Is detection of angry faces more efficient in humans?

I'm not sure there's totally indisputable evidence on this, but I found a newer (2017) paper by Bayet et al. with infant subjects, but with fear rather than anger as the emotion tested (vs. happy), and (more importantly) using a different methodology (and IMHO better) because instead of different faces (in a crowd), they used the same face but mixed with noise, e.g. for fear [but for illustrative purposes only, see blow why]

They actually tried to determine which facial features enabled easier detection, eyes or mouth by mixing noise preferentially in that region (the resutling images were validated with SSIM, so there were four series of stimuli prestented (whith varying level of noise in each series).

Each of the face stimuli were presented in differents tests to the infant subjects; each test consisted of a noise-mixed face vs pure noise (two images on screen) and a camera was used to record the infant's reactions. The film was then analyzed to determine several measures of reaction, which were in turn used to calculate measures of face detection.

Two different measures of face detection were ultimately derived: A simple one based on percentages of total looking time [PTLT] and a more complex psychometric measure, the methodology of which is pretty involved (and thus perhaps a weak point of this paper):

  A multivariate measure of face detection was derived by classifying
  trials as ‘face is on the left’ or ‘face is on the right’. The
  rationale for this metric is similar to the idea of ‘double psychophysics’
  [48]: if one can reliably guess on which side of the screen
  the face was presented by looking at the infant’s behaviour, then
  it can be inferred that the infant is discriminating between the
  presence of a face or noise. We implemented this idea computationally
  using MVPA [42] to locate the side of presentation of the
  face (left or right) on each trial based on (i) PTLT to the left,
  (ii) number of looks to the left, (iii) number of looks to the right,
  (iv) duration of first look to the left, (v) duration of first look to
  the right, (vi) median duration of looks to the left, (vii) median
  duration of looks to the right, and (viii) direction of first look
  (left or right). Durations were log-transformed [56]. Continuous
  measures were z-scored within-subject. Measures were chosen
  a priori given the visual preference of infants for faces [57].
  PTLT to the right is equal to 100% minus PTLT to the left, and
  thus did not need to be included. Trials from all participants
  were pooled to maximize the number of training examples, and
  a logistic regression algorithm (a common classifier for MVPA)
  was repeatedly trained on all trials except one and tested on the
  trial that was left-out (leave-one-out cross-validation). Forward
  sequential feature selection was implemented inside each crossvalidation
  loop (see electronic supplementary material, table S2
  for results on the full dataset). This procedure led to locating
  the face side for each trial in a way that reflects generalization.
  We used logistic regression because it provides log-odds, a
  direct, criterion-free, continuous measure of evidence for each
  response (‘face is on the left’ versus ‘face is on the right’)—as
  opposed to accuracy, a binary measure dependent on a decision
  criterion. Raw evidence (log-odds for the right versus left side)
  was pooled to derive correct evidence (log-odds for the correct
  versus incorrect side) as a multivariate measure of face versus
  noise discrimination.

The overall results of their analysis look like this (one row for each detection measure):

Their interpretation of results:

  Psychometric curves of the PTLT to the face side revealed
  a significantly lower threshold for the Fearful eye+ face condition
  (44.41  ± 1.98% face signal; [...]; figure 3a) than for the Happy eye- face
  condition (difference: 5.20 +/- 2.62% face signal, 95% CI
  [0.001 0.103]), but not the other conditions ([...] figure 3a), across all age
  groups. [...]
  A similar result was found when applying psychometric
  curve modelling to the correct multivariate face versus
  noise discrimination evidence; the face detection threshold
  for the Fearful eye+ condition (44.07 ± 2.14% face signal;
  [...] figure 3c) was
  significantly lower than the detection threshold for the
  Happy eye- condition (increase in threshold: 7.90  ± 2.52%
  face signal, 95% CI [0.030 0.128]) but not the other conditions
  (Wald confidence intervals, alpha = 5%; [...]; figure 3c)

  Similar models were used to estimate the difference in
  threshold between the Fearful eye- condition and other conditions,
  or between the Happy eye+ condition and other
  conditions (electronic supplementary material, tables S5–S8).
  Results are summarized in figure 4. Overall, psychometric
  curve modelling of infant looking data revealed face detection
  thresholds at about 44% signal, with an increase of
  about 5% signal in threshold for Happy eye- condition
  compared to the Fearful eye+ condition, and intermediate
  thresholds for Happy eye+ and Fearful eye- conditions
  depending on whether PTLT alone (figure 4a) or correct
  multivariate discrimination evidence (figure 4b) was used
  as a measure of face versus noise detection.

  To clarify whether these differences in detection
  thresholds reflected a main effect of facial expression, a
  main effect of eye visibility, or an interaction between the
  two, and to test for an effect of age, we conducted further
  analyses focused on the linear portion of the psychometric
  curves corresponding to trials around the fitted detection
  thresholds (40–50% signal). [...; figure 3b,c,e,f I'm omitting all the chi-square stats]

  Results were mixed when considering PTLTs for the
  face side alone, as the effect of face emotion was restricted
  to 3.5-month-olds on this measure. However, correct discrimination
  evidence, a more comprehensive multivariate
  measure inclusive of PTLTs and other aspects of looking
  behaviour (e.g. first look) revealed a detection advantage for
  fearful faces compared to happy faces across all age groups
  (i.e. it did not significantly interact with age).

Of course this doesn't answer the question whether the effect holds in a crowd (or any non-laboratory setting, or if applies to anger etc.) The authors themselves say:

  Future research should determine
  whether the readiness to detect fearful faces (compared to
  happy faces) in infancy generalizes to naturalistic settings
  beyond the laboratory. Comparing detection of fearful
  versus angry versus sad faces will also clarify whether the
  effect applies just to threat-relevant stimuli (anger and fear)
  or more generally to negative novel expressions (fear,
  anger, and sadness).


Why is it that some (yet not all) people may struggle to retain information unrelated to what they are interested in?

Preface

Your question can be phrased as: what controls storage of information in Long-Term Memory? And more specifically, declarative memory? And one answer to this is one of my favourite stories in neuroscience.

In the following, I'm ignoring a lot of important aspects about memory - especially the difference between encoding, consolidation and retrieval. But I hope it still answers the question.

Psychology of memory

We generally distinguish between two forms of memory. Procedural memory is about sequential, a-then-b type of stuff - for example, movement patterns, like dancing, or calligraphy. There's basically only one way to get stuff into procedural memory: grind it in there. Do it a lot. Do it so much, it stops being under conscious control, and submerges into cerebellum and motor cortex. This is so for everyone; even the people who're absolutely the best at some sport or instrument will practice day after day after day to really get it down, to effortless perfection.

The other kind is declarative memory. This is a-is-b memory; the three branches of government are judiciary, legislative and executive, and the dorsal stream is where and the ventral stream is what, and your wedding anniversary is on 11.9. and so on. In contrast to procedural memory, declarative memory is conscious and controlled, it's largely subserved by different brain areas, and it is acquired in a much different way.
If you want to learn to rumba, you got to learn to rumba a lot. But when you're at the [book store/nightclub/sports venue] and the most attractive [boy/girl] you've ever seen walks by, and up to their friends, and is greeted with "Hi Alex!", you'll immediately store that name. You won't have to listen to the friends say "AlexAlexAlexAlexAlex" again and again. You'll hear it once, and remember it immediately, and possibly forever.
This is because you're aroused.
Roughly the same thing happens if you eat something and get extremely sick afterwards, or if you get a shock after pushing one lever, and a treat after pushing the other. Why? Your arousal - be it positive, or negative - is high. Metaphorically speaking, your brain thinks "whatever is going on right now seems to be important, I better store what's going on".

One cool experiment in that regard I can't find the citation for right now goes like this: students saw either a neutral video, or a disgusting surgery video after the lecture. A few weeks later, those students who had seen the surgery video did significantly better on those questions of the exam relating to the lecture after which they'd been shown the video. Another example is how so many people know what exactly they were doing on 9/11, when they heard the news. Do you remember what you did two days before? 7? But 9/11 was uniquely arousing.

The reverse is, of course, that we don't remember boring stuff. You remember Alex' name, but not their 7 homely friends' names. You remember every detail of Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, but not your math classes - or a boring movie (what was the plot of Star Wars Episode 2?). And why would they? Evolutionary speaking, there is very little point to storing memory about low-arousal situations; if they had been important, they would have been arousing, right? Memory formation is costly, so we only do it when we (think we) have to.

Individual differences

And that's the gist of it, really: low-arousal situations are not conductive to declarative LTM formation. And the stuff we study is very often low arousal.
Now to get it right, there are two options. The first is: be aroused! If you truly care about math, you will remember this stuff. It will be much easier to memorize information you actually care about. And this is one way by which people differ: some are more, some less bored by abstract, complicated information.

The next one is that our ability to focus obviously differs. Some people have short attention spans, some longer attention spans. A bit simpler than your question about salience, simply paying attention vs. not paying attention makes a huge difference, and some people are much better at paying attention to boring stuff than others. These people are often much better at reading something boring again and again. Because the situation is low-arousal, chances of encoding are still bad, but better than when you don't look at it, and eventually, it'll get there via mere exposure.

That is, then, my answer: two main factors concerning inter-individual differences in declarative LTM formation are 1. different propensity to find abstract, complex information interesting/boring, 2. different ability to study even though something is boring.

Neurological substrate

Surprisingly, the neurophysiology of this is relatively well understood. "[E]ntry of information into long-term memory", as the title of Lisman & Grace's paper goes, is mostly controlled by two sets of brain structures: an interaction between the medial temporal structures, especially the hippocampus, that controls the encoding of memories, and the mostly subcortical systems signaling salience and valence of events. The neighboring amygdala as the coder of valence, and, most importantly, the subcortical VTA (dopamine source) and the Locus Coeruleus (norepinephrine source) tell the hippocampus to "open its gates" for declarative memory formation in arousing contexts, to arousing stimuli. These systems are of course also generally relevant for setting the "tone" of the brain - from aroused to lethargic; this is under the control of the Locus Coeruleus. So, what's out there - arousing, novel, salient stuff? Dopamine/Norepinephrine up, hippocampus "gate" open, declarative memory in. Boring situation? Dopamine/Norepinephrine down, hippocampus shut.

You can still learn to rumba though. Just do it a lot. You don't need the hippocampus for that (as HM's ability to acquire new motor patterns shows).

Some references

Neurophysiology

Lisman & Grace, Hippocampus-VTA Loop/Dopamine

One specific experiment showing Dopamine is crucial for LTM persistence

Sara & Bouret, Locus Coeruleus/Norepinephrine

Psychology

Arousal and memory

Single-exposure rich memory formation for arousing events

And another one, for 9/11


Do introverts engage in too much self-control or do they lack impulsivity?

This may not be a perfect answer to your question but it should be of help. Essentially, I think that research on personality suggests that self control (and thus a lack of impulsivity) may be part of the reason why introverts don't engage in extraverted behavior.

According to personality research on arousal [1], levels of extroversion and introversion are linked to peoples' arousal levels. Extroverts are argued to be under-aroused (in terms of brain arousal) therefore they seek out new stimuli, while the opposite is the case for introverts. Hence as introverts already over-aroused, they are more likely to avoid new stimuli.

While the research you have cited suggests that introverts would actually benefit from seeking more social interaction, the fact that they do not is not particularly surprising as humans frequently fail to act in ways that benefit themselves.

[1]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Arousal


What does "affect component" mean in this article on well-being?

As the CDC page you linked states,

  Well-being integrates mental health (mind) and physical health (body) resulting in more holistic approaches to disease prevention and health promotion.

Mental health and physical health are the 2 main components to well-being, and both these components have components within them.

Mental health will have positive affects and negative affects as 2 of its components.


Survey Questionnaire design - What are the alternatives to Likert scale in measuring attitudes?

In attitude psychology Likert response scales are still the norm. They do have their problems (and there are a good deal of problems), but many of them can be addressed satisfactorily.

The acquiescence bias you mention is a small issue. It can be balanced out by reverse coding roughly half of your test items. The acquiescence bias then becomes random noise rather than a systematic bias, which is annoying but not very damaging as long as your analysis has good power.

For example, if you have a 4-item scale that measures roughly the same thing, you could mix items like "The system provides accurate information" with items like "I would not recommend the system to others".

Does that make sense?


Is acrophobia connected to falling in dreams?

Dreams and nightmares often relate to thoughts, worries, and concerns that a person has during waking hours. Various theories both describe this phenomena and suggest reasons for this (e.g., activation of memories, memory consolidation, discarding information, working through issues). Thus, it seems plausible that someone with a particular phobia would be more likely to have dreams related to that phobia (i.e., fear of heights accompanied by dreams about falling).

Muris et al (2000) discuss some of the research on children looking at fears, worries, and scary dreams. They cite Amaya-Jackson and March (1995) as evidence for links between traumatic events and frightening dreams.  They also mention research by Bauer (1976) which suggests that the contents of children's dreams and fears may change with age and that such changes co-occur both in daily fears and in scary dreams (e.g., fewer monsters and more fears about bodily injury/illness with age).

However, in addition to associating a phobia with dream content, you might also want to look at the baseline prevalence of any given type of dream. There is a sleep and dream database you can look at.
In a survey of 2992 participants 48% reported having had a dream of falling (Bulkeley - database - Q9).
Given the relatively high prevalence of dreams of falling, there may be other reasons, perhaps related to the nature of dreaming that induces them. For example, dreams of being unable to move can readily be explained by the paralysed state of body while dreaming. Perhaps a similar argument could be made about falling (e.g., a body sensation while dreaming is interpreted in a way that links with the fear of falling, thereby inducing the nightmare).

References

Bauer, D. H. (1976). An exploratory study of developmental changes in children's fears. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(1), 69-74.
March, J. S., Amaya-Jackson, L., Terry, R., & Costanzo, P. (1997). Posttraumatic symptomatology in children and adolescents after an industrial fire. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 36(8), 1080-1088.
Muris, P., Merckelbach, H., Gadet, B., & Moulaert, V. (2000). Fears, worries, and scary dreams in 4-to 12-year-old children: Their content, developmental pattern, and origins. Journal of clinical child psychology, 29(1), 43-52. PDF


Does societal view of epic musician, author's epic work affect mainly any human the way they view them overall or it's their personal life or both?

In general, our main impression of someone colors aspects of their details. It's called the halo effect or when it has a negative tone it's sometimes called the "pitchfork effect" or "horns effect". The positive halo effect is definitely exploited in advertising.

As for why the tabloid press has been on the rise, that's a more complex issue. I'm not sure there's a single good explanation for it.
But regarding its contents, some evolutionary psychologists propose that it has contents that would have been relevant to our (ancient) past:

  We examined the content of three successful tabloids, using a list of evolutionary-based topics created a priori. The results indicate that tabloids reflect fitness-relevant topics that were important throughout our evolutionary past. The tabloids equally represent both sexes, and while they mostly concentrate on entertainers and royalty, they do pay some attention to unknown individuals. By correlating who and what is gossiped about, we found celebrities are more often the subjects of stories involving wealth, while unknown individuals are almost always gossiped about within the context of life-threatening events.


Is teacher guidance always necessary to become an expert?

I'll give you an example of a famous mathematician who developed his mathematical research in isolation. Arguably If someone manages to achieve a high level of skill in solitude for such an extraordinary difficult discipline as mathematics I would deny the need to have a teacher (in any case) to master a skill which is less difficult than be an expert in math. (Which is arguably any discipline). However as mentioned in the comments having some kind of feedback might be useful in mastering a skill faster. Additionally not every person is as gifted as was S. Ramanujan. Therefore I suggest it depends on your inborn intellectual abilities with regard to the skill you want to become an expert of. Therefore this question cannot be answered in general but only with respect to person X inborn intellectual qualities with regard to the skill person X wants to become an expert of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan


Confirmation bias:

  Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is
  the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information
  in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses, while giving
  disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.

A feature of this bias is belief perseverance:

  ... when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false ...

Confirmation bias is an umbrella term for a variety of strategies and effects that may be applicable in different situations, including self-justification, self-verification, attitude polarization, escalation of commitment, cherry picking, etc, etc.  See the duplicate questions I listed in the comments above for more varieties of these.  You may find that some sub-category of confirmation bias is more apt to your question.

Note: Cognitive dissonance refers to the cause of a number of possible inconsistency reduction strategies, of which belief perseverance is one.

Note: Denial refers to an ego-defence mechanism - ie, it applies only if the person feels personally threatened by the inconsistency.


In voltage clamp, you measure current.

If you voltage clamp the cell near it's resting potential, you need little current to hold the cell.

If you want to voltage clamp the cell depolarized or hyperpolarized relative to rest, you need to inject current (positive or negative). How much current you need to inject depends on the membrane properties of the cell, and the leak conductance. Therefore, measuring the current as a function of the held voltage tells you about these membrane properties.

As you depolarize the cell, yes, you will open voltage-gated conductances, but these conductances also often inactivate (sodium channels especially). That said, yes, if you depolarize a cell and channels open or close, you will record those changes in your voltage clamp. However, you will never get an action potential if you have a good clamp. The whole point of voltage clamp is that you hold the voltage constant. Action potentials are positive feedback increases in voltage. If you clamp a cell at -40mV, even if -40mV is normally above threshold in a current-clamped cell, the cell will stay at -40mV. It doesn't really make sense to think about action potential thresholds in voltage clamp, they don't exist because the threshold phenomenon (voltage positive feedback) is blocked by clamping the voltage.

One of the benefits of voltage clamp is that you can (somewhat indirectly) measure the flow of certain ions. If you set the voltage equal to the reversal potential for some ion, you know the current for that ion is exactly zero. This allows you to make inferences about how much current is flowing (and knowing voltage you can calculate conductance) at other voltages.


Technically no two words are identical, especially between speakers, but the term is still useful. Here's my answer borrowing from a few disciplines:

Semantics:

It may be useful to think of words in terms of their sense and reference. You can think of reference as the thing that the word/phrase 'points to' in the world, and sense as additional meaning conveyed by a word/phrase. If for example, you were to refer to your friend's dog as "Lassie", the reference of Lassie in this context is simply your friend's dog. If you referred to your friend's dog as a "mutt", then the reference of "mutt" is still your friend's dog. Both "Lassie" and "mutt" share elements of the same meaning--in that they have the same reference, but they differ in their sense. You could make the same argument for "wash" and "clean", though they may have the same reference they have different senses, therefore, they are not the exact same.

Cognitive Science:

How do we define words and phrases? It cannot be just a dictionary definition, because we know much more about what constitutes a word than what a dictionary attempts to do. One could extend the idea of a dictionary definition and compose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that encapsulate a word's meaning (for example a dog could be something that is furry, four-legged...etc.) But this is problematic--for one it does not account for gradation across categories. Secondly, it is almost impossible to fully define categories such as "dog" and "chair" using necessary and sufficient conditions. (You could fill a book with conditions that could satisfy "chair" but can never work out a contingent system), finally, it leads to infinite regress. (For example, if we define a "dog" as something that is "furry", what then is are the necessary and sufficient conditions of "furry"?)--thus necessary and sufficient conditions don't have much use in natural language. An alternative is prototype theory (see: Eleanor Rosch), which asserts that a concept's meaning is graded around an idealized core. For example, you may have an idealized concept of "dog" (say, a golden retriever), and all other examples of dogs you see in the world lay on a spectrum in relation to your idealized representation of a dog. The farther away, or more different, the object is from the idealized core, the less "dog-like" it is. The interesting thing about prototype theory is that the idealized core is arbitrary--it varies from person to person. So one person's idea of a "dog" is not the same as another person. That means that the word does not mean the exact same from speaker to speaker, despite having very similar senses and references. From this we could conclude that no two speaker's englishes are the same. So even when comparing the same word, their meanings are not truly the same. The processes that involve how prototypes form in the first place are as much dependent on individual variation, as they are culture and language.

Phonology:

The Bouba-Kiki effect shows that speech sounds themselves may come to have meaning (see: sound symbolism). So the fact that your synonyms "wash" /waʃ/ and "clean" /klin/ have different phonological realizations means that they also have differing semantic implications.

Bringing it together:

As an ESL teacher you may be working with children who may have learned english explicitly--this is in stark contrast to native english speakers who learned english passively. ESL speakers may be comparing their native language (and prototypes) to english, thereby producing different conceptualizations of the semantic space english expressions explore.

So cognitively no two words are identical. From this you could claim that there are no "true" synonyms--but that doesn't mean that the term "synonym" is useless. Even though all words have multiple complex layers of meaning, some words have more semantic similarities than others, and that still bears pointing out as an interesting feature in language.


Is quantum tunneling required for nerve signals to cross the dendritic synaptic barrier?

I don't know what precisely "nerve signals" is supposed to refer to, but neurons exchange information mainly via one pathway: neurotransmitters. And these do not travel the synaptic cleft via quantum tunnelling - obviously, since quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon on a quantum scale (concerning electrons), while neurotransmitters are far larger, at the molecule level.
There are a number of other ways by which neurons cooperate, such as ephaptic coupling. However, the main one is the release of neurotransmitters following an action potential in the presynaptic neuron. Neurons are connected at their synapses, mostly via axo-dendritic chemical ones. That means that one neuron's axon (its "output line") is met by a part of another neuron's dendrite tree. The point where the two meet is the synapse. Axon and dendrite do not actually touch; there is a microscopic "synaptic cleft" between the two, in which the extracellular fluid which fills the brain flows. I assume it is the synaptic cleft which the "dendritic synaptic barrier" is supposed to refer to.
During the action potential, the presynaptic neuron releases neurotransmitters, such as GABA or Glutamate, into the cleft. These passively diffuse within the cleft, eventually coming in contact with the post-synaptic neuron. There, they bind to receptors which activate the post-synaptic neuron.
As far as I know, neither the release of neurotransmitters at the presynaptic neuron, nor the passive diffusion process through the synaptic cleft, or the binding to postsynaptic receptors require quantum tunnelling to any interesting degree. Basically, the stuff just floats around in the extremely narrow synaptic cleft until it comes across a receptor.
Possibly, the "person" you are talking about means some other aspect of the process, such as the receptor binding. Alas, I do not see how the specific way by which action potentials propagate is relevant for consciousness. Consciousness does not seem to depend on what happens at a specific synapse, but to the large-scale patterns of neuronal activity. If neurons were to communicate via lasers, electrically, or as they do (chemically) hardly seems to matter - what matters is that they communicate, and which neurons communicate, and what they communicate.

All of this are very basic, well-established facts about the workings of the brain. The wikipedia article is a perfectly fine introduction, though literally any neuroscience textbook will explain it like that, and countless research papers in peer-reviewed journals have investigated the process in detail, e.g. this.

There exist a number of theories regarding cognitively relevant quantum phenomena in the brain, most prominently probably Orch OR. As far as I understand it, Orch OR does not focus on the communication between neurons at chemical synapses, but on quantum states within neurons and other forms of coupling (some ephaptic coupling/electrical synapse hybrid?). Regardless of what Orch OR proposes of how the brain works, the chemical synapse is commonly thought to be the primary way by which brain neurons exchange information, and there, neurotransmitters don't tunnel, but diffuse - trivially; since neurotransmitters, being molecules, are far too large to quantum tunnel.
Furthermore, Orch OR is universally assumed to be a rather bad model of the brain.
Certainly, other perspectives exist; but the basic process of action potential propagation via chemical synapses has a well-deserved near dogmatic status in the neurosciences.

Lastly, the person you're quoting seems quite confused about very fundamental brain anatomy. For example, there are no "dendrite brain cells". The brain hosts neurons, each a single cell, each with a dendrite tree (see here for a famous picture). I wouldn't expect anybody who doesn't even understand what a neuron is to revolutionise neuroscience any time soon.


Is there a psychological explanation for the age of 18 being important in many societies?

A cursory search strongly suggests that the distinction is arbitrary and practical, with little link to developmental science.

I can find no evidence for any particularly compelling biological change centered around the age of 18.  That, along with the fact that the age of eighteen is not a universal age-of-majority, makes me say that there is no scientific basis for the choice.


I'd say yes, in german literature there are some reportings of athelets "training" in slow motion while they are lucid dreaming. I'll try to recap those reportings in english.
Paul Tholey & Kaleb Utecht cite Sadko Günter Solinski, an equestrian, in "Schöpferisch Träumen" (p.257-258):

Als Reiter kann ich somit im Klartraum (A) meine Figuren
zentimetergenau in den Sand (bei der Dressur) bzw. in den Parcours,
z.B. eines Cross-Country hufbreitgenau in die Landschaft zeichnen (bei
der Military). Gelingt mir dies im Zeitlupentempo und verbinde ich (B)
dabei sämtliche (dem Pferd angepassten) ”Hilfen“ im jeweils einzig
richtigen Augenblick einer Bewegungsphase und ”reite ich“ (C) die
Aufgabe so mehrmals (drei- bis neunmal) während eines Klartraums
genau und vollständig durch, so verfügt mein Körper
erfahrungsgemäß am folgenden Tag über genügend ”Körperwissen“, um
den Parcours autonom, d.h. ohne mein bewußtes oder willentliches Zutun
hinter sich zu bringen.

Summary: Solinski claims to able to prepare dressage and eventing very accuratly while lucid dreaming ("im Klartraum"). Sometimes he is able to do this in slow motion ("im Zeitlupentempo").
The citation can also be found in Daniel Erlacher's PhD thesis (p.62).

Daniel Erlacher has another example in his german PhD thesis on motor learning in lucid dreams. It's about himself training high diving in a lucid dream (above PDF, p.125):

Ein typischer Klartraum in dieser Periode sah etwa wie folgt aus: [...]
Ich versuche, möglichst kunstvoll Salti und Schrauben, oder
Auerbachsalti zu machen. Da das ganze langsam abläuft – wie in
Zeitlupe – habe ich die gute Gelegenheit auf alle Bewegungsabläufe
genau zu achten.

Summary: Erlacher describes one of serveral characteristic lucid treams, where he is trying to do backflips and so on. As everything happens really slowly ("Da das ganze langsam abläuft") - like in slow motion ("wie in Zeitlupe") - he is able to focus on every single movement.


Status of introspection in psychological research today

Okay, let's see if I can tackle this...

Almost all of my answer to this question is being drawn from the first chapter of Michael Posner's Foundations of Cognitive Science. I, myself, am just a rising freshman at a decently ranked American university who has been studying the cognitive science literature on my own for the last few years.

Here I will attempt to explain one (and perhaps the most significant) example of introspections in modern cognitive science: protocol analysis.

I've only recently learned about it, but with the book here in front of me, I'm sure I can manage to give a good summary of it.

Protocol analysis, simply put, is the use of verbal reports of mental activity as data. It's not quite the same as the introspection of early psychology. From Posner, "Although verbal reports date back to the introspectionists, the use of such reports as data should not be misconstrued as introspection. Introspection took subjects' verbalizations at face value as constituting a valid theory of their own thought processes. Protocol analysis today, however, treats verbal reports as a source of data to be accounted for with an experimenter-generated theory, perhaps in the form of a computer simulation.”

The instructions given to subjects about how to report their introspections seems to have a great impact on the content of verbal reports. Here are some examples:

You could ask someone to "Think aloud" as they are performing some task. ("25 plus 25. 2 plus 2 is 4, and 5 plus 5 is 10, so carry the one and the total is 50.")
You could ask them to report their mental processes as they are performing their tasks. These tend to elicit more theoretical answers ("I am now visually processing..."), especially since you're probably questioning college psychology students. These answers are usually not preferred by modern psychologists.
You could ask the subjects questions. ("How did you decide to do that?")

And so forth. The verbal reports get transcript-ed and then the experimenter then segments the report into parts that can be encoded (translated into a formal language, like mathematics) independently. Reliability of the data becomes higher the more simple and precise your coding scheme is. In fact, some systems have been invented for the automatic coding of segmented protocols, though they don't rival human experts quite yet.

After analyzing many subjects' narratives in this way, you have loads of rich data about how people think through a given task. Since we aren't introspectionists, of course, we don't interpret this data at face value. So how do we interpret it?

“Verbal protocols generally provide explicit information about the knowledge and information heeded in solving a problem rather than about the processes used. Consequently it is usually necessary to infer the processes from the verbal reports of information heeded instead of attempting to code processes directly.”

So protocol analysis is most useful for understanding the knowledge consulted when one is thinking through a task. The verbs that participants use to describe their thoughts often provide useful clues about the processes involved in completing a task. For example, the tenses of verbs can distinguish between the retrieval of information from memory and the planning of future actions.

Since we are cognitive scientists, after all, our interpretation of verbal reports are usually informed by information-processing theories of thinking aloud. In other words, our science of introspection improves our ability to derive correct conclusions from introspective data.

But yeah. As a tool for guiding the creation of more precise hypothesis of human thinking (with computational models), introspection is still quite useful. Today it's more diffident and rigorous and better informed, but still alive.

You also can't understate the role introspection probably informally plays in driving the hypothesizing of cognitive scientists. This has less rigor, however, and may even be holding us back.

I keep saying "us" like I'm a scientist already. I'm not. >_<


Why is labeling a cognitive distortion? How is it different from categorization?

As Bryan Krause suggested (above), talking with your psychotherapist is likely the most important next step for you to take.
Also, please note that what I write below is simply general information about cognitive behavioral therapy. I do not know your situation. What I share with you here is not personal advice. It is information only.
You might find it helpful to read more about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) because it might answer at least one of your questions, which I will paraphrase as: Why are cognitive distortions potentially harmful?
Brief answer with an example
What you think (assumptions, beliefs) about yourself and the world greatly influences what you do (behavior) and how you feel (emotions). Our minds often distort reality by "telling" us untruths, which in turn lead us to feel and act differently.
Example: I'm a college student majoring in psychology. I studied reasonably well for a statistics test, but I received a "B-" grade. My friend received an "A". I immediately think, "I'm not smart enough to be a psychologist." I subsequently don't study as hard and I start thinking about changing to an "easy" major. I feel down and start to smoke weed every day to feel better, which causes me to feel even less motivated.
Thus, according to cognitive behavioral theory, my negative (distorted) thoughts about the "B-" grade led to a downward spiral of maladaptive behaviors and depressed mood.
Very brief history
[Edit of 17 Dec 2020: Thank you to tale852150 for calling attention to my egregious and baffling omission (see the Comments, below). I added this section about Albert Ellis because Ellis was indeed the first cognitive-behavioral theorist and clinician.]
Albert Ellis (1913–2007)
In the mid-1950s, Albert E. Ellis, Ph.D., developed the first systematic cognitive therapy, which he originally called "rational therapy", with the therapy approach evolving, the name changed to "rational-emotive therapy" (RET), and finally, "rational-emotive behavior therapy" (REBT). This book chapter provides a concise, yet complete overview of REBT:
Dryden, Windy, Daniel David, and Albert Ellis. "Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy." In Handbook of Cognitive Behavioral Therapies, 3rd ed., edited by Keith S. Dobson, 226–276. New York: Guilford, 2010.
And here are few representative samples of Ellis' publications:
Ellis, Albert. "Rational Psychotherapy and Individual Psychology." Journal of Individual Psychology 13, no. 1 (1957): 38-44.
Ellis, Albert, and Robert A. Harper. A New Guide to Rational Living. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.
Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart.
Ellis, Albert. "Rational-Emotive Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Similarities and Differences." Cognitive Therapy and Research 4, no. 4 (1980): 325-340.
Ellis, Albert. "Changing Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)." Journal of Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy 13, no. 2 (1995): 85-89.
Aaron Beck (1921– )
Aaron Beck, M.D. developed "cognitive therapy" in the early 1960s. One of his first breakthrough articles was:
Beck, Aaron T. "Thinking and Depression: I. Idiosyncratic Content and Cognitive Distortions." Archives of General Psychiatry 9, No. 4 (1963): 324–333. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1963.01720160014002
Helpful articles
John M. Grohol, "15 Common Cognitive Distortions", PsychCentral (24 Jun 2019). Here is a quote from Dr. Grohol's article:

What’s a cognitive distortion and why do so many people have them?
Cognitive distortions are simply ways that our mind convinces us of
something that isn’t really true. These inaccurate thoughts are
usually used to reinforce negative thinking or emotions — telling
ourselves things that sound rational and accurate, but really only
serve to keep us feeling bad about ourselves.

Cherry, Kendra. "What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?" verywellmind (13 June 2020). This is a quote from the article:

Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on changing the automatic
negative thoughts that can contribute to and worsen emotional
difficulties, depression, and anxiety. These spontaneous negative
thoughts have a detrimental influence on mood.

Note that "automatic negative thoughts" and "cognitive distortions", as used by most psychotherapists, have very similar if not identical meanings.
Best-selling book
The top-selling cognitive behavioral therapy book on Amazon.com currently is:
Gillihan, Seth J. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Made Simple: 10 Strategies for Managing Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Panic, and Worry. Emeryville, CA: Althea Press (Callisto Media), 2018. (Amazon rating/reviews: 4.6 stars; ReviewMeta: 4.6 stars)
I haven't read Gillihan's book, but a ReviewMeta rating of 4.6 based on 97 reviews suggests it's been helpful to most people.
Of course, there are scores of good online articles and books about cognitive behavioral therapy. The ones I mentioned are just a select sample to (hopefully) get you started learning more.


I found this 2018 meta-analysis of 24 studies by Wendelienvan & Klingsieck on procrastination intervention - Educational Research Review article.

They used Steel's 2007 definition of procrastination as an irrational and acratic behavior. Procrastination is a voluntary delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. Wendelienvan & Klingsieck found that cognitive-behavioural therapeutic approaches had a greater reduction in procrastination than self-regulation and strength & assertiveness training interventions.

Quite an accessible and interesting read.


Do researchers and laypeople understand statistics differently?

Even among researchers there is widespread misunderstanding of core statistics ideas. Look at the work by Geoff Cumming. Example paper title: 'Researchers misunderstand confidence intervals and standard error bars.'


Anti-psychotic medication withdrawal-induced psychosis

It depends on what you mean by psychosis.

Anti-psychotic medications effectively reduce the positive symptoms of schizophrenia (hallucinations, paranoia) at the expense of worsening the negative symptoms (rigidity, bradykinesia, cognitive slowing). Long-term use of antipsychotics, especially the older ones, can induce a Parkinson's-like syndrome.

These effects are not withdrawal so much as side effect of the medication.

Second generation antipsychotics are used as mood stabilizers in bipolar II and major depression. Post-marketing surveys of aripiperazole and the like have not bred rebound psychosis.

Use of dopamine agonists is associated with psychosis.


Does dream recall alter the dreaming process?

Your experience with more dream following dream recall can be explained in this paper, Effect of encouragement on dream recall (Halliday, 1992). People experience lighter sleep when they recall dream upon awakening (Shapiro, Goodenough, & Gryler, 1963), Armitage (1992) reported that males had more dream recall in low stress days while females showed the opposite.

Armitage, R. (1992). Gender differences and the effect of stress on dream recall: A 30-day diary report. Dreaming, 2(3), 137. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0094354

Halliday, G. (1992). Effect of encouragement on dream recall. Dreaming, 2(1), 39.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0094346

Shapiro, A., Goodenough, D. R., & Gryler, R. B. (1963). Dream recall as a function of method of awakening. Psychosomatic medicine, 25(2), 174-180.


Miscarriage throwing potential shadow on life of next child

If they knew the gender it was more likely to be a stillbirth than a miscarriage.

As a mother of a stillborn child, and as a psychologist, I've been interested in research on the trauma involved, but have found only a few medical papers and no serious empirical work in psychology. There is some grief literature but a lot of the accent is on 'everyone grieves differently', whereas my impression is that the trauma involved leads to quite a decisive set of commonalities among the bereaved. But I have never seen a professional, empirically informed description of these commonalities in the case of early child loss.

The next child is a big theme in the bereaved parents community (they call them 'rainbow babies', in case you want to Google). One thing I've heard from a neonatologist working with parents in this situation, is that anxiety about the next baby is usually very high, even after birth, even when everything is clearly all right. It seems to take several years to get back to baseline (even in the absence of another child).

Sorry for the anecdotal reply, I wish I had some empirical articles to back my observations. The overarching belief used to be that stillbirth is something a women can get over easily, and that it's best if the baby is not mentioned by anybody. This used to be the medical approach a few decades back, and it is only now that parents (usually mothers) are speaking up, doctors are listening, and the psychological profession yet has to follow in a serious way.

I think your best chance of catching some new research is by following perinatal ptsd research. Perhaps the old school psychoanalysts have had thoughts about this as well, but I haven't come across them.

Hopefully someone will prove me wrong and give you an answer with proper references.


Why do some people bond with their captors and vice versa?

What you are describing is a condition popularly known as the Stockholm Syndrome. It should be noted that very little research has been conducted into this condition, and it has not been classified as a disorder. However, very briefly, Stockholm Syndrome leads to a hostage developing an emotional bond with their captor, where they sympathize with them and form positive feelings towards them.
It is believed that this syndrome is a coping mechanism (Cantor C, Price J), a result of spending intimate time with their captor where they are subjected to abuse. The captives are in an incredible amount of stress and typically lose the ability to think rationally and reasonably. Their primary motive is to survive, and this instinct leads them to develop defense mechanisms. Hatred, in this situation, would not be productive, and obedience is the only way to survive.
It is believed that 3 aspects make it more likely for the syndrome to develop:

Long duration of time spent together
Spending a longer duration of time with their captors leads the
hostages to believe that their captors truly will not kill them. They
believe that the captors are their friends and they will get out of
this messy situation together.

Intimate and continual contact between the captor and the hostage
In order to ensure that they do not anger their captor in order to escape violence at their hands, the focus of the captives is on obedience and pleasing their captors, for which they try to get to know their captors during the period of their captivity. This 'humanizes' their captors. Moreover, the captives want to make sure that their feelings do not appear fake, and eventually begin believing that they are genuine.

Small acts of kindness
During the course of the captivity, if the captor shows an unexpected
act of kindness, or simply chooses to not behave violently, it may
lead the captive to become affectionate towards their captor. In a
situation where a person is made to fear for their life, this small
act can be seen as merciful on the captor's part.

Women are said to be more likely to develop Stockholm Syndrome. (Graham, Dee L. R.) Societal conditions lead the women to be afraid of male violence. This fear encourages them to engage in actions that would please the male, and bond with them to survive. Similarly, the captives bond with their captors and attempt to please them to survive.
A lesser known condition is the Lima Syndrome, where the abductors develop sympathy towards their captives.
As mentioned in the beginning, these conditions are still widely contested and much more research is required.


How does SPA relate to deep learning concepts?

Deep Learning (which is now supposed to be called Differentiable Programming?) is a means of doing inference over a set of data.

SPA is a Vector Symbolic Architecture (VSA) implemented using Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR). That is to say, sparse vectors represent symbols and there is a set of operations that can be used to combine them.

Consequently, SPA can be used as a sort of prior for Deep Learning to provide constraints on the representation it's learning.

For example, SPA could be used to represent the output of a visual system, which would then be used by other symbolic systems. In the case of Spaun, Deep Learning is used in the vision system to map images onto known symbols. These known symbols can then be manipulated in ways that would be impossible for Deep Learning to perform. For example, Rapid Variable Creation used for solving Raven's Progressive Matrices is impossible for Deep Learning to perform without any structural priors.


Can information in the media increase fear of something?
Yes of course, let's see what these learning processes are.

Common processes employed by psychology in order to explain the development of anxiety, fear and phobias are the vicarious learning processes (modeling, observational learning and social learning).

Vicarious learning, although the terms observational learning and social learning are more commonly used:

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

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

These processes of learning have been well developed (Albert Bandura, a Canadian psychologist, is recognized as the professional who most impulse these learning processes, his investigations are often misinterpreted since one of the most famous ones also dealt with violence, his investigations are also misinterpreted in their objectives, it must be said that their research always had clinical objectives) and are commonly used for different purposes in learning, here we refer specifically to learning processes developed by a third person (such as a person who sees something on TV ) about situations and events that happen to other people.

In relation to frequency these learning processes are developed as commonly as classical conditioning or instrumental learning and are commonly employed in explanations of phobias, since many people with significant clinical problems with phobias have never experienced a situation (a person can develop a phobia to fly without having ever experienced any negative experience, or related incident, aboard an airplane), that is, these learning processes are based on information that the person has obtained from the story of other people's experiences.

Of course the increase or development of anxiety or fear (and others) is mediated by contructs or common causes in the study of psychology: estimates of possibility and frequency, locus of control, expectations (very specifically in phobia expectations about the control of object or phobic situation), and many others.

When searching databases, it may be more productive to use the term phobia than fear:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=vicarious+phobia&cmd=DetailsSearch

About possible neuroanatomic related structures:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2555428/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4907690/

You may also be interested in social hypotheses and theories related to the media:

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


What was her/his name again.....ahh got it!

You'll want to look up literature on the "Tip of the Tongue" (TOT) phenomenon.  It's been studied since the 60s I believe and can be experimentally reproduced.


Is there a standardised questionnaire measuring tendency to think emotionally versus logically?

I studied the Child and Adolescent participation in decision-making questionnaire of L. O'Hare, O. Santin, K. Winter, C. McGuinness

They found that children and young people's involvement in decision-making, when it went well, had a four stranded positive ‘therapeutic effect’ in that it led to better child/professional relationships, higher levels of self-esteem in children and young people, increased their sense of mastery and control and reduced their stress and anxiety.

Some items are:

Information to make a decision is presented to me in a way I understand
I am given the full information to make a decision
I feel involved in making decisions in my life
I am given the opportunity to weigh up the pros and cons to make a decision
I have the ability to weigh up the pros and cons to make a decision

(...)
I wish this questionnaire will be useful for your research.

REFERENCES:

L. O'Hare, O. Santin, K. Winter, C. McGuinness (2016), "The reliability and validity of a child and adolescent participation in decision-making questionnaire", "Child: care, health and development",5,692-698.

LINK :  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12369/full


What is the exact meaning of a "calculating" person?

The thesaurus may assist.  The Synonyms of 'calculating' are: artful, astute, calculative, canny, conniving, crafty, cunning, deceitful, devious, dexterous, dirty, disingenuous, foxy, guileful, machiavellian, manipulative, scheming, shrewd, slick, slippery, sly, subtle, underhand, unscrupulous, and wily.
Acknowledging that everyone pursues self-interest to an extent, the intent of the definition appears to suggest that a 'calculating' person has little empathy or consideration of others.
Synonyms extracted from Merriam-Webster and Oxford.


To me, the copy of DSM-5 follows the idea put forward by proponents of the term “addiction” in the meetings mentioned in your quote whereby

proponents of the term “addiction” believed that this word would convey the appropriate meaning of the compulsive drug-taking condition and would distinguish it from “physical” dependence, which is normal and can occur in anyone who takes medications that affect the CNS.

In the second page of the preface to DSM-5 (page xlii), the following is stated.

Restructuring of substance use disorders for consistency and clarity. The categories of substance abuse and substance dependence have been eliminated and replaced with an overarching new category of substance use disorders—with the specific substance used defining the specific disorders. "Dependence" has been easily confused with the term "addiction" when, in fact, the tolerance and withdrawal that previously defined dependence are actually very normal responses to prescribed medications that affect the central nervous system and do not necessarily indicate the presence of an addiction. By revising and clarifying these criteria in DSM-5, we hope to alleviate some of the widespread misunderstanding about these issues.

The section on Substance Use Disorders is within the section titled Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders which starts on page 481.

The substance-related disorders encompass 10 separate classes of drugs: alcohol; caffeine; cannabis; hallucinogens (with separate categories for phencyclidine [or similarly acting arylcyclohexylamines] and other hallucinogens); inhalants; opioids; sedatives, hypnotics, and anxiolytics; stimulants (amphetamine-type substances, cocaine, and other stimulants); tobacco; and other (or unknown) substances. These 10 classes are not fully distinct. All drugs that are taken in excess have in common direct activation of the brain reward system, which is involved in the reinforcement of behaviors and the production of memories. They produce such an intense activation of the reward system that normal activities may be neglected. Instead of achieving reward system activation through adaptive behaviors, drugs of abuse directly activate the reward pathways. The pharmacological mechanisms by which each class of drugs produces reward are different, but the drugs typically activate the system and produce feelings of pleasure, often referred to as a "high." Furthermore, individuals with lower levels of self-control, which may reflect impairments of brain inhibitory mechanisms, may be particularly predisposed to develop substance use disorders, suggesting that the roots of substance use disorders for some persons can be seen in behaviors long before the onset of actual substance use itself.
[...]
The substance-related disorders are divided into two groups: substance use disorders and substance-induced disorders. The following conditions may be classified as substance-induced: intoxication, withdrawal, and other substance/medication-induced mental disorders (psychotic disorders, bipolar and related disorders, depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, sleep disorders, sexual dysfunctions, delirium, and neurocognitive disorders).


Efficiency drop when joining and splitting teams

Has there has been done any research on why you should or should not
  join or merge teams in short time periods?

One big difference in how the troops were maintained in the second world war was that for the allied forces when a person died/got seriously injured this person was always replaced with another one (under the assumption "you always want the troops to be fully staffed"), whereas the Germans did not replace troop members and the troop kept its original staffing until it became too small when it was just broken up (motivated by group dynamics as you are asking about).

It seems at first a bit counter intuitive, but the Germans performed better due to their strategy than just continuously replace personnel. I am sure there exists a lot of research into this.


EEG segmentation and denoising which one should done first?

Depending on whom you ask, you get both answers. That's mostly dependent on the denoising algorithm. If you're using an adaption of GST, you are segmenting first with an n-1 overlap.

If you're using S3P I'd recommend not segmenting, since (in my experience) there is a slight difference, with unsegmented data having slightly closer results to Fernandez and Li, 2003 and Frangakis and Hegerl, 2001.


Psychology behind repeated viewing of certain pictures and songs

That's a difficult to say I assume many kind of past memories* linked with emotions subconsciously play certainly a critical role nevertheless I found an interesting link (http://www.gizmag.com/predicting-hit-songs/20939/) which is about a formula on how to find out the next hit song.

*by memories I mean more kind of episodic memories rather than semantic although it could be semantic if someone would be expressed of a song by its lyrics.


Why does extrinsic motivation sometimes reduce intrinsic motivation?

This effect has been termed Overjustification effect and was originally reported by Lepper, Greene & Nisbett (1973) who studied the influence of rewards on intrinsic motivated behavior.

Some theories hypothesize that the reward reduces the feeling of self-determination, which in turn reduces intrinsic motivation, because the reward induces the feeling of being controlled by the person that offered the reward.

References

Lepper MR, Greene D, Nisbett RE (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the 'overjustification' hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28 (1): 129–137. doi:10.1037/h0035519.


How do you know if it's psychosomatic or not?

I believe 'psychosomatic' describes a way the mind has effects on the your body which might result in somatic symptoms. Often psychosomatic disorders are diagnosed as such when:

no somatic correlate to the experienced symptoms can be found
somatic correlates do not sufficiently explain the experienced symptoms

This often results in patients who visit different doctors over a longer period of time, desperately looking for a reason for their symptoms.

Also psychosomatic can refer to diseases which have a clear somatic correlate (e.g. Hashimoto-Thyreoiditis) but the cause of the disease is unknown and the symptoms are influenced by your state of mind (e.g. symptoms worsen under stress).

However as medical diagnostic tools are limited, it cannot be excluded that there is really no somatic cause for psychosomatic disorders.

ICD-10 diagnostic criteria for psychosomatic disorders are available online, e.g. for somatization disorder:
http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F45.0


Study on likability, weakness, and competence?

Thank you all for your responses. I found the answer independently - I was looking for the Pratfall Effect described in Elliot Aronson's 1966 paper "The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness" in Psychonomic Science.

The paper's abstract reads:

  An experiment was performed which demonstrated that the attractiveness
  of a superior person is enhanced if he commits a clumsy blunder; the
  same blunder tends to decrease the the attractiveness of a mediocre
  person. We predicted these results by conjecturing that a superior
  person may be viewed as superhuman and, therefore, distant; a blunder
  tends to humanize him and, consequently, increases his attractiveness.

More information on the Pratfall Effect can be found here: Wikipedia, Psychology Archive

Aronson, E., Willerman, B., & Floyd, J. (1966). The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 4(6), 227-228.


How to explain emoticons to an autistic person?

First question, how deep is your knowledge about autism and Asperger Syndrome? Do you understand how autistic people think? Do you understand, what this girl have meant, when she have written, she doesn't really understand what each means?

For neurotypical person, a typical use-case for I understand you phrase is I know what you feel. But autistic people by understand mean in the first line to know the cause-and-effect. So your friend saying she don't understand what really each emotion means, could as good mean: I don't know how particular emotions are affecting the meaning of words the given person use.

If you want to explain emoticons to her, you should IMHO in first line explain, how particular emoticon in modifying the meaning of the sentence. So, think of emiticons not as the way to communicate emotions (which is of low importance to autistic people) but as the modifiers that change the meaning of the sentence or of the particular words.


Can scientific evidence support concepts of the soul?

[Edit]: Parts of this answer respond to removed content in older versions of the OP, and to comments. The current version of the OP deserves some elaboration of this answer. (And, IMHO, other answers too!)
There are other spiritual "worlds" than those that are dualistic. By common psychological definitions of spirituality, the existence of an "ethereal soul" is not a definitional belief. That is not to say the "spiritual world[s]" to which you're referring are invalid—only that spirituality does not necessarily require belief in anything supernatural or unobservable. Psychological theory on spirituality is quite diffuse itself; in my own study of it (it's among my top five research interests!), I've found it hard to really limit what kinds of belief systems qualify as spiritual, except in as much as they entail some sense of self-transcendence, interconnectedness among identities of discrete beings, or at least an opposition to reductionistic or nihilistic systems that ascribe mundanity or emptiness to phenomena in general.
This is not to say that spirituality itself (i.e., spiritual beliefs) can't be studied scientifically either; in fact, some admirable progress has been made in defining a measurable set of dimensions by which spiritual beliefs can be assessed and compared at the individual level. Ralph Piedmont, with whom one of my former labmates has worked directly, has made a lot of this progress himself, so I'd recommend checking out some of his work to get a sense of what research on spirituality is like in the professional psychological community. He's even proposed spirituality as a "sixth major dimension of personality" that belongs in the same general domain of individual differences in personality traits as the Big Five Factor Model, and he's reported success in generalizing his operationalization of spirituality cross-culturally (Piedmont, 1999, 2007; Piedmont & Leach, 2002).
As I responded to your comment, "The oneness that we all share on accord of having the same Godly element within us" is also not a definitional belief in all forms of spirituality. You'll see this if you consider Piedmont's definition of spirituality (and don't find it too vague to be valid). Here's a brief quote from Piedmont (2007) that I think sums it up about as succinctly as any other quote from him that I've seen:

To capture a broad-based aspect of spirituality that would be nondenominational in nature, Piedmont (1999)...Working from a trait perspective for construing spirituality...operationalized spirituality as a motivational drive directed towards creating personal meaning for one’s life. Three correlated subscales were identified: Universality, a belief in the unitive nature of life; Prayer Fulfillment, a feeling of joy and contentment that results from personal encounters with a transcendent reality; and Connectedness, a belief that one is part of a larger human reality that cuts across generations and groups.

If you look further into his work, you may note that the "unitive nature of life" is not required of all forms of spirituality. Universality is measured as one of three dimensional aspects, any one of which may be sufficient alone to qualify a belief system as spiritual (or at least, not completely non-spiritual) wherever present. Nor does Universality necessarily involve the existence of any "Godly element" anywhere. Even to whatever extent people believe we share oneness through having any of the same elements we have within us, Connectedness does not necessarily involve anything supernatural; definitionally (as in the above quote), it does not involve much more than "a larger human reality."
For reasons such as these, it is necessary that you narrow down the concept of a soul before it can find any scientific support. Consider your statement, "Everything that we feel or do or think is attributed to our soul." This conflicts with most folk and religious concepts of a soul with which I am familiar, at least when taken literally (your intended meaning may be necessary to specify here as well, if you didn't mean this literally). Most concepts of a soul do entail some amount of dualistic belief, whereby some feelings/thoughts are attributed not to the soul, but to the brain, mind, or body. (Even these three entities are not necessarily the same thing either, depending on whom you're talking to!) This lack of consensus on basic, crucial definitions is partly what makes the issue so difficult to separate the scientific issue from philosophical or religious issues.
If you can narrow it down, we might get somewhere, if only (I'd bet) to conclude that your definition of an ethereal soul is fundamentally inaccessible to empirical science for lack of measurability or falsifiability. Without narrowing down the concept of what would qualify as a soul more specifically than you have in your question, I suspect someone could come up with an equivalently strong counterargument to any scientific support one could give for an ethereal soul, so long as ethereal means unobservable and unknowable in some sense.
[Edit]:
One complication that remains in the updated OP so far is that biological, cognitive, or social explanations of sentiments don't necessarily preclude a loosely defined "soul" from adding explanatory power. These three kinds of scientific explanations often work together (and may not even be distinct from one another, ultimately) in our models of behavior, emotion, and cognition; I'd say there's still plenty of room for more explanatory factors. The hard part is finding others that actually provide falsifiable explanatory power in ways that existing scientific theories haven't covered already. I'm unaware of any way of measuring unique, useful information about the soul, so I'd say the prospect of doing so is pretty dismal, even though I can't rule it out entirely (and I don't see how others could either).
In your examples of soul-relevant beliefs, I think this becomes even clearer. Each may deserve its own separate question and answers, but I'll respond very briefly to each here to help you decide whether you want to pursue them.
First, the soul mate concept is very loosely defined itself, and most plausible folk concepts don't seem universally applicable. Lots of research has examined romantic attraction and long-term commitment, and some very mundane factors (e.g., proximity, children) have a lot more influence than one might expect if people were routinely finding their soul mates in an idealized sense. Somewhat mundane factors like communication skills, shared values, and physical attraction seem to play predominant roles even in a more limited, rare sense of "true love". There's surely more to it, but good luck improving any statistical models with a soul concept.
Second and third, the soul may ultimately be little more than a popular metaphor and folk concept of a person's ethical systems, impulse regulation, and psychological well-being. It certainly may not too, because it refers to something supernatural and apparently unfalsifiable; i.e., there may be much more to the soul than we'll ever know in this life (regardless of whether there are other lives). In either case, the challenge remains to distinguish the soul's role in moral behavior from the roles of factors that fall within the scope of scientific research, such as attitudes, values, and other cognitive processes for decision-making, impulse regulation, and internal conflict resolution. Similarly, consequences for the soul that people might be able to detect seem very hard to distinguish from purely secular consequences for well-being.
However, again, the idea of souls is useful to study scientifically as a belief and social construct regardless of whether souls exist independently of culture. Plenty of research examines the relationship between religiousness and well-being in general, and some even considers the specific relationship between religiousness and the experience of meaning in life. Thanks in part to my own research efforts as an undergraduate, there's even one published study out there that reports the specific relationship between self-reported meaning in life and belief in an afterlife ($r=.32, p<.01$; Steger et al., 2010). That's the best empirical evidence of which I'm aware so far that belief in a dualistic soul relates to the subjective meaningfulness of existence.
References
Piedmont, R. L. (1999). Does Spirituality Represent the Sixth Factor of Personality? Spiritual Transcendence and the Five‐Factor Model. Journal of Personality, 67(6), 985–1013. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-6494.00080/abstract.
Piedmont, R. L. (2007). Cross-cultural generalizability of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale to the Philippines: Spirituality as a human universal. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 10(2), 89–107. Available online, URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232602191_Spirituality_and_religiosity_as_cross-cultural_aspects_of_human_experience/file/32bfe50d10210133de.pdf.
Piedmont, R. L., & Leach, M. M. (2002). Cross-cultural generalizability of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale in India: Spirituality as a universal aspect of human experience. American Behavioral Scientist, 45(12), 1888–1901. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/45/12/1888.short.
Steger, M. F., Pickering, N. K., Adams, E., Burnett, J., Shin, J. Y., Dik, B. J., & Stauner, N. (2010). The quest for meaning: Religious affiliation differences in the correlates of religious quest and search for meaning in life. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2(4), 206–226.


How to obtain adult norms for Raven's progressive matrices?

You would need to obtain a copy of the test manual. It includes norm tables for different groups.

If you Google it you might be able to find out where to purchase a copy

Equally, many psychology departments have test libraries and they are likely to have a copy.

It's also possible that some journal articles that have used Raven's could provide a rougher approximation to actual test norms.


Is modality-specific working memory capacity correlated within individuals?

How working memory breaks down, or even whether it is a valid construct at all, is still somewhat controversial.  The evidence for domain-specific modalities is largely based on the (lack of otherwise expected) interference between them.  Another line of evidence that could be used to validate this model is checking the correlations between them: A high correlation would argue for a domain-general working memory, while a low correlation would support domain-specific modalities.  In practice, however, the value of examining correlations between working memory measures is confounded by a general capacity factor (eg, executive control), interaction with short-term memory, the possibility of any number of additional modalities (for example, visual vs. spatial), and the result of many years of assuming a unitary working memory construct resulting in a variety of measures that are validated against each other (ie, expected to correlate highly).

Nonetheless, just such a test was done by Alloway, Gathercole & Pickering (2006), who subjected over 700 primary school children to a battery of different working memory capacity measures.  As expected, correlations between many of the measures were statistically significant, but importantly, not commensurate with either a simple domain-specific model, or a simple general model with WM/STM split.  To answer your question, here is a table from the paper that summarizes some of the results (more detail here):

As you can see, the correlations, while nearly all significant at p>.001, vary considerably.  These results are consistent with similar studies that review several independent measures of working memory that nonetheless all tend to correlate well with cognitive factors such as general intelligence.


The following is taken from the bio answer https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/94/how-does-cerebrospinal-fluid-circulate-in-the-central-nervous-system

  Venous system has generally low pressure, thus sucking the CSF up to drainage points. Speaking about drainage we also should consider the fact that the venous system has a pressure lower than the atmospheric pressure and much lower than pressure in any middle-sized arterial vessels. This is reached by having elastic walls and by transmitting the negative pressure from the mediastinum during the inhale, when the diaphragm and the thorax expand. This negative pressure propagates mostly to the connected vessels, including sinus system. Due to the elastic wall other parts of venous system can accommodate this negative pressure constrict their lumen, but not the sinus system which has a hard external framework formed by dura mater and bones. That is here we can measure the lowest pressure and this is the pressure that sucks CSF in into the venous system

click here for bonus .gif of this process happening in an MRI


Difference between active and passive touch?

The difference is in whether the animal has voluntary control over the touch. If the animal touches another object by moving its body to initiate the touch, then the it is active touch. If the animal is touched without control over the movement (for example, a human experimenter grazing the whiskers with a finger), then the touch is passive.


In operant conditioning, how do you get the subject to "pull the lever" for the first time?

Rats and other creatures are curious and like to explore their environments. When the action is easy, such as a large lever on the wall, most animals will find it quickly, and if the action is reinforced, easily demonstrate operant conditioning. In the case where the action is hard, such as Thorndike putting cats in puzzle boxes and observing how long it took them to escape, the motivation to find the solution comes from the animal seeking to escape: https://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html


Is there some effect that forces humans to judge things and people according to the conception of their own image?

Judging something by your standard is evaluating another's culture based on your shared and differing experiences. Its commonly called ethnocentrism. Originating in the field of anthropology, the word is equally used in psychology as a bias for many theories originating in America and the West.

  Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and subdivisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.[2] Ethnocentrism may be overt or subtle, and while it is considered a natural proclivity of human psychology, it has developed a generally negative connotation.
  -wikipedia


What is a principle that describes competitive advantage in this case

"Binary Opposition"

Systems are "binary" when they are composed of only two parts.  It's easy to imagine things "in opposition," like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, or the World War II alliances known as the "Axis Powers" and "the Allies."  For an opposition to be truly "binary," however, the opposing classes of thing/idea must be mutually exclusive.  That is, membership in one class must make impossible membership in the other. source

My observation is that this is being politicized and used in conjunction with other techniques to exert control. So they're creating "Binary Oppositions".


Is it possible to improve reading speed and visual comprehension by doing exercises?

There's a general discussion of speed reading methods on Wikipedia, but let's look at some specific articles and see what they say about reading speed and comprehension.

Bell's review of the reading speed and comprehension literature

In Bell's (2001) review of the empirical literature, he makes a number of points, which seem reasonable to me:

A few studies have shown that you can increase reading speed with various "speed reading techniques" (e.g., Hill, 1981, Richard, 1982).
However, "techniques ... employed on speed reading courses ... tend to cause readers to suffer lower levels of reading comprehension..." This is a within-person phenomena. People who read particularly slowly often have low comprehension, but this is not relevant to the question of whether an individual should increase or slow down their reading speed.
Several authors recommend reading at the right speed, neither too fast nor too slow (e.g., Coady, 1979).
Part of being a skilled reader is about adapting reading strategies, particularly with regards to the speed / comprehension trade-off, to the nature of the text and the reading goals in the situation.

Discussion of reading expertise

There is a massive literature on reading comprehension.
For example, take Pearson et al's (1992) list that states that expert readers:

  Search for connections between what they know and the new information they encounter
  Monitor the adequacy of their models of text meaning
  Take steps to repair faulty comprehension once they realize they have failed to understand something
  Learn early on to distinguish important from less important ideas in text they read
  Are adept at synthesising information within and across texts and reading experiences
  Draw inferences during and after reading to achieve a full, integrated understanding of what they read
  Sometimes consciously, and almost always unconsciously, ask questions of themselves, the authors they encounter, and the texts
  they read.

The key feature of this list is that expert readers employ strategies related to constructing meaning. They don't pertain to exact strategies for moving the eyes over the page and the process of visualising text, and so on.

Implications for increasing reading speed

On the basis of the above, I don't think trying to integrate whole blocks of text visually would be a useful training exercise for helping a person achieve his or her reading goals.

When it comes to reading, I think it's more important to think about your goals than to focus on reading speed. Why do you need to read the text? What are you hoping to get out of the text? How will this information be used?

References

Bell, T. (2001). Extensive reading: Speed and comprehension. The Reading
Matrix, 1(1). PDF
Coady, J. (1979). A psycholinguistic model of the ESL reader. In R. Mackay, B. Barkman, & R.R.
Jordon (Eds), Reading in a second language (pp 5-12). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Hill, J.K. (1981). Effective reading in a foreign language. English Language Teaching Journal, 35,
(pp 270-281).
Pearson, P., Roehler, L., Dole, J., and Duffy, G. (1992). Developing
expertise in reading comprehension. What research has to say about
reading instruction, 2:145-199. PDF
Richard, W. (1982). Improving Reading Speed in Readers of English as a Second Language. JALT Journal, 4, (pp 89-95).


Questions on Interpreting Factor Analysis Results and Scores

Is my approach in generating a distribution based on the samples' factor scores flawed? How do they do it in practice?

I found this somewhat difficult to follow. But in general, you should be able to approximate a set of test scores using a multivariate normal distribution where the covariance matrix implies positive correlations between all tests. Some might be larger and some smaller, but the idea is that all ability tests are correlated. And general mental ability can be estimated as the first unrotated factor that results from such tests.

  Is the log-likelihood of a sample even an appropriate score to use? (If not, what alternative ways are there to score a sample?)

This sounds more like how you evaluate a model. E.g., how you evaluate a factor analytic solutions.
In general, factor saved scores will be a weighted composite of the scores on the  component tests.

In R, you can use factanal

factanal(x, factors, data = NULL, covmat = NULL, n.obs = NA,
         subset, na.action, start = NULL,
         scores = c("none", "regression", "Bartlett"),
         rotation = "varimax", control = NULL, ...)

See the scores argument. There are a few different methods.

  I have gone ahead and generated the scores using the score_samples() method for all the samples, but they range between -4 and -49. Is there a reason they would be negative?

I don't know Python. But in general, factor saved scores are typically quantified in such a way that they are z-scores (e.g., mean = 0, sd = 1).

  If you are only looking for 1 latent factor, is it good practice to set the number of factors to 1 or should you leave it unspecified anyways?

You need to either extract only one factor or ensure that you apply no rotation to the extract factors. Without a rotation, the first factor will be equivalent to just one factor. If you rotate, variation will be partitioned across the extracted factors.


Is there a lot of redundancy in written and spoken language?

It seems that for written English, the figure is 50%.
From pages 27 to 28 of The making of cognitive science: Essays in honor of George A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Estimates of redundancy.  Shannon (1948, 1951) had himself estimated the redundancy of printed English to be about 50 percent.  He had used a technique in which a subject was given a passage of text and then required to guess the next letter until the correct response (i.e., that corresponding to the original text) was given.  Redundancy was calculated from the distribution of the numbers of guesses required.  Garner and Carson (1960) [...] also estimated the redundancy of printed English to be about 50 percent.  Newman and Gerstman (1952) [...] estimated redundancy to be 52 percent.
Uses of redundancy.  [...] Chapanis (1954) and Miller and Friedman (1957) both showed that when text was mutilated by deleting different percentages of letters, subjects were able to restore the missing letters with a high degree of accuracy.  Such restoration is possible because of redundancy, so these experiments showed that redundancy was useful to humans.
[...]
In summary, printed English is redundant, and thus constrained, both in letter sequences within words and in sequences of words themselves.  This redundancy is known to humans, who can use it to reconstruct mutilated text and to recognize and learn words and sequences of words that reflect varying degrees of this constraint.  [...]

From page 1086 of A new kind of science by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, Inc., 2002):

[...] English text typically remains intelligible until about half its characters have been deleted, indicating that it has a redundancy of around 0.5.  Most other languages have slightly higher redundancies, making documents in those languages slightly longer than their counterparts in English.


I've looked into some papers about life happiness , and how work hapiness and familly hapiness can affect it.

A quick google search lead me to 2 articles :
Work, family, and happiness

Job Satisfaction and Family Happiness:
The Part-time Work Puzzle

I don't have the time to read them all , but from what I saw "work hapiness" and "family hapiness" are both parts of "life hapiness" but it seems like you could include as much hapiness sources as you want like "sport hapiness" , etc... (the last part is a personnal thought)

One important point seems to be that they're both different for men and women and are not exclusives.

For more details I'll invite you to reader the papers I linked you.

From what I've read I can tell that :

  Do we really have two different types of happiness?
  No , we don't. Hapiness is hapiness as a whole , but it comes piece by piece from everything you enjoy in your life.

  Are the two happiness qualitatively different from each other? Hapiness is formed from everything you enjoy in your life , so the quality of everything forming your hapiness is realy personnal. Though , the studies points that men and women react differently to the work/familly hapiness balance but here again everyone builds his hapiness his own way.

  Is one of them much more superior than the other type ? One could argue that familly , having kids , etc is the beautifulest thing in life , and so the best source of hapiness but as I said , it's a realy personal thing and I have no trouble imagining housewifes can be as happy as women working a lot and loving their work.


Reducing adverse impact, discrimination and unfairness when using psychological assessments for selection purposes

This is a big and important topic. The following is a bit of an introduction. Feel free to ask a separate more focussed question.

Some terminology

In general distinctions are made between the terms bias, fairness, and discrimination.

Bias is a statistical term. Bias for a group can indicate that test scores for that group are systematically lower or higher than would be expected from the group's true score. It is often assessed by seeing whether there is a group by test interaction in predicting the criterion. In particular, just because groups differ in means does not mean the test is biased, the groups may differ on the underlying construct.
Fairness is a moral and ethical construct. There is scope for different people to value different things. For example, using a test that while unbiased
, reduces the prevalence of a minority group, may still be seen as unfair. Likewise, affirmative action might be seen as fair in the context of a history of discrimination, yet others may perceive that is being unfair to the non-minority group.
Discrimination is often used in a legal sense to refer to either direct or indirect forms of discrimination.

Reviewing this area

I strongly recommend you read page 16.16 onwards (from the section labelled "Improved understanding of subgroup differences") of Sackett and Lieven's (2008, PDF) review.

In particular they note that several good predictors of task performance also show subgroup differences. Thus, there is sometimes a trade-off between validity and adverse impact. For a review of subgroup differences see Hough et al, 2001.

I quote a few sections with particular relevance to the question of what can be done to minimise adverse impact:

  Sackett et al. (2001) reviewed the cumulative evidence and concluded
  that several proposed mechanisms are not, in fact, effective in
  reducing differences. These include (a) using differential item
  functioning analysis to identify and remove items functioning
  differently by subgroup, (b) providing coaching programs (these may
  improve scores for all, but group differences remain), (c) providing
  more generous time limits (which appears to increase group
  differences, and (d ) altering test taking motivation.

  Sackett et al. (2001) did report some support for expanding the criterion as a means of
  reducing subgroup differences. The relative weight given to task,
  citizenship, and counterproductive behavior in forming a composite
  criterion affects the weight given to cognitive predictors. Sackett et
  al. cautioned against differential weighting of criteria solely as a
  means of inﬂuencing predictor subgroup differences; rather, they
  argued that criterion weights should reﬂect the relative emphasis the
  organization concludes is appropriate given its business strategy.
  They also reported some support for expanding the range of predictors
  used. The strategy of supplementing existing cognitive predictors with
  additional predictors outside the cognitive domain can reduce the
  overall subgroup differences in some circumstances. This strategy has
  received considerable attention because broadening the range of
  predictors has the potential to both reduce subgroup differences and increase validity

International context

If you're particularly interested in the international context check out Myors et al (2008) which provides an overview of the context of selection and adverse impact from the perspective of a wide range of different countries.

General thoughts

In general, there is also a  wide range of general strategies that we might recommend to increase fairness. e.g., Ensure that choice of selection tools is based on a thorough job analysis and an understanding of the competencies required for the job; Use well-validated measures; standardise decision making processes; minimise potential for cheating; etc.

References

Hough LM, Oswald FL, Ployhart RE. (2001). Determinants, detection and amelioration of adverse impact in personnel selection procedures: issues, evidence and lessons learned. International Journal Selection & Assessment. 9:152–94.
Myors, B., Lievens, F., Schollaert, E., Van Hoye, G., Cronshaw, S.F., Mladinic, A., Rodr\'\iguez, V., Aguinis, H., Steiner, D.D., Rolland, F. & others (2008). International perspectives on the legal environment for selection. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 206-246. PDF
Sackett PR, Devore CJ. 2001. Counterproductive behaviors at work. See Anderson et al. 2001,
pp. 145–64
Sackett, P.R. & Lievens, F. (2008). Personnel selection. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 419-450. PDF


Selective Attention v. Sensory Adaptation

Sensory adaptation is very low level and completely subconscious.

Selective attention is pretty much as high level you can get before hitting consciousness.

The two mechanisms work on a polar ends of the stick.


How are neurons able to effectively communicate when there are way more dendrites than axons?

I did a quick Google search and I found out the following:
Although the University of Queensland, Australia states that the neuron has three main parts:

A neuron has three main parts: dendrites, an axon, and a cell body or soma

There is a part which is neglected to be mentioned, which answers your question, and that is the axon terminals (Biology Dictionary).
Dendrites
These are the receiving parts of the neuron. Dendrites receive synaptic inputs from axons, with the sum total of dendritic inputs determining whether the neuron will fire an action potential — a brain signal.
Axons
These are the long, thin structures in which action potentials are generated (the transmitting part of the neuron). After initiation, action potentials travel down axons.
Axon Terminals

(Also called synaptic boutons, terminal boutons, or end-feet) are distal terminations of the telodendria (branches) of an axon. An axon, also called a nerve fiber, is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, that conducts electrical impulses called action potentials away from the neuron's cell body, or soma, in order to transmit those impulses to other neurons, muscle cells or glands.(Wikipedia)

Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons and licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
While there is one axon, there are many terminations from that axon. Synapses at the end of the axon terminals pass the action potential to either another neuron cell body to be passed to many more or to muscle cells or glands.
Be aware though, that:

Neurons are not in direct contact with each other. There are extremely small spaces between each neuron known as synapses. Because there is not a direct connection, neurons must communicate with each other indirectly through the use of neurotransmitters. This communication is facilitated by the conversion of the electrical signals within the neuron to the chemical signals within the synapse.(Biology Dictionary)