Are self-described "socially conscious" individuals less likely to show implicit bias as measured by the implicit association test (IAT)?

The relationship between implicit bias and individual behaviour is not direct and does not satisfactorily explain biased behaviour on an individual basis.

There are two studies that looked at cardiovascular disease, which does propose some interesting hypotheses. These studies add to the growing evidence that bias whether implicit or explicit is significant at a group or community level instead of at an individual basis. This 2014 a study of 503 cardiologists by Daugherty et al. performed implicit gender bias test and asked the cardiologists to go through a clinical vignette. The differences the recommendations in the clinical vignette according to gender was not wholly explained by the differences in the implicit bias test. We know there is a bias against aggressive management of heart disease in women by cardiologists in general by previous studies.

  The utility of secondary stress testing after an abnormal exercise treadmill test was rated as “high” more often for female than male patients (32.8% versus 24.3%, P=0.04); this difference did not vary with implicit bias. Angiography was more consistently rated as having “high” utility for male versus female patients (part 1: 19.7% versus 9.8%; part 2: 73.7% versus 64.3%; P<0.05 for both); this difference was larger for cardiologists with higher implicit gender bias on risk taking (P=0.01)

At a community level however, there is a strong correlation between communities that have a high level of black racial bias and higher rates of black deaths from circulatory diseases. This 2016 study by Leitner et al mapped over 1.4 million responses of white participants to US counties through a national survey and found that counties with high rates of implicit and explicit bias against blacks had far higher rates of "circulatory disease and in circulatory-disease-related death rates" than counties with lower racial bias. Although this study does not solely focus on implicit racial bias, (it included explicit racial bias), it does provide food for thought.

  (I)n counties with high (1 SD above the mean) explicit racial bias, the difference between Blacks’ and Whites’ death rates was 62 deaths per 100,000. In contrast, in counties with low (1 SD below the mean) explicit bias, the difference was 35 deaths per 100,000... We made this estimate at the average Black population level in counties for which we had death-rate data for Blacks (average Black population = 28,598); 11 more Blacks per county were predicted to die annually in high-explicit-bias counties (95 deaths) than in low-explicit-bias counties (84 deaths).

References:

Daugherty Stacie L., Blair Irene V., Havranek Edward P., Furniss Anna, Dickinson L. Miriam, Karimkhani Elhum, … Masoudi Frederick A. (n.d.). Implicit Gender Bias and the Use of Cardiovascular Tests Among Cardiologists. Journal of the American Heart Association, 6(12), e006872. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.117.006872

Leitner, J. B., Hehman, E., Ayduk, O., & Mendoza-Denton, R. (2016). Blacks’ Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites’ Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616658450


Can prosopagnostic (face-blind) people draw other people recognizably?

According to Bruce & Young model (1986), face recognition is composed of 2 main sub-processes, one more "perceptive" (called structural encoding) and the other one more "associative" (fru, pin, name generation). Bruce & Young model

A person with "apperceptive prosopagnosia" cannot create a precise percept, that is a mental representation of who he's looking at. He's unlikely to be able to draw other people face.

A person with "associative prosopagnosia" can create a percept of who he sees, but he cannot understand who the person is, deficit is semantic not perceptive. In this case, he is able to draw other people face, even though he cannot recognize it.

This subdivision can be found also in object recognition process and its related impairments: apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia.

It's important to note that all this stuff is heavily theoretical. Reality is much more complex and sometimes unclear.

Bruce, V., & Young, A. (1986). Understanding face recognition. British journal of psychology, 77(3), 305-327.


Is there any theory supporting the idea that writing with your non-dominant hand is beneficial?

Yes. It is beneficial. There is physical evidence. And it also can play a role in terms of plasticity.


Why do people want to harm those who harmed them?

There are at least two additional domains you can investigate.

The first is reciprocity as a means towards justice. In The Fourth Arm of Justice: The Art and Science of Revenge (1997), Judi Parks looks at this from the perspective an employee, but cites Susan Jacoby's report on the survivors of the Majdanek concentration camp in her 1983 Wild justice: The evolution of revenge:

  A desire for retribution does not require rationalization. "A victim wants to see an assailant punished not only for reasons of pragmatic deterrence but also as a means to repairing a damaged sense of civic order and personal identity. Deterrence and retribution are hardly identical, but the former invariably involves an element of the latter.

A more recent book that explores this dimension is Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge (Barash & Lipton, 2011).

Since deterrence is quite salient in game theory, this aspect shows up there, too. See, for example, The Paradox of Revenge in Conflicts (Amegashie & Runkel, 2012).

The second is identity theory. An example in “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Social identity salience moderates support for retaliation in response to collective threat (Fischer, Haslam, & Smith, 2010)):

  Specifically, we found that a threat to national identity (the 7/7/2005 London bombings) led to greater aggression and greater support for revenge when national rather than gender identity was salient. In contrast, a threat to gender identity (Taliban misogyny) led to greater aggression and greater support for revenge when gender rather than national identity was salient.


What is the evolutionary purpose of envy?

A lot of sources might be of use here, but one thing in your question is not clear to me - when you write "envy", do you mean a kind of resentment towards someone with material possessions that you don't have, or a jealousy in a romantic context? Everything that I would write is about the first meaning, and I have no idea about anything connected with the second. I don't really understand it, or questions number 2 and 3. Whence the data about it?

Basically, a negative feeling towards someone with a larger lot of things (like food) is quite easily understandable in an evolutionary context - someone with more goods has a larger chance to survive and produce an offspring, thus feeling bad about it motivates us to reduce the difference. As fitness is not absolute, but relative, reducing someone's fitness enlarges ours. More nuanced view would be that it rather motivates us and enhances cognitive abilities, and it is indeed what some have found - a link.

Somewhat different story comes from modern behavioral economics. It claims that humans have something that they call social preferences, or "other-regarding preferences" (Gintis 2009). An few examples - Fehr and Schmidt show that agents have a concern for the welfare of others and income distribution, with equality being preferred. Further studies has shown  that in experimental games, such as Ultimatum Game, Dictator’s Game or Prisoners’ Dilemma,  participants observing the interactions of others were punishing those who did not cooperate or share, although their interest was not involved and punishing itself was costly for them – they punished altruistically (Fehr and Gachter 2002). This also allowed for cooperation to flourish, while if such third-party punishment was not allowed, cooperation broke down.

Fehr and Gachter’s data were then explained by postulating an evolutionary mechanism that brought about these patterns of behaviour - specifically group selection, which was deemed possible precisely because of altruistic punishment, in which individuals were acting in the interest of their groups at some cost for themselves. A bit different conclusions were reached by Charness and Rabin (2002), who claimed that participants were more concerned with increasing social welfare, especially that of the worst-off, rather than with equity, as was in previous models. Later, the Fehr and Gachter model of inequity aversion was challenged and the same data were said to better explained by egalitarian motives, which tend to lead to punishment of the highest earner (Fowler et.al. 2005).

Thus, envy could be interpreted as really an urge to restore fairness. This urge might of course be a mistake, since some inequality could be fair, but for our hunter-gatherer minds it is still a bad thing.

Some involve envy in their more general theories. For example, Binmore has a whole, somewhat complicated, game-theoretical explanation of fairness as an equilibrium-selection device. If you were to buy his theory, it would answer your first question - the purpose of envy in this theory is to maintain stable social system in hunter-gatherer bands, as large inequalities would lead to hierarchy and a possible dissolution of their social contract. Envy construed in such a way is also a criterion of fairness, not just for Binmore, but for quite many modern welfare economists: assignment of goods is deemed fair only if nobody envies the bundle of commodities assigned to someone else (while envying here means not only to compare just material goods, but also what comes with them - few would envy in this way a millionaire with a terminal cancer).


What is the fastest language to think in?

With your question you are limiting thinking to conscious and rational thought. But human information processing has so many more aspects, some of them faster and more efficient than cogitation.

If, for example, you sit in front of the computer and have forgotten that you have put water on the stove, and suddenly you hear the noodles cooking over, you'll jump up and run to the kitchen quicker than you can form the sentences that describe what is happening and what you need to do. It is not a reflex (like flinching away from being hit), but clearly a conscious understanding, a consideration, and a decision, only not verbal. For me, parts of that process are visual (I see what I need to clean away, when I hear the water hit the hot plate), others include a body-memory projection of me moving to the kitchen, a muscular plan of action that is forming while I jump up, see what is on my path, and "pre-feel" how I will navigate it at maximum speed.

Another example is what I have often experienced when I "sleep over" a decision; what has been exemplified in Einstein dreaming of relativity theory; and what I have read about again a few days ago in a book summarizing current research on intuition: that conscious rational thought is only able to make decisions in situations with a limited complexity (the level of complexity was the focus of some research), and that highly complex decisions, involving too many aspects to "juggle" in your (conscious) mind, are made on an unconscious level, with "you" (that is consciousness) only receiving the outcome (that is intuition) of that information processing.

Language is a very recent development in evolution, and consciousness is not much older, and it is my opinion that we are misled by our self-identification with the constant chatter in our minds to believe that we are this speech, while in truth language and consciousness are just tools that are as peripheral to our core selves as our arms are to our bodies. There is this famous experiment, conducted a few years ago, that showed that the muscular impulse for a movement happens before the conscious decision for that movement is made. It shows that what we perceive as decisions happens after a behaviour has already begun. The ego, as Freud said, is not master in its own house.


Practice or forget, that is the rule. If you want to recall more words for your vocabulary then read more and write more texts with less common words. If you want to recall memories look at old photographs of your life and try to recall everything associated with those events.
Memory improves when health improves, so work on that too.


Binocular rivalry refers to a situation where you present different images to each eye (often in the context of an experiment, although you also point out some quick 'at home' ways to achieve this), and your perception switches between what each eye observes.

This phenomenon is related to other forms of bistable/multistable perception, one of the most famous examples of which is the Necker Cube but there are many many examples.

It's hard to answer your question about why this is the case, but I think it's helpful to think about what the purpose of the brain is: making a model of the world for you to act in. It doesn't really make sense for the world to be in two different states simultaneously. Your brain is constantly making perceptual decisions that translate observations into a model.

To make just a toy example for why you may want to select a single model rather than trying to incorporate both forms of information simultaneously, imagine you are some animal trying to catch a flying insect. One eye suggests the insect is in one part of space; the other eye suggests a slightly different part of space. You can reach to only one of the two spaces. You are more likely to be successful if you choose one of the targets (at least you have a 50/50 chance), whereas if you used some other strategy like an average of the two positions, you would miss every time.

There is also a lot of literature focusing on the role of attention in binocular rivalry as well as other aspects. It's probably beyond the scope of SE to provide a full review, but hopefully this is enough information for you to do some of your own further research on.


Do you know the name of this psychological phenomenon?

I think this phenomenon can be explained by the hindsight bias :

  Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping
  determinism, is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see
  the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little
  or no objective basis for predicting it. ... Hindsight bias may cause
  memory distortion, where the recollection and reconstruction of
  content can lead to false theoretical outcomes.

.

  A basic example of the hindsight bias is when, after viewing the
  outcome of a potentially unforeseeable event, a person believes he or
  she "knew it all along". Such examples are present in the writings of
  historians describing outcomes of battles, physicians recalling
  clinical trials, and in judicial systems trying to attribute
  responsibility and predictability of accidents.

.

  Hindsight bias has similarities to other memory distortions, such as
  misinformation effect and false autobiographical memory.
  Misinformation effect occurs after an event is witnessed; new
  information received after the fact influences how the person
  remembers the event, and can be called post-event misinformation.

.

  There is no solution to eliminate hindsight bias in its totality, but
  only ways to reduce it. Some of which include considering
  alternative explanations or opening one's mind to different
  perspectives. In terms of auditory communication, the speaker would
  try to provide more clarity in his or her delivery and the listener
  may seek greater clarification


Good conferences on (computational) neuroscience in Europe and whether to submit to conference or journal?

To touch on your broader question, as I understand getting full text publications in conferences are highly respected in computer science. In psychology and neuroscience (note I don't know so much about computational neuroscience), publishing papers in high impact journals is more respected in the field. While some conferences do have full-length papers, such publications often carry little weight. It is often tricky to even hunt down such conference proceedings. As such they are often barely part of the published research literature.  So yes, in psychology and neuroscience, you should generally submit your work to journals if you want to maximise its scientific impact.

That said, conferences are important in psychology and the neurosciences. As with any field, conferences are an important opportunity to network, share ideas, form collaborations, learn about developments and so on. A very common strategy is to present a work in progress at a conference. This allows you to set a preliminary deadline, get some feedback, and then refine your ideas before submitting to a journal.


The origin of the term "construct" in the cognitive sciences

The term "construct" means:

  In a scientific theory, particularly within psychology, a hypothetical construct is an explanatory variable which is not directly observable. For example, the concepts of intelligence and motivation are used to explain phenomena in psychology, but neither is directly observable. (Source)

The earliest reference I can find to the term "construct" is from Clark L. Hull (1943) pp. 21—22

  In some cases there may be employed in scientific theory a whole series of hypothetical unobserved entities; such a series is presented by the hierarchy of postulated physical entities: molecule, atom, and electron,the molecule supposedly, being constituted of atoms and the atom in its turn being constituted of electrons.

  A rough parallel to this chain of hypothetical entities from the physical sciences will be encountered in the present system of behavior theory. For the above reasons the subject of symbolic constructs, intervening variables, or hypothetical entities which are not directly observable requires comment.

  Despite the great value of logical constructs or intervening variables in scientific theory, their use is attended with certain difficulties and even hazards.

Reference

Hull, C. L. Principles of behavior. New York: Appleton-Century, 1943 [Free PDF]


Are psychology students more neurotic than the general population?

In general, females score higher on neuroticism and psychology students are predominantly female.

In some young adult norms that I've seen in the NEO-PI-3 test manual, females score about two-thirds of a standard deviation higher on neuroticism.

In my experience at the undergraduate level, about 70% to 85% of students are females. For example, in my most recent paper using a third-year Australian undergrad psych sample (n = 393), we had 79% females (Horwood & Anglim, 2018, JHB).

I believe also that neuroticism declines with age ( e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ ) and psychology students as with other university students tend to be 18 to 25 or so.

You'd have to look a little further to see whether there are differences after controlling for age and gender differences; i.e., whether there's a deeper reason for any differences.


How does it come about that specific areas of the brain are associated with specific functions?

Short answer
Neural wiring is governed by nature and nurture.

Background
I'm not a language person, but I will try to address the question on more familiar grounds to me, namely sensory systems.

A bunch of most intriguing studies have addressed your question directly. Among these is the study from Frost & Metin (1985), who severed the optic tracts of newborn hamsters and found that optic axons would project to the somatosensory thalamic (ventrobasal) nucleus instead. The experimentally induced retinal projection to the somatosensory nucleus occurred through the stabilization of an early, normally transient projection. Moreover, visual stimulation reliably evoked neural responses in the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices (SI and SII) in treated hamsters. Not only that - the representations of the visual field in SI and SII showed a partially retinotopic organization. In other words, the animals had effectively converted (part of) their somatosensory cortex into visual cortex.

Later, Sur et al. (1988) showed with a similar procedure that retinal cells could be induced to project to the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN), the principal auditory thalamic nucleus, in newborn ferrets. They showed that many MGN cells were then visually driven and that the auditory cortex became visually responsive. Some visual cells in auditory cortex were direction-selective or orientation-sensitive, resembling the complex cells in primary visual cortex.

Hence, functional visual projections can be routed into nonvisual structures in higher mammals, suggesting that the modality of a sensory thalamic nucleus or cortical area may be specified by its inputs during development. However, there is a short time window where the extent of neural plasticity will allow such gross abnormalities to develop - both studies used newborn animals therefore.

References
- Frost & Metin, Nature (1985); 317(6033): 162-4
- Sur et al. Science (1988); 242(4884): 1437-41


Can thought processes be sensed to happen exactly in the head?

In the 4th century BC, Aristotle wrote that the source of intelligence was the heart (source). Other greeks like Alcmaeon of Croton thought it might be the brain. I think the fact that they were having this discussion means that it's not obvious from our sensations alone that the thoughts are happening in the head.


Are inhibitory synapses the cause of not doing something?

Inhibitory synapses allows one brain region to suppress activity in another. Since the car is in motion per the laws of motion and momentum, it would be incorrect to say that suppressing one brain region would cause the car to stop moving toward the wall. The closest thing would be if those inhibitory synapses caused one part of your brain to inhibit the part that causes your foot to press the accelerator pedal. For example, dopaminergic neural processes from the basal ganglia (particularly the substantia nigra) indeed suppress motor impulse indirectly (see here and here). However, more activity than simply releasing the pedal is required in most cases to avoid hitting something. In short, you most certainly need both inhibitory and excitatory synapses to help you avoid running into something on the road or on your path as you walk. These functions are probably very complex, involving a great many of both types of synapses in several brain regions.

It is important to remember that many if not most neural circuits are primarily for very specific actions in the body or mind. Most "actions" in the common sense that a person can undertake are the result of a great many action potentials in the brain. Perhaps in some very small (such as microscopic) creatures, a single action potential is needed to initiate an activity such as feeding, but larger creatures with bigger brains have so many neural pathways that most observable actions of the animal require many internal actions of the processing system.


Talking about a problem helps (software developing)

I can think two reasons why talking about a problem helps :

Explaining your knowledge can reveal gaps and bugs

The following extract is from the book Smart Thinking by Art Markman :

Talking about a problem changes its mental representation

  Our mental representation is the ideas, concepts, stories, theories,
  and skills that make up how we internalize something in our mind.
  Gardner writes:

  “Generically, mind change entails the alteration of mental
  representations.  All of us develop mental representations quite
  readily from the beginning of life.  Many such representations are
  serviceable, some have notable charm, others are misleading or flatly
  wrong.  Mental representations have a content:  we think of these
  contents as ideas, concepts, skills, stories, or full-fledged theories
  (explanations of the world).  These contents can be expressed in words
  — and in a book, that medium is customarily used.  However, nearly all
  contents can be expressed in a variety of forms, media, symbol
  systems: these systems can be exhibited publicly as marks on a page
  and can also be internalized in a ‘language of the mind’ or a
  particular ‘intelligence.’”

The mere fact of trying to formulate our thinking into speech, changes its representation (see this article).


I thought I would edit to add a bit of information.  First of all for those who don't know, (I didn't until I looked it up when I saw this question for the first time), the term hebephilia has been proposed to split pedophilia and denote the erotic preference for pubescent children (roughly, ages 11 or 12-14), but it has not become widely used. Along with hebephilia, there is also Pedohebephilia which is erotic preference on both pedophilic and hebephilic levels.

I would also like to address the issue of Milo Yiannopoulos who seems to have been a topic of discussion, which raised this question.  In the Wikipedia page I linked here and in my edit of the OPs question, it says:

  Yiannopoulos stated that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adults can be "perfectly consensual," because some 13-year-olds are, in his view, sexually and emotionally mature enough to consent to sex with adults; he spoke favourably both of gay 13-year-old boys having sex with adult men and straight 13-year-old boys having sex with adult women. (Source 1) (Source 2) He used his own experience as an example, saying he was mature enough to be capable of giving consent at a young age.

The page also states that

  Defending himself in a press conference, Yiannopoulos alleged that he had been the victim of child abuse, and that "his comments were a way to cope with it".

I am not going to enter into any debate or express any opinion on what Yiannopoulos said or didn't say — or even what he may have been trying to say — as this is not the forum to do this, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who has, over a period of over 17 years, supported many who have been sexually abused and raped, I can categorically say that different people use many different ways to "cope" with the effects of the past events.  Was he using repression or projection as an ego-defence mechanism? It's difficult to say.

I have been drafting my answer and editing the draft many times in order to make sure I try not to add anything which might inflame the already heated debate over Yiannopoulos, so here goes.

The question raised here is

  Are there any fair studies exploring the effects of a sexually maturing teenager (14ish) engaging in sexual behavior with a significantly older adult (at least 23 years old)?

In The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology there is an article which examines behavioural scientific research on the subject (McCord, D. 1986).

  A researcher reviewing the literature on the subject, came to the conclusion that little had been learned about child sexual abuse during the preceding twenty-five years.  He also noted that the literature dealing with the sexual abuse of minors, was "scant, unintegrated, and ambiguous. Books on the topic are rare. Articles are scattered and hidden among a wide range of journals, many in non-accessible medical and legal journals."

  One reason for the lack of solid research is simply that the subject is a very difficult one to study. Only a small percentage of cases is ever reported. In those cases that are reported, the participants are often reluctant to discuss the situation. As a result of problems like these there are methodological difficulties virtually built into most research projects in the area.

Comments from research state the following

"Children can exhibit the entire gamut of behaviors in response to a sexual assault, ranging from the negative to the positive." (Burgess, et al., 1978)
"Children's immediate reactions to an assault vary." (Leaman, 1980)
"Incest victims show a wide variety of symptom complaints or may show none at all." (Stuart & Greer, 1984; Sgroi, 1975)
"Even those professionals who have a clinical definition with which they are comfortable will still have problems in identifying sexually abused children." (Mrazek, 1987)

The reason that such a wide variety of symptoms has been noted is that child sexual abuse is very complex situation from the point of view of the victim.  This can perhaps best be illustrated by comparing it with adult rape, which is, by contrast, very unambiguous from the victim's perspective. In adult rape the victim is often but not always coerced by physical force or threats of physical force to engage in sexual activity which he or she does not desire. Under these circumstances, even when there is no physical violence, or threat of physical violence, there is no possibility of the victim enjoying the activity or emerging from the situation with any positive psychological emotions, as consent has not been given. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the reactions of adult victims to forcible rape are remarkably similar to each other and are drastically negative. By contrast, a child sexual abuse victim's feelings may be, and often are, ambivalent. The victim's will is usually much more malleable than an adult's, particularly when the perpetrator may be assuring the child that the activity is normal and even possibly suggesting that it is teaching them what they need to know.

Another point of note which can cause problems for the child in later life is that, although not in all cases, the child may even feel physical pleasure during the activity. As one researcher put it:

  Contrary to the stereotype, most victims in our study readily acknowledged the positive as well as the negative elements of their experience. They talked about the times the physical sensations felt good, or they remembered how their sexual experience with an adult or family member satisfied a longing for affection and closeness that was rarely met at any other time. (Finkelhor, 1981)

While this researcher found that 60% of adult women who had been sexually abused as children remembered the experience as primarily negative, only 7% remembered it as primarily positive.

The effects of statutory rape, and childhood sexual abuse is complex and whether or not it may be perceived to be consensual, it is generally believed that informed consent cannot be given by someone under the legal age of consent. (Abel, et al., 1984).

References

Abel, G. G., Becker, J. V., Cunningham-Rathner, J., 1984. Complications, Consent, and Cognitions in Sex Between Children and Adults. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 7(1), pp. 69-103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-2527(84)90008-6

Burgess, A. W., Groth, N. A., Holmstrom, L. L., & Sgroi, S. M., 1978. Sexual assault of children and adolescents. Lexington, MA: D.C. Health.

Finkelhor, D., 1981. Sexually victimized children. New York, NY: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan.

Leaman, K. M., 1980. Sexual abuse : the reactions of child and family in U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Sexual Abuse of Children: Selected Readings.

Mrazek, P. B., 1987. Definition and recognition of sexual child abuse: historical and cultural perspectives in Sexually abused children and their families. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press.

McCord, D., 1985. Expert Psychological Testimony about Child Complainants in Sexual Abuse Prosecutions: A Foray into the Admissibility of Novel Psychological Evidence. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 77(1), pp. 1-68.
Available Free from: http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol77/iss1/1/

Sgroi, S. M., 1975. Sexual Molestation of Children: The Last Frontier in Child Abuse, Children Today, 4(3) pp. 18-21.

Stuart, I. R., Greer, J. G, 1984. Victims of Sexual Aggression: Treatment of Children, Women, and Men. Publisher: Chapman & Hall.


How are musical hooks defined/studied in psychology?

Looking into the term earworms lead me to the following answer.

If you search earworms into Google Scholar, at the top of the list is 3 papers, after which the rest seem to be about corn earworms.  The papers are Beaman & Williams (2010) followed by Halpern & Bartlett (2011) which is then followed by Williamson, et al. (2012).

It was the last paper which lead me to the term Involuntary Musical Imagery and the paper was in Psychology of Music which lead me to the field of Music Psychology

  or the psychology of music, [which] may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behavior and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life (Tan, et al.2010; Thompson, 2015).

Searching Google Scholar for Involuntary Musical Imagery leads you to much more.

References

Beaman, C. P., & Williams, T. I. (2010). Earworms (stuck song syndrome): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British Journal of Psychology, 101(4), 637-653. DOI: 10.1348/000712609X479636 PDF: http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/5755/1/earworms_write-upBJP.pdf

Halpern, A. R., & Bartlett, J. C. (2011). The persistence of musical memories: A descriptive study of earworms. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(4), 425-432. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2011.28.4.425 PDF: http://www.academia.edu/download/45162267/The_Persistence_of_Musical_Memories_A_De20160428-27955-1tiomp.pdf

Tan, S., Pfordresher, P., & Harré, R. (2010). Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance. New York: Psychology Press.

Thompson, W. F. (2015) Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music, 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williamson, V. J., Jilka, S. R., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Müllensiefen, D., & Stewart, L. (2012). How do “earworms” start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery. Psychology of Music, 40(3), 259-284. DOI: 10.1177/0305735611418553 PDF: http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas03dm/papers/Williamson_etal_Earworms_POM_2012.pdf


What is the term for two mutually exclusive, contrasting emotions

In terms of systematic desensitization, you're thinking of reciprocal inhibition (see, e.g., Wolpe, 1954).

For what it's worth, beyond this literature, there's a general debate about whether positive and negative affect can be experienced simultaneously.  (Indeed, Emotion Review just published a series of articles about this.)  It's fair to say that the debate has not been resolved.


Computational Model Linking Neural Activity to Behavior

There are several such models in the field of auditory perception. For example Patterson 1996 [1] suggests a model that starts with a simulation of the cochlea and the neural activity and reaches up to perception; Winkler 2006 [2] reviews the process of auditory perception, again from the cochlea up to perception.

Somewhat old and does not mention a specific model, but still a very relevant review of the neural activity - behaviour interaction debate is provided in Barlow 1972 [3].

[1] Patterson R.D., Holdsworth J., A functional model of neural activity patterns and auditory images. Advances in Speech, Hearing and Language Processing, 1996. link.

[2] Winkler I., Denham S.L., Nelken I., Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects. Trends in cognitive sciences, 2009. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.09.003

[3] Barlow B.H., Single units and sensation: A neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology? Perception, 1972. link


According to the National Institute for Drug Abuse

  Some hallucinogens interfere with the action of the brain chemical serotonin, which regulates:

  mood
  sensory perception
  sleep
  hunger
  body temperature
  sexual behavior
  muscle control

  Other hallucinogens interfere with the action of the brain chemical glutamate, which regulates:

  pain perception
  responses to the environment
  emotion
  learning and memory

Morphine is a hallucinogenic and

Morphine is used to treat chronic pain

The NHS has also provided proof with links to articles that opiates are useful for chronic pain

Other hallucinogenics known to help with pain include Peyote (unreferenced)


How does psychiatry judge suicide by military and political leaders?

Suicide is not a psychiatric disorder. Suicidal ideation or attempts are considered a symptom of certain psychiatric disorders (e.g. depression), and these disorders are treated by psychiatrists, but in and of itself suicide can be a rational choice and is in some legislations even legally facilitated by physicians (e.g. for the terminally ill).

Within their professional capacity, psychiatrists have nothing to say about people killing themselves to avoid shame or punishment or as a sacrifice for their country.


"Nice" window views do improve well-being, but with "nice" meaning "nature" mostly:

  The most consistent finding in the literature is that people prefer natural rather than built or
  urban views from windows. Windows with views of nature were found to enhance work and well-being
  in a number of ways including increasing job satisfaction, interest value of the job, perceptions of selfproductivity,
  perceptions of physical working conditions, life satisfaction, and decreasing intention to quit
  and the recovery time of surgical patients. However, the access to a view did not improve the
  performance of students or actual productivity of office workers.

and later

  The preference of people for natural over built or urban views is one of the earliest and most consistent findings in the window literature [numerous citations].

From Kelly M. J. Farley and Jennifer A. Veitch (2001) "A Room With A View: A Review of The Effects of Windows on Work and Well-being".

And apparently art works of nature do have some effect as well, but I don't know the exact level of substitutability (beyond "real is better"):

  But perhaps the quickest and cheapest way to reap the benefits of biophilia – albeit not the most effective – is to install artworks showing natural scenes. Browning cites a 2008 study in which office workers were put in a room with closed curtains, with a garden view or with a flat-screen TV with the same dimensions and view as the window. After they received a stressor, the blood pressure and heart rate of those volunteers with the real view dropped the fastest and lowest, followed by those with the simulated view. “Both real nature and representations of nature suffice,” Browning explains, but “real is better.”

From https://www.ioshmagazine.com/article/office-wellbeing-desk-view which unfortunaltely doesn't have a references list, so I couldn't locate that study right away.

As for why people like nature better, an evolutionary theory (quoting again from Farley and Veitch) is that

  In summary, Ulrich’s (1983) psychoevolutionary theory suggests that acquiring a capacity for
  restorative responding to certain unthreatening natural contents and configurations had important
  advantages for humans during evolution. These included rapid attenuation of stress responses following
  threatening encounters, and fostering recharge of physical energy. In fact, Ulrich (1983), argued that
  modern humans are biologically prepared to quickly and readily acquire restorative responses with
  respect to unthreatening natural settings, but have no such preparedness for most urban or built contents
  and configurations.

It was criticized by others though (for incompleteness etc.), and as with many such evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, it's hard to test. And the critics propose instead:

  In contrast to Ulrich (1983) and Ulrich et al., (1991), R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan (1989) proposed
  the Attention Restoration Theory (ART) arguing that recovery from directed attention fatigue (restoration
  of effectiveness) could be accomplished by using modes of attending that required no effort. For these
  authors, James’ (1892) concept of involuntary attention partially explained the preference of many people
  for natural rather than urban views. Natural environments, they argued, are restorative because the
  involuntary attention (or fascination) they engender requires no effort on the part of the perceiver. In this way, natural scenes are advantageous to human health because they provide an opportunity for recovery
  from mental fatigue.

In fact ART proposes four factors that affect the restorative properties of a view:

  Fascination, as the ability of an environment to generate awe in people; the amount of awe can give the directed attention a rest as it appears the involuntary attention in its place. Being away, a feeling that can be in objective or subjective form, as a person can be far away from a location or let his or her mind let go from everyday life and worries. Extension [aka extent], referring to the connection between each element found in an environment; the feeling of being able to travel through the environment in order to look for information it provides to the observer. Compatibility, characteristics found in an environment that meet the preferences and goals of a person.

There is some empirical evidence that the Kaplans may be mostly correct, except for "being away" being two things actually:

  Laumann et al. (2001) found a five factor structure in their data
  gathered with the RCS, largely in line with the four factor structure as
  proposed by Kaplan and Kaplan (1989). However, the being away
  factor split into two factors: a physical component (referred to as
  novelty), and a psychological component (referred to as escape). This
  finding seems plausible, because Kaplan and Kaplan’s definition of
  being away also has two components: a physical component (being in
  different setting than usual), and a psychological component (being
  able to escape from unwanted distractions and reminders of your
  daily obligations). So, the distinction between the two being away
  components is plausible both theoretically and empirically.

This five factor model has been mostly confirmed in subsequent research, e.g. by Pals et al. (2009) but not all factors seem to come up in some contrasts; most doubt being about compatibility. And there has been further investigation from that group on how fascination actually works.


I recently completed a study involving physical ergonomics of rifles.  We monitored heart rate and respiration using the Zephyr BioHarness.  It seemed to work pretty well.

It also monitors movement of the user, if that is of interest to you.

To get data out, it is possible to compile a report and export it to CSV, which works well if you need to do analysis on the data using other programs.


Are the "scientific" points made in the James Damore document factually accurate?

A few thoughts on those two pieces...

Do women prefer working with people?

Results on this are certainly debated. This article summarizes a study (linked in the article) that concludes women prefer collaborative work more than men (though the reasons for this are not necessarily clear). Obviously, standard contextual warnings of interpretation apply. For me, the interesting thing discussed in the article is the potential reasons for these differences (such as male overconfidence). In any case, the answer seems to be "yes, women (on average) prefer collaborative work". Also, at the risk of being mis-interpreted, I should add that individuals do not necessarily follow statistical patterns employed by research to make these claims, and thus, this information should not be used to predict the behavior of a specific individual. It merely discusses certain people's behavior in a certain setting.

Are women are more prone to anxiety?

I don't know much about this, but the first hits on my search (from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America and a The Conversation article from a PhD candidate at Cambridge) both seem to support that women are about twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder. Theories on the reasons for this seem to vary (and not yet be proven), but the first one in both places was difference in brain chemistry. As with the previous disclaimer, this information shouldn't be used to judge individuals. Also, relating to your question, note that this is not necessarily related to job tasks. For instance, the presence of an anxiety disorder does not mean that women are less fit than men to handle the anxiety and pressure of a particular position.

Ultimately, it seems that there may be some scientific support on these claims on average, though: 1) they are not generally "proven" (and may not be able to be proven for the general population), and 2) the results cannot be used to make claims on an individual (this is true of almost all research). Final note is that, in my brief review, the reasons for these phenomenon (if they exist) are primary theorized and not fully studied, casting further doubt upon conclusions for action based upon this research (e.g., women shouldn't be programmers).


Why do humans/primates laugh/smile when they are happy, and not cry?

Subcortical unconscious programming originating in distance evolutionary relatives cause humans to smile when they feel happy.

-Consciousness, Volition, and the Neuropsychology of Facial Expressions of Emotion

There are disorders like the Pseudobulbar affect which cause people to express a different emotion than what is typical like crying instead of smiling. With PBA the emotions displayed are sudden, frequent, extreme and uncontrollable.


What are a digital dementia and a pseudo debility?

"Digital dementia" seems to be (from de.wiki link) an idiosyncratic (and pejorative) term used to describe a high dependence on portable electronics like smartphones, notebooks. See e.g.

"Why Smartphone Dependence Is Ravaging a Generation" obviously from an alarmist proponent of this phenomenon, or "Mobile phone overuse" on Wikipedia for a more neutral perspective.
the more general term seems to be "overuse of technology". Calling it "dementia" probably relates to an influential article (discussed in the previous link) titled "Is Google Making us Stupid?". Another pejorative term is "digital zombie".

From the absence of sources you provided, I don't know what "pseudo debility" might be, but based on your def "simplification and flattening of delirium in the modern world" it doesn't sound terribly related to "digital dementia" in the sense used by Manfred Spitzer.


What is Joan suffering from in this example?

I don't think you can rule out that she really is suffering from headaches and dizziness.  Just because the doctors can't find a physiological cause doesn't mean that there isn't one.


Is learning facts via audio while sleeping possible?

Theoretical perspective:
No. I don't think so. From a cognitive information processing perspective, I would hypothesise that declarative learning of new facts would not occur while sleeping. Of course, learning declarative facts while awake, but in bed (e.g., when going to sleep or when waking up in the morning) is possible, and sleep is important in consolidating what is learnt during the day.
I don't think the mind is capable of the kinds of information processing required to process facts when asleep.

Empirical perspective:
Nonetheless, my theoretical perspective above may be wrong, so it is worth while looking at the empirical evidence. I found an early review of research in Simon and Emmons (1955). The study critically evaluates 10 or so studies on sleep learning and suggests that each of them suffers from some form of methodological weakness.

Wood et al (1992) provide a more recent summary of the literature:

  When a distinguished committee of the National Research Council (NRC)
  recently concluded that sleep learning deserves a "second look" from
  experimenters (Druckman & Swets, 1988; Swets & Bjork, 1990). a
  distinguished sleep researcher swiftly and pungently disagreed (Webb,
  1990). This controversy is not new to the field of sleep learning.
  Disagreement has been common since the mid-1950s, when Simon and
  Emmons (1955. 1956) severely criticized the methodology of existing
  studies and demonstrated that recall and recognition for verbal
  material presented during sleep do not occur when proper experimental
  controls are exercised.

  Although the views of Simon and Emmons were
  generally accepted, in ensuing years some empirical studies continued
  to report evidence of learning for verba! information presented during
  sleep (see reviews by Aarons. 1976; Eich, 1990; Hoskovec, 1966).
  Though subject to methodological criticism, their findings were
  buttressed by evidence from electroencephalographic and evoked
  potential studies that (a) transmission of auditory information to the primary auditory cortex is not different during sleep and the waking state, (b) habituation
  and conditioning can occur during sleep in both nonhuman animals and
  humans, and (c) some transfer of information to long-term memory
  occurs during sleep (see review by Wood, 1990). Furthermore, recent
  studies have suggested the existence of a cognitive unconscious
  (Kihistrom. 1987) and indicated that information processed outside of
  conscious awareness, for example, while under anesthesia (Kihistrom,
  Schacter, Cork, Hurt, & Behr, 1990), can be stored in memory and exert
  an influence on later performance. In addition, research with both
  amnesic and normal subjects has demonstrated the existence of implicit
  memory, that is, learning that does not require deliberate or
  conscious recollection of experience (see reviews by
  Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork. 1988, and Schacter, 1987).

Specifically, it appears that in their study Wood et al (1992) did not find any effect:

  This study examined implicit memory for words presented during sleep.
  Ten experimental subjects were presented with word pairs including a
  homophone and a close associate (e.g., “tortoise-hare”) and with
  category-instance pairs (e.g., “bird-cardinal”) during REM or Stage 2
  sleep and tested immediately afterward. Twelve control subjects
  underwent the same procedure while awake. Unlike the controls,
  subjects in the sleeping condition showed no learning effects on the
  implicit memory tasks. Recall and recognition were observed in a few
  cases, but only when presentation was immediately followed by arousal.

References

Simon, C. W., & Emmons, W. H. (1955). LEARNING DURING SI. EEP?. LEARNING, 52(4), 1055. PDF
Wood, J. M., Bootzin, R. R., Kihlstrom, J. F., & Schacter, D. L. (1992). Implicit and explicit memory for verbal information presented during sleep. Psychological Science, 3(4), 236-239.


Psychological behavior of talking alone in front of mirror.

By itself, a single incident like this, or even a habit of talking to oneself in the mirror, doesn't qualify as a mental disorder, in the opinion of one psychiatrist.
For a bit more background on the research in this area, there's a NYT article. Alas it doesn't get into children... and children to have more behavior that few adults have, like imaginary friends.
So the contents of the external self-talk is probably more important than the mere fact she does it.
The introductory part of an article focused on self-talk in Down syndrome mentions that

Self-talk or talking out loud to oneself (also referred to as 'private speech') is a common behavior in young children and plays an important role in the development of higher-level thinking and self-directional skills. Developmentally, children engage in self-talk to coordinate their actions and thoughts. During focused goal-directed activities, self-talk/private speech systematically becomes more selective in 4-year-old children than in 3 year olds[1]. By the age of 6 or 7 years, most children stop talking out loud to themselves and develop an internal dialogue when working out problems or challenging tasks[2].
In certain situations, people engage in self-talk (either positive or negative) during periods of stress or conflict or to motivate themselves. Negative self-talk has been found to increase during levels of affective stress in children and adolescents with anxiety and depression[3,4]. Studies of the use of self-talk in people engaged in exercise and competitive sports have found that exercisers and athletes use self-talk as a positive, motivating behavior to enhance their performance[5,6,7]. Few studies have been conducted on self-talk behavior in people with intellectual disabilities. Self-talk has been a common observation by parents of children and adults with Down syndrome[8,9]. It was postulated that self-talk is an important aspect of the thought processes of people with Down syndrome when they are working out difficult situations, expressing feelings, and entertaining themselves[10]. No association was found between self-talk/private speech and behavior problems, communication difficulties, or social isolation. However, self-talk in adults with Down syndrome has sometimes been incorrectly considered to be hallucinatory behavior [11,12].


The Just-World Theory/Belief/Hypotheses is an assumption that people eventually get what they deserves. Good people will eventually receive good things and bad people will eventually be punished, hence the world is "just/fair".

  One form of defensive attribution is to believe that bad things happen
  only to bad people or at least, only to people who make stupid
  mistakes or poor choices. Therefore, bad things won t happen to us
  because we won t be that stupid or careless. Melvin Lerner (1980,
  1998) has called this the belief in a just world the assumption that
  people get what they deserve and deserve what they get (Hafer, 2000;
  Hafer & Begue, 2005; Lipkus, Dalbert, & Siegler, 1996).

Fundamentally, this belief is motivated by our need to feel secure, to decrease anxiety from our vulnerabilities. After all, if bad things can happen to anyone, they can also happen to me regardless of what I do/don't do. Consequently, there are no guarantee that I'll receive "reward" for doing good.

  By using this attributional bias [belief in just world], the perceiver does not have to
  acknowledge that there is a certain randomness in life, that an
  accident or criminal may be waiting just around the corner for an
  innocent person like oneself. The belief in a just world keeps
  anxiety-provoking thoughts about one s own safety at bay.

You can imagine that this "randomness" can be overwhelming at times, especially when a tragedy strikes; for example when someone from work/school was raped.

Ironically, those who strongly believe in a just-world tend to unfairly judge that it must have happened because the victim did something wrong, e.g dressed inappropriately, flirting, etc. That way, the person can still believe that this world is fair, and if he/she doesn't do bad things, it will never happen to him/her.

  Research by Elaine Walster (1966) and others has focused on such
  attributions, which these investigators call blaming the victim (e.g.,
  Burger, 1981; Lerner & Miller, 1978; Stormo, Lang, & Stritzke, 1997).
  In several experiments, they have found that the victims of crimes or
  accidents are often seen as causing their fate. For example, not only
  do people tend to believe that rape victims are to blame for the rape
  (Abrams, Viki, Masser, & Bohner, 2003; Bell, Kuriloff, & Lottes,
  1994), but also battered wives are often seen as responsible for their
  abusive husbands behavior (Summers & Feldman, 1984).

  ...

  When something bad happens to another
  person (as when someone is mugged or raped), we will undoubtedly feel
  sorry for the person but at the same time will feel relieved that this
  horrible thing didn t happen to us. We will also feel scared that such
  a thing might happen to us in the future. How can we cope with these
  fears and worries? We can protect ourselves from the fear we feel by
  convincing ourselves that the person must have done something to cause
  the tragedy. We feel safe, then, because we would have behaved more
  cautiously (Jones & Aronson, 1973).

Does it always apply? No, not for everyone and not in every situation.

It explains one possible way people deal with anxiety of feeling insecure, but not as the only way. I couldn't find any scientific sources, but I imagine that people can see tragedy without feeling any insecurities, or can perceive the world as fair but have an entirely different reaction, or even doesn't see the world as just/fair in the first place.

References:

Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert. (2010). Social Psychology Seventh Edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.


Scientific way to prove you are ambidextrous, right handed or left handed?

I don't know whether the following has been used to distinguish natural from "corrected" right handers, but following up on the suggestion from @user3169, the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory contains a range of handedness tasks, many of which would probably not be as explicitly trained as writing or eating, and which thus potentially could be used in distinguishing natural from corrected right handers.

There is an online version of the inventory here.


Does work exist on relative valuations versus numeric valuations?

Short answer
Sensory systems in general operate on a relative basis. Hence, seemingly objective rating scales are often still relative, because subjects implicitly, or explicitly compare previous trials to the current one. Perception is per definition always relative. So numeric ratings are similar to ''larger than'', or ''smaller than'' ratings. The advatnage of numeric ratings is that it is a (semi-)continuous scale, allowing for quantitative analyses.

Background
You are asking about rating scales and specifically to the difference between numbering opposed to larger-than / smaller-than ratings.

You have to realize that when subjects rate on a scale from, e.g.,  0 to 10, the S is already quite explicitly indicating whether a trial's stimulus is larger or smaller than a previous trial. Even if you force an absolute number scale, the result is a comparison nonetheless.

Moreover, even if you as an experimenter force an absolute rating, Ss will always start comparing later conditions to previous ones (this is larger/bigger/brighter/more intense than the last trial, etc.), either consciously or subconsciously. The only really absolute one, in absence of a baseline measure, will be the very first trial. It is a known phenomenon that previous trials affect subsequent ratings because of that. Hence, true absolute ratings are a rarity.

Also - perception is physiologically and per definition always relative. Sensory systems operate at relative measures at the neural level.

And to conclude, as a comment - What often happens in rating experiments is that the experimenter assigns a certain baseline. For example, consider the rating of speech-understanding. First, the listener can be instructed to rate speech in silence from 0 (unintelligible) to 10 (highly intelligible). You might urge the S to rate it 10, as speech in silence is per definition highly recognizable and understandable. After that, you present various distorted speech forms, or speech in variable amounts of noise. Under these conditions, Ss will (likely) rate these trials lower, because of lower signal-to-noise ratios. This way, the absolute ratings are relative less than/larger than comparisons nonetheless, because Ss are rating the subsequent trials relative to baseline. i.e., they are comparing the noisy conditions to 10 - per definition a relative measure, whether you are asking them to give numbers, or larger than, or smaller than answers. The big advantage of numbers is that it allows for (semi-)quantitative analyses, while '<', '=' or '>' will make your life a lot harder to do stats.


What are the neurological differences between varying types of love?

It is very difficult to offer a response in the sense proposed, different researchers may have very different views. One of the keys in these research is to have clear differences between: attachment, attraction, sexual behavior, esthetics (philosophical theme), likes, interests, and very huge etc.

One can begin by reading Neil R. Carlson's chapter about reproductive behavior (Carlson, pp. 319-366) which addresses both hormonal and neural control of sexual behavior as well as maternal behavior from basic and general psychophysiological approaches.


Examples of interventions that yield large long term effect sizes in psychology

Skill acquisition: If you take a novice on a task and get them to practice that task, performance will tend to improve. See the Power Law of Practice. In many cases that I've seen, the difference between between initial and final performance is similar to the standard deviation of individual differences at baseline. So I guess you could call that a d of around 1. Of course, the exact numbers will depend on the domain, but that is indicative.

Of course, you also get forgetting effects which in some sense reduce the effect of skill acquisition over time, but there is also an associated faster relearning effect. And the degree of forgetting is related to a range of factors. In particular, motor-learning seems to have less forgetting than learning related to declarative facts.


The SCID  is a Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders.

The SCID website talks about a version designed for children called the KID-SCID.

You mention a specific interest in DSM-V. Under "what's new", the SCID website states:

  January 2013: Development efforts are underway for the SCID for DSM-5
  and updated training materials, which are expected to be released in
  the fall/winter 2013.


Why am I more "musically" creative in the last 30 seconds before falling asleep?

This is quite a well documented phenomenon - stereotypically these moments of creative insight occur in the shower. A google for 'psychology aha moment' or 'neuroscience creative aha' will give you some articles, in Psychology Today for instance, talking about this.

One characterisation of thought is that links between neurons are created and by travelling down the intricate pathway, you have the thought. A lot of conscious thought is driven by "picking" the "quickest" path and travelling down that, as it is economical in terms of energy use.
One understanding of creativity is that it is combining of existing ideas in novel patterns. When you enter a more relaxed state, or even just a more distracted state such as showering or exercising, your brain is free to try novel combinations as you are not consciously driving it down specific well-worn pathways (the "easy" paths).

Mark Beeman has done research on this, which he calls it insight. For more information, see the article he co-wrote "The Aha! Moment: the Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight".

For another explanation, Alice Flaherty has done research linking these moments to dopamine release, which is more abundant in our brains when we relax. For more information see the publication "Frontotemporal and dopaminergic control of idea generation and creative drive".


Is there a survey regarding the meaning of distress in the definition of mental disorder?

When it comes to any surveys on how mental health is assessed, you can't go far wrong with looking at the DSM-5

  In 2010, the APA launched a unique Web site to facilitate public and professional input into DSM-5. All draft diagnostic criteria and proposed changes in organization were posted on www.dsm5.org for a 2-month comment period. Feedback totaled more than 8,000 submissions, which were systematically reviewed by each of the 13 work groups, whose members, where appropriate, integrated questions and comments into discussions of draft revisions and plans for field trial testing. After revisions to the initial draft criteria and proposed chapter organization, a second posting occurred in 2011. Work groups considered feedback from both Web postings and the results of the DSM-5 Field Trials when drafting proposed final criteria, which were posted on the Web site for a third and final time in 2012. These three iterations of external review produced more than 13,000 individually signed comments on the Web site that were received and reviewed by the work groups, plus thousands of organized petition signers for and against some proposed revisions, all of which allowed the task force to actively address concerns of DSM users, as well as patients and advocacy groups, and ensure that clinical utility remained a high priority. (Source: Page 8 of DSM-5)

My copy of DSM-5 has the following definition for Mental Disorder:

Notice that it said:

  Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability

So therefore, Allen Frances was only slightly incorrect with what he said as there can be social or occupational disabilities without distress, but then based on the findings of Miller at al (2007), John Gartner was also wrong.  An example is that Narcisistic Personality Disorder has "weak but significant" relation with intrapersonal distress (Miller, et al. 2007).  However, in defense of John Gartner is the fact that;

  the strongest impairment associated with NPD is the distress or “pain and suffering” experienced not by the narcissist but by his or her significant others.

References

Miller, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Pilkonis, P. A. (2007). Narcissistic personality disorder: Relations with distress and functional impairment. Comprehensive psychiatry, 48(2), 170-177.DOI: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2006.10.003 PMCID: PMC1857317Free PDF: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1857317/pdf/nihms18536.pdf


Psychologically, guilt can be described as "a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined" (Dictionary.com).

Guilt is an emotion triggered by a belief that you did something wrong, based on what you think is wrong. You can feel guilty after breaking your New year resolution. You can also feel guilty when doing something what is considered wrong by social, moral or religious criteria set by others but only when you believe that what you did is wrong.

So, you can feel guilty when you do something against your personal beliefs. I'm not answering to "Is a concept of good and bad innate or learned?" because, this is not a psychological question...The question what is innate and learned, of course, can be a psychological question. I believe that the capability of feeling guilt (not guilt by itself) is innate.


Success rates or reviews of Brain Working Recursive Therapy (BWRT), and number of sessions needed on average

Looking at the client testimonials on the website you provided it looks like it varies from 1 session to a few more.  Like any other therapy it seems to depend on the client and problem being dealt with.

You could ask the therapist how many sessions you are likely to need for your problem in order to find out whether you would like to go ahead or not.

I am really interested in this and I am going to look at this therapy in some detail as it is interesting to me considering it is supposedly not a remodel of NLP, EFT, TFT, WSN, SD, EMDR, Hypnosis, Reiki, Meridian/Energy therapies, Noesiology, Chinosis or any other style of therapy according to the home page.


Is it possible to raise the complexity of what you can mentally process?

I think the answer you are looking for is chunking.

  A chunk is defined as a familiar collection of more elementary units
  that have been inter-associated and stored in memory repeatedly and
  act as a coherent, integrated group when retrieved (Tulving & Craik,
  2000). It is believed that individuals create higher order cognitive
  representations of the items on the list that are more easily
  remembered as a group than as individual items themselves.

The repeated exposure unconsiously creates chunks of many elements that are stored in long term memory, which are retreived as whole units in the working memory. In this case the limit is 3-4 chunks, each composed of many elements.

It is sometimes possible though, if needed, to consiously decompose the chunk into its elements in working memory, but in this case only 3-4 items of the decomposed chunk can be active in the working memory.


Does the lexical hypothesis have any role in 'creativity'?

Jauk et al. (2013) talks about the relationship between intelligence and creativity whilst King, et al. (1996) talks about the the relationship between the 5-factor model and creativity.

  4.2. Personality predictors of creative potential

  When performing separate multiple regression analyses in samples of lower and higher intelligence, we found that openness to experiences predicts creative potential in the subsample above the threshold whereas conscientiousness is negatively related to creative potential in the lower IQ range.

  While it is well documented that that there exists a positive association between openness and creative potential (Batey & Furnham, 2006; Feist, 2010; King et al., 1996), the present result points to an interaction between intelligence and openness: High creative potential is not possible with a low level IQ; but once the intelligence threshold is met, openness may explain to some extent whether the required cognitive disposition is actually turned into high creative potential (Jauk, et al. 2013)

References

Batey M., Furnham A. (2006). Creativity, intelligence, and personality: A critical review of the scattered literature. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs. 132(4) 355–429.PMID: 18341234

Feist G.J. (2010). The function of personality in creativity: The nature and nurture of the creative personality. In: Kaufman J.C., Sternberg R.J., editors. The Cambridge handbook of creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press;  pp. 113–130.

Jauk, E., Benedek, M., Dunst, B., & Neubauer, A. C. (2013). The relationship between intelligence and creativity: New support for the threshold hypothesis by means of empirical breakpoint detection. Intelligence, 41(4), 212–221.DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2013.03.003

King L. A., Walker L. M. & Broyles S. J. (1996). Creativity and the five-factor model. Journal of Research in Personality. 30(2), 189–203.DOI: 10.1006/jrpe.1996.0013


Are action potentials necessary for experience?

It is generally accepted that all activity having to do with conscious experience is mediated by spiking in the cortex. Sub-threshold activity, such as excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) are not carried forward in the nervous system and will 'fade' before having an effect. It all revolves around action potentials.

Quoting from Kandel et al. (2000):

  Action potentials constitute the signals by which the brain receives, analyzes and conveys information. These signals are highly stereotyped throughout the nervous system [...]. The information conveyed by the action potentials is determined not by the form of the signal but by the pathway the signal travels. The brain analyzes patterns of incoming electrical signals and in this way creates our everyday sensations of sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound.

Reference
Kandel et al. eds. Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, 2000


Is Elizabeth Holmes having a psychological disorder?

Welcome to Psychology.SE! For a number of reasons outlined in this meta post we can not, and will not, give advice for any individual. Therefore, if you was seeking advice for yourself or a friend, this question would be off-topic.

One of the reasons is that we cannot properly diagnose any psychological disorder here. The same will be said for the person in your question.

Forde (2007) highlights the following concerning assessment techniques:

reliability means

  the extent to which a test consistently measures the same thing,

validity is

  the extent to which the test measures what it is intended to measure

a test

  cannot be valid if it isn't also reliable

any form of assessment

  (and not just a traditional pencil and paper test) must be both valid and reliable, or it is useless.

With this in mind, you cannot say anyone has a psychological disorder without a valid and reliable method of diagnosis (Forde, 2017).

In other situations where someone says someone has a psychological disorder, they can be situations where they are voicing possible but not confirmed psychological disorders, which are personal opinions, which cannot be taken notice of officially without the necessary valid and reliable assessment(s).

References

Forde, R. A. (2017). Bad Psychology: How Forensic Psychology Left Science Behind. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.


How did the unique features of human intelligence evolve?

If non-human animals do have intelligence too, why is their intelligence not as advanced as humans?

Notions like “advanced” or “better” really have no place in evolutionary thinking. Again, evolutionary fitness is about self-reproduction and success compared to whatever competition is present at any moment. There is no force “optimizing” species to meet some external criteria of “progress”.

One important observation is that (relatively) simple species have in fact been quite successful (in terms of number of individuals, total biomass, capacity to survive climate changes and other disruptive events, etc.). Humans have been flourishing very recently (few thousands of years), colonizing big parts of the earth, reaching large population numbers but before that there is evidence that they went through a severe population bottleneck as recently as 70000 years ago. Great apes populations are also not very large and all species are considered endangered.

Sustaining a large brain and human intelligence is in fact extremely onerous. The human brain requires a lot of energy. Furthermore, it has become too big to go through the mother's womb so that it still undergoes growth after birth, meaning that human babies require a lot of care and protection. All that suggest that “high intelligence” is not always such a big advantage, evolutionary speaking. As often, there are trade-offs and various successful “strategies”.

In any case, you might be interested in Wikipedia's article on the “Evolution of human intelligence”.


How is doing a manipulation check different from doing the analysis on the main dependent variable?

It depends on what you mean by manipulation check.

Manipulation check to filter participants: A manipulation check is usually done to verify that some experimental manipulation has had some preliminary effect. For example, in one of my studies I asked people to answer a personality test (a) honestly, (b) as an ideal worker, and (c) as the worst possible worker. I asked each participant how they intended to answer the personality test. The manipulation check was there to verify that they had understood the instructions. In this case, the manipulation check was used to potentially exclude participants who failed to pass the manipulation check.

Manipulation check to verify group-level effect: Of course, you could perform such manipulation checks on an entire group using group comparison tools such as ANOVA for a numeric variable or chi-square for a categorical outcome. For example, in some psychological studies, the experimenter may attempt to manipulate mood as baseline manipulation. Thus, they may want to get check whether the group that has been made to experience negative affect does on average experience more negative affect. In that case an ANOVA makes sense.

Checking approximate group equivalence:: A third case is where you are merely checking whether the groups are the same at baseline and that has more to do with how participants were allocated to groups. It doesn't sound like you are talking about this case.

Using manipulation check outcome as covariate: In general, manipulation checks are typically reported prior to conducting main analyses. In this sense, they are a bit like assumption tests. They verify that some experimental manipulation has worked and that you can now proceed to examine the effects of substantive interest. That said, you could do a range of other analyses where the outcome measure in the manipulation check is included in your analysis of the substantive outcome. For example, if you were studying task performance in two groups, one with a positive mood induction and one with a negative mood induction, you could run an ANCOVA where condition was your independent variable, measured mood (i.e., the manipulation check variable) was your covariate, and task performance was your dependent variable.


Facet versus scale prediction of Big 5 personality

Several studies have been conducted comparing facets versus factor prediction (e.g., Paunonen and Ashton, 2001; Mershon and Gorsuch, 1988; Ashton et al, 1995; Dudley et al, 2006; Ekehammar & Akrami, 2007).

Many of these studies have found substantial incremental prediction of facets over factors. However, there are several potential methodical issues that may potentially arise: (a) overcoming biased estimates of R-square particularly when comparing analyses with facets versus factors where more predictors increases the bias; (b) overcoming issues of multiple comparisons when there are many facets that can be compared to factors; (c) some studies only have small sample sizes.

By statistical definition, the population r-square for a factor model is less than or equal to the population r-square for a facet model where factors are defined as a linear function of the facets. Nonetheless, I have not yet read any systematic studies that have provided an unbiased estimate of population r-square in factors versus facets. Having read all the above articles, my hypothesis would be that I would expect an increase in r-square of around 5 to 20 percent, but that's just a rough sense.

References

Ashton, M. C., Jackson, D. N., Paunonen, S. V., Helmes, E., & Rothstein, M. G. (1995). The criterion validity of broad factor scales versus specific facet scales. Journal of Research in Personality, 29(4), 432-442.
Dudley, N. M., Orvis, K. A., Lebiecki, J. E., & Cortina, J. M. (2006). A meta-analytic investigation of conscientiousness in the prediction of job performance: examining the intercorrelations and the incremental validity of narrow traits. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(1), 40.
Ekehammar, B., & Akrami, N. (2007). Personality and prejudice: From Big Five personality factors to facets. Journal of Personality, 75(5), 899-926.
Mershon, B., & Gorsuch, R. L. (1988). Number of factors in the personality sphere: Does increase in factors increase predictability of real-life criteria?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(4), 675.
Paunonen, S. V., & Ashton, M. C. (2001). Big Five factors and facets and the prediction of behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 81(3), 524-539.PDF


Does research support the notion of mimicry building trust?

A good primer on the psychological effects of mimicry is the review by Chartrand and Lakin (2013), who define mimicry as "the automatic imitation of gestures, postures, mannerisms, and other motor movements" (also see this earlier question).

They cite several findings suggesting that mimicry indeed contributes to positive relationships between people. For example, people being mimicked become more prosocial to the mimicker, as expressed in increased liking, empathy, helping behavior, and felt closeness. Chartrand and Lakin describe mimicry as a kind of "social glue" bringing people together.

More specifically with regard to your question, several studies are in line with the idea that mimicry increases trust.

For example, as per Chartrand and Lakin (2013):

  Van Swol (2003) had a confederate, while trying to change the participant’s opinion on a topic, imitate his or her behaviors (or
  not). Later, participants reported that they perceived the mimicking confederate as more knowledgeable and persuasive, even though
  they did not ultimately change their opinion on the topics. In a twist on this, Bailenson & Yee (2005) found that participants liked a computer avatar that mimicked their head movements more than one that didn’t, and
  were more persuaded by its arguments.

They also cite studies that measured trust specifically:

  Trusting behaviors tend to increase after a person has been mimicked. For example, mimicked participants seem more willing than those who were not mimicked to divulge personal information to strangers, even when that
  information could be embarrassing (Gueguen et al. 2012). According to Maddux et al. (2008), mimicry also smoothes the progress of negotiations. They instructed negotiators to either mimic or not mimic partners’ behavior and later assessed mimicry’s impact on negotiation outcomes. Mimickers experienced higher individual and dyadic gains and were more willing to come to an agreement with others regarding a difficult decision, and the
  relationship was mediated by interpersonal trust (see also Swaab et al. 2011)

Does mimicry always work?

NLP holds that Mirroring is a powerful technique. Note, however, that the cited findings only document modest mean differences, showing that mimicry can have an effect. Nevertheless, the size and importance of this effect may still be questioned.

Furthermore, under some circumstances mimicry may not work or even backfire.

Lakin and Chartrand (2013):

  It turns out that one does need to mimic the “right” people to enjoy the positive consequences of mimicry. Recent research has found that mimicking may backfire (in terms of public opinion about one’s social competence) if
  someone mimics an unfriendly person. After watching someone mimicking unfriendly behaviors, people thought the mimicker was less socially competent than someone who mimicked a friendly partner or someone who mimicked no one (Kavanagh et al. 2011).

In addition mimicry may work less well if people mimic outgroup members, if one has to mimic nonaffiliative expressions (e.g., anger), or when people have a proself mindset or have high levels of social anxiety (Chartrand & Lakin, 2013).

Finally, in some situations, complementary (doing the opposite) rather than imitative behavior may increase liking. For example, Tiedens and Fragale (2003) asked confederates to mimic or complement bodily postures of dominance or submission (using an expanded or constricted posture). Participants whose behavior was complemented (the confederate showed a submissive posture when the participant was behaving in a dominant way, or vice versa) liked the confederate more. Thus, in power or status relationships mimicry may have different effects.

References

Chartrand, T. L., & Lakin, J. L. (2013). The antecedents and consequences of human behavioral mimicry. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 285–308. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143754


Evidence for EFT (Emotional Freedom technique) for PTSD

The meta-analysis on anxiety referred to by Church, D. et al. (2018) was performed by Sebastian & Nelms, (2017) was published in a questionable journal.

This critique by Ferrara found that

  four studies suffered from two fatal flaws: they had a small number of participants, and EFT was compared to waitlist controls that did nothing. These studies really tell us nothing about the effectiveness of EFT and they do not validate the theory behind it.

  Small, biased studies without comparison groups from one group of researchers with a financial interest in EFT have shown the treatment is associated with improved PTSD symptoms. However, when it has been compared to CBT, there are no differences between the approaches.

https://healthybutsmart.com/emotional-freedom-technique/

Church, D., Stapleton, P., Mollon, P., Feinstein, D., Boath, E., Mackay, D., & Sims, R. (2018, December). Guidelines for the Treatment of PTSD Using Clinical EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). In Healthcare (Vol. 6, No. 4, p. 146). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.

Sebastian, B., & Nelms, J. (2017). The Effectiveness of Emotional Freedom Techniques in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Meta-Analysis. EXPLORE, 13(1), 16–25.


Why is it easier to fall asleep in the dark?

It's probably more accurate to say that it's more difficult to fall asleep in the light because the circadian rhythm is directly regulated by ambient light. Our retinas contain a small amount of cells specialized for detecting ambient light levels, and these are directly connected to the brain center which controls the circadian rhythm. As our eyelids don't completely block out ambient light, and the light which passes through and hits these specialized cells begins tampering with our circadian rhythm, it becomes more difficult to fall asleep.

Background
The Suprachiasmatic Nucleus
The reason is a small nucleus above the optic chiasm in the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), found across many different species. Comprising only approximately 20,000 neurons, the human SCN is nonetheless responsible for regulating a vast number of circadian functions over the entire body. The SCN is, for all intents and purposes, the pacemaker of the brain, and it runs on light: if ambient light is detected, then it must be because it is time to be awake, and the circadian rhythm is slowly adjusted accordingly.

(Suprachiasmatic nucleus. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Retinohypothalamic Tract
In mammals, the SCN receives input through the retinohypothalamic tract, which originates at a set of special photosensitive ganglion cells on the retina. They contribute to regulating the circadian rhythm by expressing melanopsin (Berson, Dunn and Takao, 2002). These highly specialized, sensitive and non-image-forming retinal neurons evolved to detect an environment's ambient light levels. They are most sensitive to blue light wavelengths of 488 nanometers (al Enazi et al., 2011), which may in part explain why users of electronic monitors sometimes report difficulties falling asleep.

(Effects of light exposure on the mammalian retinohypothalamic tract. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A critical note
These fairly recent discoveries, while published in top-tier journals and widely hailed, have generated some controversy. Due to the ethical difficulties in deploying a methodology consisting mostly of disabling cones and rods in human samples, most of the evidence has come from animal models. At least one study, however, managed to discover patients naturally lacking cones and rods due to a rare illness, and they did report support for the SCN account in humans (Zaidi et al., 2007):

We examined the spectral sensitivity of non-image-forming responses in two profoundly blind subjects lacking functional rods and cones (one male, 56 yr old; one female, 87 yr old). In the male subject, we found that short-wavelength light preferentially suppressed melatonin, reset the circadian pacemaker, and directly enhanced alertness compared to 555 nm exposure, which is the peak sensitivity of the photopic visual system. In an action spectrum for pupillary constriction, the female subject exhibited a peak spectral sensitivity (λmax) of 480 nm, matching that of the pRGCs but not that of the rods and cones. This subject was also able to correctly report a threshold short-wavelength stimulus (∼480 nm) but not other wavelengths. Collectively these data show that pRGCs contribute to both circadian physiology and rudimentary visual awareness in humans and challenge the assumption that rod- and cone-based photoreception mediate all “visual” responses to light.

References

al Enezi, J., Revell, V., Brown, T., Wynne, J., Schlangen, L., & Lucas, R. (2011). A “melanopic” spectral efficiency function predicts the sensitivity of melanopsin photoreceptors to polychromatic lights. Journal of biological rhythms, 26(4), 314-323.
Berson, D. M., Dunn, F. A., & Takao, M. (2002). Phototransduction by retinal ganglion cells that set the circadian clock. Science, 295(5557), 1070-1073.
Zaidi, F. H., Hull, J. T., Peirson, S. N., Wulff, K., Aeschbach, D., Gooley, J. J., ... & Lockley, S. W. (2007). Short-wavelength light sensitivity of circadian, pupillary, and visual awareness in humans lacking an outer retina. Current Biology, 17(24), 2122-2128.


We don't have a well tested or accepted model of how specific items are encoded in the cortex, so text to brain is still far off. However, it is possible to send information to the brain.

Ramirez et al. 2013. Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus

This study (in mice) involved creating a false sense of fear associated with a particular context. This implanted information is much higher level than just text, but it is still information.


Why is the sound of running water soothing?

There cannot be a single answer to this question which would be entirely correct. Different theoretical approaches to psychology will yield different explanations. This is evident from the other answers in this question (some which you provided) which all stem from different theoretical accounts:

Evolutionary Psychology: Species evolving around water
Developmental Psychology: Prenatal development in womb
Sensory and Perception Psychology: White noise account
Behaviorism, specifically Classical Conditioning: We develop a learnt association between the sound of water and relaxation.
A prediction based on a cognitive science approach is less clear in my opinion. It would likely stem from a combination of sensory arguments (white noise) and from neural networks of association.

Why do we see so many different accounts for the same phenomena? Firstly, it is difficult to produce a falsifiable explanation for why such a perverse qualitative effect exists. In order for any given explanation to be scientifically valid, it has to be able to be tested. The explanations provided so far do not generate meaningful hypotheses which we can test using experimental studies. Therefore, it is difficult to form a single model accounting for why we find water sounds relaxing. Consequently, we see a range of explanations with little evidence for any of them (they are all just untested just-so stories). Note, even some of the better responses, such as this one (linked above), do not provide falsifiable or testable answers.

A second reason we see such variation could be that there is no simple answer. The "true" answer probably will draw upon a wide range of reasons for this phenomena. In this way, perhaps the best explanation at this point is that there are a variety of reasons why certain individuals find water sounds relaxing (those aforementioned). Although perhaps not the most satisfying conclusion - it is likely the most accurate.


Does an exceptional working memory inhibit intelligence?

The conclusions drawn in Inoue & Matsuzawa's (2007) study, which seems to be available here, are suspect. First off, the sample sizes (6 chimp, 9 human subjects) are simply too small to draw good inferences about working memory, at least about human working memory, but as I imagine chimps are somewhat expensive subjects, c'est la vie.

Secondly, and more worryingly, the study design itself seems to have a real problem: Matsuzawa does not reveal how many hours of practice either group of subjects have had, but presumably, the humans have not had any practice, while it is explicitly noted that the chimps have had some. The mother-offspring pairs practiced the numerals task from offspring age 4, and then the block task from offspring age 5. Even if we ignore the sample size problems and take the reported results at face value, we are still left with a situation where the mother chimp Ai underperformed the humans, who in turn underperformed the offspring chimp Ayumu--also suggestive of a training effect.

This strikes me as a problem for Matsuzawa's claim, because we know that the ultimate limit of task-specific human memory span is very high compared to a task-general baseline. For instance, Ericsson, Chase and Faloon (1980) reported a case study of a subject who increased their memory span from 7 to 79 in 230 hours of practice, and one need look no further than the world memory records to see that the lack of control for practice seriously undermines Matsuzawa's claim about this unexpected "relationship" between chimp and human WMC.

A more restrained interpretation of the evidence presented in the article would suggest that sufficiently well-trained chimps can outperform untrained humans on the particular task. Any conjecturing about "evolutionary trade-offs" on the basis of these findings seem unwarranted to me, but that would have been the case even if these results had been ironclad.

References

Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W. G., & Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208(4448), 1181–1182. doi:10.1126/science.7375930
Inoue, S., & Matsuzawa, T. (2007). Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees. Current Biology, 17(23), R1004-R1005.


Is short-term memory theoretically possible to with spiking neurons?

While we don't entirely know how all aspects of working memory operate, experiments show that a subset of cells in the brain exhibit persistent activity during working memory tasks.
Here's an example from a review by Curtis & D'Esposito:

This is a task in panel (a) where there is a cue presented briefly (marked by "C"), and then the monkey needs to remember the cue (during the time marked by "D"), and finally at time R the targets appear and the monkey can make a response.
We see in spiking recordings from monkeys that there are cells in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that are activated not only by the cue and during the response, but they have persistent activity during the delay period. In human studies we can't ordinarily place electrodes but part (b) shows a similar study using fMRI, and the colored areas on the brain indicate brain areas that demonstrated more blood flow (marking metabolism) during the delay period, which includes areas of the same brain region as the monkey experiments.
The explanations are recurrent network activity and bistability: a population of cells that is excited can continue to excite each other and remain active until stopped (see for example attractor networks for a conceptual idea), as well as bistability in individual neurons where a neuron that reaches threshold continues to fire tonically rather than firing a single action potential, until firing is ceased via inhibition. Camperi and Wang 1998 is an excellent, clear review of these concepts with a straightforward mathematical approach to how you can model this in silico. It's probably more efficient to start from here rather than reinventing it on your own.
I also recommend other papers by XJ Wang who has done extensive work in this area. I also recommend you look at phase-space diagrams which can help conceptualize dynamic systems with stable properties (and which network parameters are necessary for stability), they come up a lot in theoretical neuroscience. Dayan and Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience is also a good starting point if you can find a copy.

Camperi, M., & Wang, X. J. (1998). A model of visuospatial working memory in prefrontal cortex: recurrent network and cellular bistability. Journal of computational neuroscience, 5(4), 383-405.
Curtis, C. E., & D'Esposito, M. (2003). Persistent activity in the prefrontal cortex during working memory. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(9), 415-423.


Can a person with multiple personality disorder have one of their personality based on a real person?

The article you link to is fairly comprehensive, and probably already answers your questions.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is no longer referred to as multiple personality disorder.  This is a highly misunderstood disorder, and involves many possible symptoms besides the appearance of "alters".  "The diagnosis itself remains controversial among mental health professionals."
"It is now acknowledged that these dissociated states are not fully mature personalities, but rather they represent a disjointed sense of identity."  This answers your question about how close a "clone" personality would be to the real thing - ie, only in a limited sense.
Similarly, note that in most cases this disorder manifests in childhood "(usually before age 9)".  While I don't doubt that "alters" are modelled on people (fictional and real) that the patient has observed in their past, any actor will tell you that creating a "clone" personality takes a lot of work, and is likely far too much to expect of a child, let alone one suffering from the extreme level of abuse or neglect that typically initiates this disorder.
"Sometimes the alters are imaginary people; sometimes they are animals."  So while I can't say for sure if it's possible for an "alter" to be an imitation of a real person, it's certainly not common.
Moreover, it is believed that "The distinct personalities may serve diverse roles in helping the individual cope with life's dilemmas."  In other words, "alters" are formed to avoid stress, not increase it, so it wouldn't be in the patient's interest to imitate a real person.
Finally, "Environmental triggers or life events cause a sudden shift from one alter or personality to another," so this is the likely outcome should a "clone" alter meet its inspiration.


How to measure and quantify concentration or focus?

Short answer
Attention can be quantified with a sustained attention to response task.

Background
I think with focus or concentration you mean sustained attention to a certain task. A sustained attention to response task (SART) (Silverstein & Palumbo, 1998) could be helpful to you (here is a free PsychoPy script). SART seems to be a reliable measure for attention (Smilek et al., 2010).

Basically SART consists of a set of stimuli (e.g., simple shapes) and the subject is asked to repeatedly give a response (e.g. a button press) when a certain event occurs (e.g. a shape changes color). Reductions in correct rates, increased lapse rates, and/or decreased reaction times all may signal reduced attention to the task.

Admittedly I am not too familiar with these tests, but I do have a lot of experience with people loosing attention during tedious psychophysical tasks :) I hope the links and references provided here may be of further help.

References
- Silverstein & Palumbo, Computers in Human Behavior (1998); 14(3): 463-75
- Smilek et al., Neuropsychologia (2010); 48(9): 2564-70