Does computer usage (YouTube, Facebook, etc. ) influence social abilities?

Social media usage is still quite new and there have been no major longitudinal study that I know of, that has looked into how usage influences social abilities in the long run.  If you limit it to youtube only, then I don't know of any study at all that looked at youtube usage only and social skills.

One of the reasons it's difficult to study this, is that people who are drawn to these online activities are not the same as others, and not everyone who uses them becomes "addicted" to them.  In other words, we don't start with people having the exact same social or cognitive skills.  In addition, people don't actually use them the exact same way (length of time, content, etc).  Not to mention that people often don't just use one particular thing like youtube but many different sites and so that's another reason it's difficult to make comparisons.

Of course, there are ways to use them that can be of benefit.  For instance, concerning younger people who use social media including youtube, The American Academic of Pediatrics mentions potential benefits, such as communicating and socializing, better learning opportunities, and access to health info, while warning of dangers such as cyberbullying, sexting, violation of privacy, powerful influence of advertisement, and last but not least, "facebook depression."

An interesting area of study is "internet addiction".  The final decision was made not to include it in the latest psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-V), partly because as one article asks "Problematic Internet use: a distinct disorder, a manifestation of an underlying psychopathology, or a troublesome behaviour?  Other authors however have a specific definition in mind, such as this editorial that states the four defining criteria of internet addiction:

  1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a
  neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger,
  tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3)
  tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more
  software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions,
  including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and
  fatigue.

In summary: There is a lack of good longitudinal research in this very important area.  There is also problem with defining what is appropriate usage and what is not.  But it is speculated that proper usage (e.g. access to useful info, or socializing) can be beneficial while inappropriate usage (e.g. online bullying) can be detrimental to mental health.  Regardless of purpose of usage, excessive usage to the point of ignoring more important daily functions may also be a sign of mental illness, be it caused by the computer usage itself or as manifestation of another already present illness.

Hope this has been useful to you.

References:

Block J. J. (2008). Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction. American Journal of Psychiatry; 165, 306–307.

O’Keeffe, G., & Clarke-Pearson, K. (2011). Clinical report the impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families. Pediatrics, 127, 800–804.

Starcevic, V. (2010). Problematic internet use: A distinct disorder,
a manifestation of an underlying psychopathology, or a troublesome behaviour?
World Psychiatry, 9, 92.


What speech synthesis software is suitable for research?

You are looking for Mbrola! It's an open-source, text-based diphone synthesizer. While it doesn't allow you to control subtle information like formant frequency, it's perfect for controlling pitch and duration. The one caveat is that I have yet to get it to work on an Intel-based Mac, but that is primarily because the Windows GUI works so well that I could never be bothered to try to get the OS X version working.

Each line is a sound, composed of four or more text commands separated by blank spaces. The first part is the segment, composed in X-SAMPA. The second element is the duration of the segment. In the above example, all the consonants are 100 ms long, and all the vowels are 200 ms. The fourth element is the pitch in Hertz. The third element is the percentage of the duration at which this pitch is supposed to start. An Mbrola file for what you want would look like this:

 _ 100 10 200
 p 100 10 200
 A 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 d 100 10 200
 A 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 b 100 10 200
 A 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 k 100 10 200
 i 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200
 t 100 10 200
 u 200 10 200 99 160
 _ 100 10 200

The underscore is a silence, and we set the baseline pitch to 200 Hz. Each syllable starts at 200 Hz. At 10% of vowel duration (20ms), the pitch is 200Hz, then this is linearly interpolated down to 160 Hz at 99% of the duration, giving it a nice falling contour.


How accurate is this explanation of memory?

Really nice video and pretty much seems to be correct. The only thing that i am questioning is about the patterns. He says they won't exist after regeneration. However, just a thought: if you would replace one neuron of a network with a new (exactly the same but younger) neuron, it would receive the same input and produce the same output right? Then why would a memory be lost. Taking a step further, if an entire network is replaced, wouldn't the hippocampus with Long Term Memories (LTM)s still be able to give the same input to that network, which would then show a similar activation pattern, thus remembering?

To finish my short argument. Assuming that the hippocampus indeed stores the patterns for LTMs and the cells in Deadpool regenerate in an identical way, then I believe that LTMs may still exist after regeneration. Only when the hippocampus is affected, LTMs may be lost. I base this just on my thought experiment however and have no scientific proof. Maybe you can ask the YouTube guy for some references.


Structural neuroimaging processing with FreeSurfer or SPM?

SPM and FreeSurfer are similar in the sense that both are morphometry tools.
However, they belong to different kinds.

SPM implements voxel-based morphometry while FreeSurfer represents surface-based morphometry. It is really difficult to do an objective choice here. I don't know a truly impartial comparison of both methods. As a disclaimer, I should say that I prefer surface-based morphometry, and I would suggest as a comparison for you the PDF An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Surface- and Voxel-based Morphometric Analysis and, as it is written by researchers at the home of FreeSurfer, it is somewhat inclined to FreeSurfer's approach. But its references are good for both SPM and FreeSurfer if you want to know them better.

Putting morphometric technicalities aside, other aspect setting them apart is that SPM is a MATLAB toolbox, so despite being free, it relies on a non-free software.  SPM project, under request, are able to provide a standalone version, but this precludes contributed SPM toolboxes. This can be an option when core SPM is enough for your needs. Regarding FreeSurfer, it can be used on a mostly free platform (not free as in Free Software Foundation's sense but more like what you would find in Ubuntu's based software). FreeSurfer runs natively on POSIX-like operating systems (Linux and MacOS) and the project has virtual machine images for VirtualBox, so Windows users can run a virtualized XUbuntu with FreeSurfer installed.

Finally, in terms of integration with R, FreeSurfer project lacks an official integration as it tries to be self contained and includes some statistical analysis capabilities on its own. I have used R to analyze data from FreeSurfer and it wasn't particularly difficult as it is stored in textual form. I heard about an R package, freesurfR — I don't know if it is still maintained — that could do some things in a two-way fashion.

SPM, being aimed at MATLAB, makes an integration with R a somewhat challenging manual task. I heard about an attempt to implement it in R, by means of a package called spmR. When I have used SPM, I had access to a licensed MATLAB and R integration was not that important so I have not insisted. Perhaps it can be done on a more natural way.

In the context of my Master's, FreeSurfer was our choice.


When your goals is to measure one option over the other

As part of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study I also needed to measure cognitive load in order to assess whether a particular user interface could reduce perceived cognitive load (as compared to a control group). Because of practical reasons (and not to intrude too much in 'ordinary' computer usage) I decided to stick to the commonly used NASA TLX scale (Hart, 2006). However, for small-scale studies (mine involved just 16 participants) I have the impression you are just as well off merely asking for qualitative feedback. Of course you can't run statistics on these, but interpreting effect size on such small sample sizes is arguably meaningless either way. You could thus simply ask participants which option is preferred in regards to perceived cognitive load and report on this as a 'significant' result. Of course I can not guarantee whether reviewers would agree. :) In the case you have suitable existing NASA TLX measures to compare against this still remains a worthwhile option.

However, as you state a big downside to such a scale-based test is that it can only be administered at a few points throughout the study, since filling out scales is time intensive.

For large scale or continuous quantitative studies

Skin conductance, blood volume, and pulse rate seem quite promising and are being used in HCI (Janssen et al., 2015; Mark et al., 2012), which are indicative of arousal. These nowadays can more easily be measured in an easy form factor (e.g., a watch). However, it is important to mention that arousal is not indicative of valence—the
pleasantness or unpleasantness of stimuli. Neither is using such equipment straightforward. Establishing a baseline for participants takes a considerable amount of work and care needs to be taken to do it properly (if one wants to compare results with other participants). Measurements on the wrist (as in measured by a watch) are weaker than on palms. For some people, no suitable signal is measured at all. Environmental factors like temperature changes and movement (in regards to skin conductance) and changes in lighting (pupil dilation) need to be controlled for.

To answer one of your containing questions, I do not believe there is an established opinion or a preferred method and it still relies heavily on what can be measured in the given context and what is to be expected (e.g., can it be presumed there is no positive valence?). Depending on the study one could still be preferred over the other (does the task involve movement?), and I definitely would not rule out qualitative measures.

Studies comparing different measures

When I was looking for information I did run into some sources which compare different measures. However, I can not summarize them by heart, but I hope the current mentioned issues and sources can already guide you in the right direction.

A master thesis by Forne (2012): Physiology as a Tool for UX and Usability Testing.
Haapalainen et al. (2010) Psycho-physiological measures for assessing cognitive load.

Hart, S. G. (2006, October). NASA-task load index (NASA-TLX); 20 years later. In Proceedings of the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting (Vol. 50, No. 9, pp. 904-908). Sage Publications.
Janssen, C. P., Gould, S. J., Li, S. Y., Brumby, D. P., & Cox, A. L. (2015). Integrating knowledge of multitasking and Interruptions across different Perspectives and research methods. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 79, 1-5.
Mark, G., Voida, S., & Cardello, A. (2012, May). A pace not dictated by electrons: an empirical study of work without email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 555-564). ACM.
Forne, M. (2012). Physiology as a Tool for UX and Usability Testing. School of Computer Science and Communication, Master. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
Haapalainen, E., Kim, S., Forlizzi, J. F., & Dey, A. K. (2010, September). Psycho-physiological measures for assessing cognitive load. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing (pp. 301-310). ACM.


How does caffeine work as an analgesic adjuvant?

Zhang (2001) reports that the analgesic activity of caffeine is due to

a blockade of peripheral pro-nociceptive actions of adenosine;
the activation of the central noradenosine, pain-suppressing pathways;
stimulation of the central nervous system with subsequent actions on pain perception;
inhibition of PG (prostaglandine) E2 synthesis, just like the primary mechanism of paracetamol and caffeine by blocking the COX enzyme;
disinhibition of inhibitory adenosine actions on central cholinergic nerve terminals, leading to increased acetylcholine release and activation of cholinergic mechanisms involved in analgesia;
lastly, caffeine-induced changes in mood may help in in pain relief.

Concerning the direct COX inhibitory action (which highly surprised me, personally) - Aspirin-like drugs act on the catalytic site of the COX enzyme. Paracetamol is believed to act at a different site, such as the peroxidation site of COX, while caffeine may block synthesis of the COX-2 protein, probably at the transcriptional level,thereby leading to enhanced COX-2 inhibition. Caffeine is a nonselective antagonist of adenosine A1 and A2 receptors. Adenosine A2a receptors induce intracellular signalling events that cause an upregulation of the COX-2 gene and the release of PGE2 in rat microglia, which is antagonized by caffeine.

Tavares & Sakata (2012) also provide an interesting review on the analgesic effects of caffeine, without it being used in conjunction with other medications.

References
- Tavares & Sakata, Rev Bras Anestesiol (2012); 62(3): 387-401
- Zhang, Drug Safety (2001); 24(15): 1127–42


Seeing others with anorexia nervosa vs. "thinspiration"

From my reading, I believe that anorexics can see others in the same way as us or they can also see other anorexics as normal.  It seems that anorexics don't necessarily hallucinate rolls of fat or other shape differences between healthy and overweight or obese people.

Thomas et al. (2012) describes the case of ‘Ms A’, who described herself as having ‘3% of full vision’: she could detect only high contrast, some colour, and large shapes under optimal conditions, but otherwise nothing at all. Her anorexia began at age nine, with obsessive-compulsive disorder predating its onset, and anorexia and depression being formally diagnosed at age 14. When she was first admitted to a residential treatment programme, aged 19, Ms A denied the seriousness of her low body-weight (BMI 15.9) and didn’t manifest the psychological criterion for anorexia,

  intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though underweight.

Instead, she said that she refused food in order to provide a sense of ‘containment, safety, and control’ through the practice of self-restriction.

Talking about her disturbed body image, Ms A described typical features of anorexia in the sighted, including checking behaviours, body avoidance (e.g. avoiding tight clothing), and comparisons with others. As she put it, ‘I do all of the checking, but without the eyes’. She, like other blind sufferers from anorexia, used tactile body checking – feeling for bony protrusions in face, ribcage, spine, and hips, and assessing how tight her clothes felt.

This might mean that in anorexia, vision and touch lend themselves equally readily to involvement in the kinds of distortions that are characteristic of anorexia: over-generalisation (this part of my thigh looks/feels big, therefore I’m fat), and all-or-nothing thinking (either I can see/feel every rib clearly or I’m fat) (Troscianko, 2012)

With this borne in mind, thinspiration could exacerbate the problem if they compare their bone protrusions with the photos shown.

References

National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (UK). Eating Disorders: Core Interventions in the Treatment and Management of Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders. Leicester (UK): British Psychological Society (UK); 2004. (NICE Clinical Guidelines, No. 9.) Appendix 17, Diagnostic criteria for eating disorders. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK49317

Thomas, J. J., Weigel, T. J., Lawton, R. K., Levendusky, P. G., & Becker, A. E. (2012). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of body image disturbance in a congenitally blind patient with anorexia nervosa. American Journal of Psychiatry, 169(1), 16—20.
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.10040555 PMID: 22223010

Troscianko, E. T. (2012). Seeing and (Not) Believing in Anorexia - PsychologyToday
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hunger-artist/201212/seeing-and-not-believing-in-anorexia


Why do people donate money to others engaging in activities for charity?

When people ask others whom they have a relationship with to sponsor their activities for charity, the requester is providing two things to the potential donor:

An awareness of the cause and the given charity which supports that cause (the cause is, in essence, a problem)
An prepackaged opportunity to help the person they know contribute to the cause (a solution!)

An essential prior factor here is that most people in the developed Western world have had a sense of charity and 'giving to those less fortunate' culturally drilled into us for most of our lives. That's why when we hear of some charitable cause, we're immediately inclined to feel that 'this is important!'.

In many cases, to the person being asked to donate, the personal monetary cost seems more convenient than shaving their head or running an Iron Man. The friend who is asking you to sponsor their activities is perceived to be doing something more challenging or more uncomfortable than what they are doing themselves, and we feel like they're letting us off the hook.


Why is the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard so intolerable?

My initial thoughts are that the sound produced a dissonant sound, that is (from the link):

  "An unstable tone combination is a dissonance; its tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord. Thus dissonant chords are 'active'; traditionally they have been considered harsh and have expressed pain, grief, and conflict."

—Roger Kamien (2008)

According to the article "Psychacoustics of a chilling sound", (Halpern et al. 1986), it is the low frequency components of the sound that cause the most discomfort. In their tests, removing the low frequency part in a digital simulation, made the sound a bit more bearable.

In the conclusion of the article, there is some support for the Wikipedia article that Josh Gitlin linked to in his question:

  the complex acoustic stimulus pictured in Figure I
  very closely resembles some of the spectrograms of warning
  cries emitted by macaque monkeys (Green, 1975). As
  another possibility, the signal may be similar to the vocalizations
  of some predator.


How can I find out why a person gets dementia?

As there are several diseases and conditions that can mimic dementia and as there are many possible causes of dementia, in order to avoid unnecessary investigations, the diagnosis of dementia and of the cause have to be done methodologically. The best way is to meet a neurologist to do this.

First to diagnose whether someone has dementia, a clinical history of his/her symptoms, especially those related to memory, speech, cognitive functions, behavior, and functional performances, and a mental state exam, such as MMSE and MMSE in elderly perople, have to be taken. This step will tell whether or not the person has dementia or whether the person has other conditions such as benign forgetfulness, mild cognitive impairment, or depression.

Next, if the person has dementia, the cause of dementia can be diagnosed by the following steps.

Clinical history and physical examination. In some overt cases, this step alone can diagnose the cause of dementia, such as clinical pictures of brain tumor, chronic meningitis, and CJD.
Imaging, such as CT scan, MRI scan, and PET scan. This can diagnose some diseases right away, such as brain tumor, normal pressure hydrocephalus, and Alzheimers's disease.
Laboratory tests, such as thyroid function tests, blood calcium level, and vitamin B12 level. These tests can diagnose metabolic causes of dementia.
Other tests, such as lumbar puncture to examine the cerebrospinal fluid, Electroencephalography, and brain biopsy. This may have to be done in some cases. They can diagnose some difficult diseases such as neurosyphilis, CNS lymphoma, cerebral vasculitis, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

Which investigations in 2.- 4. are to be done first depend on the clinical picture in 1. and subsequent investigations may be needed later.


Academic Background for Switchtracking Phenomenon

Switch-tracking seems very similar to the "Dialogue Alignment" in Psycholinguistics and some other fields of Cognitive Science. For a successful conversation interlocutors need to develop similar representations. Switch-tracking, however seems an abstract conceptual domain problem, but dialogue alignment mostly investigates issues in a more concrete linguistic domain.

Here are some related publications:

  Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2006). Alignment as the basis for
  successful communication. Research on Language and Computation,
  4(2-3), 203-228.
  Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). Alignment in dialogue. The
  Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, 443-451.
  Brennan, S. E., Galati, A., & Kuhlen, A. K. (2010). Two minds, one
  dialog: Coordinating speaking and understanding. Psychology of
  Learning and Motivation, 53, 301-344.

And this one investigates bilingual alignments:

  Purmohammad, M. (2015). Linguistic alignment in L1–L2 dialogue.
  Language and Dialogue, 5(2), 312-333.


What is the bias that arises because a thing is way more common than the rest?

Wikipedia refers to "regressive bias" though I admit I have never heard the term used, defined as:

  A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated

However, in addition to not recalling this term's use before, I also did not find it used in quite that context in the majority of results on Google Scholar for "regressive bias" - so I would use it only with caution (and probably not at all in the context you refer to) and along with your own definition if at all.

You could also possibly refer to the default effect although this mainly refers to a default action rather than a default conclusion, one could argue these are one and the same (i.e., if the default diagnosis for the symptom is X).

The availability heuristic is also relevant. Although this bias is normally focused on recency of exposure, surely the most common diagnoses would be most 'available' simply because it is encountered more often, whereas it is unlikely that the doctor has recently experienced disease Y. Of course, once they do encounter someone with Y, the availability heuristic would suggest that in the future they will be more likely to diagnose or at least consider Y when X is more likely based on simple probability.


Curved/angled geometrical forms and association with femininity/ masculinity

Yes. Lieven et al. (2015) attributed angular logos to masculinity (and curved logos to femininity). They grounded their hypothesis in the shared perceptual traits:

  "Whereas the prototypical masculine body shape involves an angular
  V-shape induced by a low WCR (Horvath, 1981) and moderate heaviness
  (Furnham and Radley, 1989), a curved (“hourglass”) body shape
  characterized by a WHR of about 0.7 and a slender build is associated
  with femininity and female attractiveness (Singh and Young, 1995)."

They also cite the book Marketing Aesthetics when referring to the general concept. I'm not sure if it contains an empirical study, but it might have more evidence.

I found that previous study when I was researching the literature for my article on font psychology. You might find value in my article as well. I explain more details on the curved vs. angular relationship.

Sources:

Lieven, T., Grohmann, B., Herrmann, A., Landwehr, J. R., & van    Tilburg, M. (2015). The effect of brand design on brand gender    perceptions and brand preference. European Journal of Marketing,    49(1/2), 146-169.

Schmitt, B., & Simonson, A. (1997). Marketing aesthetics: The    strategic management of brands, identity, and image. Free Press.


Why it is so difficult to think critically about family members behaviour?

Short answer
Millions of years of evolution have resulted in increased empathy towards family members.

background
I may be taking a big leap here, but I think the roots of the family-related tolerance may be ingrained in our very genes.

In an interesting article by Tomasello (2018) he hypothesizes that collaboration was among the key features that resulted in the separation of the homo lineage from the apes, starting around 2 mln years ago. Homo heidelbergensis (400k years ago) is believed to have actively collaborated when foraging for food. This collaboration became compulsory, as individuals became dependent on one another to obtain their daily food. Tomasello hypothesizes that morality and empathy were born out of this interrelationship, which helped to sympathize and help their partners. The partners learned to cooperate in hunting (one would chase, the other spear the animal). A "we is greater than me" kind of morality was born.

Then, 200k years ago, modern homo was born, an era characterized by competition between small, closely knit groups for food and other resources This meant that members of such a group would have to collaborate and protect each other against invaders. Often (but not always) there would be kinship involved in these small groups ('tribes'). Tomasello continues that this collaboration eventually resulted in the development of culture, but that's outside the scope of this answer.

In all I think I would conclude that millions of years of evolution have resulted in increased empathy towards family members.

Reference
- Tomasello, Sci Am, September issue 2018


Using a Linear Non-linear Cascade with a Non-Random (deterministic) Stimulus

The short answer is yes. The longer answer involves a more precise meaning of deterministic and a number of research considerations.

In the strict sense of deterministic, which means that given the same input, the same output will always occur, any probability distribution modeled on a computer is deterministic, since most digital computers have a deterministic instruction set. However, this isn't quite relevant for your task, since the samples from the distribution that your model sees are largely uncorrelated with the model properties, making them appear random to the model.

Researchers often use probabilistic or stochastic stimuli because they are the simplest option and because they do not want to introduce a number of potential biases that occur when the model interacts with or entrains to specific patterns in deterministic stimuli. Such patterns would produce effects that are not representative of the general properties of the model, which may be misleading. Introducing a probability distribution therefore becomes a simple way to explore more of the state space of the model. Additional reasons why people introduce noise (through a stochastic stimulus) include the fact that real neurons tend to exist in noisy environments (modeling considerations), and the fact that some kinds of proofs about model performance are easier to perform for probabilistic stimuli.

Your choice as to whether you want to use a deterministic stimulus depends largely on your goals in this research project. Do you want to know what happens when the model sees a specific pattern? Do you care if this pattern has noise in it? Do you want to perform mathematical proofs? Do you care about perturbation stability (some deterministic models may falsely appear stable because they are not moved off of their tiny equilibrium point by noise)? What process are you modeling?

Given these considerations, you should be able to choose what kind of stimulus to use. Your model will accept many kinds of stimuli as input, but the choice of stimulus affects what you will learn from the specific simulation.


Can neural spiking in an organism temporarily cease?

Your link to Wikipedia's cryptobiosis article mentions that Tardigrades are capable of reducing their metabolic activity to 0.01% of normal levels, and their water content to 1%, a state which they can maintain for up to 10 years. Possessing a considerable nervous system, it is almost certain that Tardigrade neurons are not active at all during that period, especially since neurons are some of the most energy-demanding cells. Some nematodes, which apparently are also cryptobiotic, would be a similar case.

Another relevant context would be hypoxic insults to brain tissue. Hypoxia-induced neurological damage results partly from a cascade of glutamate-release that is caused by diminished ATP production in neurons. According to a study by Bickler and Donohoe (2002), some animal's neurons, in order to preserve ATP levels, are equipped to block action potentials at the onset hypoxic incidents. See the section "Why does the lack of O2 kill typical neurons rapidly?"--they even cite a study that performed EEGs (as you suggested) on anoxic turtles.

Whether it is anything-but-rare for spike trains to be completely inhibited during the course of regular nervous system function is another question, and I wish I knew the answer.

Bickler, P. E., & Donohoe, P. H. (2002). Adaptive responses of vertebrate neurons to hypoxia. Journal of experimental biology, 205(23), 3579-3586. [PDF]


What does hemispatial neglect vision look like?

I think this is an interesting, but difficult question to answer.

Hemispatial neglect patients do not typically have problem with visual pathways per se. Wikipedia suggests that the disorder is most closely linked to damage of the temporo-parietal junction and posterior parietal cortex, areas associated with attention. Thus, the sensation (e.g. on the retina, and in early visual pathways) should be similar in patients and non-patients.

Let me make an analogy to the inattentional blindness literature. You may have seen a famous video by Daniel Simons and Christopher Charis. If you haven't, go watch it now before continuing... (I'll wait.)

Now how would you paint a picture of how that video 'looks' to someone? Does that picture include a gorilla? It seems even normal perception has blindspots. In fact, much of our perception is not strictly bottom-up, but is a mixture between bottom-up and top-down processes.

I would argue comparing a hemispatial neglect patient to a control is (very loosely) like comparing someone watching the inattentional blindness video for the first time to someone who has seen it before.

One might argue that hemispatial neglect patients do not 'see' things any differently than us, only that they 'perceive' it differently. So you could possibly create a caricature of how these patients 'see' the world, but it would be just that: a caricature.

One thing for certain is that hemispatial neglect patients do not 'perceive' that half of their visual field is missing (e.g. leaving half the page blank). When prompted, these patients typically do not report that anything is out of the ordinary.

All that being said, this is not my area of expertise, so please feel free to post a better answer if you think this analogy is misleading...


Difference between valence and sentiment

Basically, in the context of this research, "sentiment" can mean the same thing as "valence" if the analysis is unidimensional; that is "valence" is the usual "sentiment" analyzed. Otherwise "sentiment" can have a broader meaning, with "valence" being just one dimension of "sentiment".

As for why the two lexicons come with different valence values, that's a methodological question for the natural language processing community (e.g. https://ai.stackexchange.com) or even better, the author of the papers. What is obvious to me just from the web page is that the first "sentiment" lexicon has

  Association scores: binary (associated or not)

whereas the 3-dimensional one with valence as one dimension has scores between 0 and 1.

In the context you have it, "sentiment" just refers to sentiment analysis, an endeavour in NLP (natural language processing) that most psychologists are probably completely oblivious to.

The previously linked Wikipedia page explains that "sentiment analysis" is an umbrella term for a fairly broad class of analyses:

  Generally speaking, sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker, writer, or other subject with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity or emotional reaction to a document, interaction, or event. The attitude may be a judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author or speaker), or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect intended by the author or interlocutor).

A paper accopmpanying the data you mentioned defines it as:

  Sentiment Analysis involves determining the evaluative nature of a piece of text. For example, a product review can express a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment (or polarity).

Which is the most common instance of "sentiment analysis" in my experience.

As far as the psychology of "sentiments" goes, general terms used in psychology (and psychiatry) in this area are: mood, affect, emotion and (sometimes) feeling. I will not detail these here, because it's not what you are asking for (they all have Wikipedia pages). Only the first two (mood affect) have somewhat more scientific definitions but there's still a great deal of confusion over them.

If I were to propose a cross-field linkage, "sentiment analysis" tries to infer affect (and sometimes perhaps even mood) from text. In fact there is a notion in psychology of affect display, which is basically just the manifestation of affect that can be seen or read.

As for "valence", it is indeed a specific concept as used in that data page you link in a comment. From a companion paper they wrote

  Russell (1980, 2003) showed
  through similar analyses of emotion words that
  the three primary independent dimensions of
  emotions are valence or pleasure (positiveness–
  negativeness/pleasure–displeasure), arousal
  (active–passive), and dominance (dominant–
  submissive). He argues that individual emotions
  such as joy, anger, and fear are points in a
  three-dimensional space of valence, arousal, and
  dominance. It is worth noting that even though
  the names given by Osgood et al. (1957) and
  Russell (1980) are different, they describe similar
  dimensions (Bakker et al., 2014).

So "valence" is indeed referring to Russel's core affect framework as you suggest. However, looking at Bakker et al. as well as Russel's own paper, he doesn't seem to use the word "valence", preferring "pleasure" instead. I'm not sure who came up with "valence" for "pleasure"; from Bakker, I see not even Osgood used that term.

Also Russell's (2003) conceptualization seems two dimensional. In his own words:

  Core affect is a pre-conceptual primitive process, a neurophysiological state,
  accessible to consciousness as a simple non-reflective feeling: feeling good or
  bad, feeling lethargic or energised. There is something it is like to feel core
  affect. Its presence in consciousness varies from being focal to peripheral to
  out of sight. A structural description of core affect is an empirical matter,
  and I have proposed a circumplex with the two underlying dimensions
  of pleasuredispleasure and activationdeactivation (Russell, 1980, 2005;
  Yik, Russell, & Steiger, 2008). Although two-dimensional, core affect is,
  subjectively, a single feeling. That is, the two dimensions combine in an
  integral fashion to form one unified feeling. Pleasure and arousal combine to
  form the single feeling of ecstasy, for example. An analogy is the sensation of
  a specific colour, such as the red of the autumn leaf outside my window. The
  dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness combine in an integral fashion
  to form one unified sensation of any particular colour.

From Bakker's illustration of that:

I looks like the 3rd dimension (dominance, not shown aboce) came from Mehrabian.

Also "valence" has a somewhat broader meaning in psychology that is reasonably close to the way it is used above by the author of those NLP lexicon studies:

  Valence, as used in psychology, especially in discussing emotions, means the intrinsic attractiveness/"good"-ness (positive valence) or averseness/"bad"-ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation. The term also characterizes and categorizes specific emotions. For example, emotions popularly referred to as "negative", such as anger and fear, have negative valence. Joy has positive valence. Positively valenced emotions are evoked by positively valenced events, objects, or situations. The term is also used to describe the hedonic tone of feelings, affect, certain behaviors (for example, approach and avoidance), goal attainment or nonattainment, and conformity with or violation of norms. Ambivalence can be viewed as conflict between positive and negative valence-carriers.

Having said this, it looks like few(er) psychology researchers actually use this term. The definition quoted right above originates in a book by Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda.


What makes some criminals glamorous to others?

Glamorization of a criminal is no different than glamorization of a non-criminal, except for the added excitement of doing something wrong. Not that glamorizing something wrong is the impetus for the glamorization itself, but it does add to its excitement. The more the excitement, the more the interest, and hence, what the media covers. In some cases, the individual may not be "interesting enough" without the added excitement.

A second factor is appreciation. Appreciating expertise in a specific field is closely related to our own involvement in that field. For example, while a person may watch the World Cup with interest, he might not fully appreciate the expert performance unless he has played the sport himself. The more he tries to become an expert himself, the more he would appreciate the actual experts. Similarly, the more he reads about a subject, the more he appreciates the experts in the field. (Pun intended.)

When a criminal takes an action, it is generally not random. Usually, there is a goal that most people can understand or there is a consistent set of actions along some line. People who have an appreciation of the goal or the subject, even if they "would never do it themselves", are led to an appreciation of the perpetrator as an expert in the field. If they have a latent desire to perpetrate the same action, but suppress the desire rather than sublimate it, they will identify with the perpetrator as well, or in extreme cases, see them as a form of secret hero, whether they realize it or not.


yes, hunger increase philogeneticaly older brain activity and supress prefrontal cortex...
so it could be anger or some other negative affect.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763402000076

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/21/14/5304.short

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/126/6/890/


How to fit averaged data to obtain a single psychometric function?

Short answer
Averaging psychometric curves may not be the preferred way to pool psychophysical data.
background
Typically, extracted gold-standard outcome measures from the psychometric curves will be pooled and averaged to perform statistical analyses and so on.
For example, in the visual sciences a much-used outcome measure is the visual acuity where, for example, gratings in four orientations are shown using standard psychophysical tests. Since it's a 4AFC task, the 62.5% correct score will be taken as a measure of the threshold, where the gratings will be varied in their width, measures in cycles per degree (cpd) or related measure of visual angle.
To pool and average individual subject scores the acuity scores will be averaged, measured in cpd, and not the psychometric curves. For examples see Nau et al. (2013) and Bach et al. (1996).
If you would really insist, you could pool every measurement in case the method of constant stimuli or related paradigm was used. Then one single psychometric fit could be performed on the congregate data. Problem with this approach, as opposed to the preferred method described above, is that the fit will yield awesome outcomes in terms of superbly small variances in the fitted outcome parameters, as well as favorable descriptive statistical parameters, such as the correlation coefficient, simply because there are so many data points and hence many degrees of freedom. Further, random errors occurring in one, or a few subjects will now affect the overall fit and 'weird' data points will tend to be obscured by the multitude of data points per x value.
A better approach in terms of statistical descriptive outcomes would be to first average every data point and then do the fit. However, also here outliers will be obscured because of the averaging procedure. The power of psychometric fits is that individual subjects can be analyzed.
In case an adaptive method is used above procedure won't hold as each subject will have different x values. Adaptive procedures in general do not lend themselves very well for curve fitting as the data points around threshold are dense, but the trials targeting chance level or 100% correct are sparse or nonexistent altogether. Hence the asymptotes are ill-defined. You could average these data, if you insist, by averaging each of the fitted parameters and generate a 'master' fit out of those. Beware of logarithmic values, though, as averaging those is not arbitrary. Again, descriptive statistical parameters become obscure in such a master fit, and statistical analyses become difficult.
In all, my advice is to stick with pooling the single outcome measures obtained from the psychometric curve, i.e, stick to pooling your PSE outcomes.
References
- Nau et al., Transl Vis Sci Technol (2013); 2(3): 1
- Bach et al., optom Vis Sci (1996); 73(1): 49-53


Ritalin for treating attention and lack of focus in depression

Yes, there is 2014 review of Corp et al. on stimulants in the treatment of MDD (and bipolar). There is another 2015 review by Pary et al. just on stimulants in depression.

Some researchers reviewing this, e.g. Mahli et al. (2016) have been critical of this use of stimulants, on the argument that the effects appears to be short-lived:

  Clinically, the rapid amelioration of depressive symptoms with traditional psychostimulants is often dramatic but short-lived, and this suggests that they likely operate via different mechanisms to conventional antidepressants. More importantly, there is little evidence from randomised controlled trials supporting their efficacy in treating depression, although modafinil has been shown to be effective in reducing prominent depressive symptoms, such as fatigue. Research is urgently required to clarify psychostimulants’ mechanisms of action and to evaluate their long-term benefits and risks in the treatment of major and bipolar depression.

There aren't a lot randomized-control studies either.

UpToDate says

  Stimulants (eg, methylphenidate) are indicated for late-life, treatment-resistant unipolar major depression. In addition, stimulant-like drugs (eg, modafinil and pramipexole) have limited evidence for efficacy in the general population of patients with treatment-resistant major depression. The use of stimulants and stimulant-like drugs is consistent with multiple treatment guidelines [11-13]. Based upon our clinical experience, we are more inclined to use stimulants and stimulant-like drugs for patients who lack energy, drive, motivation, interest, optimism, pleasure, and the ability to initiate activities

I didn't review those guidelines cited (American Psychiatric Association's or CANMAT) to see if they really say that. The last review they mention there is a little older, from 2007.


Where does instinctual knowledge come from?

In my mind there are two main explanations of this kind of instinct behaviours.

The first one is rooted in evolution. There are many examples of human innate behaviours which we can't explain e.g. when we see a lace or tape on the street we automatically jump and feel scared. Although we live in big city our brain associates the lace with a snake. It is an effect of our "prememories", memories of our ancestors.

-> Buss D., Evolutionary Psychology: the New science of the Mind (1999)

The second explanation is more connected with your question as it refers to animals' innate instincts such as birds' travels (how do they know where to fly?) etc. Some interesting experiments were conducted on a phenomenon called epigenetic inheritance. An example is teaching animals some reactions after specific stimulus (e.g.fear after specific smell etc.). Then we observe the learned behaviours in the descendants of these animals. Offspring of trained animals show the same reaction , although nobody trained them to do that. There is an abstract of such experiment with mice:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/full/nn.3594.html

And there you can read more about it in another article:

http://www.nature.com/news/fearful-memories-haunt-mouse-descendants-1.14272#/b1

-> Griffiths, Gelbart, Miller. Modern Genetic Analysis.(1999)


How can the effects of pain on cognitive functions be tested in an ethically accepted way?

Pain is a form of stress. I would replace pain with another, ethically less problematic stressor. If you would want to do it elegantly, test a group of subjects with chronic pain (anything; e.g., back pain) and use a control group where you submit a group of healthy subjects to a stress test (e.g. Stroop test - huge body of literature on this) and a third group without a stressor. See if the pain group matches the stressed group and whether they are both significantly different from the controls. If yes, you've found a way to prevent ethically kind of unacceptable tests, where the search for volunteers will likely be very difficult too.


Why does the Elaboration Likelihood Model not account for truthfulness of the message?

Not my area, but an interesting question.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model appears to divide messages between that which is true and that which is persuasive.  If you are intent on determining whether a message is true, it must go the rough the central route which will take protracted effort.

However, very often we are less interested in what is true and more interested in taking cues from others so that we avoid the laboursome effort of intensive thought.

To answer your question, if the message is persuasive, then no about of truth or falsity of which you are unaware will influence you.

I could not see it in the article, however, I imagine that if you were a priori aware that a message is false, you would naturally be more circumspect about allowing a false argument to be persuasive.

Modern advertising seems to revolve around persuasive arguments rather than truthful arguments (I'm not saying they are false, but the investment effort is making the commercial persuasive rather that factual).

The following except from Kitchen (2014, page 2034) clarified the issue for me.

  The premise of ELM is that when elaboration likelihood is high, information
  processing will occur via the central route. Resultant attitude formation, change or endurance is derived from extensive consideration of the message arguments and will be more persistent (Haugtvedt and Petty, 1989) and predictive of an individual’s subsequent behaviour (Petty and Cacioppo, 1983). When elaboration likelihood is low, processing occurs via the peripheral route. The peripheral route to persuasion requires little cognitive effort, instead relying upon peripheral cues such as source credibility and heuristics (Petty and Cacioppo, 1983). As such, attitudes formed via the peripheral route are relatively unaffected by argument quality, are temporary in nature, and are not as predictive of subsequent behaviour as those formed using the central route (Petty and Cacioppo, 1983).

Kitchen, P. J., Kerr, G., Schultz, D. E., McColl, R., & Pals, H. (2014). The elaboration likelihood model: review, critique and research agenda. European Journal of Marketing.  https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-12-2011-0776


Why is it common for people to default to a single causal source to explain new phenomena?

I don't quite know an agreed upon word for this type of thing, but I do know what you're talking about.

At a very basic level, we use previous beliefs to interpret new information. In a way, it's at the core of how we perceive at all. I don't necessarily see these types of fallacious thinking as exceptions. Their belief about the order of the world is different, and so they interpret individual events differently. The examples you listed seem like instances of this happening.

If anything, it's just simplistic thinking, or a tendency to over-synthesize information. Illuminati type conspirators need to bring a bunch of disparate information into a model that makes sense, so they form connections between things that don't really connect. It probably doesn't help that they expose themselves to a lot of information presented in a way that strongly suggests some sort of Illuminati presence.

But don't forget that we do the same thing. Many times, the difference is that those around us also agree with the assumptions we make, so we don't even notice.


Self aware or introspection would probably be the a good way to describe it.

Here is a non wikipedia link which gives a detailed explanation of interospection

You could also say self conscious but that is sometimes associated with a negative emotion.


Is there evidence that STDP is responsible for the ability to infer causation?

Fernando et al. (2008) proposed a neuronal mechanism to copy network topologies from one region of the brain to another which is based on Spike Timing Dependent Placticity (STDP) and argue that the mechanism of neuronal copying is a neuronal implementation of causal inference.

  Fernando C, Karishma KK, Szathmáry E. (2008) Copying and evolution of neuronal topology. PLoS One 3(11):e3775. [Free PDF]

  Abstract

  We propose a mechanism for copying of neuronal networks that is of considerable interest for neuroscience for it suggests a neuronal basis for causal inference, function copying, and natural selection within the human brain. To date, no model of neuronal topology copying exists. We present three increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to demonstrate how topographic map formation coupled with Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) can copy neuronal topology motifs. Fidelity is improved by error correction and activity-reverberation limitation. The high-fidelity topology-copying operator is used to evolve neuronal topologies. Possible roles for neuronal natural selection are discussed.

In the discussion, the proposed relation between STDP and causal inference is addressed in detail:

  [...] In the process of thinking about promising mechanisms, we discovered two serendipitous ancillary benefits of copying. The first was that the mechanism of neuronal copying was a neuronal implementation of causal inference [86]. The capacity of STDP to capture temporal relations consistent with causality rather than just correlations has been described by several authors [65], [87], [88], [89]. However, to our knowledge, STDP has until now not been used in an algorithm to explicitly infer whole causal networks. Considerable attention has been paid recently to the capacity of animals such as New Caledonian crows [90], rats [91], non-human apes [91], children [92] and human adults [92] to undertake causal reasoning tasks, i.e. tasks in which good performance cannot be well explained by pair-wise associative learning alone. [...]

  [68] Florian RV (2007) Reinforcement Learning Through Modulation of Spike-Time-Dependent Synaptic Plasticity. Neural Computation 19: 1468–1502.

  [86] Glymour C (2003) Learning, prediction and causal Bayes nets. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 43–48.

  [87] Abbott L, Nelson SB (2000) Synaptic plasticity:taming the beast. Nature Neuroscience supplement 31178–1183.

  [88] Bi G-q, Poo M-m (2001) Synaptic Modification by Correlated Activity: Hebb's Postulate Revisited. Annu Rev Neurosci 24: 139–166.

  [89] Gerstner W, Kistler WM (2002) Mathematical formulations of Hebbian learning. Biol Cybern 87: 404–415.


Is there any science behind movie/commercial camera angle changes?

Admittedly, this question has intrigued me also.  This is a partial answer, as the article below deals with perceptions borne of camera angles of a person, as an example of the effect of camera angles.

According to the article "The influence of camera angle on comprehension and retention of pictorial events" (Kraft, 1987), camera angles significantly influence viewers' mental construct of the story representations.  These representations are related to our experience with the real world around us.

Kraft summarises previous research in saying that there is a connotation that:

  physically looking down at an actor
  translates into looking down on that actor; physically looking
  up at an actor translates into looking up to that actor.

This also could apply to characters.  Thus influencing our perception of the person and the events surrounding them.

In regards to scenes:

  by changing vertical camera angle, one changes the real life
  consequences of the pictured scene.

These connotations are often 'woven into the storyline'.

I hope this helps


Is there a disorder similar to dyscalculia but only for time/date arithmetic? (also memory)

Dyscalculia includes or at least is closely related to difficulty reading an analog clock, says Wikipedia citing a PhD thesis which I haven't checked myself. Also, without a citation this time, Wikipedia adds "Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early." General comorbidity with ADHD is also mentioned.

There are obscure forms of marginal dyslexia (there was a question here recently), so I don't doubt there are probably obscure/marginal forms of dyscalculia that may or may not have received much attention separately. Research into the heterogeneity of dyscalculia is a fairly recent endeavor. Quoting from a recent paper on the topic

  time processing [is] more often affected by number processing than vice versa. (e.g., Cappelletti et al., 2011) Also space and time have demonstrated to exert reciprocal influence on each other.

So what you describe (time but not general number dyscalculia) is probably fairly rare. The more focused article of interest by Cappelletti et al. looks only at acquired cases, following brain lesions; however if my analogy with marginal forms of dyslexia holds, my crystal ball says eventually the developmental version will be found and studied.

As for the final part of your list of symptoms, I don't know how researched the relationship between remembering times and manipulating them is, but it seems obvious that the former can affect the latter.

References (spelled out):

Ulf Träff et al., Heterogeneity of Developmental Dyscalculia: Cases with Different Deficit Profiles, Front Psychol. 2016; 7: 2000. doi:  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02000
Cappelletti M., Freeman E. D., Cipolotti L. (2011). Numbers and time doubly dissociate. Neuropsychologia 49, 3078–3092. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.07.014


How long does physical attraction typically last in a permanent relationship?

I'm not sure I can give you the data purely for physical attractiveness, but what has been intensively researched is passionate love, which includes physical attraction. Passionate love is usually assumed to include sexual desire, and correlates quite well with rated attraction. As Hatfield writes:

  Generally, passionate love is associated with the terms “arousal,” “desire,” “lust,” “passion,” and “infatuation".

I hope that's what you're asking for.
Elaine Hatfield (of the "would you go to bed with me?" study fame) has developed the Passionate Love Scale; Tennov has researched Limerence. Other famous names in this regard are Liebowitz and (Helen) Fisher. The counterpart to passionate love is often called companionate love, attachment, or affection.

Qualitatively speaking, on average, passionate love goes down with relation length. As Hatfield says, time has a "corrosive effect". Past researchers conceptualize this in a multi-stage model of relationships, where relationships naturally transition from passionate love into compassionate attachment. A well-known correlate of this is the "7-year itch", corresponding to a globally consistent mode around 4 years after marriage for divorces. However, some people report passionate love after decades of being together.

In all attempts to quantify any of this, there are a number of critical cofounds. @what has already brought up that some objective component of attractiveness might naturally decline with age. I'm not so sure this is that dramatic though, because there are well-known compensatory mechanisms for attraction within relationships that might be more important than e.g. decline of outsider-rated attractiveness with age. After all, what correlates with how attractive you rate someone is not the same as how attractive your partner is to you.
Moreover, there is a reliable difference between studies on younger and on older couples; the correlation between relationship length and passionate love/attraction is very reliable in young couples, but much weaker in older couples, and while younger couples often break up seemingly because passion has waned (as passion and satisfaction are correlated), there are older couples who're passionately in love (here and here). As Hatfield speculates, this might be because couples were passion is stable have a much higher chance to last, but those where it wanes quicker, end quicker. So that's for cofounds. I did not find any clear solution to this problem, and I can't really think of a good way of dealing with the self-selection problem (where longer relationships will inherently qualitatively differ from younger ones because they must have certain qualities to have come that far).
However, the relationship within relationships seems to hold, with a negative correlation within both older and younger relationships.

Quantitatively speaking, a much-quoted figure is Tennov's "18 months to three years". Exceptions are assumed to be comparatively rare, but also known to exist.
I can't give you the standard deviation on this, but I can give you something better: a regression model. One is by Sprecher & Regan, page 172, one by Hatfield, page 404.
Of course, this will not give you the single point in time where passionate love suddenly ends; but this is not realistic either. In relationships, attraction usually doesn't suddenly stop, it wanes. Graphically speaking:

However, I also found a much more optimistic picture for physical attractiveness over time in a large (almost 2000 people) sample:

What is clear even here however is the "7th-year itch".


First of all even between quotes you shouldn't use heal about homosexuality.
Then you should first try to learn about sexuality.

what types of homosexuality are there

Homosexuality is a thing, one thing. There is now a loooooot of sexualities, you acknowlodge them or not it's up to you, but there is not such a thing as "types of homosexuality".

how about combination with heterosexuality?

Are you asking about bisexuality ?

exists some known causes for homosexuality?

Homosexuality is "accepted" as something you're born with. Further than this I don't know any research proving there is a gene or a cause for it to happen.

how about those, who claim, that were "healed from homosexuality?

I guess you should see it as someone who doesn't like some type of food, but buy forcing himself eating some he actully gets over it.
This being said your sexuality is something quite stronger than your food taste, and going against it often comes with depression and other issues.

is some type of homosexuality changeable?

As I said, going against your nature isn't something you should do because it never goes well for you. It always comes with depression, etc...
From your enormous lack of knowledge I guess you're straight, then imagine from now on trying to force yourself to be homosexual ? How hard do you think it would be ? Ho do you think you could deal with it ?


What is the psychological term for disregarding correct but unwanted information?

Belief perseverance is "the tendency to cling to one's initial belief even after receiving  new  information that  contradicts or dis-confirms  the basis of that belief" (Anderson, 2007).

Belief perseverance is usually regarded as a special case of the confirmation bias. (Also see these earlier questions.)

References

Anderson, C.A. (2007). Belief perseverance (pp. 109-110). In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Social Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


Effects of Game-based Learning on Motivation for Learning

I think it depends.

If the game is good, the player will be motivated to learn what they need to succeed in the game. The long term effects may vary depending on different attributes, which I divided into two groups.

This is of course not an exhaustive list.

Providing learning tools

Did the game generalize enough, so that the player feels like the more they learn the better they will be in the game? as opposed to being predictable enough so that the user can learn exactly what they need and only that.
Did the user learn how to learn independently or did they rely on specific instructions in the game?

providing learning motivation

Why did the user not want to learn in the first place? If it's because of a sense of incapability, games are great. If it's lack of interest, the long term effect could be negligible.
Did what the player learn in the game turn out useful for the player in real life? Did the player see it as a positive outcome of learning, or as an outcome of the game?
Did a motivation swap occur? sometimes the user may be one that learns for fun, and after playing the game they will only learn for points etc.

Since the concepts 'game' and 'learn' are so wide and subjective, I'm doubtful you can get a clear cut answer on this question.


Does adult neurogenesis occur only in the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus?

You are right that active adult neurogenesis is generally considered to be restricted to the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, and the subventricular zone of the lateral ventricles. The latter generates neurons that subsequently migrate through the rostral migratory stream to the olfactory bulb to become interneurons (Ming & Song, 2011).

Although the hippocampus is critical for the formation of memory, hippocampal neurogenesis does not simply 'add memory' (Kemperman, 2002). Instead,  hippocampal neurogenesis is believed to mediate the continuing modulation of cortical functions in response to exposure to novelty (Aimone et al., 2014). Specific examples are spatial-navigation learning and long-term spatial memory retention, spatial pattern discrimination and contextual fear conditioning. Adult olfactory bulb neurogenesis is associated with maintaining long-term structural integrity of the olfactory bulb, short-term olfactory memory, olfactory fear conditioning, and long-term associative olfactory memory involving active learning (Ming & Song, 2011).

Neurogenesis in other regions in the adult brain are generally believed to be limited under normal physiological conditions, but can be reproducibly induced after inflicting injury to the grain (Gould, 2007). These regions include the neocortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, substantia nigra and the brainstem, among other regions (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Regions of neurogenesis in mammals, shown in a rat's brain. The red regions (hippocampus & subventricular zone of the lateral ventricles) are considered to be neurogenic. The other regions may also be neurogenic, but only reproducibly so in experiments after damage to these regions. Source: Gould (2007).

References
- Aimone et al., Physiol Rev (2014); 94: 991–1026
- Gould, Nature Rev Neurosci (2007); 8 481-8
- Kemperman, J Neurosci (2002); 22(3): 635-8
- Ming & Song, Neuron (2011); 70(4): 687–702

Related question
- What evidence is there that the adult brain can produce new neurons?


Is there any evidence for a bias towards perceiving darker surfaces as 'figure' rather than 'ground'?

Short answer
From my personal experience, I do not think darker surfaces are regarded preferably as the object, and light surfaces as the background.

Background
I have been pondering on this question for so long that I decided to post an answer. Perhaps it will draw attention from others who can give a more definitive answer.

This answer was inspired by this question on the Rubin Vase Illusion. It is an ambiguous figure/ground illusion which is thought to depend on the visual system analyzing scenes in terms of object (figure) and background (ground). You can see a vase when you regard the faces as background and vice versa. In the Fig. 1 below I have posted two versions of this illusion where the black and white portions are reversed. Personally, and hence anecdotally, I do not perceive a clear difference in the perception of the vase versus faces between both figures. Hence, based on this anecdotal evidence I tend to believe that the definition of figure and ground is independent on color (shades of gray in this case). I couldn't find references for the flip-flop rates or vase-versus-face perception time on the two stimuli, unfortunately. In all, what a great question!

Fig. 1. Contrast-inverted Rubin Illusions. sources: Winkler et al. (2006) (left panel) and Russel & Dowey (2014) (right panel)

References
- Russel & Dowey, Psychology: An Introduction (2014)
- Winkler et al. Eur J Neurosci (2006); 24(2): 625–34


Can PTSD be mild? Do the traumas have to be of a certain kind?

In order for something to be diagnosed as a disorder by a mental health professional, the client typically experiences distress and impairment in activities of daily functioning.

If the time frame is under 3 to 6 months, please consider "Acute Stress Disorder" as a possibility. I agree that the DSM V is going to be a useful resource for diagnostics.

Trauma, in any form, does pose very specific challenges for diagnostics and a treatment plan. For further reading on trauma therapy, I highly suggest "Life After Trauma: A Workbook for Healing" by Rosenbloom and Williams (2010). Treatment will be dependent on the practitioner's training, and the formulated diagnosis. You are welcome to research efficacies of therapeutic interventions.

Therapy is very useful for any and all of the items you have mentioned. If you are attempting to get insurance coverage, usually a diagnosis from a qualified professional will qualify you for therapy (at least here in the United States). A good diagnosis could take a few sessions to formulate. It's sometimes a longer process if someone suspects trauma.


"Depression" is a symptom or state of being, one that everyone can experience.

"Major Depressive Disorder," however, is a diagnosable medical disorder for many reasons. The following list is by no means exhaustive:

Major Depressive Disorder runs in families, and a genetic component is well established by family and twin studies.
Anyone who experiences a major depressive episode is at increased risk compared to the general population.
Major Depressive Disorder costs the US $200 billion per year in medical treatment and workplace costs.
There are many specific ways in which functioning in the brain is altered in depressed patients. Decreased functioning in the prefrontal cortex (executive functioning) is a good example.
Contrary to belief common in the 80s and 90s, clinical depression is much more complicated than "a deficiency in serotonin" - the neurology is multifactorial and still poorly understood. However, clinically depressed patients (usually) respond to SSRIs in a manner different from healthy individuals. Prozac is not a "happy pill" if you are not depressed.

"A problem of thought" is one aspect of depression. Most individuals have some combination of cognitive, behavioral, neurochemical, and genetic elements.

I agree with you that telling people "you have a disease" is not always helpful and can be counter-productive in many instances. I too am a fan of positive psychiatry, and I think most individuals could benefit from caring for their mental wellbeing in the same way that healthy people benefit from exercise. On the other side of the coin, it is a serious issue that many patients do not take seriously enough, and non-compliance to medication and therapy is common and can have very serious adverse consequences.

Your question is a good one, and a common one. Thank you for asking. Be aware, though, that it may come off as insensitive and offensive to some who have it bad.

To use rationalist terms: depression and suicide has been a large problem for many people throughout human history. From that, you can assume that 1) many people care very deeply about it, and 2) it is a difficult problem. Given those facts, any statement along the lines of "All it requires is ____", someone will likely take offense.


Is gender biologically or socially determined?

There has been a lot of debate amongst scientist, and they are not in agreement on any one argument. In general, there is a trend towards thinking that gender identity is based on biology.

Argument that gender identity is based on biology:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150213112317.htm
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/transgender-kids-show-consistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html
http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/21032/20150109/gender-identity-determined-brain-region-cross-links.htm

The arguments here are that the brain patterns of transgendered people are more similar to the brain patterns of people of the gender that they identify with, which seems to indicate that gender identity is based in biology.

Argument that there is a lot more to be understood:

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/opus/issues/2011/spring/gender_identity_development

  "Neither the affects of prenatal and puberty hormones nor socialization alone are enough to explain gender identity development, the process must lie in a brain structure."


What is different between children and adults that cause children to forgive so quickly?

The short answer, kids live in the now.  They tend to forget everything quickly.  A child can be crying about their milk being spilled one moment, and playing the next.  They don't think as much about past or future, just what is happening now, and NOW is a big deal.  This can cause problems in some ways, but the plus side is they are quickly side tracked from whatever was bothering them before.

They don't hold grudges for the same reason you can make them forget how fun banging on the trashcan or drawing on the wall was.  The moment something is out of sight it's quickly forgotten.  The offense of 30 seconds ago don't matter, because that was back an eternity ago, and is not NOW.

That 'eternity ago' thing was only half a joke also.  It's been argued that children actually experience time different, because of their length of life and perspective.  A 2 year old has been alive for a tiny fraction as long as it's parent's have, it has less then a tenth the life experience.  However, since they measure time relative to the length of time they have been alive that means that 30 minutes feels like it's 10 times longer to them, because that 30 minutes actually makes up more then 10 times the amount of their life that it does for an adult.  If this is true it explains why a 15 minute wait is an eternity to a young child.  However, it also means that something that happened a day ago feels like it was weeks ago to a young child.  It's easier to forget pass offenses if it feels like they happened in some distant past of time.


What is the linguistic equivalent of functional fixedness?

I'm not sure whether this can explain your crossword experience, but perseveration is a fairly well-studied phenomenon in word production. Individuals with aphasia (a neurogenic language disorder) often exhibit perseveration errors in tasks like picture naming. For example, imagine trial N is a picture of a dog and the participant responds "dog" (correct) and trial N+1 is a picture of a car and the participant again responds "dog" (perseveration error). Stark (2007) provides a good historical review of theories of perseveration in aphasia, which generally propose either failure to inhibit the representation of the previous response or failure to sufficiently activate the representation of the new stimulus (and it is possible that both can happen: Fischer-Baum & Rapp, 2012). Like other speech errors, perseveration errors are also produced by typical (non-aphasic) adults, just much less frequently than in aphasia.

More general kinds of perseveration - inability to stop focusing on a particular topic - are associated with deficits of executive function (possibly related to frontal lobe dysfunction or damage) and a variety of psychopathologies, such as depression.

References:

Fischer-Baum, S., & Rapp, B. (2012). Underlying cause(s) of letter perseveration errors. Neuropsychologia, 50(2), 305–318. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.12.001

Stark, J. (2007). A review of classical accounts of verbal perseveration and their modern‐day relevance. Aphasiology, 21(10-11), 928–959. doi:10.1080/02687030701198239


What are some credible conferences and journals in computational neuroscience?

Adding to what was already mentioned, there are several "Frontiers" journals:

Frontiers in Neuroscience
Frontiers in Neural Circuits
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
Frontiers in Synaptic Neuroscience

Then there are also several rather experimental journals that also sometimes publish computational papers, such as:

Elife
The Journal of Neuroscience
Neuron
European Journal of Neuroscience
PNAS (proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences)
Cerebral Cortex
Hippocampus

Another review journal would Annual Review of Neuroscience. I think Nature Neuroscience was also not mentioned yet but is very reputable. Some older (but classical) papers might even be in Physical Review Letters. Finally, there are many preprints to find on http://www.biorxiv.org/collection/neuroscience and https://arxiv.org/list/q-bio.NC/new.

I think it's worth mentioning that, as far as I know, conference papers are far less important in the field of Neuroscience than compared to Machine Learning.


Does neuroplasticity cancel the notion of "aptitudes" as a natural gift?

To elaborate upon @Rooirokbokkie's comment, neuroplasticity is not exactly like changing computer code, because the brain is not a computer. The brain performs computations, but thinking of it as analogical to consumer CPUs and their Von-Neumann architecture is limiting. For more information on this idea, see "Moving Beyond Metaphors: Understanding The Mind For What It Is" by Chris Eliasmith.

The most important difference is that not everything in your brain is re-wireable. Related questions that explore this are:

Does adult neurogenesis occur only in the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus?
What evidence is there that the adult brain can produce new neurons?


How to think about things when it's the right time?

What you refer to is probably 'controlling' your mind, which is a common practice called 'mindfulness training', i.e., learning to observe thoughts without interacting with them.


Are there any open access journals in the cognitive sciences with impact factor >1

Frontiers is an example of a collection of different open access journals where you find some high-impact publications within the cognitive science field. They have A LOT of journals within the neuroscience and the psychology field.
This is what Frontiers themselves says about impact factors of their journals:

Thomson ISI requires at least three complete years of publishing, plus a few of other criteria, before issuing an impact factor for a specific journal. In the case of Frontiers, this condition has so far been met by only three of our Neuroscience journals. Impact factors are issued for the preceding year involving complex criteria that evaluate the previous three years' citations.
The impact factor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience was 1.58 in 2009
and 1.94 in 2010, indicating substantial growth year over year. We
expect to see this growth in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
(2.58 in 2010) and Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience (3.58 in 2010),
as well as a number of impact factors issued to other Frontiers
journals in 2012. We expect these impact factors to continue to rise
in 2012 as well as to have Thomson ISI issue several more impact
factors to Frontiers journals in June 2012.

So, in this case "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience", "Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience" and "Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience" would probably be three good answers to your question.


I'd recommend consulting informally with IRB staff at your institution beforehand, usually (and maybe especially at a smaller institution?) they are willing to help out a bit at the design stage. Once you find the right person to contact, I'd convey to them almost exactly what you've posted here (probably via email), plus a bit more background on the actual current form of the data.

IRBs can vary quite a bit on what they allow; there are minimum standards they are required to follow but I've seen IRBs go well beyond those standards at times. It may be that the IRB decides the data are anonymous enough and low risk enough that you don't even need consent; it may be that they won't allow it in any form unless you start from scratch (and contacting the people who originally participated may similarly not be allowed; you might be able to solicit the group but not the previous responders directly).

There is likely a blanket prohibition on you collecting data, then trying to go back and get consent to use it in another way, but your situation is a bit different in that you weren't the one collecting in the first place and the collection does not seem to meet the criteria for "research" at the time of collection.

These flow charts from HHS might help a bit if you are in the US. Following Chart 2 and then Chart 4/5, it is quite possible that this work could be exempt from full review (but at least at my institution, it is still the IRB that decides whether the exemption applies).


Why do people have the tendency to pick their nose while driving?

I suppose one explanation of this observation is that being a driver in a car is a semi-private space. It is semi-private in that it often feels like people can't see you. In addition, even if someone sees you, you will be driving away from them shortly. And it is unlikely that they know who you are and that your nose picking will ever affect your reputation.

Thus, presumably there are many activities that people tend to do more in private, that occur often in a car. E.g., random singing, farting, etc.


Practical ways to increase Mental alertness?

I've heard many times all the benefits to Meditaion and Hypnosis, to which I can immediately propose those as methods in this scenario towards improving mental focus. You can check out this article https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201204/brain-scans-show-how-meditation-improves-mental-focus which talks about that very thing.


Have ideas of "gamification" been applied to education?

A popular lit review [1] discusses some game concepts that have been empirically tested to support the idea of gamification. In some cases, these may be very hard to quantify. For instance, the article cites fantasy as one gaming characteristic that engages gamers. Other characteristics, such as having clear, well defined rules/goals seem easier to objectify.

The authors also cite mystery, challenge (something hard but not too hard, with levels of increasing difficulty), sensory stimuli, and user control as important attributes as well.

[1] Garris et al. (2002). Games, Motivation, and Learning: A Research and Practice Model. Simulation and Gaming, 33, 441-467. Retrieved from http://scottsdale.brainadvantage.com/PDF/Games,%20Motivation,%20and%20Learning.pdf


What's the frequency of the ringing in my ear?

The frequency is individual, and known as tinnitus frequency or pitch.
From  Okamoto et al., 2010:

Our target notched music introduced a functional deafferentation of
auditory neurons corresponding to the eliminated frequency
band, and because this frequency band overlapped the individual
tinnitus frequency, the notched music no longer stimulated the
cortical area corresponding to the tinnitus frequency, although it
still excited surrounding neuron.

There is a dependency on "training" (from a Discover article):

Even in adulthood, experiencing new sounds can rewire the auditory cortex.
If a rat is trained to recognize sounds at a particular frequency, the
corresponding region of the tone map will get bigger.

From König et al., 2006:

To further examine the relation between tinnitus pitch
and hearing loss, we grouped the patients by tinnitus pitch
(<=3 kHz, 4 kHz, >=6 kHz) and calculated the mean audiogram as well as the mean audiogram edge frequency for
each group

References
Okamoto, H., Stracke, H., Stoll, W., & Pantev, C. (2010). Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 1207-1210. PDF
König, O., Schaette, R., Kempter, R., & Gross, M. (2006). Course of hearing loss and occurrence of tinnitus. Hearing research, 221(1), 59-64. PDF


Free software to run online visual category learning experiment

You might want to take a look at jsPsych, which is an open-source JavaScript library for building experiments. There is an example of running a visual categorization task in the documentation for the library.


Recommended resources (journals, blogs, etc) for nurturing a background of statistical/methodological rigour in behavioural science research?

There are various loosely-defined 'camps' among reform-minded methodologists, so you probably want to try to follow a representative of each.

Andrew Gelman is a prominent landmark in this area, and runs a really nice frequently-updated blog at statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu with frequent paper critiques.

The JASP crew also have a blog, https://www.bayesianspectacles.org/ which is a bit on the aggressive side, but JASP is great and it'll point you to things like the recent 'redefine statistical significance' paper, which will give you plenty to talk about if you run into a methods guru on their coffee break.

You might also enjoy http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/ and the author Daniel Lakens has a Coursera MOOC on this sort of thing. To be sure, there are a ton of good stats MOOCS, just this one happens to be by a psychologist with similar concerns to you :-)

This is a short list but I think it cuts across the camps I'm aware of (I'd love to know more about the camps in methodology myself, maybe some other StackExchange folks have some pointers!) My impression is that at minimum you should try to read someone who solves their problems with parameter estimation and cares about S and M errors (Gelman, Kruschke), someone who solves their problems with model selection and cares about Bayes Factors (EJ Wagenmakers 2018 "Bayes factor design analysis" maybe?), and someone who is happy to be frequentist so long as you're super careful about the interpretation (Lakens, I think? Or, like, most of statistics? Efron's awesome feats of bootstrapping are a great antidote to Wagenmakers' extreme takedowns of everything frequentist).

In my particular corner of psychology, Stan is taking over the world, if that's interesting to you you might get some good mileage out of http://elevanth.org/blog/ I reckon upwards of 20 people recommended the 'rethinking' textbook to me, and they were right! It's pretty great.


What are the appraisals tendencies for fear and anger?

Examples of appraisals which evoke the emotion of Fear may include dangerous and harmful situations which results people to experience fear. Appraisal of unfair treatment is one cause of Anger which may lead people to behave in an uncertain or unpredictable way both physically and verbally.


DISC correlation with Big Five personality

According to Jones and Hartley (2013), it's a test seldom mentioned in textbooks, but "used extensively in industry", more precisely in business organizations. Thee same paper also provides cross-correlation with Big Five factors:

Since the names in the left column of this table are a bit unusual ("left factors"), they are (in this order)

the opposite of Extraversion
the opposite of Openness
the opposite of Agreeableness
Conscienscouness (not negated)
the opposite of Neuroticism

Also the Wikipedia descriptions of "DISC" factors don't quite agree with Jones and Hartley, which give them as

Drive/Dominance (D) – task-oriented, fast-mover, bottom-line-oriented
Influence (I) – people-oriented, energetic, desire popularity and praise
Steadiness (S) – very people and family-oriented, motivated by loyalty and security, slower-moving
Compliance/Conscientiousness (C) – task and detail-oriented, wants all information, slower-moving

The correlations are pretty weak, but some "conclusions" are amusing: to be "stable" (i.e. non-neurotic in Big Five terms) one needs to be steady/submissive (and not dominant/driven) and the opposite goes for "tough-minded", or otherwise put, being agreeable looks (again) like being submissive/steady and not dominant. Being "closed minded" is correlated with being steady/submissive and not being good at influencing/inducing other people. And an introvert is "compliant" (??) and again not good at influencing other people. These "conclusions" don't make a lot of sense to me, except maybe the last one...


Does the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM contain a Global Assessment of Functioning measure?

I couldn't find the SCID anywhere on the web. So i did some digging I found one literature search that used the DSM SCID as an example of a semi-structured interview from which GF data could be found (H Monrad, 2014). I also found that DSM- 5 had removed the GF scale (Gold, 2014), but presumably the alternative measures the same properties.

  the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (GAF), the previously
  endorsed numerical rating scale used for assessment of functioning and
  reported on Axis V, has been eliminated. In its place, DSM-5 offers
  psychiatrists a new tool for assessment of global functioning and
  impairment, the World Health Organization Disability Assessment
  Schedule 2 (WHODAS 2.0).

And finallly I found a study by Aas which looks at rating the GF assesment, in which they reference a study by Williams which looks at the test retest reliability of the SCID.

  Rating GAF may mean choosing the lowest score for other specified time periods, for example the lowest level in the past month or for the worst week during the month prior to interview (Williams et al, 1992).

Based on the above it is reasonable to conclude that the SCID contains a measure for GF, even if it now called WHODAS.

Aas, I. M. (2011). Guidelines for rating global assessment of functioning (GAF). Annals of general psychiatry, 10(1), 1.

Williams, J. B., Gibbon, M., First, M. B., Spitzer, R. L., Davies, M., Borus, J., ... & Wittchen, H. U. (1992). The structured clinical interview for DSM-III-R (SCID): II. Multisite test-retest reliability. Archives of general psychiatry, 49(8), 630-636.

Gold, L. H. (2014). DSM-5 and the assessment of functioning: the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (WHODAS 2.0). Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online, 42(2), 173-181.

H Monrad Aas, I. (2014). Collecting Information for Rating Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF): Sources of Information and Methods for Information Collection. Current psychiatry reviews, 10(4), 330-347.


Learned dyslexia? adult predicament from childhood teacher´s incompetence?

I will answer your questions out of order. I hope that is ok.

6 I have dyslexia and other "stuff". I have been diagnosed as such by a psychologist and diagnostician multiple independant times.

2 Dyslexia is quantified as a DSM 5 Neurodevelopment Disorders subcategory Learning Disorder.

  “difficulties learning and using academic skills.”

Before DSM 5 dyslexia was identified by a difference between verbal and performance IQ which would effectively measure the severity of the dyslexia in comparison with the persons ambition. I'm sure psychiatrist have a new standard test which is able to perform such functions as well.

1 Dyslexics typically learn coping strategies at school. Without foundation of those coping strategies I know reading and writing would be even more difficult for me. I was taught to read and spell with the Scottish Rite Dyslexia method. Its basicly phonics on steroids. It seemed to work very well for myself and the others with learning disabilities though not all were dyslexics. I would recommend finding curriculum based on the framework the Masons provide and that is at least is phonetic.

3 Motivating an adult is very difficult. You might do some research on Social Influence which is ethically acceptable manipulation like what doctors use.

4 Absolutely no one knows what causes learning disabilities like dyslexia all major theories point to something biological involving the brain. Finding the source of the problem doesn't help the person. Only treating the symptoms is rational.

5 No. Your friend comes from a time just before the major push for treatment of learning disabilities in public schools. Now learning differences and disabilities are given coping strategies and other tools (primarily time and technology) to help them perform and live healthy normal lives.


Measures to study working memory level related to physical activity

A very common test of working memory is the N-back.

In the N-back, the subject needs to remember what happened some number (N) of steps earlier. For example, imagine seeing the following numbers one at a time on a computer screen. Your task is to press a key whenever the number on the screen is the same as the number that was there 3 steps earlier:

1 4 5 2 6 3 4 5 6 4 2 5 3 2.

The numbers in bold are when the subject should respond.

There are many variations of the n-back, and it is easy to adjust the difficulty of the test by changing how many steps back subjects need to remember.


Is getting trapped in an asylum a realistic scenario?

It all boils down to the Duty of Care

Duty of Care

The duty of care is the responsibility of a mental health professional to protect patients and others from foreseeable harm. If a client makes statements that suggest suicidal or homicidal ideation, the clinician has the responsibility to take steps to prevent harm where reasonably practicable, and if necessary, initiate involuntary commitment.

The same goes when a person has been assessed as suffering from one or more severe mental health conditions which has a high chance of resulting in any other physical harm to the individual or others.

Voluntary Commitment

Getting committed either voluntarily or involuntarily is not straight forward.  In both the US and here in the UK, you can't just go into a hospital, sign a form and then be taken in as a mental health patient.  You can go into a hospital and ask to be committed, but you need to be assessed in order for the committal to be accepted.

Involuntary Commitment

With voluntary committal, you are free to discharge yourself by signing a discharge form and leave at any time, however, if at any time it is deemed that you would be a danger to yourself or others, the voluntary committal can change to involuntary committal.

Aside from an unscrupulous group of psychiatrists it is practically impossible to trap a mentally healthy person in a psychiatric unit against their will.  For a person to be held against their will, it needs the co-ordinated efforts of more than one psychiatrist.  Where it happens that a mentally healthy individual is held against their will, there is possible legal redress and the psychiatrists involved could have their practice licenses removed.

In the US

Voluntary Committal

As pointed out by psychiatrist, Scott Alexander, in his Slate Star Codex post, you are not guaranteed admission to a psychiatric unit on a voluntary basis just because you want it. You might be turned down if the psychiatrist thinks you aren’t sick enough to need it, or if your insurance refuses to pay for it. Insurance companies are very reluctant to pay for hospitalisations unless there is a clear risk involved.

Involuntary Committal

The laws governing this seems to differ depending on which state you are in.

For example:

In CaliforniaAccording to the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (Section 5150 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code)

  When a person, as a result of a mental health disorder, is a danger to others, or to himself or herself, or gravely disabled, a peace officer, professional person in charge of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, member of the attending staff, as defined by regulation, of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, designated members of a mobile crisis team, or professional person designated by the county may, upon probable cause, take, or cause to be taken, the person into custody for a period of up to 72 hours for assessment, evaluation, and crisis intervention, or placement for evaluation and treatment in a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment and approved by the State Department of Health Care Services.

In FloridaAccording to the Florida Mental Health Act

  A person may be placed in involuntary inpatient placement for treatment upon a finding of the court by clear and convincing evidence that:

  (a) He or she is mentally ill and because of his or her mental illness:

  1.a. He or she has refused voluntary placement for treatment after sufficient and conscientious explanation and disclosure of the purpose of placement for treatment; or

  b. He or she is unable to determine for himself or herself whether placement is necessary; and

  2.a. He or she is manifestly incapable of surviving alone or with the help of willing and responsible family or friends, including available alternative services, and, without treatment, is likely to suffer from neglect or refuse to care for himself or herself, and such neglect or refusal poses a real and present threat of substantial harm to his or her well-being; or

  b. There is substantial likelihood that in the near future he or she will inflict serious bodily harm on himself or herself or another person, as evidenced by recent behavior causing, attempting, or threatening such harm; and

  (b) All available less restrictive treatment alternatives which would offer an opportunity for improvement of his or her condition have been judged to be inappropriate.

In the UK

The whole issue of committal, voluntary and involuntary, is governed by the Mental Health Act 1983 and the Mental Health Act 2007.

Involuntary Committal in the UK

To be involuntarily committed (also known as sectioned), it needs to be founded on the written recommendations in the prescribed form of two registered medical practitioners, including in each case a statement that in the opinion of the practitioner:

The individual is suffering from mental disorder of a nature or degree which warrants the detention of the patient in a hospital for assessment (or for assessment followed by medical treatment) for at least a limited period; and
The individual ought to be so detained in the interests of his own health or safety or with a view to the protection of other persons. (See Sections 2 and 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983)

For voluntary committal in the UK

It needs to appear to the registered medical practitioner or approved clinician in charge of the treatment of the patient that an application ought to be made under Section 5(2) of the Mental Health Act 1983, for the admission of the patient to hospital, he or she may furnish to the managers a report in writing to that effect; and in any such case the patient may be detained in the hospital for a period of 72 hours from the time when the report is furnished. By which time the patient should be assessed by the two registered practitioners prescribed in Section 2 of the Act.


What is the effect of high expectations on long-term happiness?

There are definitely studies on this, but I don't have the references at hand. I've heard about this in the online Harvard courses on positive psychology by Tal Ben-Shahar.

In terms of "crashing", there are studies about baseline-happiness, showing you bounce back up after a setback, and back down, after a positive event, like winning the lottery. Only intrinsic perspective changes can increase or decrease your base-level of happiness.

He also talks about a study showing "pessimists" are better at estimating their short and long term success rate. And "optimists" are bad at estimating short term, but good at estimating long term success. The interesting thing is, the pessimists set lower expectations, and their base-level of happiness remains. The optimists have higher expectations, and try until they succeed. The increased belief in their own efficacy, and resilience in the face of a set back, helps to increase their base-level of happiness.

On the other side of the coin, he stresses the importance of "realistic optimism". He says the keys to success are a combination of optimism, passion and hard work. Only optimism (high expectations) is not enough. A quote, by approximation, by Maslow:

  Too much optimism does not lead to success, and results in depression. A sense of reality is needed.

You can look into the Stockdale paradox.

Sorry I can't give you a shorter, more concise answer at the moment, maybe I'll revisit this later.