How to analyze reaction choice experiments?

Omitted responses are not usually analyzed (what does that even mean, no response before a deadline?, a "does not want to respond" button?).

If you want to analyze jointly choices and RTs, you need a model. I would say the most admitted model right now is the drift-diffusion model (Ratcliff & Rouder, 1998), which models choice and RTs as the accumulation of noisy evidence toward a decision boundary. These models are actually quite old (the late 50s), but they regained a lot of interest in the past 10 years. Some toolbox (e.g. Vandekerckhove & Tuerlinckx, 2008) will do that for you. Note that these models originally predict equal RTs for correct and incorrect choices, which is typically not what is found. You'll have to add parameters to predict these aspects which will require more data do produce good fits. You can also tweak the model to predict opt-out choices (Kiani, Corthell & Shadlen, 2014). You can tweak it some more to make it predict trials that failed to produce a response before a deadline, but I doubt any toolbox will do it out of the box.

These models are especially usefull if you have various conditions on the same scale (for example 5 levels of luminance), because that will strongly constrain your fits. If you want to analyze differences between a small number of conditions, especially if they are not on the same scale, I would avoid using them. (1) Fitting a 10+ parameter model to compare just 2 conditions is highly dubious (despite that people do it all the time), and (2) your results become model dependent. What if the model is wrong, are your conclusions still valid? What you can do is simply compare z-transformed ratio correct responses and median of RTs (because the are not normally distributed, you can also take their inverse which make them more or less normal) in your favorite statistical test and make sure there is no speed-accuracy tradeoff.

Ratcliff, R., & Rouder, J. N. (1998). Modeling response times for two-choice decisions. Psychological Science, 9(5), 347-356.

Vandekerckhove, J., & Tuerlinckx, F. (2008). Diffusion model analysis with MATLAB: A DMAT primer. Behavior Research Methods, 40(1), 61-72.

Kiani, R., Corthell, L., & Shadlen, M. N. (2014). Choice certainty is informed by both evidence and decision time. Neuron, 84(6), 1329-1342.


Assuming a neuron does not reach activation, what is the rate of repolarization in the absence of new stimulus?

Neurons (either the neuron as a whole, or segments such as a length of dendrite) can be modeled as an RC circuit. This is because the membrane acts as both a resistor and capacitor.

RC circuits have a time constant tau, equal to R * C. This time constant describes how long it takes to passively discharge the membrane capacitor.

In the context of neurons, this is referred to as the "membrane time constant" and like other exponential decay constants it refers to the amount of time that passes before the voltage has gone ~63.2% of the way towards rest.

In exponential decay, equilibrium is never truly reached, but after ~2-3 time constants it is likely decayed to within measurement precision given other sources of noise.

To answer your question "how long" the only answer is "it depends" - neurons with different functions have very different time constants. Time constants also aren't perfectly static, because the membrane resistance is not constant due to channels gated by voltage or signalling molecules. Typical values are from milliseconds to tens of milliseconds.


How to obtain Fritz Perls' Eye Witness to Therapy film?

This youtube channel has videos labeled "Fritz Perl ClipN" where N = 1,2,3, 4.0 and 5:

Clip1
Clip2
Clip3
Clip4
Clip5


Can binaural beats be generated with carrier tones outside the audible frequency range?

Short answer
No, infrasonic or ultrasonic sound cannot generate binaural beats.

Background
Binaural beats are generated in the brain and are associated with the frequency bands of the EEG. Binaural beats in the delta (1 to 4 Hz) and theta (4 to 8 Hz) ranges have reportedly been associated with reports of relaxed, meditative, and creative states, and used as an aid to falling asleep. Binaural beats in the alpha frequencies (8 to 12 Hz) are said to enhance alpha brain waves and those in the beta frequencies (16 to 24 Hz) have been associated with reports of increased concentration or alertness (source: Web US).

The binaural beat is not heard in the ordinary sense of the word - the human range of hearing is from 20-20,000 Hz and hence pretty much all the aforementioned frequencies cannot be registered directly by the auditory system. Instead, binaural beats are auditory brainstem responses which originate in the superior olivary nucleus of each hemisphere. They result from the interaction of two different auditory stimuli from opposite ears. The carrier frequencies have to be approximately below 1000 Hz and have to differ in frequency between one and 30 Hz. For example, if a pure tone of 400 Hz is presented to the right ear and a pure tone of 410 Hz is presented simultaneously to the left ear, an amplitude modulated standing wave of 10 Hz, i.e., the difference between the two, is experienced as the two wave forms mesh in and out of phase within the superior olivary nuclei (source: Web US).

Because auditory information needs to be sent to the brainstem, the auditory system is needed from the far periphery up to the brainstem. Thus, the hair cells in the inner ear are necessary to convey the information to the brain via the auditory nerve. Because infrasonic and ultrasonic sounds do not activate the hair cells and do not lead to auditory nerve activity, these sounds can hence not activate the brainstem and do not generate binaural beats.

Sources
- American Speech, Language & hearing Association
- Gray, Auditory System: Structure and Function. In: Neuroscience Online
- Web US


Controlling for response bias in a forced choice memory task

Let's start with signal detection methods. The big one in memory literature is D-Prime analysis (hits versus false alarms). If the subject chooses X more times than Y, you can compare the number of times choice X is made correctly versus chosen incorrectly (as a false alarm). If that was your paradigm, then choice Y would be the correct rejection (if correct) or a miss (if incorrect).

With this in mind, you can add some degree of confidence to your paradigm. Instead of only two choices, x or y, you can give for options (1 - definitely x, 2 - probably x, 3 - probably y, 4 - definitely y). Never give the option to say, I don't know, because subjects can be unaware that he or she knows the answer, and studies show subjects can be greater than chance through unconscious recognition. Then, if you're afraid of a side bias, extracting only "definitely" answers should be a way of excluding that possibility, because if they were just guessing they would choose the "probably" answers.


Difference vs. Ratio of evidence in sequential sampling models

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, ratio of evidence is actually a terrible method because that would end up with an immediate decision as soon as any evidence is encountered for either side, giving a ratio of infinity for that side (something/0 is greater than any finite decision threshold).

Try Gold and Shadlen 2007 for a review http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/gold_shadlen07_annu_rev_neurosci.pdf


Do readers consider the passive voice as more authoritative?

Short answer
I haven't found scientific literature on it. Non-scientific sources generally do seem to acknowledge that the passive voice radiates authority.

Background
To answer the question if there's scientific research on this topic - I wasn't able to find anything of value on an, admittedly, quite cursory Google Scholar search.

In fact, given the high element of subjectivity in 'finding a text sounding authoritative', I think this question may be more suitable for Writing.SE. However, since the question is heavily upvoted, and since it does indeed touch on the Psychological Sciences, I'll give my two-cents worth based on two non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed book quotes and a regular website entry.

Online Writing Training says:

  One of the main reasons why the passive voice gets such a bad name is that many [] writers overuse it to make their writing seem more formal and authoritative. The result is often turgid, difficult-to-read prose. Take this example

Lebrun Jean-luc says in his book Scientific Writing 2.0: A Reader And Writer's Guide

  [The] passive voice [] give[s] the paper a more authoritative disembodies voice,...

As a last example, William M. Vatavuk states in his book Marketing Yourself with Technical Writing: A Guide for Today's Professionals:

  Maybe technical writers feel that  that the passive voice is more formal, more professional sounding, and that it gives their writing a more authoritative ring...

I think that last quote is important: people feel that way, but it's entirely a subjective thing; some may find the passive voice boring, others may regard it as authoritative.


where can i find preprocessed fmri data set for alzheimer's disease

See https://www.reddit.com/r/neuro/comments/5y4pta/does_anyone_know_where_i_can_find_a_repository_of/ for a similar question.

Websites that were posted there include http://www.humanconnectome.org/data/, http://neurovault.org, http://www.ppmi-info.org, https://openfmri.org/, http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/abide/ and http://radiopaedia.org.  Some of those are repositories of data for other diseases, but their control scans could be useful.


For a non-clinical sample in a study on paraphilic sexual interests, Dawson et al. (2016) report that

  Fisher’s exact test of proportions revealed that a significantly greater proportion of men reported arousal to activities related to voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, biastophilia, and urophilia compared with women (all ps < .05). A greater proportion of men were also more likely to endorse items related to frotteurism, hebephilia, and pedophilia compared with women (all ps > .05 and < .10). Similar proportions of men and women reported being aroused by activities involving exhibitionism, scatologia, transvestic fetishism, masochism, scatophilia, and zoophilia (all ps > .10). [Absolute numbers are reported in table 4 on page 13 of the PDF.]

A fortiori the answer is yes, women do »have fetishes«.

• Samantha J. Dawson/Brittany A. Bannerman/Martin L. Lalumière. 2016. Paraphilic Interests: An Examination of Sex Differences in a Nonclinical Sample. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of
Research and Treatment 28(1), pp. 20–45.


Death from sleep deprivation, what physical mechanism is failing that makes one not to be alive anymore?

As far as I know REM is just brain running a simulation

During sleep hormones and neurotransmitters shift in their quantities available along the phases of sleep: slow wave sleep, intermediate stages and REM ( this happens several times during a typical sleeping session) and each phase brings corresponding highs and lows of the aforementioned chemicals.

There is not a definitive and agreed function of sleep, but currently it is heavily tied to memory consolidation and metabolic regulation as well as a supporting role in the immune system.1

  When death from sleep derivation occurs, what mechanism is failing that makes one not to be alive anymore.

Well, we don't really know,at least in humans it is not something we can really experiment, so most of the accounts are just that, anecdotes.

In order to try to answer the question, we unfortunately have to turn to the animal world, studies of Total Sleep Deprivation (TSD) in rats are perhaps the best researched ones, and yet there is still coinsiderable doubt about what ends up being the cause of death. 2 and it's relationship to sleep.

  I mean there has to be some physical thing that breaks down

To summarize a review/update of the original sleep deprivation study3 :

The effects of total sleep deprivation seem to have interfered with thermoregulation,caused a deterioration in the appearance of the rats, skin lesions, and changes in brain activity; infection, hypothermia and malnutrition are the leading suspects then and the thing that broke down in a roundabout way is the supporting mix of chemicals ( neurotransmitters, hormones) & brain activity that normally keep these deadly effects at bay.

Reference/Sources:

A great and accessible introduction to the science of sleep is The Secret World of Sleep (Lewis). - Sleep and Metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929498/ -Sleep and the immune system: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12701994/ - Neuroscience (Purves) has a more technical overview.

Sleep deprivation in the rat: III. Total sleep deprivation. In this 1989 study rats were deprived of sleep and died, no direct cause was found.

Sleep Deprivation in the Rat: An Update of the 1989 Paper Does a great job in presenting the difficulties of a definitive answer, but does give a general one.


How come that someone understands an utterance only after a few moments?

I think what you describe can be explained by echoic memory and working memory.

  Echoic memory is one of the sensory memory registers; a component of
  sensory memory (SM) that is specific to retaining auditory
  information. The sensory memory for sounds that people have just
  perceived is the form of echoic memory. ... This particular sensory store is capable of storing large amounts of
  auditory information that is only retained for a short period of time
  (3–4 seconds). This echoic sound resonates in the mind and is replayed
  for this brief amount of time shortly after the presentation of
  auditory stimuli.

.

  Working memory, a core executive function, is a cognitive memory
  buffer with a limited capacity that is responsible for the transient
  holding, processing, and manipulation of information. Working
  memory is an important process for reasoning and the guidance of
  decision making and behavior.

.

Person A is fully concentrated and his working memory capacity is full, so he does not pay attention to what the other person is saying. But when person A asks "What do you say?", working memory resources are released and attention is diverted to the echoic memory which replays what person B said.


Biondi et al. (1998) compared MR images of monozygotic twins and found that while the brains of monozygotic twins are not identical, they are similar. Relevant for understanding the concordance rate of schizophrenia in  monozygotic twins, Suddath et al. (1990) examined MR images of monozygotic twins who where discordant for schizophrenia. They found that the schizophrenic twin had enlarge cerebral ventricles and subtle anatomical abnormalities although the study seems to lack a control group of either both schizophrenic, both normal, or discordant on some other disease.


At what age are infants first able to perform pattern recognition?

This question is difficult to answer if you do not specify what kind of pattern recognition you refer to. In the context of human development, pattern recognition can be as simple as recognizing a row of dots as a line (Gestalt perception) or experiencing the pop-out effect (see Treisman's feature integration theory), but it can also be as complex as face recognition, speech recognition, or reading. Nevertheless, the complexity of a pattern recognition ability does not necessarily correlate with the time of its acquisition. Face recognition, for instance, happens to work pretty early.

There is good evidence (e.g., Pascalis et al 1995) that 4 days old newborns can recognize their mother's face, an ability that definitely requires pattern recognition. Note that this example is a rather conservative estimate: if the newborn is able to detect its mother's face at the forth day, it was able to detect faces probably earlier.

As a more liberal estimate: there are reports of unborn children that respond to certain voices or certain kinds of music already in their mother's womb (for instance being calmed by certain pieces of music). This should definitely require pattern recognition.

References

Pascalis O, de Schonen S, Morton J, Deruelle C, Fabre-Grenet M. (1995) Mother's face recognition in neonates: a replication and an extension. Infant Behavior and Development 17:79–85.


Are there detectable differences in brain activity when thinking about people of different degrees of closeness?

This domain is extensively explored as a "self-referential processing"
The largest difference between self vs. non-self is higher activation for self-relatad activation of medial posterior and frontal regions
(e.g., https://davidcjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/self-ref-vs-valence.png?w=694&zoom=2)
Those two regions are part of the Default Mode Network.

One of the most prominent researchers is Georg Northoff:

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=-w-9zOQAAAAJ&hl=en
You can check his reviews and found references to many additional studies.


Are there animals with only excitatory neurons?

Not in any well-studied animal; for example, C. elegans certainly has both excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Even in animals with very simple and poorly understood nervous systems (for example, jellyfish) there are certainly inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters used, even though one could argue whether their nervous tissue cells are all that similar to neurons of more organized animals.

More broadly speaking, I think it is non-controversial to state that "excitatory" versus "inhibitory" communication between cells predates the development of nervous systems themselves.

Note that neurotransmitters used vary across species, so although glutamate is a common excitatory neurotransmitter in vertebrates, that does not mean glutamate is a common excitatory neurotransmitter in other animals.

Bargmann, C. I. (1998). Neurobiology of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome. Science, 282(5396), 2028-2033.

Martin, S. M., & Spencer, A. N. (1983). Neurotransmitters in coelenterates. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part C: Comparative Pharmacology, 74(1), 1-14.

Kass-Simon, G., & Pierobon, P. (2007). Cnidarian chemical neurotransmission, an updated overview. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology, 146(1), 9-25.


How is psychohistory theory of deMause viewed in academia?

On the subject of criticism and how psychohistory is viewed by academicians, you stated that

The wiki is rather silent on such discussions.

Yet, the Wikipedia article outlines the criticism with plenty of citations.  The criticism in the article is laid out below, although I was not able to find url links for some of the journal articles referenced.

Psychohistory remains a controversial field of study, facing criticism in the academic community (DeMause, 1988; Stannard, 1982; Pomper, 1973; Paul, 1982), with critics referring to it as a pseudoscience (Hunt, 2002). Psychohistory uses a plurality of methodologies, and it is difficult to determine which is appropriate to use in each circumstance.
In 1973, historian Hugh A. Trevor-Roper dismissed the field of psychohistory entirely in response to the publication of Walter Langer’s The Mind of Adolf Hitler. He contended that psychohistory’s methodology rested “on a defective philosophy” and was “vitiated by a defective method.” He also contended that

Instead of proceeding from demonstrable steps, from fact to interpretation, from evidence to conclusion, psycho-historians move in the opposite direction. They deduce their facts from their theories; and this means, in effect, that facts are at the mercy of theory, selected and valued according to their consistence with theory, even invented to support theory (Shepherd, 1978).

DeMause has received criticism on several levels. His formulations have been criticized for being insufficiently supported by credible research (Demos, 1986). He has also received criticism for being a strong proponent of the "black legend" view of childhood history (i.e. that the history of childhood was above all a history of progress, with children being far more often badly mistreated in the past) (Aries, 1975). Similarly, his work has been called a history of child abuse, not childhood (Heywood, 2001). The grim perspective of childhood history is known from other sources, e.g. Edward Shorter's The Making of the Modern Family and Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. However, deMause received criticism for his repeated, detailed descriptions on childhood atrocities:

The reader is doubtless already familiar with examples of these psychohistorical "abuses." There is a significant difference, however, between the well-meaning and serious, if perhaps simplistic and reductionistic, attempt to understand the psychological in history and the psychohistorical expose that can at times verge on historical pornography. For examples of the more frivolous and distasteful sort of psychohistory, see Journal of Psychohistory. For more serious and scholarly attempts to understand the psychological dimension of the past, see The Psychohistory Review (Kohut, 1986).

Recent psychohistory has also been criticized for being overly-entangled with DeMause, whose theories are not representative of the entire field (Comtois,  2005).
References
Aries, P. (1975). De l'enfant roi a l'enfant martyr. Revue Psychologie. 68, 6.
Comtois, M. (2005) Introduction to Historical Method https://web.archive.org/web/20071130222935/http://cliopolitical.blogspot.com/2005/08/introduction-to-historical_112482482753969170.html
Updated 2010 at http://cliopolitical.blogspot.com/2005/08/introduction-to-historical_112482482753969170.html?m=1
DeMause, L. (1988). On writing childhood history. The Journal of Psychohistory, 16(2), 135. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1305588616
Demos, J. P. (1986). Child Abuse in Context: An Historian's Perspective. In Past, Present and Personal: The Family and The Life Course in American History. NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 68–91.
Heywood, Colin (2001). A History of Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 41.
Hunt, L. (2002). Psychology, Pschoanalysis and Historical Thought -The Misfortunes of Psychohistory. In Kramer Lloyd S. and Maza, Sarah C. (ed.). A Companion to Western Historical Thought. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. pp. 337–357.
Kohut, Thomas A. (1986). "Psychohistory as History". The American Historical Review. 91 (2): 336–354. https://doi.org/10.2307/1858137
Paul, R. A. (1982). Review of Lloyd deMause's Foundations of Psychohistory. Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, 5, 469.
Pomper, P. (1973). Problems of a Naturalistic Psychohistory. History and Theory. 12(4): 367–388. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504699
Shepherd, Michael (1978). Clio and Psyche: the lessons of psychohistory. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 71(6): 406–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/014107687807100604
Stannard, D. E. (1982). Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory. Oxford University Press, USA.


Do high heels increase female attractiveness in men only through indirect means?

It is probably quite simple to test whether high heels themselves are the main cause of the increase in attractiveness, or rather the changes to posture imposed by them - just let participants rate the attractiveness of women who do not wear high-heels, but, for instance, hold them in their hand.

Alternatively, you could expose one half of your participants to high heels and the other half not. Afterwards let them rate pictures of women and compare the mean ratings of the groups.

In principle, you could a multitude of experiments with women and high heels - as long as the women do not wear the high heels, you can exclude that the effect on posture explains your results.

An alternative approach, suggested by Artem Kaznatcheev in the comments, would be to compare the attractiveness ratings on women with and without high heels while their feet are not visible (e.g., covered or removed from the picture). Finding the same rating difference like observed with visible feet would suggest an effect of posture caused by high heels, rather than high heels themselves. (Actually you would need at least an two-by-two design ([high-heel vs. no-high-heel] x [feet-visble vs. feet-invisble]) to draw this conclusion.)


Is there any evidence to suggest telling puns to a child makes them enjoy it when they are older?

Nostalgia for fond memories commonly produces positive emotion (for further review, see Zhou, Wildschut, Sedikides, Chen, & Vingerhoets, 2012). As for the increase in your appreciation of these particular puns, I've mentioned in a very recent answer of mine to another very recent question about humor that positive emotion alone may encourage the sense that something is funny. Depending on the nature of the particular puns, they might also appeal to a certain sense of humor you've had to develop with age and experience.

This last point is just conditional speculation though; I also admit that the article I've cited doesn't pertain to humor directly, and I can't provide more direct evidence of the sort your question requests offhand. I hope someone else can!

Reference

Zhou, X., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Chen, X., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2012). Heartwarming memories: Nostalgia maintains physiological comfort. Emotion, 12(4), 678–685. Available online, URL: http://www.wildschut.me/Tim_Wildschut/home_files/emo-2012-05385-001.pdf.


Reaction when light is turning on and off

In neurophysiology we refer to "efference copy". In short, efference copy is when the brain area that sends a signal to cause a movement also sends some "copy" of that signal to the sensory part of the brain. This copy signal helps the sensory brain areas predict what to expect from your own movements, and therefore lets your perception be driven by changes in the world rather than your own self-motion.
You can also frame this in predictive coding models of brain function, in which brains are said to create model of the world and respond primarily to violations of this model/relatively unexpected events (for example, if a filing cabinet remains motionless in the corner, you don't notice it; your model is that filing cabinets are inanimate objects that stay still. If it moves forward a few centimeters, you will notice it quite quickly). A light flashing on and off is a somewhat "unexpected" stimulus: ordinarily, lights stay either on or off. However, if you blink such that when your eyes are open only when the light is on, nothing unexpected is happening to the light: it's on when your eyes are open, and you expect to see nothing of the world when your eyes are shut so the absence of the light with eyes closed is expected.
For another example that's easy to test out, if you move your head side to side, you won't perceive other objects as "moving" (the vestibular system helps inform this perception of the world as stationary as well, by measuring rather than predicting your head movement). You may notice that your visual perspective changes, but you don't sense that objects are really moving in the environment. Same when you change your visual gaze from one target to another: you'll blink briefly and the image that lands on your retina will be completely different from the one you just saw, but you still perceive the world as having stayed the same, not as if everything in front of you has just jumped by a meter or more.
Other applications include understanding why it is difficult to "tickle yourself", and how an echolocating bat can differentiate between its own calls and the reflected echos.
The Wikipedia page I linked to at the start has a lot more to say about efference copy, and you can also use that phrase as a search term to find out more about the specific circumstance you're describing.


According to the article "Addiction to Music Has Biochemical Basis" on Softpedia News by Tudor Vieru, which reports on findings by Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor (Salimpoor & Zatorre, 2013), who both hold appointments as neuroscientists at the McGill University:

"listening to music you like also triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in underlying pleasurable reactions caused by food, drugs and arousal before intercourse"

"The chemical has been linked in a variety of studies with mechanisms underlying addiction in humans, and it would appear that it also plays a role in the way people feel when listening to their favorite tunes."

"Dopamine is important because it makes us want to repeat behaviors. It’s the reason why addictions exist, whether positive or negative,”

"the euphoric ‘highs’ from music are neurochemically reinforced by our brain so we keep coming back to them. It’s like drugs. It works on the same system as cocaine,"

"It’s working on the same systems of addiction, which explain why we’re willing to spend so much time and money trying to achieve musical experiences,"

References
Salimpoor, V. N., & Zatorre, R. J. (2013). Neural interactions that give rise to musical pleasure. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(1), 62–75. 10.1037/a0031819 Free PDF available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f818/f3a9db17e3defb250a0c00ff64b4c4631376.pdf


Two different values for criterion in signal detection theory?

For these types of questions I really like Detection Theory: A User's Guide by Macmillan and Creelman. They consider 3 types of bias. The criterion location $c$ is calculated relative to the zero-bias point and expressed in units of standard deviations, such that a $c$ of 1 means the criterion is 1 standard deviation to the right of the zero-bias location and a $c$ of -2 means the criterion is 2 standard deviations to the left of the zero-bias location. Since $c$ is relative to the zero-bias location, if $c$ is held constant, then as $d'$ changes the distance of $c$ to the mean of the distribution changes.  Arguably, this means that there is a change in response bias, but the measure of $c$ does not reflect that (after all, the distance to the zero-bias location, which is $c$, does not change with changes in $d'$).  The response bias metric $c'=c/d'$ avoids this issue by taking sensitivity ($d'$) into account. The third measure of bias $\beta$ is defined as $\beta = e^{cd'}$ (which if you do the math is what your code calculates). This measure of bias is based on the likelihood ratio of the two distributions. Because of the mathematical relationship between the measures, they tell you the same thing. There isn't a correct measure and it is easy to switch between the measures, so it does not matter which you report.

For further reading, see also Stanislaw & Todorov (1999), Calculation of Signal Detection Theory Measures


is it possible to be severely autistic yet not being "visibly autistic"?

What you propose

Is it possible that someone has level-3 (severe) autism yet on superficial look or talk the disability does not appear?

is nonsense by the usual (DSM) definition of autism, which is based on several criteria which are behaviorally defined, i.e. from an observer's standpoint, to start with

a child must have persistent deficits in each of three areas of social communication and interaction (see A.1. through A.3. below) plus at least two of four types of restricted, repetitive behaviors

Nowhere in there is that presupposed to be just "basically the impairment in social cognition" that may not even be manifested.
(Somewhat of an aside here; DSM-5 has tried to be less "atheoretical" than its III/IV predecessors, but in the end the differences in that regard are minor.)

Now if you want a bit of a deep[er] dive here, the DSM-5 acknowledges that some compensatory behaviors exist and should even be considered in assessing the (actual) severity of the diagnosis.
And a bit of digging through recent research finds a controversy in (re)defining (of sorts) "true" autism to mean Theory-of-Mind-deficits instead of [DSM] behavioral-autism... or at least (thus) identifying "camouflaged" or "highly compensated" autism (understood as ToM-deficits). This is quite a complicated discussion because ToM is multidimensional (or at least its measures are--and some correlate better than others with DSM-autism), and so (varied) are compensatory mechanisms for its deficits. The latter are surprisingly used by "normal" people as well, with perhaps only "shallow" compensation strategies specific to autism.
In the realm of personalities, you have prominent researchers on both sides of this dispute, e.g. Happé (responding to) Fombonne's (editorial). (h-index > 100 for both.)
I'm guessing you've read & bought the ToM-deficits view of autism when you say "autism is not itself a visible condition at all" and "is basically the impairment in social cognition". Frankly if you look at Happé's last piece I linked, she (and her group) are cautious not to take that extreme position, although I'm sure it came off like that in some popsci article (the BBC at least has an article on people discovering their "hidden autism" thanks [or at least in relation] to Happé's research.)
As a final (recommended) reading here, which may help put this in context, some piece from Allen Frances who was quite involved with
the previous editions of the DSM on the conflicting views on mental illness diagnosis standards in general (e.g. is clinical impairment needed) is also relevant here.


What were the long-term effects on the participants of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

I found this snippet from Quora: Whatever happened to the participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

"They performed extensive follow-ups by bringing all the subjects back individually or in groups over a period of the first year and then for the next ten years they have surveyed them by mail and phone and the consensus is that they did suffer during that week of the experiment, but they learned a great deal about themselves and about human nature that most of them say was quite valuable."

Perhaps within the first decade after the experiment they found constancy in how the participants were affected and felt there was no longer a need for further analysis / recording.


I think the simple and obvious answer to this question is "Yes".  That is, everyone at some point in their life is likely to make a 'big mistake'.
Regret is the likely emotion felt subsequent to making a 'big mistake' and is a well researched topic as per the references below.
There are countless situations in which an individual is likely to feel the emotion of regret, including: divorce, bankruptcy, loss of a close friend, self-inflicted injury, resigning from employment in a rage, being sentenced to jail etc. (The examples chosen here are likely to reflect instances where the big mistake endures for more than a few months.
Clinical psychology is the profession with specific training for helping individuals move on from their mistakes and overcoming a deep-set emotion of regret.
References

Connolly T, Zeelenberg M. Regret in Decision Making. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2002;11(6):212-216. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00203

Sweis BM, Thomas MJ, Redish AD (2018) Mice learn to avoid regret. PLoS Biol 16(6): e2005853. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005853


Will smoking marijuana lightly during teens cause developmental damage to the brain?

It is impossible to say with any degree of certainty whether a given individual will or will not suffer from any consequences of any amount of marijuana consumption, so we'll have to use the scientific data which can only say something about group-level effects.
It is quite well known that cannabis impairs cognition in the short-term*, and that the effects may last for at least a while of abstinence in heavy users. What you're asking about is whether there are any lasting and irreversible effects of cannabis on cognition, and this remains a debated and unresolved question in the scientific literature on harmful effects of cannabis. For instance, a recent review find inconsistent evidence for long-term working memory deficits in current heavy users and limited evidence for recovery after abstinence. In the same study, similar results are reported for other areas of cognition.
When it comes to IQ, there are some long-term studies that assess whether there are lasting long-term effects of cannabis on IQ. I believe the first such study was the one published by Meier and colleagues in 2012, in which they reported that among heavy users who had begun using cannabis before the age of 18, there was a lasting decline of IQ from childhood to mid-life with about 8 points, that persisted even after cessation of cannabis use. A similar study was published in 2016 by Mokrysz and colleagues, finding no decline of IQ between ages 8 to 15 in adolescents and pre-teens who had used cannabis during those years. Both studies may be subject to methodological criticism, and to my knowledge, there are no other studies with similar design.
Another issue is whether cannabis impacts brain development and/or causes morphological brain changes. The literature on this topic is also on the whole inconclusive, as shown in a recent review by Kroon and colleagues. However, it should be noted that there is actually some evidence ("limited evidence") for reduction in the volume of prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, which is consistent with animal studies in which especially a reduction of hippocampus volume can be induced under experimental conditions.
In short, the scientific literature in this area is on the whole inconclusive, and while it cannot be ruled out that there might be irreversible negative effects of cannabis on cognition, especially in those who start to use cannabis early and develop a heavy use over long periods of time, there are no hard evidence to support this either.
*. Though there is also some reports indicating positive effects of cannabis on divergent thinking (i.e. "out of the box"-thinking), which might be considered a positive effect on cognition.


How does intelligence or general cognitive ability vary with level of CO₂?

According to Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance Environ Health Perspect. 2012 Dec; 120(12): 1671–1677:

of 9 different cognitive tests performed at 600ppm (green), 1000ppm (blue) and 2500ppm (red) several show very marked decrease in scores at higher C02 concentration.

Authors summarized findings as:

  Relative to 600 ppm, at 1,000 ppm CO2, moderate and statistically significant decrements occurred in six of nine scales of decision-making performance. At 2,500 ppm, large and statistically significant reductions occurred in seven scales of decision-making performance

Four years after the above was published, the negative effects of carbon dioxide were confirmed in Associations of cognitive function scores with carbon dioxide, ventilation, and volatile organic compound exposures in office workers: a controlled exposure study of green and conventional office environments. Environ Health Perspect (June 2016) 124:805–812, which was mentioned on Earth SE by Ken Fabian, although there is one common author Usha Satish.

On the other hand, a very recent article Effects of acute exposures to carbon dioxide on decision making and cognition in astronaut-like subjects NPJ Microgravity. (June 2019) 5: 17, which also has Usha Satish as an author, tends to contradict the above:


What is the difference between recurrent and feedback synapses?

The different types of connections can be histologically identified and separated on the basis of their connectivity in the cortex.
Recurrent synapses in the cortex can be defined as (Douglas & Martin, 1995):

[...] connections between layer 2 and 3 pyramidal cells, in which a target neuron projects
back to its source neuron in a tight positive feedback loop

Feedforward and feedback neurons can be histologically defined as (Berezovskii et al., 2011):

In general, feedforward (FF) projections originate in the superficial layers of the cortex and terminate in layer 4, while feedback (FB) connections originate in the superficial and deep layers, and their axon terminals tend to avoid layer 4.

The cortical layers and their functions are schematically depicted in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Schematic of the cortex showing recurrent connections (rc) in layer 2/3 and feedforward and feedback connections that avoid layer 4. source: Rolls & Mills (2017)
References
- Berezovskii et al., J Comp Neurol (2011); 519(18): 3672–83
- Rolls & Mills, Neurobiol Learn Mem (2017); 145: 205–21


What makes it necessary to define autism beyond perceptual dysfunction?

There are several other aspects that I think are not just "perceptions" but something more complicated.

Having an weak or a different theory of mind; that hinders processing in general how other people may perceive or interpret something.

Having difficulty with cognitive empathy; that hinders understanding others' motives and intentions.

Having difficulty with consequences of something especially in social situations.

Problems with planning.

Problems with working memory.


How do different dendritic spines experience a correlated/coupled calcium signaling?

With little to go on, your questions are difficult to answer specifically but I'll give the general guidance I can.

1) Calcium signals in neurons are typically brief. "Calcium transient" is a synonym for "brief calcium signal." Someone could contrast between types of calcium transients in terms of their source (external calcium vs. internal stores), location (spines vs dendrites), etc, but you would have to give a more specific example to describe any difference.

2) Calcium signals could be correlated in different neurons or different spines of the same neurons if both cells/spines get excitatory input from the same presynaptic cell, or if excitatory input is from different cells that have temporally correlated firing. You could also get coupling if the entire dendrite is depolarized, either locally or via a back-propagating action potential. Again, without a specific example it's difficult to give more information.

The review you cite:

Higley, M. J., & Sabatini, B. L. (2008). Calcium signaling in dendrites and spines: practical and functional considerations. Neuron, 59(6), 902-913.

discusses both (1) and (2).


Is the length and intensity of feelings and emotions limited?

The key terms to help understand the answers about the duration and intensity of experiences over time would likely include habituation, emotion, and pain. You might be surprised by how scientists use these terms differently than most people. Consider an intro psych textbook or wikipedia.

For example, emotions are generally defined as being brief, transitory affective states. If someone has a negative feeling that lasts for hours, psychologists might call that a mood. If a person has a negative feeling that lasts for years, psychologists generally use other labels such as personality. The experience in a moment might be the same between these cases.

There are some assumptions in your question that are not shared by most research or clinical psychologists or neuroscientists. For example, emotions aren't deterministically caused by hormones.


Is sign language handled differently by the brain than spoken laguage?

For a broad meaning of "similarly", the answer is yes, the processing of sign language has substantial similarities with that of spoken language, in terms of brain areas involved. There are also some differences; the latter issue is a vast and still somewhat controversial research area; from the conclusion of a 2007 review:

Where differences can be shown between sign and speech they can, on the whole, be ascribed to the different input modalities of the language system—auditory for spoken language, visuospatial for signed language. The specialization of cortical networks for language processing does not appear to be driven either by the acoustic requirements for hearing a spoken language or by the articulatory requirements for speaking. It seems likely, therefore, that it is the specialized requirements of language processing itself, including, for instance, compositionality, syntax, and the requirements of mapping coherent concepts onto a communicable form, that determine the final form of the specialized language circuits in the brain. Even the disagreements in the literature, especially those concerning the relative importance of the RH [right hemisphere] in processing sign, do not trouble this basic insight. It is probably more constructive to pose a somewhat different question: How might signed language use specific brain specializations that are unlikely to be involved in spoken language processing?

And for an illustration of the similarities/differences the review has this:

Color-rendered images of the brain depicting (group) fMRI activation. (a) Regions activated by BSL [British Sign Language] perception in deaf and hearing native signers (first and second columns, respectively) and by audiovisual speech perception in hearing nonsigners (third column). For language in both modalities, and across all three groups, activation is greater in the left than the RH and perisylvian regions are engaged. [The rows are the hemispheres.]

And a more recent (2015) study perhaps more elaborately addressing your question (of similar regions):

sign language constructions—even those similar to gesture—engage language-related brain systems and are not processed in the same ways that nonsigners interpret gesture. [...]
It is already established that a very similar, left-lateralized neural network is involved in the processing of many aspects of lexical and syntactic information in both spoken and signed languages. This includes the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (classically called Broca’s area), superior temporal sulcus (STS) and adjacent superior and middle temporal gyri, and the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) (classically called Wernicke’s area) including the angular (AG) and supramarginal gyri (SMG). Likewise, narrative and discourse-level aspects of signed language depend largely on right STS regions, as they do for spoken language.


I'm not sure how constructive it is to think of it in terms of "components", because there are so many that contribute to selfishness: for example, you only feel your body's pain.  Food and sex only feel good to you when you're the one experiencing them.

Instead, it might be more constructive to look for components of selflessness and altruism, them being the exception.  And that, according to some, lies in kin selection.


Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance?

Measures of arousal surely do play a role in subject performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Generally, scientists can safely ignore this factor as it is assumed to introduce random noise between participants. From a hypothesis testing perspective, scientists are much more worried about factors that introduce systematic bias, or factors that skew performance in one condition but not another.

As an example, consider a psychologist that is testing whether some intervention has an effect on performance. If we assume that arousal levels throughout the sample are randomly distributed, it should not affect our ability to detect an effect of our independent variable. In fact, there are potentially infinitely other factors that may affect performance on a cognitive task. To name a few: prior experience, mood, fatigue, cognitive load, intelligence, or attention. Each one of these factors in turn is the result of numerous other incidental variables (for instance, my mood may be affected by the weather, or how long it's been since I've eaten).

It would be infeasible to test for all of these factors, but again, if we assume that each measure is randomly distributed throughout a sample, it won't make a big difference-- in fact, it's somewhat statistically convenient:

Many psychological measures are normally distributed, which allow us to run statistical tests that assume normality (e.g., t-tests!) The reason this is so is because what we are measuring is actually the sum of many independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) variables-- such as arousal, experience, attention, etc. The Central Limit Theorem tells us that the sum of all of these factors lead to a normally distributed measure.

It is still important to know when and how sleep measures may affect performance. In knowing that information, scientists can watch out for situations in which arousal may cause systematic bias between conditions, a potential confound. But in general, it often just doesn't really matter for the tests we are conducting.


I think this is a somewhat controversial area of research. On one hand

Participants were asked to predict the weather after receiving a repeated set of cues. During part of the learning, researchers added a second task where participants had to keep a running mental count of high tones that they heard, thus adding an element of distraction.
The results showed that when doing single-task learning, the brain used the region associated with declarative memory, while the habit memory region was associated with dual-task learning.
The dual-task learning did not affect the participants' ability to predict weather at the time, but it reduced their knowledge about the task during a follow-up session later.

On the other:

Psychologists know that the things we learn in one context might not be remembered in another. Famously, investigators once showed that words learned while scuba diving are easier to recall underwater than on dry land. Now Brown University psychologists suggest something similar happens with distraction. The researchers trained 48 people to hit a computer-screen target using a wonky touch pad—tracing up, for example, might move the cursor diagonally—and later evaluated them on their ability to quickly hit the mark. During both training and the test, participants were randomly selected to do a distracting second task: counting letters on a screen. Those distracted during just one phase performed poorly when tested, but those who had done the letter-counting task during both training and testing performed just as well as those who had trained and been tested without distractions, according to the results published in February in Psychological Science.
The consensus remains that distraction is typically bad for learning, the scientists explain. But if you anticipate a distracting testing or performance environment, try to mimic those distractions as you study or practice to avoid being caught off guard.

So distractors are generally bad, but not always.
There's even more controversy whether background music helps or doesn't with school activities or learning other stuff.


Where to find information regarding the effect of ion concentration in the brain on behaviour?

The 'ion concentration in the brain' is a really general concept. A biochemist (I did Biochemistry in a, seemingly, previous lifetime) might approach this question by taking a brain, freeze drying it, then homogenize it and determine ion concentrations.

However, the effect of ion concentrations in the brain plays out its role in a much more confined space, namely across the cell's membranes. The differences in ion gradients across the neuron's membrane is what determines its responses. Further, different brain areas govern different responses. Gross changes in ion concentrations in the prefrontal cortex for instance will exert wildly different effects than the same procedure in the brain stem.

If you want to go this way, you should perhaps confine yourself to a specific area of the brain, and to a specific way of disregulating ion homeostasis. Or veer away from the idea entirely.

What you'd rather could use as a source of inspiration are zombie ants. These ants are 'zombified' by the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which infects Camponotus leonardi ants that live in tropical rainforest trees. Once infected, the spore-possessed ant will climb down from its normal habitat and bite down on a leaf and then die.

The fungus can only flourish at a certain temperature, humidity, location and distance from the ground. By hijacking ants they re-locate themselves to ideal spots. in fact, 95% of the ants found their way to the north side of a plant, about 25 centimeters above the ground, in an environment with 94 to 95 percent humidity and with temperatures between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius (Harmon, 2009).

Note, however, that the underlying pathophysiological underpinnings are entirely different from your original ion homeostasis idea.

Zombie ant. source: Wikipedia

Source
- Harmon, Sci Am, Fungus Makes Zombie Ants Do All the Work, July 2009


What does fMRI data look like after pre-processing?

The MRI signal is a small electrical current induced in the receiver coil by the precession of magnetization during resonance, i.e., a manifestation of Faraday's Law of Induction, wherein a changing magnetic field induces a voltage in a nearby conductor. The BOLD response often used in fMRI measures the hemodynamic response, i.e., the relative levels of oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin that can be detected on the basis of their differential magnetic susceptibility.

As any digital signal, there are limits to the resolution of fMRI, and is dependent on a number of factors (Kashou, 2014), including the field of view (x- and y- directions) and the slice thickness (z-direction). Multiplying the x, y and z sizes results in the total voxel size (Fig. 1). each voxel has 1 value, namely its respective BOLD response signal value.

Reference
- Kashou, A Practical Guide to an fMRI Experiment, Intech Open Science (2013)

Fig. 1. Time series of fMRI. source: Principles of fMRI


Are you more successful if you publicly commit to pursuing a difficult goal?

Ok, I found something. Gollwitzer and colleagues (2009) have published an interesting paper on this question.

First of all, they say that, yes, publically stated intentions should lead to commitment, because the person wants to act in way that is consistent with the communicated intentions (e.g., Cialdini, Wosinka, Barrett, Butner, & Gornik-Durose, 1999). Second, public intentions should increase accountability (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999), which should also lead to an commitment effect.

However, they show that sometimes this can go wrong. Such public commitments may often be made in domains that are highly identity relevant and may thus be a means to reach some overarching goal. For example, committing to a triathlon may serve the goal of being a successful athlete. Now, symbolically, publicly committing to triathlon training may already help reaching this identity goal (because other people take notice of this effort). And thus ironically, it may be less necessary to actually reach the goal and diminish goal striving.

In line with these ideas they found that

  Identity-related behavioral intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than those that
  had been ignored (Studies 1–3). This effect was evident in
  the field (persistent striving over 1 week’s time; Study 1)
  and in the laboratory (jumping on opportunities to act;
  Studies 2 and 3), and it held among participants with
  strong but not weak commitment to the identity goal (Study
  3). Study 4 showed, in addition, that when other people
  take notice of an individual’s identity-related behavioral
  intention, this gives the individual a premature sense of
  possessing the aspired-to identity

I should boast with the finished triathlon on Facebook only afterwards, I guess.

References

Cialdini, R.B., Wosinka, W., Barrett, D.W., Butner, J., & GornikDurose, M. (1999). Compliance with a request in two cultures:
The differential influence of social proof and commitment/consistency on collectivists and individualists. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1242–1253.

Gollwitzer, P. M., Sheeran, P., Michalski, V., & Seifert, A. E. (2009). When intentions go public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap? Psychological Science, 20, 612–618. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02336.x

Lerner, J.S., & Tetlock, P.E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 255–275.


Is it true that acting can affect one's behavior?

This is true. Mot et al. (1994) published scientific research about it. Also there are a lot of actors that claim they feel that their personality has changed since they played a role.

Also a similair practice can be used for insecure people. If they act confident it has been proven that after some time, they feel more confident as well.

Edit:

Since I'm new to stackexchange I did not know how much detail is desired. Therefore, let me expand upon my original comment.

The article states the following hypotheses:

  (1) the actor chosen to play a given character would have personality characteristics similar to that of his or her corresponding character

  (2) the actor′s self-perceived personality profile would become more similar to the character′s during the rehearsal and production period.

Later on the article states that:

  Support emerged for the second hypothesis, but not for the first. Observations regarding these findings and suggestions for future explorations are given.

The article expands upon this, but I can't access the paper, because it's pay-walled.

Reference:

Hannah M. T., Domino G., Hanson R. Hannah R. (September 1994) Acting and Personality Change: The Measurement of Change in Self-Perceived Personality Characteristics during the Actors Character Development Process, Journal of Research in Personality, 28(3):277-286


What are some examples of controversial themes in psychology?

Short answer: Representations are a noteworthy controversy in embodied or situated psychological theories. Can we explain behavior without reference to representations?

Long answer: Most modern theories presume that information is represented somewhere, such as the brain, and that behavior is organized because that somewhere is organized. Anti-representational theories, such as ecological psychology (e.g., Richardson et al., 2008) or radical embodied cognitive psychology (Chemero 2009; Chemero, 2013 for a brief review) explicitly reject this assumption and say there are no representations. Fink, Foo and Warren (2009) provided an apt, and ingenious, demonstration of how we may explain a behavior, namely catching flyballs, without reference to representations. Embodied cognitive theories, such as enclothed cognition (Adam and Galinsky, 2012), are examples of hybrid approaches incorporating both representational and nonrepresentational features.

References

Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918-925.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Chemero, A. (2013). Radical embodied cognitive science. Review of General Psychology, 17(2), 145.
Fink, P. W., Foo, P. S., & Warren, W. H. (2009). Catching fly balls in virtual reality: A critical test of the outfielder problem. Journal of Vision, 9(13), 14.
Richardson, M. J., Shockley, K., Fajen, B. R., Riley, M. A., & Turvey, M. T. (2008). Ecological psychology: Six principles for an embodied–embedded approach to behavior. Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach, 161-187.


Effect of having false confidence because of confusion of familiarity and knowledge

Change blindness: failure to notice large changes to the visual scene [1].
If you are interested in familiarity change blindness I suggest this article [2].
Reference:
[1] Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in cognitive sciences, 1(7), 261-267.
[2] Tovey, M., & Herdman, C. M. (2014). Seeing changes: How familiarity alters our perception of change. Visual Cognition, 22(2), 214-238.


Record an eye blinking waveform signal from EEG signals

You can't.

Flatline EEG is how brain death is defined, and while it may be possible to induce an eye blink in a deceased human, I am sure ethics will not approve, and it won't be scientifically satisfactory.
even in the case of a real flatline EEG, there will always be some remaining residual activity (albeit very weak), such as line noise.

However,

the eye blink is a few orders of magnitude stronger than the ongoing EEG
you can isolate eye blink activity using techniques such as ICA


So this may be long-winded, but I gotta get through some theoretical background first!

Conceptual Act Theory

If we take from the Conceptual Act Theory (CAT) of emotions (Barrett, 2014), then we can consider emotions like fear to be what are called "situated conceptualizations." This means that we feel an emotion when we make meaning out of our situated affective experiences (what CAT calls a "conceptual act").

For example, I'm making a conceptual act when I interpret (conceptualize) as fear my high arousal and negative affect in the context of anticipating a snake bite.  What this means is that I'm automatically categorizing my experience using an emotion concept (i.e. fear) that I've learned.

As Condon, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barrett (2014) point out:

  Emotion concepts make affective changes in the body meaningful, guide action, allow communication about one’s state to another, and influence another’s mental state and actions.

So categorizing my experience as "fear" is just like categorizing a big gray moving thing with a trunk as an "elephant."  The elephant categorization makes meaning of the moving gray mass, allows me to compare it to other objects, communicate what I saw, guides my actions, etc.

Emotion Variability and Pleasant Fear

What's interesting about CAT is that it predicts tremendous variability in emotional experience. The ways in which we can conceptualize our situated affective experiences are vast.  In this sense, CAT might predict something like pleasant fear. I've shown you this image before (from Condon et al., 2014), but it's even more relevant here:

As you can see, our prototypical fear concept involves negative feelings.  We are very familiar with this negative fear concept, and so we can easily and automatically apply it to our affective experiences.

On the other hand, we never really talk about what it might mean to experience pleasant fear.  The pleasant fear concept is not in our folk taxonomy of emotions. We're unfamiliar with it. Thus, we'll have greater difficulties activating that concept and applying it to our experiences.

Conceptual Learning

So, can we learn to experience pleasant fear?  Yes!

But at the moment there's little empirical research on learning emotion concepts (in adulthood).  We can probably draw from the literature on emotion socialization in children (e.g., Widen & Russell, 2010), but I'm not personally convinced that we can make an easy parallel.

There is potentially some indirect evidence that there is rapid conceptual learning when exposing remote tribes to Western emotion concepts (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman & Scott, 2015, and a response by Gendron, Roberson, & Barrett, 2015).

Also, there's some emerging evidence (Kashdan, Barrett, & McKnight, 2015) that we can improve people's levels of "emotion granularity."  High emotion granularity means you label your affective experiences using many different emotion words (happy, sad, surprised, angry, remorseful, contemptuous, etc.).  Low granularity means less diverse labeling (happy, sad, good, bad).

So if we can teach people to make more fine-grained conceptualizations of their affective experiences (i.e., improve granularity), you can probably learn to experience pleasant fear.

Conclusion

This is a new and growing area of research, so you'll have to stay tuned for more direct evidence.  But overall, you can learn new emotion concepts like pleasant fear, and you can get better at using them with practice.

Emotion Utility (Edit)

It's also possible to treat negative fear as having positive utility (see Maya Tamir's work, e.g., here).  That is, even though fear might feel unpleasant, you might learn to view it as serving some adaptive function within certain contexts, e.g., facilitating quick withdrawal from danger.


Have the abilities of John Lorber's patients with limited cortical mass been further evaluated in adulthood?

It's unclear whether follow-up tests were ever performed on Lorber's patients, and in particular the student referenced by Lewin. Patient confidentiality precludes a systematic search of the literature, particularly because the Lewin (1980) article does not provide a pseudonym with which we can use to track the patient (e.g. "HM"). It is possible that this patient has been the subject of other scientific studies, but there does not appear to be any information that would uniquely identify him as the patient referred to in this article. John Lorber has since passed away (1996), making it unlikely that we'll know for sure.

However, the condition itself has not been ignored. Lorber himself has later studies which look at the brains structure of hydrocephalus patients (Jackson & Lorber, 1984). A more recent study by Feuillet et al. (2007) seems to show similar results with regard to brain tissue, but the IQ of Feuillet's patient was measured at 75. He appeared to function normally in society, but his intelligence is regarded as significantly below average. A news article about this study, including CT images, can be found here.

In 2011, a review article by De Oliveira et al. discussed the above two cases and others. However, no mention of a follow-up to Lorber's original patient is discussed. It seems likely that if a follow-up were performed, it would be mentioned in this review.

There does not appear to be a concrete answer with respect to how these patients can function despite a deficit in cortical tissue. However, De Oliveira and colleagues discuss one hypothesis, as quoted below:

  Computational models such as the “small-world” and “scale-free”
  network might explain clinical resilience in various situations
  (Friston and Price, 2003; Noppeney et al., 2004; Achard and Bullmore,
  2007; Van den Heuvel et al., 2008). Small-world networks predicts that
  neuronal cells are engaged in clustered connectivity with fewer
  long-range connections (Friston and Price, 2003; Achard et al., 2006).
  Thus, there would be a shorter path length between any pair of neurons
  or Brain regions, resulting in higher dynamical complexity, lower
  wiring costs, and resilience to tissue insults. A scale-free network
  is characterized by the existence of a small number of nodes having
  more connections than the other nodes. The nodes that have such a high
  connectivity degree are referred to as hub-nodes and are suggested to
  play an important role in the overall network organization (Friston
  and Price, 2003).

  Brain resilience may be also the final result of processes such as
  redundancy, degeneracy, and pluripotentiality of neural systems
  (Friston and Price, 2003; Noppeney et al., 2004). Another possible
  mechanism would be the local neurogenesis already reported in
  structures such as the basal ganglia, with preferential distribution
  in sub-regions of the ventral striatum (Stopczynski et al., 2008).

References

  De Oliveira, M. F., Pinto, F. C. G., Nishikuni, K., Botelho, R. V.,
  Lima, A. M., & Rotta, J. M. (2011). Revisiting hydrocephalus as a
  model to study brain resilience. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 5.
  PDF

  Feuillet, L., Dufour, H., & Pelletier, J. (2007). Brain of a
  white-collar worker. The Lancet, 370(9583), 262.

  Jackson, P. H., & Lorber, J. (1984). Brain and ventricular volume in
  hydrocephalus. Z Kinderchir, 39(Suppl 2), 91-93.


Are there emotions that only some people can feel?

There is strong evidence that there is indeed a interindividual differential distribution of emotional processes or capabilities.
For instance, Bartels and Pizzarro (2011) could show that some antipersonality traits connected to the lack of compassion and empathy towards others are varying among people. Those who endorsed a more pragmatic and "straight" (utilitarian) view of life scored lower in social (and hence empathic) questionnaire batteries.
When people are asked about their spiritual attitudes and habits and what emotions they connect to this, they respond very different. For example, mystical experiences - the strong feeling of oneness with the environment - are more likely to score on altruism and empathy (no reference ad hoc present). A more "realisitic", grounded person would deny having such feelings simply because his or her internal self-construction processes do not attach with the same strength to those emotions. They would have different emotional attachments.
A very simple, common and intuitive (needs not really a scientific approach) illustration is when you consider "self-confidence" as an internal state. This is obviously a dramatically varying emotional state in humans. Overconfidence evokes internal security about own capabilities and the feeling of "i can master that", in contrast to a lack of confidence.

So, people have different default emotional states and they evoke different feelings in themselves due to different interaction with the environment.

References

Bartels, D. M., & Pizarro, D. A. (2011) The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Cogntion PDF


How much time is required to relearn a subject after x years?

Suppose a person learns a subject in college and waits for 10 years before learning it again. An exam is given one week after the person relearns the subject. So in this case, the ISI (inter-study interval) is very long compared to the RI (retention interval). The person will definitely forget some of the material after the 10 years. So how long they would need to restudy depends on how much they have forgotten. In this paper, Hal Pashler and others develop a model that predicts the spacing function based on the forgetting function for fixed retention intervals. The forgetting function depends on the type of material being studied and other variables. All other things being equal, it seems that testing/examinations would be one of the more efficient ways of relearning the material.

References

Mozer, M. C., Pashler, H., Cepeda, N., Lindsey, R., & Vul, E. (2009). Predicting the optimal spacing of study: A multiscale context model of memory. Advances in neural information processing systems, 22, 1321-1329. PDF


Does the retina contribute in distinguishing lines and borders?

Short answer
Yes, retinal circuitry enhances the perception of contrast.

Background
In the retina, the neurons that guide the visual signal to the brain, the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), process contrast. The receptive fields (RFs) of these cells exhibit a so-called center-surround organization (Fig. 1). They integrate the signal from multiple cones in the retina. ON RGCs fire when their RF is illuminated in the center (the central cone in the retina in the RF is illuminated) and they are inhibited when their surround is illuminated. OFF-center RGCs do the reverse. Together this organization results in sharpening of contrasts and aids in the coding of edges and contours. Midget cells also have RFs like this.

Remember that the retina is considered a part of the central nervous system by some. Thi because of its embryological origins, but also because of its complexity.

Note that further processing of contrast and edges occurs in the primary visual cortex (V1) (Schmolesky, 2002) and that awareness of that contrast information, i.e., the perception of edges, patterns and objects within the visual field occurs at high-tier associative cortices (Lorreys, 2005).

Center-surround RFs in RGCs. ON cells (left) fire when illuminated in the center, and are inhibited when illuminated in the surround. OFF cells have a reversed pattern (right). source: Stanford University

References
- Lorreys, Trends Cogn Sci (2005); 9(12):556-9
- Schmolesky, Webvision, The Organization of the Retina and Visual System, Kolb et al. (eds). Utah University


Are hallucinations a requirement for Schizophrenia?

No – at least, they shouldn't be required. Wikipedia describes the DSM-5 as requiring "delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech". Delusions are distinct from hallucinations in that they aren't necessarily perceptual in a conventional sense, though both diverge a person's conscious experience from empirical reality. Disorganized speech is characteristic of disorganized / hebephrenic schizophrenia, regarding which Wikipedia states:

  The most prominent features of disorganized schizophrenia are not delusions and hallucinations, as they are in paranoid schizophrenia,[5][6] although fragmentary delusions and hallucinations may be present.

This doesn't seem to be the only (partial) exception to the rule you ask about, and your source mentions it too: "Affective changes are prominent, delusions and hallucinations fleeting and fragmentary".


Severe depression/anxiety can't be treated with CBT

Yes, that is the consensus view among psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (e.g., Parker et al., 2012). A commonly referenced authoritative guideline for treatment of major depressive disorder is the NICE guide.

Reference
Parker et al., Acta Psychiatr Scand (2013); 128(4): 271-81


Is there any scientific basis to different learning styles?

In response to a related question about learning styles, I provided this answer.

In that answer, I quote Pashler et al (2009) which is generally critical of the learning styles literature.
I quote Pashler et al where they state:

  Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children
  and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer
  information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence
  arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some
  fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for
  processing different types of information.

However they find minimal experimental evidence to indicate that students assigned to educational conditions that are adjusted to their stated learning style preferences do any better.

References:

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., Bjork, R. (2009). Learning Styles
Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 105. ARTICLE.


How could siblings rivalry / jealousy be useful to human evolution?

First, it must be understood that not all traits in an animal are evolved or selected traits – some are only variations. Some of these variations may be selected by some evolutionary pressure in the future and then become evolved or selected traits.

For example, each of the various hair colors (black, brown, blond, red, white, etc.) is not an evolved or selected trait – all of them are only variations in hair colors. For now, there is no evolutionary pressure to select any of them, so present-day people have various hair colors. But suppose there is a strange disease that gradually kills off people who do not have blond hair; then the blond hair will be selected by this evolutionary pressure. And after some time, there will be only people (or the majority of people) with blond hair. At this stage, the blond hair will become a selected trait. These also happened to the variation of the finch’s beaks in Galapagos, some of which were selected by evolutionary pressure in some specific ecological niches. This pressure led to speciation that resulted in various kinds of finches that Darwin found in various niches. So were true for variations in appendages, which at first were in in-complete forms but later were selected by evolutionary pressure in various ecological niches and evolved into arms, wings, and fins.

How do we know that a trait is an evolved/selected trait or a variation of a trait? One important characteristic is that, if it’s an evolved/selected trait, it will appear in all or in the majority of that species. So, for example, the human hand, the bird wing, and the fish gill appear in all humans, birds, and fish – these are evolved/selected traits.

Yet, not all traits that are present in all/the majority of a species always are evolved/selected traits. Some may be just vestigial traits or just results of genetic drifts (see Evolution’s Useless Traits). But these are exceptions rather than the general rules.

The general rules of evolution are variations in traits, competition, differential production/survival among different traits, and heritability of (some) traits (Natural selection, Natural Selection – Wikipedia).

For the case in question, siblings jealousy/rivalry that is strong or destructive does not seem to be an evolved/selected trait because it does not occur in all humans and not in the majority of human families. It’s probably just a variation trait in some families. And minor jealousy/rivalry is not an evolved/selected trait either. It is probably just one emotion of several emotions that the versatile amygdala (and other emotion-creating neural centers) can produce (to flag various kinds of stimuli that an animal encounters). The amygdala is the evolved/selected trait; any of the various emotions (including sibling jealousy/rivalry) that it can produce is not.


Why do people often do unnecessary things while performing a main task?

In the whole scheme of human consciousness, these movements may be a result of what one individual person's autonomic and central nervous system has been conditioned to expect. While awake during different hours of different days, implying different variables to be present depending on [social code] etc, our central nervous system (CNS) has a threshold for response- the level of response/arousal to sensory input accompanied by these variables stated above will ultimately help someone read what their basal level of arousal is. If that basal level arousal is not met in a certain social context (this basal level has increased via techna-cultural advancement) than the body may expend this energy via other methods of movement or concentration.


Where can I find stimuli for steady-state visually-evoked potentials?

Researchers are often willing to share their stimuli. If you know of a paper that uses the same kind of stimuli that you want to use, you could try emailing the authors. A friendly request with a brief explanation of why you want the stimuli usually works.


Evidence-based best practices for writing a gratitude journal

Empirically supported treatments are specific interventions which controlled (generally quantitative) research has demonstrated to be effective for specific populations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_practice). The empirical literature on gratitude is rapidly expanding, but, as many of the reviews I will mention note, still emerging. Several recent reviews and meta-analyses address the support for gratitude interventions, including journaling. A 2010 dissertation reviewed 12 gratitude studies and found that letter-writing and list-making (e.g. gratitude journals) were associated with positive psychological outcomes (Borgueta). A 2010 narrative review also looks at 12 gratitude studies, and reports that while most studies find positive results, methodological limitations make it difficult to draw firm conclusions (Wood, Froh, & Geraghty).

A 2009 meta-analysis of 51 studies assessing the impact of positive psychology interventions on depression found small to moderate effects (Sin & Lyubomirsky). That meta-analyses included 20 studies with gratitude or positive writing interventions, and provides a discussion of possible moderators. A 2013 meta-analysis of 39 positive psychology studies found smaller, but still significant, effects for similar interventions on psychological well-being and depression, some of which remained at 3-6 month follow up (Bolier, L. et al). This analysis included at least 12 studies that used gratitude or positive writing interventions.

These studies do note that the interventions are not effective for everyone and discuss some factors (gender, positive affect, length, etc) which may impact receptiveness to and effectiveness of these interventions (Parks, Schueller, & Tasimi, in press). Clear demographic and situational moderators are only beginning to emerge, but these reviews may help you determine the clients for whom these interventions may be most effective. In general, although some studies did not find the interventions to be effective, there is little mention of the interventions being harmful. Additionally, the interventions tend to be easily understood and implemented, requiring few materials and a brief time commitment; thus, they may be worth trying, even if a study has not been conducted on a sample with demographics that precisely matches your clients.

These studies list a range of possible gratitude interventions and the current evidence for each approach. As with most therapeutic interventions, the answers here are not black and white. Practicing evidence-based care involves not only identifying the best available support for those treatments, but then using clinical judgment to determine whether it would be worthwhile to implement the approach with a particular client, given the client’s individual characteristics and the therapist’s competence in providing the intervention (http://www.asha.org/members/ebp/). Hopefully these resources will provide some support for that decision.

Bolier, L., Haverman, M., Westerhof, G. J., Riper, H., Smit, F., & Bohlmeijer, E. (2013). Positive psychology interventions: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies. BMC Public Health, 13, 119-129.

Borgueta, A. M. (2010). Adapting gratitude interventions to the practice of clinical psychology: Considerations for treatment selection and implementation. Dissertation, Palo Alto University.

Parks, A.C., Schueller, S. & Tasimi, A. (in press). Increasing happiness in the general population: Empirically Supported Self-Help? To appear in I. Boniwell & S. David (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (http://hiram.us/h/images/pdfs/psychology/parks-increasing-happiness.pdf).

Sin, N. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: A practice-friendly meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(5), 467-487.

Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. A. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 890-905.


How to apply different motivational theories to understand career orientation?

Assuming the specific case of being "motivated towards a career" rather then simply getting a job to make ends meet, there can be several factors.

Social status is probably the most common pursuit of a career.

Enjoyment, which is the ideal reason for pursuing a career. Usually a career sought for enjoyment is referred to as 'pursuing one's dream'.

Proximity (a.k.a. convenience) is another driving factor. Which could also be considered the "path of least resistance". An example of this is following in your parents' footsteps. Another example could be someone's part-time job turning into a full-time career.

Addition

I found these two article which describes the work of John Holland and his theory of career choice. (not the scientific essay as requested in the comments but perhaps with more time I, or someone else, could elaborate on this topic further. It is definitely a good one)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201106/the-psychology-career-choices-why-personality-matters

http://www.careerkey.org/choose-a-career/hollands-theory-of-career-choice.html#.U04FZfldXh5


Can neuron change from excitatory to inhibitory (and vice versa) over time?

As far as I know, it is not possible for a neuron to change which type of neurotransmitter it releases.  However, it is the case that the neurotransmitter GABA changes from excitatory to inhibitory over the course of development.  This is occurs because GABA activates Cl- (chloride) channels.  The chloride concentration gradient across the cell membrane changes directions over development, so the direction of current caused by opening of Cl- channels also changes.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, 728-739 (September 2002) | doi:10.1038/nrn920
Excitatory actions of gaba during development: the nature of the nurture
Yehezkel Ben-Ari
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v3/n9/abs/nrn920.html


Complex reaction times have been extensively studied and broken down into underlying processing stages. Sternberg (1969) [Acta Psychologica, 30, 276-315.] was one of the first systematic attempts at using reaction time to understanding cognitive processing. For simple reaction times (like responding to a brief sound or light), Botwinick (1966) [Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(1), 9-15.] split reaction time into pre-motor and motor components and found the motor component accounted for 50 ms of a simple reaction time task that took about 250 ms. I am not aware of anyone who has split apart the remaining 200 ms into addiitional stages.


During body-scan ('sweeping') meditation, what does brain-imaging (e.g. fMRI) look like?

The Mind of the Meditator may be what you are looking for:
https://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v311/n5/full/scientificamerican1114-38.html

The image taken from the article gives some good explanation:


What causes some people to unconsciously imitate the accents of others?

TLDR When two speakers become more similar in their speech this is called convergence or accomodation (opposite: divergence). This can occur on all levels of language, phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. When mutual intellgibility is not an issue, accomodation mainly occurs when speakers like each other or want to appear likeable.

  Q: Has there been research on the process of unconsciously imitating accents?

Phonetic accommodation has been documented for a range of cases, for example for

mean intensity (Natale 1975)
perceptual similarity of individual lexical items (Pardo 2006)
vowel duration (Kim 2012, Pardo 2012)
voice onset time, fundamental frequency and the frequency of the first formant in vowels (Kim 2012)

Most studies have not studied spontaneous interaction and were mostly based on special elicitation techniques, but accommodation has also been documented in spontaneous speech (Levitan et al. 2012).

  Q: What causes individual differences in the tendency to unconsciously take on accents?

We converge with interlocutors that we like or that we want to like us (shown by, for example, Babel 2009). We diverge from those that we don't like, although this may be rarer - In general, speakers adopt pronunciations that they think are socially desirable in a situation (see Mather 2012 and the classic study by William Labov it is based on).

I beg to disagree with @Skippy's opinion that people "without a firm sense of identity or an underdeveloped ego" are more likely to accomodate or converge with another speaker. It rather appears that converging with an interlocutor is a social skill connected to empathy. You speak more like your interlocutor or a group you interact with so that you will be accepted as one of the team. This will make social interaction and achieving your aims easier than if you did not accomodate.

I don't mean to say that there are not people with "a firm sense of identity" that are particularly unlikely to converge with other speakers. But I do disagree with the implication behind these phrases, namely that "a firm sense of identity" (and not accomodating) is something desirable and an "underdeveloped ego" (and accomodating) something undesirable. On the contrary, converging with other speakers is an important and valuable social skill that helps us connect with other people and establish common ground. Those who (even unconsciously) insist on not accomodating to other speakers could also be characterised as having problems in adapting to new people or groups they come in contact with and lacking in empathy.

But I do see the point that those who are desparate for the approval of other people might go to great lengths to get it - including accomdating their speech to a high degree.


What would happen to the human brain after running out of memory?

I’m not sure that there is an answer to this question in the literature, and I doubt that we’ve ever studied cases of “running out of memory”.  But it’s an interesting question, so I’ll venture to answer it.  However, my answer, at best, will be just an assumption based on current knowledge and based on similar situations in other cognitive functions. Yet, I hope that it will give some ideas regarding this question. Or, better yet, other people will provide more comments and ideas that improve this answer.
We may never have seen cases of “running out of memory”, but we all certainly have encountered situations that we run out of our abilities to do something, such as to break our own sport records, to learn to speak a foreign language, and to memorize as many digits as we can in a single glance. What does the brain do when it encounters situations that it runs out of its abilities? The answer is it adapts itself by the process called neuroplasticity (ref 1, ref 2). Although, generally, our abilities will improve to some degree, this neuroplastic adaptation takes time and does not guarantee that it will be successful (e.g., we may never be able to break the Olympic running records ourselves or to remember 1,000 digits in a single glance) because we all have biological limits. What does the brain do when it reaches those limits? From observations, I think it just accepts the limits and does nothing more.
From this, it is logical to think that if anyone really runs out of memory, the first thing that the brain does will probably be not rewriting the old memory but modifying its memory synapses  because it has the ability to form new memory form modifying its memory synapses (ref 3, ref 4, ref 5). But after some time, it may reach its ability to further modify its synapses for new memory, what happens then? Does it rewrite the old memory? I have no references to answer this question, but I doubt that it does. To rewrite the old memory means to destroy the previous structure of synapses that hold the old memory and build the new structure of synapses to hold the new memory. The brain will end up having the same amount of memory but wasting its resource to do that. Is it worth it? Also, there are technical issues such as which old memory to be erased, how to locate the scattered synapses that hold the to-be-erased memory, and how to dismantle those synapses. Perhaps it’s best to just accept its limits and do nothing more as in the other situations above.
References

Adult Neuroplasticity: More Than 40 Years of Research

“Today it is generally accepted that the adult brain is far from being fixed. A number of factors such as stress, adrenal and gonadal hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors, certain drugs, environmental stimulation, learning, and aging change neuronal structures and functions. The processes that these factors may induce are morphological alterations in brain areas, changes in neuron morphology, network alterations including changes in neuronal connectivity, the generation of new neurons (neurogenesis), and neurobiochemical changes. Here we review several aspects of neuroplasticity and discuss the functional implications of the neuroplastic capacities of the adult and differentiated brain with reference to the history of their discovery.”

Changes in plasticity across the lifespan: Cause of disease and target for intervention

“We conceptualize brain plasticity as an intrinsic property of the nervous system enabling rapid adaptation in response to changes in an organism's internal and external environment. In prenatal and early postnatal development, plasticity allows for the formation of organized nervous system circuitry and the establishment of functional networks. As the individual is exposed to various sensory stimuli in the environment, brain plasticity allows for functional and structural adaptation and underlies learning and memory. We argue that the mechanisms of plasticity change over the lifespan with different slopes of change in different individuals.”

Synapses and Memory Storage

“We now understand in considerable molecular detail the mechanisms underlying long-term synaptic plasticity and the importance that such plastic changes play in memory storage, across a broad range of species and forms of memory. One surprising finding is the remarkable degree of conservation of memory mechanisms in different brain regions within a species and across species widely separated by evolution. However, although it is now clear that long-term synaptic plasticity is a key step in memory storage, it is important to note that a simple enhancement in the efficacy of a synapse is not sufficient to store a complex memory. Rather, changes in synaptic function must occur within the context of an ensemble of neurons to produce a specific alteration in information flow through a neural circuit.”

The Corticohippocampal Circuit, Synaptic Plasticity, and Memory
“Synaptic plasticity serves as a cellular substrate for information storage in the central nervous system. The entorhinal cortex (EC) and hippocampus are interconnected brain areas supporting basic cognitive functions important for the formation and retrieval of declarative memories. Here, we discuss how information flow in the EC–hippocampal loop is organized through circuit design. We highlight recently identified corticohippocampal and intrahippocampal connections and how these long-range and local microcircuits contribute to learning. This review also describes various forms of activity-dependent mechanisms that change the strength of corticohippocampal synaptic transmission. A key point to emerge from these studies is that patterned activity and interaction of coincident inputs gives rise to associational plasticity and long-term regulation of information flow. Finally, we offer insights about how learning-related synaptic plasticity within the corticohippocampal circuit during sensory experiences may enable adaptive behaviors for encoding spatial, episodic, social, and contextual memories.”

Learning to learn – intrinsic plasticity as a metaplasticity mechanism for memory formation

“Use it or lose it” is a popular adage often associated with use-dependent enhancement of cognitive abilities. Much research has focused on understanding exactly how the brain changes as a function of experience. Such experience-dependent plasticity involves both structural and functional alterations that contribute to adaptive behaviors, such as learning and memory, as well as maladaptive behaviors, including anxiety disorders, phobias, and posttraumatic stress disorder.”


Is the logic of self-reported thoughts related to psychological disorders?

There's no theoretical reason to believe that depression is characterized by an increase in "double implications."  If anything, the double implication you've posed (depression ⟺ no friends) is a pretty accurate understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the causes and consequences of depression (e.g., Stice, Ragan, & Patrick, 2004; Teasdale, 1983). So if depressed individuals have such an insight, then we might actually expect this to facilitate mood repair and regulation.

Otherwise, to my knowledge, no studies have examined the logical structure of depressive thoughts. Perhaps you might be aware that depression is characterized by cognitive distortions, but I'm guessing that this isn't the kind of "logic" that you're referring to.


if IQ is inherited, is it from father or mother?

Both.  The Independent article used a blog post as its main source.  The blog post (which is no longer online) claimed to rely on a doc (scientific document) that actually hardly supports its main assertion.  What that doc actually found was that there are 41 genes on the X chromosome associated with mental retardation, and none on the Y chromosome, and many (but well under 41) such genes on each of the other 22 chromosomes.  These autosomes had a total of 180 such genes.  (My source for the doc)  The doc then goes on to make a bunch of conclusions based on "assuming that these [41] genes are responsible for the development of general intelligence or cognitive abilities (‘g’ according to Plomin)", but this is a totally unwarranted assumption in my view.  Oh, and the doc is in the Opinion section, so it's probably NOT peer-reviewed, which is why I call it a doc rather than a paper.


What rules are tested during the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task?

If you read between the lines of Evaluation of a Short-Form of the Berg Card Sorting Test, you can find that indeed the only rules tested are the simple colour, number and shape matching. This can be identified by either looking at the source code attached to the paper or looking at the sample result table.

Update:

See also this paper.


Is there scientific evidence that IQ tests measure intelligence?

There is no universally accepted definition of "intelligence", so there is no universally accepted measure of it. An IQ test can be argued to measure specific types of intelligence like pattern recognition, but may completely ignore other types of intelligence like creativity and social intelligence. IQ has been shown to be associated with many factors like income, educational attainment, job performance and incarceration rates, so IQ tests clearly measures something meaningful and associated with many aspects of one's life, but whether you call that "intelligence" is open to debate. It's reasonably well accepted that an IQ test can measure specific kinds of intelligence, but there is no way to even define, much less quantify, intelligence in a general sense.