Bilingualism and cognitive development in relation to threshold theory" (Ricciardelli, 1992), it is stated that:

  This theory (threshold theory) maintains that there may be levels of linguistic proficiency which bilingual children must attain in order to avoid cognitive deficits and to allow the cognitive benefits.

Further, in "A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Cognitive Correlates of Bilingualism" (Adesope, 2010), some links between bilingualism and some increased cognitive abilities have been suggested from research.  From their abstract:

  Results indicate that bilingualism is reliably associated with several cognitive outcomes, including increased attentional control, working memory, metalinguistic awareness, and abstract and symbolic representation skills.

A link between bilingualism and how the bilingual student would tackle worded maths problems, in Cognitive Benefits and Costs of Bilingualism in Elementary School Students:
The Case of Mathematical Word Problems (Kempert et al. 2011).

An important point

  bilinguals gained scores comparable to those of their monolingual peers on
  word problems that required attentional control skills although performing significantly below their
  monolingual classmates on ordinary word problems, suggesting that bilinguals have an advantage
  when it comes to attentional control.

However, there are potential cognitive costs in transferring knowledge from one language to another.

I hope this helps


if "chunking" is not used?
  This answer neatly explains what chunking is

Chunking is a strategy for more efficiently storing information by changing the way you encode or process it. Effectively, you're arranging/re-arranging information in a way that makes sense to you. Chunking refers to breaking it up into meaningful lots. For example:

Suppose you had a digit span task. Normal capacity is 7 plus/minus 2 digits. I was presented the following digit span numbers:

11111111111111111111111112221111111111111111111111111

I could store it as: 1-1-1-1… however, by the time I got to the end, the information I encoded at the start would have decayed.

So instead of trying to store it that way, I could break it up into the meaning parts: twenty-five 1s, three 2s, twenty-five 1s.

Wow! Did I just increase my digit span to over 53 digits? No, not quite. I just changed the way the information was encoded.

By chunking information, one can store more information by more efficiently structuring it.

That said.

  Does the digit span test draw on any executive functions besides working memory, if "chunking" is not used?

Yes, it does.

It actually becomes a better measure of executive function. And working memory.

First, is there a reason why you're looking at digit span? I ask because it's not a good measure of working memory capacity/executive function. Also, your use of digit span may be leading to a number of misconceptions about what is going on during the  WM task, and it's because the digit span task is biasing your understanding of it.

To begin with, any digit span test requires executive function. This is because at a bare minimum, you need to be paying attention to new information. You need to rehearse it. You need to store it.

Instead, if you would like to get a better conceptual idea of what working memory tasks are trying to measure then have a look for the "N-back task". You should be able to download it. Recommendation: Try to "walking yourself through" the sorts of things you need to do in order to perform the task. It's a hard task. In fact, they don't recommend it be used to actually test WM because performance is too unreliable to be used as a measure of WMC.

  I'm not sure I believe that the digit span is a test of a single raw cognitive function.
  e.g. surely we don't need to "chunk" for perceptual speed to play a role: would that be helped by other executive functions?

What you're asking ought to be inferable from first principles.

First, you need to look at positive manifold. See all those intercorrelations? They're all positive. When you move them around, however, you identify the way that different tasks build up on one another.

The easiest way top make sense of this is to look at Carroll's Three Stratum Model. The single abilities are right at the bottom. But our digit span test is at stratum II

  I'm not sure I believe that the digit span is a test of a single raw cognitive function.

There is no such thing as test of a "single raw cognitive function". For example, the closest to what I presume you're thinking of is say, a reaction time task. This is called an elementary cognitive task (ECT). But it's not like reaction time is comprised of a "single raw cognitive function". Instead, (and I think this is what you mean is) this is meant to tap into independent processes as maximally possible.

But more to the point, digit span is meant to be a measure of WMC. It's "higher up" in terms of requiring that there is integrity of simpler cognitive processes below it.

It's a higher-order task. It's simply not possible to tap a single raw cognitive function. Even without looking it up, I know that it has to be tapping into numerical ability.

This is what a good test of WMC will be tapping into. However, digit span doesn't do this, because it's only going to be loading on the phonological loop:

  e.g. surely we don't need to "chunk" for perceptual speed to play a role: would that be helped by other executive functions?

I think I know what you're getting at. Let's just way that, perceptual speed has to have some role, because if you're, say, looking at a computer screen, light hits your eyes, the travels through the optive nerve and to your brain, Then you create a mental representation somewhere, and then perform higher order processing on it. But if you're asking will it affect it any meaningful way? Then no. But more importantly, one shouldn't design a cognitive task that does.

There are good and bad tasks. A well designed test of WM is will not try to "tap into" perceptual speed, because if you did poorly in that task, you would not know if it was due to a bottleneck in WMC (which you want) or perceptual speed. This is particularly relevant if somebody has a brain injury where damage in more elementary cognitive process renders then incapable from even performing the task.


How does one escape learned helplessness?

History

Martin E. P. Seligman, has written extensively on the nature, etiology, and significance of learned helplessness, and in 1975, he broadened the scope of learned helplessness from animal behaviour to a wide variety of human behaviours, including reactive depression, stomach ulcers, voodoo deaths, and child development, then in 1978, he criticised and reformulated his hypothesis.

  The old hypothesis, when applied to learned helplessness in humans, has two major problems: (a) It does not distinguish between cases in which outcomes are uncontrollable for all people and cases in which they are uncontrollable only for some people (universal vs. personal helplessness), and (b) it does not explain when helplessness is general and when specific, or when chronic and when acute. A reformulation based on a revision of attribution theory is proposed to resolve these inadequacies. (Seligman, 1978)

Seligman then went on to rectify these deficiencies.

Problem (a): universal vs. personal helplessness

Universal Helplessness

  Suppose a child contracts leukemia and the father bends all his resources to save the child's life. Nothing he does, however, improves the child's health. Eventually he comes to believe there is nothing he can do. Nor is there anything anyone else can do since leukemia is incurable. He subsequently gives up trying to save the child's life and exhibits signs of behavioral helplessness as well as depressed affect. This example fits the specifications of the old learned helplessness hypothesis. The parent believed the course of the child's disease was independent of all of his responses as well as the responses of other people. We term this situation universal helplessness (Seligman, 1978).

In the same paper, Seligman considered universal helplessness to be externally attributed. Situations where people believe that neither they nor relevant others can solve the problem are instances of universal helplessness according to the 1978 hypothesis.

Personal helplessness

  Suppose a person tries very hard in school. He studies endlessly, takes remedial courses, hires tutors. But he fails anyway. The person comes to believe he is stupid and gives up trying to pass. This is not a clear case of uncontrollability according to the old model, since the person believed there existed responses that would contingently produce passing grades although he did not possess them. Regardless of any voluntary response the person made, however, the probability of his obtaining good grades was not altered. We term this situation personal helplessness (Seligman, 1978).

In the same paper, Seligman considered personal helplessness to be internally attributed. Situations in which people believe they cannot solve solvable problems are instances of personal helplessness according to the 1978 hypothesis.

Flow of events leading to helplessness

The 5 steps towards helplessness was outlined in Seligman's 1978 paper (Page 52 - bold emphasis mine).

Objective non-contingency
Perception of present and past non-contingency
Attribution for present or past non-contingency
Expectation of future non-contingency
Symptoms of helplessness

  Objective noncontingency is predicted to lead to symptoms of helplessness only if the expectation of noncontingency is present (Seligman, 1975 & 1978).

Pre-1978, Seligman's model was vague in specifying how perception that events are non-contingent (past or present) was transformed into an expectation that events will be non-contingent in the future.

  Our reformulation regards the attribution the individual makes for noncontingency between his acts and outcomes in the here and now as a determinant of his subsequent expectations for future noncontingency. These expectations, in turn, determine the generality, chronicity, and type of his helplessness symptoms. In the context of this general account of the role of attribution in the production of symptoms, the distinction between universal and personal helplessness can now be clarified.

  ...

  Cognitive and motivational deficits occur in both personal and universal helplessness. Abramson (1977) has demonstrated this empirically while showing that lowered self-esteem occurs only in personal helplessness (Seligman, 1978).

Problem (b): general vs. specific helplessness, and chronic vs. acute helplessness

When helplessness deficits occur in a broad range of situations, they are called them global or general helplessness; when the deficits occur in a narrow range of situations, they are called specific helplessness.

Some helplessness deficits may last only minutes and others may last years. Helplessness is considered to be chronic when it is either long-lived or recurrent and transient or acute when short-lived and non-recurrent (Seligman, 1978).

Your Question - How can human learned helplessness be escaped?

Seligman, in his 1978 paper touched on this in a number of ways.

  The subject is presented with an unsolvable problem, tested on a second solvable task, and finally debriefed. The subject is told that the first problem was actually unsolvable and therefore no one could have solved it. Experimenters in human helplessness studies seem to believe that telling a subject that no one could solve the problem will cause helplessness deficits to go away. The prior discussion suggests that convincing a subject that his helplessness is universal rather than personal will remove self-esteem deficits suffered in the experiment (Seligman, 1978).

He also outlined some general observations.

Those who typically attribute their failures to general, stable, and internal factors will be more prone to general and chronic helplessness depressions with low self-esteem.
Beck (1967) argued similarly that the pre-morbid depressive is an individual who makes logical errors in interpreting reality. For example, the depression-prone individual overgeneralises; a student regards his poor performance in a single class on one particular day as final proof of his stupidity.
Boys and girls have been found to differ in attribution styles, with girls attributing helplessness to lack of ability (global, stable) and boys to lack of effort (specific, unstable) (Dweck, 1976).

  Therefore, the therapeutic implications of the reformulated hypothesis can now be schematized.

Seligman went on to state that depression is most far reaching when

the estimated probability of a positive outcome is low or the estimated probability of an aversive outcome is high,

  Change the estimated probability of the outcome. Change the environment by reducing the likelihood of aversive outcomes and increasing the likelihood of desired outcomes.

the outcome is highly positive or aversive,

  Make the highly preferred outcomes less preferred by reducing the aversiveness of unrelievable outcomes or the desirability of unobtainable outcomes.

the outcome is expected to be uncontrollable,

  Change the expectation from uncontrollability to controllability when the outcomes are attainable. When the responses are not yet in the individual's repertoire but can be, train the appropriate skills. When the responses are already in the individual's repertoire but cannot be made because of distorted expectation of response-outcome independence, modify the distorted expectation. When the outcomes are unattainable, this does not apply.

the attribution for this uncontrollability is to a general, stable, internal factor.

  Change unrealistic attributions for failure toward external, unstable, specific factors, and change unrealistic attributions for success toward internal, stable, global factors. The model predicts that depression will be most far-reaching and produce the most symptoms when a failure is attributed to stable, global, and internal factors, since the patient now expects that many future outcomes will be noncontingently related to his responses. Getting the patient to make an external, unstable, and specific attribution for failure should reduce the depression in cases in which the original attribution is unrealistic. The logic, of course, is that an external attribution for failure raises self-esteem, an unstable one cuts the deficits short, and a specific one makes the deficits less general

In 1983, learned helplessness was also proposed as a model for the emotional numbing and maladaptive passivity sometimes following victimisation. Victims may learn during the victimisation episode that responding is futile

  If this learning is represented as a general expectation of helplessness, then subsequent deficits may occur in situations unrelated to the original situation in which the victimization occurred. The victim’s causal interpretation of the victimization episode may partly determine the chronicity and generality of these deficits, and the involvement of self-esteem. (Peterson & Seligman, 1983).

Based on Seligman's findings, Cognitive Therapy might be beneficial as:

  Therapy may consist of testing the assumptions which one makes and looking for new information that could help shift the assumptions in a way that leads to different emotional or behavioral reactions. Change may begin by targeting thoughts (to change emotion and behavior), behavior (to change feelings and thoughts), or the individual's goals (by identifying thoughts, feelings or behavior that conflict with the goals).

References

Abramson, L. (1977). Universal versus personal helplessness: An experimental test of the reformulated theory of learned helplessness and depression. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Beck, A. T. (1967) Depression: Clinical, experimental and theoretical aspects. New York: Hoeber.

Dweck, C. (1976). Children's interpretation of evaluative feedback: The effect of social cues on learned helplessness. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, 22(2), 105-109.Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23083956

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. (1983). Learned helplessness and victimization. Journal of Social Issues, 39(2), 103—116.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1983.tb00143.x

Seligman, M. E. P., & Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1—9.
DOI: 10.1037/h0024514

Seligman, M. E. P., Maier, S. F., & Geer, J. H. (1968). The alleviation of learned helplessness in the dog. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 73(3, Pt.1), 256—262.
DOI: 10.1037/h0025831

Seligman, M. E. P., & Groves, D. (1970). Non-transient learned helplessness. Psychonomic Science, 19(3), 191—192.
DOI: 10.3758/BF03335546

Seligman, M. E. (1972). Learned helplessness. Annual review of medicine, 23(1), 407—412.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203 PMID: 4566487

Seligman, M. E. P. (1974). Depression and learned helplessness. In R. J. Friedman & M. M. Katz (Eds.), The psychology of depression: Contemporary theory and research. Oxford, England: John Wiley & Sons.

Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. San Francisco: Freeman

Seligman, M. E. P., Abramson, L. Y., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87(1), 49—74
DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.87.1.49 Retrievable from: Semantic Scholar


Is neurogenesis driven by prediction error?

This question is very difficult to provide a satisfactory answer to because the technical neuroscience definition of prediction error is murky and since your question brings up machine learning then the answer is going to depend on what you're trying to do. I'm going to assume you're referring to neurogenesis in an adult brain and not the process that happens immediately after conception because that process is more analogous to deep learning.

From the neuroscience perspective:
I'm not aware of much direct evidence that neurogenesis is a response to prediction errors because we understand very little about the phenomenon. However, it seems bizarre to think that neurogenesis just occurs spontaneously and randomly, so we come to the nature vs. nurture debate. Pure logic would tell me that neurogenesis in adults is something more of a maintenance response to DNA pressures and has little to do with any prediction errors generated by external environmental stimuli. Will explain why in my concluding paragraph.

Keep in mind that even the death of a neuron can be considered prediction error because the machine learning equivalent of "prediction error" in biology is simply a signal that communicates a "deficit" that needs to be filled in some way. In fact, to answer this properly, we must first make it clear that there are potentially dozens, hundreds, or an arbitrarily high number of other "prediction error types" in use by the brain. Here are just a few major ways, hypothetically:

Lots of different neurotransmitters
The opening/closing of various ion channel species that regulate the membrane potential
Synaptic vescicles/receptors
Neuronal firing rates (as in bursting, a rapid succession of action potentials)
Temporal coding (relative firing times to the firing of other neurons)
And I can think of 10 other more-subtle and harder to explain possibilities, but that are just as important, off the top of my head

Keep in mind that each neuron also seems to have its own differentiated mechanisms for, both, interpreting and signaling prediction error. This complicates things further. For instance, one neurotransmitter may communicate prediction error to one particular neuron, but has no effect (or a different effect) on a different neuron. It may even be that neurotransmitter X must be present while temporal code Y happens for the event to be interpreted as a prediction error.

From the machine learning perspective:
In machine learning, we tend to oversimplify prediction error but the brain conforms to no such simplicity. I didn't want to mislead you by saying "yes" to your question because prediction error in artificial neural networks is traditionally a singular concept and not multiplexed like it is in neuroscience. So there is no analogy between prediction error in deep learning and prediction error in neuroscience evidence.

You might need to clarify the reason you are asking so that I can provide a more applicable response.

Deep learning is not biologically plausible, and it sounds like you are trying to discover a more accurate biological solution. If that's the case, looking into neurogenesis as a way to reduce prediction error may not be very fruitful because the new neurons created in adulthood only account for an incredibly tiny portion of the neurons that already exist, and humans encounter prediction errors potentially every second of every day. If we simply created new neurons for all prediction errors, then why are we born with pretty much all the neurons we will ever have? The brain overwhelmingly seems to have a way of learning and retaining the important information without having to create new neurons in response to prediction errors.


Q: Is unconsciousness actually superior to the conscious mind?
Short answer:
In some aspects, yes; in some, no. Both unconsciousness and consciousness are essential for organisms that have evolved to have consciousness; these organisms can’t survive without both of them.
Long answer:
All mental processes are unconscious in the sense that we never are conscious of the processing at any of the processing steps in any mental process (e.g., we never are conscious of the processing at any of the processing steps in the processing processes of vision, sound, taste, language, decision making, etc. and never know what the processing at each step is like); we are conscious of only the results of some mental processes (e.g. we are conscious of the vision, sound, taste, meaning of words, and decisions resulting from the corresponding mental processes and know what they are like) while the vast majority of mental processes have unconscious results, such as the information of the pressure in the blood vessels, blood pH level, and blood electrolyte and hormone levels (e.g., we never are conscious of the pressure in the blood vessels, blood pH level, and blood electrolyte and hormone levels and never know what they are like).
(N.B. To avoid confusion, it should be note that mental processes whose results we can be conscious of are often called conscious mental processes even if we are not conscious of the processing at any step of their processing processes, and that mental processes whose results we cannot be conscious of are often called unconscious mental processes.)
The major differences between unconsciousness and consciousness is that the following occur if something is conscious but do not occur if it is unconscious:

The mind has the awareness and experiences of what that something is like – what the vision of the house is like, what the sound of the song is like, what the taste of the honey is like, etc. (Compare these to the unconsciousness cases: the mind doesn’t have the awareness and experiences of what the blood pressure at 120 or 130 mmHg is like, what the blood pH of 7.35 or 7.45 is like, what the blood sodium level of 135 mEq/L or 140 mEq/L is like, etc.)

The mind can share the information of that something to its various parts that include the cognition part, the symbolizing part, and the storage part. Thus, it can think about, analyze, compare, and do other mental activities regarding that something intentionally; it can directly represent that something with symbols – written signs, sounds, gestures, etc. – thus, it can communicate information about that something to other members of its species; and it can intentionally memorize and recall that something, at least with some details and for some time. For example, we can do these activities (think about, analyze, compare, talk and write about, and memorize and later recall) to the vision of the house, the sound of the song, and the taste of the honey, but we cannot do these activities to the unconscious registration of the blood pressure, blood pH, and blood sodium level.

These properties of being globally available for various mental processes, being able to be stored and retrieved, and reportability certainly give organisms that have consciousness flexible response mechanism to cope with infinite challenges it may encounter in the environment and thus increase the survival chance of the organisms and their species.
Thus, although unconsciousness performs the vast majority of mental processes and are essential to life, there are something that is survival-promoting that unconsciousness cannot do while consciousness can. In the former case, unconsciousness may be considered superior while in the latter case consciousness is certainly superior.
Q: Is being totally unconscious superior?
A: From the discussion above, the answer is obviously “no”.
Q: Or is it only superior to a conscious mind in a "Complete" Chinese room scenario, where the system/brain has already been fed with enough information to compute all its "results"?
A: In real life, there are infinite, unpredictable challenges in the environment to tackle with. It’s impossible to feed the Chinese room with infinite amount of information for infinite scenarios in advance so that anyone in the room can automatically respond to each scenario correctly. This is true in the case of organisms as well. It’s impossible to have an unconscious system in any organism pre-fed with infinite information to cope with infinite challenges. That’s why consciousness evolves to tackle this problem of infinite challenges.
If it were possible to feed an infinite amount of information into a system, including an unconscious system, the answer to this question would probably be yes; but in real life, it’s not possible to do so.
References.

Earl B. The biological function of consciousness. Front Psychol. 2014;5:697. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00697.

Dehanene S. Fathoming unconscious depths. In: Consciousness and the brain. Penguin Books. 2014. New York, New York, USA. ISBN 978-0-670-02543-5, 978-0-14-312626-3. p 47-88.

Dehaene S, Changeux JP, Naccache L, Sackur J, Sergent C. Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: A testable taxonomy. Trends Cogn Sci. 2006 May;10(5):204-211. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2006.03.007.


Name of the psychological phenomenon of doing something just because you've already started doing it?

Although Cognitive Inertia (as mentioned by hexadecimal) is a nice, broad way to point to the phenomenon, people have also studied it from other points of view. Two of them are from economic and cognitive angles.

From an economic level, what you are referring to is called the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Here is an example from Wikipedia that explains it from a business perspective:

  In business, an example of sunk costs may be investment into a factory
  or research that now has a lower value or no value whatsoever. For
  example, \$20 million has been spent on building a power plant; the
  value at present is zero because it is incomplete (and no sale or
  recovery is feasible). The plant can be completed for an additional
  \$10 million, or abandoned and a different but equally valuable
  facility built for \$5 million. It should be obvious that abandonment
  and construction of the alternative facility is the more rational
  decision, even though it represents a total loss of the original
  expenditure—the original sum invested is a sunk cost. If
  decision-makers are irrational or have the wrong incentives, the
  completion of the project may be chosen. For example, politicians or
  managers may have more incentive to avoid the appearance of a total
  loss.

On a more personal level, this can be generally explained as the Zeigarnik effect, which states that "people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks".

Although there are some issues with the reliability of the effect, it is generally extrapolated to say that the phenomenon "compels humans to finish a task that they've already started, and that when we don't finish a task we experience discomfort and intrusive thoughts about it." (from an AsapSCIENCE video on "The science of Productivity")


What is the name for the psychological therapy involving socially isolating a patient?

In my recent graduate school psychology training, no therapy of this type was ever mentioned. In fact, conversion disorders are under some scrutiny because, in at least 33% of cases, an organic cause eventually is discerned. Medscape on conversion disorders
In-patient treatment is uncommon these days, and most modern psychological treatment includes increasing social support, activating the patient with exercise and meaningful activity.
I would be concerned about the nutritional and, more seriously, the emotional impact of this unusual form of "treatment".
BTW, Extinction, as a therapy, usually refers to a phobia treatment with relaxation training and progressive exposure to the feared stimulus.


What are the benefits of transformational over transactional leadership?

Here is one meta analytic comparison:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15506858

Bernard M. Bass is one of the most cited researchers on this field:
Here is one of his articles but there are plenty on the net:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-882207.pdf

I think he is also author of MLQ - multifaceted survey of leadership.

There is also revised theory by Bass and Avolio:
The implications of transactional and transformational leadership.

And also: Re-examining the components of transformational and transactional leadership using the Multi-factor Leadership; Journal of Occupational and organizational psychology. 2010.


What is the field that deals with observing an individual's fitness within a system called?

The study of physiological fitness is simply evolutionary biology. The study of animal behavior and how it evolved is ethology. John Maynard Smith was one of the first to apply mathematical modeling, especially game theory, to the evolution of species. It is now a well-established field (see for example the wikipedia page for evolutionary game theory). But other mathematical frameworks, such as dynamical systems, have been applied to the question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory

The precise algorithm you describe is called an evolutionary algorithm and is a well-known, well-studied subclass of optimization algorithms that are loosely inspired by biological systems (e.g. genetic algorithm, particle swarm algorithm...). These algorithms are useful when trying to optimize a high-dimensional and/or highly non-linear function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

As for your side note I think you didn't think this through very carefully. Firstly you are now talking about behavior, not physiology. It is far less clear how behaviors are shaped by evolution. Then you describe how an observer would attribute value to an environment, while fitness is precisely the opposite. Finally there is no notion of "value" in evolution. You might be fit in one environment, but not in another. It doesn't make you any better or worse.


Is Allen Carr's "easy way to stop smoking" a form of cognitive therapy?

Cognitive therapy
The driving principle behind cognitive therapy is that mental problems are caused not by any 'objective' qualities of the events that we experience, but our perception and interpretation of those events. By changing these perceptions and interpretations, we can alleviate or solve those problems (Beck, 1970).
In this sense, Carr's method can be seen as consistent with cognitive therapy, but I would not go so far as to call it a form of cognitive therapy without peer review and validation that does not seem to exist.
Cognitive behavioral therapy
The difference between Burns' and Carr's methods can be explained by the fact that Burns is a cognitive behavioral therapist (CBT). This is a form of therapy which incorporates and expands on the principles of cognitive therapy, by acknowledging that not all of our perceptions and interpretations are under rational or conscious control. It therefore incorporates both cognitive and behavioral elements. An introduction to and meta-review of CBT's efficacy compared to therapy forms like cognitive therapy can be found in Butler et al. (2006).
Validity of Carr's method
Carr's work does not appear to have been directly referenced, at least not in any readily discoverable form, in the psychological literature. This may be because his method is actually not new, but seems to have been loosely based on a mix of Beck's ideas and Albert Ellis' stoicism-inspired rational therapy, so it should not necessarily be taken to mean that the method is nonsense; Carr may simply be popularizing established methods.
References

Beck, A. T. (1970). Cognitive therapy: Nature and relation to behavior therapy. Behavior therapy, 1(2), 184-200.
Butler, A. C., Chapman, J. E., Forman, E. M., & Beck, A. T. (2006). The empirical status of cognitive-behavioral therapy: a review of meta-analyses. Clinical psychology review, 26(1), 17-31.


Cingulate cortex vs Limbic lobe are they same or slightly different?

Updated answer:
The limbic lobe (aka limbic cortex) is made up of the cingulate gyrus and the parahippocampal gyrus (so the cingulate gyrus is only part of the limbic lobe). The limbic lobe is part of the limbic system. There is some disagreement over what the limbic system includes, but some of the other areas contained in the limbic system include the subcallosal gyrus, hippocampus, and amygdala.


Is there a formal name for the effect/cognitive bias of seeing something new

Salience comes to mind, which in Psychology can be defined as...

... anything (person, behavior, trait, etc.) that is prominent, conspicuous, or otherwise noticeable compared with its surroundings. Salience is usually produced by novelty or unexpectedness, but can also be brought about by shifting one’s attention to that feature. Salience usually depends on context. A child would not be particularly salient at his or her school, but would be at a nursing home. The act of crying would not be salient at a funeral, but would be at a job interview. A salient feature can be thought of as the “figure” that stands out against the “ground” of all other nonsalient features.

Source
IResearch.net: Psychology Research & Reference


What is the name of the condition where you feel like you have been somewhere before?

The term is typically called déjà vu..

There's a section on wikipedia discussing scientific research.

Brown (2003) looks like a good starting point for a more rigorous scientific analysis.

Kusumi (2006, PDF) has another scientific review article on the topic.

References

Brown, A. S. (2003). A review of the déjà vu experience. Psychological bulletin, 129(3), 394.
Kusumi, T. (2006). Human metacognition and the déjà vu phenomenon. Diversity in cognition: Evolution, development, domestication, and pathology, 302-314.
http://www.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/cogpsy/personal/Kusumi/dejavu.pdf


Aesthetic preference for even or odd numbers

Some ancient historical precedent exists for preferring $10$, but also for $6$, so that's mixed support from Wikipedia on perfect numbers. As for honest-to-goodness modern research, here's one quick result on prevalence of round prices in marketing (Klumpp, Brorsen, & Anderson, 2005): it's higher than for non-round prices. Some other results are reviewed within, including those of Kandel, Sarig, & Wohl (2001), who claim "direct evidence that investors prefer round numbers," Harris (1991), who claims, "Stock prices cluster on round fractions," and Osler (2003), regarding whose results Klumpp and colleagues wrote, "[market] trends tend to increase after certain prices levels (specifically round prices) are crossed." Osler's own wording (with numeric list reformatting and emphasis added):

  trends tend to reverse course at predictable support and resistance levels, and
  trends tend to be unusually rapid after rates cross such levels.

  The data are the first available on individual currency stop-loss and take-profit orders. Take-profit orders cluster particularly strongly at round numbers, which could explain the first prediction. Stop-loss orders cluster strongly just beyond round numbers, which could explain the second prediction.

Klumpp and colleagues' research claims to be a relatively new attempt to apply these ideas outside of financial market analysis...but to some extent, wheat is just another form of currency, so this is debatable.

As for substantive theoretical explanations, a good review and test of theory is freely available (Kahn, Pennacchi, & Sopranzetti, 1999). This paper mentions many circumstantial and traditional peculiarities about financial markets as motivating factors, but the ideas most interesting for our audience pertain to memory. Here's an excerpt (emphasis added):

  Experimental tests performed by Schindler and Wiman (1989) find that individuals tend to recall odd-ending prices less accurately than even-ending prices, and that expressing a price as odd-ending increases the likelihood that it will be underestimated when recalled. A biological explanation for this downward bias in recalling odd-ending prices is offered by Brenner and Brenner (1982). They propose a theory of fixed storage capacity which assumes that the extra decision of rounding the initially observed number is costly, so that the cheapest transfer mechanism involves simply storing the first digit. Hence, if a prices right-most digits are not stored in memory, odd-ending prices will tend to be underestimated. If firms recognize consumers downward bias in recalling odd-ending prices, they may significantly increase the demand for their products by making odd-ending price quotes rather than slightly higher even-ending ones. Even-ending quotes will then represent pricing points where product demand experiences a discrete decline. Blinder (1991) reports some empirical support for this notion. Based on interviews with firm managers, he finds that a majority were reluctant to cross the psychological barrier of raising prices from an odd-ending quote to an even-ending one.

In summary, it seems people prefer to ignore the last available digit for conservation of memory and attentional resources. People use round numbers as arbitrary thresholds for decision making, probably because they can be simplified by dropping the lowest digit, and hence require less unnecessary cognitive elaboration to select when the decision really is arbitrary anyway. Busy people with lots of other things to worry about would probably experience cognitive dissonance when finding themselves thinking about such arbitrary decisions any harder than they have to. Since people pay more attention to that second-to-last digit, they notice when that number "rolls over", and evidently find it a suitable stimulus to trigger premeditated actions like buying and selling.

I haven't seen any particular references to five or symmetry in general, but if you look into these references further yourself, you might find more than what I've reviewed here. [Edit]: On second thought, here's one (emphasis added again):

  Consumers disproportionately selected round, whole-dollar, and half-dollar amounts. About 73 percent of customers tipped a round, whole-dollar amount, and an additional 8 percent rounded their tips to a half dollar. They also clustered their tips around multiples of $5. And on the occasions when the bill didn’t end in .00, nearly a quarter of diners left an unrounded tip that when added to the bill, came to a round total. This requires some mental math skills, the authors note, implying that consumers’ preferences for round prices is so strong that they’ll calculate an exact tip amount to arrive at a round total.

This demonstrates that ordinary people have these preferences too, not just financial marketeers. Read the rest here (Palmquist, 2013), or at his source, a study of tipping behavior in the Journal of Economic Psychology (Lynn, Flynn, & Helion, 2013).

References

- Blinder, A. S. (1991). Why are prices sticky? Preliminary results from an interview study. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 81, 89–96.
- Brenner, G. A., & Brenner, R. (1982). Memory and markets, or why are you paying \$2.99 for a widget? Journal of Business, 55, 147–158.
- Harris, L. (1991). Stock price clustering and discreteness. Review of Financial Studies, 4(3), 389–415. Retrieved from http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~keechung/TEM/Journal%20Articles/Clustering%20-%20Harris.pdf.
- Kahn, C., Pennacchi, G., & Sopranzetti, B. (1999). Bank deposit rate clustering: Theory and empirical evidence. The Journal of Finance, 54(6), 2185-2214. Retrieved from https://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/workpaper/1996/wp9604.pdf.
- Kandel, S., Sarig, O., & Wohl, A. (2001). Do investors prefer round stock prices? Evidence from Israeli IPO auctions. Journal of Banking & Finance, 25(8), 1543–1551.
- Klumpp, J. M., Brorsen, W., & Anderson, K. B. (2005). The preference for round number prices. Selected paper prepared for presentation at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association annual meetings, Little Rock, Arkansas, February 5–9, 2005. Retrieved from http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/35537/1/sp05kl01.pdf.
- Lynn, M., Flynn, S. M., & Helion, C. (2013). Do consumers prefer round prices? Evidence from pay-what-you-want decisions and self-pumped gasoline purchases. Journal of Economic Psychology, 36, 96–102. Retrieved from http://tippingresearch.com/uploads/Round_Prices_JEP.pdf.
- Osler, C. L. (2003). Currency orders and exchange rate dynamics: an explanation for the predictive success of technical analysis. The Journal of Finance, 58(5), 1791–1820. Retrieved from Ben-Gurion University's Department of Economics.
- Palmquist, M. (2013, November 21). The psychology of pricing: Customers prefer round numbers. Strategy + Business. Retrieved from http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-Psychology-of-Pricing-Customers-Prefer-Round-Numbers?gko=f4877.
- Schindler, R. M., & Wiman, A. R. (1989). Effects of odd pricing on price recall. Journal of Business Research, 19(3), 165–177.


Term/phrase for remembering the negative over the positive

There isn't a name (that I am aware of at least) for a person who has this experience, but the concept is referred to as negativity bias.

Negativity bias is a general phenomenon, though certainly individuals can vary as to how strongly they are influenced by negative rather than positive events/information.