# Question
Title: What are some known roles or correlations of glucocorticoid receptor function to behaviour?
The NR3C1 gene encodes for a neuron-specific glucocorticoid receptor (GR), of which methylation levels have been shown to relate to altered maternal care and stress response in rodents (Weaver et al., 2004) and to suicide in humans (McGowan et al., 2009).

I am wondering what other behaviours and phenotypes could or has GR function been associated with?

# Answer
First off, the question is superbly broad and it would have faced closure if it would be asked at the time of this writing. Nonetheless, given the high number of upvotes I think it deserves an answer. Note that my answer is just a small bunch of behaviors associated with the NR3C1 gene, as based on a cursory Google Scholar search, using the terms '*NR3C1 + behavior*'.

<sub>**References**
**-** Efstathopoulos *et al*., *Translat Psychiatry* (2018); **8**(121)
**-** Sheinkopf *et al*., *Front Behav Neurosci* (2016)
**-** Li *et al*., *Genet Test Mol Biomarkers* (2017); **21**(8): 497-505
**-** Park *et al*., *Behav Brain Functions* (2016); **12**:22
**-** Vukojevic *et al*., *J Neurosci* (2014); **34**(31): 10274-84 **-** Zhen *et al*., *Prev Sci* (2016)</sub>
> 1 votes

# Answer
Previously: All cells have receptors for glucorticoids, see these sources:

You do not want us to include in our response all effects on the behavior of all the cells of the body (in animals and humans of course) (with direct functions or modulating function of course).

In this specific case it does not work safeguard in the subject raised saying: I ask for the gene .. since in that case you would ask about the behavioral functions of that gene ... and we are in the same situation. Or maybe I did not understand your intelligent question.
> -2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, stress, genetics
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# Question
Title: By which neuronal mechanisms does music make us happy or sad?
There are brain regions (X) that show stronger activation for joyful music, regions (Y) that show stronger activation for sad music, and regions (Z) that show similar activation for both.

Assuming that joyful or sad music activates similar brain regions as other tasks designed to induce a joyful or sad mood, we know more specifically:

On the other side, it has repeatedly been found that happy music is characterized by fast tempo and major mode, whereas sad music is typically played in slow tempo and minor mode.

Bringing these findings together the question arises

> By which specific neuronal mechanisms does fast tempo and major mode music activate more strongly brain regions X than regions Y? And vice versa.

Is it by some kind of fine-tuned resonance (involving feedback) between the sensory input from the ears and the brain regions involved?

Are there specific theoretical (computational) models, and have they been tested?

How can - by these mechanisms - the subtle difference between a major and a minor third become so significant, both neuronally and emotionally?

---

References:

# Answer
In a comprehensive review that included 140+ primary research papers, Juslin & Laukka (2003) explain that there is a close relationship between vocal expression of emotions and the musical expression of emotions. Indeed, music and speech have similar characteristics and therefore can illicit similar emotions (table 1).

Table 1. Commonalities of speech and music in emotional expression. source: KTH Sweden

Wikipedia states that emotion is indeed linked with tonality in both music and speech:

> The tones in music seem like a characterization of the tones in human speech, which indicate emotional content. The vowels in the phonemes of a song are elongated for a dramatic effect, and it seems as though musical tones are simply exaggerations of the normal verbal tonality.

**References**
**-** Gramfors & Johansson, thesis KTH Sweden
**-** Juslin & Laukka, *Psych Bullet* (2003); **129**(5): 770–814
> 2 votes

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Tags: cognitive-neuroscience, emotion, theoretical-neuroscience, cognitive-modeling, music
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# Question
Title: Are the findings of the Rat Park experiments applicable to porn addiction?
Many people say porn is addictive, but the conversation around this sounds quite similar to the conversation around drugs -

https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600144/

which hold that substance and not setting is the main driver of addiction. In the Rat Park experiments the addictive power of morphine was negligible if the rats had a happy social scene instead of a blank cage to live in - see here for clever cartoon on it

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/

http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park

Extrapolating from rats to people, is it possible that porn addiction is less to do with the 'substance' and more to do with the social setting of the user ? (Note: there are critiques of flaws in rat park experiment but I don't know where to find them).

# Answer
As a therapist working with patients suffering from all kinds of addictions – drugs, porn, computer games, social media, gambling, sex, etc. – the simple answer is that addictive behavior is influenced by:

* currenct life circumstances (Rat Park versus cages, if you want)
* personality (some people are more prone to addiction than others)
* life experiences (childhood abuse and other trauma)

So yes, a person in a happy romantic relationship with a supportive network of friends and family working a satisfying job will most likely not become addicted to porn from masturbating to it every now and then, just as they won't become addicted to THC from smoking a joint on Saturday evenings, but the influence of these life circumstances do not protect someone from becoming addicted when they make traumatic experiences such as the death of a child or when their personality is "addiction prone" (e.g. high neuroticism, low conscientiousness, high impulsivity, high reward and threat sensitivities, and so on).
> 1 votes

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Tags: addiction
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# Question
Title: Is the logic of "Herrnstein's syllogism" sound, and are its premises true?
Herrnstein (1973) wrote

> My theory hinges on an argument in the form of a syllogism:
>
> 1) If differences in mental abilities are inherited, and
> 2) If success requires those abilities, and
> 3) If earnings and prestige depend on success,
> 4) Then social standing (which reflects earnings and prestige) will be based to some extent on inherited differences among people.

Herrnstein, R. J., Deutsch, K. W., & Edsall, T. B. (1973). Controversy. *Society*, 10(4), 5-6.

# Answer
> 4 votes
*Herrnstein's Syllogism*, as shown above, comes from the 1971 article written for *The Atlantic* by psychologist Richard Herrnstein (Herrnstein, 1971). It argued that while socioeconomic status of individuals may be caused by various factors, one of those factors must be differences in inherited genetics. The article ignited a big controversy.

As a personal note, I must admit that I don't quite understand the controversy (Well, at a scientific level). It was already accepted by most psychologists in the 1970s that general intelligence was a heritable trait. Further, it was accepted that general intelligence statistically predicted success in education as well as in professional life. Therefore, it should not be surprising if genetic differences acting on intelligence would not be distributed evenly across the social environment.

I will first deal with the premises. Is general intelligence heritable? Then I will merge the two next premises. Does intelligence predict mobility in success and social standing? I will also look directly at the conclusion of the syllogism. Do differences in genetics that influence differences in intelligence vary as a function of socioeconomic status?

Was Herrnstein's conclusion scientifically justified back then? That could be argued, but ultimately it doesn't matter. Today we have much more evidence available. We can now directly look at molecular genetics that is known to influence intelligence. As I will show, the best current evidence absolutely supports Herrnstein's conclusion. This does not mean that intelligence is everything, or that genetics is everything, but that it is a part of the story.

### Heritability of Intelligence

Is intelligence, educational success and similar variables partly heritable traits? In fact, this is not even questioned by the relevant experts anymore. From a landmark *Nature* editorial (2017), I quote:

> *it’s well established and uncontroversial among geneticists that together, differences in genetics underwrite significant variation in intelligence between people.*

In an expert review on five findings regarding genetics and intelligence, the first noted finding is the heritability of intelligence (Plomin & Deary, 2015).

The question remains: how do we know that intelligence is partly heritable? Quantitative genetics is a field which attempts to address such questions. In particular, methods have been developed that attempt to estimate aggregate genetic influence *without finding the influence of particular genetic variants*.

The most highly used method for humans is the **twin study**. Identical twins are more genetically similar than fraternal twins. Identical twins also tend to be more similar than fraternal twins on various variables such as facial similarity, height, and even on psychological variables. From this increase in genetic similarity coupled with the increase in phenotypic similarity, an estimate of heritability can be calculated. This method can be extended to compare not just similarities between twins, but in general siblings of all kinds, cousins and more in **pedigree studies**. For example, based on a massive Dutch birth cohort a team of researchers estimated a heritability of educational achievement of 85% (Schwabe et al, 2017).

Another method is the **adoption study**. This method compares the correlations of children with their adoptive parents and with their biological parents. Based on this an estimate of heritability is calculated. Adoption studies show substantial genetic influence on intelligence (McGue et al, 2007). One of the most powerful variants of the adoption study is a study that compares the similarity of **identical twins separated at birth and reared apart.** For example, the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart found a very high heritability estimate (Bouchard et al, 1990). Identical twins are highly similar in intelligence regardless of whether they are reared together or not.

These are classical methods of estimating heritability, yet more and newer methods have been developed. **Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis** (GCTA) estimates narrow-sense heritability by directly quantifying the chance genetic similarity of unrelated strangers and comparing it to their measured similarity on a trait. A study of approximately 20,000 individuals found a substantial heritability of general intelligence with this method (Hill et al, 2018). In general, based on this finding and all the other findings together, one can conclude that genetic similarity is a better predictor of similarity in intelligence than environmental similarity is. For example, identical twins reared apart are much more similar than adoptees raised together.

There are far more studies one could cite, and other lines of evidence. For example, inbreeding has been shown to lower intelligence, and this effect is larger the higher degree the inbreeding is (Fareed & Afzal, 2014). This should only be viewed as a snippet of the evidence from which researchers conclude that it is "uncontroversial" that genetics influence intelligence.

One thing is to estimate the aggregate genetic effect; another thing entirely is to find the actual genetic variants at play. This is done using **genome-wide association studies** (GWAS). It has been found that intelligence is a highly polygenic trait, meaning that it is influenced of *many* genes each of very small individual effect. This means that huge sample sizes are required to unlock the individual variants that affect the trait. However, in the last few years, GWA studies have found many variants affecting intelligence, see e.g. (Savage et al, 2018). By aggregating the effects of many of the variants thought to affect the trait one gets a **polygenic score**, such that a higher polygenic score is associated with higher average intelligence. Of course, most of the genetic variants have yet to be found, and hence only a moderate portion of the variance in intelligence can be captured directly by molecular genetics currently.

### Practical Implications of Intelligence Differences

It can be difficult to establish causal effects in the life sciences. Does a correlation between higher pay and higher intelligence mean that higher pay causes higher intelligence? Or how about vice versa? Or is a third variable at play? One of the best ways of providing causal evidence is through **longitudinal studies**. For example, measure the intelligence of a sample at age 11 and see if that predicts later success.

Higher intelligence longitudinally predicts **higher grades**. For example, a meta-analysis of 240 independent samples with 105,185 participants finds that intelligence is a very strong predictor of school grades (Roth et al, 2015). In a massive longitudinal study of 70,000+ English children the association between intelligence measured at age 11 and educational achievement later was tested. Educational achievement was calculated as a general factor of GCSE results and they found a strong correlation of 0.81 between measured intelligence and educational achievement (Deary et al, 2007). Studies that attempt to break down whether teachers, schools, or individual student factors matter most for student educational success find that individual factors account for the vast majority of the variance (Detterman, 2016).

General intelligence has been found to be a big predictor of **job success**, especially in jobs of higher complexity (Gottfredson, 1997; Schmidt, Oh & Shaffer, 2016).

General intelligence longitudinally predicts **financial well-being** (Furnham & Cheng, 2017). A large-scale longitudinal analysis showed that intelligence affected **salary growth** whereas socioeconomic background primarily affected starting salary (Ganzach, 2011). Intelligence predicts **upward socioeconomic mobility** (PEW Upward Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States).

Individuals tested and assessed to be gifted at young age longitudinally predicts **profound achievements academically and professionally** (Makel et al, 2016).

Highly intelligent individuals are much more likely to **become inventors** (Aghion et al, 2017). This study found that intelligence *"matters more than all family background variables combined"*.

We already know that intelligence is highly heritable, and hence these effects are expected to be partly due to genetic differences. Yet, some posit that these effects may be due to some socioeconomic variables that are not controlled for.

Testing this hypothesis is possible with **within family sibling analysis**. By restricting studies to only look at the outcomes of intelligence differences between siblings who are raised together, one can establish that these effects are not due to different rearing environments. In fact, restricting analyses to siblings only slightly changes the associations (Murray, 2002). The study on the origins of inventors mentioned above similarly does a brother-only comparison, and they conclude *"This suggests that these coefficients capture an effect of IQ on the probability of inventing which is largely independent of unobserved family background"*.

### Herrnstein's Conclusion: Societal Stratification of Genetics

Taking the two previous sections together, I don't see a plausible way in which it would not be the case that genetic variants influencing intelligence would distribute unevenly across socioeconomic lines. However, today we have far more direct evidence in the form of molecular genetics. As I already alluded to in the section on genetic influence on intelligence, we now know many variants influencing intelligence. From the DNA of an individual person one can then sum up the effects of the variants into a **polygenic score** associated with that individual. Indeed, as I will show, these polygenic scores have been show to predict various outcomes and have been shown to not be distributed evenly (which is exactly Herrnstein's conclusion in other words).

One cause of increased genetic stratification is **assortative mating**. Assortative mating is when couples are more similar than random strangers. In fact, intelligence is the psychological variable that has the highest degree of assortative mating (Plomin & Deary, 2015). This has not just been found at the phenotypic level, but also at a genetic level. In a study of 24,662 spousal pairs a team of researchers found a genetic correlation of educational attainment between spousal pairs of 0.654 (Robinson, ..., Visscher, 2017). Since intelligence is heritable, assortative mating of intelligence/educational attainment makes it even more likely that intelligent parents pass on genes that are associated with increased intelligence.

In a large sample, a team of researchers showed that **spousal pairs where both were university educated had children with higher polygenic scores** than pairs where only one or none were university educated. Furthermore, **polygenic scores predicted educational mobility**. Children of educated parents who went on to become highly educated themselves had higher polygenic scores than children who did not become educated like their parents. On the other hand, children of non-educated parents who went on to become educated, unlike their parents, had higher polygenic scores than children who, like their parents, did not become educated (Ayorech et al, 2017).

It is well known that students of some schools do better on average than students of other schools. But the question remains: is it because of the schools? Studies already referenced earlier showed strong evidence that individual factors account for the largest amount of variance. In a large sample of students from different types of schools, a team of researchers found that indeed students do better in more expensive private schools. However, once they controlled for various pre-selection factors there remained no statistical difference. In other words, they did not find evidence that it was *because* of the schools that the students did well, but rather the schools had *selected* students who already were good. But furthermore, they found that **differences in exam performance between the schools mirrored the genetic differences between them**. That is, they found that pupils attending expensive selective schools had higher polygenic scores on average (Smith-Woolley et al, 2018).

Intelligence has been shown to predict later wealth as shown in the previous section. However, whether this is partly due to genetics can be tested directly be examining whether **polygenic scores predict later wealth**. A large sample study examined exactly this and they concluded that *"genetic endowments linked to educational attainment strongly and robustly predict wealth at retirement"* (Barth et al, 2018).

Lastly, do longitudinal studies show that polygenic scores predict upward social mobility? A major study on this was recently published. They took data from *five* samples of more than 20,000 individuals and showed that **polygenic scores predicted longitudinal socioeconomic mobility**. In sibling-analyses the sibling with higher polygenic score was more likely to be upwardly mobile. Not only that, **individuals of lower socioeconomic status had lower average polygenic scores** (Belsky et al, 2018). That is a validation of Herrnstein's conclusion in modern words: namely that differences in social standing is partly due to genetic differences.

### Conclusion

As I have shown, there is more than a little evidence that Herrnstein's premises and conclusion were correct. However, this does not mean that intelligence or genetics is all that matters. Many of the studies above, and others like them, also show effects of non-genetic origin. However, to suggest that genetics is *part* of the explanation is scientifically justified.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Take a look at this.

"...,The Bell Curve. Herrnstein and Murray argue that social inequality (including racial inequality) is the result of inherited variations in IQ. Here, Chomsky presents his critique of Herrnstein’s position:"

http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/chomsky-on-iq-and-inequality

Chomsky, Noam. 1972. ‘I.Q. Tests: Building Blocks for the New Class System.’ Rampart:24–30. pp. 26, 27, 28, 30.

# Answer
> 0 votes
Modern genetics does indeed confirm what Hernstein was arguing for.

However, the nature vs nurture debate is a false dichotomy; here is a basic logical argument:

Either intelligence has a genetic component or intelligence is caused by the environment alone.

Down Syndrome is not caused by the environment alone.

Therefore, intelligence has a genetic component.

As you can guess, there is no division between genes and behavior, let alone brain structure, so this is why Professor Plomin, a professor of genetics, makes the case that genetic differences are responsible for most variation in psychological traits – things like personality and *cognitive abilities*\- in his most recent book entitled, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are."

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Tags: intelligence, iq
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title: Can logic be traced back to neurons?

text:
# Question
Title: Can logic be traced back to neurons?
In our everyday experience, and in both math and philosophy particularly, there exist some binary order in the sense that some statements can be classified as true or false.

Does this have a specific neural correlation in the brain (classifying a statement as either true or false)? Or in other words, is it possible to correlate the process of assigning true/false with some particular feature of the brain?

# Answer
Certainly some statements are either true or false. Either it rains or it doesn't. But when you think about many of these statements more carefully, the truth of these statements isn't really binary at all, or the binary fact is largely irrelevant.

Using the weather example, for most people it is not very helpful to know that it doesn't rain when there is a hurricane or it's snowing, both of which wouldn't usually be considered "not rain" by someone who wants to know what to wear. So the answer to "Does it rain?" usually isn't "No", but, for example, "You should take your umbrella because it looks like it might rain later".

The brain also isn't binary. Axons do not either forward an electrical impulse or not, but impulses of different intensities or frequencies. Neurons are often not activated by impulses from a single synapse, but usually by multiple synapses. Synapses do not either send out transmitters or not, but different amounts of them. Functions aren't located in one area, but in multiple areas. And so on.

Logic and maths (and psychological theories) are *simplifications* of a very complex reality. They provide simple solutions that often work (because life is flexible enough to adapt to a rigid approach), but just as often logic or mathematical (or psychological) approaches to deal with real problems are destined to fail.
> 2 votes

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: Is Freuds theory of negation testable and does it survive testing?
Freuds body of work not only provides a basis von clinical practice, but is also often quoted in social sciences and social philosophy. I recently came across a text that references Freuds concept of *Verneinung* (Negation):

> Ein verdrängter Vorstellungs- oder Gedankeninhalt kann also zum Bewusstsein durchdringen, unter der Bedingung, dass er sich verneinen lässt. Die Verneinung ist eine Art, das Verdrängte zur Kenntnis zu nehmen, eigentlich schon eine Aufhebung der Verdrängung, aber freilich keine Annahme des Verdrängten. \[...\]. Mit Hilfe der Verneinung wird nur die eine Folge des Verdrängungsvorganges rückgängig gemacht, dass dessen Vorstellungsinhalt nicht zum Bewusstsein gelangt. Es resultiert daraus eine Art von intellektueller Annahme des Verdrängten bei Fortbestand des Wesentlichen an der Verdrängung.
>
> A supressed element of thoughts or imaginations can surface in the conscious mind under the condition it can be negated. Negation is away of acknowledging the supressed, actually a repeal of the supression, but of course not an acceptance \[...\] By way of negation only one consequence of the supression is undone, that the content of the supressed does not become conscious. The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the supressed, while the supression mostly persists.

(German text wikipedia, translation mine)

Now my question is, is this aspect of negation testable (=falsifiable) in some way? What where results of such tests, if any? Absent tests that would satisfy a positivist, is there a body of experience from clinical practice that supports (or not) this theory of negation?

I'm aware that there's a lively debate about inhowfar psychoanalysis is science or pseudoscience. Much of psychoanalysis is not falsifiable, but this specific aspect may be.

# Answer
The correct translation of *Verneinung* in English is **denial**. Roy Baumeister, Karen Dale, and Kristin Sommer (2002) have reviewed empirical evidence for (or against) seven of Freud's defense mechanisms and have found that "denial \[has\] been amply shown in studies". You can read about the findings in detail in the article itself, which is currently avialable online here.

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Source:

* Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, 66(6), 1081-1124. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.00043
> 6 votes

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Tags: psychoanalysis
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title: Nociceptor (possible threat signal)

text:
# Question
Title: Nociceptor (possible threat signal)
I've read this on Wikipedia:

> A nociceptor is a sensory neuron that responds to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to the spinal cord and the brain.

What is a "possible threat" signal? And, how is it different from a "real threat" signal in terms of the way they are transmitted?

# Answer
> 1 votes
This statement on Wikipedia is merely intending to separate the agency of determining "What is pain?" from the nociceptors. Nociceptors can be activated by a number of stimuli that reflect possible damage (i.e., a possible threat): this could include signals released by cells that are actually damaged, it could include hot temperature, it could include certain types of pressure or touch.

The decision about whether a particular stimulus is sufficiently threatening to warrant a response (which could include things like reflexes all the way up to the perceptual and emotional experience that we refer to as pain) is made in the spinal cord and brain. At the level of the nociceptor, "possible threat" and "real threat" aren't any different: the nociceptor is just reporting the possibility of the threat. The CNS makes a 'decision' about how to respond.

This system is really no different than the other sensory systems, they all carry some information to the CNS which then interprets that information.

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Tags: neuroscience, neurology
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# Question
Title: For an average adult, in general, if one knows they will wake up in the middle of a cycle--is it better to go to bed later?
Let us say that one consistently goes to sleep at the same time every day, and sets an alarm for the same duration of sleep 7 hours and 45 minutes (e.g., 10:45pm to 6:30am).

One day, they get caught up in something, and are 30 minutes late to "bedtime." Is it better to wait 45-60 minutes to wake up at the same time (at the end of a cycle), refreshed, and not in the middle of a cycle, groggy?

---

I know there are some odd assumptions here, but if you could please either help edit or have better questions (or advice) to strike more at the heart of the matter--please do so. I think the largest assumption is the roughly 90 minutes sleep phase cycles at the end at least:

# Answer
As a precursor, even if a stringent sleep schedule is absolutely followed, one still needs to practice other good sleep hygiene habits: avoiding blue light (or using a filter for screens), exercising regularly, eating healthy and attaining an overall equanimous mood (lack of distress). That, among other non-ideal factors, such as sleep disturbances could also result in a poor nights sleep. But the question was stated as if in a 'perfect vacuum.' Non-idealities are overlooked.

That being said, I am going off the aforementioned assumptions about religiously going to bed at 10:45 and waking at 6:30 every day--including weekends. Let's say this person could sleep for nine hours (9:15 TIB), and we can safely assume that an adequate nights sleep is 7:45 TIB. In other words, this person can be high-functioning on 7.5 hours of sleep (five phases).

**Is it better to wait until 12:15?** (Either way, 6:30 wakeup for work stays constant.) One deviant day--does it matter? When will the sleep debt be relinquished? Honestly, I didn't find any research remotely about it.

Let's go out on a limb, and say it doesn't matter given the ideal-vacuum conditions. Then how many deviations, say, twice a week--do matter? How many will lead to partial sleep deprivation? Still, the answer is **unknown**.

---

So I emailed sleep researchers from U.W. Madison and Stanford:

`Going to sleep in the middle of a phase versus "catching" the next phase (with less sleep) for one night` (subject)

> Hello Professor \_______,
>
> I have question for you about making a bedtime choice, a deviation, from a consistent sleep schedule: For an average adult, in general, if one knows they will wake up in the middle of a cycle--is it better to go to bed later?
>
> ***Scenario1***
>
> Get home late, and ready to be in bed at 11:15 PM. Must wake at 6:30 for work.
>
> ***Scenario2***
>
> Get home late, later, and ready to be in bed at 11:45 PM. Must wake at 6:30 for work.
>
> The first is 30 minutes late. The second is 60. Let's say for this person that we can safely assume that an adequate nights sleep is 7:45 TIB. In other words, this person can be high-functioning on exactly 7.5 hours of sleep (while following a consistent sleep/wake routine).
>
> → Is it better to wait until 12:15?
>
> \[...\] I ask this question because I follow the routine above. I deviate 1-2 times a month, and either way usually take a nap before 3PM to follow, but persistently wonder which is the ideal choice.

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## Prof. Responses

> Hi Adam,
>
> There is not easy answer, I do not know of direct evidence for one schedule over the other; you are the best judge; try the different schedules and decide which one works for you (i.e. you feel better and you are “ready” to go)
>
> It may be that they are very similar; in any case, it is dangerous to assume 7 or 8 hours is what YOU need
>
> Inter individual variability is huge, this is why each person is the best judge

~ C.C.

> Adam,
>
> Unfortunately, there is no good answer. The data for waking up in the middle of a cycle is sparse and doesn't offer good conclusions (the only reasonable one is that if it makes you feel better to wake up at the end of a cycle, that's probably a good thing). There are some circadian consequences of bouncing around a sleep onset time too much, with greater variability in onset time leading to more difficulty initiating sleep (and probably some other changes as well, though less well documented). Me, I'd stick with the earlier bed time that is closer to standard bedtime and get the extra sleep...

~ J.Z.

## Going Further

Assess your ideal amount of sleep by taking a 'sleep vacation.' Over a two-week period, keep your consistent bedtime, but don't wake up with an alarm clock. Log. (See healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/need-sleep/what-can-you-do/assess-needs.)

How do you objectively analyze your sleep?

> There are two commonly used methods to assess sleep, Actigraphy and Polysomnography. Actigraphy is a non-invasive method of monitoring sleep and involves wearing wrist activity monitors, which are devices worn like a wristwatch that continuously record body movement (usually stored in 1-min epochs). \[...\] Actigraphy is useful for understanding sleep patterns as it is non-invasive and relatively easy to collect data over significant periods of time (commonly two weeks of monitoring).
>
> The second method is Polysomnography (PSG) which is a sleep study in which body functions such as EEG, eye movements, muscle activity and cardiac activity are measured. PSG provides information on sleep staging and is considered the “gold standard” for assessing sleep quality and quantity.

~ Sports Science Exchange (2013) Vol. 26, No. 113, page 2

→ DIY: https://sleepjunkies.com/features/the-ultimate-guide-to-sleep-tracking

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## Additional Resources

Extra
> 1 votes

# Answer
As your contacts have already pointed out, there is no research on this specific question. But from what I have observed (both in patients with sleep disorders with whom I have been working as well as in healthy subjects), it is most likely that someone who has been following the same bed and wakeup routine for a month or longer will wake up at their usual time regardless of where they are in their sleep cycle, if they go to bed at a different time only once.

And that's the whole point of regular bed and wakeup times in sleep hygiene: those routines remain relatively stable, once they have been established, even in times of stress or other – temporary! – interferences. Only when the sleep routine is consistently eroded (or the deviation from the regular bed time is large), will wakeup times begin to shift significantly.

You may notice that if you go to bed half an hour later than usual, that you wake up a little tired or a little on the late side of your usual range of wakeup times.

What I have noticed is that people who go to bed a little later than usual may find that they have trouble *falling asleep!* Because when they remain awake beyond the point where their body had prepared them for sleep, their body will begin to rouse them again, "thinking" the person needs wakefulness. So it might actually take you until the next phase to fall properly asleep and you'll be sleeping rather restless until then, if you sleep at all.

But this, as I said, is observation over a small sample and not generalizable.
> 1 votes

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Tags: sleep, performance
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# Question
Title: Is it possible to effect both positive and negative reinforcement through the same action?
Consider the following scenario: a rhesus monkey is being put under severe duress somehow (isolation, sense of physical threat, whathaveyou). It is desired that a behavior, like pressing a lever, is increased. Let's say administration of a CNS depressant as a reward is used to try to get this outcome. This could possibly be seen as positive reinforcement (due to euphoriant effects in themselves) *and* as negative reinforcement (because stress is being taken away). Is it possible to model both sides of this picture and is this done in practice?

# Answer
> 4 votes
Yes.

In fact, the modern view of positive and negative reinforcement is that they are essentially synonyms. They are different ways of looking at the same thing, like describing a glass of water based on how full or how empty it is:

> In this paper, we reconsider the issue from the perspective of 30 years. However, we could not find new evidence in contemporary research and theory that allows reliable classification of an event as a positive rather than a negative reinforcer.

Wikipedia as well:

> Distinguishing between positive and negative can be difficult and may not always be necessary; focusing on what is being removed or added and how it is being removed or added will determine the nature of the reinforcement.

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Tags: behaviorism, conditioning
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# Question
Title: Why some papers suggest that losses and gains are coded by the same mechanism while other suggest that distinct circuits anticipate gain and loss?
In this paper, it states that "Consistent with neuroimaging evidence suggesting that distinct circuits anticipate gain and loss,..." However in this paper, it states "..., these results are consistent with the conclusion that losses and gains are coded by the same mechanism rather than by two separate mechanisms."

Both papers are from reputable journals and well-cited. So why are there these two contradictory statements? Is it because the papers are in different contexts? (The statements themselves seem to be general statement though.)

# Answer
> 4 votes
**Because we still don't know exactly how the brain works.** That's why we do research. If these authors knew the answer ahead of time, neither of them would have done the study.

These are research papers, they are showing findings that are consistent with different models. Maybe the real model is somewhere in between, maybe there are context-dependencies, maybe one measure was more sensitive than the other for a particular result, maybe statistical thresholds caused one paper to emphasize one circuit and another to emphasize another.

There are other mediating effects like arousal and salience that can bias results; responses may not be linear so the degree of effect may be important.

Brain regions can excite or inhibit other regions and those connections can be reciprocal, so it is often not clear if decreases in one area are causing or caused by increases in another.

There are more recent papers like Bartra et al 2013 (citation below) that have tried to compare these different studies, so that's a good place to start for further reading, but you will find that they still do not have a clear answer.

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Bartra, O., McGuire, J. T., & Kable, J. W. (2013). The valuation system: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of BOLD fMRI experiments examining neural correlates of subjective value. Neuroimage, 76, 412-427.

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Tags: neuroscience, behavior, behavioral-economics, economics
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# Question
Title: Visual field testing: Choose between Yes/No, 2AFC, and 2IFC task?
As a newbie to psychophysics experiment, I have a small project to do visual field testing on healthy, adult, naive subjects. The experiment stimulus is a small sine grating (0.3 degree, 6 cycles/degree) embedded in one of 25 possible locations in a noise background picture (18 degree). The orientation of the grating, and the contrast of background noise is fixed, and I need to measure the sensitivity (d') at 25 locations given a series of (probably 3) grating contrasts, and a series of stimulus exposure time (50,100,200,300,400 ms).

In a single trial, subject knows where the grating will be located, and maintains fixation at the center of noise background. Then the stimulus will be briefly presented (once in Yes/No and 2AFC, twice in 2IFC) for one of the stimulus exposure time, and subject need to judge whether the grating is present (Yes/No), or is located in which stimulus (2IFC and 2AFC). For a each unique combination of grating location, grating contrast and stimulus exposure time, I plan to do 16-20 repetitions to measure d'. So there are LOTS of trials.

I think this should be a mature experiment, but I am stuck on choosing between the following 3 experiment paradigms. The major problem is the time required to complete the experiment. I have run pilot experiments on all of them.

1. 1-interval yes/no task. This task runs fast, but suffers from changing response bias. Is the response bias going to negatively affect d'? In signal detection theory, d' is insensitive to bias only when the variance of response to signal and signal+noise is equal. However, I don't know whether there is firm experimental evidence to support this.
2. 2AFC task. This task comes from a suggestion in textbook. Instead of presenting one cue of target location on each trial, I can present two cues that is symmetric around fixation point, and subject need to judge which cue location has the grating. The task assumes that human visibility map is central symmetric, and effectively cut the number of locations to half, so it runs even faster than the Yes/No task. However, it is rarely used in literature about visual field testing, what might be the potential drawback?
3. 2IFC task. I see many literatures doing this, but it is the slowest one (more than double of the time for Yes/No). What's worse, because the stimulus is brief presented, and the interval between them is short (400 ms), sometimes subjects report that they "see the stimulus but forget which interval has it". So in some of our pilot data, the sensitivity at fovea is lower than in near-peripheral, because subjects had made an error. How do psychophysical researchers overcome the problem of subject error, and the problem of long, boring experiment?

Thanks for any help.

# Answer
> 1 votes
I am unsure as to the exact purpose of your experiment; the title seems to point toward a visual field test, whereas the question body seems to point to a visual acuity (VA) test? Are you interested in testing grating VA across the visual field? In the latter case, a subject needs to focus on a particular point and visual scanning is absolutely forbidden. The VA will be determined according to the last visible grating across a number of visual angles.

On way or the other, I think you answered your question yourself.

A **yes/no task** is prone to bias, as the threshold to say 'yes' may change over time. It's also prone to investigator influence, as the % false-positive rate (which you should keep track of online) may exceed a certain threshold (often set at 25%). At that point the researcher should intervene and tell the subject to elevate their threshold, after which the data are likely substantially different from previous trials. However, it's fast, as only one stimulus per trial is needed.

I have personally always used serial **2AFC** tests. A subject definitely needs time to do the test. As you say yourself, 400 ms inter-stimulus time is simply too short. I think I would opt for a presentation time of a few seconds, a downtime of at least a second, and then the second stimulus.

The problem with the simultaneous 2AFC task is one of definition - if one stimulus is the target, then the other one is the no-stimulus. If they are up simultaneously, then isn't this identical to the yes/no task? The subject either perceives a grating, or not (yes/no). As wikipedia states:

> Two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) is a method \[where\] the subject is presented with two alternative options, only one of which contains the target stimulus, and is forced to choose **which one was the correct option**.

A true 2AFC task is thus when they need to choose between A or B. That's only possible when doing it serially in your case as far as I can see, as a simultaneous task can basically be reduced to a yes/no task (they see the grating, or they don't).

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Tags: vision, psychophysics, signal-detection
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# Question
Title: People do not like change, but need diversification? Is that not contradictive?
People generally resist change, yet they have a desire for diversification.
Of course, both is possible. Just like the need of safety but the desire for new discoveries and adventures.

But what is the psychological explaination? Is there anything I misunderstood?

# Answer
> 2 votes
Balancing a combination of 'sticking with what you know' and 'exploring new things' is optimal in a lot of environments. What the optimal balance is depends on a bunch of factors like your planning horizon, the distribution of good things in the world (common/rare & similar/dissimilar), and how you interact with them (reusable, like a shortcut, depleting, like a gold mine, or one-shot interaction like buying a house).

People are really surprisingly good at this! Fun search terms for google scholar might be "explore/exploit tradeoff" or "multi-arm bandit problems" \[with humans\]. But it's a big and complicated literature, actually I'd recommend starting with a popsci version, "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I think you might enjoy it, it's a great book, very readable, and it goes into some detail on this question and a few of its near neighbors.

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Tags: attitudes, needs
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title: What is the human brain made of?

text:
# Question
Title: What is the human brain made of?
I read an article that stated that the human brain contains 60% fat. Is this fatty tissue structural building material? Or does it just serve as an energy source for the mitochondria?

Since our body are also made out of 70% water, is there also a water in our brain?

And the most important question I want to ask is: what percentage of the brain is actually a neuron?

# Answer
The brain has a lot of a fatty substance called **myelin**. It wraps around nerve fibers and enhances the speed of electrical communication between neurons (source: Brain Facts), and increases transmission efficiency (Fig. 1). It is produced by supporting cells in the brain called **oligodendrocytes**. Myelin is really just many wraps of membrane, and since neurons have long axons and dendrites, too, they also have a lot more membrane than if they were just spherical cells - all of this membrane is "fat" called phospholipid.

Now on to your questions -

> Is this fatty tissue structural building material? Or does it just serve as an energy source for the mitochondria?

Myelin and cell membranes are the most abundant fatty substances in the brain - they are structural fatty substances found around cells and neuronal axons, respectively, and they are not fuel.

> \[I\]s there also a water in our brain?

Every cell contains water, as nearly all biochemical reactions take place in a watery solution. An early report found the water content of neurons to be 55% (Saubermann & Scheid, 1985)

> \[W\]hat percentage of the brain is actually a neuron?

Scientific American performed a review on this and settles on a ratio of neurons : glia cells of 1:1 (although numbers of 10:1 have been reported). **Glia** are the brain's supportive cells and include the oligodendrocytes as mentioned above that produce the myelin (Jabr, 2012).

Fig. 1. Schematic showing a myelin sheath around an axon. source: WebMD

**References**
\- Jabr, *Sci Am* (2012), June 2012
\- Saubermann & Scheid, *J Neurochem* (1985); **44**(3): 825-34
> 5 votes

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Tags: neuroscience, brain
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# Question
Title: Is there an audio equivalent of eidetic memory?
In this YouTube video by The Blaze it is claimed that Ted Cruz has "audiographic" memory. He does seem to have quite a good memory based on videos I've seen of him, but I'm not sure if Glenn Beck is exaggerating and I can't find the Wall Street Journal article he's referring to.

I know about eidetic memory (photographic memory):

> ... is an ability to vividly recall images from memory after only a few instances of exposure, with high precision for a brief time after exposure, without using a mnemonic device.

Is there something similar for audio exposures and recall? Audiographic memory does not seem an academic term. Is this phenomenon discussed in academia?

# Answer
> 6 votes
I have been doing some research and this is what I found so far.

First, the memory of sounds is called **echoic memory** (Alley Dog; Echoic Memory Definition) and is a form of sensory memory. This means that by nature, it is short-term.

However, I found an interesting wikipedia article, followed the source, and found that, in fact, it appears that **eidetic memory** also includes remembering sounds! (Taylor; Encyclopedia of Human Memory; Superior Autobiographical Memory; p.1099).
So it could be that there isn't a term for it because it is included in this.

When it comes to '**audiographic memory**', a thorough search leads me to thinking that indeed, it's not an academic term and is not researched or discussed as such. The only things I can find that use that word are of questionable validity (ex: Bates, Unconscious Processes, 2009).

For some reason, the video link does not work for me, but I hope that this information makes things clearer for you!

Other sources:
-Wikipedia Page; Echoic Memory
-Wikipedia Page; Eidetic Memory

# Answer
> 2 votes
As mentioned before the correct terminology for "audiographic" memory is **Echoic**, however, "audiographic" isn't a bad term. This is because for auditory sensory input to be stored as long-term memories, the information must be visualized.

A simple way to demonstrate is this goes as follows...
Set a reminder for five minutes and make a sound. When the reminder goes off try to recall the sound.

If you are to do this, you'll find that the sound that you recall is almost hollow in a sense. You'll know that you heard the sound, but you won't be recalling the actual sound, you're recalling the idea of it. In other words, your brain, knowing you heard a sound will "jot it down" and later when it's asked what it heard it will "expand" the idea of audio out into your memory of sound.

When it comes to Ted Cruz's case, it still appears he remembering the idea of the sound and the sound itself. I got that from the mention of transcripts. Ted is just remembering the ideas conveyed by the sound of speech with a high degree of accuracy.

The degree of accuracy Ted is able to accomplish while recalling conversations is due to a technique that is well known as "Memory Palaces". This is also known as **The Method of Loci** (link at the bottom). What is happening is Ted is memorizing the conversations by visualizing the conversation as a transcript and filing it away to be recalled later. I assume that this happens naturally for him, but you can train yourself to be able to do this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method\_of\_loci

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Tags: memory, terminology
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# Question
Title: how does our brain knows the simialrities between anything?
If I see your face today then I will recognize you if I see you tomorrow. There must be something similar will happen in my brain for both incident, since the inputs to my body/brain is similar(at least some). So, that means the brain is clustering things/Inputs and I don't force the brain to cluster your face view, this happens automatically. Or may be the brain can calculate how much similar these two views of your face. anyway,may be I am completely wrong. But the question is then how it does? and It applies for any type of sensor input to our brain.

edit: yeah, it should be more specific. I am talking about neocortex.when some similar incident happens then similar regions in neocortex will active, but how does the brain calculates the similarities? it's like the brain can calculate the similarities between two groups of networks. And I trust this site more than others so I'll ask things here.

# Answer
The brain has the abilities to do a lot of marvelous things:

* It can convert electromagnetic waves that reach the eyes into spectacular visions of faces, people, trees, animals, houses, etc.
* It can convert vibrations in the air (sound waves) into the sounds of speech, music, screaming (for help), etc.
* it can convert contacts at the skin into the feeling of touch, vibration, pain, hot, cold, etc.
* It can create a language from arrangements of dots it sees (written languages) or sequences of sounds it hears (verbal languages).
* It can store the information it receives in the form of memory and can retrieve it later when needed.
* It can mark the of danger or reward in the environment by creating emotion of fear or pleasure.
* It can process signals it receives resulting in the complex thinking processes that can solve the encountered dangers/daily problems, complex mathematical/scientific problems, mysteries of the universe, etc.
* And many other things.

Face recognition is one of its abilities. It requires specialized neural circuits to do this function. These specialized circuits are located in specific areas of the brain, especially the FFA (Fusiform face area or fusiform gyrus), Superior temporal sulcus (STS), Anterior middle temporal gyrus (AMTG), prefrontal, and orbitofrontal cortex. Although the exact arrangement of the circuits and how they can recognize faces are still not fully understood yet, they are being studied in many centers. You can search for more information about this ability on the net by using the search words like “facial perception” or “brain facial recognition”.

The following references can be the starting point:

1. Tsao DY, Livingstone MS. Mechanisms of face perception Annu Rev Neurosci. 2008;31:411-37.
2. Dekowska M, Kuniecki M, Jaśkowski P. Facing facts: Neuronal mechanisms of face perception. Acta Neurobiol Exp (Wars). 2008;68(2):229-52. PMID: 18511959

Some references for mathematical and logic operations of the brain:

1. Friedrich RM, Friederici AD. Mathematical Logic in the Human Brain: Semantics PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e53699. PMID: 23301101 PMCID: PMC3536745 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053699.
2. Xie K, Fox GE, Liu J, Lyu C, Lee JC, Kuang H, et al. Brain Computation Is Organized via Power-of-Two-Based Permutation Logic. Front Syst Neurosci. 2016 Nov 15;10:95. eCollection 2016. PMID: 27895562 PMCID: PMC5108790 DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2016.00095
3. Tsien JZ. Principles of Intelligence: On Evolutionary Logic of the Brain. Front Syst Neurosci. 2016 Feb 3;9:186. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2015.00186. eCollection 2015. PMID: 26869892 PMCID: PMC4739135 DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2015.00186

And for the function of the brain, which is very complex, you can read about it in many textbooks. But one reference that is available on the net (also available as books) is the following:

*Purves D, Augustine GJ, David Fitzpatrick D, Hall WC, Lamantia AS, McNamara JO, Williams SM, editors.* **Neuroscience. 3rd ed.** Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates Inc; 2004. ISBN-13: 9780878937257 ISBN-10: 0878937250.
> 3 votes

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Tags: brain-development
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# Question
Title: How to answer questions that don't seem to be possible to be answered on a Strongly disagree - Strongly agree scale and what's their point?
I'm continuously being perplexed by psychological tests that display a lot of questions that don't seem to be able to be answered in a simplistic ways, but nevertheless simplistic answers are demanded.

I was subjected to such tests a few times in my life already. Each time the questions were a major challenge for me... until, out of necessity, I was stopping caring about the accuracy of the answers. Instead, I was giving rough estimations, feeling these estimations are almost meaningless.

As an example, I was once subjected to a test whether I was aggressive, submissive, assertive, or manipulative. The test contained questions like "do I think cunning is an effective way to get what one wants"? Do I think so? Yes, I think it is an effective way insofar people were able to trick me a few times in my life. Do I do this? I try not to and I don't even think I'm any good at it. Nonetheless, such questions clearly contribute to showing that I'm manipulative.

For an other example, let's take the Dark Factor test. We have here questions like:

* Most people deserve respect.

My problem with this questions is that, as far as I'm aware, there are many definitions of "respect". How am I supposed to answer this question without knowing what definition of respect we're talking about?

* The innate respect that, according to many moral theories, is an indefeasible privilege of every human being?
* The respect that is defined as a person's trustworthiness or ability to perform their duty?
* The respect that stems from fearing other person?

All 3 definitions entail radically different answers on my part, including an "I don't know, I'm not strong enough in philosophy to be able to answer this" in the first case.

Or another question. "It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to help others in need." Is it? I believe yes. Can I? Sadly, rarely. Which of these two answers should I give?

Another category are questions like these two: "It’s wise to keep track of information that you can use against people later." and "I feel sorry if things I do upset people." Here, however, my problems with these questions border critiquing the test itself, so I wonder if I'm not falling to the trap of arrogance. Namely, I have a feeling (maybe very wrong) that this test here treats what is not necessarily immoral as if it was. Is it wise to keep track of information that can be used against people later? In most circumstances likely no. But there are situations when this course of action is both necessary and perfectly ethical, I suppose: to protect oneself from these people anticipated unwarranted attacks. Do I feel sorry if I do things that upset other people? This depends on circumstances even more. If I win a sport match I'm likely to upset my opponents: does my attempts to win a fair game make my personality have dark traits? Escaping one's mother's overprotectiveness is likely to make her even more upset: but as far as I can tell, the psychologists' theories were that it is most healthy and necessary to do this. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a positive answer to such a question would make one's personality darker in the results.

Could someone explain to me what's the point of such questions and how to answer them?

# Answer
Really good question - I've had this exact conversation with a student.

It's important to understand that mature scales are validated:

> In the fields of psychological testing and educational testing, "validity refers to the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests".

An interesting example is predictive validity:

> ... the extent to which a score on a scale or test predicts scores on some criterion measure. ... predictive validity provides somewhat more useful data about test validity because it has greater fidelity to the real situation in which the test will be used. After all, most tests are administered to find out something about future behavior.

From the point of view of the developer of a psychometric test, what a subject might think of a question, how they interpret (or misinterpret) it, or what ambiguity it contains, is not as important as whether or not answers to the question contribute to the validity (especially predictive validity) of the test. **A question that seems meaningless to you, might actually be highly predictive (at least in general) of the criterion measure.**

It is not always necessary for the developer to know *why* a question is predictive, only that it *is* predictive (provided other validation criteria are also met). Scales in general are developed using the scientific method \- a survey you take that contains say, 20 questions, might originally have contained over 100 questions. After testing the scale on an experimental group, researchers may discover that 20 of those questions provide 80-90% of the predictive power of the full test, and decide to shorten it. Researchers cannot really know in advance which questions work best - that's what testing is for!

Another interesting factor in psychometric testing is demand characteristics:

> In research—particularly psychology—demand characteristics refers to an experimental artifact where participants form an interpretation of the experiment's purpose and unconsciously change their behavior to fit that interpretation. ... A possible reason for demand characteristics is the participant's expectation that he or she will somehow be evaluated and thus figures out a way to 'beat' the experiment to attain good scores in the alleged evaluation.

In other words, if you feel like your test score forms some evaluation of your character, then you might try to provide answers that you think will form a desirable evaluation, rather than an accurate one.

However, it is difficult to ascertain the value or purpose of a question in a test - some scales contain questions added for testing internal validity, specifically for detecting demand characteristics and other biases that may affect results. For example, a test may contain 2 identical questions worded differently. Different responses to these questions could indicate dishonesty, misinterpretation, inconsistency, or inattentiveness. Bottom line: I wouldn't worry about what the point of a question is - don't over-think it.
> 5 votes

# Answer
I can understand why you are perplexed. I really does seem like these sort of questions make it so that these tests can't be accurate.

If the tests have a lot of ambiguous questions, it is either going to inaccurate, or it doesn't matter how you answer. How can it not matter what you will answer? It's because they use a technique that palm readers use in **Cold Reading**. It's called a **Rainbow Ruse**. This is when a statement both reinforces a trait as well as the opposite of it. When personality tests aren't based on research, they typically use a modified version of a *rainbow ruse*.
> -1 votes

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Tags: methodology, test
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# Question
Title: Are there rule of thumb regarding sample size when neuroscientific measurements are used?
According to this paper, 10-25 subjects are enough for an fMRI study. However, regarding EEG, it only mentioned in this paper that some "authors concluded that the relatively small sample sizes (average 20 subjects) in these studies are likely responsible for the inconsistent result". This paper did not give a recommendation of sample size.

Are there a rule of thumb regarding how many subjects should be used for neuroscientific measurements in general? Are there papers regarding this?

Note that I am not currently designing an experiment, but writing a literature review regarding application of neuroscience. So I don't think I can conduct a power analysis as an answerer suggested.

# Answer
> 2 votes
The minimum sample size required to plausibly reject the null hypothesis depends not on the area of study (e.g. neuroscience), but on your study design and the statistical tests you perform.

What you need to do is a power analysis. Questions regarding power analysis have been asked on Cross Validated. You may want to read up on power analysis in your favourite statistics textbook and, if you have questions, ask them there.

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Tags: neuroscience
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# Question
Title: In fMRI analyses, what is the t-test actually comparing?
In a 1st-level fMRI analysis, it is unclear to me what the t-test performed for each voxel is actually comparing. I've seen this being described in one of two different ways:

1. The t-test estimates how well the model (HRF curve convoluted with the design) fits the data (BOLD signal), in other words is a measure of the goodness of this fit.
2. The t-test compares the BOLD signal to a baseline.

I guess both of these can be conceptualized as one-sample t-tests, but it's unclear if the two comparisons would in fact be equivalent, or if different types of t-tests are used in different situations, with the two cases given above being but two examples.

# Answer
The *coefficient* is the measure of how strongly the given factor predicts the dependent variable, or in other words how much of the variance in the dependent variable can be explained by that factor. So the coefficient itself, and not the t-statistic of the coefficient, is a measure of what you're calling how well the model (or, more correctly, the regressor) fits the data.

The *t-statistic* of the coefficient in a multiple regression is the statistical test of that coefficient, calculated as the coefficient divided by its standard error. So it would be most correct to say that this is a measure of how reliable the sample coefficient is, or how likely it is, given the coefficient we got, that the true coefficient is 0. But this is theoretically independent of the goodness of the fit, and you could have a very stable but small coefficient, which would get a high t-stat, or a large-on-average, but highly variable coefficient, which would receive a low t-stat. The results of the test will also, obviously, depend on your sample size and the degrees of freedom in your model.

Where the confusion might be is that the coefficient is more or less the same as a comparison to baseline, becuase the baseline is not (or shouldn't be) an explicit regressor in the model. A higher coefficient will mean, all else being equal, that the fit is better and/or that the effect is larger. But unless you're explicitly running a comparison of activation vs. baseline, this not what the coefficient actually means.

You can read more about this last issue here: https://github.com/jdkent/tests\_and\_musings/blob/master/magnitude\_and\_delay\_in\_bold.ipynb?fbclid=IwAR3H-pvYmVQtMaDBzDAfexyNeuCUHHe6vuYLsV83l957rvHawv1bWJlaB9U
> 3 votes

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Tags: statistics, neuroimaging, fmri
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# Question
Title: Terminology: why do psychologists use "positive" and "negative"?
In a lot of places in psychology - for example in operant conditioning and in describing symptoms of psychological disorders - various things are described as "positive" and "negative". Positive rewards/punishments or positive symptoms are things that are *added* or *given* to an individual, whereas negative rewards/punishments or symptoms are things that are *taken away* or that *disappear*.

This terminology seems confusing - both the word "positive" and the word "negative" have other connotations in areas that psychology is concerned with, for example in describing mood. Using this particular terminology for things like the symptoms of psychological disorders, instead of less ambiguous words with more direct meanings like "additive" or "subtractive", seems confusing. Is there a particular reason why the words "positive" and "negative" continue to be used in a scientific sense over such less ambiguous alternatives?

# Answer
They are used in conditioning because those terms were originally used by Skinner, and after some shuffling around ("negative reinforcement" used to be used to describe what is now called "punishment" or more specifically "positive punishment") became standard terms. Dinsmoor (2004) covers a bit of the history and cites the relevant source literature.

For the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, that goes back earlier, to Bleuler who was also the first person to use the term "schizophrenia" in 1908 to describe the disease known by that name today. The 1908 use of schizophrenia was at a conference, but there are also published books and articles by him later that use the terms, I've included a reference to one from 1912 below.

It isn't all that uncommon for scientific terms to differ from their lay usage; language is also mutable, so even carefully chosen terminology can drift away from the meaning in broader society. I'm not suggesting that is what happened in this case, but I just want to emphasize that it is typically more important to use terms consistently in science. Changing terminology that has been used for a long time is difficult, potentially confusing, and makes it harder to connect older literature to newer work.

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Ashok, A. H., Baugh, J., & Yeragani, V. K. (2012). Paul Eugen Bleuler and the origin of the term schizophrenia (SCHIZOPRENIEGRUPPE). *Indian journal of psychiatry*, 54(1), 95. Available from: http://www.indianjpsychiatry.org/text.asp?2012/54/1/95/94660

Bleuler, E., & White, W. A. (1912). The theory of schizophrenic negativism. *Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease*, 39(1), 50-57, 133-139, 195-202, 274-279. doi: 10.1097/00005053-191201000-00009

Dinsmoor, J. A. (2004). The etymology of basic concepts in the experimental analysis of behavior. *Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior*, 82(3), 311-316. doi: 10.1901/jeab.2004.82-311 pdf: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1285013/pdf/15693525.pdf
> 4 votes

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Tags: terminology
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# Question
Title: Exact Medical situation name for Guided Meditation/Visualization to "Re-live a moment"
There are lots of videos & audios for Guided Visualization for particular things like forest, beach, sky etc.. But what should I exactly search to get result for "ReLive past Moment". Is there dedicated word in psychology? Thank you.

# Answer
Before I give the answer to your question, I must point out that pursuits into recalling past events through hypnosis etc. can lead to mixed results. You can be lucky and gain true insight into a past event previously forgotten, but it cannot generally be relied upon in legal and forensic terms due to the risk of false memories being inadvertently implanted. See my previous answer to a similar question and also this answer.

The term you are looking for is either

* guided regression hypnosis,
* memory recall therapy or
* memory recall training

All involve trying to get you to recall one or more specific events in such detail that you can remember them clearly. The problem is that these methods have been found through research to cause False Memory Syndrome. Although as with many pieces of research, there are opponents to the idea.
> 1 votes

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Tags: terminology, consciousness, meditation, visualization, hypnosis
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title: Perception of time as a function of age

text:
# Question
Title: Perception of time as a function of age
For many people time seems to run faster as they get older. That is, for an old person an hour, a day or a year seems to be shorter than for a young person.

Is there any hard data for such phenomenon? And if so, what is the cause?

To name a few possibilities it can be about the reaction time (so one have more or less 'turns' in a minute), the relative time comparing to one's age, ways in which memory changes with age or habits (younger may live more active life). Of course, there may be different causes for different time scales. However, I haven't found anything but anecdotal data and home-made theories.

# Answer
There is "hard evidence" regarding how timing and the subjective experience of intervals changes as a function of age. McAuley et al. (2006) ran a battery of different timing and time perception tasks on participants of ages ranging from 4 to 95 years. One finding that relates to your question was that children in the range of 4 to 7 years preferred and, when asked to tap, produced sequences where the inter response interval was much shorter (around 300 ms) than that for adults (around 500 ms). One interpretation of this finding is indeed that small children prefer living on a faster time scale than grownups.

**Referenses**

The time of our lives: Life span development of timing and event tracking. McAuley, J. Devin;Jones, Mari Riess;Holub, Shayla;Johnston, Heather M.;Miller, Nathaniel S. *Journal of Experimental Psychology: General*, Vol 135(3), Aug 2006, 348-367. doi: 10.1037/0096-3445.135.3.348, free pdf
> 14 votes

# Answer
### Wikipedia on time perception

The Wikipedia article on "time perception". In particular, the section on long-term time perception cites a couple of articles. * The articles makes the common point that a unit of time as a proportion of one's life decreases with age. A few empirical studies are also cited.

### Ukraintseva (2001)

Ukraintseva (2001) wrote an article devoted to the topic and makes several interesting points about time perception over aging. E.g.,

* Ukraintseva argues the rate of aging decreases with age and that this may have relevance to experience of time.
* Ukraintseva also suggests that living may be slower in some sense with age citing examples of slower "metabolic rate, rate of cell proliferation, physical, mental alertness, and the rate of living in general".

### Graf and Grondin

Graf and Grondin have an article that reviews the literature on the psychology of time perception and discusses age related differences. However, the article seems to focus more on aspects of performance rather than the subjective experience of time slowing.

* They cite a few studies that suggest that in relation to judging time intervals, older adults may be less accurate.

### Personal musings

My own random musings (treat them as you wish) suggest that topics such as flow, goals, rhythm of life, and boredom might also be relevant.

* A feature of being immersed in a state of flow is a sense of time distortion.
* As we get older, perhaps we start to set more long term goals, and this might shape the experience of time and change.
* Increased levels of routinisation and automaticity might also decrease awareness of time passing.
* Perhaps knowing how to avoid boredom would be relevant to time passing.

### References

* Graf and Grondin "Time perception and time-based prospective memory" in TIMING THE FUTURE - The Case for a Time-Based Prospective Memory (FREE PDF)
* Ukraintseva (2001) Aging and the subjective sense of time. (FREE PDF)

*The above are just a few quick points (it's not my area):*
> 19 votes

# Answer
To extend on @BenCole comment, an interesting summary of different models of time perceptions can be found in this paper. These models are in a sense more descriptive than the fundamental biological hypothesis mentioned by caseyr547, so you might not be ready to call these "explanations", depending on what you mean by that.

The models attempt to give a precise (functional) form to the extent to which time perception decrease as the "stock" of experienced time increases.

A simple model which seem to have initially attracted some attention is the logarithmic time perception model (see http://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html#LM) :

> \[perception of change from time $t$ to $t'$\] = constant * $\[\log(t') - \log(t)\]$.

Apparently, this model was an attempt to link time perception with the so-called Weber-Fechner law relating the intensity of a perception to the magnitude of some initial stimulus of the same nature (e.g. the perceived increase in the weight of an object depending on the initial weight of the object).

However, researchers seem to have found little evidence of such relationship in the case of time perception (see the aforementioned article and http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03204158#page-1). So other model have been developed. The first paper describes some of these newer models.
> 4 votes

# Answer
Time perception is active field of study in psychology and neuroscience. How individuals experience time is so subjective and interwoven into the fabric of our being that it cannot be directly explained it can only be tested. Current theories include that of lower dopamine in the aged (it is debated) and maturation of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus (it is not debated). There are other minor theories which have less evidence for their validity. Emotions are known to affect our perception of time in a temporary way.
> 2 votes

# Answer
I'm 33. I don't feel a bit like time is flying. I have aspergers. On the other hand, the was a YouTube video of a 29 year old who said that when he was a child, he lived in the moment and now, he feels like it's really rushing and he has anxiety about it. I have a tendency to do my own thinking from scratch which naturally buries my past in the sand. My awareness goes the other way. I have more awareness of the recent stuff. My childhood like doesn't stand out at all. Once when I went to the Church of the Transfiguration games night recently for the first time in the past year, it triggered another letting go of prior thought patterns and thinking again from scratch. Using slow thinking that just came to me, I remembered that the past did happen after all and was comparing my current thinking with earlier to see that I had let it go and started again. So my brain constructed the sensation that enough time went by for me to let it go and do it again and so eons of time had passed. After we started practicing social isolation, I adapted to it nice and easily like a young and inexperienced child who interprets what's going on right then from scratch. I'm like not thinking about when it's over. I don't have isolation fatigue a bit.

Once I think in the past year, there was a girl who looked about 6 in a driveway drawing a picture with her mother. At first, I walked past, then I remembered it had said the word thank you and then saw and noticed that it could mean thank you for looking at my picture. So I came back and told them I saw and noticed that and then the mother was glad I had seen and noticed something interesting about it. I indeed was able to because the brain isn't hard wired and instead I do my own thinking from scratch and bury my past in the sand.

Once maybe about 2 months after a pancake supper, I had a dream that it was already the time of the next one and didn't like it because it didn't seem very long. Then when it actually was the time of it, I truly felt like it had been really long. My brain had changed enough so I didn't have a problem anymore. Now it may have been something like 5 years ago. Yet, I don't have a problem now. It's almost like I'm a reincarnation and don't have a problem with feeling like less time has passed because less time actually passed and the question is not how much time has passed but how far back your past goes. When I learned about events in our universe from billions of years ago, I felt like it was a new experience of my own. I guess maybe looked back at the buried in the sand past is no different.

I've sometimes had false memories in dreams where my past went totally differently than it did. One more recent case of a false memory in a dream was a very wierd one. In one dream, I was 70. I had a false memory that my recent past was different than it was and that what was going on now was so long ago that it was very buried in the sand and therefore didn't feel like time was rushing and so had no problem.

I guess it's cause I had already been thinking before about how although you feel like the present is fundamentally different from the past, what you're experiencing now actually is essentially the same as what you were experiencing then as long as you're a person who's brain continues doing its own thinking and burying the past in the sand and it's because you're doing your own thinking and naturally letting it get buried in the sand. If that's still what my brain is doing by 70, then technically, it will be essentially the same experience as what I'm experiencing now even though it won't feel that way because my interpretation of now will be distorted. So my brain was able to construct what it could be like when I'm 70. Maybe by then, the dream of it will be buried in the sand just like I felt like now was buried in the sand during the dream. However, I'm not thinking of this as being about a real existing time.
> 0 votes

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Tags: perception, developmental-psychology, cognitive-modeling, time, aging
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# Question
Title: Are reaction time and memory physiological measure or behavioral observation?
I think that the choice made by a subject in a choice task should be behavioral observation. But I am not sure about reaction time and memory, which is more about ability instead of intention.

# Answer
> 1 votes
It may help considering whether the phenomenon is under some control by the participant. Pupil dilation is a physiological measure, but the speed at which I hit a key (reaction time) is a behavioral measure. Memory is a phenomenon. If you meant recall, recognition, or another memory retrieval task, how could you measure that physiologically? Memory is generally measured through (somewhat controlled) self-report. However, it could also be probed through less controllable, more automatic reactions.

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Tags: behavior, behaviorism, physiology, reaction-time
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# Question
Title: Why fear is the opposite of desire and not disgust?
Wikipedia page on desire has the following passage:

> A 2008 study by the University of Michigan indicated that, while **humans experience desire and fear as psychological opposites**, they share the same brain circuit.

Personally, I feel that fear and disgust are different. Former is what you can feel when there is something dangerous or risky. Latter is when you just perceive something like awful smell or flavor.

So, why and how fear and not disgust is the opposite of desire?

# Answer
Just because two phenomena (partially!) share brain architecture does not mean they are experientially similar or opposite. There is little understanding of how neuronal activity creates conscious experiences. There is a lot of controversy in taxonomies of emotion because it is not clear what the emotions are or how many there are. Also, note that psychologists tend to define emotion in a narrow way, in particular referencing how transitory it is compared to moods or personality traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion\_classification

So, you feel disgust and fear are different: I anecdotally agree, some models of emotion agree, and they do not have the exact same neural correlates.

Major theories of emotion generally classify emotions on two dimensions: approach vs. avoidance motivation, and pleasant vs. unpleasant. Fear and disgust are both avoid/unpleasant. Desire is in this sense the opposite of fear: approach/pleasant. An example of this model is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion\_classification#Circumplex\_model
> 4 votes

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Tags: cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, emotion, evolutionary-psychology, fear
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# Question
Title: Word for person showing psychological projection
Is there any single word for a person who shows more psychological projection (the defence mechanism of attribution of your own undesireable qualities to someone else) than a normal person? And is there a specific term for such condition?Wikipedia link everydayhealth.com

Let me explain my question. A person showing extreme self importance is called a narcissist. So what do we call a person who shows extreme projections?

# Answer
> -2 votes
Projection is both normal (we all do it always) and (in excess) a symptom of many different psychological disorders.

There is no name for such a person, as that symptom never occurs in isolation.

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It is not correct that extreme self-importance makes someone a narcissist. Again, extreme self-importance can be found in many different disorders, and narcissism has many additional symptoms.

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Tags: projection
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# Question
Title: What is the definition of sanity? How can I prove someone either sane or insane?
In my experience the definition of insanity is thus:

> **Insanity**: The state of being seriously mentally ill, mad, and/or irrational.

Is there a proper scientific definition of this term? While mentally ill is relatively easily to pin down, the others criteria seem subjective.

Is there any test or method that can be used to prove a subject to be either sane or insane? How can any such test give objectively accurate results for this or another similar definition of insanity?

# Answer
> 17 votes
Sanity is an explicit *legal* definition. It is generally **not a psychological term**. This is Wikipedia's definition of Sanity which aligns perfectly to my understanding of abnormal psychology. (emphasis mine):

> In criminal and mental health law, **sanity is a legal term denoting that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility for his or her actions**. The official legal term is compos mentis. It is generally defined in terms of the absence of insanity (non compos mentis). It is not a medical term, although the opinions of medical experts are often important in making a legal decision as to whether someone is sane or insane.

Psychologists are often called in to determine "sanity" but they deduce whether one fits the *legal* definition based on any *psychological disorders* the individual might have. "Insanity" in this sense could be considered to be one of many psychological disorders that would cause one to be unable to function in a court room and understand their rights.

"Temporary Insanity" was a previously common but largely ill regarded legal excuse in the earlier days of psychology. It is not a psychological term nor does it have a psychological definition.

You'll note **the DSM does not include diagnostic criteria for sanity.** It is not a term commonly used in research or psychiatry because as you suggest it is much too broad of a concept.

Research on "insane" people is as uselessly broad as it would be on "silly" or "dumb" people. Instead research is conducted on specific conditions or measures.

Wikipedia has some information on Sanity in Psychiatry and Psychology but note these are very outdated ideas and I'm not aware of any current researchers who respect these theories as valid.

# Answer
> 12 votes
**Ben Brocka** makes many fine points. Insanity is a ***legal*** definition and what constitutes insanity will vary state to state, even jurisdiction to jurisdiction. What makes sanity so hard to quantify is the fact that so often, in a forensic setting, it comes down to the discretion of a jury of one's peers or the Court to accept or deny insanity as an explanation for a specific instance of behaviors. Laypeople (persons who are not mental health professionals) bring their *personal* understanding and definition of insanity to the determination process, at least minimally on an unconscious level, and these are strong biases on which to predicate an untarnished, comprehensive determination of sanity, or lack thereof.

Almost always, the establishment of sanity focuses on this general question: Did the individual understand ***at the time he/she was committing a crime*** that what he/she was doing was wrong under the law? This may seem basic and obvious, but it's not.

You wanted to know which specific tests or evaluation criteria might be used in determining sanity. I can speak only from a forensic point-of-view, based on my experiences in my state.

The determination of sanity will almost always start with a comprehensive psychological or psychiatric assessment. It is at this level that the presence of underlying Axis I criteria -- mental illness, substance use disorders, learning disorders -- and Axis II -- typically personality and intellectual/learning symptoms (and note that learning disorders and intellectual dysfunctions are not the same thing) -- disorders are determined.

During this process, a person's General Assessment of Functioning, or GAF, score is determined. This score is used as a general indicator of a person's ability to function in society and maintain self-efficacy. The lower the score, the lower a person's abilities are seen; however, note that this is ***not*** an intelligence assessment.

Intelligence testing may be part of the process of determining sanity. Tests frequently used are the Woodcock-Johnson, the Weschler (adult and child versions), and the Stanford-Binet.

A substance abuse evaluation often occurs at this point; there are tons of testing instruments for substance abuse assessment, and the criteria examined from a forensic point-of-view is less focused on the individual than on community safety.

> Psychological assessment is similar to psychological testing but usually involves a more comprehensive assessment of the individual. Psychological assessment is ***a process*** that involves ***the integration of information from multiple sources***, such as tests of normal and abnormal personality, tests of ability or intelligence, tests of interests or attitudes, as well as information from personal interviews. Collateral information is also collected about personal, occupational, or medical history, such as from records or from interviews with parents, spouses, teachers, or previous therapists or physicians. A psychological test is one of the sources of data used within the process of assessment; usually more than one test is used.\* (CITATION)
> Before diagnosing a psychological disorder, Clinicians must study the themes, also known as abnormalities, within psychological disorders. The most prominent themes consist of: deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger. These themes are known as the 4 D's, which define abnormality. (CITATION)

Other specific tests used might include the MMPI or the MMPI-II, the PCL-R (Hare). How can psychology be measured objectively? First, I think it's important to understand that a thorough psych assessment is like a snapshot of the big picture. You cannot measure the properties of a person as you might a rock, but the testing instruments are highly *highly* specialized, and should take into account an individual's willingness to report their symptoms and history accurately and honestly (which is different than being *unable* to self-report due to mental illness or another factor). In other words, psychological and forensic tests have 'lie scales,' which gives the assessor a comparison point -- how open is the subject being in relation to the overall picture put together from not only test scores and information, but also collateral information?

It is *extraordinarily* difficult to successfully malinger to the trained eye. For example, I had an individual under my supervision who had successfully avoided offender accountability for years because he maintained he was illiterate. He made the mistake of emptying his pockets on my desk; there was a Lotto card among his items -- it was a crossword puzzle Lotto card, where a person had to write the words in (as opposed to scratching the letters out from a pre-printed card). A person who is not genuinely mentally ill, learning disabled, or intellectually challenged cannot continuously keep up the ruse, because they *don't know what it really feels like* to have any of those conditions, and eventually they make a mistake.

# Answer
> -2 votes
Here is a proper scientific definition for insanity: **a disconnection from reality**. If I say I'm a rabbit when it is clear to everyone else that I'm a human, I'm insane (presuming, for completeness that I'm not *acting*).

Now, philosophers may argue on the use of the world "reality", but let's stop right there -- it's a psychology SE.

Unfortunately, there are so many pathologies extant in some of our present culture, insanity is practically the norm. There are many misdiagnosed people because the doctors *themselves* are disconnected from reality. That's right. They have no idea, for example, what life is like "on the street" because they've *never* been homeless. So, they are getting involved in complex and difficult social-economic dynamics in which they are not qualified *in any way whatsoever*. (I will argue that giving drugs to people on the street is an act of **psychopathic** behavior, too.)

But to get back to your question: you cannot *prove* that someone is sane or insane, because you've just broken and blurred a boundary between subject and object when trying to stick with an *objective* definition (using the word "prove" implies either a closed logical system or a strictly empirical one). Even *attempting* to do so makes YOU the suspect of an insanity charge. Doing so set you up for a State-sponsored type of abuse akin to Nazi Germany, since *sanity* cannot ever simply be **conformity**.

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Tags: abnormal-psychology, terminology, rationality
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title: Repeating a rumor that you started?

text:
# Question
Title: Repeating a rumor that you started?
I've heard that repeating a rumor by denying it only serves to reinforce the rumor.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141110142443-1967426-how-firms-should-fight-rumors/

*Try to avoid reinforcing minor rumors by repeating them in order to deny them.*

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200811/the-8-laws-rumor-spread

*Even a denial can be a repetition of a rumor." (Just ask Senator John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential bid sunk thanks to whispers about his swift-boat service in Vietnam—even though most of the media stories were about how the rumors were false.)*

https://www.wikihow.com/Stop-Rumors

*If it was you who started the rumor in the first place, don't deny it. Instead of reacting to what others will think of you, admit what you did wrong out of character.*

But what about in cases where I told something about myself that was less than flattering, or even downright embarrassing, and am now regretting having said? Does the same principle -- repeat it in any way by denying, asking to keep silent about the matter etc... -- result in heightening the possibility that it will spread to other people, because of the effects of priming?

Or is it the case that if I ask him/her specifically to not repeat the rumor, that he/she will more likely comply compared to if I kept silent about the matter?

# Answer
> 4 votes
The Truth Effect:

> Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated, statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful. ... The illusory truth effect plays a significant role in such fields as election campaigns, advertising, news media, and political propaganda.

A seminal experiment is Begg et al (1992), in which subjects were presented with statements that they were told were false, but later rated them as truer than statements they were not previously exposed to. Merely being exposed to statements makes them more familiar, and hence judged more true, and even being told that they are false does not counteract this effect of familiarity.

More recent studies have replicated these results with fake news stories. For example, Polage (2012):

> ... repeating false claims will not only increase their believability but may also result in source monitoring errors.

And Pennycook et al (2017):

> ... even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy ... Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability, and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact-checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. These results suggest ... that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem.

This is consistent with belief perseverance. The broader familiarity effect that causes illusion of truth is called processing fluency or cognitive ease.

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Tags: social-psychology
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# Question
Title: Free-to-use parenting style questionnaire
I'm working on a master's thesis in UX design that I might want to turn into a commercial project later on. The subject matter is use of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in parenting.

For the research phase, as part of a screener, I want to get a sense of a person's parenting style. I've been looking for questionnaires on evaluating parenting styles and found the Parental Authority Questionnaire.

However, this questionnaire was made to be evaluated by children, not by the parents themselves. Is there an alternate questionnaire for them? Would I be able to use its questions in my screener? What are the regulations regarding using questions from a different questionnaire?

# Answer
> 1 votes
There are a lot of parenting style questionnaires. Without knowing what dimensions of parenting style are of key interest, how long you want the questionnaire to be (e.g., trade-offs between validity, reliability with ease) and such, it's hard to recommend a particular one. You can see several from the parent perspective here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=parenting+style+questionnaire

As to regulations, you may need to contact the authors or journal about whether the scale is permissible for commercial use. I've only ever used scales for academic use.

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Tags: measurement, personality, psychology, parenting
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# Question
Title: Getting useful readings out of GSR sensors while moving?
I'm currently thinking about a project that would involve using a GSR sensor and an Arduino (Probably the Grove GSR Sensor) to measure Stress levels in a person.

It will not be a research project, but an art project instead. I want to build a device that shows my stress level with some LEDs as indicators. The idea is that I can walk around with it and when I approach people and talk to them the color changes because of my social anxieties. So it doesn't have to be accurate, but if it won't work at all, I might as well scrap the project.

**In which ways would movement of the subject distort the readings?** Suppose the wearer has heightened physical activity, would the GSR sensor give any useful readings? And if so: any pointers on how to pull this off?

# Answer
I think the general downside of the galvanic skin response (GSR) apply here. Wikipedia sums up a few confounding factors that affect the validity of GSR:

* Temperature and humidity (affect the resistance of the skin and hence GSR);
* Internal factors, such as medications and hydration;
* Different locations of measurement on the body can lead to different responses; for example, the responses on the left and right wrists are driven by different regions of the brain, providing multiple sources of arousal.
* Different body parts may have different sweat gland density
* Electrodermal responses are delayed 1–3 seconds.

My personal biggest issue with the method is the fact that the GSR depends so much on the temperature of the room and activity of the subject. However, my purpose for it is a quantitative one; your is more of a qualitative one as I understand it. If yes, then some variability may not be so problematic and you can counter the above drawbacks by

* Only do the experiment indoors in a climate controlled environment;
* Calibrate the equipment on yourself and only use yourself as a subject and stay hydrated;
* Always use the same location (fingers in case of your linked device);
* Give your device some time to respond; so the (stress) situation has to be somewhat prolonged, and the response will be delayed.

Do note that skin conductances are finicky. You can assure good contact by rubbing the skin with alcohol and a rough-surface pice of gauze. Make sure to apply some conductive paste. Measure the impedances regularly.

FYI: I have chosen to use **pupillometry** as a measure of stress. It has its own drawbacks and issues (especially adaptational responses and baseline issues), but once it works, it's less prone to signal drift, *e.g.* because of impedance issues as with electrode-based methods.

Below I've added a reference that lists an entire protocol for such measurements.

<sub>**Reference**
**-** Cartocci *et al*., *J Vis Exp* (2017); **126**: 55872</sub>
> 2 votes

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Tags: measurement, methodology, stress
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