Why do con artists like Frank Abagnale Jr. not feel guilt?

Cognitive science generally does not try to explain individual behavior, but rather the behavior of all people. We can meaningfully speak about what may cause a deficient ability to feel guilt and remorse, or other features that characterize an individual, but we cannot speak directly about the individual's behavior outside an applied or clinical context. Therefore, and I cannot stress this enough: please do not read this answer and then start looking for signs of APD in individuals.

Antisocial Personality Disorder
Deficient ability to feel guilt and remorse is a cardinal trait of antisocial personality disorder, or APD (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), which may offer a tentative framework. APD is a complex personality disorder with many different facets and characteristics that, at least at face value, seems to describe a behavioral pattern matching the popular image of a con man, such as Frank Abagnale Jr. surely represents in the popular mind.
Diagnosing APD
Under the DSM-IV-TR definition, satisfying the APD diagnostic criteria requires an individual to A) be over 18 years old, B) exhibit evidence of conduct disorder before age 15, C) not exhibit antisocial behavior exclusively during manic or schizophrenic episodes, and D) exhibit at least three of the following seven symptoms suggesting a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since 15 years old:

Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.
Reckless disregard for the safety of self and/or others.
Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.
Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another.

It's worth noting that the DSM-IV-TR and DSM-V definitions of APD differ somewhat. Because the DSM-V is still so recent, most empirical research at time of writing has used the DSM-IV-TR definition. How well the new definitions correspond with the old ones is ultimately an empirical question, so I will focus on the DSM-IV-TR literature here to avoid speculating.
Cognitive neuroscience of APD
A number of neurocognitive deficits have been identified in patients with DSM-IV-TR antisocial personality disorder. As with most mental disorders and cognitive functions, it's difficult to pin down any one region or set of regions and say "here is where X is." However, Blair and Frith (2000) reviewed three common trends, reporting support for the latter two:

... [1] an impairment in executive functioning implicating prefrontal cortex, [2] an impairment in executive emotion's processing implicating orbito-frontal cortex, and [3] an impairment in emotion processing implicating the amygdala ...

Amygdala

CG illustration of the amygdala's location
One of the main regions commonly associated with APD and antisocial behavior, and in particular with its remorselessness criterion, are the amygdala (Blair and Frith, 2000). However, while the amygdala's heavy involvement in emotional processing is well established (Kandel, 2013), and a veritable sea of studies support an emotional processing deficits and abnormalities in the amygdala for general antisocial behavior (e.g., Coccaro et al., 2006; Narayan et al., 2007; Veit et al., 2002) over different antisocial disorders, I couldn't find any direct investigations of amygdaloid activity in APD patients.
Orbitofrontal Cortex

Model and sagittal MRI of the orbitofrontal cortex
The other region commonly implicated in association with APD and antisocial behavior is the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (Blair and Frith, 2000). For example, Völlm et al. (2004) reported fMRI evidence for a go-no-go task suggesting that APD patients exhibited reduced OFC activity for response inhibition as compared with controls. Dinn and Harris (2000) reported that "APD subjects showed greater neuropsychological deficits on measures sensitive to orbitofrontal dysfunction in comparison to control participants." The OFC seems to be associated with increased impulsivity and risk-taking via deficient response inhibition.
Did Frank Abagnale Jr. have APD?
At this point, one may be tempted to answer, "Clearly, he did!" and start looking for APD in oneself, or others. This would be a mistake. Identifying APD in a person requires a considerable amount of well-structured information about that person. Nothing could illustrate that we lack such information here better than Abagnale's own words:

In 2002, Abagnale himself addressed the issue of his story's truthfulness with a statement posted on his company's website which said in part: "I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over-dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography."

With respect to Abagnale himself, therefore, cognitive science does not have anything to say about his story, because we don't have any way to independently verify most of it. We can probably surmise that some of it is accurate, some of it is not, but we can't empirically say which is which. People don't necessarily need to be pathological in order to be jerks.
References

American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., Text Revision). Washington, DC: Author.
Blair, J., & Frith, U. (2000). Neurocognitive explanations of the antisocial personality disorders. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.
Coccaro, E. F., McCloskey, M. S., Fitzgerald, D. A., & Phan, K. L. (2007). Amygdala and orbitofrontal reactivity to social threat in individuals with impulsive aggression. Biological psychiatry, 62(2), 168-178.
Dinn, W. M., & Harris, C. L. (2000). Neurocognitive function in antisocial personality disorder. Psychiatry research, 97(2), 173-190.
Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessell, T. M., Siegelbaum, S. A., Hudspeth, A. J. (Eds.). (2013). Principles of neural science (Vol. 5). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Narayan, V. M., Narr, K. L., Kumari, V., Woods, R. P., Thompson, P. M., Toga, A. W., & Sharma, T. (2007). Regional cortical thinning in subjects with violent antisocial personality disorder or schizophrenia.
Veit, R., Flor, H., Erb, M., Hermann, C., Lotze, M., Grodd, W., & Birbaumer, N. (2002). Brain circuits involved in emotional learning in antisocial behavior and social phobia in humans. Neuroscience letters, 328(3), 233-236.
Völlm, B., Richardson, P., Stirling, J., Elliott, R., Dolan, M., Chaudhry, I., ... & Deakin, B. (2004). Neurobiological substrates of antisocial and borderline personality disorder: preliminary results of a functional fMRI study. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 14(1), 39-54.


Is there a name for the phenomenon of perceived repeated interruption?

I would classify this as a cognitive bias. Specifically, selection bias:

  Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.

These are 'every day' actions you describe. They are not very memorable. In contrast, when encountering such interruptions during these otherwise 'normal' actions they become more memorable and stick with you.

Consequently, this then leads to a selection bias: only the interrupted actions come to mind immediately. If you were to systematically count how many times this occurs it would be less frequent than it seems.


Why does speaking with rhythm help a subject get into a trance?

This is not exactly my area, but I suspect it simply may not be anyone's area.
It is not clear from the research literature that speaking rhythmically does help get into a trance, mostly because it is not currently clear that "trance" is distinct from other forms of dissociation (though dissociation is often confusingly described as "trance-like" or variations thereof). The closest recent paper I could find (Becker-Blease, 2004), simply reports on subjectively reported associations between certain kinds of music and the experience of a "trance" state, but this does not answer the questions of why or whether speaking rhythmically induces dissociative states.
A non-paywalled review of dissociation and dissociative states in a clinical context can be found in a Review of Psychiatry chapter by Putnam, 1991. Putnam employs the following definition of dissociation:

Dissociation is a process that produces a discernible alteration in a person's thoughts, feelings or actions so that for a period of time certain information is not associated or integrated with other information as it normally or logically would be.

Unfortunately, while subsequent literature in the same line of research has tentatively described a difference between clinical and nonclinical dissociative experiences (Waller, Putnam and Carlson, 1996), this was only descriptive, and did not attempt to investigate ways of inducing dissociative states. The focus appears to have remained on clinical dissociation.
In conclusion, the literature and evidence currently does not seem to distinguish between the two possibilities that nonclinical dissociation either can or cannot be induced by rhythmic speech, and there does not seem to be any meaningful consensus or even particularly influential views on the cognitive processes underlying nonclinical dissociation. It simply does not seem to be an active area of psychological research.
References

Becker-Blease, K. A. (2004). Dissociative states through new age and electronic trance music. Journal of trauma & dissociation, 5(2), 89-100.
Putnam, F. W. (1991). Dissociative phenomena. Review of psychiatry, 10, 145-160.
Waller, N., Putnam, F. W., & Carlson, E. B. (1996). Types of dissociation and dissociative types: A taxometric analysis of dissociative experiences. Psychological Methods, 1(3), 300.


Does our brain react as if we were physically hurt when we are lied to?

Perhaps you're referring to Naomi Eisenberger's work on the neural basis of social pain. Her seminal paper found that the neural correlates of distress from social rejection overlapped with those of physical pain, i.e., dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula.

She's recently published a literature review on social pain in the brain (Eisenberger, 2015), summarizing her work and addressing its various controversies.

However, Woo et al. (2014) recently challenged the notion of overlapping neural bases for social and physical pain. They used fancy multivariate methods to analyze the shared vs. distinct neural representations of social vs. physical pain.  They conclude:

  These findings demonstrate that separate representations underlie pain and rejection despite common [shared] fMRI activity at the gross anatomical level. Rather than co-opting pain circuitry, rejection involves distinct affective representations in humans.


What is the difference between psychophysics and neurophysiology?

I'm glad you asked! The two fields are really quite different, but I think people get them confused since the terms both make reference to physics and something vaguely mental.

Psychophysics is basically the measurement of subjective percepts corresponding to physical stimuli (e.g. measuring pain thresholds or visual acuity). So here the 'physics' refers to the physical reality we're trying to represent in our mind.

Research here is almost exclusively behavioral, with the classic paradigm being to try and determine the 'just noticeable difference' between two stimuli. Signal detection theory has also been hugely influential for data analysis in the field. I find it helpful to think of psychophysics as experimental cognitive psychology at its least abstract.

Neurophysiology, on the other hand, investigates the anatomical structures underlying the brain (e.g. categorizing the types of neuron, figuring out what glia are made of). Thus the 'physics' referred to here is the physical structures underlying the brain.

Here the methodology involves various sorts of neuroimaging, tissue sampling, and other ways of probing human and animal brains at various levels of intrusiveness.

Note that these definitions paint the two fields with very broad strokes, so I'd do further research if you want to differentiate say, neurophysiology from neurobiology, but I think this suffices for the purposes of your question.

Hope that helps!


What is the scientific definition of "brain training"?

I think in most scientific contexts, "brain training" refers to working memory training. Scott Barry Kaufman wrote a nice article entitled In Defense of Working Memory Training. Hulme and Melby-Lervag wrote a meta-analysis about working memory training. They note that these exercises would not generalize to other mental skills such as reading comprehension, word decoding, and arithmetic. However, they did find that these exercises did improve short term verbal and visuospatial spatial working memory skills.

Kaufman argues that one should not dismiss working memory training as not improving intelligence. It may improve one aspect of intelligence (i.e. working memory). Note that according to may researchers, intelligence is comprised of many facts. Also, the age of people participating in brain training should be taken account. For example, very young people and very old people may benefit more than "normal age" people. Likewise, personality traits such as conscientiousness and neuroticism should be taken into account.

Kaufman also notes that mindfulness meditation and other "whole body" exercises would be more beneficial than specific working memory training exercises.

Sources

Is Working Memory Training Effective? A Meta-Analytic Review by Monica Melby-Lervåg
and Charles Hulme. Developmental Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association
2013, Vol. 49, No. 2, 270–291.

A Dynamical Model of General Intelligence: The Positive Manifold of
Intelligence by Mutualism by Han L. J. van der Maas et al. Psychological Review
2006, Vol. 113, No. 4, 842–861.


Manipulating the difficulty of guessing a correlation

You will probably need to do pilot testing to ascertain the difficulty of a given correlational task.

From pilot testing, you would need to quantify the difficulty of the task. One option would be the mean discrepancy between actual and predicted correlation. However, there would be other metrics of both degree of error and difficulty.

I would hypothesise that the easiest correlations to guess based on scatterplots would be strong linear relationships involving bivariate normal distributions and lots of data (e.g., n > 1000).

There are a whole bunch of things that you could try to make the task more difficult. Here's what comes to my mind:

Outliers (both outliers that increase the correlation and outliers that decrease the correlations); vary the number of outliers in a particular region; combine outliers that increase and decrease the correlation; make outliers even more extreme
Non-linear relationships (e.g., mixtures of linear and another function such as quadratic, cyclical, stepwise; power functions, logistic fucntions, circular, etc.)
bimodal distributions on one or both variables
Highly skewed distributions on one or both variables
Fewer data points
data that yield correlations only a little bit above or below zero
where there is a function like a quadratic, make the x depend on y rather than y depend on x.

More generally, I think that practice and feedback effects will also be relevant. I.e., it may be relevant to ascertain whether the differences in difficulty with novices also correspond to relative differences in difficulty with participants who have been exposed to the full range of items you have generated.


Are people with high willpower more likely to succeed at keeping a diet then people with lower willpower?

There was a study that was published in 2009, which focused on food and self-control. This study, revealed that self-control didn’t have much of an effect one way or another on whether or not the volunteers were able to constrain themselves from eating the presented food (in this case, chips)

In addition, professor and health psychologist Traci L Mann Ph.D. concluded ,through her studies, that willpower is a myth when it comes to dieting. You can view the multiple papers she has written here or purchase her book on this topic on amazon.


Can processing effort for sub-tasks in neural networks be measured?

Well firstly, what are those statements really saying?  How do you measure "processing" or "power" as it relates to the brain?  For an electrical engineer working in communicatons, it's easy: you just take the square of the amplitude of the signal (signal power) or count the number of instructions per second (processing power).  But that's the discipline where processing power is defined; making an analogy to a brain brings a lot of caveats.  What's an instruction? How many little instructions can you break one instruction down into?  Where do you want to draw the line in a color spectrum that divided orange from yellow?  Or do you want to draw more lines and have dark and light yellow?  Or yet more lines...?

Hans Moravec, a machine intelligence researcher, is famous for his comparisons of technology to organismal processing power.  Here he explains a little bit about how he comes up with his numbers, but they're really not satisfactory to me.  He seems to take one example (the retina) and judge it by what it can do empirically with an image, then extrapolate from there to the rest of the brain.  So this only considers a single network topology in a system that has millions more variations in topology.

The major problem that is a typical complaint by biologists when people use the computer science analogy for brains is that metabolism and functions are too closely coupled to easily separate.  Functional mechanisms can occur as negotiations between molecular networks (including genetic transcription) in addition to the electrical signals that electrical engineers and computer scientists generally think of as "processing".

This is especially outlined in the glutamine, gaba, and adenosine molecular networks (i.e. the transmitters are closely coupled to metabolism through ATP and the Krebb cycle).  A lot of recent evidence has also put a larger emphasis on astrocytes.  This paper is about epilepsy, but takes some time in the introduction to develop ideas about astrocytes and brain metabolism complete with references.  The brain-metabolism material is typical in any neurobiology text book; astrocyte participation is a more recent line of research.  There's also still a lot of research coming up in molecular mechanisms for memory.

There have been all kinds of measurements on processing power, including at the genetic level, but all these measurements make an assumption about what a bit is by breaking biological subsystems into two states (this, 1 and 0).  But then later down the line, somebody will find that there was actually a third significant functional state.  So it's all about where people want to draw lines.

Another problem (more at the macro level now) is that the same task will have different processing requirements depending on how robustly the organisms internal model is approximating and predicting the external world.  So a task that you know what to expect for will take considerably less "processing power" than one where your expectations are not met.  Karl Friston wrote an interesting review suggesting a modeling framework that might help to explain this.


Kinetic synesthesia evoked by abstract thoughts?

Short answer
No.

Background
The definition of synesthesia is generally as follows:

  ... a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality (e.g. vision). Likewise, perception of a form (e.g., a letter) may induce an unusual perception in the same modality (e.g. a color).

The most common form of synesthesia is thought to be colored hearing: sounds, music or voices seen as colors. Most synesthetes report that they see such sounds internally, in "the mind's eye." Only a minority see visions as if projected outside the body, usually within arm's reach (source: APA).

Most of the discussions I've had with peers in that field reported to work with people that see letters and numbers to have a particular color. Indeed WebMD reports that

  One of the most common responses [of synesthetes] is to see letters, numbers, or sounds as colors.

Hence, I think that synesthesia often (but see the APA site) manifests itself through relatively 'simple' visuals brought about by relatively 'simple' stimuli. The number '4' appears to be green etc. In contrast, the highly cognitive complex associations you are envisioning seem unlikely to occur. Further, synesthesia is mostly coupled to the senses of vision and hearing, and not to motor functions. So, to answer your question, no I don't think so.


Is it possible to be clinically obsessed with school?

Short answer

With the limited amount of information given, it is hard to say.  However, if the obsession causes marked distress in the person who displays obsessive behaviour, or it substantially interferes with the person's normal routine, the obsession could, but not necessarily, be diagnosed as a disorder under the category of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders

Long answer

There are a fair few obsessive/compulsive habits which can be clinically diagnosed as being a disorder.  For any obsession or compulsion to be considered obsessive or compulsive in the realms of psychological disorders, the habits and their presenting symptoms need to follow a set criteria laid down in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — 5th Edition)

DSM-5 has a whole section on Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders and these include obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), hoarding disorder, trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder), and excoriation (skin-picking) disorder.

To be diagnosed with a Obsessive-Compulsive or related Disorder, the person:

  Must exhibit obsessions, compulsions, or both.
  The obsessions and/or compulsions cause marked distress, are time consuming (take more than 1 hour per day), or interfere substantially with the person's normal routine, occupational or academic functioning, or usual social activities or relationships.
  The obsessions and/or compulsions are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance or other medical condition.
  The disorder is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder, such as obsession with food in the context of an eating disorder.

  Obsessions are:

  Recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted and in most individuals cause marked anxiety or distress.
  There is some effort by the affected person to ignore or suppress such thoughts, impulses, or images, or to neutralise them with some other thought or action (i.e., by performing a compulsion).

  Compulsions are:

  Repetitive activities (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.
  These behaviours or mental acts are performed in order to prevent or reduce distress, or prevent some dreaded event or situation. However, they are either clearly excessive or not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralise or prevent. (BMJ, 2017; APA, 2013) [Emphasis mine]

When making a formal diagnosis, the person making the dignosis would have to specify certain aspects in the diagnostic report based on specifier criteria laid out in the DSM.

Published by the World Health Organization, the ICD-10 offers another internationally recognised definition of OCD. It classifies OCD in its own chapter, F42, distinguished from the other anxiety disorders.

  The essential feature is recurrent obsessional thoughts or compulsive acts. Obsessional thoughts are ideas, images, or impulses that enter the patient's mind again and again in a stereotyped form. They are almost invariably distressing and the patient often tries, unsuccessfully, to resist them. They are, however, recognized as his or her own thoughts, even though they are involuntary and often repugnant. Compulsive acts or rituals are stereotyped behaviours that are repeated again and again. They are not inherently enjoyable, nor do they result in the completion of inherently useful tasks. Their function is to prevent some objectively unlikely event, often involving harm to or caused by the patient, which he or she fears might otherwise occur. Usually, this behaviour is recognized by the patient as pointless or ineffectual and repeated attempts are made to resist. Anxiety is almost invariably present. If compulsive acts are resisted the anxiety gets worse.

  Incl.:   anankastic neurosis
             obsessive-compulsive neurosis

  Excl.:  obsessive-compulsive personality (disorder)

Although it is not a diagnostic tool, the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) (Goodman, et al., 1989; Rosario-Campos, et al., 2006) is the most widely used measure of OCD symptoms. It is a severity assessment tool which can be used as a self-report instrument or a semi-structured interview, and has been demonstrated to be valid in OCD. The Y-BOCS exists in both an adult and a child version.

References

APA, 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

BMJ, 2017. British Medical Journal: Best Practices - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder [Online]Available at: http://bestpractice.bmj.com/best-practice/monograph/362/diagnosis/criteria.html

Goodman, et al., 1989. The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. I. Development, use, and reliability. Archives of General Psychiatry, 46(11): pp. 1006-11PMID: 2684084 DOI: 10.1001/archpsyc.1989.01810110048007

Rosario-Campos, et al., 2006. The Dimensional Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DY-BOCS): an instrument for assessing obsessive-compulsive symptom dimensions. Molecular Psychiatry, 11(5): pp. 495-504.PMID: 16432526 DOI: 10.1038/sj.mp.4001798


Does EMDR legitimately treat any condition?

TLDR: EMDR seems to be equally efficacious to other therapies.

Davidson & Parker, (2001) conducted a meta-analysis.

  Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a controversial treatment suggested for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other conditions, was evaluated in a meta-analysis of 34 studies that examined EMDR with a variety of populations and measures. Process and outcome measures were examined separately, and EMDR showed an effect on both when compared with no treatment and with therapies not using exposure to anxiety-provoking stimuli and in pre–post EMDR comparisons. However, no significant effect was found when EMDR was compared with other exposure techniques.

Rothbaum, Astin, & Marsteller, (2005). Looked at EMDR with Rape Victims.

  This controlled study evaluated the relative efficacy of Prolonged Exposure (PE) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) compared to a no‐treatment waitlist control (WAIT) in the treatment of PTSD in adult female rape victims (n = 74). Improvement in PTSD as assessed by blind independent assessors, depression, dissociation, and state anxiety was significantly greater in both the PE and EMDR group than the WAIT group (n = 20 completers per group). PE and EMDR did not differ significantly for change from baseline to either posttreatment or 6‐month follow‐up measurement for any quantitative scale.

Seidler, & Wagner, (2006) conducted another meta-analytic study.

  The superiority of one treatment over the other could not be demonstrated. Trauma-focused CBT and EMDR tend to be equally efficacious. Differences between the two forms of treatment are probably not of clinical significance. While the data indicate that moderator variables influence treatment efficacy, we argue that because of the small number of original studies, little benefit is to be gained from a closer examination of these variables. Further research is needed within the framework of randomized controlled trials.

References

Davidson, P. R., & Parker, K. C. (2001). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR): A meta-analysis. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 69(2), 305.
DOI: 10.1037/0022-006X.69.2.305 PMID: 11393607Free PDF: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d703/9ab57fabe1a3b0aee33bf558b95cf228700c.pdf

Rothbaum, B. O., Astin, M. C., & Marsteller, F. (2005). Prolonged exposure versus eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) for PTSD rape victims. Journal of traumatic stress, 18(6), 607-616.DOI: 10.1002/jts.20069FREE PDF: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d5cd/abbee19ef9886327fd77be0587e6826842d6.pdf

Seidler, G. H., & Wagner, F. E. (2006). Comparing the efficacy of EMDR and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of PTSD: a meta-analytic study. Psychological medicine, 36(11), 1515-1522.DOI: 10.1017/S0033291706007963


Are spatial memory and mental mapping skills the same?

The two key parts of memory are coding and recall, we code information to our spatial memory, and the recall is the mental map and, therefore, part of memory. I'd be curious to see what your colleague's logic is behind their definition for skill, but from what is provided, I'd argue that the distinction of spatial memory being memory because we can't test it, while the mental map is a skill because we can to be in error. The Weschler Memory Scale (WNS) is designed specifically to evaluate memory (and is often a vital part of a neuropsych assessment) and, by your colleague's logic, the tests within the WMS don't test memory at all, but the way we manifest our results (such as how to use a pencil), and, of course, memory could arguably be considered a skill anyway.


Can I use other softwares than Linger to run a self-paced reading task

You can use Ibex, if you want to run it online: http://spellout.net/ibexfarm/

But in any case you should be able to upload the files in Linger, you'll need to do it centered since Linger doesn't support right-to-left languages. And you should check the encoding of the files. It should be ISO 8859-15 and not UTF-8.


Reconciling one-dimensional valence with distinct mechanisms for reward/punishment

A meta-analysis of 397 neuroimaging studies was just published looking at this very question (see here).

They tested three hypotheses:

Bipolarity - negative and positive are on the same continuum
Bivalence - negative and positive are independent
Affective workspace - valence is supported by a "flexible set of valence-general regions".

Their analyses are rather complicated, but they didn't find much support for the bipolarity or bivalence hypotheses.  Instead, in support of the affective workspace hypothesis, they conclude (emphasis mine):

  These findings suggest that, at the level of regional brain activity, there is no single region or even voxel that uniquely represents positivity or negativity. Limbic tissue, including the anterior insula, rostral ACC/ventromedial prefrontal cortex, dorsal ACC, amygdala, ventral striatum, as well as several other regions including the thalamus and occipitotemporal cortex, appears to contain cells that are part of the brain’s valence-general affective workspace or “affective neural reference space

But they note that some brain regions have preferences for negativity or positivity, meaning that these brain regions may tend to represent negativity or positivity over the other.

This meta-analysis isn't definitive, but it's the best we have right now.


Why do men have greater variance than women in mental test scores?

I've heard two theories related to genetics. Mental traits are massively polygenic (many genes with tiny effects). Men (XY) do not have a duplicate X chromosome like women (XX), which means that mutations to an X chromosome that disrupt typical gene expression can affect men more than women, driving variance in mental scores. The second theory is related to the fact that individual men are less likely to pass on their genes than individual women. Counter-intuitively, most of our ancestors are women. Men may have evolved a riskier genetic strategy that produces more high and low cognitive scores in phenotypes. Consider that men also take more risks. This is a behavioral outcome that may have emerged from the same selection pressure.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877


Do 10.000 hours of practice make you an expert?

The answer is more involved than it seems. Expertise research programmes, including Ericsson's line, has tended to blend quantitative and qualitative research methods (e.g., case studies, talk-aloud protocol, etc.), and there is a veritable host of critiques and qualifications that apply. For the scope of this answer, I will therefore try to err on the side of too restrictive than too broad.

10,000 hours?

The 10,000 hours figure, supposing that you are right to pin Malcolm's work on this article, appears to derive from an analysis of retrospective practice accounts of violinists. In any case, from the article, page 379.

  "The number of hours of practice accumulated by a violinist at a given age can be easily calculated by adding the yearly estimates at and below that age. The average number of hours of accumulated practice for each of the four groups is shown in Figure 9 as a function of age."

In my experience, rather than giving the 10,000 hours figure, Ericsson himself instead often proffers 10 years, as he does in the abstract of this article. This is more consistent with recent research on effects like spaced repetition and the generation effect, since using hours seems to imply that hours of deliberate practice are interchangeable and independent, which they are evidently not. I don't know if it's meaningful to give a year value, but I subjectively doubt it.

Is deliberate practice effective?

I will interpret the second question as, "What is the state of research on the training efficacy of deliberate practice?" instead of the alternative meaning about 10,000 hours, which I have argued is flashy, but not meaningful or central to expertise acquisition.

Deliberate practice has been studied and compared with traditional training and educational methods fairly extensively across a number of domains. Here, I will restrict myself to studies dated 2011-2015 which were not published by K. A. Ericsson himself. I found a convenient meta-review of 14 studies, which found deliberate practice combined with simulations to be effective for clinical training (McGaghie et al., 2011), the area in which deliberate practice sees the most use by far.

Multiple recent studies have taken a critical view of Ericsson's strong theory of deliberate practice (i.e., performance is a monotonic function of deliberate practice), but no one appears to seriously dispute that it is a substantial factor in expertise acquisition for some domains. A critical meta-analysis of deliberate practice by Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald (2014) reported:

  "We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions."

Concluding remarks

For the purpose of this question, I would say this: on the one hand, the number of hours is meaningless and more likely than not to vary substantially between domains, persons and situations. The 10,000 hours figure is therefore only illustrative, not practically meaningful.

On the other hand, there is evidence to support the efficacy of deliberate practice as a learning strategy. Finally, though it remains influential, recent research suggests that deliberate practice alone is not sufficient to explain expertise acquisition, and that interacting factors need to be considered.

Despite the waning star of strong-form deliberate practice theory, I thoroughly recommend Ericsson et al.'s Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006) for an introduction to this increasingly relevant area of psychology. Personally, I think the recent studies finding that deliberate practice doesn't seem to predict anything in some domains are absolutely fascinating, but I can only speculate as to why.

References

Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P. J., & Hoffman, R. R. (Eds.). (2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge University Press.
Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions A Meta-Analysis. Psychological science, 25(8), 1608-1618.
McGaghie, W. C., Issenberg, S. B., Cohen, M. E. R., Barsuk, J. H., & Wayne, D. B. (2011). Does simulation-based medical education with deliberate practice yield better results than traditional clinical education? A meta-analytic comparative review of the evidence. Academic medicine: journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 86(6), 706.


Rarely does one find oneself wearing lipstick unintentionally, I'd venture to guess. Therefore, one can at least conclude simply, "They want their lips to look redder or darker." There is added information in this conclusion, however sparse, about the motives of such women.
You might then wonder, "Why would women want their lips to appear redder or darker?" You might also note that most lipsticks have this effect, or add gloss to lips that are often paler and more matte naturally. Therefore you could probably consider the function of lipstick in general, not only red and dark shades, because this already includes most. Here's a recent article you might want to check out...
Hill, S. E., Rodeheffer, C. D., Griskevicius, V., Durante, K., & White, A. E. (2012). Boosting beauty in an economic decline: mating, spending, and the lipstick effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(2), 275–291. Available online, URLs: http://gatorlog.com/handout/handouts/Hill_Rodeheffer_Lipstic_Effect.pdf, http://personal.tcu.edu/sehill/LipstickEffectMS20March2012.pdf. Retrieved January 7, 2014.
It mostly discusses beauty products in general, and uses lipstick as a particular operationalization of bueaty products, which might even be cause for some concern about their conclusions. In any case, it should give a decent introduction to how some psychologists think about the implications of lipstick in general. I agree with @KasperBruhn that you're unlikely to hear about any good empirical research about why women choose the colors they do, but you might...This question is already the fourth hit for a "lipstick shade psychology" Google search! Also, the first hit is pretty informative about the psychology of men viewing women with lipstick:

Research has reasserted a strong link between males' perceptions of female attractiveness and red lipstick. Specifically, men are not only most drawn to a woman's lips, but, they spend the most time (7.3 seconds) fixated on a woman's lips when she is wearing red lipstick (as reported by the Daily Mail). Other research has similarly asserted perception of power is related to lipstick, again with red in particular.

You've got to suspect that women know that they're doing this to us...The author clearly does! As for the Daily Mail's original contribution to the discussion:

Scientists found that in the ten seconds after meeting a lady for the first time, the average chap will spend more than half his time gazing at her mouth. If she’s applied lipstick, he’ll find it difficult to look away, with a dash of pink holding his attention for 6.7 seconds and red keeping him fixated for 7.3 seconds. The study, carried out by scientists at Manchester University, involved tracking the eye movements of 50 men as they were presented with images of different women. When the women wore lipstick, the men gazed at their lips for an average of seven seconds – spending just 0.95 seconds looking at their eyes and 0.85 seconds studying their hair. But when they went without make-up, the men tired of looking at their lips after 2.2 seconds, instead devoting 2.97 seconds to admiring their eyes and 2.77 seconds to studying their noses. Full lips were deemed to be the most attractive feature, but the appeal of thin lips increased by more than 40 per cent once make-up had been applied.
Dr Geoff Beattie, who led the research, said: ‘This study proves that lips represent one of the most sensual aspects of a woman’s body and play a critical role in human sexual attraction. Full and red lips combined deliver the perfect pout to achieve male fixation, but women who simply wear lipstick – regardless of their lip type – secure significantly greater levels of attraction than those who do not. For centuries, women have painted their lips red to enhance their appeal, with this practice dating back as far as the Ancient Egyptians who commonly used red lipstick and rouge to enhance their attractiveness. The research suggests that red lips and perceived attractiveness are still inextricably linked, with red lipstick proving to be the most powerful attractor and significantly increasing visual fixation.’


Were the subjects in the Stanford prison experiment randomly assigned to the study?

The subjects in this experiment were randomly assigned in two groups (prisoner versus guard). They were all healthy and without any  identified psychological issues. I quote from the Setting-Up page of your linked website:

  We wanted to see what the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. To do this, we decided to set up a simulated prison and then carefully note the effects of this institution on the behavior of all those within its walls.

  More than 70 applicants answered our ad and were given diagnostic
  interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with
  psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of
  crime or drug abuse. Ultimately, we were left with a sample of 24
  college students from the U.S. and Canada who happened to be in the
  Stanford area and wanted to earn $15/day by participating in a study.
  On all dimensions that we were able to test or observe, they reacted
  normally.

  Our study of prison life began, then, with an average group of
  healthy, intelligent, middle-class males. These boys were
  arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were
  randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners.

Note that people can do pretty nasty  stuff under experimental conditions. For instance, take the Milgram experiment. In this experiment, actors were placed behind a closed door. They would be faking a test subject being electrocuted up until the point of agony. The real test subjects were instructed that they would be helping in an experiment where the effect of punishment through electric shocks would be tested in a learning task. The actors had to answer questions and when they were wrong, the test subjects were instructed to deliver increasingly stronger electrical shocks by pushing a button, until the trainee would improve their performance on the task. This experiment ended up with people consciously electrocuting innocent volunteers. Although everything was faked behind the scenes, it did show that regular, healthy test subjects obediently followed the instructions of the authorative experimenter when instructed to increase the voltage and electrocute the person behind the door, even when the actor was screaming in agony and explaining having a heart rhythm disorder.


Indeed, the brain is absolutely full of vasculature; I thought this image was a nice example...

(figure from Adams et al 2015)

(a) and (d) are sections through cortex, parallel to the surface. All the black/colored dots are indicating vessels (arterioles and venules) that are diving down into the brain. (b) shows the vasculature of the pial surface, where arteries and veins can be distinguished (color coded in c); this is how they get the color coding in (d), by comparing the overlay position. You can see all the veins, in blue, are larger and surrounded by the arteries, in red.

Note the millimeter scale. The authors report 27.4 vessels per square millimeter.

When describing the blood brain barrier people are not referring to an absence of blood vessels in the brain; rather, the blood brain barrier is between the walls lining all of those vessels and the neurons themselves. Therefore, the actual surface area of this blood brain barrier is absolutely massive. Wong et al estimates 15-25 square meters of surface area over 600 kilometers of blood vessels in the brain, whereas the skin is only about 2 square meters.

(figure from Wong et al 2013)

Elsewhere in the body, nutrients just leak out of capillaries by diffusion. The endothelium in the brain (BMEC in the figure above) strictly controls the transport of most substances from the vascular space to the brain space, and the space between the endothelial cells is tightly closed.

Furthermore, the endothelial cells themselves are covered by the processes of glial (non-neuronal) cells called astrocytes, serving as a second layer of regulation.

Adams, D. L., Piserchia, V., Economides, J. R., & Horton, J. C. (2015). Vascular Supply of the Cerebral Cortex is Specialized for Cell Layers but Not Columns. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 25(10), 3673–3681. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhu221

Wong, A. D., Ye, M., Levy, A. F., Rothstein, J. D., Bergles, D. E., & Searson, P. C. (2013). The blood-brain barrier: an engineering perspective. Frontiers in neuroengineering, 6, 7. doi:10.3389/fneng.2013.00007


Top-down knowledge is knowing what a target is. When detecting an object, the rate at which you can detect it (measured via reaction time, or 'RT') is partially dependent on how fast you can identify it based on its sensory features.

Bottom-up knowledge is integrating recognition of the features, or the dimensions of an object, such as its color, orientation, and visibility. Neighbouring locations containing items with similar features tend to
inhibit each other, whereas neighbouring locations containing different features tend to activate each other, thus lending to the saliency of an object. Think of how salient a bright red stop sign is in the dark, and consider why that may be important to ensure the safety of nighttime drivers.

Once top-down and bottom-up systems have calculated their outputs, they are summed together in a spatially-guided 'activation map', thus lending itself to perception.

Both are important for object recognition and reaction time. For example, you must use top-down processing while driving to recognize that a streetlight is a streetlight. You then use bottom-up processing to recognize if the light is red, green, or yellow. Both are important mechanisms of perceptions to use, so that you can act appropriately and avoid an accident on the road.

If you are curious and want to read more, this paper examines both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in visual search, and may prove useful to you.


What is the evidence for the efficacy of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy?

Internal Family Systems therapy have not been subjected to large rigorous clinical trials. Most of the studies were pilots with no confirmatory studies as yet. I am just repeating the IFS website which best summarises the three existing studies in rheumatoid arthritis, PTSD and depression. I could not find any decent trials in my preliminary search.
A pilot study of 13 patients with PTSD and comorbidities found a 92% improvement after completing 16 sessions.
A randomised trial of 79 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, the 39 patients receiving IFS had reduced pain and depressive symptoms, while improving physical function and self-compassion.
A study of female college students did not find any difference in the 17 students treated with IFS compared with the 15 students treated with usual care of IPT or CBT, which supports IFS's efficacy, but the therapists in the IFS arm mainly only had 1 year of IFS training and experience.
https://ifs-institute.com/resources/research


Neurologic coherence between numbers and colors?

In some sense yes, we all have some mild synesthesia and tend to associate some shapes with some colors/names etc. There is a famous experiment from Ramachandran showing that when asked to identify 2 shapes, one called "bouba" and the other one "kiki", almost everybody reports the rounder shape as "bouba" and the sharper one as "kiki". It's unclear why, it's a classical chicken or egg problem. It could suggest that language reflects to some extent the visual appearance of objects. Or that from experience we match the visual appearance of objects with sounds they are (randomly) often associated with. In any case, if one takes the time to conduct polls and measure how often a stimulus is associated with another stimulus one can, at least in some situations, predict to a fairly large degree what people will think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect


Why is it difficult for employees to express hatred to their boss?

While there may be many social norms operating that discourage expression of hatred to your boss, typically there would be many rational reasons not to express such hatred:

The employee's job could be terminated, which may result in lower income for the employee or  a worse job in the future. Swearing in the workplace would often be considered harassment which would often be grounds for termination.
Even where an employee has arranged another job to go to (but then technically, the relationship is not really one of employee to boss), there is the risk associated with reputation damage that can result from verbally abusing a boss.
If the outburst does not result in loss of job, a boss typically has extensive control over the employee. Bosses can typically influence your work duties, when you get leave, when you have to be at work, whether he supports a promotion, who is terminated during a redundancy process, etc. If your boss likes you, then they often have substantial discretion to make your life easier. In all those kinds of situations, life is easier if your boss is on your side.
Independent of the power relationship, you need to spend time with co-workers, and many people find it more pleasant to exist in a pleasant social work environment.

Thus, I don't think we need to resort to a neural explanation to adequately understand this behaviour.

Furthermore, presumably there are legitimate ways of expressing displeasure with your boss that would be more effective in achieving your goals. This might broadly come under the heading of "negotiation".


Can cats get depressed in a way similar to humans?

Human depression has been modeled in a variety of animal models, including cats (Wilner, 1984). Cats show comparable signs of distress when subject to maternal separation, including separation phenomena of protest, followed by despair. Although it is hard to project the DSM-V criteria onto cats, they can show comparable behaviors when subject to anxiety and stress.

Reference
- Wilner, Psychoneuropharmacol (1984); 83(1): 1-16


How much of brain power consumption is for information

According to "Tightly coupled brain activity and cerebral ATP metabolic rate" which is summarised in the Scientific American article "Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?", conscious computation accounts for 50% of the brain's power consumption. From the Scientific American article:

  Chen and his colleagues used MRS specifically to track the rate of
  adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production, the primary source of
  cellular energy, in rat brains. MRS employs a magnetic resonance
  imaging (MRI) machine programmed to pick up particular elements in the
  body—in this case, the three phosphorus atoms in each ATP molecule...

  The team noted that when the lab rats were knocked out, they produced
  50 percent fewer ATP molecules than when they were mildly
  anesthetized.The ATP produced when the brain is inactive, says Chen,
  seems to go mostly toward cell maintenance, whereas the additional ATP
  found in the more alert animals fueled other brain functions. He
  speculates that only a third of the ATP produced in fully awake brains
  is used for housekeeping functions, leaving the rest for other
  activities.


Is it possible to become totally envy free?

Smith and Kim's (2007) review article in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin titled "Comprehending Envy" might be a good starting point. They define envy as

  an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of
  inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a
  desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of persons.

They are also clear to distinguish proper envy from several other emotions including benign envy, longing, jealousy, and resentment.

Individual differences in experiencing envy: As a starting point, from a trait personality perspective, people differ in their tendency to experience various emotions. In particular neuroticism is associated with a tendency to experience negative emotions. Smith and Kim (2007) mention several self-report scales:

"Dispositional envy scale (DES; R. H. Smith, Parrott,Diener, Hoyle, & Kim, 1999) consists of eight items, four of which ask respondents to indicate the degree and frequency of their
experiences of envy"; copy of items
"measure of enviousness developed by Gold (1996) uses a number of items containing familiar idioms that were argued to encourage truthful responses."

Table 2  from Smith et al (1999) report the means and SDs for the items of the DES. The means and sds are generally less than 2.5 on a 1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree scale (e.g., I feel envy everyday M=2.3).
This  suggests that a bit over half the participants are either disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the test items.
The scale showed moderately strong positive correlations with neuroticism and negative correlations with self-esteem. Thus, you might conclude that some people rarely consciously experience envy. That said, some researchers consider that this might be due to social desirability in responding or even at a deeper level, people may not even realise that they are experiencing envy.

Thus, while social desirability might explain some of the individual differences, I think that some people just rarely experience envy. That said, this still leaves open the question of how people who do experience negative effects from envy, might reduce such effects.

Coping with envy:
Smith and Kim (2007) review research on coping with envy:

  Types of strategies for coping with envy. Salovey and Rodin (1988)
  followed up their survey by examining what strategies people use to
  cope with envy and jealousy and to assess which seemed most effective
  in doing so. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing their
  emotional reactions to envy-provoking situations in a number of
  domains and the frequency with which they used three distinctive
  coping strategies (self-reliance, selfbolstering, and selective
  ignoring). A number of important, suggestive findings emerged.
  Self-reliance, which included items tapping emotional control (e.g.,
  “refrain from feeling angry”), perseverance (“don’t give up”), and
  goal commitment (e.g., “become committed to the goal”), and to a
  lesser extent, selective ignoring (“decide it isn’t so important”)
  were associated with reduced envy. Self-bolstering (e.g., “think about
  my good qualities”) was unrelated to reduced envy; however, for those
  participants already experiencing envy, it was associated with less
  depression and, along with self-reliance, with less anger, both
  affects associated with the experience of envy. Salovey and Rodin
  (1988) interpreted these findings to mean that the more effective
  strategies for reducing initial envy appear to be stimulus focused rather than
  self-focused.

References

Smith, R. H., Parrott, W. G., Diener, E. F., Hoyle, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (1999). Dispositional envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 1007-1020.
Salovey, P., & Rodin, J. (1988). Coping with envy and jealousy. Journal
of Social and Clinical Psychology, 7, 15–33.
Smith, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological bulletin, 133(1), 46. PDF


What is a good rough rule of thumb regarding required sample size for questionnaire studies?

Obviously, this question is highly under-specified. The sample size you need depends a lot on the aims of your analysis.

In general, when thinking about sample size requirements, you need to think about power analysis and desired precision of estimation. This in turn requires you to think about your research question and expectations about results (e.g., effect sizes, expected means, and so on).

That said, you asked about a few simple rules of thumbs for questionnaire style research.

These would be my rough rules of thumb:

If you are wanting to do a proper survey study of the population and are aiming to get good  estimates of proportions, then I'd think you'd want at least 1,000 participants in order to get reasonable standard errors. But if you are doing this kind of study, you are going to want to know a lot more about sampling than this question implies.

More likely, you are thinking about rules of thumb for a standard observational psychology study. In these kinds of studies, you are typically measuring several psychology scales perhaps along with some demographics. A typical analysis might involve correlations, regression-type models, and perhaps some reliability analysis and factor analysis to check the scales. In these kinds of studies, I generally think of a sample size of 100 as a reasonable starting point, 200 as good, and 300+ as very good, and of course even bigger samples are better. These rules of thumb are related to the precision with which you are estimating correlations which in turn relate to the precision of predictive models and so on.

For more discussion of rules of thumb, see this question on rules of thumb for regression.

That said, the above are just rough rules of thumb. There are trade-offs between required resources and sample size. More importantly, if you are serious about these things you should analyse your problem in terms of either power analysis or desired precision.


Are scintillating scotomas really caused by cortical spreading depression? If so, how is this known to be true?

The primary visual cortex is topographic, which means that specific parts of that brain region correspond exactly to specific parts of your visual field. In order to prove that a scotoma (literally a blind spot in your vision) is due to dysfunctional neurons, all you need to do is show that the neurons responsible for that spot in your vision are not working but the rest of them are. We can do this with a variety of tools, the most common one these days being fMRI. In addition to showing that the area of neuronal dysfunction maps onto the area subserving vision in that area where the scotoma is located, a spreading depression does exactly that: it spreads, at a predictable rate, from the location of its onset to adjacent brain tissue. fMRI will show you not only the area of brain dysfunction, but will allow you to "follow" the neuronal dysfunction as it moves over time, and show that it corresponds to the location of the scotoma in your visual field, which will also move in correspondence. HTH. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC31895/ for first reference to this type of research (more in pubmed with keywords fMRI and migraine aura).


In a simplified example, a tennis player's eyes see the tennis ball's movements, and is working with the brain to track the speed and trajectory.  The brain is then reacting to these cues along with all other available cues, to send signals to the nerves responsible for moving the body in the required way to respond to these cues.

If however, something happens externally to the tennis game, which is then interpreted by the amygdalae and hypothalamus as a threat to the host's wellbeing, the brain's attention is immediately moved from the tennis game to the threat in order for it to react in the best way possible to protect the body from the perceived impending danger.

Now, the brain may not be immediately conscious of the threat in a psychological sense as it may not have time to think about the threat in a psychological way, but nevertheless, the brain will be conscious of the impending danger and will respond accordingly in the most efficient way possible.

This is reflex reaction.

Emotional reactions are psychological reactions to stimulae which the brain receives, whereas reflex reactions are reactions which result from stimulae which the brain currently doesn't have time to process psychologically.


When was statistics used in psychology research first?

This paper suggests it was a psychophysics experiment by Fencher in 1860.


Is there any direct or indirect empirical support for the effectiveness of Mel Robbins' five second rule?

I'm having a difficult time finding anything on suppression aside from various bits on the white bears experiment you noted. Of particular note is this study, I suppress, therefore I smoke detailing how suppression can help with immediate control. But, when they stopped suppressing a large rebound effect occurred. This would indicate that the five-second rule, at least for continued behavior change, might have some drawbacks.

It seems like her evidence for the five-second rule is based on the culmination of other individuals work. So in the absence of evidence to support, I'll work through her claims.

She takes psychological concepts and describes how the five-second rule either enhances or overcomes them. Mel Robbins cites five principles of how the five-second rule overcomes the 'tricks your brain plays on you', in this video.

Locus of Control & A Bias toward Action
Behavioral Flexibility
Do good, Be good
The Golden Rule of Habits
Activation Energy

Locus of Control is the extent to which you believe you have control over your life. A concept rather than evidence. Robbins argues that the five-second rule will help promote your locus of control by giving you a bias toward action, that is doing over thinking. Locus of control is assumed to be related to self-efficacy, the belief in your own abilities.

Behavioral Flexibility Robbins asserts that only recently scientists have discovered our brains continue to grow after age 25. The research I believe she's referring to is about maturity and adulthood. I'm not sure how this relates but apparently it's good news because we can use the five-second rule even after the age of 25.

Do good, Be good Is based on Timothy Wilson's cognitive behavioral therapy work around 'narrating your story'. From what I understand, his work focuses on writing or talking with yourself to better understand your thoughts. He mentions briefly that one way to change your narrative is to act how you want then narrate from there. I have not found any evidence this is a 'proven technique' like Robbins states.

The Golden Rule of Habits is the concept that the only way you can break a habit is by replacing it. Starting with the cue. Robbins asserts that the five-second rule becomes a cue and by extension, gets you in the habit of action. There's extensive research on habits that might support this and a bevy of similar techniques.

Activation Energy is the starting point for 'flow' which is based in scientific research. You need something to trigger that minimal exertion to get start on your task. Robbins asserts that the five-second rule can be used as your activation energy.

The final and probably biggest claim is that counting back from five activates the prefrontal cortex which can override what looks to be the amygdala. I can't find substantive evidence for this statement either way.


Psychological theories about the end of a romantic relationship

Is there a split between desire and love?

Of course, love and lust/desire are two completely different things.
A simple definition I have of the word love:  An involuntary response to virtue.

This obviously means I can't "love" someone without knowing whether or not they are honest, benevolent, or have integrity.  It also means that I can't love someone if I am morally corrupt, because doing so would expose my corruption.  To protect myself, I would be repulsed from that person.

Lust, of course, is biologically programmed in our brain and nearly impossible not to experience, unlike love.  I can scarcely be attracted to a woman, go on one date with her, and conclude that I love her.

Like you said, dopamine and other chemicals in the brain can cloud our judgement and lead us to believe we love someone and ignore their red flags for negative behaviors like abuse, when we are merely biologically driven to reproduce with them.  I have heard that this euphoria lasts for about six months until desire fizzles and romantic interest is lost by someone and the relationship ends.

Which other theories explain the decline in closeness?

Abuse of all kinds.  Verbal, physical, and sexual abuse cause big problems, particularly if the abuse is at a young age.  Simply spanking children has been conclusively found to reduce empathy and IQ and increase "brain disorders."  With this information available, more than 80% of American parents still spank their children!  From Christian culture, to Tongan culture, to Muslim culture, spanking and abuse is the norm.  How can we be close to someone if we cannot empathize with them?  Empathy is the deepest level of understanding we can have for someone at any point in time.

I would argue that we are increasingly trying to ignore our unconscious responses to trauma and grief, particularly as children, in society.  The problems are ignored by parents with empathy and emotional distance from their kids which allows them to spank their children and let depression and other problems that could be significant, go unnoticed or even criticized. Endless amounts of "culture propaganda" about how parents are inherently good and loving people despite their abuses, and schools that are teaching kids what to think instead of how to think & solve problems only exacerbate the problem.

Depression and substance abuse is a natural and valid response to events that are usually traumatic - childhood sexual abuse is just one example.  These valid responses in our brain are being labeled with "brain disorder" diagnoses and antidepressants when the unconscious brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do - Warn us that something is wrong.  The benefit for this is obvious.  Just look at the millions of dollars worth of advertising spent for antidepressants on American television.  Often victims are told something is wrong with them, when more often than not, someone wronged them.

Instead of finding the problems in our past that have contributed to unhealthy lifestyle patterns through therapy or self-knowledge work, we, with the help of our "what to think" education, run to the nearest "answer" - a mind-altering drug and a label for our problem.

A closer look at how ignoring the truth can affect society as a whole...

Biologically speaking, as children we are genetically designed to understand that our parents are biologically successful.  They reproduced.  We grow up and learn patterns of behavior from parents in order to be biologically successful based on their success.

Generally speaking:

A boy will model general behavior patterns in his father and be attracted to the general behavior patterns found in his mother
A girl will model general behavior patterns in her mother and be attracted to the general behavioral patterns found in her father

Patterns can be categories such as honesty, empathy, integrity, etc.

For example, children that grow up without a father (exception: children of widowed mothers) experience:

Increased promiscuity
Increased likelihood of committing crimes, violence, and abuse
Increased aggression
Increased teen pregnancies
Increased likelihood of being abused
Increased likelihood of divorce

This is an example of two parents that had an apparent lack of empathy for their children.  It is important to remember that empathy is taught behavior and instead of empathy, they were largely traumatized and abandoned.  The boys absence of a father leads them to have less empathy, shown through crimes and violence against other people.  The pattern often repeats through promiscuity and teen pregnancy and can extend to other families through crime.

I think the evidence suggests that poor parenting choices, whether directly or indirectly, is deteriorating our closeness, community, and ability to love and empathize. How long before the unabused outnumber the abused?  That, I believe, is up to us.

Sources (unfortunately can only do 2 links):

Single Mother Childhood (additional sources)

Facts About Spanking (additional sources)

Search "sins of the father" on the same channel for a firsthand abuse story

Search "confessions of a womanizer" on same channel for a firsthand story from a cheater!

Search "an honest conversation with a single mother" on same channel for a firsthand story from a single mother


How does this illusion - that I just inadvertently created - work?

This is likely related to other illusions of relative size, such as the  Ebbinghaus (A) and Delboeuf (B) illusions.

These illusions show that perception is not a 1:1 representation of retinal input. Instead it is a mental (re-)construction.

As reviewed by Mrucek et al:

  an object's size is not inherently represented in the size of its projected retinal image. Rather, the perceived size of an object is constructed by integrating multiple sources of information including, but not limited to, retinal image size, physical and perceived distance (Berryhill, Fendrich, & Olson, 2009; Boring, 1940; Emmert, 1881; Ponzo, 1911), an object's geometrical and textural properties (Giora & Gori, 2010; Kundt, 1863; Lotze, 1852; Oppel, 1855; Helmholtz, 1867; Westheimer, 2008), knowledge of an object's typical size (Konkle & Oliva, 2012), and the relative size of different objects in a scene (Coren & Girgus, 1978; Roberts, Harris, & Yates, 2005; Robinson, 1972).

A number of factors produce assimilation and contrast effects in size (as in your example), central variables seem to be the distance and the similarity of target and inducing stimuli (Roberts et al. 2005).

This is getting a little bit off topic, but Mruczek et al. (2014) show that dynamic visual aspects can feed into this illusion too. Also check out the StarTrek illusion which also has a relative size component. Isn't that cool? The name alone...

These illusions may seem to be cute effects. However, they have important real world consequences. For example, Wansink and van Ittersum (2012; Ittersum & Wansink, 2013) investigated the effect of plate size on consumption. Imagine that the white circle in picture B is the plate and that the black cirle is your dessert. If you have a big plate you eat more, which is (also) related to the Delboeuf illusion. These illusions seem difficult to counteract:

  Even a 60-min, interactive, multimedia warning on the dangers of using
  large plates had seemingly no impact on 209 health conference attendees, who subsequently served nearly twice as much food when given a large buffet plate 2 hr later.

I could go on..., sorry.

References

Ittersum, K. V., & Wansink, B. (2012). Plate Size and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 215–228. http://doi.org/10.1086/662615

Mruczek, R. E. B., Blair, C. D., & Caplovitz, G. P. (2014). Dynamic illusory size contrast: A relative-size illusion modulated by stimulus motion and eye movements. Journal of Vision, 14(3), 2. http://doi.org/10.1167/14.3.2

Roberts, B., Harris, M. G., & Yates, T. A. (2005). The roles of inducer size and distance in the Ebbinghaus illusion (Titchener circles). Perception, 34(7), 847–856.

Wansink, B., & van Ittersum, K. (2013). Portion size me: Plate-size induced consumption norms and win-win solutions for reducing food intake and waste. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 19(4), 320–332. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0035053


How does the brain act on the information gained via eye saccades?

A good place to start for a high level understanding of all perception and action is Jaoquin Fuster's perception-action cycle. As he says, it's a "cybernetic cycle linking the organism to its environment". He describes two moieties of the brain, posterior sensation moiety, and the anterior behavioral moiety. Information cycles between perception, interpretation (in the posterior moiety), action plans (in the anterior moiety), and actual movement. The movement is perceived, and the cycle continues. This is a good frame for thinking about how saccades work.

Your actual question then is opening a big ol' meaty can of worms. How the brain makes use of the sequence of images produced by the saccades, is actually two questions. First, how does the brain perceive images? Next, how are saccades relevant to this? In the context of the perception-action cycle, we're then looking at how the posterior moiety interprets visual information, and how the anterior moiety acts on that interpretation. Without writing 10,000 words, I'll try and give a thumbnail sketch of this. Then I'll try and circle it back to answer your specific question.

So, how does the brain interpret visual images? Here we only really need to understand that the posterior moiety creates distributed and hierarchical cell assemblies representing increasingly complex sets of features.  Distributed because the cell assemblies are sparse, as in they consist of many scattered members each representing a different feature. In some way these are bound together to form the gestalt of the object. Hierarchical because cortical regions are connected in a way where successive regions integrate features from previous regions. So, basically a hierarchical set of cell assemblies are activated and thus the sensory information is represented in the mind.

One point before moving on: these cell assemblies are temporal. They represent information over time. It's not so obvious in vision, but for other sensory modalities it is. What does a single configuration of cochlear activations mean? Or a single configuration of touch sensors? Not much. It means vastly more in temporal sequence. A melody, or a hand patting your shoulder. Vision is not different, the confounding thing is that each individual configuration carries so much information it's easy to think of the visual system as a static system. But it isn't. Saccades themselves are helping create temporal information, by focusing on successive things. If you think in terms of the activity of the retina, instead of the static external scene, you'll see that saccades are an integral part of making visual information temporally dynamic.

Because of this, I don't think it is optimal to think of saccades as a procession of images. On the level of the retina, or V1, this might be true. But throughout the perceptual moiety, these images are bound together. Each saccade doesn't present a radically new image, it elaborates an already existing image within the mind. The higher hierarchical regions are binding the information from each saccade into a framework.

Ok, so if the posterior moiety understands the scene, how is it translated into an action (like a saccade)? I believe the answer is the route through the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia helps "select" motor behaviors. To put it very simply, the perceptual moiety is the input, and the output goes to the anterior motor moiety. Through mechanisms that are unclear, a transform is done where a saccade movement is disinhibited that will move the eyes to the bit of the scene that it wants to see next.

I realize I'm shooting kind of wide here, so let me know if you want to know about something more specific. I'm just not sure that your current question can be answered narrowly.

  Fuster, J.M. (1990). Prefrontal cortex and the bridging of temporal
  gaps in the Perception-Action Cycle. Annals of the New York Academy of
  Science, 608, 318-336.

  Felleman, D.J., & Van Essen, D.C. (1991). Distributed Hierarchical
  Processing in the Primate Cerebral Cortex. Cerb Cortex, 1, 1-47.

  Sakurai, Y. (1999). How do cell assemblies encode information in the
  brain? Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 23, 785-796.

  Engel, A.K., Konig, P., Kreiter, A., Schillen, T.B., & Singer, W.
  (1992). Temporal coding in the visual cortex: new vistas on
  integration in the nervous system. Trends in Neurosciences, 15,
  218-226.

  Hikosaka, O., Takikawa, Y., & Kawagoe, R. (2000). Role of the basal
  ganglia in the control of purposive saccadic eye movements. Physiol
  Rev, 80, 953-978.


When a group of people laugh, people will instinctively look at the person they feel closest to in that group

I suspect the claims were distorted versions of what was found in the study below. It supports a weaker form of the above claims: the idea that a person would often look at someone they are socially close to when laughing in a group setting, but not necessarily at the socially closest person.

From McAdams, et. al. (1984):

  [High scores on] intimacy motivation was positively associated with
  greater levels of laughter, smiling, and eye contact.

  Along with non verbal behaviors [...], looking, laughter, and smiling have been classified as cues of [...] "intimacy".

  Harper et al. (1978) conclude: "With some exceptions and qualifications, the research to date shows a direct relationship between looking and positive interpersonal sentiment" (p. 189)

  Rubin (1970) found that the amount of time in which the couple engaged in mutual eye contact during a laboratory session was positively correlated with their score on a questionnaire measure of love intensity.

  Observing adults interacting in dyads, Rosenfeld (1966) found that the frequency of smiling significantly differentiated between those subjects instructed to seek approval and those instructed to avoid approval from the other.

Anecdotally, it would seem very strange that in a group setting with multiple acquaintances (for example at a dinner table with friends/family), two people would only look at each other every time a joke is made. In settings where social closeness disparity is larger (e.g. at a comedy club show) it seems obvious that two people who went to the show together would look at each other when a joke is made.

The larger point is the usefulness of the laughter-eye-contact response. The response would be useful to gauge more general "who knows who" information, but would probably not be specific to any previous or desired sexual encounters.


Can the daily use of two or more languages impact cognitive capacity?

A lot of research seems to have been done on the challenges multilingualism poses for the human brain, but not so much on how much actually meeting those challenges improves one's overall cognitive capacity. At present the general approach seems to be summed up: "Cognitive science suggests that the brain has selective resources with limited capacity" (Emily Holmes et al.). Stanislas Dehaene in particular asks, "How can cerebral circuits that normally handle a single phonology, lexicon and syntax adapt to the storage of multiple language systems?", and suggests that "sophisticated mechanisms of segregation must exist to prevent cross-talk." These can be witnessed in action when "anyone trying the well-known party trick of reciting the number sequence while switching languages (for instance un, two, trois, four, cinq) will recognise that central coordination is a very plausible source of difficulty in translation and language switching." Source of difficulty maybe, but not yet apparently evidence of positive capacity for other tasks. Hopefully some work has gone down that road since.

References:

Holmes, E. et al. "Can Playing the computer game 'Tetris' reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A proposal from Cognitive Science" Abstract.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004153

Dehaene, S. "Fitting two languages into one brain" Brain (1999) 122(12)

Since this answer I have indeed found some reports on the beneficial cognitive effects of bi- if not multi-lingualism:

Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy - two factors thought to help fight off dementia.
"We are pretty dazzled by the results," Professor Ellen Bialystok of Toronto's York University said in a statement.
"In the process of using two languages, you are engaging parts of your brain, parts of your mind that are active and need that kind of constant exercise and activity, and with that experience [it] stays more robust," she later told CTV television.
(Bilingualism delays onset of dementia
23:22 12 January 2007 by New Scientist and Reuters)

So his team compared the age dementia symptoms appeared in some 650 natives of Hyderabad, India, over a six-year period. About half spoke at least two languages. This group's symptoms started on average four and a half years later than those in monolingual individuals.
The same pattern appeared for Alzheimer's, frontotemporal and vascular dementia. The results also held true for a group of people who were illiterate, suggesting that the benefits of being bilingual don't depend on education (Neurology, DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000436620.33155.a4).
A leading theory as to why bilingualism may affect dementia involves the constant suppression of one language, and switching between the two. "This permanent switching and suppressing offers you constant brain training," says Bak. ("Learn une autre langue to hold off dementia" New Scientist 9 November 2013.)


Readiness Potential vs. Lateralized Readiness Potential in ERP

The Lateralized Readiness Potential can be considered a later component of a more generalized Readiness Potential, i.e., an LRP would develop out of an RP. As such, RPs can be interesting if you want to determine the earliest point in time at which a movement plan "gets worked on" in the motor cortex.

For reference, I recommend reading these sources and I hope you will be able to find your way around the paywall:

Predicting Motor Intentions with Closed-Loop Brain-Computer Interfaces
The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements


Can one claim that a person is having cognitive distortion and be always correct?

The use of assumptions in clinical settings seems to play into the errors you mention. Cueball is just as prone to distortions as Megan.

According to Dawes, Faust, & Meehl (1989), a professional in the field has to rely on one of two choices when making a decision on a client, either their own clinical judgment which is based on experience and knowledge or actuarial judgment which essentially rests on the statistical method, establishing a link between empirical data and the event in question. The clinical judgment does not seem to be accurate, for the most part. Clinicians fair better when using methods that are backed by actuarial methods, rather than relying on their own "hunches" or "gut feelings".

It would probably be a better idea for Cueball to at least try to jot down some explicit instances of distortions and compare them to some baseline to ensure it is something out of the ordinary, at least for what he might know about Megan.
Though he would be correct, at least in this instance, but it wasn't necessarily due to experience, but chance.
 Which is one of the big issues pointed to in the article by Dawes and his colleagues, they essentially find that the criticisms towards the therapist being an all-knowing being are valid and point out that they often forget to consider other variables that might be contributing to the situation, so with the occasional correct guess, they may begin to rely on their gut or worldview which distorts their decisions, overall.

To combat these errors Lambert and Shimokawa (2011), highly recommended that client feedback is collected because it helps in understanding the client's subjective point of view and can aid in aligning the therapist's views to better meet the needs of their client, leading to stronger outcomes. The practice of feedback helps build a factor in therapy success, which is the therapeutic alliance (the relationship between client and therapist). Flexibility also helps as well.

This notion of client feedback is another layer on top of the common factors pointed out by Rosenzweig (2002) that seem to contribute most to positive client outcomes, more so than the theoretical method used. These factors include the qualities of the therapist and how they interact with the client and their specific qualities.

Essentially, it is the nonspecific elements, like therapist and client qualities in interaction, that create the foundation for a better client outcome.

Dawes, R. M., Faust, D., & Meehl, P. E. (1989). Clinical versus actuarial judgment. Science, 243(4899), 1668-1674.

Lambert, M. J., & Shimokawa, K. (2011). Collecting client feedback. Psychotherapy, 48(1), 72–79.

Rosenzweig, S. (2002). Some implicit common factors in diverse methods of psychotherapy. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 12(1), 5–9. doi:10.1037/1053-0479.12.1.5


Does typical duration of Short Term Memory differ between tasks?

As you pointed out, the duration of short term memory(STM) varies and there are different theories.   However, in mainstream opinion, ideas or thoughts classified as "short term" are said to decay after a short amount of time (minutes at most). If an idea is recallable after a few minutes (or even a minute) then it would be classified under "long term memory" (LTM). Your example of leaving your keys and then later remembering would be the following process: You leave your keys and the act is stored in your working memory and through special attention is encoded into LTM which you later recall while looking for your keys. Further, if you are using "retrieval cues" then you are attempting to "retrieve" it from your encoded LTM. So if a cue reminds you of something then that "thing" was already encoded in LTM. So this "keys" example and examples involving "remembering lists of words/numbers/letters, remembering parts of a story, answers to a quiz" are not short term memory issues at all but rather encoding and LTM issues.

So if your question is "Does the chance of encoding from STM to LTM differ between tasks?" the answer is yes.

You do have a greater likelihood of encoding certain short term memories over others. This is generally because you have a vested interest in an idea or it has an attribute that is distinct from the others. For example: if I listed "apple, banana, orange, house, kiwi, mango" then you may pay special attention to "house" because it is not a fruit and thus different. Because you pay more attention to this it has a greater chance of being remembered. Interest also plays a part. If you obsessed over something (let's say ponies) and that word or an associated word (e.g. pony) appeared in a random list then you are more likely to remember that word than the other, less significant, words. It has also been shown that on average people remember the first word in a list (primacy) and the last word in a list (proximity) than any given word in the middle. Lastly, of course, there is a greater liklihood of remembering something if you try through mnemonics such as you mentioned (rehearsal and chunking). I hope this answered your question. I also hope I didn't misunderstand your question.


With the brain's propensity for homeostasis, how can some drugs be labelled addictive and others not?

Here is a part answer to your question.

According to the article Drug Facts: Understanding Drug Abuse and Addiction and Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction, addiction is a disease caused by some types of drugs.  Specifically, they rewire the brain to cause an overstimulus of the 'reward' centres and by imitating some of the pre-existing neurochemical messengers in the brain - essentially, 'tricking' the brain that homeostasis is maintained.

Related, the article "Why does the rapid delivery of drugs to
the brain promote addiction?" (Samaha and Robinson, 2005) concluded that the rate of delivery is an important factor:

  that rapidly
  delivered drugs might promote addiction by promoting
  forms of neurobehavioural plasticity that contribute to
  the compulsive pursuit of drugs.


What are biological primary mathematical skills?

The term seems to come from David C. Geary's 1995 article. Here's the abstract with full-text link below:

  An evolution-based framework for understanding biological and cultural
  influences on children's cognitive and academic development is
  presented. The utility of this framework is illustrated within the
  mathematical domain and serves as a foundation for examining current
  approaches to educational reform in the United States. Within this
  framework, there are two general classes of cognitive ability,
  biologically primary and biologically secondary. Biologically primary
  cognitive abilities appear to have evolved largely by means of natural
  or sexual selection. Biologically secondary cognitive abilities
  reflect the co-optation of primary abilities for purposes other than
  the original evolution-based function and appear to develop only in
  specific cultural contexts. A distinction between these classes of
  ability has important implications for understanding children's
  cognitive development and achievement.

You can read more about David C. Geary's articles on mathematics on his website.

References

Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children's cognition: Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24-37. FULL TEXT


What is the difference between (and importance of) extrinsic vs. intrinsic rewards in gamification?

Intrinsic Rewards (motivation)
These are rewards which are directly of value to the person, rather being something that represents (or could be "traded in") for something to of value.

So getting a badge in and of itself isn't an Intrinsic Reward, but up votes on an answer would be b/c it converts Status and Validation of the user's work.
These rewards are also intrinsic to the task. They have not been "bolted on" or "dangled like a carrot" in front of the user.

Extrinsic Rewards (or incentives) are rewards which  are not naturally a part of the task.
So if you enjoy drawing and I compliment you on the drawing that's intrinsica. If I offer to pay you to draw more, that's extrinsic.

from this slideshow.

Extrinsic Incentives are demotivating and, thus, should be avoided in Gamifying a system
There is a lot of research that shows that Extrinsic Rewards are demotivating because:
They extinguish internal motivation

Result in Habituation, requiring higher levels of the External reward
to achieve the same effects.
Send a message that you think they should not want to do this (why
else would you need to bribe them)
Seem manipulative

Therefore, Extrinsic Rewards should be avoided.
And if you find that your "players" are focused more on the game mechanics than the work then that's a clue that your game mechanics may be offering extrinsic motivation.