Does homosexuality correlate with narcissism or finding yourself attractive?

What you have here is a hypothesis and it's almost impossible to answer this conclusively because you can't design a randomized study but only look at correlations.  In addition, "narcissism" itself is far from a simple concept and used differently by different researchers.  For instance some see is as synonymous with self-esteem and self-confidence, some don't.

In fact, your view is closer to some of the psychoanalytical views of homosexuality.  For instance, a hundred years ago, in talking about narcissism and abnormal development, Freud suggested that people who had experienced problems during libidnal development (libido is a kind of instinctual sexual energy behind our psychological development), including gays and "perverts", instead of choosing their mother as their "love-object", they'd use themselves as the love object.  He labeled this abnormal sexual development a kind of narcissism.  The theory is more complex than that but I just wanted to give you an idea of the kind of views I was referring to.

Contemporary research does not follow this line of thinking nor talks about development, gays or not, in those terms.  In fact many (not all) psychoanalytical concepts are no longer seen as scientific (=falsifiable) so they're not seriously studied these days in universities.  You would instead find researchers look, for instance, at homosexuality and mental health (with a lot of attention paid to social factors; see Herek & Garnets, 2007), but not studies of narcissistic development in homosexuals, except a couple here and there in psychoanalytical journals.

I took a look and most recent study I found in a non-psychoanalytical journal was by an Israeli researcher, Rubinstein, published in 2010.  In her study she found exactly what she believed based on Freudian conception, that gays were more narcissistic but had less self confidence than heterosexuals.

As the invited commentary on that study (Hartmann, same issue, can't find citing info) mentions, given that there is still stigma against homosexuals, one need a higher standard for offering the conclusion that she had (the study used only 200 Jewish students in their 20s living in Israel and within what Hartmann calls "forceful social and religious traditions", and had relied on self-report, which is far from objective).  In her defense, Rubinstein did talk about three potential interpretations and also the limitations of her study.

Summary:

Some psychoanalysts believe that homosexuals are more narcissistic than heterosexuals but no good data is available to confirm that, partly because researchers try to be careful when they study sexual orientation because of potential misuse of findings, but more importantly because those conceptions of homosexuality are no longer seen as scientific or more useful/productive than current biological or psychological theories of homosexual development.

I hope you found this answer helpful.

Works Cited

Freud, S. (1957). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.),The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 67–104). London: Hogarth Press (Original work published 1914).

Herek, G. M., & Garnets, L. D. (2007). Sexual orientation and mental health. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 3, 353–375.

Rubinstein, G. (2010). Narcissism and Self-Esteem Among Homosexual and Heterosexual Male Students. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 36:24–34.


Experiencing neuronal activity inside the body/brain

Without neural activity you wouldn't experience or perceive anything. Perception in itself is a reflection of neuronal activity. If you are referring to the question whether you can feel a neuron fire - then no, that is not possible. To 'experience' neuronal activity you should record it. There are a wide variety of methods to do that: EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET etc.


What can we learn from the neural networks of C.elegans to understand human brains?

Caenorhabditis elegans is probably not an ancestor to Humans. As found in Sponge proteins are more similar to those of Homo sapiens than to Caenorhabditis elegans, certain sponges were found to have more similar protein structures to humans than C. elegans suggesting the sponges are the ancestor.

For your second point, it depends what you mean. The actual, exact sort of network in C. elegans doesn't exist as a "part" in Human brains nor would it even if humans had C elegans as a direct ancestor; the network would have evolved considerably.

The basic structure of the neural network as a connected net of neurons and the basic functionality has of course remained through all organisms with developed neural networks. Like all life, certain related developmental processes exist between humans and C. elegans, which is why studying them (and most any other animal) is often relevant to Human research of similar biological or psychological areas of interest.

C. elegans can even learn, showing it is a very complete model of a neural network, despite it's simplicity.

C. elegans is not studied because it is an ancestor or because it has any particular relation to the human mind, but because it has an extremely simple, completely functional neural network. There are complete maps of C elegans' neural network and even online tools to search the synapses of C elegans. There are whole websites dedicated to research on C. elegans.

Similar to fruit flies, C. elegans also provide a great vector for developmental research because they have a lifespan of a couple weeks instead of decades.

Some great further reading is the introductory Why use C. elegans to study the synapse ?


What neural mechanism explains the tendency to visually attend to the whole scene before attending to details?

First, it is not only your intuition - there are many experimental results showing that we first perceive the gist of scenes (for example, is it outdoors or indoors?), then the major parts of it (was there an animal, or a human figure in it?) then more and more details (is that figure male or female? what is her expression?) [1] [2]. Note, however, that it is not exactly related to the size of the object, but more to its perceived importance or relevance. (See also this great video about change blindness, that exemplifies that)

Reverse Hierarchy Theory [3] proposes a mechanism for that - the activation in the network flows mostly "bottom up", but conscious perception starts at higher level, and then actively (through attention) accesses "lower level" details as they are needed. or in their words:

  Classically, the visual system was seen as a hierarchy of cortical areas and cell types. Neurons of low-level areas (V1, V2) receive visual input and represent simple features such as lines or edges of specific orientation and location. Their outputs are integrated and processed by successive cortical levels (V3, V4, medial-temporal area MT), which gradually generalize over spatial parameters and specialize to represent global features. Finally, further levels (inferotemporal area IT, prefrontal area PF, etc.) integrate their outputs to represent abstract forms, objects, and categories. The function of feedback connections was unknown. Reverse Hierarchy Theory proposes that the above forward hierarchy acts implicitly, with explicit perception beginning at high-level cortex, representing the gist of the scene on the basis of a first-order approximate integration of low-level input. Later, explicit perception returns to lower areas via the feedback connections, to integrate into conscious vision with scrutiny the detailed information available there. Thus, initial perception is based on spread attention (large receptive fields), guessing at details, and making binding or conjunction errors. Later vision incorporates details, overcoming such blindnesses

[1] Potter, M. C. (1976). Short-term conceptual memory for pictures. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2(5), 509. link

[2] Rensink, R. A., O'Regan, J. K., & Clark, J. J. (1997). To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5), 368-373. link

[3] Hochstein, S., & Ahissar, M. (2002). View from the top-hierarchies and reverse hierarchies in the visual system. Neuron, 36(5), 791-804. link


When faced with a choice and trying to make a quick decision, are 2 options better than 3 or more options?

As Piotr mentions in the comments, you must operationalize "better".

Total time spent making a decision is likely to increase as the number of decision alternatives increase. This is known as Hick's Law.

If each choice has some objective value, then the maximum possible value that could be attained is likely to increase as the number of decision alternatives increase. This is probability.

The truth is not so clear cut. Each choice has some subjective value that is governed not only by its own intrinsic properties, but by comparison to other choices. Barry Shwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, will tell you that having other choices available to you can increase the experienced regret post-decision, which lowers the subjective value of the choices.

There's also a speed-accuracy trade-off. If a decision needs to be quick, as you say, there is some cost associated with time that needs to be subtracted from the value of the chosen option.

Overall, it would be too simplistic to say "2 choices are always better than one", or vice versa. The answer, as usual, is "it depends".


What computerized EEG analysis algorithms are there?

http://sccn.ucsd.edu/eeglab/

http://chronux.org

are two libraries with tons of functions for analyzing eeg and emg data


Is there a phenomenon where one feels alienation towards certain body parts

The condition is called Somatoparaphrenia, and was first described by Josef Gerstmann, in this paper:

Gerstmann, J. (1942). Problem of imperception of disease and of impaired body territories with organic lesions: relation to body scheme and its disorders. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 48(6), 890.

For a more recent review of the topic, see:

Vallar, G., & Ronchi, R. (2009). Somatoparaphrenia: a body delusion. A review of the neuropsychological literature. Experimental Brain Research, 192(3), 533-551.

Relevant parts from this review's abstract:

  Somatoparaphrenia has been reported, with a few exceptions, in
  right-brain-damaged patients, with motor and somatosensory deficits, and the syndrome of unilateral spatial neglect.
  Somatoparaphrenia, most often characterized by a delusion
  of disownership of left-sided body parts, may however
  occur without associated anosognosia for motor deficits,
  and personal neglect ... Somatoparaphrenia is often brought about by extensive right-sided lesions, but patients with posterior (parietal-temporal), and
  insular damage are on record, as well as a few patients with
  subcortical lesions.


How do certain frequencies of sound induce psychological states?

Auditory information is conveyed to the brain from the cochlea via the VIII cranial nerve (aka vestibulocochlear nerve). Under standard conditions the vestibular system gets activated when we move our heads. If we spin around rapidly this can obviously make us feel dizzy and nauseous. The vestibular system can also be activated do to other causes. For example, positional alcohol nystagmus (aka the drunk spins) occurs due to alcohol changing the densities of the endolymph and the cupula (part of the sensory organ in the semicircular canals). It turns out that low frequency pressure waves at high enough levels can activate the sensory cells in the vestibular system.

In some causes of deafness and hearing loss the vestibular system remains normal, or near normal. These individuals are therefore susceptible to these feelings. Other causes of deafness destroy the vestibular system making individuals immune to these feelings.


The main question here is "is there any scientific research into objective differences between people with MBTI types?" I suppose a second question is "does this research actually SHOW differences?". This is one aspect of the debate about the validity of MBTI, which is covered in other questions (e.g., this one).

There is not as much research as you might think, which is because most scientists avoid the MBTI. It is a commercial product (you have to pay for it) with poor reliability, which means that scientific psychology tends to use better-validated and published scales. This recent meta analysis includes MBTI as one of the "ipsative" measures, finding little validity for predicting occupation. This paper is similar and suggests that normative measures like the MBTI can predict GPA and job performance, although they do so less well than the Big Five. I haven't found any other studies looking more closely at behaviour, although given that some people consider the Big Five to subsume MBTI types, you could look for that instead.


Which intervention improves the ability to remember names the most?

Too long for a comment, so given as answer.

I know of no studies, but what teachers do is connect each name to a face (that is "elaborate") and repeat this elaboration each time they enter class and check attendance (sort of like learning vocabulary or a poem). Personally, I write down the names in the sitting order of the pupils or students, because I remember where which "face" sat. Another option is to find the person on Facebook, download a photo from their profile, and add that to a list of the names. Then I repeatedly look at that list. What also helps is actually addressing the person by name each time you speak to them, especially after they gave their name to you the first time, but also when you meet them again.

Hope this helps in case you want practical proven advice.


Special treatment of youngest member of a group

I'm not aware of any special technical term for such a phenomenon, though colloquially the youngest child may sometimes be called "the baby of the family".  Furthermore, I'm not aware of this phenomenon existing outside of family dynamics - it might be just your personal experience.  In the workplace for example, the youngest members of a team may be treated as inexperienced or incompetent, as competition or threat, or as subordinate or servant.  Favouritism may equally be shown to the eldest, most senior, most productive, or most visionary members of a team.

Within families, a number of surveys have suggested that parents do appear to favour their youngest children.  However, a few interpretations of this phenomenon are possible.  One interpretation is that younger children demand and respond to preferential treatment over their older siblings (eg, Jensen & McHale, 2017).  Another is that younger children are easier to manage than older children, and in fact they receive no better treatment than their older siblings did at the same age (eg, Mumsnet, 2018).  It is also possible that there is a cuteness effect:

  ... human adults react positively to infants who are stereotypically cute.

Also of note: Being the youngest child does not grant any special advantage later in life.


How does the frequency of a visual stimulus affect the steady-state visually evoked potential?

The steady state response is a sustained oscillatory response to a stimulus that is varying in strength with some regularity. But it is not a true oscillation, it's closer to an ERP in nature: it is a stimulus-driven response to variations in the stimulation.

In auditory processing, which I am familiar with, people take a tone and then add an amplitude modulation to it. This means that the sound level increases and decreases regularly at a certain frequency. Increases and decreases in neural stimulation are clearly visible in the brain, so if you average the frequency decomposition of your signal over all trials, you get a response at the frequency of the amplitude modulation. If you then manage to change something about this frequency response (e.g. the power) over different experimental manipulations, then most likely you've found some true top-down effect.

In vision I assume it would be similar if you flicker a picture: the stimulation will increase and decrease regularly and you should get a response at the frequency of the flicker. I haven't got a clue what would happen if you would split the frequency rate for the two eyes though.

One thing that mystifies me is that in audition, the steady-state response is particularly well picked up if the amplitude modulation is around 20 or 40 Hz. I have no idea why this is. I also don't really understand what the advantages are over just recording brain activity and looking at the ERP. With the steady-state response, you're in danger of covering up genuinely interesting oscillatory activity with the frequency of the flicker. Also, I'd expect that you'd also pick up a flicker that matches the frequency of the refresh rate of your display. I don't know how that would influence the steady state response (we don't have that problem in audition).


Why do higher incentives lead to lower performance for non-rudimentary tasks?

I think you have to be careful with the proposition that "rewards do not increase performance on non-rudimentary tasks". The experiments that Dan Pink cites involve experiments where participants are in a room and are supervised by an experimenter while they complete a task. This social pressure by the experimenter may well be enough for participants to be focused and diligent in completing the task.

But in the real world:

people often have time to prepare for situations that involve high stakes rewards. For example, performance on exams often have major rewards tied to their outcome. A major goal of exams is to motivate students to study hard for the subject matter.
effort and time on task is often not fixed. Employees can do overtime if the task is hard but the rewards are good (or if the pay implies that the extra effort is expected). They can engage in less off-task behaviour.
people choose the tasks they do at all. When people choose a career, it is assumed that among many other things, that many will consider the probability of getting a job and the likely salary and conditions (i.e., rewards). When a person chooses to work for a particular employer, salary relative to other potential employers is often an important factor. Thus, rewards can influence whether an individual engages in a particular activity at all.

Thus, I think one needs to be careful when generalising the meaning of these experiments to work and other contexts.

In terms of theories that might explain the results:

The Yerkes-Dodson curve and related models suggest that the relationship between arousal and performance is an inverted-u relationship and that the peak of the inverted u varies with task difficulty (i.e., greater arousal is optimal for simpler tasks).


Why does one's mind swing between different moods based on external circumstances?

Abnormal psychology is a tricky thing. You did not give us enough information to determine accurately which disorder you might be referring to. The reactions you describe sound rational: a pattern of responding with a positive emotion to positive experiences and negatively to negative experiences. Mental illness can be thought of as extremes of normal emotions for the sake of this discussion so what really matters is how frequent and proportionately the emotion was to the stimuli. It is normal to feel sad when you fail at a task and when more major events happen in life it is normal to absolutely grieve for a short time. At a point the response becomes abnormal (it interferes with normal life tasks or the correct response is is repressed) and can be treated by medication and therapy by a psychiatrist and/or psychologist.

The person you describe might be perfectly normal needing no treatment. They might have ADD with depressive features which is treated with dopamine receptors enhancers like Aderall. I think every working person on the planet would like ADD medication as they are a performance enhancing drug however the side effects make them unsuitable for all people. They might be bipolar which is treated with mood stabilizers like lithium and anti-psychotics like zyprexa. They might just be depressed which is treated by anti-axiety/depressive medication like celexa an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). Maybe even some kind of performance Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is treated with anti-anxiety medications or anti-psychotics sometimes. Maybe their poor performance was caused by poor quality or quantity of sleep and a sedative like Ambien is used the treat the insomnia. I'm sure there are a whole host of other illnesses and treatments that might fit the profile you describe and it is impossible to know without more information and a doctor's diagnosis.

Talk therapy treatments are more diverse than drug treatments. With many different combinations helping various illnesses. Common treatments include Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic, Individual or Group counseling. Each practitioner implements talk therapy differently following a general guideline.


Differences in reaction time on visual tasks with and without binocular disparity ques?

According to these three published studies I found below - reaction time is slower when depth disparity information is withheld, as to whether or not that extra information is actually encoded in the brain is still an open question.

This first paper by Young Lim Lee; Jeffrey A. Saunders used left and right eye rendered images of novel 3D shapes with and without binocular cues to time test subjects in discriminating whether two images were rotational views of the same object.  With a set of three experiments they concluded in all cases that the stereo information improved reaction times.

Stereo improves 3D shape discrimination even when rich monocular shape cues are available
The second paper by Darren Burke, Jessica Taubert, Talia Higman had test subjects view pairs of photographed human faces briefly through a stereoscope with and without stereoscopic information and were required to identify if it was the same or a different individual.  Results were that the subjects had faster reaction times and lower error rates when stereoscopic information was present.

Are face representations viewpoint dependent? A stereo advantage for generalising across different views of faces
And the third paper by Oliver ZJ, Cristino F, Roberts MV, Pegna AJ, Leek EC the test subjects were split into a mono and stereo groups before being required to memomrize a set of 3D objects and then determine amongst a series of test objects whether or not it was from the set. The test was conducted using a 3D stereo monitor and glasses with the images displayed either with complementary or identical images to either eye depending on the group while 128 channel ERP (event-related-potential) traces were recorded.  Results showed higher accuracy for the stereo group and while there was no statistics given for reaction times, the paper concludes with an analysis and discussion regarding the differences in ERP data collected from the two groups.

Stereo Viewing Modulates Three-Dimensional Shape Processing During Object Recognition: A High-Density ERP Study


Integrated Information Theory - If correct could humans create artificial consciousness?

IIT implies that just about everything is 'conscious' (to a degree) in that you can measure its integrated information to say how conscious it is, while accepting that what we as humans typically describe as 'consciousness' is a very high value of this measure. That's sort of the whole point of the theory: having a definition of consciousness that starts from a more basic principle ('integrated information') rather than starting at "humans are conscious" without defining what it really means to be conscious.

High levels of integrated information are not easy to achieve with typical computers we use today, but nothing about the theory says it cannot be done. If you have a sufficient level of integrated information, we can call that consciousness based on IIT.

IIT does not say anything about implementation of such a system, even though your question implies that it does (you could view this as either a weakness or a strength depending on your perspective); there are certainly ways to connect artificial systems dynamically without them needing to be neurons. It is true, however, that an individual neuron is far more complex than typical artificial instantiations of neurons, like the nodes of an artificial neural network.

As far as your paragraph beginning "IIT seems to imply that conscious experience lies in certain configurations of the electron field" I don't know what this means or where your got it; IIT doesn't say anything like this. IIT says that consciousness is what you get when you connect information to other information; for example, placing information you are measuring from the world right now in the context of your life's experience involves integrating information from your sensory systems with your memories. Computers can already achieve this to some degree, the part about human consciousness that is remarkable is just how deeply and rapidly (and automatically) these comparisons occur in parallel.

Koch, C., & Tononi, G. (2008). Can machines be conscious?. Ieee Spectrum, 45(6).


Categorisation of attributes according to OCEAN

It's unclear what is your definition of attributes.
But the Big Five emerged from the lexical hypothesis whereby adjectives in the dictionary that describe people were systematically examined and categorised using approaches such as factor analysis. Some of the papers in this area would contain lists of terms.

Equally, for briefer lists, you could look at the domain-facet frameworks of various Big 5 personality models, such as the NEO. In this context, the facets help to define the Big 5 Domains.

Here are a few such domain-facet/aspect frameworks, summarised in Anglim & O'Connor (2018, PDF). That article also provides a brief review of the lexical approach with some further references.

Anglim, J., & O'Connor, P. (2019). Measurement and Research Using the Big Five, HEXACO, and Narrow Traits: A Primer for Researchers and Practitioners. Australian Journal of Psychology, 71, 16-25. https://psyarxiv.com/a78g2/download


Are neural adaptation and drug tolerance to psychoactive drugs related?

Drug tolerance can be generally defined as

  A condition that occurs when the body gets used to a medicine so that either more medicine is needed or different medicine is needed.

Tolerance to drugs can be produced by several different mechanisms.

In the case of morphine or heroin, tolerance develops at the level of the cellular targets. Activation of opiate receptors triggers the inhibition of the enzyme adenylate cyclase. After repeated receptor activation, adenylate cyclase adapts so that the morphine can no longer cause changes in cell firing (source: NIH).

However, stating that a single target is involved is definitely an oversimplification.

Another NIH report on ethanol dependence gives an awesome comprehensive overview of the bewildering complexity behind this phenomenon, and I will only shortly sum up the different mechanisms stated there:

Functional Tolerance develops due to brain adaptations that compensate for the alcohol. Chronic heavy drinkers show few obvious signs of intoxication even at blood alcohol concentrations (BAC's) that would otherwise be considered fatal. Examples of functional tolerance are the following:
Acute tolerance can be observed within a single drinking session. Alcohol-induced impairment is greater when measured soon after beginning alcohol consumption than when measured later in the drinking session.
Environment-dependent tolerance develops over several drinking sessions and is accelerated if alcohol administration is always in the same environment, for instance in the local pub.
Learned tolerance develops by practicing a task while under the influence of alcohol. Rats develop tolerance faster in the context of maze walking when they have been when walking in a maze under influence for instance that practiced the task while under the influence of alcohol than rats practicing without prior alcohol administration. Likewise, people develop tolerance more rapidly if they practice a task while under influence, for instance on an eye-hand coordination task. w
Environment-independent tolerance needs larger doses.
Metabolic tolerance results from a more rapid elimination of alcohol from the body and is caused by the upregulation of liver enzymes that metabolize alcohol. Enzyme activation increases alcohol degradation and reduces the time during which alcohol is active in the body, thereby reducing the duration of alcohol's intoxicating effects.

The metabolic tolerance is the easiest to comprehend, but the environmentally-dependent tolerance and learned tolerance, for instance, are definitely centrally mediated, but not just by one simple molecular mechanism, but by the interplay of complex neural networks governing complete and complex associations and tasks.

Source
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism


Hence, my question: Is there any scientific evidence that support that the cell assembly is the basis of thought/a concept?

This paper Thinking in circuits reviews this matter in detail, and its references can provide more related scientific evidence.

Question: What is the neurophysiology of a thought?

I think the following papers can provide some current information about the neurophysiology of thought:

1.How neurons make meaning

2.Brain Networks and Cognitive Architectures

3.Language and thought are not the same thing


Which neurotransmitters can be measured in a living human brain?

There are many, many more neuromodulators in the brain than that.  Essentially anything that binds to G-protein coupled receptors could be considered a neuromodulator.  Even "classic" fast neurotransmitters like GABA and glutamate have "neuromodulatory" receptors (GABA-B receptors for GABA, 3 different families of "metabotropic glutamate receptors").  Peptides (e.g., endogenous opioids, orexin, oxytocin...) also commonly bind to G-protein coupled receptors.

There are even "orphan receptors" that exist, but we haven't identified the chemical that naturally binds to them.

As you get deeper into pharmacology, you'll learn that each of the common neurotransmitters has MANY kinds of receptors that are located in different places and do different things.  On the other hand, G-protein coupled receptors can be be classified according to which G proteins they bind to.  "Second messengers" would be a good thing to search for to learn more about this (cAMP, phospholipase C.....).

To answer your question, though, we can measure the release of some neurotransmitters using PET.  The idea is that you pick a drug that binds to a particular receptor for that neurotransmitter (e.g., dopamine).  Then, you manufacture some of that drug such that one of the atoms in the drug is radioactive (i.e., the drug is made with a radio-isotope of carbon, fluorine, etc.).  The PET scanner will pick up the radioactivity released by the drug, which will be localized to places that contain that type of receptor (e.g., D2 receptors).  Drugs don't stick to receptors perfectly, though.  The natural ligands for the receptors ALSO bind to the receptors.

You can take advantage of this by having two conditions in your experiment.  In one, subjects do some control task while you measure the level of radioactivity in various parts of the brain.  In the other, they do the task you're interested in.  If that task is associated with an increase in dopamine release, you should see a DECREASE in the amount of radioactivity, since some of the receptors will now be occupied by normal, nonradioactive dopamine instead of the drug.  The more dopamine release, the less radioactivity.

Neurotransmitter levels can also be measured directly using a technique called "microdialysis".  The idea is that you've got an animal implanted with a probe that ends in a particular brain region you're interested in.  The end of the probe is a "semi-permeable membrane", and you've got liquid flowing through the probe.  At regular intervals, you take some of the liquid and use a chemistry technique called high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to measure the levels of various things that dissolved into the probe.  In rare cases, you can do microdialysis experiments in humans (patients with severe epilepsy).

Another way of measuring the release of particular neurochemicals, with better time resolution than microdialysis, is fast scan cyclic voltammetry (sp?).  I'm not really familiar with it, but it exists.

In terms of interactions among different neurotransmitter systems, there are many ways this can happen.  Cells that release transmitter A might be excited or inhibited by transmitter B.  Transmitters A and B might act on different G proteins in the same cell, with opposite effects on some downstream system ("Gi coupled receptors" and "Gs coupled receptors" have opposite effects on cAMP, for example).  Receptors for two different transmitters may be physically right next to each other and affect each other's functioning (D2 receptors and adenosine A2A receptors, for example).  Neurotransmitters may bind to each other's receptors or use each other's uptake proteins (cortical dopamine is taken up by norepinephrine transporters; there are norepinephrine receptors in the striatum despite the absence of norepinephrine terminals, presumably because they can be activated by dopamine).  Single neurons may release more than one transmitter at a time (glutamate and dopamine can be released from the same cell).  The downstream effects of one receptor may cause a second receptor to be phosphorylated, affecting its function in some way.  Downstream effects could also change gene expression.

My suggestion would be to start searching PubMed for review papers related to things you're interested in.  At least some of them should be available without a university library.


Why do we rely on others in dangerous situations?

Q: What is the reason for people to implicitly trust their peers in extreme (or not) situations?

Reliance is basically the dependence or trust in someone, to each lies a limited capability of being relied on due to our limited capacity as human beings. What I'm trying to imply is that your friend might have been able to consciously lead you across the road without you questioning his judgement, but in a time of crisis would you let that same friend tell you that it's best to invest all of your money into a shoe shining company?

We depend, or rely on specific people for specific things. Growing  up we rely on our mother to provide us with the maternal support and experience required, just as we rely on our father (or father figure) to teaching us what it means to be a man. (Assuming the example human is a male..)

If you were a CEO of a huge company, you would have no trouble relying on your employees to do a specific job in which you ordered them to complete, but only knowing them on a work-basis what are the chances of you trusting them to the extent of looking after your children for a week while you're on holiday? (Also assuming the example human is a parent..).

Trust is a huge factor in the concept of persuasion, and to pursuade someone is to induce someone to do somthing through reasoning or argument. You are more likely to be pursuaded by someone whom you trust in, rather than someone you don't. That person you have relied on has shown to prove the actuality of being credible and knowledgable in the field in which you have decided to trust them in, thus allowing them to lead or guide you as an authority figure.

Also, childhood experience highly influence who we trust and to what extent, but that is an area in which I have little knowledge available to answer you question. I hope I made my message clear. Nonetheless, these are based off of opinion, although @denniswennen had a similar argument.


Study claims that human brain does not produce new brain cells?

The hippocampus does make new brain cells, especially after aerobic exercise; there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for this claim (Erickson, Voss, et al., 2011; Firth, Stubbs, et al., 2017; Patten, Sickmann, et al., 2013). I was unable to find the California study published or peer-reviewed anywhere, and the abstract presented at the conference contained no indication of the sample size used in the study or a justification for why those specific types of neurons were studied. Therefore, it is unclear whether this single study was correctly conducted, and the article discussing the abstract is appropriately cautious about interpreting the results.

There's many different reasons why this study might contradict the scientific literature on hippocampus. One might have to do with a neurogenesis marker they used, doublecortin (DCX). One study notes that DCX levels may be dependent on specific brain regions and can be affected by age, although this is uncertain (Balthazart and Ball, 2014). Another study also warns that DCX reading levels should be interpreted with caution because they can exist at relatively high levels outside of neurogenesis (Kremer, Jagasia, et al., 2013).


Dynamical systems theory as a metaphor in psychology: is it useful or not?

Like all models and modeling frameworks, the utility of the approach is often tied to how much it increases our understanding of the phenomena of interest. As summarized nicely by Smith & Thelen (2003), there are developmental questions that are better conceptualized through the framework of DST than through alternative modeling frameworks due to the richly interactive and multi-causal structure of the phenomena.

You'll also find that applications of DST in Developmental Psychology are not just appealing to the metaphorical use of DST. There are rigorous mathematical uses of the tools of DST to explain developmental phenomena. One of the most cited examples is Thelen et al. (2001), who modeled the A-not-B error. There is a lot of similarly inspired modeling work being done throughout the field.


Consistent neuroanatomy coordinates naming

I'm not familiar with radiography, only MRI, but I assume conventions are similar. By convention images are always shown as if in front of the subject, or looking at the subject's feet (from below). There might be specific names for the direction of the cut (from top or from below) but they are not common (I've never heard them). Usually to avoid ambiguity you would always present cuts in the standard orientation. You can describe the cut ("coronal" or "axial") but images are usually self-explanatory.

For planes there are multiple names being used. The most common, in my experience, are axial, sagittal and coronal. But you will occasionally see respectively horizontal, medial and frontal. The 3 axes orthogonal to these planes and their associated orientations are the superior/inferior axis, the left/right axis and the anterior/posterior axis. Again, these cuts will usually always be shown from front, or from below. If, for any reason, someone decided to present a different orientation that would be specified explicitly. The sagittal cut is unambiguous, but usually you'll see it with the patient pointing left.

I don't know the name of an image "without cutting it", but I would assume it is just a "projection". And I would assume that unless specified explicitly orientations would be the same as cuts. Indeed, the orientation conventions used in modern imagery have been inherited from the old-age radiographic plates. While drawings are usually depicted as seen from top because it makes more sense to look at a brain from the top during a dissection.

Left/right is useful to describe the overall orientation of a subject, but not of an area in the brain (area X is to the right of area Y is true only in one hemisphere), so these directions are replaced by medial/lateral for brain locations. For some reason superior/inferior are also replaced by dorsal/ventral, I don't know why. For example the dorso-lateral PreFrontal Cortex is the "outer-top" part the the PFC. The ventro-lateral PFC is the "outer-bottom" part. And the ventro-medial PFC is the "inside" of the PFC (that you cannot see looking directly at the brain). Even weirder anterior/posterior are kept, but rostral/caudal are also used. To make it even more confusing these 2 axes do not perfectly match (rostral points toward the front for the anterior parts of the brain but down for the posterior parts of the brain). The axial plane for the brain is defined by the interaural axis and the lower ridge of the eye sockets. Brain coordinates are usually (at least in the scientific literature) reported by their position on the antero-posterior and medio-lateral axes. The origin of the system is the midpoint of the interaural axis.

Unfortunately there is more terminology that you'll find. For example referring to other parts of the brain, like "occipital". Different reference system are often mixed, like Caudal IntraParietal vs. Anterior IntraParietal. So long story short, there is no consistent coordinate system. It is truly unfortunate that terms used to disambiguate brain locations are themselves source of confusion.

Here is an example of macaque MRI with from top-left rotating counter-clockwise, an axial cut, a sagittal cut and a  coronal cut. I labeled directions for clarity.


What is the consequences to be a person who works in theory of science?

Quoting from "Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making"

  Many researchers have emphasized the distinction between two types of cognitive
  processes: those executed quickly with little conscious deliberation and those
  that are slower and more reflective (Epstein, 1994; Sloman, 1996; Chaiken and
  Trope, 1999; Kahneman and Frederick, 2002). Stanovich and West (2000) called
  these "System 1" and "System 2" processes, respectively. System 1 processes occur
  spontaneously and do not require or consume much attention Recognizing that
  the face of the person entering the classroom belongs to your math teacher involves
  System 1 processes-it occurs instantly and effortlessly and is unaffected by intellect,
  alertness, motivation or the difficulty of the math problem being attempted at
  the time. Conversely, finding $\sqrt{19163}$ to two decimal places without a calculator
  involves System 2 processes-mental operations requiring effort, motivation, concentration,
  and the execution of learned rules.

This distinction is apparently also called dual process theory.

I for one like to call these "intuitionists" and "calculationists", but I also think the distinction is probably not too sharp. In my experience, the "intuitionists" exploit some patterns, partly "subconsciously", and tend to be better in games like Go or Backgammon (where the trees are very broad and humans cannot think too many moves ahead) and often have surprising idea that they themselves can't always explain how they came up with, whereas the "calculationists" tend to be better at Chess, long proofs and so forth.

Not coincidentally (in my intuition) these coincide with the best performing algorithms for such games: neural nets for Backgammon, but mostly deep tree exploration for chess. These are not entirely exclusive though, good Backgammon algorithm "think" 2-3 moves ahead but their performance comes mainly from a very well tuned neural net. I'm less familiar with Go, but from what I know of AlphaGo the story is similar. One should not discount the role of board evaluation in chess, but I think the tree exploration is main factor for success there. Anyhow, intuition is believed by some researched to work like a probabilistic decision, perhaps using pattern matching as discussed above.

As more anecdotal evidence: When I was in grad school, I had an adviser and co-adviser who had authored a large number of papers together. They described their roles in their collaboration as one being the idea generator and other one the tester.

More recently, unconscious thought theory
 posits that for complext decisions intution is essentially better, but after a highly-cited debut in Science, insofar it has failed replication particularly in large studies. I suspect a lot depends on the nature of the test.

On the other hand, dual-system theory seems to have fared better with a (simple test of distinction), introduced in the first paper I quote in this answer; Here's a quote from a more recent paper:

  The present study replicated and extended earlier results from Campitelli and Gerrans (2014). In particular, Cognitive Reflection and Calculation behaved like distinct abilities, and Calculation was positively correlated with numeracy. However, Cognitive Reflection was positively correlated with numeracy as well; this correlation had not been tested in earlier studies.


Do measures of Big 5 personality have a positive bias towards extraverted, conscientious, emotionally stable, ageeable and open individuals?

Backstrom et al (2009) have a paper devoted to the question of whether the intercorrelations between the Big 5 scales is due to social desirability bias or substantive factors.
In Study 2 they re-wrote each item on a 100 item IPIP scale so that each item had reduced positive bias. They then administered the original and neutrally worded items to a sample of participants. They found that when IPIP items were worded in a more evaluatively neutral fashion, the correlations between the Big 5 were substantially reduced. Specifically, they state that:

  The first component accounted for 19.3% of the variance in the IPIP
  items as compared with the variance of the first component from the
  analysis of the neutral items of 10.5%. The mean correlation between
  the first principal component and the items was .40 for the IPIP items
  and .12 for the neutral items.

Their first paragraph in the discussion captures several interesting conclusions:

  Taken together, the two studies presented here support a model that
  still appears to be controversial. The model can be described as
  follows: when we use self-ratings for the measurement of personality
  traits, some items tend to activate social desirability concerns. In
  the scores, the participants’ tendency to respond in a socially
  desirable way is mixed with the descriptive aspect of the items, which
  is supposed to measure the FFM. The result is a common factor related
  to all of the other factors in the inventory (Edwards and Edwards,
  1991 and Peabody and Goldberg, 1989). It has been shown several times
  that this factor can be reduced, and that when this is done the items’
  descriptive quality stands out more clearly. In previous studies the
  social desirability of the items has been reduced by simply selecting
  items that correlate weakly with social desirability inventories (e.g.
  Jackson et al., 1996). In the present study, the focus was on the
  semantic content of the items. By systematically making the items from
  the IPIP-100 less attractive, without changing their meaning in any
  crucial way, we could get rid of almost all common variation between
  the factors, i.e. variation related to social desirability. These new
  items appeared to measure the same thing as the original items in the
  IPIP-100, except social desirability. This shows that it is relatively
  easy to create personality inventory items that measure FFM traits
  with less influence of social desirability. We therefore encourage
  inventory constructors to henceforth strive for making inventories
  where descriptive scales are less confounded with social desirability.

References

Bäckström, M., Björklund, F., & Larsson, M. R. (2009). Five-factor inventories have a major general factor related to social desirability which can be reduced by framing items neutrally. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 335-344. PDF


I think you want the term Life Course Social Mobility. Try searching for it and the outcomes of interest, e.g., life expectancy:

Climbing the social mobility ladder: where does health fit in? on "The Health Foundation" blog by Hannah Jones.

  [The UK] Social Mobility Commission also touched upon the idea that health and wellbeing play a role in an individual’s social circumstances and, thus, their mobility. For example, the report concluded that those in social housing are less likely to find employment as they are more likely to have a mental health condition, disability or other health condition.

Heller, R. F., McElduff, P., & Edwards, R. (2002). Impact of upward social mobility on population mortality: analysis with routine data. Bmj, 325(7356), 134.

  16% of the reduction in deaths between 1970–2 and 1991–3 among men in England and Wales was attributable to increases in the proportion of men in higher social classes

It is difficult to summarize across many different outcomes, and it also depends on a) the starting and ending classes as well as b) the life stage when the transition occurs and c) the speed of the transition.

So I think the question as originally phrased, whether they appear more like the bottom or the top, cannot be answered in the general case. It is generally going to be in-between.


Eating disorders and childhood sexual abuse

You can never deduce the cause of any disorder from it's mere presence.

A review (Connors, 1993) found that

  "around 30% of eating disordered patients have been sexually abused in childhood, a figure that is relatively comparable to rates found in normal populations."

Patients with eating disorders have been victims of childhood sexual abuse just as often as non-patients. So you might just as well say that not having an eating disorder was caused by sexual abuse! Sexual abuse simply does not distinguish patients with eating disorders from the rest of the population.

The review continues:

  For some patients there may be a direct link between sexual trauma and eating pathology, but in general sexual abuse is best considered a risk factor in a biopsychosocial etiological model of eating disorders.

In some cases the eating disorder might in fact have been caused by sexual abuse. But in most cases the patients were either not abused at all, or the sexual abuse was only one of the contribution factors that allowed an eating disorder to develop. Examples for other such factors are certain personality characteristics or genetics.

Advice

What you did – forcing someone to admit to childhood sexual abuse – is highly unhelpful, especially if this person has acutally suffered through it.

What you can do to help this person is help her get professional help. And again: Don't force anything on her. Suggest it, find addresses and telephone numbers, if that research seems to put her off, find reports of patients who have profited from a therapy, if she does not believe in a positive outcome or does not recognize her problem, propose to accompany her, if she is afraid to go, help her keep her appointments and adhere to the treatment (medication, eating rules etc.). But remember: therapies only ever work if the patient herself is motivated to go through it. Force is counterproductive. You can only offer support, and if that offer is declined, there is little you can do.

Sources:

Connors, M. E. (1993). Sexual abuse and eating disorders: A review. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 13, 1-11. doi:10.1002/1098-108X(199301)13:1<1::AID-EAT2260130102>3.0.CO;2-P


How to compare tasks completed by neural architectures objectively?

More than two years later, I now have a heuristic (which is a close as I can get to an objective metric) that I rely on. As I write about in one of my blog posts, there are a couple of tasks that humans are capable of that are still really hard for machines. They require the following things for a machine (or a neural model):

Balancing Planning and Exploration: Modelling the environment's future state and the possible future states via exploration efficiently.
Scaling Skills: Transfering skills between tasks and building more complex skills atop of basic skills.
Knowledge Representation: Keeping relations between skills, environmental variables, past knowledge and priorities all usefully organised.

Any neural model that begins to leverage these things is evaluated as impressive in my eyes.

However, these requirements are mostly for Artificial Intelligence. What about neural models specifically? All neural models that complete a task are, by definition, cognitive models, so in addition to the above criteria they must satisfy various Cognitive Criteria to prove the system is achieving it's goals in a human-like manner.


How can you limit excessive risk-taking at the institutional level?

Optimal contracting under moral hazard is an incredibly rich field. Any answer to your question would rely more on the assumptions being made about risk preferences, effort sets, etc. than any "universal solution" to moral hazard.

That being said, there are a couple of interesting pieces of the literature to note:

Optimal contracts often have a fixed component (the opposite of your "alignment" premise),  with the variable component offered only insofar as it is required to induce more effort from the agent.
Optimal contracts use any information relevant to determining the effort expended by the agent, not just the result.

So I would think an answer would be to reduce (not increase) the amount of compensation variable upon the result and to condition compensation relative to other benchmarks that would indicate whether someone is just benefiting from tailwind.


What is understanding of natural language and how can we test or measure it?

Natural language understanding systems can be based on discourse representation theories, which represent the meaning of English sentences as first-order logical predicates. Attempto Controlled English is one example of a natural language understanding system that relies on discourse representation theories.

Similarly, there are several implementations of semantic parsers that convert natural-language texts into formal representations of their meanings.


Number of presynaptic inputs per cell in primary visual cortex

Very detailed estimates for almost all of your points, for cat, can be found in Binzegger, T., Douglas, R. J., & Martin, K. A. C. (2004). A quantitative map of the circuit of cat primary cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 24(39), 8441-8453.


Doing PCA and ICA analysis on EEG data with 24 channels

First of all, I would recommend working with a domain specific (EEG) and established analysis package of your choice. You mentioned python, so I would advise you to check out MNE-Python. There is a tutorial regarding eyeblink detection/correction/rejection from EEG data that you could work through.

To answer your general question, ICA and PCA are typically done on the complete data matrix, i.e., each row of the data matrix is a channel and each column is a sampled timepoint (values in microvolts).


Fasting causes stress and makes your body work off of fat rather than sugar. Sugar is of course related to insulin, which even in normal (non-diabetic) people must be maintained at a certain level (Kaditis et al., 2005). Without a proper level of insulin, your body will upregulate orexin in the brain until you eat (Willie, Chemelli, Sinton, & Yanagisawa, 2001). Orexin will give you artificial energy and inhibit sleep.

References

Kaditis, A. G., Alexopoulos, E. I., Damani, E., Karadonta, I., Kostadima, E., Tsolakidou, A., ... & Syrogiannopoulos, G. A. (2005). Obstructive sleep‐disordered breathing and fasting insulin levels in nonobese children. Pediatric Pulmonology, 40(6), 515–523.

Willie, J. T., Chemelli, R. M., Sinton, C. M., & Yanagisawa, M. (2001). To eat or to sleep? Orexin in the regulation of feeding and wakefulness. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24(1), 429–458.


Brain areas active while learning hierarchical structure of a problem

According to "Frontal Cortex and the Discovery of Abstract Action Rules" by David Badre, Andrew S. Kayser, and MarkD'Esposito:

  ... the rostro-caudal axis of frontal cortex support rule learning at
  higher levels of abstraction. Moreover, these results indicate that
  when humans confront new rule learning problems, this rostro-caudal
  division of labor supports the search for relationships between
  context and action at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously.

They found this by contrasting fMRI signals collected while the subject performed two tasks, one requiring a hierarchical, abstract rule and one requiring a flat, basic mapping.


The nature vs nurture debate is long standing. Nurture presumably plays little or no role for the majority of newborns (see prenatal discussion below), therefore nature (genetics) would be the only influencing factor. Subsequent to birth, nurture presumably plays an increasingly greater role as time progresses.  Some (but not all) twin studies demonstrate some impact of genetics on behaviour (Johnson, 2002; Plomin 1976).
The behaviour of newborns are generally referred to as being instinctive or innate and may include goal-directed behaviours such as suckling, looking, smelling and imprinting. Researchers such as Lorenz and Sluckin are foundational on early life behaviour research.  I also contributed to an article on newborn instinctual behaviours.
The impact of prenatal stressors on the newborn have been considered in relation to maternal mental health (Erickson, 2017), alcohol abuse (Lange, 2017; McLachlan, 2019), substance abuse (Forray, 2016) and gestational diabetes (Schmidt, 2019):

Mother’s mental health: The findings were that there was no support for relationships between prenatal mental health indicators and infant temperament in multiple studies.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder: The reported prevalence is less than 1% of births, however, the implications on the newborn are profound with as many as 30% of adults in correctional facilities suffering Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

Substance abuse: Whilst birth and health problems have been widely investigated, little could be found on the implications on personality of the newborn.

Diabetes: Whilst birth and health problems have been widely investigated, little could be found on the implications on personality of the newborn.

It is likely that I've not identified all relevant studies in relation to prenatal stressors affecting the personality and would welcome the advice of others.
References
Johnson, W., Krueger, R. F., Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (2002). The personalities of twins: Just ordinary folks. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 5(2), 125-131. https://doi.org/10.1375/twin.5.2.125
Plomin, R., Willerman, L. & Loehlin, J.C. Resemblance in appearance and the equal environments assumption in twin studies of personality traits. Behav Genet 6, 43–52 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01065677
Sluckin, W. (2017). Imprinting and early learning. Transaction Publishers.
Sluckin, W., Herbert, M., & Sluckin, A. (1983). Maternal bonding. Blackwell.
Lorenz, K. (2002). King Solomon's ring: new light on animal ways. Psychology Press.
Mobbs, E. J., Mobbs, G. A., & Mobbs, A. E. (2016). Imprinting, latchment and displacement: a mini review of early instinctual behaviour in newborn infants influencing breastfeeding success. Acta Paediatrica, 105(1), 24-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.13034
Erickson, N. L., Gartstein, M. A., & Dotson, J. A. W. (2017). Review of prenatal maternal mental health and the development of infant temperament. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2017.03.008
Forray A. (2016). Substance use during pregnancy. F1000Research, 5, F1000 Faculty Rev-887. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.7645.1
Schmidt, C.B., Voorhorst, I., van de Gaar, V.H.W. et al. Diabetes distress is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes in women with gestational diabetes: a prospective cohort study. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth 19, 223 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2376-6
Lange, S., Probst, C., Gmel, G., Rehm, J., Burd, L., & Popova, S. (2017). Global Prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Among Children and Youth: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA pediatrics, 171(10), 948–956. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.1919
McLachlan, K., McNeil, A., Pei, J. et al. Prevalence and characteristics of adults with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in corrections: a Canadian case ascertainment study. BMC Public Health 19, 43 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6292-x


Recent Peer Review Studies on How Many Have Narcissistic Personality Disorder

While not a peer-reviewed study per se, but the DSM-5 says that the prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the population is 6.2%, or approximately one out of sixteen members of the population (6.25%). The DSM-V was published in 2013 and is a peer-reviewed text, so it is within the 10 year criteria you mentioned and this fact is mentioned in more recent sources like an article for Psychiatric Times published in 2016. Another study from 2019 doesn't mention Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but does mention how approximately 3% of the population has Antisocial Personality Disorder, another disorder that is a common dual-diagnosis with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Then, there is a 2020 study that shows 1.6% of people have borderline personality disorder or BPD, which can be associated with a lack of empathy and lead to behaviors that can be mistaken for NPD. This is similar to Histrionic Personality Disorder (which doesn't cause people to suffer from a lack of empathy like with NPD, but can appear that way due to how it is difficult for those with HPD to recognize the emotions of others and thus lack emotional intelligence) that affects less than or equal to 2% of the population according to the  University of Arizona College of Medicine.


Why use a quasi experimental design when you can do an experiment?

The first paper I found searching for "advantages of quasi-experimental design" was this one:

Schweizer, M. L., Braun, B. I., & Milstone, A. M. (2016). Research methods in healthcare epidemiology and antimicrobial stewardship—quasi-experimental designs. Infection control & hospital epidemiology, 37(10), 1135-1140.

Most of the benefits are pragmatic: less cost, potential for retrospective analysis, bypassing ethical considerations that present barriers to randomized trials, etc.

An example of the type of quasi-randomized design I've often been involved in myself is when the data have already been collected in normal medical practice. Sometimes these patients are difficult if not impossible to consent: an intensive-care unit population, for example. Those patients are very sick and their imminent needs are live-saving care; there may not be time to obtain consent for a randomized trial. However, if practices and policies change over time or are different in different facilities, you can use a quasi-experimental design to determine whether those changes or differences in standard of care have an important impact or not.


The first Google hit for "creativity training psychology" (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013) seems to answer your question pretty thoroughly. Prof. Chamorro-Premuzic is a pretty formidable psychologist, so it's no surprise coming from him! To quote the post:

  In short, creativity is not 100% malleable, but it can be affected by deliberate interventions. People's generic creative potential is more dependent on personality than contextual factors, but domain-specific creativity depends more on acquired expertise and our inspiration to be creative is both dispositional and situational. In simple terms, if you want to be more creative there's a lot you can do to achieve this - the only difficulty is to achieve the same results with people who don't want to be more creative (once again, it is a case of the rich getting richer and...)

Here's one particularly promising way to learn creativity: have other cultures teach you! Psychology Today (Markman, 2010) offers a nice review of a study of multicultural experience and creativity (Maddux, Adam, & Galinsky, 2010) that found creative improvements among travelers abroad. Good excuse for a vacation!

References

- Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2013, May 18). Training creativity: Can psychology boost our creative potential? Psychology Today: Mr. Personality. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201305/training-creativity-0.
- Maddux, W. W., Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2010). When in Rome... Learn why the Romans do what they do: How multicultural learning experiences facilitate creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(6), 731–741. Retrieved from http://psp.sagepub.com.uncensor.it/content/36/6/731.full.pdf.
- Markman, A. (2010, June 26). Can living abroad make you more creative? Learning to live in another culture has real benefits. Psychology Today: Ulterior Motives. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201006/can-living-abroad-make-you-more-creative.


Can one depressive episode be enough to prescribe antidepressants?

Suppose someone were to see a psychiatrist, explain their life
  problems and such and then their psychiatrist concludes they are
  currently in a depressive episode. Their psychiatrist doesn't yet know
  if they have major depressive disorder - MDD - bipolar disorder or no
  disorder.

  Are there situations where someone in such scenario might be able to
  be prescribed antidepressants or any kind of medication?

Yes, absolutely. I do not think that they are necessarily rare either. As this link attests:

The proportion of non-psychiatrist doctor visits where antidepressants were prescribed without a documented psychiatric diagnosis increased from 59.5% to 72.7% between 1996 and 2007, according to a new study in Health Affairs.

  Does the fact that they have been prescribed such medications imply
  that they have been diagnosed with or highly thought by a doctor to
  have a mental illness instead of simply having an "episode" or a
  temporary mental health problem?

Being prescribed the medicine implies that the doctor believed that they were suffering from depression, a form of mental illness. Other factors (e.g., the symptoms or their history) would dictate whether the doctor though it was/would be a long term mental illness/mental health problem.


Is emotional processing lateralised in the brain?

Alright, so I'll give this question a go...  Admittedly, I'm not really familiar with theories of emotion lateralization, but let's look at some meta-analyses for insight!!!

As a quick theoretical note, a single study cannot confirm emotion-related lateralization. The representation of emotions or affect in the brain can change from context to context, person to person, and over time.  This is why we need to rely on meta-analysis (in my opinion)!

Lindquist et al. (2015)

This is a meta-analysis of positive and negative affect in the brain. Overall, the meta-analysis shows large correspondence between the brain regions that are involved in positive vs. negative affect (in favor of a valence-general "workspace").  Moreover, affect seems to be represented bilaterally in most regions as well as right temporal/occipital cortex (see image below).

These areas represent the "salience network," which is involved in self-relevant attention (e.g., to internal bodily sensations and "feelings").

However, the above image shows that the left amygdala and the left insula are more often involved in negative affect than positive affect.  No regions seem to show preference for positive affect over negative affect.

Wager et al. (2015)

This is a meta-analysis using very, very fancy statistical techniques to differentiate among discrete emotion categories (e.g., fear, disgust, anger, etc.).

The above image (B) shows activation intensity in cortex, amygdala, basal ganglia, and thalamus for each emotion.  You can see that some regions are more strongly active for certain emotions in a lateralized manner (R and L mean Right and Left Hemisphere).

The most significant lateralization was for happiness, which showed "left-hemisphere dominance in the hippocampus" (p. 16).

Conclusion

While these meta-analyses provide interesting clues about emotion lateralization, I'm going to go ahead and say that we don't really know whether emotion is lateralized. Moreover, the idea of "emotional processing" is incredibly vague and is likely constituted by more basic psychological processes (e.g., interoception and exteroception).

The theory about sympathetic/parasympathetic afferent streams to the right vs. left insula seems plausible (outlined in Wikipedia; Craig), especially given the importance of interoception to affect and emotions (Barrett & Simmons, 2015).

However, overall, it's just not clear.


TLDR: Self-actualisation is the goal of Maslow's Theory, not a need

Needs

As far as the needs are concerned, @jsakaluk's excellent, well supported answer to Is Maslow's hierarchy of needs really accurate at labeling sex as a physiological "need"? gave a good rundown of the definition.

  Definitions of "Needs", "Motives", etc., are dime-a-dozen. Though I don't necessarily agree with all the ingredients, I like how well explicated the criteria by Baumeister and Leary (1995) are, according to whom a fundamental need should:

  produce effects readily under all but adverse conditions
  have affective consequences
  direct cognitive processing
  lead to ill effects (such as on health or adjustment) when thwarted
  elicit goal-oriented behavior designed to satisfy it (subject to motivational patterns such as object substitutability and satiation)
  be universal in the sense of applying to all people
  not be derivative of other motives
  affect a broad variety of behaviors
  have implications that go beyond immediate psychological functioning

Self-Actualisation

We need to determine what self-actualisation actually is.  Maslow described it as follows: (Maslow, 1943)

  This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein (1939), is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

  The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions. It is not necessarily a creative urge although in people who have any capacities for creation it will take this form.

  The clear emergence of these needs rests upon prior satisfaction of the physiological, safety, love and esteem needs. We shall call people who are satisfied in these needs, basically satisfied people, and it is from these that we may expect the fullest (and healthiest) creativeness (Kardiner, 1941). Since, in our society, basically satisfied people are the exception, we do not know much about self-actualization, either experimentally or clinically. It remains a challenging problem for research.

Maslow's hierarchy is visually put together as follows:

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons Under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

and to attain the sixth level or stage: self-actualisation, is the goal of Maslow's Theory, not a need.  Take away any of the levels below self-actualisation, and you will not reach the top goal. And as stated by Maslow (1943) — see above — and in the TLDR summary of @NickStauner's answer to Does evidence support Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?,

  One sequence can't fit all (it didn't claim to), but it makes sense in general, and so do the exceptions, and so do other motive models.

Maslow himself said:

  Though, in principle, self-actualization is easy, in practice it rarely happens (by my criteria, certainly in less than 1% of the adult population.  For this, there are many, many reasons at various levels of discourse, including all of the determinants of psychopathology that we not know. (Maslow, 2013)

also, the fact that "most of us function most of the time on a level lower than that of self-actualization" he called it the psychopathology of normality. (Loevinger, 1976)

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 PMID: 7777651

Goldstein, K. (1939). The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man. Salt Lake City, UT: American Book Publishing.DOI: 10.1037/10021-000

Kardiner, A. B. R. A. M. (1941). The Traumatic Neuroses of War, New York: Paul B. Hoeber.

Loevinger, J. (1976) Ego Development: Conceptions and Theories (Jossey-Bass Behavioral Science Series). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50 (4), 370–96.DOI: 10.1037/h0054346FREE via http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm.

Maslow, A. H. (2013). Toward a psychology of being. Simon and Schuster [eBook].


How can employee anxiety over poor evaluation be avoided by management?

Make it less obvious.

If you can implement gamification a bit more subtly, then any anxiety employees may have of being evaluated based on a leaderboard will be reduced.

For example a 'leaderboard' could implemented as a statistical tool, to determine the usability of an application. If you take feedback from less performant employees, then they may feel that they are benefitting. This keeps the competition element present, but also has the added advantage of improving your application.

The top answer to this question raises a good point about keeping the stakes low, if you do offer any tangible rewards (which would help with those less interested in badges) you must ensure that they are of low value. Focusing on rewarding employees for good work is (typically) better than ranking them based on performance, this could also be on a team level to take stress away from individuals.


Does working memory have a role in creativity?

Takeuchi et al. (2011) had participants in an fMRI perform three tasks in order to measure creativity, working memory and intelligence.

S-A creativity test as a measure of creativity (Society For Creative Minds, 1969).
Verbal n-back as a measure of working memory (Calicott et al., 1999).
Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrix as a measure of intelligence (Raven, 1998).

They reported no association between creativity and WM performance after controlling for IQ.

  To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the association between individual creativity and functional activity during WM. Creativity and WM performances did not correlate in this study of young healthy and cognitively intact subjects. However, congruent with our hypothesis, our findings showed that reduced TID during the WM task in the precuneus (one of the key nodes of the DMN) is associated with creativity measured by the divergent thinking test.

There was no apparent evidence to suggest that performance on a WM task is associated with performance on a divergent thinking task, but the authors proposed a complex argument for the idea of creativity as "diffuse attention," which they argue may share a neural basis with WM (such that they are opponent processes). The evidence for this is indirect and seems difficult to reconcile with the concretely reported independence of WM and creativity performance, however.

References

Callicott, J. H., Mattay, V. S., Bertolino, A., Finn, K., Coppola, R., Frank, J. A., ... & Weinberger, D. R. (1999). Physiological characteristics of capacity constraints in working memory as revealed by functional MRI. Cerebral Cortex, 9(1), 20-26.
Raven, J. Court (1998). Manual for Raven’s progressive matrices and vocabulary scales. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists.
Society For Creative Minds (1969). Manual of S-A Creativity Test.
Tokyo Schinri Corporation. Tokyo.
Takeuchi, H., Taki, Y., Hashizume, H., Sassa, Y., Nagase, T., Nouchi, R., & Kawashima, R. (2011). Failing to deactivate: the association between brain activity during a working memory task and creativity. Neuroimage, 55(2), 681-687.


What causes an inability to recall a melody, beat, or music?

The following answer is based on my own experience learning music combined with general principles of cognitive psychology related to skill acquisition.

I think that learning music would help a person recall a melody, a beat, and music in general. Formal training would be particularly helpful, but informal training would also often have a similar result.

In particular, learning music teaches you how music is structured. This training teaches you a whole range of skills. You learn to isolate instruments. You learn about the structure of songs (e.g., bars, beats, sections, repetition). You learn about melody (e.g., scales, intervals, chords, progressions, etc.). You learn about rhythm.
There is a theoretical aspect to this knowledge whereby you conceptually understand the ideas. However, there is also a large procedural component whereby you train your ear to identify different sequences, and you also learn to produce such sequences with a suitable instrument.

Learning to sing can be particularly helpful in training your ability to reproduce melody without the song present. Singing trains you to be able to reproduce intervals, scales, and so on without an external source.

All this declarative and procedural knowledge of music simplifies and enables the mental recall of music. For example, instead of seeing a pop-song as a 3 minute stream of sound, You start to see the simplicity of for example, 3 chords, and 2 major melodic elements. You see the similarities with other songs in terms of the chord progressions, scales, and rhythm. It's similar to the way that language becomes simpler once you appreciate the basic principles of vocabulary and grammar.

Beyond musical skill, actual repetition and spending time seriously thinking about the song should also help in the recall a that specific song.


Believing only one thing matters, when in reality, it was a chain reaction. What's the bias called?

The described scenario is about ascribing the problem to a single mistake, while the real problem was long-term wrong behaviour. From the list of cognitive biases or fallacies, this is the closest what I could find:

Fallacy of the single cause:

  The fallacy of the single cause, also known as complex cause, causal
  oversimplification, causal reductionism, and reduction fallacy, is
  a fallacy of questionable cause that occurs when it is assumed that
  there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may
  have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes. It can be
  logically reduced to: " X caused Y; therefore, X was the only cause of
  Y" (although A,B,C...etc. also contributed to Y.) (Wikipedia)

The terms bias and fallacy are used to describe how being unaware of deceptive logic or prejudice results in wrong conclusions. In the scenario in the question, one is consciously trying to interpret the situation in attempt to avoid the full truth, which can be described with the terms, such as:

Minimisation - a type of deception involving denial coupled with rationalisation in situations where complete denial is implausible (Wikipedia).
Belittling - regarding or portraying as less impressive or important than appearances indicate (Dictionary.com).


Term for the tendency to relate events that occurred in proximity?

This is informally referred to as the illusion of causality:

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there
is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated.
Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and
superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences
in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and
wellbeing.

This is a cognitive error in the way humans infer cause and effect.
The example that I'm most familiar with is in medical quackery.  Suppose someone is experiencing constipation.  They try some advice from friends: Go for a long walk, eat some prunes, massage their stomach, use magnesium supplements.  Then they try more questionable solutions: Probiotics, colon hydrotherapy, acupuncture, herbal medicines.  At some point during the process, the constipation is relieved, and the patient naturally concludes that whatever treatment immediately preceded this event must have been the cure.  They "swear by this treatment" from then on, failing to consider that prior treatments may have needed more time to take effect, that other activities not considered treatments may have affected the results (eg, regular exercise, dietary changes), or simply the mere passage of time.


How are inherited instincts related to deprivation states?

No, not really. In the first quote, deprivation states are mentioned separately from physiological arousal because homeostatic and nonhomeostatic motives for behaviour are often discussed as separate forces:

  Homeostatic motives include hunger, thirst, respiration, and
  excretion. They work to keep the body in a balanced internal state.
  The term homeostasis refers to the body's tendency to maintain such a
  balanced internal state. Many homeostatic motives are set in motion
  either by bodily deficits or bodily excesses. When the body needs
  water, for example, changes occur that cause thirst and motivate the
  person to seek something to drink.

  Nonhomeostatic motives include sex, such activity as nest building,
  and curiosity about the environment. These motives are aroused by
  occasional forces. In the absence of such forces, nonhomeostatic
  motives may be inactive. In contrast, the needs for food, water, and
  air--homeostatic motives--have almost continuous influence.

The first quote thus just acknowledges this distinction without discussing it further. Here, deprivation states refer to homeostatic motives and physiological arousal to non-homeostatic ones. Freud does not make this distinction when he discusses instinctual drives.


What is the difference between confidence and overconfidence?

Usually, confidence is based on experience; proven results with regards to a task or ability increase one's belief that the task can be completed a second time.  Notice that this has nothing to do with what others believe you can do - it's about what you believe you can do.

Overconfidence is bravado - false posturing to fool or mislead others; most often used to hide an actual lack of confidence.  This is all about getting others to believe that one is capable of a task.

There are a lot of non-scientific articles related to the difference between the two concepts:
Here is a "10 characteristics of" page from Hindustan Times
while here is an article from National Geographic talking about narcissism and overconfidence.

These were found with a Google Search for 'overconfidence vs confidence'.  I'm sure you would get more scientific results if you dig some digging, or tried Google Scholar.


Difference between the cingulate gyrus and the cingulate cortex

Short answer
The cingulate gyrus and cingulate sulcus are the two components that make up the cingulate cortex. The cingulate cortex is involved in emotions, self-control, and problem solving.

Background
In terms of the anatomy of the cingulate area in the brain the following nomenclature is important:

Cerebral cortex: the few-millimeters of superficial layer of the brain with its characteristic foldings in higher animalia;
The cortical foldings result in the formation of sulci and gyri (plural for sulcus and gyrus). Sulci are grooves, gyri are ridges. These wrinkles increase the cortical surface and allow more neurons to be packed onto the brain. Cortical neurons are important for higher cognitive functions, explaining why higher primates have a high density of sulci and gyri.
The cingulate cortex comprises one sulcus and one gyrus: the cingulate sulcus and cingulate gyrus (Fig. 1) (Kandel et al., 2000). Hence, the cingulate gyrus is part of the cingulate cortex.

Regarding the functions associated with the cingulate region - The cingulate cortex is an integral part of the limbic system. The limbic system is the emotional control center of the brain. The cingulate cortex as such is involved in emotional self-control, focused problem solving, error recognition, and adaptive response to changing conditions (Allman et al, 2001). Especially the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has received special attention, as it connects the limbic system with the “cognitive” prefrontal cortex. The ACC is thought to integrate the neuronal circuitry for affect regulation and a locus responsible for affective disorders (Stevens et al, 2011).

Fig. 1. The cingulate cortex comprises one sulcus and one gyrus. source: Wikipedia

References
- Allman et al, Annals NY Acad Sci (2001); 935: 107-17
- Kandel et al., The anatomical organization of the central nervous system. In: Principles of neural science 4the ed. (2000)
- Stevens et al., J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci; 23(2): Spring 2011


How should medication for the treatment of ADHD symptoms be calibrated?

My understanding also is that the drugs effect different people differently, and so finding the right dose of the right specific drug is an exercise of 'finding what works'.
The question is - how should a medical practitioner determine when and by how much to change a patient's medication schedule?

I think you've answered your own question: titration of dose i.e. slow, incremental changes in dose until desired therapeutic response is achieved.
The best way to understand it is terms of pharmacokinetics: if a drug has a linear dose-response curve, then we can anticipate a slightly higher dose will result in a slightly greater therapeutic effect, and a slightly greater increase in side-effects. The point of titrating the dose is to either stop when one reaches a ceiling effect i.e. increasing the dose won't have any improvement in symptoms, because it will only increase the side-effects, which haven't reached a ceiling yet,.
This is essentially true for all psychiatric drugs, and the same rationale applies to all pharmacotherapies.
With regards to ADHD, my understanding is that severity of symptoms does not predict the dose of psychostimulants required. So the psychiatrist will typically hand a patient a bottle of amphetamine, some dosing instructions, and tell them to sort it out themselves over the course of a few weeks. The whole point with the use of psychostimulants for ADHD is that its mediated by dopaminergic hypofrontality. But if one goes overshoots the  therapeutic window, then it will result in worse cognitive functioning, etc.


Does the relationship between positive mood and motivation for sex differ between males and females?

In men, Mitchell et al (1998) found that positive mood induced by music affected greater sexual arousal, and that musically induced negative mood affected reduced sexual arousal. In women, Ter Kuile et al (2010) found similar results for women.
However, your question is not quite addressed by these studies. Whereas these studies address the effect of mood on arousal in the presence of erotic stimuli, it is possible that negative affect may still induce pleasure-seeking (even if it reduces the pleasurable effect of stimuli in general).
Indeed, Lykins et al (2006) found that a subgroup of both men and women reported increased sexual interest during depressed and anxious moods. Men were more likely than women to report increases of sexual interest during negative mood states. One's inclination toward sexual excitation was the strongest predictor of this relationship between negative mood and sexual interest. To speculate a little, this may be because it moderates the effect of negative mood on arousal that is mentioned above. That is, people inclined toward sexual excitation may not show the arousal dampening effect of negative mood.

Mitchell, W. B., DiBartolo, P. M., Brown, T. A., & Barlow, D. H. (1998). Effects of positive and negative mood on sexual arousal in sexually functional males. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 27(2), 197-207.
Ter Kuile, M. M., Both, S., & Van Uden, J. (2010). The Effects of Experimentally‐Induced Sad and Happy Mood on Sexual Arousal in Sexually Healthy Women. The journal of sexual medicine, 7(3), 1177-1184.
Lykins, A. D., Janssen, E., & Graham, C. A. (2006). The relationship between negative mood and sexuality in heterosexual college women and men. Journal of Sex Research, 43(2), 136-143.


Are woman more Judging than men in the MBTI?

The MBTI is widely used in applied contexts, such as for personnel selection. Nevertheless, it is hardly used in scientific research on personality because its theoretical basis questionable, because its validity is limited, and because its reliability is inferior to other established measures of personality (for a starting point to criticisms of the MBTI see McCrea & Costa, 1989 and this earlier post). For these reasons it is unlikely that you will find reliable data on gender differences in the MBTI.

However, it has been shown that the MBTI traits overlap with those of the Big Five (the most widely adopted model of personality) and gender differences with regard to the Big Five have been studied extensively.

The MBTI Judging dimension and its Perceiving counterpart overlap to a large extent with the Big Five trait conscientiousness (e.g., Furnham, 1996, McCrea & Costa, 1989). This is not surprising if you look at how Judging vs. Perceiving and conscientiousness are measured:

Judging vs. Perceiving is measured by having people choose between sentence pairs such as

"I like to have things decided." vs. "I like to stay open to respond to whatever happens."
"I like to make lists of things to do." vs. "I appear to be loose and casual. I like to keep plans to a minimum."
"I like to get my work done before playing." vs. "I like to approach work as play or mix work and play."
"I plan work to avoid rushing just before a deadline." vs. "I am stimulated by an approaching deadline."

Conscientiousness is measured by items such as

"I get chores done right away."
"I carry out my plans."
"I stick to my chosen path."

Thus, there appears to be a clear semantic overlap between the two constructs.

Are there gender differences with regard to conscientiousness? According to a large scale meta analysis (with data from more than 23.000 participants from 26 nations, Costa et al. 2001), 1. there are far more personality differences within the genders than between genders 2. for conscientiousness there doesn't seem to be a detectable gender difference.

References

Costa Jr., P., Terracciano, A., & McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 322–331. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.2.322

Furnham, A. (1996). The big five versus the big four: the relationship between the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and NEO-PI five factor model of personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 21, 303–307. doi:10.1016/0191-8869(96)00033-5

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1989). Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator From the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality. Journal of Personality, 57, 17–40. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1989.tb00759.x


Are psychiatric disorders merely statistical deviations?

When diagnosing Psychological/Psychiatric Disorders, psychologists would consider the extent of the patient's:

Deviation from the norm;
Distress;
Danger to themselves and others;
Dsyfunction, i.e. ability for the person to carry out tasks important for everyday functioning in an independent fashion.

The current paradigm uses a continuum model for disorders; how severe a psychologist would judge your disorder to be depends on the extent of the 4 D's. However, they're aren't weighted equally.

Deviation from the norm is, in fact, the factor with the least weight given when considering if someone has a mental disorder. What is abnormal for one society may be completely acceptable for another.

Instead, what is given more attention to is the extent of the distress and dsyfunction a person exhibits. The greater the distress or dsyfunction, the more serious your disorder will be placed within the continuum.

Danger is the iffy component, since usually the person with the mental disorder who will become the victim of exploitation, violence, and general hostility and fear. Because of this, it's usually only brought up when there is a clear and present danger to themselves or others.


This is a wide open question - I'm not sure that you can say there is an "effect on learning" due to time pressure. It's going to depend on a lot of factors, including the learning context, the learner, the amount of time they have to complete the task, etc.  Ultimately, all learning is time-limited, so you need to break this down into different lengths of time.

There are several theories that may speak about it. One is cognitive load theory (Paas & Van Merriënboer, 1994).  This theory is based on the limitations of working memory, where the "processing" of learning takes place.  Basically, there is intrinsic load required to learn a certain type of material, and this is a characteristic of the material to be learned.  There is also extraneous load during learning, which occurs when the learner must divert attention to tasks not directly relevant to the learning task (e.g. checking a clock, computing how much time is left, etc).

Based on CLT, one would expect a decrease in performance from having a clock sitting in front of the learner.  But again, I suspect that the amount of time vs. the time required will be a strong mediating factor.

Edit

I just skimmed the article you cited.  It seems like there are a lot more relevant sources there you could track down.  Why don't you do that and come back with what you find?

References

Paas, F. G., & Van Merriënboer, J. J. (1994). Instructional control of cognitive load in the training of complex cognitive tasks. Educational Psychology Review,6(4), 351-371


Q: How is Pain Subjective and Different from Nociception?
A: Pain is not nociception because their definitions are different. The usual definitions are like this:

Nociception refers to the peripheral and central nervous system (CNS) processing of information about the internal or external environment, as generated by the activation of nociceptors. Typically, noxious stimuli, including tissue injury, activate nociceptors that are present in peripheral structures and that transmit information to the spinal cord dorsal horn or its trigeminal homologue, the nucleus caudalis. From there, the information continues to the brainstem and ultimately the cerebral cortex, where the perception of pain is generated.  Pain is a product of higher brain center processing … (1)

Or
“Nociception (also nocioception, from Latin nocere 'to harm or hurt') is the sensory nervous system's process of encoding noxious stimuli. In nociception, intense chemical (e.g., cayenne powder), mechanical (e.g., cutting, crushing), or thermal (heat and cold) stimulation of sensory nerve cells called nociceptors produces a signal that travels along a chain of nerve fibers via the spinal cord to the brain.1 Nociception triggers a variety of physiological and behavioral responses and usually results in a subjective experience (or perception) of pain in sentient beings.”(2)
That is, nociception is defined to be the processing of noxious stimuli, which involves several levels of processing, but pain is defined to be the perception of the result of nociception processing. As there are many factors that can affect nociception at each level of processing, such as the pain control mechanism (e.g. the pain gate control) in the spinal cord and brainstem, analgesics, and even the mood of the subject, the pain perception can be altered/modified, and the final pain perception can be different even if it occurs in the same individual and from the same noxious stimuli. Also, because these factors are different among different subjects, the final pain perception in each individual is subjective – depending on various factors in each subject and different among different subjects even if it occurs from the same noxious stimuli.
For example:

When your shin hits something hard and you feel pain there, if you stroke or massage the injured shin lightly, you’ll feel better with less pain – this is because the pain is modified by the pain gate control or other pain control mechanisms by the touch sensation. (3,4)

In a person who has a spinal cord transection with a loss of all sensations and voluntary movements of the legs, if you prick his foot, his foot will involuntarily jerk away from the prick, which means nociception is still being processed, but you won’t feel any pain because the pain perception in the brain does not occur (due to the spinal cord transection).

Alice has been given a flu shot in her arm, but she is a strong person and is in a good mood, so she feels little pain in her arm. On the contrary, Bob has been given a flu shot with the same needle size and ease of injection, but Bob is an irritable person and already in a bad mood, so he feels that the pain from the shot is very severe. So, the pain perceived from the same noxious stimuli is different among different subjects, depending on various factors in each subject.

Therefore, the pain is different from nociception and is subjective.
References:

National Research Council. 2009. Mechanisms of Pain In: Recognition and Alleviation of Pain in Laboratory Animals.  Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12526.

Wikipedia. Nociception

Nachum Dafny.Chapter 8: Pain Modulation and Mechanisms. Neuroscience Online. The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Wikipedia. Gate Control Theory