Why is cultural understanding often wrong?

I have a little difficulty understanding your question. are you asking why do we percieve slightly different behaviors as culturally different? I would say that for me cultural difference is a continuum or degree rather than difference. For example, as you wrote, prolonged eye contact is rude everywhere, but how much is acceptable might be different. Also for me the source of difference doesn't make it not culturally different. Every cultural difference comes from a source, socio-economic, geographic, historical etc. The different intellectual developments led to some cultural differences at least that's my opinion. Of course we can discuss if we should focus on differences or similarities among human groups. I would say should we choose between. I hope that was what you were asking.
P.C: to be honest, I was thinking about my own experiences and observations but when you think about one of the most popular theories about culture, Hofstede's four dementional theory, sees cultures in a continuem of four dementions (tolerence for uncertainty, individuality-collectivity, masculanity-feminaty, power of distance)(Hofstede, 1983).  It is not some cultures avoid uncertainty or seek it, but that some cultures/social groups avoid uncertainty or seek it more than other cultures/social groups for example.
Hofstede, G. (1983). National cultures in four dimensions: A research-based theory of cultural differences among nations. International Studies of Management & Organization, 13(1-2), 46-74.


Does anyone know of any clinical psychology journals that use a double-blind review process?

My impression is that many (perhaps most) psychology journals do double-blind review (or at least give you the option).

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology is one example.
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/ccp/?tab=4

  This journal uses a masked reviewing system for all submissions.

It sounds like that (a) you are not aware of what clinical psychology journals exist in your area; and (b) how to determine whether they require or allow for masked review. I'll discuss each of these points.

Finding a relevant clinical psychology journal: If you are writing a journal article, you will need to perform a review of the literature. Identify journals from those that you cite in your references. There are also various lists of journals organised by topic (e.g., Science Citation Index) that often give an indication of journal prestige. If you are interested in clinical psychology, then you may also want to check out "psychiatry" journals as well.

Determining review policy. Every journal has a website, and a section of the website will include instructions to authors. Here you will typically find information about the reviewing process.


Are the skills trained and learn from world memory championship transferable?

Improvements will be limited to likewise tasks (memorizing stuff). Quoting https://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/blog/brain-training-only-makes-you-better-at-brain-training:

A just-released meta-analysis (Melby-Lervag, Redick, & Hulme, 2016) reviewed the literature on transfer effects in working memory training. Working memory is a key aspect of cognition, because a reasonable assumption is that an improved ability to temporarily store and manipulate information in the brain would lead to wide-ranging cognitive benefits. In other words, if anything could lead to far transfer, it would be effective working memory training.
The results, though, are disappointing for brain training fans.
Working memory training demonstrated no far transfer effects. Important real-world skills like verbal ability, word decoding, and arithmetic were completely unaffected by training programs. There was, however, some “intermediate transfer,” where tasks that shared stimuli or methods with the training tasks improved slightly with training.

[...]
There is also a sort of meta-story to this meta-analysis, which points out that publication bias, methodological problems, and some sketchy control groups can explain individual studies that do find strong effects. So, even the near- and intermediate-transfer effects may be due to a number of factors that have nothing to do with genuine brain improvement.

In the figure, k = number of studies. "Treated controls" means the control group also received some kind of sham training, in order to minimize the gains from placebo effect on the actual treatment/training group. The observation form the last paragraph is based on p-curve analysis of the studies. Alas the studies with treated controls (group B in the figure below) are also those with a more anomalous p-curve, indicating potential publication bias etc., whereas the "A" group (untreated controls) doesn't show this anomaly, but these studies are weaker methodologically in a different (control-group related) way.

I should also mention that the people behind dual n-back training (Jaeggi's group) conducted their own meta-analysis, and they stick by their claim that memory training boosts fluid intelligence.
And here's a summary of meta-analyses in this area... till 2016 from yet another one by Soveri et al. (2017):

They also do their own meta-[re]analysis (but only of n-back)...

Note that they use a different (and perhaps more standard) terminology of active/passive control group but it has the same meaning as treated/untreated.
They ultimately conclude:

In sum, in the present meta-analysis, the only notable transfer
effect is seen to untrained n-back tasks. Despite the fact
that the transfer effects to the other domains are also statistically
significant, they can be considered very small. This is
because an effect size of 0.2 means that only approximately
1% of the variance of the dependent variable (e.g., score on a
Gf task) can be explained by which group (training or control
group) the participant belongs to. The practical significance of
such effects can thus be questioned (see also Melby-Lervåg &
Hulme, 2016).


Why do those with viral infections feel better after wrongly taking antibiotics?

Placebo effect is not the only explanation, although it can be a large component.

To be clear: Neither of the explanations below are reasons to use antibiotics for infections not due to bacteria. They do illustrate anchoring. Just because we call a drug an antibiotic and first note its effects to be killing bacteria does not forbid that drug from having other effects.

Antibiotics are anti-inflammatory

Bacterial and viral infections both induce an innate immune response, which includes the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Antibiotics can provide symptomatic relief by inhibiting the release of those cytokines, decreasing inflammation.

Bacterial super infections

The risk of a bacterial infection jumps during and shorty after a viral infection. Children, for example, are more likely to get strep throat after the flu. If the patient is unaware of two infections, taking an antibiotic will appear to treat the viral infection. It is, in reality, treating the bacterial rider.


How to assess the effect of individual difference measure on quadratic fit of a within-subject factor?

By default your 8 levels are probably coded linearly: e.g.,

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Or

-3.5,-2.5, ..., 2.5,  3.5

To examine quadratic effects you could simply square these values. Interpretation of linear and quadratic parameters will be clearer if you first center the linear variable before squaring.

So you could enter (-3.5)^2 = 12.25; (-2.5)^2 = 6.25, etc.

Equally, some data analysis software will allow you to specify polynomial contrasts (i.e., linear, quadratic, cubic). And in such software you can specify interactions.

In R, you would specify that the 8-level variable is an ordered factor.

In SPSS, the GLM - Repeated measures dialog allows you specify interactions and polynomial contrasts.


Is it better to say "Don't forget" or "Remember" in written encouragement?

I'd argue that Churchill's "Never,  never, NEVER give up" didn't reputedly have this effect.

With 'Don't forget' the 'don't' may well outweigh the infinitive verb in its cognitive effect, especially if stressed. The language here is of stimulation, incentivising, or command, and I'd say the more likely undesired reaction is the dislike of the perceived patronising (or, certainly, the imperious) approach.

With 'Don't think of a pink elephant' there is little likelihood that one feels patronised or browbeaten.


Is there any file format standard for EEG data?

As far as I know, short answer is no - there is no gold standard for EEG files. But EEG is a time series (amplitude) from several channels. So the most common way to represent it is columns as electrodes and rows as points of time. I think almost all software is possible to read such structure as txt file. But EEG is not only time series. Usually it is important to have additional channel with event markers. It make the situation a little bit tricky. But usually popular software is able to read most of EEG data formats and it's not difficult to write a custom function for reading your data.


Why are some people unable to easily memorize the lyrics to a song?

From an information processing perspective, I'd conjecture the following points:

Many songs have lyrics that are difficult to decipher. If you can't decipher the words, then you wont be able to recall them. If you decipher alternate words, then this may reduce the degree to which the words have semantic meaning, and therefore the ease with which the lyrics can be retained and recalled.
Even when the words of the lyrics are readily discernible, lyrics vary in the degree to which (a) they have easily discernible meaning; (b) follow standard grammatical structures; (c) repeat lyrics, etc. Recalling meaningful sentences that follow standard grammatical structure is much easier than recalling random words, and increasing the depth of processing (i.e., greater meaning) of the material should also help with recall (see this discussion of level of processing effect). There would probably also be a range of other effects related to properties of the lyrics which would make a given song easier or harder to recall (e.g., rhyming and rhythm in lyrics might make lyrics easier to discern).
Practice is a fundamental effect in recall. Thus, the more times a person has heard a  song, the better they should be at recalling. However, I think this should be qualified with the above points. If a person has heard a song 100 times without actually being able to decipher some of the words or understand their meaning, then that practice may be largely wasted.
Practice also applies to recall, and this would be closely related to context effects. Thus, if practice always occurs within the context of the music being played with singer present to assist with any forgotten lyrics, then the person has never practiced in the absence of such cues and may be dependent on the cues. Practicing trying to recall the song without the song in the background, and then with feedback on failed sections would presumably be more effective than just singing along.
All the above also relates to the distinction in the expertise literature between deliberate practice and play (see, Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993, PDF). When people listen to songs, the aim is typically to have a good time rather than to learn the lyrics. Deliberate practice in contrast would involve a deliberate effortful practice regime aimed at learning the lyrics. For example, it might involve a detailed study of the semantic meaning of the lyrics, then repeated recall of the lyrics without assistance, and then correcting on failed sections (e.g., think of an expert pianist learning a piano piece and working on difficult sections, etc.).

Individual differences

You ask the question of why some people appear to be better than others at recalling lyrics. It's an empirical question as to whether there is a domain general difference.
Presumably, it would reflect a combination of the above effects: e.g., different levels of practice; different levels of understanding of the song lyrics, and perhaps also some more
general ability related to verbal recall.

Recalling melody versus lyrics

You also ask about why you can recall the melody but not the lyrics. hearing a melody does not require you to understand the lyrics, even if understanding the lyrics might act as useful cue. Thus, in the context where a person does not completely understand the lyrics, he or she may have years of practice hearing the melody, but almost no practice with a semantically meaningful understanding of the lyrics.
There would also presumably be a wide range of variables in the person that would make them better at recalling a melody (in particular, pitch perception, singing, and musical ability come to mind as factors that should simplify the task of learning a melody).
Then one could also look at characteristics of the melody which made it harder or easier to recall (e.g., degree of repetition, simplicity of intervals, familiarity of the intervals and structure, etc.).


Do bilingual children learn two languages faster than monolingual children learn one language?

I think it's all about passion for languages. I have bilingual children and my first was having difficulties with my native language compared to the second one. It's all individual...So the answer is

  it depends

in my opinion I think there is no advantage over the children from monolingual. Children from bilingual families take 2 different languages as one. So in some sense there are still monolingual...

here is some paper:

  Because a key expectation parents have is for their child to perform
  well in school, it is important for parents to know that bilingual
  children and monolingual children develop their learning abilities at
  different speeds. Children learning two languages learn each language
  more slowly than monolingual children learn their native languages. It
  is easy to understand why -- children have a limited amount of time
  with which to dedicate to listening and reading language; if a child
  is bilingual, he will split that time between the two languages, which
  slows his learning speed. This often affects the academic performance
  and communication skills of bilingual children, which can cause stress
  in the family. In a sense, the average school is set up to go at a
  monolingual speed, which might outpace bilingual children.

http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/child-development-bilingual-vs-monolingual-household-7371.html

  Bilingual 12-year-olds perform worse at school than their monolingual
  peers, a researcher at Sweden's Örebro University has found.

http://www.thelocal.se/20110323/32766


Are there any studies that were able to localize Fusiform Face Area (FFA) for face processing using EEG source localization algorithms?

The N170 (the face selective component of the brain) is commonly mapped indeed to OFA or FFA. It's trivial to find examples for this, e.g.: this, this, this, this, this. Many more studies can be found by searching the relevant data bases, e.g. like this.
Some of these include co-registered EEG/fMRI or MEG. There is some uncertainty of where exactly it originates from - OFA, FFA, both.

Note that dipole fits can be seen as leading to oversparse solutions - they might locate the N170 to one out of OFA or FFA, when it is actually projected by a larger are including OFA, FFA, and possibly even more of the cortex.


Are there connections between some properties in peoples faces and their behavior?

There is some research in the realm of sex differences and hormonal effects of aggression. The hypothesis meant by that is not so much the rather obvious one that male faces reliably cue "male" behaviour; although that is an important fact. For example, if a person has a beard, they are much more likely to be sexually attracted to women than to men. However, perhaps more in response to the intent than the phrasing of the question, researchers have speculated that "sexually dimorphic facial width-to-height ratio may be an 'honest signal' of propensity for aggressive behaviour". The idea behind this is that a common component, testosterone, underlies and causes both wide, masculine faces and aggressive behaviour.

I personally am not yet convinced of the reliability of this research - for example, in the progress of this research programme, more and more mediators are discovered, which by some might be interpreted to indicate an unreliable finding. However, the basic concept seems to be what you're looking for.

More generally, for now, even the linkage between hormones or neuroanatomy on one hand, and behaviour on the other hand is rarely clear, reliable and strong. Few of the variance in behaviour can be expected to be read off of facial configurations.


Perceive person's importance to the education

I think this issue touches on a number of aspects like self-worth, self-image and self-concept among others.
Undoubtedly people can place a distorted or disproportionate value on self and others based on education. It's mostly a problem of reference, how exactly do you value education and knowledge correctly?

Can we perceive, through some indications, if a person gives too much or too little importance to the education and intellectual formation?

Certainly, if the value they place on education/formation does not correspond to real tangible values. For example the janitor who thinks himself overall more qualified than the brain surgeon. Or the brain surgeon who thinks himself necessarily superior to others in areas where he has no expertise.

knowledge and its importance are not reflected in behavior

This is objectively wrong, for example the study of morals and ethics enables a person to positively change their behavior (as can the knowledge of healthy eating help to change dietary habits.) However, there's no necessary causal relation between knowledge and behavior.


Is there any evidence that fluid intelligence is malleable?

Is there any evidence of malleability of fluid intelligence?

In the downward direction, definitely yes.
There are many ways you can directly pull fluid intelligence downwards. Things like being exposed to much lead, suffering from iodine deficiency (especially a developing fetus during pregnancy, see e.g. (Qian et al, 2005)), or by not getting decent nutrition. Anything that interferes with a healthy development of the brain might be implicated in intelligence. Similarly, you could presumably push intelligence downward by directly harming the brain (Brain lesions, anyone?). Fluid intelligence also lowers with ageing (Whitley et al, 2016), and so anything that slows down the ageing process may also have an effect.
Next, let's consider the more interesting question:

Besides avoiding decreases in fluid intelligence, can we push it up?

There does not seem to be a reliable way of increasing intelligence known (as of yet), perhaps except for one.
Here we have to turn to Richard Haier, the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence, as he has written extensively on this topic. Perhaps disappointingly, we refer to his article Increased Intelligence is a Myth (So Far). The title says it all. He goes into details with the difficulties of establishing increased intelligence. You need to show that you're not just raising test scores, but actually something that transfers over to general intelligence. He also goes into further detail regarding the topic of increasing intelligence in his book The Neuroscience of Intelligence.
To truly appreciate the difficulty of increasing intelligence, you really need to understand the history of methods being suggested. This also helps you develop a healthy amount of scepticism -- you should not believe any method without a substantial amount of evidence backing it up. What has been suggested to increase intelligence? First, the Mozart effect. Meta-analyses show no convincing effect especially when you consider the evidence of publication bias (Pietschnig et al, 2010). The second craze was memory training as you've already noted. Again, not convincing (Melby-Lervåg et al, 2016). Similarly, chess training has been suggested as a way of improving intelligence, but the results are not great (Sala & Gobet, 2017). Now the craze is video games, although it suffers from many of the same methodological issues: (very) small sample sizes, and probably publication bias.
While people can cite all kinds of studies showing increases in intelligence, the real question is really whether these can withstand hard scientific scrutiny.
It is likely not impossible to raise intelligence. Haier suggests some plausible ways of increasing intelligence in his book, but no massive evidence yet. Currently there does not seem to be a very convincing way of increasing intelligence...
...Perhaps except for one way?
Education has been suggested as a candidate for improving intelligence. There is a question whether education really increases general intelligence or just specific skills (Ritchie, Bates, Deary, 2015), but currently education is the best bet (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, Preprint 2017). Ritchie and Tucker-Drob report the following:

Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.

However, even here we should withhold some scepticism. First, it may simply be increases of specific skills. Secondly, the fadeout effect is pervasive in psychological research of intelligence. Intelligence increases do not seem to last. For example, massive programs such as Head Start showed some initial increases in intelligence measurements, but this boost eventually fades out (Protzko, 2015).
Like Head Start, other programs have been created with the purpose of increasing school performance. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program Gates Effective Teaching Initiative did not see the benefits it hoped.
It might also be hypothesized that expensive private schools would improve the intelligence of the pupils (beyond regular schools). It is well known that pupils of these private schools show higher average scores, but the question is: is it because of the schools? These schools are also highly selective; the pupils attending these expensive private schools are not representative of the general population. This has been tested in at least one large sample. They found that after controlling for factors involved in prior pupil selection, there remained no statistical difference (Smith-Woolley,..., Kovas, Plomin, 2018). In other words, they found that expensive private schools did not demonstrate improvements in intelligence beyond what ordinary schools did.
In fact, all of this goes back to Arthur Jensen's infamous 1969 paper How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement, which made intelligence research controversial if it wasn't already. He concluded already back then that teaching intervention did not show noticeable improvements. Jensen's opening line in his long paper:

Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.

So currently, if education can increase intelligence it does not appear to be through teaching intervention, but simply through longer education.

Summary

Many methods for increasing intelligence have been suggested. They tend to not withstand proper scientific scrutiny.
Therefore, it is important to have some healthy scepticism to suggested methods, and accept them only when a high evidential threshold has been reached.
Currently, the most backed up way of increasing intelligence is through longer education. However, even here it is not certain, and more research is needed to understand the relationship between education and intelligence.


Perception of probability of being right

You'd probably want to take a look at signal detection theory. This is a set of tools that you use to analyse how well a person (or an animal, or a machine) is able to discern trials where there is a signal present (e.g. a picture is shown that has been shown before, a tumour is present in an x-ray image, a dot on a radar is an enemy aircraft) from trials where there is no-signal present (e.g. a picture is shown that hasn't been shown before, a tumour is not present in an x-ray image, a dot on a radar is not an enemy aircraft).

Whether a person perceives a signal or not is not always easy to discern. There will always be a certain interplay between the hit rate and the false alarm rate (in that you for example, if you always answered "signal", would have a perfect hit rate, although your false alarm rate would be terrible), and based on a number of criterias (time pressure, instructions, reward structure et cetera) one can manipulate the response patterns of a certain individual.

There has been attempts to create models where accuracy, speed and certainty all are taken into concideration; see for example Plescak and Busemeyer (2010).


What hardware setup is commonly used for low-latency audio stimulation?

It generally helps to provide some sort of specification as to how well you want to control the timing. There are 4 orders of magnitude difference between the 100 ms timing accuracy required for auditory and visual stimuli to be judged simultaneous (Zampini et al. 2005) and the 0.1 ms timing accuracy required for binaural stimuli to be judged simultaneous (Hershkowitz and Durlach 1969). There are two types of latency when it comes to audio stimulation, what I will refer to as the ongoing and onset latencies.

Ongoing Latency

Imagine a study on virtual reality where the subjects head orientation is being tracked in real time presented sound depends on the orientation. In this type of study it is not possible to load the sound in advance onto the sound device. If the audio device requires 1000 ms of sound in advance so as to not drop samples, there will be a noticeable lag between moving the head and the sound position updating. Scarpaci et al. (2005) found that an for these types of studies an overall latency of under 32 ms is desirable. This overall latency needs to include the time required to read the current position as well as generate the sound and then buffer the sound. Depending on the speed of other devices and the amount of required processing time, this may only leave 5-10 ms for sound buffering. Head movements are relatively slow and our sensitivity to the location of a sound is relatively poor, and other experiments may require much lower latencies.

A perfect sound device would have an ongoing latency less than a sample. With a sample rate of 10 kHz, the sound hardware has 0.1 ms per sample, but at 100 kHz it only has 0.01 ms per sample so when choosing a sound device it is important to consider the sample rate. Off the shelf systems with PortAudio can provide ongoing latencies on the order of 10 ms. The PsychToolbox patches PortAudio and can achieve lower ongoing latencies. Scarpaci et al. (2005) achieved subsample ongoing latency with a 44.1 kHz sample rate by using a real time Linux kernel and a dedicated DA board. Custom systems by TDT can provide subsample ongoing latency with a 200 kHz sample rate.

Onset Latency

Imagine an EEG study in which one wants to start recording from the EEG electrodes at the same time as the sound starts playing. Unlike ongoing latency, it is possible to load the stimulus onto the sound device in advance. The goal is then to have the sound device start as quickly as possible. In my opinion, it is more important to minimize the variability in this latency rather than minimize the latency itself. If it takes between 99 and 101 ms (high latency, low variability) to start the sound, then if the EEG recordings are delayed by 100 ms, the onset of the sound and recordings will be within +/-1 ms. If however, it takes between 0 and 20 ms (low latency, high variability) and the EEG recordings are delayed by 10 ms, then the onset asynchrony can be as large as 10 ms. The case where the onset latency really matters is when the start of the sound is externally triggered. For example if a subject presses a button to start the sound, having a "long" delay would be problematic.

Similar to ongoing latencies off the shelf systems can provide onset latencies on the order of 10 ms and PsychToolbox can get down to about 5 ms (maybe less). Scarpaci et al. (2005) did not measure onset latency and performance is likely poor since the system was not optimized for that aspect of sound delivery. The TDT systems provide an external trigger and can provide onset latencies down to levels that make it difficult to measure (sub microsecond). CRS provides custom hardware that can be externally triggered so should provide extremely low onset latencies, but the system requires the stimulus to be loaded in advanced so it essentially has an infinite ongoing latency.


Is Trauma‐Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy applicable to adults?

While there are major issues surrounding CBT in general, and the clinical studies (see my answer to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Limitations), the UK charity Mind, points out (Mind, n.d.) that:

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) – the organisation that produces guidelines on best practice in health care – currently recommends [in guideline CG26] two types of talking treatment for PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]

One of them being trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT):

This is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) specifically adapted for PTSD. NICE recommends that you are offered 8–12 regular sessions of around 60–90 minutes, seeing the same therapist at least once a week.

For the studies on weekly therapy, see Why is almost all therapy done as one-hour sessions weekly?
The American Psychological Association (APA) has a write-up on how CBT can supposedly be used to treat PTSD (APA, n.d.) and they reference a book CBT for anxiety disorders: A practitioner book with a section on the subject of TF-CBT (Ehlers, 2013)
While a lot of studies on TF-CBT have been focused on supporting child sufferers of PTSD, it reportedly is effective for adults too (Forbes et al., 2007) - Free PDF available from The Pennsylvania State University

[W]hile psychoeducation, AM [Anxiety Management] and SIT [Stress Inoculation Training] were not as effective as trauma focused CBT or EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing] as stand-alone interventions, elements of these interventions may well have a role as part of a broader trauma-focused treatment. While models of brief trauma-focused psychodynamic therapy have been developed, they have not been sufficiently tested in controlled studies to derive practice recommendations. Supportive counselling and hypnotherapy have not been found to be effective as stand-alone interventions when compared to trauma-focused CBT or EMDR.

References
APA (n.d.). Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-behavioral-therapy
Ehlers, A. (2013). Trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder. In Simos, G., & Hofmann, S. G. (eds). CBT for anxiety disorders: A practitioner book (pp. 161-190). New York, NY: Wiley. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470975520.html
Forbes, D., Creamer, M., Phelps, A., Bryant, R., McFarlane, A., Devilly, G. J., ... & Newton, S. (2007). Australian guidelines for the treatment of adults with acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 41(8), 637-648. https://doi.org/10.1080%2F00048670701449161
Mind (n.d.). Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-and-complex-ptsd/treatment/


Studies linking brain chemistry to sexual infidelity

The number one hormonal suspect in infidelity has been testosterone. Partially this has been predicted because testosterone predicts sex drive in both men and women. The problem with testing this one in actual humans though is that most of the things associated with cheating also cause increased testosterone levels (flirting, increased number of sexual partners). Therefore, there's a serious chicken and egg problem in more observational studies.

Roney, J. R., Simmons, Z. L., & Lukaszewski, A. W. (2010). Androgen receptor gene sequence and basal cortisol concentrations predict men’s hormonal responses to potential mates. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 277, 57-63.


Consistency Theory - Why do we go back on promises

There's no reason that consistency and promise-breaking can't both be pervasive.  In the first place, if 20% of the population always broke promises and another 20% always obeyed the consistency principle then we would still call it pervasive and we still have 60% of the population.

But an additional complication is that no person always breaks promises or always obeys consistency and most people do both at some point. We can imagine a scenario in which a politician could simultaneously break a promise (to a rival political force) and obey consistency principle (keeping the promise would have betrayed his base).  So the two aren't really contradictory since consistency principle doesn't require one to be consistent about everything always.


A repository of publicly available NEURON models can be found on ModelDB by filtering for Models that contain the Modeling Application: NEURON.


Can non-verbal communication in interpersonal relationships be taught rather than acquired? In many ways this question answers itself. As an acquired skill is one that is learnt, and by definition, anything that can be learnt can be taught.

As with many skills, non-verbal communication begins in childhood.

  It is concluded that style of expression and skill in communication
  are influenced by the emotional expressiveness of the family
  environment.

Family socialization of emotional expression and nonverbal communication styles and skills.
Halberstadt, Amy G.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 51(4), Oct 1986, 827-836

Unlike, many, subconscious difficulties of the mind, learning to read body language can be practiced and improved. A simple google search reveals some of the books and online resources to teach people to improve these skills.

This article discusses the formal study of  improving the  non-verbal communication skills to children with deficiencies in this area.

Teaching Approach for Developing Nonverbal Communication Skills in Students with Social Perception Deficits
Part I. The Basic Approach and Body Language Clues
Esther H. Minskoff, PhD


An answer I provided before on the possibility of recalling forgotten memories briefly talks about False Memory Syndrome and PTSD.  As stated in the answer,

  Memory is not fixed as it is very plastic

and as pointed out in the article you referenced (Hyman, et al., 1995), people are susceptible to creating false memories.

To answer your question on whether non-sufferers of PTSD can develop PTSD from false memories, MyPTSD.com states that false memories can be traumatic and Psychology Today mentions an article (Southwick, et al., 1997) which reported that false memories increased PTSD in war veterans; however, I cannot find any definitive study on non-PTSD sufferers developing PTSD from false memories.  I would say that this is for the reasons @ChristianHummeluhr pointed out in his comment

  ...for methodological and ethical reasons...

For the reason that false memories can be traumatic and has increased symptoms in PTSD sufferers, I would say that it is highly plausible that false memories could lead to PTSD.

As @memebrain pointed out in his answer — although not correctly termed — there are are various forms of trauma that counsellors, psychotherapists, etc. can suffer from as a result of their work, and the US National Centre for PTSD (part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) has an article about it.

The secondary PTSD mentioned by @memebrain is actually Secondary Traumatic Stress which

  produces symptoms similar to PTSD.

We as counsellors and psychotherapists are trained to be careful not to create false memories in their clients and

we are also told how providing therapuetic help can affect a therapist's mental health as indicated in my answer to Are psychologists more immune to psychological problems? and
All UK therapists (experienced and low-experienced) who are registered with the Professional Standards Authority are required to undergo Clinical Supervision for reasons such as this, and for other reasons in my answer to How do clinicians control for their own mental disorders?

Research Article References

Hyman, I. E., Husband, T. H., & Billings, F. J. (1995). False memories of childhood experiences In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9(3), pp 181-197.DOI: 10.1002/acp.2350090302
Free PDF available at ResearchGate

Southwick, S. M., Morgan III, C. A., Nicolaou, A. L., Charney, D. S. (1997). Consistency of Memory for Combat-Related Traumatic Events in Veterans of Operation Desert Storm In: The American Journal of Psychiatry 154(2) pp. 173-177.
DOI: 10.1176/ajp.154.2.173


How does the brain learn what something is for the first time?

According to current models of human concept learning, the answer to your question is both.

Think of a simplified domain in which every object consists of only several features, and therefore can be visualized as a point in some multidimensional feature space. For example, the features that define objects might be its size, shape, color, and weight. Furthermore imagine that objects tend to be clustered throughout this space according to what category they belong to, because members of the same category are generated by the same natural process.

So based on current models, a novel stimulus is compared to existing concepts and is either placed into the concept (cluster) that it's closest to, or if it's insufficiently close to any existing concept, then a new concept will be created. This is the basic idea of current Bayesian theories such as the Rational Model, which treats human category learning as a problem of probability density estimation, and its contenders such as  SUSTAIN.

Here's a video lecture by Josh Tenenbaum, a leading researcher in both machine learning and cognitive science, in which he gives an excellent introduction to a number of these issues and many more.


Why is it that videotaping someone makes him lose his inhibitions?

Usually, being observed increases someone's self-consciousness and they control their behavior (which is a problem in ethnographic field studies: the presence of the foreign observer changes the behavior of the native subjects). Usually, this leads to more socially acceptable behavior (no public nose picking) and a self-conscious stiffness.

In a private situation, and especially when under the influence of alcohol, being observed might induce someone to decide to behave more excessive, because that is what is expected and socially acceptable in such a situation. Everybody would be quite bored and disappointed, if pointing a camera at someone while on a party or during a holiday outing would not lead to those in front of the camera doing funny stuff. So in fact, "losing their inhibitions" in front of the camera is exactly the opposite: conforming to social expectations.


Psychology test stimuli recommended shapes

If your goal is to find a set of shapes that are unique and easily distinguishable from each other, you might be interested in stimuli that get used in visual statistical learning experiments (e.g. Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Turk-Browne, Junge, & Scholl, 2005). The same set of shapes tends to get used across multiple studies in this literature. Some examples of these shapes:

There is a repository of some of these shapes on GitHub. You can download the images there.

Note that there hasn't been research on these shapes, just that they are commonly used shapes in the literature when arbitrary 2D shapes are needed. It is likely that some pairs of these shapes are more similar than others, but since there are a couple dozen different shapes, you may be able to control for that by randomly selecting a different subset of the shapes for each subject in the experiment.


How to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies (i.e., 30 minutes+)?

I've just started reading up on Mechanical Turk. This is a summary of some of the tips that I've found. Admittedly, most of it applies generally to psychological experiments, and not specifically to longer ones.

David Sharek discusses his workflow which explicitly includes studies in the 30 minute range. Thus, this post is one of the most relevant for dealing with the issue of longer studies.

Assorted resources

Here are some  other assorted resources; see also the references at the bottom.

Interoperating Inquisit with other tools
TurkGate is an open source tool to facilitate the use of Mechanical Turk with external psychology experiments.
Mason and Suri (2012) review the potential benefits, implementation, and ethics of Mechanical Turk.
Michael Buhrmester has a guide for social scientists. He provides an outline of his workflow when running studies.

Assorted blogs relevant to Mechanical Turk mentioned by Buhrmester

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com.
http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/deneme.
http://blog.crowdflower.com.

Configuring external surveys

The general model seems to be to have a link to an external site (make sure it opens in a new tab or window) where the survey is delivered and a box for the completion code to be entered.

Buhrmester discusses various completion code systems and  opted for the relatively low tech option of getting participants to make up a 4 or 5 digit number and enter it both into the survey and into the mturk. He then uses time stamp data to verify the original completer.

Payment

Mason and Suri state

  However, recent research on the behavior of workers (Chilton et al.,
  2010) demonstrated that workers had a reservation wage (the least
  amount of pay for which they would do the task) of only \$1.38 per
  hour, with an average effective hourly wage of $4.80 for workers
  (Ipeirotis, 2010a).

In terms of the relationship between payment and quality of worker they cite studies suggesting that there is an initial positive relationship that levels off at a certain point such that at a certain point additional payment does not improve performance.
Masson and Suri then suggest:

  Consequently, it is often advisable to start by paying less than the
  expected reservation wage, and then increasing the wage if the rate of
  completed work is too low.

Similarly wages up to a point should increase the speed of data collection.

Rejection of hits

Regarding rejecting hits, Michael has simply accepted all hits. This may be simpler than trying to work out which hits are legitimate. This also made sense given that he was often only paying 10 cents per participant for 10 minute experiments. It also has the benefit of not damaging your reputation.

Quality assurance

There are two issues here. Did the participant complete the study at all? And did they complete the study in an appropriate manner (e.g., trying on performance task; reading instructions properly; etc.)?

A general approach is to incorporate additional means to usual for detecting dodgy data.
If it's simple to filter out such participants then they don't corrupt the final dataset.

A few ideas:

item level reaction time measures
response patterns to negative and positively worded items
repeat items which should yield identical responses
performance measures
Include very simple true-false questions (e.g., 2+2; Who is the president of the United States); Mason and Suri mention that in 500 responses only six got it wrong and three didn't answer.

Buhrmester makes the causal observation that the quality of responses may vary based on the country of responders, so for example limited participation to US participants is one coarse means of filtering for quality.

Managing reputation as a requester

Buhrmester mentions accepting all hits both for simplicity and managing reptuation.

Mason and Suri (2012) discuss how reputation is discussed and monitored on external sites.

  Turkopticon is a site that allows workers to rate requesters along four
  axes: communicativity, generosity, fairness, and promptness. Turker
  Nation is an online bulletin board where workers routinely comment on
  requesters and communicate about individual HITs. It is strongly
  encouraged that new requesters “introduce” them- selves to the
  Mechanical Turk community by first posting to Turker Nation before
  putting up HITs.

References

Rand, D. G. (2012). The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of theoretical biology, 299, 172-179.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S.D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3-5.
Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior research methods, 44(1), 1-23.
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2011). Using Mechanical Turk as a subject recruitment tool for experimental research. Submitted for review.
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com's mechanical turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351-368.


How to import images used to analysis in SPM to FreeSurfer

I found help at the FreeSurfer mailing list regarding this question. The answer is that for the structural analysis, there is no need to run the recon-all command in a specific directory structure.

It is just a matter of running

recon-all -s SUBJECTNAME -all -i IMAGE.IMG

Note that I am feeding an img file, which is what I am using now, however the creators of the software suggest the use of the DICON filetype.


Does neuroticism cause people to hurt others?

I've edited your question somewhat; I hope I preserved its meaning.

Neuroticism relates to personal discomfort largely by definition, and probably to uncomfortable social interaction as well, though somewhat less by definition. Consider this hypothetical, mediated pathway:

Neuroticism $\rightarrow$ Anxiety $\rightarrow$ Social anxiety $\rightarrow$ Personal social discomfort $\rightarrow$ Others' discomfort

The first three of these paths are almost definitional; the last only assumes that people ordinarily feel more comfortable when interacting with others who are comfortable. Each step from neuroticism to others' discomfort changes the construct slightly, so the relationship attenuates across each step to whatever extent these mediators are all necessary, but I suspect the relationship is still reasonably strong from one end to the other. For a bit of empirical support (indirect – best I could find quickly), note that marriage satisfaction relates negatively to the neuroticism of one's partner (Fisher & McNulty, 2008), though this may be less true of women with neurotic husbands (Whiteford, 2010; for other moderators, see Larson, Blick, Jackson, & Holman, 2010).

The relationship between neuroticism and crime is somewhat more complex, largely because crime itself is diverse. Incarcerated populations are more neurotic (Dang & Sharma, 1995; Singh, Singh, Sinha, & Kumari, 1985; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1971; I also found support for this via negative emotionality in my own work as a research assistant in Robert Krueger's lab at the University of Minnesota in 2005), but neuroticism may not be the best trait predictor of delinquency (self-reported; Furnham & Thompson, 1991), antisocial behavior, or aggression – agreeableness seems to relate more strongly (negatively; Jones, Miller, & Lynam, 2011). Neuroticism relates to these, and to substance abuse and antisocial personality disorder, but not as strongly as to agreeableness or conscientiousness (both negative correlates; Ruiz, Pincus, & Schinka, 2008; see also Walters, 2014). Neuroticism doesn't predict criminal recidivism very well compared to demographic factors either (Gendreau, Little, & Goggin, 1996).

As @what implied in his response to your other question, "Would most people benefit from psychotherapy?" it seems safe enough to assume that anyone could benefit from psychotherapy, criminals included. Neuroticism is often undesirable from a personal standpoint, so neurotic individuals per se might be fairly motivated therapy clients, whereas antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is more ego-syntonic. ASPD is notoriously difficult to treat, though this reputation may be debatable. Wikipedia:

  ASPD is considered to be among the most difficult personality disorders to treat [(Gabbard & Gunderson, 2000)][verification needed]. Because of their very low or absent capacity for remorse, individuals with ASPD often lack sufficient motivation and fail to see the costs associated with antisocial acts...They may only simulate remorse rather than truly commit to change: they can be seductively charming and dishonest, and may manipulate staff and fellow patients during treatment [(Oldham, Skodol, & Bender, 2005)][verification needed]. Studies have shown that outpatient therapy is not likely to be successful, however the extent to which persons with ASPD are entirely unresponsive to treatment may have been exaggerated [(Salekin, 2002)].

  Those with ASPD may stay in treatment only as required by an external source, such as a parole. Residential programs that provide a carefully controlled environment of structure and supervision along with peer confrontation have been recommended [(Gabbard & Gunderson, 2000)]. There has been some research on the treatment of ASPD that indicated positive results for therapeutic interventions [(Derefinko & Widiger, 2008)]. Schema Therapy is also being investigated as a treatment for ASPD [(Bernstein, Arntz, & Vos, 2007)]. A review by Charles M. Borduin features the strong influence of Multisystemic therapy (MST) that could potentially improve this imperative issue. However this treatment requires complete cooperation and participation of all family members [(Gatzke & Raine, 2000)]...

  Therapists of individuals with ASPD may have considerable negative feelings toward clients with extensive histories of aggressive, exploitative, and abusive behaviors [(Gabbard & Gunderson, 2000)]. Rather than attempt to develop a sense of conscience in these individuals, therapeutic techniques should be focused on rational and utilitarian arguments against repeating past mistakes. These approaches would focus on the tangible, material value of prosocial behavior [(Beck, Freeman, & Davis, 2006); emphasis added].

An interesting interaction may occur between ASPD and neuroticism (via depression, a correlated emotional state) in predicting psychotherapeutic outcomes for substance abuse: patients with both ASPD and depression respond better than those with ASPD only (Gabbard, 2000). This further supports a mediated link between neuroticism and criminality:

Neuroticism $\rightarrow$ Substance abuse $\rightarrow$ Criminality

Neuroticism $\rightarrow$ Depression $\rightarrow$ Better outcomes for psychotherapy of substance abuse, given ASPD $\rightarrow$ Less recidivism? Worth testing at least!

References

- Beck, A. T., Freeman, A., & Davis, D. D. (2006). Cognitive therapy of Personality Disorders (2nd Ed.). Guilford Press.
- Bernstein, D. P., Arntz, A., & Vos, M. D. (2007). Schema focused therapy in forensic settings: Theoretical model and recommendations for best clinical practice. International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, 6(2), 169–183. Retrieved from http://www.schematherapytraining.com/storage/Bernstein.pdf.
- Dang, R., & Sharma, M. (1995). Study of neuroticism and socio-demographic factors amongst female undertrials. Indian Journal of Criminology, 23(2), 65–70.
- Derefinko, K. J., & Widiger, T. A. (2008). Antisocial personality disorder. In S. H. Fatemi & P. J. Clayton (Eds.), The Medical Basis of Psychiatry (pp. 213–226). Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.
- Eysenck, S. B., & Eysenck, H. J. (1971). A comparative study of criminals and matched controls on three dimensions of personality. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 10(4), 362–366.
- Fisher, T. D., & McNulty, J. K. (2008). Neuroticism and marital satisfaction: The mediating role played by the sexual relationship. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(1), 112–122. Retrieved from http://www.recoveryonpurpose.com/upload/Neuroticism%20and%20Marital%20Satisfaction.pdf.
- Furnham, A., & Thompson, J. (1991). Personality and self-reported delinquency. Personality and Individual Differences, 12(6), 585–593.
- Gatzke, L. M., & Raine, A. (2000). Treatment and prevention implications of antisocial personality disorder. Current Psychiatry Reports, 2(1), 51–55.
- Gabbard, G. O. (2000). Psychotherapy of personality disorders. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 9(1), 1–6. Retrieved from http://vuir.vu.edu.au/19368/27/00jpr001.pdf.
- Gunderson, J. G., & Gabbard, G. O. (Eds.). (2008). Psychotherapy for personality disorders (Vol. 13). American Psychiatric Publishing.
- Gendreau, P., Little, T., & Goggin, C. (1996). A meta-analysis of the predictors of adult offender recidivism: What works! Criminology, 34(4), 575–608.
- Jones, S. E., Miller, J. D., & Lynam, D. R. (2011). Personality, antisocial behavior, and aggression: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Criminal Justice, 39(4), 329–337.
- Larson, J. H., Blick, R. W., Jackson, J. B., & Holman, T. B. (2010). Partner traits that predict relationship satisfaction for neurotic individuals in premarital relationships. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 36(5), 430–444.
- Oldham, J. M., Skodol, A. E., & Bender, D. S. (Eds.). (2007). The American Psychiatric Publishing textbook of personality disorders. American Psychiatric Publishing.
- Ruiz, M. A., Pincus, A. L., & Schinka, J. A. (2008). Externalizing pathology and the five-factor model: A meta-analysis of personality traits associated with antisocial personality disorder, substance use disorder, and their co-occurrence. Journal of Personality Disorders, 22(4), 365–388.
- Salekin, R. T. (2002). Psychopathy and therapeutic pessimism: Clinical lore or clinical reality? Clinical Psychology Review, 22(1), 79–112. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11564340_Psychopathy_and_therapeutic_pessimism._Clinical_lore_or_clinical_reality/file/60b7d5162d67bf28b8.pdf.
- Singh, U. P., Singh, L. B., Sinha, B., & Kumari, R. (1985). Extraversion, neuroticism and criminality: A comparative study of different criminal groups. Indian Journal of Social Work, 46(2), 259–266.
- Stone, M. H. (1993). Abnormalities of personality: Within and beyond the realm of treatment. WW Norton & Co.
- Walters, G. D. (2014). Drugs, crime, and their relationships: Theory, research, practice, and policy. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
- Whiteford, N. R. T. (2010). Neuroticism, marital interaction, and relationship satisfaction: An exploration of affect mediation. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder).


How are related self-confidence and self-esteem?

Technically, this is an English Language question really rather than about psychology or neuroscience.
Esteem is about respect and admiration. See https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/esteem
Therefore, someone who has self-esteem respects themselves and admires their achievements.
So to expand on that, if you have self-esteem, that helps to have self-confidence which leads to a sense of security in an emotional sense.


Philosophy Meets Neuroscience: The Molyneux's Problem

A child's mind is certainly not tabula rasa; language acquisition patterns in children suggest that they have an inborn module for it — domain-specific and, while flexible, clearly incompletely flexible.

The children would probably have the same troubles with constructions of spiders and snakes; the modules that we are said to have for those species concern our prepared learning to fear these organisms, not our identification of them.

Even if the modules did concern identification rather than fear, the fact that the inborn modules do not constitute inborn abilities or tendencies. Experiences must still be had with the snakes, spiders, etc for fear to be acquired.


Is Decision-Making Emotionally Based, with Rationalization as the only Conscious Component?

This is a very broad topic.  I'll attempt to quickly summarize the most relevant findings from a wide variety of research areas.

Post-rationalization:

There is a fair bit of evidence that explanation follows decision-making, rather than the other way around.  Here is a nice quote from Wikipedia attributed to Robert Zajonc: "decisions are made with little to no cognitive process ... we make judgements first, and then seek to justify those judgements by rationalization."  My favourite example of rationalization is Choice Blindess experiments, where subjects are "tricked" into believing that they made decisions that they did not actually make, but they nonetheless explain them as if they did.

Dual Process Theory:

Part of the implication of this phenomenon is that the human mind is divided into (at least) 2 seemingly independent processes - an unconscious process that makes the decision, and a conscious process that seeks to justify it after the fact.  Emotion plays an important role in some of these theories, though not all.  Emotion certainly affects decision-making, and may help decision-making under some circumstances.

Pre-rationalization:

The tendency to make decisions unconsciously - biased by emotion and many other cognitive biases - can be overcome in a straightforward manner.  In several experiments, this is done simply by ... asking.  For example, Timothy Wilson induced different (rational) decisions from subjects by simply asking them to provide reasons for their decisions before making them.  Similarly, Ap Dijksterhuis induced rational decisions from subjects by asking them to think about their decisions before making them.

Bounded Rationality:

Unfortunately, the results of the above experiments demonstrate that decision-making is not always improved by conscious deliberation before making a decision.  This is because sometimes decisions need to take emotions into account to be successful (as in Timothy Wilson's experiments where subjects are asked to predict their preferences), and other times human deliberation is limited by bounded rationality - we have a very limited capacity for logical thought.  Perhaps the best way to overcome some of our cognitive limitations is to use computers to make rational decisions, but at the moment, humans are still better at making decisions than computers in many areas where rule-based decision-making is not practical to use.


Is there a specific term for the notion of storing "algorithms" in human memory?

This is called procedural memory.

In textbooks, memory is often broken down into a hierarchy of types.  Note that this taxonomy is primarily a guide to language use - ie, how types of memory are labelled or referred to, not how memory is actually organised in the brain.  In standard hierarchies, recalling a mathematical formula would fall under semantic memory, while the process of applying the formula would be stored in procedural memory.

Procedural memory is considered implicit (unconscious) memory, and is most often associated with motor skill or muscle memory, but includes any learned procedure or process.  Notably, the process of learning a motor skill (such as riding a bike) mirrors that of learning a cognitive skill (such as playing chess), in that initially, the process can be acquired consciously (explicit), but with practice, it becomes unconscious (implicit).


Do victims of parental abuse and neglect become abusive or neglectful parents?

Bad parenting is considered a risk factor for all kinds of disfunctional behavior. For example, childhood victimization has been found to cause a higher risk of

juvenile delinquency
prostitution
adult re-victimization
lower IQ and reading ability
drug use and drug-related crime
child molestation
etc.

These are just random samples from the first page of a Google Scholar search for the term "bad parenting". This is a well researched topic, and it appears to have been shown that victims of abusive or neglective parents run an increased risk of showing abusive and criminal behavior themselves.

As for your specific question, yes, again it seems that adults that have been mistreated as children are at a higher risk to mistreat their own children. This is a consistent finding across many studies: one example, another example. Again, there are many more examples. The other risk factors, such as partner violence (i.e. adult re-victimization), teen pregnancy and substance abuse, are in turn facilitated by child victimization (see the list above).

The problem is that many studies are badly conceptualized and often do not carefully consider other influences such as personality traits and the responsibility of the child: not all children are born as the same blank slates, and a "difficult" (irascible, headstrong, energetic etc.) child will increase the likelihood that the parents use desperate attempts such as physical force to restrain it, and will as adult - and independent of being abused or not abused as a child - have a stronger tendency for anger, impatience and transgressing the borders of other people including his own children. One article analyzing methodological problems finds that of all studies on intergenerational child physical abuse published between 1965 and 2000 only ten included a control group, and of these ten only two met several other methodological standards, and of these two one study provided evidence for the intergenerational continuity of child physical abuse, while the other did not.

So it appears that this question has not been answered to full satisfaction by current research.

Edit:

A great overview of the research on the effects of different parenting styles is given on pages 182-188 in Arnett, J. J. (2010). Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Definition: Bad Parenting

Laurence Steinberg defines "bad parenting":

  So when I say bad parenting, I mean parenting that is excessively harsh, parenting that is inconsistent, or parenting that is excessively permissive. And lots of times kids get all three of those things together. So their parents will swing from being really, really harsh and punitive to not even caring, and being what most of us would consider to be negligent. And so those three things, the harshness, the permissiveness and the inconsistency, all have been shown to contribute to antisocial behavior during adolescence.


What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent?

Mainly: the choice of variables.

Beware that the exponent depends on the choice of parameters; or even worse - relations can change from power-law to linear, logarithmic or exponential, with redefining variables.

E.g. you can measure sound volume in either amplitude, energy density (square of the amplitude) or dB (logarithm of the first one). None of it is privileged. Moreover, "psychological magnitude" needs exact definition, for the same reason (so not only to specify which type of reaction is that but what is the exact physical quantity being measured).

In general, if you consider only qualitative parameters, then you can look at only at qualitative behaviour of the relation (e.g. if it is monotonous). To calculate exponents (or even - to claim that a certain relation is a power function) it is not enough.

Of course, there are many adaptations to make sensitivity higher (e.g. edge detection) or lower (e.g. to see well in lighting conditions differing by order of magnitude, in terms of light intensity). But to compare their exponents, for the comparison to make sense, you need to have a very good justification for the right choice of variables.


How long does it take to learn to cane travel?

Short answer
Generally, a few months of active, guided training.

Background
Based on an article from a guide cane instructor who is a cane traveler himself, I can answer the question as follows:

First off - it depends on at least three important variables;

The student's background;
The student's aptitude;
the amount of time available to the student.

Ad. 1 : If the student is planning only to use the cane in already familiar environments, the process will be easier. Fear of traffic, or unfamiliarity with it may complicate the learning process.

Ad. 2. The level of independence is important; an older persom who has been used to be guided by another, sighted person for years will have a hard time replacing those two eyes with a cane. A youngster, on the other hand, will likely be able to learn faster, be more motivated and more daring than an old person. The elderly may be less mobile and possibly afraid of falling, have balance disorders etc.

Ad. 3. Time should be measured in two ways: the number of hours per day and week, and the number of months to be filled with this schedule. The author of the cited article below started as a student spending fifteen to twenty hours a week in guided practice and that worked well for her. The author says to have known people who made good progress with four to five hours of guided practice in a week, anything under three hours per week is probably getting rather thin; and these hourse refer to specific skill practice, besides using the cane wherever and whenever possible.

The author spent an intensive six weeks on travel to reach a satisfactory level of skill. Most people he knows who worked steadily for several hours a week, plus out-of-class everyday use were able to gain sufficient skill to cane travel in two to three months when starting as a beginner.

Reference
- Bickford, Future Reflections (Winter 1996); 15(1)


What is a reliable physiological measure  (e.g., serotonin levels)  of positive affect?

First - you might want to redefine you search. Are you looking for happiness or rather  positive affect? Happiness is fairly ambigious term, and it's much more associated with positive psychology studies on well-being. If you are interested in more global definition of happiness, check the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

On the other hand, there is a large number of studies on physiological measurements of positive affect.

One such physiological measurement is Electromyography (EMG) - recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. EMG will detect very brief smiles or higher activity in cheek muscles (zygomaticus major) which are correlated with positive affect. There is quite classic (but very quoted) paper on that:

  Cacioppo JT, Petty RE, Losch ME, Kim HS. (1986) Electromyographic
  Activity Over Facial Muscle Regions Can Differentiate the Valence and
  Intensity  of Affective Reactions. J Pers Soc Psychol., 50(2):260-8. download

Another simple physiological assesment is heart rate measured by the interbeat interval (IBI). For example, study by Brosschot & Thayer (2003) shows that heart rate response is longer after negative emotions than after positive emotions.

  Brosschot JF, Thayer JF. (2003) Heart rate response is longer after
  negative emotions than after positive emotions. Int J Psychophysiol.,
  50(3):181-7.

In fact, the full spectrum of somatic measurements have been used along heart rate including pulse transmission time to the finger, skin conductance level or pupil dilation (Partala, 2003). All those are a bit less reliable methods and usually they detect arousal rather then indicate physiological differences between positive and negative affect.

  Partala T.; Surakka V. (2003) Pupil size variation as an indication of
  affective processing. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies,
  59(1):185-198. download

Finally, I would advise browsing literature on measurements of negative affect. You are likely to find some interesting methods there, like in this paper on the psychophysiology of crying (Gross et al., 1994).

  Gross JJ, Frederickson BL, Levenson RW. (1994) The psychophysiology of
  crying. Psychophysiology, 31(5):460-8. download


What is the relation between measures, constructs and concepts?

In speaking to constructs vs. measures, I believe that the difference is clear and implied in your background: constructs are that which cannot be directly measured (but we assume exists), where measures are directly measurable attributes that we assume relate to the construct. The process you seem to be questioning is that of the operational definition, or the process of defining that which cannot be measured (the construct) as that which can (the measurement). Your concern that these are not equivalent is quite right, and many papers are written for the sole purpose of explaining why a certain measure matches a theoretical construct (the process of measurement validation and establishing construct validity).

As to why operational definitions are necessary, the straightforward answer is simple: communication. As constructs are not measurable (in many cases), some type of operationalization must be used. If multiple claims are made on a construct, each using different operational definitions, the results may be contradictory purely due to the differences in the operational definitions assigned by separate researchers! (Education Letter, 2013)

Using operational definitions instead of simply listing the construct can help researchers better determine which results should be comparable. Remember, each of these definitions may have been validated, yet differences in the measurement will naturally yield differences in the data that may not be relevant to the construct. This is the heart of construct invalidity (Groves et al., 2009).

I've always enjoyed seminal papers, and one that you may be interested in is the seminal work defining construct validity (and distinguishing it from other types) by Lee Cronbach and Paul Meehl.

"Construct validity is ordinarily studied when the tester has no definite criterion measure of the quality with which he is concerned, and must use indirect measures. Here the trait or quality underlying the test is of central importance, rather than either the test behavior or the scores on the criteria" (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955, p. 282).

It sounds like you may take issue with failure to apply correct validity checks, and the application of the correct types of validity to the correct situations.

I hope this help to clarify the nuances of a very involved question! Perhaps the heart of the question/solution is this: though constructs and operational definitions of constructs get used interchangeably, they shouldn't be.

References

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin, 52(4), 281–302.

Groves, R. M., Fowler, F. J., Jr., Couper, M. P., Lepkowski, J. M., Singer, E., & Tourangeau, R. (2009). Survey Methodology (Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons.

General science; new findings reported from Carnegie Mellon University describe advances in general science. (2013). Education Letter, 90.


What is the scientific term for the expectation, that a personal experience positively deviates from what first- or second-hand experience suggests?

Are you referring to the optimism bias from a social psychology perspective?

Your brain has a built-in optimism bias. The phenomenon is also often
referred to as "the illusion of invulnerability," "unrealistic
optimism," and a "personal fable."
This bias leads us to believe that we are less likely to suffer from
misfortune and more likely to attain success than reality would
suggest.2 We believe that we will live longer than the average, that
our children will be smarter than the average, and that we will be
more successful in life than the average. But by definition, we can't
all be above average.

Source: VeryWellMind


Effective sampling rate in human visual system

Yes, you can experience the stroboscopic effect under continuous illumination. This wikipedia article does a nice job of summarizing relevant findings.

As mentioned in the article, there are two competing theories for how the stroboscopic effect happens under continuous illumination in the human visual system. The first theory is that human visual processing is like a movie camera and it operates on roughly discrete frames. The second theory is that neural adaptation is responsible: the brain adapts to the very regular patterns of motion, which can cause visual after-effects where the opposite pattern is perceived. Overlaying the actual motion with the visual after-effect will 'cancel out' the perceived motion.

Kline and Eaglemen (2008) present evidence against the discrete sampling hypothesis and supporting the adaptation hypothesis. Macdonald et al. (2014) present evidence for the discrete sampling account.


How to fit an ex-wald distribution model with R?

This seems promising. I haven't used it

Heathcote, A. (2004). Fitting Wald and ex-Wald distributions to response time data: An example using functions for the S-PLUS package. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(4), 678-694.
http://www.tascl.org/uploads/4/9/3/3/49339445/26_.pdf

It does include s-plus code in a supplement to the journal article:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2FBF03206550

Often S-plus can be used in R, sometimes with some adjustments.


Psychological explanation for exorcisms?

Google Scholar reveals a substantial quantity of learned research on the topic of exorcisms, of which the items below are but a few:

Ferracuti, S., & Sacco, R. (1996). Dissociative trance disorder: clinical and Rorschach findings in ten persons reporting demon possession and treated by exorcism. Journal of personality assessment, 66(3), 525-539. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa6603_4

Ross, C. A., Schroeder, E., & Ness, L. (2013). Dissociation and symptoms of culture-bound syndromes in North America: A preliminary study. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 14(2), 224-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2013.724338

McNamara, P. (2011). Spirit Possession and Exorcism: History, Psychology, and Neurobiology [2 volumes]: History, Psychology, and Neurobiology. ABC-CLIO.

Henderson, D. J. (1976). Exorcism, possession, and the Dracula cult: A synopsis of object-relations psychology. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 40(6), 603.

Bull, D. L. (2001). A phenomenological model of therapeutic exorcism for dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 29(2), 131-139. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164710102900204

Pfeifer, S. (1994). Belief in demons and exorcism in psychiatric patients in Switzerland. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 67(3), 247-258.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1994.tb01794.x

Rosik, C. H. (1997). When discernment fails: The case for outcome studies on exorcism. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 25(3), 354-363. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164719702500304

As for many religious behaviours, exorcism behaviours appear to exist between non-intersecting religious and cultural groups.
A review of the abstracts suggests that involvement in exorcism is considered to be a Dissociative disorder.  The Mayo Clinic also has an interesting article on Dissociative disorder.


Why do humans prefer symmetrical arrangement of objects?

Indicator of genetic fitness argument

There is an evolutionary psychology argument. As with most evolutionary psychology arguments, the strength of the evidence is typically a bit fuzzy.

Symmetry in many aspects of the human body is functional. Such symmetry might be seen as the natural state that arises from a healthy life and a youthful body. In contrast various genetic abnormalities, diseases, and the like  can give rise to asymmetry (e.g., scars, moles, freckles, ageing processes, deformities, etc.).

The argument might continue that it is adaptive for us to seek out sexual partners  who appear genetically and environmentally fit where symmetry may be one indication of this fitness. One could even extend the evolutionary argument to suggest that it would be adaptive to avoid certain types of diseased individuals in order to reduce the risk of catching some disease, where various forms of asymmetry may be indicative of this.

How does this explain our desire for symmetry in physical objects? The perception of beauty in the environment might be seen as an extension of perceptions of beauty in other people.

Little and Jones also summarise this perspective

  One explanation for the preference for symmetrical faces comes from a
  postulated link to an evolutionary adaptation to identify high-quality
  mates (see Thornhill & Gangestad (1999) for review). Symmetry in human
  faces has been linked to potential heritable fitness (‘goodgenes’)
  because symmetry is a useful measure of the ability of an organism to
  cope with developmental stress (both genetic and environmental). As
  the optimal developmental outcome of most characters is symmetry,
  deviation from perfect symmetry can be considered a reflection of
  challenges to development. Only high-quality individuals can maintain
  symmetrical development under environmental and genetic stress and
  therefore symmetry can serve as an indicator of phenotypic quality as
  well as genotypic quality (e.g. the ability to resist disease: see
  Møller (1997) and Møller & Thornhill (1998) for reviews). This logic
  would lead to a preference for high symmetry mates as evolution will
  have favoured individuals who had preferences for high-quality mates
  over low-quality mates. Indeed, morphological symmetry appears to be
  related to reproductive success in many species, including humans
  (Gangestad & Thornhill 1997a; Møller & Thornhill 1998). For example,
  more symmetrical human males have more sexual partners than less
  symmetrical men (Thornhill & Gangestad 1994) and symmetrical males are
  also more likely to be chosen as extra-pair partners (Gangestad &
  Thornhill 1997b). Thus the link between symmetry and attractiveness
  may reflect that preferences for symmetrical individuals may be
  potentially adaptive.

Perceptual argument

Enquist and Arak (1994) articulate a perceptual clarity argument. They wrote (my bolding):

  Humans and certain other species find symmetrical patterns more
  attractive than asymmetrical ones. These preferences may appear in
  response to biological signals1–3, or in situations where there is no
  obvious signalling context, such as exploratory behaviour4,5 and human
  aesthetic response to pattern6–8. It has been proposed9,10 that
  preferences for symmetry have evolved in animals because the degree of
  symmetry in signals indicates the signaller's quality. By contrast, we
  show here that symmetry preferences may arise as a by-product of the
  need to recognize objects irrespective of their position and
  orientation in the visual field. The existence of sensory biases for
  symmetry may have been exploited independently by natural selection
  acting on biological signals and by human artistic innovation. This
  may account for the observed convergence on symmetrical forms in
  nature and decorative art.

References

Enquist, M., Arak, A. & others (1994). Symmetry, beauty and evolution. Nature, 372, 169-172.
Little, A.C. & Jones, B.C. (2003). Evidence against perceptual bias views for symmetry preferences in human faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 270, 1759-1763. PDF


The psychology of patriotism, dying for one's own country

The quote "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is from one of Horace's Odes (III.2.13), and it translates as: "it is sweet and honorable to die for one's fatherland".

It is assumed that Horace did not glorify the death of a soldier in this poem but allude to the two predominant philosophical doctrines of his time, epicureism and stoa, and their perspective on the summum bonum, the greatest good. For epicureism this is lust ("sweet" in the quote), for the stoa it is virtue ("honorable").

From Horace's point of view, dying for your home country contradicts neither the epicureic nor the stoic ideal, as it implies both. Both philosophical doctrines were sceptical of a service to the state, and Horace says that serving your country is in tune with both doctrines.

Death for your country is glorified in a quote from Horace's Greek source, a verse by Tyrtaios  (Fragment 6D) about the service of the Spartans:

"The most beautiful death of all is when a warrior fights for his fatherland and dies for it."

Source:

Common internet knowledge ;-)


What advantages does a neuron with multiple dendrites have?

More dendritic input makes a neuron more suitable as an integrator. The more dendrites a neuron has, however, the less faithful it will transmit a single incoming signal, as other incoming input may interfere with transmission. Hence, a neuron with a single dendrite will be better suited to faithfully relay incoming signals.

Among the most faithful neurons are the cone bipolar cells in  the central part of the retina, who receive a single input and transmit a single output (Purves et al., 2001) via a single axon to the retinal ganglion cell who's axons make up the optic nerve, while on the other end of the spectrum there are, e.g., the Purkinje cells in the cerebellum that can receive input from as many as 80,000 fibers (Konnerth et. al, 1998).

References
- Konnerth et. al, PNAS (1998); 87: 2662-5
- Purves et al. (eds.), editors. Neuroscience. 2nd ed. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates (2001) Functional Specialization of the Rod and Cone Systems


Firstly not trusting the brain in itself does more harm than good, as it gives way to paranoia and anxiety, and serves to be a very unhealthy mental disaster.

Secondly, there is much more to decision making in the brain than just intuition and the analytical part of function, as factors such as personality, perception stemming from the frontal , and gathered experiences and learned memory from the hippocampus work together as well and much more as the brain works in an integrated manner interlinking both conscious and subconscious aspects of the brain. But what the brain does best is learn from experiences, and it keeps doing so and the best way to maintaining a healthy life is to have a healthy brain, and a healthy brain demands trust and constant learning.

Thirdly recent evidences based on research suggest that the prefrontal cortex continues to get developed and shaped even until a person hits his 30’s while the other parts of brain continue to grow and develop which is where neuroplasticity also finds its role through out our life(Hötting & Röder, 2013).

If you guys want to further understand my comprehension,refer to this article, hope it was helpful:). Reference :
Hötting, K., & Röder, B. (2013). Beneficial effects of physical exercise on neuroplasticity and cognition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(9), 2243-2257. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.04.005
Mullally, S., & Maguire, E. (2013). Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future. The Neuroscientist, 20(3), 220-234. doi: 10.1177/1073858413495091


For binary (spike train) signals, take FFT of signal or autocorrelation of signal?

For binary data (spike-trains), people use a spike-train autocovariance function (same as autocorrelation but subtracting the mean firing rate). It's commonly used to study brain oscillations (e.g. Engel & Konig, 1991). There is a good description of the math in the Dayan & Abbott (page 27).

Dayan, P., & Abbott, L. F. (2001). Theoretical neuroscience (Vol. 806). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Engel, A. K., & Konig, P. (1991). Interhemispheric synchronization of oscillatory neuronal responses in cat visual cortex. Science, 252(5009), 1177.


Is Jordan Peterson correct when he states that "as societies become more egalitarian, personality differences across genders maximize"?

Searching the first three pages of "personality gender egalitarianism" on Google Scholar, I found five studies on this topic. All of them support the view finding of increased gender differences in more egalitarian countries, and I didn't find any that were against. [Edit: added a Falk 2018 as noted in a comment.]
Most of the studies analyze the Big Five personality traits. Schmitt 2017 also claims increased differences in "Dark Triad traits, self‐esteem, subjective well‐being, depression and values", and Falk 2018 finds increased differences in "willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust". One study, Lippa 2010 argues that the differences in the Big Five are quite small, whereas "gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’". The study authors agree that this shows some inadequacies in social role theory and is more consistent, attributional, and social comparison theories.
Costa Jr., Paul T.,Terracciano, Antonio,McCrae, Robert R.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 81(2), Aug 2001, 322-331. link

Secondary analyses of Revised NEO Personality inventory data from 26 cultures (N =23,031) suggest that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas. Contrary to predictions from evolutionary theory, the magnitude of gender differences varied across cultures. Contrary to predictions from the social role model, gender differences were most pronounced in European and American cultures in which traditional sex roles are minimized. Possible explanations for this surprising finding are discussed, including the attribution of masculine and feminine behaviors to roles rather than traits in traditional cultures.

Schmitt, David P.,Realo, Anu,Voracek, Martin,Allik, Jüri
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 94(1), Jan 2008, 168-182. link:

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. …

Lippa, R. A. (2010), Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4: 1098-1110. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x. link

How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.

Schmitt, D. P., Long, A. E., McPhearson, A. , O'Brien, K. , Remmert, B. and Shah, S. H. (2017), Personality and gender differences in global perspective. Int J Psychol, 52: 45-56. doi:10.1002/ijop.12265. link

… Several large cross‐cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality—Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self‐esteem, subjective well‐being, depression and values—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically‐evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

Falk, Armin and Hermle, Johannes (2018), Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality. Science. doi:10.1126/science.aas9899. link

[According to the resource hypothesis,] greater availability of material and social resources removes the gender-neutral goal of subsistence, which creates the scope for gender-specific ambitions and desires. In addition, more gender-equal access to those resources may allow women and men to express preferences independently from each other. As a consequence, one would expect gender differences in preferences to be positively associated with higher levels of economic development and gender equality.
We tested these competing predictions using data on experimentally validated measures of willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust for 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples. So that the data would be geographically representative, the dataset was chosen so as to include all continents and a broad range of cultures and economic development levels. In total, the data represent about 90% of both the world population and global income.
The data revealed substantial cross-country variation in gender differences in preferences. Gender differences were found to be strongly positively associated with economic development as well as gender equality. These relationships held for each preference separately as well as for a summary index of differences in all preferences jointly. Quantitatively, this summary index exhibited correlations of 0.67 (P < 0.0001) with log GDP per capita and 0.56 (P < 0.0001) with a Gender Equality Index (a joint measure of four indices of gender equality), respectively. To isolate the separate impacts of economic development and gender equality, we conducted a conditional analysis, finding a quantitatively large and statistically significant association between gender differences and log GDP per capita conditional on the Gender Equality Index, and vice versa. These findings remained robust in several validation tests, such as accounting for potential culture-specific survey response behavior, aggregation bias, and nonlinear relationships.

Mac Giolla, E. and Kajonius, P. J. (2019), Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding. Int J Psychol. doi:10.1002/ijop.12529. link

Sex differences in personality have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries. We advance this research by using an extensive personality measure, the IPIP‐NEO‐120, with large country samples (N > 1000), from 22 countries. Furthermore, to capture the multidimensionality of personality we measure sex differences with a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis distance D). Results indicate that past research, using univariate measures of effect size, have underestimated the size of between‐country sex differences in personality. Confirming past research, there was a strong correlation (r = .69) between a country's sex differences in personality and their Gender Equality Index. Additional analyses showed that women typically score higher than men on all five trait factors (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness), and that these relative differences are larger in more gender equal countries.


Is there a word that differentiate between image rotation and image translation?

I believe you are talking about recognition part that say if the image is transformed to be flipped one is able to righaway recognize the object, however if the transformation is say 90 degrees then its hard. I believe the word is transformation-invariance.


Why does IQ have a truncated normal distribution?

IQ isn't normal, it's normalized to have mean 100 and standard deviation 15, usually via a percentile method.

The reason IQ looks roughly normal is because intelligence (however it is defined) is a complex trait. Complex traits are predicted to have a roughly normal distribution based on the central limit theorem: a sum of many individual factors (including genetic and environmental ones) will tend to be distributed normally in a population, even if the underlying factors themselves are not normal.

There is no real concrete measure "IQ": it isn't measuring a real-world physical property the way you measure mass or length. Instead, you use tests intended to get some measure of that abstract trait, and then normalize individuals based on the group statistics. Actual tests administered to measure IQ will have a minimum and maximum score: you can at worst get every question wrong, at best get every question right.


Is there research to prove that humans achieve more when challenging ourselves or when we challenge others?

Generally, being observed raises performance on simple tasks and can hinder performance on complex tasks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation

For trivia, notice that the experiment widely regarded to be the first in social psychology was of observed vs. unobserved cycling. Being watched made people cycling faster: https://www.simplypsychology.org/Social-Facilitation.html excerpt:

  "According to Cottrell (1968), it’s not the presence of other people that is important for social facilitation to occur but the apprehension about being evaluated by them. We know that approval and disapproval are often dependent on others’ evaluations and so the presence of others triggers an acquired arousal drive based on evaluation anxiety."


Is there a database of disgusting images for stimuli for experimental study of disgust?

Try the IAPS--International Affective Picture System; they have disgusting images as well as norming procedures and data.  You can read about it here and request it (as long as you have a faculty advisor) here.