Establishing personality from shape AND color preferences

The question made me think instantly of the Kiki/Bouba effect. This effect is seen when people are to ascribe the name Kiki to point shapes and and Bouba to rounded shapes (Fig. 1); the overwhelming majority calls the star Kiki and the blob Bouba. One hypothesis is that Bouba is associated with the round shape because a more rounded shape is made by our mouths when Bouba is said. The mouth is more angular shaped when we say "Kiki." Additionally, "K" is a harder-sounding letter than "B." Those who use the modern Latin alphabet may also be visually swayed: the written letters "K" and "B" are sharp and rounded, respectively (Scientific American, November 2012).

Follow-up studies on this effect have revealed that people

Associate between femaleness and round shapes, and maleness and sharp shapes.
associate adjectives previously judged to be either descriptive of a figuratively 'round' or a 'sharp' personality with names containing either round-or sharp-sounding phonemes, respectively.

The authors conclude that sound symbolic associations extend to existing lexical stimuli, and that form and meaning are non-arbitrarily mapped (Pexman & Sidhu, 2014).

Reference
- Pexman & Sidhu, Canadian J Exp Psych (2014); 68(4): 253-4

Fig. 1. Kiki and Bouba - which is which? source: Wikipedia


Short answer
Brain waves are not electromagnetic waves.
Long answer
Measured brain activity, as you already mentioned, is the result of individual neurons firing. The activity exists, in fact, of two parts. First of all, there are the action potentials (APs). APs are current flow within a neuron from one end to the other. The magnitude of these APs (and the summation of many) is so low however, that it is barely measurable.
The actual brain activity we can measure is the result of the second way of signal conduction: post-synaptic potentials as a result of neurotransmitters. (Pyramidal) Neurons communicate with each other through neurotransmitters, which are released from multiple synapses and flow to the axon of the next neuron. The release of the neurotransmitters causes a much larger potential difference that is conducted through different tissues (e.g. bones and skin). The activity that we measure with EEG is thus only the result of potential difference of the pyramidal neurons. Due to how electrical fields work, we are only able to measure the neurons oriented in right angles to the surface of the scalp (see the right picture).

A magnetic field cán also be measured though, but this is in fact the result of the flow in current. If electricity flows through a loop, a magnetic field is generated. Moreover, if there is a magnetic field, electrical current will be generated. This is how MEG works. If there is an electrical current, and you place these loops around the head, the magnetic field will be "caught". Then, in turn, this magnetic field will generated electricity in the MEG recording equipment, thereby recording electrical activity in the brain (See left part of the picture, there are two loops where the magnetic field goes through). The magnetic fields are orthogonal to the electrical fields (look for the Right-hand rule) and neurons that lie parallel to the scalp are more easily measurable. EEG and MEG complement each other thus, and combining them greatly improves localization of activity.
This is a quick and dirty explanation. For a better one, you may want to read the book of Luck: An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique (2014), which explains it really nicely.


A few learned works on friendship:

Bell, S., & Coleman, S. (Eds.). (2020). The anthropology of friendship. Routledge. ISBN 9781000320558

Berndt, T. J. (2002). Friendship quality and social development. Current directions in psychological science, 11(1), 7-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00157   http://onemvweb.com/sources/sources/Friendship_Quality.pdf

Spencer, L., & Pahl, R. (2006). Rethinking friendship: Hidden solidarities today. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691127422

Berndt (2002) observed that friendships can be classified as prized or troubled. The characteristics of which are:

Prized friendships: intimacy, loyalty, supporting, helping, sharing, praising, encouraging. and bolstering.

Troubled friendships: conflicts, dominating, and rivalry.

Berndt's analysis can be summarised visually according to the atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour (Mobbs, 2020):

Interestingly (but perhaps not surprisingly), friendship appears to closely align to the Agreeableness dimension of the Five Factor Model.
References

Mobbs AED (2020) An atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227877 [Post author = article author]


Proportion of cortex dedicated for vision and hearing

20-30% vision. See Sheth & Young (2016) which cites Van Essen (2003).
27% vision, 8% auditory (Van Essen, 2003)
I have seen some earlier references that say 50%. I think this derives from two factors. First, it is 50% in Macaque (see above ref 1).  Second, my feeling (I haven't dug into this in enough detail to conclusively state it, so please don't quote me on this!) is that earlier studies on humans were more speculative and tended to follow that 50% as a best guess in absence of direct measurements.
As some of the above answers point out, one needs to be careful in defining what part of the brain and what vision means.  If one were to include the subcortical structures (i.e., amygdala, superior colliculus, pulvina, LGN) the estimate of total brain (not just the cerebrum cortex) would be different.

Sheth, B. R., & Young, R. (2016). Two visual pathways in primates based on sampling of space: exploitation and exploration of visual information. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 10, 37.
Van Essen, D. C. (2003). Organization of visual areas in macaque and human cerebral cortex. The visual neurosciences, 1, 507-521.


Beyond a certain level, is reading comprehension affected more by psychological intuition than by verbal intelligence?

The assessment of reading comprehension is not my main area of interest, but some of the many articles on the topic of assessment of reading comprehension may be reflevant. See "measurement of reading comprehension" on Google Scholar (e.g., a couple of the pdfs of reviews here, and here).

This entry in the literacy encyclopedia on assessment of reading comprehension might be a good starting place.
The article has a the following quote of a definition of reading comprehension:

  The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2009 Reading Framework Committee defines reading   comprehension as ...“an
  active and complex process that involves understanding    written
  text, developing and interpreting meaning, and using meaning as
  appropriate to   type of text, purpose and situation (National Center
  for Educational Statistics, 2005, p.    2).

Here are a few general points:

Multiple choice testing has the benefit of being reliable given a sufficient number of items. Of course, questions could be raised over the breadth of what it measures (i.e., validity issues).
Familiarity with the content should increase reading comprehension. Thus, to build on your question, a philosophy student should comprehend more Kant, than a non-philosophy student holding general reading ability constant. A similar argument could be made where the reader has insider knowledge about what the author is trying to say.
Some texts are more difficult to comprehend in general, whether it be because the text is poorly written (e.g., grammar, spelling, stylistic issues) or because of the complexity of the material.

Implication of the Rasch model to questions of measurement:

A basic model of responding to multiple choice questions based on Item Response Theory (IRT) is the Rasch model. It basically says that the probability of an individual getting an item correct is a function of their ability and item difficulty.

So according to this model, increasing the difficulty of the reading comprehension items would affect all individuals roughly equally. As can be shown with IRT the reliability of measurement can be increased by setting the difficulty of items to a level that discriminates between individuals. I.e., if items are too difficult, everyone gets the item wrong, and we don't learn much; likewise, if the item is too easy, everyone gets the item right, and we don't learn much.
Relating this to your question, including poorly worded writing or really difficult subject matters would only increase difficulty, which would not directly affect measurement of individual differences.

However, the Rasch model is generally simplification of the real world. In general, I think it takes you a long way in understanding the factors driving test performance. However, in some cases you might have reading items which some individuals understand better than others and this factor is unrelated to ability (e.g., a reading that embodies cultural assumptions shared by only some individuals). It is for this reason that reading comprehension tests should probably avoid content where a subgroup is likely to possess substantially more domain specific knowledge on the topic.


Are there rule of thumb regarding sample size when neuroscientific measurements are used?

The minimum sample size required to plausibly reject the null hypothesis depends not on the area of study (e.g. neuroscience), but on your study design and the statistical tests you perform.

What you need to do is a power analysis. Questions regarding power analysis have been asked on Cross Validated. You may want to read up on power analysis in your favourite statistics textbook and, if you have questions, ask them there.


Perhaps check out the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire which is designed to measures dysfunctional beliefs related to OCD. There are several papers that examine the factor structure, and perfectionism is typically seen as one of the major aspects of obsessive beliefs.

However, it seems to be a particular form of maladaptive perfectionism. See these perfectionism items from the OBQ:

  In order to be a worthwhile person, I must be perfect at everything I do
  If I can’t do something perfectly, I shouldn’t do it at all
  Even minor mistakes mean a job is not complete
  For me, things are not right if they are not perfect
  For me, making a mistake is as bad as failing completely.
  I must keep working until it’s done exactly right.

Thus, this is more than just doing your best to achieve good outcomes.

References

Moulding, R., Anglim, J., Nedeljkovic, M., Doron, G., Kyrios, M., & Ayalon, A. (2011). The Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire (OBQ):Examination in non-clinical samples and development of a short version. Assessment, 18, 357-374.
Myers, S. G., Fisher, P. L., & Wells, A. (2008). Belief domains
of the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire-44 (OBQ-44) and their
specific relationship with obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22, 475-484.
Obsessive Compulsive Cognitions Working Group. (2001). Development and initial validation of the obsessive beliefs questionnaire and the interpretation of intrusions inventory. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39, 987-1006.
Obsessive Compulsive Cognitions Working Group. (2005). Psy- chometric validation of the obsessive belief questionnaire and interpretation of intrusions inventory—Part 2: Factor analyses and testing of a brief version. Behaviour Research and Ther- apy, 43, 5127-1542.


Where are intrinsically bursting neurons found in the mammalian brain?

One very notable example of intrinsically bursting neurons are the thalamocortical relay cells.  They have a hyperpolarization-activated calcium channel which leads to periodic bursting at delta frequency.  The hyperpolarization activation allows these neurons to switch from tonic firing (esp. during wakefulness) to burst firing (esp. during sleep).  The bursting of these neurons has been associated with schizophrenia (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2802545/) and have even been fingered as the root of consciousness (see the work of Rodolfo Llinas).


How to study the effect of sustained exercise and sport on well-being?

Just to give you a few ideas. The ideas are ordered from better to worse. They are also mostly ordered from serious and expensive research to less serious and cheap research.

Randomised control trial:
If you are really interested in causality, you would randomly allocate a large group of people to either and exercise or one or more control conditions (e.g., no exercise; alternative activity; etc.) . You would then use various well-validated measures to measure the dependent variable of interest. For example, if you are interested in self-esteem, then you might get self-report measures using something like the Rosenberg Self-esteem scale. An even better study would measure a range of related dependent variables (reports by others of well-being; physical health; other life outcomes of interest).

It sounds like you are interested in longitudinal trajectories of this effect, so you'd want to measure these outcome variables on multiple occasions (e.g., baseline, 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, etc.).

You'd probably also want to do some kind of intention to treat analysis. Basically, there are two questions. What is the effect of the intervention for those who actually follow the protocol, and what is the effect of the intervention for those who are assigned to it but may or may not actually engage in the exercise?

One sample longitudinal study:
A simpler design would just be the same as above but without the control group. You'd have more threats to causal inference, but nonetheless, results would still be informative to the effect of exercise on self-esteem.

Single participant longitudinal study:
It seems like this is what you are talking about. There are many issues with this design. Do the results generalise to other people? Is the increase due to other factors in the person's life? That said, if this is just for hypothesis generation or exploring the ideas, it might be interesting.

Qualitative versus quantitative measurement:
Quantitative measurement of self-esteem is generally better if you are trying to test formal hypotheses about change.
Qualitative methods (e.g., asking open ended questions) is often more useful in generating hypotheses and explanations for the obtained results. That said, much more subjectivity can enter interpretation.

As an aside, it is interesting that the vast majority of infomercials selling exercise equipment rely on the cheapest and worst design: qualitative single observation measurement (i.e., anecdotes).


@Ana is basically correct (possibly baring the fact that the P3 is famous for being latency variant, not stable at 300msec), and I really don't want to contradict her or steal her checkmark, but since it's recent and interesting, I would like to point to some recent research by O'Connell and colleagues looking at correlations and similarities between the two measures, as the primary EEG indexes of attention and evidence accumulation. Incidentally, it also shows the differences in topography, polarity and size for the two, as well as the slight dissociation in time course. (Note also that the P3 is a distinct, monophasic peak - it has an amplitude; the SSVEP is a periodic pattern, strictly speaking, it rather has power.)

In the following picture, the close correspondence between the SSVEP and the P3 is demonstrated; see the figure caption below.

  (a) Target contrast reduction time course. (b) Grand-average reaction time (RT) distribution (19 subjects). Single trials were sorted by reaction time and divided into three equal-sized bins. (c) Neural signals undergoing gradual changes on the timescale of the physical contrast change, aligned to stimulus onset (left) and response (right). Vertical dashed lines denote mean reaction time. Markers running along the bottom of each plot indicate time points at which a linear regression of signal amplitude onto reaction time reached significance (P < 0.05). (d) The cumulative sum of SSVEP divergence from baseline provided a better fit for the dynamics of the LHB and CPP signals than the raw SSVEP amplitude. To facilitate visualization of the comparison, we baseline-subtracted and inverted SSVEP amplitude. LHB was transformed for each participant so that it reflected the percentage decrease from baseline, then inverted. (e) Single-trial surface plots showing the temporal relationship between each neural signal (normalized relative to each individual's baseline average) and target detection latency (curved black line). Single-trial SSVEP, LHB and CPP signals were pooled across participants, sorted by reaction time and smoothed over bins of 50 trials with a Gaussian-weighted moving average using the EEGLAB toolbox38. The latency of action execution was closely tied to that of the two decision signals, but was less closely related to the sensory evidence signal. (f) Signal scalp topographies, all with pretarget baseline subtracted. Color bars in e and f represent amplitudes.


Neurotransmitter based imaging techniques

I found an example of a system that researchers are aiming to use in the future for determining the level of neurotransmitter activity in the brain using MRI.  You were on the right track with the utility of hemoglobin.  The molecule used is somewhat similar.  To understand how the probes were generated requires a bit of a biological detour.

There are enzymes in the body known as P450 cytochromes, so named because they were observed as absorbing light in the 450 nm range.  They are membrane bound (e.g., in the mitochondria) and one of their primary purposes is to carry out monooxygenase reactions, and liver-based P450s are responsible much of the drug metabolism that goes on in the body.  So, different classes of these enzymes have a high affinity for certain molecules.  The most important characteristic that the P450s possess is a heme group, which is paramagnetic, and will produce a signal in an MRI.

These P450 enzymes are also found in bacteria, which can be readily used as a test bed due to their rapid cell division.  What these scientists have done is repeatedly mutated bacteria and tested the affinity of the P450s of the resulting mutants for various molecules (in this case serotonin and dopamine).

So, in retaining a culture of the bacteria, scientists can mass produce the mutated heme groups from the bacterial P450s.  Presumably once the sequence of the subunit is determined, it could be created using standard techniques.

Some challenges remain.  Primarily, the probes will have to be checked for safety, and measures will have to be taken to make them into robust MRI contrast agents, and ensure that they can localize and persist in the brain for the duration of testing.  Presumably, the proper correlations between strength of signal and local transmitter concentration can be established with in vitro studies.  It sounds like we're fairly close to non-invasive methods of measuring neurotransmitter levels.

Reproduced from here

  Brustad, E.M., Lelyveld, V.S., et al (2012). Structure-guided directed evolution of highly selective P450-based magnetic resonance imaging sensors for dopamine and serotonin.  Journal of Molecular Biology, in press, doi.


Can the mind affect the physical brain? - a simple thought experiment

The short answer is no, this doesn't violate the law of cause and effect because the mind itself is a physical entity. Your thought experiment hinges on the debate of materialism (the mind is a physical thing) versus dualism (the mind is a different kind of thing than physical things). Most cognitive scientists believe that materialism is the correct view.


What is the reward mechanism for eating spicy foods?

Rozin (1996) provides an introduction to the psychology of food.
Rozin and Schiller (1980) present a study on the acquisition of preferences for chili peppers.

In the abstract, they write:

  Interviews, observations, and measurements were carried out in both
  Mexico and the United States. Exposure to gradually increasing levels
  of chili in food seems to be a sufficient condition for preference
  development. Chili likers are not insensitive to the irritation that it
  produces. They come to like the same burning sensation that deters
  animals and humans that dislike chili; there is a clear hedonic shift.
  This could be produced by association with positive events, including
  enhancement of the taste of bland foods, postingestional effects, or
  social rewards. It is also possible that the initial negative response
  to chili pepper is essential for the eventual liking. Chili stimulates
  an innate sensory "'warning" system but is not harmful. The enjoyment
  of the irritation may result from the user's appreciation that the
  sensation and the body's defensive reaction to it are harmless. Eating
  of chili, riding on roller coasters, taking very hot baths, and many
  other human activities can be considered instances of thrill seeking
  or enjoyment of "'constrained risks.

The paper also present research for and against desensitisation processes, although they note that this still requires some general rewarding quality to chilis.

  Chili preference might be related to receptor desensitization.
  However, there would have to be positive features of chili that
  support a preference once the desensitization took place; otherwise,
  desensitization would lead to neutral responses. There is some reason
  to believe that desensitization to capsaicin could be a factor in
  human chili ingestion. High concentrations of capsaicin placed on the
  skin of humans or rats produce drops in sensitivity to subsequent
  applications of capsaicin that last for hours up to days after the
  initial treatment (Jancs6, 1960). Systemic injections of high levels
  of capsaicin into rats and guinea pigs produce months-long complete
  desensitization to the effects of capsaicin and other chemical
  irritants. Desensitized rats do not respond (as with paw wiping) to
  irritating solutions of capsaicin or ammonia placed in their eyes
  (Jancs6- Gfibor & Szolcs~myi, 1969)

References

Rozin, P. (1996). Towards a psychology of food and eating: From motivation to module to model to marker, morality, meaning, and metaphor. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5(1), 18-24.
Rozin, P., & Schiller, D. (1980). The nature and acquisition of a preference for chili pepper by humans. Motivation and Emotion, 4(1), 77-101.


How would a psychopath deem their actions?

No, usually they are smart and know that their actions are considered morally incorrect, but they just don't care.


It sounds like an aspect of extraversion. I.e., loud and fast talking sounds like gregariousness and assertiveness.  In general, extraverts are also more active and expressive.
For example, the NEO-PI-R has facets of extraversion as follows:
(E1) Warmth (E2)
Gregariousness (E3) Assertiveness (E4) Activity (E5)
Excitement-Seeking (E6) Positive Emotions
Fast talking might also be linked to intelligence.


What color is this dress? -- And why do some see it as white and gold and others see it as black and blue?

My hypothesis: The world accidentally stumbled upon the first (to my knowledge) bi-stable color illusion

Here is an example of bistable illusion:

This bistable illusion involves the perception of motion. Is the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? The deal is that the image is actually ambiguous. But you can't possible perceive both clockwise or counterclockwise motion at once, so you are automatically drawn to one and it's hard to switch off to the other.

And here is an example of a color illusion:

Amazingly the "blue" in the left cube and the "yellow" squares in the right cube are both the same color - grey! (Go ahead and take out your RGB color meter and see for yourself.) And the effect here is caused by the "context" of the color placed over the images of the cubes.

I'm thinking that somehow an ambiguous background to that dress image and the possibility for a fabric that has a sheen, is leading us quickly come to the subconscious conclusion that this is either a black/blue dress under bright yellow-tinted light or a gold/white dress that is in a bluish shadow. And whatever conclusion we start with is so strong that we can't break from it or see it any other way.


Emotional detachment as a reaction can be considered an aggressive behavior?

It is not clear the context in which you expect an answer. For example, should it be considered from a legal, ethical, survival, or psychological standpoint? I would expect the answers aimed at different philosophies to differ quite a bit. Let me address a few of your questions, at least as I understood them in your posting.

Can the person being "ignored" feel impotent as a result of this "silent treatment"? Of course this can happen. However, this reaction is not something that should be blamed on the person doing the ignoring. After all, if you look at someone funny and they throw a tantrum, is it your fault they cannot control themselves?

"Can emotional detachment be considered as a dysfunctional behavior for the victim of a verbal aggression?" Dysfunctional is not a term that can be legitimately applied here without context. There are many cases where ignoring a verbally abusive person can be extremely useful or even necessary to carry on with daily activities. For example, if people talking on forums got caught up responding to trolls, they would not be able to have reasonable discussions with non-trolls. A troll is a perfect example of a verbally abusive person for which silent treatment is clearly not "dysfunctional". The key thing you have to understand here is the intent of the verbal abuse. If the abuser is simply trying to reason or convey a message, with no hidden agenda, then reasoning in response may be fine. However, if the verbal abuser is socially sadistic, such as a troll, then the worst thing you can do is to get emotional in response to his or her provocation. After all, that would be accepting the damage they are trying to inflict for their sadistic pleasure.

Should a person "demand empathy" instead of ignoring the abuser? Successfully demanding and receiving empathy requires two things: (1) You must be deserving of empathy, which is highly subjective, and (2) the abuser must be able to feel empathy. The former requirement could necessitate skills in persuasion, which not everyone has. Furthermore, if you are being verbally abused because you legitimately did something wrong, you would need to show that you understand your wrongdoing and truly intend to make things right. The latter requirement depends on the personality and mental state of the abuser. A psychopath, for example, would not be able to feel empathy, so there would be essentially no point in trying to demand empathy from them. In fact, it would be dysfunctional to demand empathy from a psychopath. Such would be like demanding a shower head to dry you.

"[Can] emotional detachment can be considered hostile / aggressive?" Hostile perhaps, but I cannot see it being "aggressive" since it is in the very definition of the word that force be involved, which clearly is not the case in reactionary abstinence. Sure, there is such as thing as "passive aggressive", but the term itself is practically oxymoron. A more correct term would be "passive hostility".


Body Language: Why do we give each other the grumpy/frowning fake smile?

Since this (excellent) question has been around for a while without any answer, I thought I'd give my two cents.

I think we do this as a gesture of respect to the other person. We may fear that if we don't acknowledge them at all, it will come off as rude or arrogant. Maybe we fear that if we don't even look at the other person, we're basically pretending as if they're not there. So we want to acknowledge them in some way. However, they are often a total stranger, so we may feel that saying "hi" or anything like that, is a bit over the top. (Sometimes we may actually say "hi" combined with the frown, though.)

So, as you suggest in the question itself, it's a way to acknowledge the other person.

Now, why not give an authentic smile? Well, because it's a little bit difficult to give a real smile without actually being happy about something. If you see a dear friend for the first time in months, you'll probably give a real smile, because you are genuinely happy to see them. When you meet a total stranger, the truth is that that person doesn't really mean much to you. You might not really feel that you have anything to smile about.

Have you ever tried to smile for a photograph, when you're actually not very happy? It's not easy. The smile often looks inauthentic. Similarly here, we try our best to greet the passing person with respect, but it's not that easy to smile authentically.

Not wanting to look like a fake smiling clown, we may not even try that hard. The other person knows that we're just trying to acknowledge them. They're not looking to give us an Oscar award anyway. And we know that they know that.

If we were to make eye contact with them without altering our facial expression at all, we might end up looking a bit mad. (Imagine it, you cross paths with someone, and they just look into your eyes without altering their facial expression at all. Personally, I would be a bit freaked out if that happened.) Most changes in our expression will be better than nothing (except, of course for a downright hostile or angry face). It means we acknowledge that they are there, and we are making an effort to do so.

There's another possible reason: Fear of rejection. We want to acknowledge the person. So why not give them a real smile? Well, what if you do, and they respond with a careful nod, a frown like the ones in OP, or even totally ignore you? (This is quite possible, since it's not that easy to produce a genuine smile.) When you genuinely smile at someone, you are giving a little part of yourself out to them. If they then merely nod at you, or something like that, most people will feel uncomfortable. As if they just gave someone a gift and the other person was uninterested in the gift. I'm not saying this is a reasonable feeling, I'm just saying it's the way people might feel, thus motivating their behavior.


Is there any evidence to support a correlation between how much bodily energy you are using, and how quickly time appears to pass?

There's literature on temporal expansion with vigilance.  Perhaps this might get you started.

Tse, P. U., Intriligator, J., Rivest, J., and Cavanagh, P. (2004). Attention and the subjective expansion of time. Perception & Psychophysics, 66(7):1171–1189.

In this instance they're looking at how odd, unique, or surprising events might increase the amount of attention applied and that those events seem to last longer than othewise very comparable ones.  The literature reviews speaks a bit to what you've asked about.


How to achieve homeostasis and cognitive closure, while living with more infinite unanswered questions and concrete explanations?

Unanswered questions don't necessarily cause cognitive dissonance. Need for closure varies across individuals; some of us don't mind having some (or even many) unanswered questions much at all.

One also moves forward along a path while "looping," and that path isn't necessarily infinite; in fact, it probably isn't for any mortal, practically speaking. For people with relatively low personal need for structure, novelty (and presumably uncertainty) may even be somewhat reassuring when confronting one's mortality (Vess, Routledge, Landau, & Arndt, 2009). Maybe accepting mortality and one's inability to individually pursue the path to completion (regardless of whether completion is possible in any sense) is just another way to not desire the impossible, but it is not impossible to continue the quest for some distance. Depending on what one really wants, not continuing might be a more dissonant alternative to simply continuing as far as one can. If one wants to complete the quest in the sense that one can't, some dissonance may be inevitable; if one wants to participate in the quest without concern for completion, only stopping should cause dissonance with that motive.

Here's an interesting quote from Heflick (2006) relating mortality salience to need for closure:

  Landau and colleagues (2004) found that mortality salience increases desire for clear, well structured information and for paintings that have a clear, coherent meaning (Landau et al., 2006). Further, death salience has been found to increase preference for more cultivated landscapes (Koole & Van den Berg, 2003 [published 2005]), for letter sequences that have clear patterns (e.g., AAAABBBB instead of ABBBAABA; Dechesne & Wigboldus, 2002) and stereotypical individuals (Schimel et al., 1998 [1999 in references]). Lastly, these effects are typically stronger among people that are high in epistemic needs (e.g., Landau et al., 2004), including need for closure (e.g., Schimel et al., 2004 [not sure what is being cited here]).

This evidence further suggests (rather indirectly) that some people do find the the thought of uncertainty troubling in light of a threat to their ability to resolve it, but some people don't mind uncertainty all that much, depending partly on individual differences in need for closure. It might even have something to do with your political preferences (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Jost et al., 2007)!

References

Dechesne, M., & Wigboldus, D. (2002). [Terror management in a minimal worldview paradigm.] Unpublished raw data. [As referenced here with year 2001.]

Heflick, N. A. (2006). Terror management and self-enhancement: The moderating role of self-esteem and need for closure (Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida). Available online, URL: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3005&context=etd. Retrieved January 25, 2014.

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339.

Jost, J. T., Napier, J. L., Thorisdottir, H., Gosling, S. D., Palfai, T. P., & Ostafin, B. (2007). Are needs to manage uncertainty and threat associated with political conservatism or ideological extremity? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(7), 989-1007. Available online, URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6216707_Are_needs_to_manage_uncertainty_and_threat_associated_with_political_conservatism_or_ideological_extremity/file/9fcfd507eeb6a8980d.pdf. Retrieved January 25, 2014.

Koole, S. L., & Van den Berg, A. E. (2005). Lost in the wilderness: Terror management,
action orientation, and nature evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 1014-1028.

Landau, M., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T. & Martens, A. (2006). Windows
into nothingness: Terror management, meaninglessness and negative reactions to modern art.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 879-892.

Landau, M., Johns, M., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Martens, A., Goldenberg, J.L. &
Solomon, S. (2004). A function of form: Terror management and the structuring of the social world. Journal of Personality of Social Psychology, 87, 190-210.

Schimel, J., Simon, L., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Waxmonski, J., &
Arndt, J. (1999). Support for a functional perspective on stereotypes: Evidence
that mortality salience enhances stereotypic thinking and preferences. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 905-926.

Vess, M., Routledge, C., Landau, M. J., & Arndt, J. (2009). The dynamics of death and meaning: the effects of death-relevant cognitions and personal need for structure on perceptions of meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(4), 728. Available online, URL: http://existentialandselfprocesseslab.yolasite.com/resources/Vess_et_al_2009.JPSP.deathmeaning.pdf. Retrieved January 25, 2014.


Why do we say, "Oh!" when we are surprised?

This is a hard question because there are probably many different (but not equally valid) answers.

From my perspective (Barrett & Russell, 2015), there are a couple of things to think about.

How often do you actually say "Oh!" when you are surprised? Your memory of these instances is likely unreliable, as you're depending on semantic memory about cultural beliefs, and not on episodic memory of your actual behavior (Robinson & Clore, 2002).  Indeed, we might expect a lot of variability across different contexts (see next bulletpoint).
How much variability is there within/between individuals and cultures?  If we've learned anything from relating emotions to variables like physiology, behavior, and facial expressions, we know that there is no one-to-one correspondence (e.g., fear and running away, anger and increased heart rate, etc.).  Instead the relations between discrete emotions and these response systems change across individuals, contexts, and cultures.
Does surprise produce an "Oh!" or does an "Oh!" indicate surprise?  On the one hand, you can think of an emotion as a reaction to some stimulus, producing loosely coordinated responses (e.g., "Oh!").  On the other hand, you can think of emotions as interpretations or categorizations of what's going internally and externally.  In this sense, you infer from your "Oh!" that you are surprised.  This means that "surprise" is a category that you deploy for all the instances in which you say "Oh!"  This is sort of like how "bird" is a category for all instances in which the object being described is animate and has wings.

So in a tautological way, you say "Oh!" when you are surprised because you categorize all instances of "Oh!" as surprise.  Either way, your question has not been studied empirically (to my knowledge), so it's hard to give an answer based on actual data, and different theories will make different hypotheses.


Are most self-help books properly rooted in cognitive sciences?

You can probably classify non-fiction books written for a lay audience into three categories:

Books written by experts and summarizing research in a non-technical language that can be understood by non-experts. The only difference between such a book and a research article is that this book simplifies the findings and cites its sources in a vague and general manner.
Books written by non-experts who quote only those research findings that appear to support their opinion and dismiss (and do not mention) what contradicts them.
Fantasy, prejudice, and other ignorant ramblings.

Most of the Pick Up theory falls into the second category. People like Mystery are successful with their pick up routines in a specific setting and with a highly select sample of women (US, white, middle-class, club goers). So their methods are valid. What is completely false is their assumption that all women (and men) are the same and that their methods will work for everyone everywhere. They read some popular science books, and whenever they read something that resonates with their experience, they believe they have found the scientific proof for how and why what they did worked for them and they quote it in their books to give them credence. European Pick Up Adepts have found that much of what people like Mystery recommend (e.g. peacocking) does not work in their culture. Many others find that many women do not react favourably to other routines (e.g. push-and-pull). The very fact that even "master" PUAs have to "next" many women (or stand on the street for minutes before they find someone whose body language signals the right kind of susceptibility) shows that the popular claim that you can pick up any woman any time is nothing but a power fantasy and marketing lie. Pick Up only works for those women and men for whom it works, and that is all the "science" there is to it.

Dale Carnegie is a motivational speaker. His books fall into the third category. They are as true as religion. They have positive effects for those who believe in them, but you can be equally successful by doing everything completely different than he recommends. They don't "work", because they are true, but because they make you believe in yourself and give you the courage to try.


Is cortisol an effective measure of stress for pre and post task performance?

I don't think measuring serum cortisol levels would be a great method of testing for stress. It is expensive, painful, and the results are difficult to interpret. Salivary levels might be better, but this would also be expensive.

To actually determine the effect of stress on cortisol levels, you would need to control for variables including (but not limited to): age, gender, sex steroid levels, pregnancy, lactation, smoking, coffee and alcohol use, diet, level of exercise, genetic factors and habituation to repeated psychosocial stress exposures.[1]

An easier and less costly method would be before and after blood pressure and heart rate measurements.

[1] Why do we respond so differently? Reviewing determinants of human salivary cortisol responses to challenge? Psychoneuroendocrinology Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 2-18


How to know whether a methodological technique is quantitative or qualitative?

ANOVA and t-tests are statistical tests for significance and therefore quantitative.

The other mentioned items are scales (adding numbers to a certain choice) and therefore they can be considered as ordinal scales, and hence as quantitative as they are based on numbers.

The NASA one can be administered by using a sliding scale which can be considered to be a continuous scale, allowing for parametric statistical testing. However, if divided in say 10 choices, it becomes an ordinal scale and non-parametric tests have to be used.


Why do people overestimate future happiness when they imagine acquiring something like a house or winning the lottery?

Like many people, I do this a lot, the whole thought process "If I won the lotto...".  Following on from the term that AsheeshR linked in his comment, there has been several studies on the phenomenon of the Hedonic Treadmill.

One particular study is "Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a
time: The impact of regular religious practice
and exercise on well-being" (Mochon et al. 2008), where they assert that a sudden large event, such as winning the lotto gives an initial burst of happiness, but we quickly adapt, from the article:

  Many studies have shown that few events in life have a lasting impact on subjective well-being
  because of people’s tendency to adapt quickly; worse, those events that do have a lasting impact tend
  to be negative.

Whereas, regular small-scale events, using the examples provided in the article: exercise, religious attendance, and I'll add seeing a good movie, meeting an old friend etc may do so

  by providing
  small but frequent boosts: if people engage in such behaviors with sufficient frequency, they may
  cumulatively experience enough boosts to attain higher well-being.

The authors of the article suggest that major events, such as winning the lotto do not promote a lasting sense of well being as do frequent smaller scale events.

An earlier study that found similar results was "Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?" (Brickman et al. 1978).


Why is it that in TV series the major part of the shots don´t last longer than 10 seconds?

James E. Cutting has done a number of studies on this topic in the movie domain. Take a look at "Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular   Movies" (Cutting, 2015):

"The pace of popular movies has    increased and statements about  this trend can be found in both the popular media and   in  scholarly works (see, for example, Bordwell and Thompson 2004;  Bordwell,   Staiger, and Thompson 1985; Cutting, Brunick, DeLong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011b; Salt 2006, 2009)"
"...   shorter shot durations make for more cuts, which in turn make for
more intensified demands on viewers’ attention."

More work can be found here:
http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pictures_film.htm


Do modern personality traits exist with native people

See the study below conducted on Tsimane (indigenous Bolivians). It uses Big-5 traits to assess whether if a general factor of personality can be identified with the natives (who mostly fit your criteria) similar to western population studies.

Which is 'evidence' that personality traits exists in indigenous tribes the same way they do in Western populations, since well, how else would they measure it?

van der Linden, Dimitri et al. “How Universal Is the General Factor of Personality? An Analysis of the Big Five in Forager Farmers of the Bolivian Amazon.” Journal of cross-cultural psychology vol. 49,7 (2018): 1081-1097. doi:10.1177/0022022118774925

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6047301/


Any work being done on Perception, Action, and/or Cognition in Video games?

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games (C. S. Green, D. Bavelier, 2004) is a good if somewhat dated overview of cognitive research on video game players. They note that ordinary video game users show a number of differentiated and improved mental skills:

  Video game play has been shown to dramatically
  enhance visuo-motor skills.  In particular, video game players have been shown to
  possess decreased reaction times, increased hand-eye coordination and augmented
  manual dexterity.  Video game play has also been shown to improve spatial skills such as
  mental rotation, spatial visualization and the ability to mentally work in threedimensions.  In addition, video game play has been shown to enhance numerous aspects
  of visual attention including the ability to divide and switch attention, the temporal and
  spatial resolution of visual attention, and the number of objects that can be attended.

BrainHex: Preliminary Results from a Neurobiological Gamer Typology Survey is a study that mapped personality types to "gamer archetypes":

  The model presents seven different archetypes of players: Seeker, Survivor, Daredevil, Mastermind, Conqueror, Socialiser, and Achiever. We explain how each of these player archetypes relates to older player typologies (such as Myers-Briggs), and how each archetype characterizes a specific playing style. We conducted a survey among more than 50,000 players using the BrainHex model as a personality type motivator to gather and compare demographic data to the different BrainHex archetypes. We discuss some results from this survey with a focus on psychometric orientation of respondents, to establish relationships between personality types and BrainHex archetypes.

Their archetypes present an interesting insight into personality types as mapped to certain kinds of gamers.


What is the effect of Social Proof on Conversion Rate?

This is a partial answer, but there are a number of academic studies on this topic.  The findings of the Berkeley article "Long Tail or Steep Tail?
A Field Investigation into How Online Popularity Information Affects the
Distribution of Customer Choices" (Tucker and Zhang, 2007) suggest that

  evidence of a complementary effect, where
  the steep tail indicates new interest in the most popular vendors from outside, with
  negligible cannibalization of interest for less popular vendors. The ndings suggest
  that popularity information can serve as a powerful marketing tool that facilitates
  product category growth. They also explain the prevalence of rm practices to highlight
  bestsellers.

where 'long tail' refers to customers buying low-volume products and 'steep tail' refers to the flocking to popular products.

A couple of key conclusions from that study:

  We find strong evidence for a steep tail effect, where customers are more likely to click
  on the most popular vendors when the popularity information is publicized and made salient
  through ranking the vendors on the page by popularity.

and that there was little negative effects to less popular product sales

  If a steep tail effect exists, and if it complements the long tail, websites such
  as Google.com and Digg.com can increase overall number of clicks at little cost to the less
  popular listings.

A caveat of sorts is stated in the article "On the Depth and Dynamics of Online
Search Behavior" (Johnson et al. 2004) in that their study showed a bit of 'consumer inertia', in that their study

  show that the amount of online search is actually quite limited.


What genetic polymorphisms are linked to aggression or violence?

I had a similar experience 8 years ago, I felt rage that I have never felt before. The day I nearly punched the wall, I understood my completely uncharacteristic behaviour was induced by the drug. Then I asked everyone close if they had noticed recent changes in me, they had. I talked to my doctor and I weaned off of it, my behaviour returned to normal and now at nearly 50 years of age, this was the only such brief period of episodal rage I have ever experienced. It was intense, I've often thought of the poor souls who have comitted suicide and their loved ones who hypothesize the drug is to blame. I would believe it, given my experience.

I am female, have the low MAOA activity gene (homozygous), I also possess 2 homozygous mutations in COMT genes, these affect (slow) degradation of neurotransmitters. I also possess mutations related to dopamine receptor inefficiency, decreased BH4 production (precursor to dopamine), and folate metabolism (precursor to BH4). I am naturally and consstently one of the most even tempered people I know, I have rarely even experienced PMS and my reproductive years will soon be over. Interestly, the MAOA mutation I have has been called the "happiness" gene for woman (not-so for men, infact it's the opposite). I have 2 copies, resulting in even more self-reported happiness in day to day life, which is true for me, but was not for my time on the drug when I had anger, aggression, and rage, like never before. Incidently, it did work for me in giving up the cigerettes.


Why are the ERP amplitudes recorded and analyzed from different software so different in voltage?

The short answer is yes, probably.

Referencing is the process of subtracting a referent signal from all of your channels. While recording, the EEG data are typically online referenced to a vertex electrode, earlobes, back of the neck etc. During post collection processing EEG are most often rereferenced to the average reference, or the linked mastoids. The reference  that is selected changes the shape of the signal simply because the reference channel (or average signal if using more than one) are subtracted from every channel. This means that comparing results across data that have different references is not direct. Since referencing is linear it can typically be undone and the reference channel can be changed. I never use a nasion reference so I can't say for certain why the amplitude is so large but I would guess if you looked at the signal at that channel you would see how it is adding (if channel of interest is positive and referant is negative then amplitude goes up) to your electrode of interest or subtracting from it (if both are positive). For a P3 response 6 micro volts is reasonable. If you want a more detailed explanation of referencing I recommend Nunez's book, or another book on EEG data analysis and theory.


Impact of pre-college schooling on IQ (WAIS)?

Almost a week with no answer. I found an article covering part of the topic, though.

http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iso/torberg.falch/Articles/Article.pdf

THE EFFECT OF EDUCATION ON COGNITIVE ABILITY

TORBERG FALCH and SOFIA SANDGREN MASSIH

Economic Inquiry. Vol. 49, No. 3, July 2011, 838–856


How effective are multiphasic sleep schedules?

Results from experiments with polyphasic sleep are (Stampi, 1992; as summarized in Pinel, Biopsychology):

Test subjects needed two weeks or more to get used to a polyphasic sleep cycle.
Once test subjects got used to their new sleeping pattern, they were happy with it and showed no deficits in performance tests.
Leonardo da Vinci's rhythm of 15 minutes of sleep every four hours works well.
Most test subjects slept too long, and were not refreshed, or too short, and were groggy for a few minutes after waking up ("sleep inertia").
At first, sleep is mostly slow wave sleep, but after some time the normal relation between slow wave sleep and REM-sleep re-asserts itself.

Stampi, C. (Ed.) (1992). Evolution, chronobiology, and functions of polyphasic and ultrashort sleep. Boston: Birkhäuser.

What I don't know and what would interest me:

In a normal monophasic night sleeper, among other things melatonin is high at night, body temperature is low, and, as your question hints at, there is a long break with no food intake. A polyphasic sleeper would disrupt these "natural" (i.e. corresponding to the rhythm of day and night) physiological rhythms, because he probably wouldn't spend his nightly wakeful hours inactive and in darkness. I don't know, what (longterm) effects this might have.

Stampi's book is rather old now, and I'm sure there is more recent research. Maybe some of these open questions have been answered by now.


How should multiple Mechanical Turk research subjects from the same IP address be handled?

I'll address just the first of your three sub-questions, the others have been answered by Chuck Sherrington.

What does it mean when you get two or more Mechanical Turk participants in a study with the same IP address?

IP addresses are rarely "fixed" to an individual computer. Each provider has a range of IP addresses available and assigns them to computers as they connect to the network. Every time you boot your computer, every time you connect to a WLAN network, you'll probably have a different IP address. Try it with a tool such as http://whatismyipaddress.com

So of course the IP address you had yesterday will be assigned to someone else tomorrow. It only means that both computers were connected through the same provider. No other conclusions can be drawn from the IP address!

(Only the combination of IP address and connection time is unique to your computer. Your provider stores your connection data for a legally specified period, and during this time the police will be able to identify your computer if they know the time of the connection, but this data is not publicly available.)

Usually IP addresses remain stable through a session, but you cannot even rely on that. DSL connections are often reset once every 24 hours, so if you are online at night, you might experience a loss of your network connection, and after that you'll very likely have a different IP. Mobile connections are separated much more often, and your IP address will change as often. So, if you save a user's IP address at the beginning of a survey and again at the end, both might differ! This will be especially true for users surfing through anonymisation tools such as a TOR network which are programmed to switch IP addresses regularly.

You cannot reliably identify a single computer through an IP address. Use cookies for that or rely on user specified data.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address#IP_address_assignment


Why does paraphrasing result in failure to obtain the spacing effect?

Short answer
Paraphrasing indeed negates the spacing effect observed in learning, because it causes mass repetition to be as effective as spaced repetition. The confusion is that paraphrasing does not degrade spaced learning, instead it improves the effectiveness of learning through mass repetition up until the level of spaced repetition.

Background
Basically the question is why

  The spacing effect fails to occur with paraphrased repetitions

Krug et al. (1990) define the spacing effect as

  ...[T]he phenomenon in which material encountered on two different occasions with a lapse of time between the encounters is remembered better than material studied for an equal amount of time on one occasion.

Your cited text from Dempster, 1998) reads:

  Thus, this account helps to explain failures to obtain the spacing effect with paraphrased repetitions, that is, repetitions having a changed surface structure (Dellarosa & Bourne, 1985; Glover & Corkill, 1987).

Paraphrasing means

  [Restating] a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form

Now why does this fail to induce the spacing effect? The author cites two papers. The first from Dellarosa & Bourne (1985) states

  On the basis of previous research, it was assumed that memory for surface structure of sentences decays rapidly, and hence can contribute to initial identification of repetitions only at short spacings. Because this manipulation
  should hinder recognition of repetitions as repetitions, it was expected to induce full processing of massed repetitions, and thus facilitate recall of these items.

Why is this important? The authors believe that processing is key to the learning of verbal information. They claim that mass repetition, defined as

  [M]aterial studied for an equal amount of time [as spaced repetition] on one occasion

Spaced repetition is believed to be more effective, because the information upon repeated exposures is all fully processed, because it is not recognized by the brain anymore as a full repeat. In contrast, mass repetition leads to incomplete processing during repeated exposures, and hence is not processed fully anymore, because the brain recognizes it as an exact repeat of previously handles material Dellarosa & Bourne (1985). The surface structure of sentences is defined as

  [The] representation of a string of words or morphemes as they occur in a sentence, together with labels and brackets that represent syntactic structure.

Changing the surface structure disrupts the brain from recognizing it as an exact repeat. Dellarosa & Bourne (1985) hypothesized that changing the surface structure might prevent the brain from recognizing the same material as exact repeats of information in mass repetition, and thus that learning would become equally effective in mass repetitions. And indeed, their experiments showed that

  When sentences were repeated verbatim [] or by the same speaker [], the typical spacing effect was obtained. However, when the surface structure or speaker changed at time of repetition, massed repetitions were recalled nearly as well, or as well as their spaced counterparts.

Subsequently, Glover & Corkill (1987), the second paper Dempster cites, extended these findings to written text, showing the same effect, namely that changing surface structure of texts negated the spacing effect.

Your quote from Dempster, 1998)

  The spacing effect fails to occur with paraphrased repetitions

says the same thing, albeit in a condensed and indeed less clear form. It took me quite some detective work to solve this obscure sentence indeed!! Very nice question.

References
- Dempster, American Psychologist (1998); 43(8): 627-34
- Glover & Corkill, J Educational Psychol (1987); 79(2): 198-19
- Krug et al. J Educational Psychol (1990); 82(2): 366-71


Why do people have different opinions about an object when they are given different information about that object?

There is a tendency to want a named response. Such as 'confirmation bias' - a bit as if confirmation bias were a thing, like a computer processor. But it is not.
It also may be useful to notice that nothing in the world can be perceived directly. The image of your teacher is put together in your brain based on your perception and past experiences; if you develop prosopagnosia you will not perceive the teacher's face any more. Even the surface of the table you touch is not perceived directly, appreciation of the rough wooden surface is the result of synthesis of perceptions and memories.

Therefore the photo of the person in your experiment is appreciated through  your priors/givens and you will find what you are (unconsciously) looking for. You can call it a particular bias, however many of them have been described and they overlap. For example you could view this one as perceptual priming or you could consider this an anchoring effect.

Snyder, J. S., Schwiedrzik, C. M., Vitela, A. D., & Melloni, L. (2015). How previous experience shapes perception in different sensory modalities. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00594
Damasio, A. (2004). Looking for Spinoza (New Ed edition). London: Vintage.
Lyons, J. (2017). Epistemological Problems of Perception. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/perception-episprob/
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Priming (psychology). (2018, March 17). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Priming_(psychology)&oldid=830901864


Using the median for non parametric (Likert) data, when it gives you a decimal place

You are using the wrong justification for using the median. The only reason you can even consider using a median or mean with Likert data is because there is meaning to values between Likert items. If you have "Agree" and "Strongly Agree" there is definitely the possibility of some value where someone agrees more strongly than agree but less strongly than strongly agree.

However, you lose a ton of information when you calculate the median of a Likert-like item, and it can be dangerous to do so when the shapes of the response distributions vary. Let's consider a case where you have 5 levels. These two count vectors give you the same median '3':

A = [5 5 50 20 20]

B = [20 20 50 5 5]

but the distributions are quite different and the median is not very informative about that difference.

You may consider using the "interpolated median" which treats a Likert item as indicating the interval between adjacent items, for example a "3" really means "somewhere on the interval [2.5 3.5]."

For the cases A and B above, the interpolated medians are:

mintA = 3.3

mintB = 2.7


Short Answer

A cognitive model is made that decomposes any skill in smaller elements or production rules. These elements (or combinations thereof) are often context independent and can be used for multiple tasks. The requirement for transfer of skill is that the tasks need to have some sort of overlap in how it is performed.

Long Answer

I found a cognitive model that tries to explain how transfer works (and thereby acknowledges its existence). The theory is called primitive elements theory of cognitive skills (PRIMs; Taatgen, 2013). The model is implemented based on the ideas of the cognitive architecture ACT-R. I will not go in to that too much, but in Figure 1 is the PRIMs representation of ACT-R:

According to PRIMs, each production rule represents part of a cognitive task. While initially each production rule is a separate cognitive step, with learning you can accumulate these production rules into one (See Figure 4 for an example).

The idea is that some of these elements (gray and white ones) are context independent. Steps like "check for empty working memory" and "check for visual input" are used in almost any task that requires visual input. Being context independent makes it not necessary to learn this over and over for every new skill you want to learn. The final figure (Figure 9) shows how counting, or to be more precise, an iterative component of counting, can be transferred to a Semantic task (answering questions like "is a canary a bird?"). The essence of transfer is thus that the tasks need to have some overlap in how the task is performed (in terms of basic cognitive elements).

Taatgen, N. A. (2013). The nature and transfer of cognitive skills. Psychological review, 120(3), 439.
ISO 690


How can experimental compliance (willingness of participants to participate) be measured?

You might look for examples in the Witt, Donnellan & Orlando (2011). They tested subject motivation in a psychology subject pool to see how it varied among groups. There may be follow up studies. Looking through similar studies will give you an idea of the kinds of things people use to assess. This is not a standardized line of research (yet).

Witt, E. A., Donnellan, M. B., & Orlando, M. J. (2011). Timing and selection effects within a psychology subject pool: Personality and sex matter. Personality and Individual Differences, 50, 355-359. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.10.019


Is speed up of arithmetic calculations as a result of memorisation?

I asked this question back when I was building a neural model of progression through counting strategies [1]. The quotes in this answer are taken from that publication.
Psychologically, there is some evidence of addition speedup being a result of memorisation.

Typically, children progress through various strategies before finally
memorizing the results of addition, as shown in Table 1 (Siegler,
1987). The Counting strategy involves choosing the larger number and
incrementing it a number of times equal to the smaller number. The
Recall strategy is where the two numbers form an association with a
previously memorized answer, which is then recalled from long-term
memory. Other strategies have been identified, although we focus here
on recall and counting [...]
[The] recall strategy [...] improves reaction time and accuracy,
consistent with the data from Tables 2 and 3, respectively.

There is also some evidence from the Cognitive Neuroscience point of view which ends up being supported by the neural model I built:

First, when doing mental calculation, age is correlated with the use
of parietal brain areas. However, it is inversely correlated with the
use of prefrontal and hippocampal brain areas, as well as the use of
the dorsal basal ganglia area (Rivera, Reiss, Eckert, & Menon, 2005).
Within the model, this transition can be framed as older children
using fewer iterative processes (no use of working memory in
prefrontal, no iterative process control requiring the basal ganglia,
and no loading of instructions from the hippocampus) and more
memorization.
Second, those with dyscalculia show greater activation
of the prefrontal cortex compared to individuals with normal numeracy
(Kucian & von Aster, 2015). Although this model make no claims about
why dyscalculia occurs, given that it is a complicated disability
usually accompanied by various comorbidities and no direct cause
(Rubinsten & Henik, 2009), it does provide part of a possible
explanation as to why such compensation occurs. Specifically, those
with dyscalculia are unable to consolidate the functional role of the
prefrontal cortex during the counting task within the frontal-parietal
region and must instead rely on their working memory. Given an
excessively noisy input, inaccurate feedback, or inappropriate
modulation of the error signal, the Fast-Net could fail to learn the
mapping between addends and sum. Consequently, there would be limited
progression from counting to recall and a continued dependence on
working memory.

Improving With Practice: A Neural Model of
Mathematical Development


Does anger lower a person's cognitive ability?

The first question that should be asked is, do you mean cognitive ability or IQ? They are intertwined, but different. Unfortunately, I can not comment.  I'm going to answer based on the question in the title.
Yes. Walter Mischels work on self-control indicates that anger, a "hot" emotion led by the amygdala in the limbic system, will provoke more immediate response. Limiting cognitive abilities like working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", decision making, and comprehension.

The limbic system consists of primitive brain structures located under the cortex on top of the brain stem, which developed early in our evolution. These structures regulate basic drives and emotions essential for survival, from fear and anger to hunger and sex... Within the limbic system, the amygdala is especially important. It plays a key role in fear responses and in sexual and appetitive behavior. The amygdala rapidly mobilizes the body for action. It does not pause to think and reflect or worry about long term consequences. (Pg 43)
The hot system is ... Reflexive, simple, emotional, it automatically and quickly triggers consumptive behavior, arousal, and impulsive action (Pg 44-45)
This hot response is not useful when success in a given situation depends on staying cool, planning ahead, and problem-solving rationally. (Pg 45)

(Emphasis mine)
The "cool" cognitive system, where we find our cognitive abilities.

Closely interconnected with the brain's hot system is its cool system, which is cognitive, complex, reflective, and slower to activate. It is centered primarily in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). It's important to note that stress attenuates the cool system and accentuates the hot system. The hot and cool systems continuously and seamlessly interact in a reciprocal relationship: as one becomes more active the other becomes less active. (Pg 46)
The PFC is the most evolved region of the brain. It enables and supports the highest-order cognitive abilities that make us distinctly human. ...Unlike the hot system, the cool system is attuned to the informational aspects of stimuli and enables rational, reflective, and strategic behavior. (Pg 46)

Here we have a pretty clear description of how anger, "hot", limits the cognitive abilities of the prefrontal cortex, or the "cold" system.
Finally,

Prolonged stress impairs the PFC, which is essential... for things like surviving high school, holding down a job, pursuing an advanced degree... and refraining from decisions that seem intuitively right but on closer examination are really stupid. (Pg 49)

In the same book, research done by nueroscientist Amy Arnsten at Yale is mentioned,

"Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress (like that caused by anger) can cause rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities." The longer stress persists, the more those cognitive abilities are hurt and the more permanent the damage, ultimately leading to mental as well as physical illness.

(Italicized content is a personal addition to clarify how anger can cause uncontrollable stress)
Demonstrating long term and short term impacts of stress caused by anger and irritation.
Walter Mischel. "The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control is the Engine of Success". 2014.


Could the basis of love be the expectation of a future benefit?

Can love ever be without expectation of benefit? It would seem that the actual experience of love, itself has a reward.

  According to licensed psychologist Dr. Rachel Needle, specific chemical substances such as oxytocin, phenethylamine, and dopamine, have been found to play a role in human experiences and behaviors that are associated with love. They function similar to amphetamine, making us alert, excited, and wanting to bond.

This is less of an answer, and more an expansion on the notion of altruism and human motivation. This question deals with the concept of morality, and embraces many concepts, including the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. (ie finding a suitable mate)

A superficial glance at this would suggest that any human interaction is based on fulfilling our needs, as a species.

I don't believe there is a definitive answer to this question. This question, crosses into philosophical realms, in defining love and the true nature of mankind, as a creature. The concept that  the individual seeks to benefit from a "relationship" when they love another person, also addresses the entire notion, of whether, as a species, we are motivated by any other than self interest.

  Can love exist in a seeming vacuum, ...

Nothing in the realm of humanity truly occurs within a vacuum. People's feelings, translate into actions, which cause ripples. (See ripple effect, butterfly effect, causality; as an indicator of my reasons for making this statement. It is more of a sociological discussion and so I won't go into it further).

  ... with the realization that the beloved does not have the power to benefit you in any way, or worse, has no intention of ever benefiting you in any way?

I do believe that many would say this is the definition of unconditional love. Which is where this becomes a philosophical debate over the concept of altruism.

  More to the point, you expect that your appreciation of someone will help generate an appreciation of you by that person, with your other qualities doing the rest. ...//... this might be the beginning of love.

The motivations behind attraction are complex. Yes, there is the instinct to find a partner and within this, there would be an expectation of benefit.

  You no longer have any reasonable expectation of benefiting from whatever desirable qualities this person may have. Does your potential love now turn into hate, or at least jealousy?

How people manage perceived rejection is a question on it's own. For some people, yes, unrequited love can turn into a poison, many move on and become indifferent.  This reaction, may have less to do with the concept of the loss of potential benefits from this person, than the complex nature of human relationships and the effects of rejection.

  But the fact is that the parent-child relationship is bound by real ties; each person possesses roughly half of the other's genes. That would probably create a strong expectation that whatever benefits the other person produces in life will accrue to you.

This again brings us back to the notion of our behaviour as a species. To a degree it is self interested to protect one's gene pool.

As to the attraction style of individuals, and whether they form patterns of seeking unavailable or unobtainable prospective partners, is another discussion in itself.


To what extent does the awarness of the presence of others affect brain function and cognitive state?

I recently came across an article (1) examining the effect of an observer on cognitive task performance. The meta-analysis showed an overall negative effect associated with the presence of others leading to a poorer cognitive performance.

I am not aware of an article investigating such an observer effect using brain imaging techniques. It didn't stop researchers (2) to speculate on a cognitive/neuropsychological model of social inhibition. They stated that "the presence of others places high demands on the frontal and executive systems, leaving less available processing capacity to dedicate to performing tasks that require executive and frontal processing. The presence of others may, in turn, facilitate performance on tasks that rely less on frontal and executive processing".

I leave them the final sentence of this post:

"there is clearly potential for more collaboration between social psychologists
and those working in cognitive psychology and neuroscience"

(1) Eastvold et al. (2012). Does a Third Party Observer Affect Neuropsychological Test Performance? It Depends. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 26(3).

(2) Wagstaff et al. (2008). Some cognitive and neuropsychological aspects of social inhibition and facilitation. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 20(4).


Is the placebo effect a form of cognitive bias?

The question is not terribly clear since it can be just an issue of categorizing the placebo effect in a philosophical sense as a "cognitive bias" for some broad meaning of the latter. But...

  Some have argued that neuroimaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) can help determine whether placebo effects are independent of response bias (27). For example, one team of researchers has reported that placebo responses occur in pain-related areas of the brain during the time of stimulation and not only during assessment (28), while other researchers have shown that spinal cord mechanisms are involved with placebo analgesia (29). These experiments seem to indicate that at least some of the observed effect of placebo in an experimental setting is independent of response bias; however, they cannot rule out the hypothesis that some of the observed clinical effect is due to response bias.

Note that response bias, whith which the placebo effect is contrasted above, is a specific [cognitive] bias.


Would the Milgram Experiment results be replicated in Eastern cultures?

While I don't know of the Milgram studies being replicated cross cultural there's an older, less severe conformity study by Asch. Those use less authoritarian and more group conformity pressure.

Eastern cultures showed higher conformity and western showed falling conformity over time.

Bond, R. & Smith, Peter. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch's (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.119.1.111


What can coma patients report about their experiences - if anything?

The majority of people who recovered from coma did not report any experiences that occurred while they were in coma (clinically unresponsive, with absent or minimal brainstem reflexes, and with severely abnormal EEG). However, some people who had cardiac arrest or came very close to clinical death but were successfully revived reported later that they had conscious perceptual experiences during these critical periods, when they were in coma. This kind of experiences is called “near-death experience (NDE)” by Moody [1]. About 10% to 20% of such critical individuals reported near-death experiences (NDEs) [2]. NDEs include many experiences, such as seeing tunnel, light, and stars; out-of-body experiences; pleasant feelings; entering a door/gate, heaven, or hell; seeing deceased relatives, religious figures, or god; a life review; a conscious return into the body; etc. [2-5]

However, NDE is still an unsettled subject. Some believe that cumulated evidence so far shows that NDEs are real, that the mind and consciousness can exist without and outside the brain, and that the current understanding that the brain is the basis of consciousness and the mind is not correct [6-10].

Others believe that NDEs are neurophysiologic phenomena that occur while the brain is functioning in an abnormal state [5,11]. Evidence is that many mental phenomena that occur in NDEs can occur or be induced to occur in other non-coma, neurophysiologic states, such as sleep [4], meditation [12], simple partial seizures [13], certain drug-induced altered states of consciousness [11,14], and electrical stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation of the brain[15]. Interestingly, some investigators found that a surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity occurred within the first 30 sec after cardiac arrest and preceded isoelectric electroencephalogram in experimental rats [16]. Whether this also occurs in humans and is the basis of NDE occurrences or not needs further investigations.

The most crucial aspect of NDEs is whether the reported experiences occurred during coma/cardiac arrest or not. It is possible that those experiences occurred when the patients have recovered but were still in a confused or dream-like state and that the patients wrongly attributed the time of those experiences to when they were still in coma/had cardiac arrest; their reports were just sincere fallacy. However, this can be investigated in NDE experiencers who have out-of-body experiences and report seeing the scene and event when they are in coma/have cardiac arrest. If these NDE experiencers report (without the help from other people) the scene and events where and when they are in coma/have cardiac arrest correctly, it means their NDEs indeed occur during coma/cardiac arrest and, indeed, normal consciousness can exist without and outside a normally functioning brain – our understanding of the neural basis of consciousness has to be greatly revised from the root. AWARE [17] was the study that was designed to investigate this. Its results, however, were inconclusive. AWAREII [18] is a similar study that is expected to finish this year (2020). It is interesting to see how its results will come out.

So far, however, our present understanding of the neural basis of consciousness has been vindicated in clinical and experimental settings all around the world every day for a long time. It predicts that no conscious experiences, complex thoughts, or complex emotions can occur when one is in coma (clinically unresponsive, with absent or minimal brainstem reflexes, and with severely abnormal EEG), and no definite incidents of conscious experiences during coma have ever been reported.

References.

Moody, R. A. (1975). Life After Life. New York, NY: Bantam Press.
Kopel J. Near-death experiences in medicine. Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent). 2019 Jan;32(1):163-164. doi: 10.1080/08998280.2018.1542478.
Belanti J, Perera M, Jagadheesan K. Phenomenology of near-death experiences: A cross-cultural perspective. Transcult Psychiatry. 2008 Mar;45(1):121-33. doi: 10.1177/1363461507088001.
Charland-Verville V, Jourdan JP, Thonnard M, Ledoux D, Donneau AF, Quertemont E, et al. Near-death experiences in non-life-threatening events and coma of different etiologies. Front Hum Neurosci. 2014;8:203. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00203.
Nelson K. Near-death experiences: Neuroscience perspectives on near-death experiences. Mo Med. 2015 Mar-Apr;112(2): 92-96.
Alexander E. Near-death experiences, The mind-body debate & the nature of reality. Mo Med. 2015 Jan-Feb;112(1):17-21.
Greyson B. Getting comfortable with near death experiences: An overview of near-death experiences. Mo Med. 2013 Nov-Dec;110(6):475-481.
Hagan JC III. Near-death experiences: I hope you are comfortable with them by now! Mo Med. 2015 Mar-Apr;112(2): 88-91.
Long J. Near-death experiences evidence for their reality. Mo Med. 2014 Sep-Oct;111(5):372-380.
van Lommel P. Near-death experiences: The experience of the self as real and not as an illusion. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2011 Oct;1234:19-28. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06080.x.
Martial C, Cassol H, Charland-Verville V, Pallavicini C, Sanz C, Zamberlan F, et al. Neurochemical models of near-death experiences: A large-scale study based on the semantic similarity of written reports. Conscious Cogn. 2019 Mar;69:52-69. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2019.01.011.
Gordon WV, Shonin E, Dunn TJ, Sheffield D, Garcia-Campayo J, Griffiths MD. Meditation-induced near-death experiences: A 3-year longitudinal study. Mindfulness (N Y). 2018;9(6): 1794-1806. doi: 10.1007/s12671-018-0922-3.
Hoepner R, Labudda K, May TW, Schoendienst M, Woermann FG, Bien CG, et al. Ictal autoscopic phenomena and near death experiences: A study of five patients with ictal autoscopies. J Neurol. 2013 Mar;260(3):742-749. doi: 10.1007/s00415-012-6689-x.
Timmermann C, Roseman L, Williams L, Erritzoe D, Martial C, Cassol H, et al. DMT Models the Near-Death Experience. Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 15;9:1424. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01424.
Blanke O, Thut G. Chapter 26. Inducing Out-of-body Experience. In: oup–Tall Tales about Mind and Brain (Typeset by SPi, Delhi). 2006 Jul 12.
Borjigin J, Lee U, Liu T, Pal D, Huff S, Klarr D, et al. Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Aug 27;110(35):14432-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1308285110. /
Parnia S, Spearpoint K, de Vos G, Fenwick P, Goldberg D, Yang J, et al. AWARE - AWAreness during REsuscitation-a prospective study. Resuscitation. 2014 Dec;85(12):1799-1805. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.09.004.
AWARE II. NHS Health Research Authority.


Converting Big 5 questionnaire data to Big 5 scores using R

Here are some resources that will show you how to score the Big 5 using R.

The main function that I like is called scoreItems in the psych package. It handles item reversal, imputation, and multiple scales. It will also give you things like alphas and item total correlations.

William Revelle has this tutorial:
http://personality-project.org/r/psych/HowTo/scoring.pdf

I have this video ( which has an associated github repository):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFFW5sK3Bhk

See in particular, this bit of the code: https://github.com/jeromyanglim/score-tests-with-r-exercise/blob/master/finished-analysis/munge/01-munge.R

sc <- scoreItems(meta.bfi[,v$scales], ccases[,meta.bfi$name])
ccases[,colnames(sc$scores)] <- sc$scores


Is "Biophysics of Computation" still a good book?

I've looked through that book briefly but never really got into it... if I could suggest some others, though: Dayan and Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience is a standard text in computational neuroscience but if I understand your question correctly, you might enjoy Kevin Murphy's Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective, or David MacKay's Information theory, inference, and learning algorithms a bit more. Trappenberg's Fundamentals of computational neuroscience is also one of my favourites, but moreso on the neuroscience side of things.


Can a person's susceptibility to hypnosis be altered?

There is no a single answer for this, but I will tell from what I have read of Milton Erickson's ideas.

Everyone is suceptible to hypnosis. The difficult in being hypnoized depends on the person's experience more than a specific part of the brain, and this implies that the most important thing is how the hipnotist is capable of capturing the person's unconscious attention, which is purely determined by the person's experience.

In conclusion, the person's suggestability is completely alterable. In my experience (not too much), if you fail hypnotizing someone and you do not handle ir properly, the next time that person will be less suggestable. This is only an example, there are many other factors that influence this process.


It's a local rule.  All that it means is that the connection between two neurons gets stronger if you use that specific connection more.  The specific connection (the synapse) must be used though; it doesn't apply to two random neurons that aren't connected that happen to fire at the same time.

Hebbian learning is generic term for outcome; there are actually two separate mechanisms I know about (probably many more, too).  First, there's "silent synapses" which have only NMDA receptors, but not AMPA receptors.  NMDA receptors have Mg+ molecules blocking their channels and require AMPA activation to expel the NMDA.  So if you have a synapse with no AMPA, it won't be an effective synapse.  However, if you have another synapse activing the tissue, expelling the magnesium, then the silent synapse has a short window to activate the synapse during the Mg expulsion.  As it does this, it activates a series of protein signaling and transcription signaling that tells the cell to bring more AMPA up (a response to all the Ca signaling that these signals rely on).  This is also a mechanism for conditioning (the two different synapses representing the pathway of the conditioned and the unconditioned response.  The conditioned response would be the pathway with the silent synapse).

Another example is astrocytic regulation of glutamate levels.  ATP is what your whole body uses for energy, but there are ATP detectors in astroctyes, which couple in the tripartite synapse as a synaptic regulator.  As the synapse is more active, ATP is released, which activates the astrocyte and causes it to release extra glutamate, bringing the postsynaptic neuron closer to firing.

All of these require only that the neurons make contact at a synapse, distance between somas is not a factor. Of course, the distance between the axon and the dendritic spine have to be close enough to form a synapse.


How can we overcome positional bias when selecting an option on a screen/document?

You could randomise the order of response options.
This wouldn't prevent bias in the individual case, but it would probably remove most bias in aggregate.
I also wonder whether in the case that you present, positional bias has much of an effect.
Equally, you could make "no preference" or something similar, the first option.


What leaps in technology would be needed to scan the total state of the human brain?

Your question can be reduced to "What level of detail do we need to know about a brain to be able to simulate it?"

The answer to this question is we have no idea. The Blue Brain project has bet on the synaptic level, but they haven't been able to scale up to behaviour yet. But why stop at the synaptic level? Why not go down to molecules or atoms? Sure the computational power required goes up, but then we get a better model! And computers are getting faster and lower power all the time, right?

Actually, traditional processors have hit a wall in terms of power efficiency [1]. So you do end up needing to choose a reasonable level of detail for what you're choosing to model, since detail for detail's sake isn't going to get you anywhere [2]. Once we can understand the basic functions the brain is computing and how it's computing them, we can start looking for that level of detail in the human brain for simulation.

In conclusion, rather than a simple technological advancement, we need a theoretical advancement in understanding what the brain is even doing in the first place before we can use the data meaningfully.

[1] "Finding a roadmap to achieve large neuromorphic hardware systems" by  Jennifer Hasler and Bo Marr. Specifically, Figure 17 shows the "power efficiency wall".

[2] "The use and abuse of large-scale brain models" by Chris Eliasmith and Oliver Trujillo


The article you link to mentions that the sample used in the research was women, there is a passing mention of males having slight pupil dilation when shown images of male masturbation.

However, the data seems to point to something a bit more complicated, Levay (2017), explains that though women in this area of research typically show stronger signs of bisexuality, even contrary to what they report, men seem to fall into one of two categories, straight or gay, with bisexuality being rarer. It seems that to distinguish bisexual males from straight or gay males requires more careful studies and evaluation, pupil dilation is only one piece of the process.
Levay calls the distribution bimodal between the three categories for males, with straight being the heavier end while gay males are a smaller amount with bisexuality running trough between the former and latter. Levay reports that there are two types of bisexual males, ones that are bisexual as measured by objective measures and have personality factors such as higher sex drive, curiosity and sensation seeking and one that claims to be bisexual but has homosexual arousal patterns. The bisexual sample in one study mentioned seemed to be unaware that their arousal was homosexual, despite claims to be attracted to both sexes. Levay believes that there could be issues of cognitive dissonance in the bisexual sample. Levay suggests another possibility, that there is a lack of feedback due to neural circuits mediating genital arousal to cortical circuits involved in the conscious evaluation of arousal in bisexual males.

So it seems that when it comes to bisexuality in males, there is a greater chance that they may actually be gay but have not fully reconciled any qualms they may have with their sexual preferences. Of course, Levay also mentions that the jury is still out on the issue of dissonance and further research can be done on the topic. This contradicts the information presented in the article you posted and shows that male preference is not as fluid as a female preference.

References:
LeVay, Simon. Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation. , 2017. Print. https://libgen.pw/item?id=1703978&adblock=true


Bias towards purchasing tangible vs virtual goods

Grabner-Kräuter et al (2003) suggest that

  Lack of trust is one of the most frequently cited reasons for
  consumers not purchasing from Internet vendors.

References

Grabner-Kräuter, S., & Kaluscha, E. A. (2003). Empirical research in on-line trust: a review and critical assessment. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58(6), 783-812. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=941185


Is there any explanation of how the human brain calculates arithmetical problems?

What I know is that there is evidence that the brain treats arithmetics very similarly as language. I also know that there is a cortical area more akin to encoding the sense of numerosity, which could be accessed while performing arithmetic calculations. However, I am no expert in the area and only know of some works done by some colleagues that I'll link here.

Eye gaze reveals a fast, parallel extraction of the syntax of arithmetic formulas
When order matters: Last-come first-served effect in sequential arithmetic operations
The cortical representation of simple mathematical expressions

If you are interested, you should look at Stanislas Dehaene's work. He has many papers on how the brain does math and how it also is able to naturally encode numbers.


What is the difference between "nudge theory" and "priming"?

They are not necessarily related concepts, and I think. While nudge (in Thaler's sense) is a mechanism for fostering choice in a planned way, priming refers to a faster processing of new stimuli related to recently activated ones.
It seems like the nudge of might happen through several possible mental processes, including (possibly) priming - although I personally couldn't find any example of how priming could be used to nudge a decision, I'm certain it might. None of the cited examples work through priming, though. For instance, it seems to me that the fly in the urinal example might work through a salience effect (a salient bug in the urinal makes one direct their attention to the salient object).
An example of priming (unrelated to nudge) could be when you see the word "bee", and then see a related stimuli, like the word "honey", and you recognize it faster because there's a previously activated schema. Priming might happen through a lot of means, like words rhyming or starting with the same syllable, semantically related objects, recognition of one object in an abstract pattern, etc. However, in priming there's always at least one prime (a previous stimulus) and one target (a later stimulus) and the prime will make the activation/recognition of the target faster.
Hypothetically, one could use priming to nudge people into "better" decisions if one could offer a prime related to the "best" decision (our target). For instance, consider there is a (widely known) healthy meal and an unhealthy alternative as the options in a restaurant menu. You might put a text saying "Be Healthy" at the cover, which people will see before seeing the alternatives. This might enhance the activation of the healthy alternative, and it might influence the choice (or not). While it's uncertain on whether the healthy food will be chosen, theoretically its activation will be faster due to priming.
SUGGESTED REFERENCES:
Matlin, M. W. Cognition. Hoboken: Wiley, 2012, 8th edition.
Sternberg, R. J. Sternberg, K. Cognitive Psychology. Boston: 2017, 7th edition.


Treatment and strategies for procrastination for ADHD

This is an interesting question, and after mostly failing to find recent literature I've become fascinated at why this topic is not more heavily studied. It looks like a field ripe for disruption by new ideas and approaches.

I'm not convinced that procrastination is any different in those diagnosed with ADHD than in neurotypicals. As with many psychiatric diagnoses, behaviors are described in the DSM but mechanisms are usually unknown. Without knowing any mechanism (hand-waving a probable weakness of connection between prefrontal areas and motor areas, but no idea what may weaken it) it's hard to say whether an unknown mechanism in ADHD differs from an unknown mechanism in everyone else, or even that the distinction between ADHD and normal has clear boundaries. I'd really appreciate the education of being shown evidence I'm wrong here, but I've seen heated debates over defining ADHD, and Stack Exchange doesn't do extended back-and-forth discussions.

The slope of the curve representing what I've known as "delay discounting" (also called "time preference") was described by Green and Myerson and has been associated with ADHD, drug abuse and gambling, and lower socioeconomic status. But I don't see this as a mechanism, just another way to quantify the behavior.

The nature of procrastination by Piers Steel and Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health by Roy Baumeister seem to be the most relevant (highly cited) descriptions of procrastination, and both are over a decade old. Some intervention articles I've found are ADHD outcomes for children treated in community based pediatric settings by Jeffrey Epstein (not that one), et al and Academic interventions for academic procrastination by Zacks and Hen, but I can't find anything on interventions that seems to be highly cited and well-accepted.

I disclose that I often procrastinate on StackExchange. I'm currently reading and writing about procrastination rather than working on analyses I need done asap. :(


Do men and women differ in their desire to have children?

Caveats

Even when the degree of men's and women's desires to have children are forced by study parameters into yes/no pigeonholes, there are very few studies, and the results are arguably inconclusive. Also, men's and women's rates of desire to have children are continuously shifting, and thus the answer may change over time. Finally, the studies have been limited to the United States and/or the United Kingdom.

Findings

If you're wondering specifically about single men and women who don't yet have any children, this should help: In 2011, the website Match.com commissioned a study by SUNY Binghamton to answer your question and more. They found that 24% of the men and 15% of the women in the study want to have children, and "men in every age group are more eager than women to have children."
On the flip side, there has been at least one study of men and women who want NOT to have children, and the men in the study were more likely than the women to want to remain childless. This seems to contradict the aforementioned study in which more men than women want children... until you consider the third group -- ambivalent men and women.
According to McAllister, ambivalent women outnumber ambivalent men.

Conclusion?

A tentative conclusion could be that men are more decisive, outnumbering women in both categories -- wanting to have and wanting NOT to have children. But, more research is required to reliably answer your question, and by then the answer may have changed.

References

  Gore, D.L. (2002) I Don’t Want Any Children... Ever:
  Gender Differences in Voluntary Childlessness in the US, 2002 [pdf]
  McAllister, F. and Clarke, L. (1998) Choosing Childlessness. London: Family Policy StudiesCentre.